One of the things I have never loved about living in Pennsylvania is the land. Not the way I loved the land in Kansas, Iowa, Vermont. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on why. It’s not like I don’t appreciate the geography of Pittsburgh — the way the rows of houses march up the hillsides, marshaled by church steeples, in Lawrenceville, the South Side Slopes, the West End, and countless other parts of the city, which is imbued with a particular magic at twilight, when the individual houses are marked with points of sparkling light but the whole is still bathed in a cool atmospheric blue glow. Or the view of Mount Washington — a long, high bluff with a sheer drop-off to the south bank of the the Monongahela — from my apartment window; at night a string of lights traces the uneven crest of the ridge, announcing Pittsburghs’s complete indifference to heights.