I went by myself, which I want to say upfront before it starts sounding like a sad detail. It is not a sad detail. It is just a fact about how I spent the evening of July 4th, 2026, which is that I drove dahntahn, found parking about six blocks from the Point, and walked over with a bottle of water and no particular plan beyond finding somewhere to stand.
The crowd was what you would expect for a Pittsburgh Fourth of July. Families with coolers and children who had been promised fireworks and were now interested only in the fireworks and could not understand why there was still so much standing around before the fireworks. Couples with blankets. Groups of people my age doing the thing where you find your spot and then defend it quietly for the next two hours without acknowledging that you are defending it.
The spot I found
I ended up near the fountain, stage left if you were facing the river, next to a family from somewhere I could not identify from the accent. Two parents, three kids, the youngest maybe four or five, who had very strong opinions about where exactly they were going to sit and announced these opinions to everyone within range. I did not mind. The kid had good spatial reasoning, actually. She picked a spot with a clear sightline and no obstructions. I benefited from this.
The wait
There is a specific kind of Pittsburgh summer evening that the Fourth of July usually delivers, where it is warm but not oppressive, slightly humid but not the weight-of-it heat we had the week before, and the light does that thing where it stays in the sky longer than you expect it to. This was one of those evenings. The sun was still doing something interesting at eight-thirty. I stood and watched the river and the people and felt, for about forty-five minutes of waiting, entirely fine.
I thought about my kids. Not in a heavy way, just in the way you think about people when you are somewhere that used to include them and now does not. We watched fireworks together when they were young, not always at the Point but close enough. My son used to cover his ears for the first few and then forget to for the rest. My daughter wanted to know the chemistry of why different colors burned differently and I did not have a good answer and she filed that away as a question to look up later, which she probably did.
The fireworks
Good. Pittsburgh does this well. The combination of the fireworks over the water and the city behind them is one of those things you cannot fully explain to someone who has not seen it. The reflections in the Allegheny came together with the lights on the bridges in a way that at one point made the kid next to me say “whoa” in a voice that was completely unguarded, and I thought: yes, exactly.
They lasted about twenty-five minutes. The finale was what finales are, loud and accumulating, and then it was over and six thousand people started moving at once in the particular shuffle of a crowd that has just finished watching something together and now needs to remember where they parked.
Getting home
Longer than getting there, because that is always how it works. I was home by eleven. Biscuit was at the door. Rusty was on the couch. I sat in the chair and thought about whether I wanted another glass of water and decided I did.
It was a good evening. The kid picked a good spot. The fireworks were worth it.
A thought that came to me on the walk back to the car:
There is something specific about being in a crowd for something like this. You are not with any of these people. You do not know them. But for twenty-five minutes you are all watching the same thing and reacting to it in roughly the same direction and that is a kind of company that does not require anything from you. I have found that I value this more than I used to. When you spend most of your evenings with two dogs and a television, a crowd that only asks you to watch with them is a pretty easy arrangement.
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Hey, thanks for stopping by. This is just a place where I write about everything I’ve tried lately: old watches, the dogs, movies, interesting sports games, and any new app or website that catches my eye. Just one guy’s take, nothing more
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