"Whose parks? OUR parks!"

Protest marching is a sort of traveling with no real destination, at least in physical space. Winding sinuously through city streets, the point is to inhabit and occupy a place – and maybe cause a few traffic jams in the process. This is how Pittsburgh and I got to know one another.

            I joined activists from Pennsylvania and all over the U.S. to protest fracking – “hydraulic fracturing” -- a new and certainly terrible method of extracting potent dead stuff from deep in the ground.  It has a high potential for contaminating ground water, it produces a lot of toxic wastewater, and it burns into methane gas that warms the climate. It’s catching on all across the Marcellus Shale (map attached) – in Pennsylvania, Ohio, an itty-bitty corner of Maryland…. New York has issued a temporary moratorium on fracking, waiting cautiously to see what happens to the other guys first. Basically New Yorkers want to make sure their tap water won’t set on fire.

            I am not a Pennsylvanian. I am from Maryland, but not the rural part, and I live in California now. I traveled to Pittsburgh with some fellow Californians to join the climate justice movement at its bi-annual conference, Power Shift. The point of the trip was not to explore another city; I spent most of the weekend inside the convention center exchanging ideas with people from all over the U.S. This was sort of a virtual traveling adventure in itself – I heard activist stories from coalmines in Appalachia, tribal reservations in North Dakota, prisons in Florida, rooftops in Oakland. But of course, the weekend was a romance with a new physical place, as traveling always is. After two days of workshops, speakers, pizza bars, and networking, Power Shift and I took to the streets on Monday morning. As I followed the crowd, chanting “the people united will never be defeated!”, I also found my eyes wandering up buildings, absorbing their architecture – this is Gotham city after all. I watched people, peered into shop windows, smelled restaurant lunches, noticed city birds, read street signs, listened to the rhythms of traffic and October wind. Most importantly, I interacted with Pittsburgh’s people.

            “Seriously? You’re here to protest fracking? Do you even fish? Our fish are fine. Go home to your parents and take a shower.” That older fisherman who stopped us was among many locals who did not appreciate our presence. It’s true that some of us had messy hair after a weekend of organizing in the convention center, and it’s true that we hadn’t fished in Pennsylvania’s rivers. I’d never been to an Alleghany County park. What was I doing here?

Over the weekend, ten of us from Berkeley stayed in the backyard of an urban farmhouse north of the river. The family had put their space on the Power Shift couchsurfing list and welcomed us in with cranberry scones, hot showers, and a warm outdoor fire pit for a modest $15 a night. We traveled to and from the convention center by bus during the day and by taxi after our late nights at the one bar we kept going back to (despite the indoor smoking).

My boyfriend and I arrived to Pittsburgh later than most of our friends on Friday night. By the time we met them at a classy bar downtown, it was 1AM and they had a story to tell. Apparently in their journey from the airport to the farmhouse, they transferred onto a bus going the wrong way. Once someone’s smart phone figured out the mistake, they got off and waited to head the other direction. “We were the only white people there, and everybody was looking at us weird,” Victoria explained to me and Steve. Police were circling the streets and stopped to talk to them. “What are you doing here?” “We’re waiting for the bus,” Victoria responded. “No: what are you DOING here?” Zen explained that they were in town for a conference and were trying to get to where they were staying. “This is the most dangerous neighborhood in Pittsburgh for drug trafficking and gun violence. I suggest you get out of here.” The policeman drove off. The flustered college kids with no drugs in their pockets got on the next bus and made it safely to the farmhouse, which turned out not to be all that far.  Clearly we were foreigners in a strange land.

Police in front, police in back, Pittsburgh’s working class on both sides. We the protesters marching through. I looked behind to see the damage. We were clogging the concrete arteries of downtown Pittsburgh – for a cause. For a purpose. We wanted to be seen. As I crossed the Ohio River on foot for the first time in my life, I hoped that maybe my shouting and marching would help keep the Ohio River clean for the people of Pittsburgh just like I wanted the Sacramento clean for Californians, just like I want the Potomac clean for Marylanders, and all the streams and watersheds in between. Besides keeping waterways clean, there was climate change to think about. We may spew greenhouse gases locally but climate change spews back disasters globally. That’s why I left California to fight someone else’s fight. Because it was my fight, too; at least I believed it was. That genuine motive gave me a ground to stand on, a ground that we all stood on together.

            Pittsburgh unfolded to me in particular ways because I was marching. I received annoyed, curious, supportive, and resentful looks from business people and drivers on the streets that my outsider body was helping fill. I had never walked these streets before and now I was helping block them. The more local bystanders I passed on the street, the more I felt I had to break off from my horde and interact, to break the dichotomy between us and them, because if not, what was I doing? So I diverged to talk to a group of bystanders in dark suits outside a tall office building. “Do you know what this is about?” A few offered cynical nods, while the other few just stared. I went ahead anyway: “We’re all here in solidarity with Alleghany County residents who don’t want Executive Fitzgerald to allow fracking in county parks.” They nodded and stared some more. I felt uncomfortable and awkward so I hopped back in the street with my environmentalist friends, where I belonged. I should have talked longer; I chickened out.

Our trajectory took us from Alleghany Landing on the north side of the river, across the 6^th Street Bridge, through downtown to City Hall. Pittsburgh was sparkling in the warm October sunshine. I was standing up for what I believe. It didn’t matter where we were going, as long as we were seen. As long as we were seeing. Soon I saw the counter-protest, floating in the middle of the Ohio River: mounds of real coal with a big sign that said, “SUPPORT AMERICAN ENERGY, SUPPORT AMERICAN JOBS.” Crossing the bridge meant walking past several old men defending their industry, the coal industry. I was wearing my new turquoise Power Shift shirt. I kept walking toward downtown and avoided eye contact. Did they know I was protesting the system, not them as people?

Sometime later, after already chanting, “Hey Fitzgerald, we don’t want our parks in peril!” I turned to an elderly woman marching with two hiking poles. “Who’s Fitzgerald?” She explained that while Pennsylvania does not allow fracking on state lands, the Alleghany County Executive, Rich Fitzgerald, has opened up some county parks to be fracked. When I told her I came from California, she was amazed. I explained that politicians in California might open up some of our public lands to fracking, and that I thought our fights – in her state and in mine – formed part of the same vision. “Thank you so much for joining us – we’ve never been able to have such a large protest before.” Her gratitude warmed me up from the cold looks and snide remarks I had received from others. She reminded me why I was there and what ground I had to stand on.

“Whose parks? OUR parks! Which parks? ALL of them!” At first I felt funny yelling these words, as if I was bending the truth a little bit, as if I was faking something.  This weekend for me was wrought with contradictions, ones important for me to face as an activist and a traveler.  Maybe I did have ground to stand on, albeit slippery.  Protest marching is a sort of traveling with no real destination.  It wasn’t about getting to city hall.  It wasn’t about knowing the answer and proving it to some abstract general public, either.  Like our sinuous route through downtown, my personal sense of place and purpose was a winding and ever changing conversation.  “There are 446 bridges in Pittsburgh,” explained our final taxi driver who dropped us off at the bus stop before we got out of town.  I was only able to cross a handful of them.  Next time I come back, I’d like to cross more.