Hey, y’all!
It’s been awhile. Two years, in fact.
One of the truths about my writing is that it tends to be prolific when things are bad and basically non-existent when things are good, but that’s only half the story here.
In 2022, I was so confounded by my naughty little puppy (and so very unemployed) that I took to the page to sort out my feelings.
In 2023, Sylvie mellowed and was doing great, but I was so pregnant (and so very miserable) that the only place I took to was my bed.
In 2024, I was a new mom (and so very overwhelmed not by my human baby, but by Sylvie’s new-baby-in-the-house anxiety) that, despite having many Sylvie-related issues to sort out, it was all so depressing that I couldn’t write anything down and simply took my Lexapro instead.
For a while, things got so good that I had nothing to write about. Then, things got so bad that there was no humor to be found in our stories.
Then, we met our dog witch Renee.
Rather than taking you step by step through the painstaking (and still ongoing) process of helping Sylvie learn that she is safe and reducing her fear-based, maladaptive behaviors, I’m going to tell you about the place where Sylvie came back to life: The Slags.
When Kyle and I bought our house, we learned that if we traversed the very sketchy stairs leading down the ridge from our backyard and took a right, we’d end up in the 8th wonder of the world Frick Park, a heavily wooded and wild-flowered and cute-little-woodland-creatured utopia that’s so serene and beautiful it’s hard to believe it’s named after such a bastard. What we didn’t know was that if we took a left, we’d end up in an otherworldly landscape of tall grasses, scrub trees, and juniper bushes that just so happened to be growing on top of a toxic waste dump slag heap.
Slag is a byproduct of steel production. As that sentence represents the beginning and end of my knowledge of steel, my bestie, ChatGPT, helped me fill in the rest: “[Slag is] the solid waste that forms during the separation of molten steel from impurities in the furnace.”
If, like me, you’re not an expert on complex mixtures of oxides and silicates, just know that a giant slag heap is not the place most people would choose to commune with nature.
And yet…
The Slags is an area on the East End of Pittsburgh where The Duquesne Slag Products Company dumped this molten waste from the 1920s to the 1970s. It’s also one of the many nicknames of a beloved expanse of unlikely meadows, ridges, bluffs, and shady trails that has become a haven for mountain bikers, dogs, hikers, cross country skiers, and teenagers looking for a secluded place to do what teenagers do.
The Slags is where we met Renee and her dog pack. It’s where every day for six months, rain or shine, Sylvie and I joined the pack to amble through grassy meadows, slog across flooded streams, and scramble up and down steep trails carved by local guerilla mountain bikers (they refer to themselves as “Slagforce”), a dozen dogs galloping, yipping, and playing beside us all the while.
It’s only fair to note that all of us who use and love The Slags are trespassing, and that I write this at risk of citation, but I’ll take one for the team if the URA decides to come after me. (URA: Please don’t come after me.)
The Slags are changing.
As I write this, bulldozers and excavators are tearing out trees and carving paths for even larger trucks to enter this majestic (and at least a little bit toxic) place that feels as much like home to me as the twelve walls that make up our very oddly-shaped house.
Now, I can’t go any further without telling you that the lede I just buried is that my happy place is NOT being flattened for condos or fracking or an AI data center; what’s happening isn’t the 2025 version of Fern Gully, even though at this moment it looks the same. The Slags are undergoing remediation, meaning that the current flora will be removed so that the land can be “capped” by two feet of new soil – non toxic! – and repopulated with native plants. Sounds nice, right?
After the remediation is complete, the plan is to build a solar farm atop two of the meadows, then reopen the surrounding woods as park land. Losing a significant portion of the current acreage to solar panels is less than ideal (and I’m very in favor of alternative energy!), but if it’s a choice between the solar farm OR a housing development of McMansions (which is exactly what they built on the slag heap across the valley in the 2000s), I’ll take a solar farm surrounded by wooded trails any day.
Logically, this change is a good thing. And yet…
It brought me to tears this morning.
During our morning reconnaissance mission nebnoser hike, I stopped in my tracks when Sylvie and I came up over a ridge and saw that “Bathroom Meadow” (I’ll leave the etymology of that nickname to the imagination) had been leveled save for one tree. As we edged along a trail that had been fully shaded by a tree canopy the day before, I realized I wasn't breathing. The trail was now just a naked ledge above a sheer drop.
It wasn’t the height that took my breath away. It was the realization that the landmarks of Sylvie’s and my shared growth and happiness were gone — our joyful memories disassembled and tossed in a pile with the trunks of felled trees.
Gone are the thickets around which Sylvie blissfully frolicked with her new friends Callie (a boxer) and Atticus (a golden), when just days before she had been petrified with fear and refused to leave our driveway. Gone are the paths where she followed the lead of calm, easygoing Hannah (a Bernese) and learned how to respect the boundaries of ancient Jellybean (a cattle dog mix) – after all, not everyone wants their invitation to play to be Sylvie’s signature punch in the butt. Gone are the milkweed and the lamb’s ear, the markers I used to practice recall with Sylvie as we learned to trust each other again. Gone are the myriad places where my shoulders softened and my smile re-emerged as I watched Sylvie turn back into the happy-go-lucky dog she had been.
I’m struggling to square my devastation about losing this landscape I know so intimately with the knowledge that this remediation project is, on the whole, a good thing. Of course I don’t want my daughter to skin her knee on slag rock or Sylvie to lap up puddles of muddy slag water on a hot day. Of course I know it’s a good thing to reduce the toxicity of a place that is basically the backyard for every resident of the neighborhood. And yet…
It's just hard to watch entire groves of trees being ripped out of the ground and think it’s a good thing.
“Let’s do both” has been my motto for most of my adult life. And now, faced with a scenario where we can only choose one – leave our beloved toxic-waste-wilderness untouched and unhealthy OR raze the intricate labyrinth of generations-old trees and wildflowers to make it safer – making the right choice hurts, even if the right choice is obvious.
Implausible
If you stuck with me through all of that preamble, here’s the point: Outfoxed will be shifting a bit. Rather than the exasperated musings of a woman struggling to accept that her puppy is simply acting like a puppy, this newsletter will, for a time, cover the place where Sylvie and I have spent many of our happiest moments, The Slags.
More than what The Slags has done for my dog and my family, what I love most is the implausibility of this place. Milkweed – the endangered habitat of the Monarch butterfly – shouldn’t grow out of toxic waste, and yet it grows in The Slags. Mountain bikers shouldn’t drive halfway across the country to test out trails and jumps on poisonous artificial hills in the middle of Pittsburgh, and yet they come to The Slags. A blue heron shouldn’t hang out in a century-old industrial garbage heap when there is a pristine park just a few acres away, and yet one does in The Slags. (I call him Cornelius.)
Even ChatGPT knows this place is ridiculous. “Some locals sled down slag hills in winter despite the risk of cutting themselves on sharp slag shards—classic Pittsburgh grit.” I truly cannot think of a more Pittsburgh sentence than that.
I’ll be making my next few pieces into a series called Implausible. Before The Slags turn into whatever they will become, I seek to capture the stories of people, plants, animals, and objects doing things they shouldn’t be doing in a place like The Slags (and I don’t mean the teenagers who sneak out there at night to drink).
Fear not: Sylvie isn’t going anywhere. She will be right there with me as I explore The Slags with the varied characters who love it as much as I do.
