Trout Fishing in Pittsburgh   I don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. I lived and loved and worked here for twenty-two of my now forty-nine years. Pittsburgh is really the bedrock of my subconscious though. I dream its tangle of streets, its wedding soup and fried button mushrooms, the grit in its air and water.               Awhile back I did the urban homestead thing. It all started one day while walking my then 1988 Bloomfield neighborhood. A Hoffman Real Estate sign caught my eye; I’m a sucker for real estate signs, you see. They are doors to the future. They are a way out. If I follow the sirens’ call, a new place will work upon me like water and wind on a rocky ridge. Rick Bass, writer and keeper of the Yaak Valley in Northwest Montana, writes about this in The Book of Yaak. Be that as it may, on this day, in this place, the floor and walls of these new rooms, the light cutting across at new angles, the lives of new people who have lived here before me—all began to carve me into something new.               I followed up that day by visiting the old Hoffman Real Estate office on Liberty Avenue. O. Scats Scatena soon had me deed in hand and mortgage in pocket. I then opened up that old row house like a patient who had eaten ninety years of Strip District breakfasts. Soot came out of the walls. Gas pipe fell useless from the ceiling. Edith Boehm, deceased long before I showed up, played her absent piano in the front, first floor room.               As I remodelled, the building went to work on me. **               As I write this I’m rereading many of Richard Brautigan’s early works. Born in Tacoma, WA, Brautigan never lived in Pittsburgh, spending most of his life in the Northwest. I don’t suppose he ever visited Pittsburgh. I don’t imagine he would have liked it much, though I have no doubt that his imagination would have gone to work on it.               You might remember "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard" chapter from Trout Fishing in America. The narrator visits a junkyard where, among other things, he finds a used trout stream for sale. It’s sold by the foot. I particularly remember the dust that collected on the used trout stream’s "various lengths: ten, fifteen, twenty feet, etc." That dust on the water really stuck in my mind.               That’s how I imagine Brautigan would have written about Pittsburgh. Trout didn’t live in any of our rivers back then. They had all been made to drink too much strip mine and steel mill run off. They all had deaths like the trout in Brautigan’s "Trout Death by Port Wine" chapter.               No, I don’t imagine Brautigan would have liked Pittsburgh much. All the same, I’m sure that being here would have rusted him a bit, made his writing less green and purple like Northern California wine, more gray and orange in our Pittsburgh boilermaker sun. ***               A series of events led to me to leave Pittsburgh in 1993. After two failed marriages with Pittsburgh gals, I met and married a Northwest gal. In some exotic experiment, we tried to transplant the Northwest into our Pittsburgh garden rooting oregon grape, fox glove, and bleeding heart. We played Yahtzee into the wee hours until she gave birth to our first child, a boy.               We lived off my parochial teaching salary at the time. Teaching for me was like panning for gold. I spent my days sifting through the slag hoping for nuggets. I just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I only seemed to be finding slag at the bottom of my pan where once there had been gold.               My wife told me we needed to change our luck, go out where the trees are tall and the rivers don’t look like yesterday’s dishwater. The rivers in the Northwest are cold and fast. The glaciers grind stones into something called glacial flour which makes some Northwest rivers run like milk. To fall in is to be baptized in strangeness, a sort of dusting with volcanic fairy dust.               Our first son was baptized in Mt. Rainier’s Carbon River. Our second son, born in Olympia, WA, was baptized in Porter Creek which runs over the backs of Dog Salmon on its way to the Pacific. Our little family nearly drowned as we tried to escape the 4:00 AM flooding of Washington State’s Satsop River. The little boat’s jet-ski style engine stalled in the swirling water. The aluminum bottom scraped over the submerged barbed wire fences. Our boatman cleared the intake of debris and got the engine going.               Northwest rivers tumble down from ice and snow heading for the Pacific like a runaway van. Eastern rivers don’t. I like the way my life has been worked over like glacial outwash tumbled downstream. ****               Richard Brautigan started working on my imagination when I was fourteen and sitting in my ninth grade English class in Lower Burrell, Pennsylvania. My English teacher was David Strellec, and as it was his first year at this job, and the ‘60s had ended the year before, he tried to inspire us. He shocked us with Sylvia Plath. He dropped a grammar book out his second story window, protecting us from an abusive curriculum. He read us his poems.               One day Mr. Strellec began reading to us from In Watermelon Sugar. The speaker did not have a regular name, mysterious, and the bridges were built from watermelon sugar, wood, and stones, "gathered from a great distance and built in the order of that distance." Someone made a lot of statues of vegetables, including a rutabaga by the ballpark. The speaker’s new girlfriend, Pauline, cooked big hotcake breakfasts and his old girlfriend, Margaret, hanged herself with her blue scarf from an apple tree. The sun shone black and soundless on Thursdays.               I listened intently with my head down on my desk. Mr. Strellec didn’t care that I didn’t look attentive. He trusted that Brautigan would do his work no matter what position I sat in. He did. *****               At this moment I’m sitting under six massive spruce trees in my now Deer Park, WA backyard. My bunny Oscar is lying happily in the grass. His back legs don’t work anymore as a result of old age and them having been broken and not healing quite right. He drags himself along if he sees a particularly tasty blade of grass. Right now he is content, only flopping his long, brown ears this way and that.               I can’t imagine Brautigan as content as Oscar. His gentle books are filled with whiskey and suicide. His daughter Ianthe wrote a memoir sifting over her and her father’s lives. His suicide at his Wyoming ranch seems both inevitable and without cause, tragic. A copy she signed sits on my nightstand.               No, I don’t live in Pittsburgh anymore. Yet, so many things work on my imagination. More often than not, I take a walk among the tangle of streets that surround Penn Avenue in Bloomfield and Lawrenceville. I visit a trout hatchery and put the little iDEATH bell on their fingerling jaws. I then wake to the Spokane sun as it comes up, big and yellow in the sky. This is how I go trout fishing in Pittsburgh now-a-days. Jeffrey Dunn is a teacher, cultural critic, & backwoods modernist currently residing in Deer Park, Washington.