But it also has deer.
The first time I saw a Pittsburgh deer was just a few nights after we moved here. My brother, Kevin and I were driving on a dark, but fairly busy street when there in front of us was not one, but two deer. Just hanging out. I stopped my car, which is the customary deer greeting back home in rural Pennsylvania, four and a half hours east of here, where deer run rampant along back roads surrounded by farmland. "I come in peace," my engine purred. "Now move." As I patiently waited for them to disperse, I suddenly remembered, I wasn't in rural Pennsylvania anymore. I was in PITTSBURGH. And there were DEER. In the middle of the STREET. "What the hell kind of place is this," my engine screeched; it also had just remembered where it was.
So the deer finally jumped out of the way, but they didn't move back the way I assumed they had come, which was the left side of the street, where there was some grass and a small patch of woods next to a retirement home. No. They moved to the right side of the street, where homes and human inhabitants stretched out for miles to the river and downtown. They moved towards civilization.
I watched them run, and then I saw who they were running to. There were three more deer, hanging out in somebody's front yard.
The next day, my brother Tim and I were driving down that same street. The deer were gone, but there was a family standing on the front porch of the house whose lawn hosted the guest herd of deer the night before.
"Look!" Tim said. "The deer evolved!"
I thought the whole thing was a fluke. I thought those five deer were rogues, rebels, doing the deer equivalent of graffiti by eating and pooping on someone's lawn.
Until two weeks ago, when I saw another deer hanging out beside another fairly busy street, eating and pooping on someone else's front lawn. Then last week, driving down that same street, I almost ran into a deer in the street, presumably working his way over to a lawn on which to eat and poop.
This is becoming a pattern, a pattern in which the deer are getting closer and closer to my car. It's only a matter of time until I hit one of them. Or they poop on my car.
It would be just my luck that I live for more than 20 years in a rural area, surrounded by farmland and woods, and never even come close to hitting a deer. But as soon as I move to an arguably urban area, I hit a damn deer.
Back home, I ran over a fully-loaded pallet of junk mail that fell off a truck into the middle of a dark and rainy highway. Pittsburgh's own Bambi is undoubtedly next.
