Commuting into Downtown on Second Ave., my route takes me down Court Place. The street is a short, narrow one-way that crosses Ross and Grant Streets and requires a kind of zigzag maneuver around the Boulevard of the Allies on-ramp — which it abuts — to stay going west-ish.

But for me the most bizarre part is getting a glimpse of the back of an eagle statue perched atop a stone pillar. The eagle is part of a pair of World War I era statues that greet the Boulevard’s traffic, which, driving up Court Pl., goes above your head and in the opposite direction. I try not to let seeing the eagle’s back throw me every time I go Downtown, panicking I’ve somehow gone the wrong way. Heading back home toward Ross St. of course requires taking a different route on an equally short, narrow one-way street (which is apparently still Second on that side). But that way, you get to take in the full view of the eagle, while also doing a weird jog around Firstside Park, not visible from the other direction.

Pittsburgh driving having its foibles is well-worn territory. I recently touched on this when Pittsburgh City Paper called out the 13 types of people who ain’t gonna make it in Pittsburgh, which for my part was largely confessional. I grew up driving mostly on a grid and mostly navigating stretches of big Texas highways, which, unlike the defensive driving required in Pittsburgh, you can do on auto-pilot after a certain level of familiarity.

That said, I’ve always had a poor sense of direction. It’s likely an inherited trait from my father and grandfather, and it can quickly cross from being a funny quirk into an embarrassing impairment (and into the realm of “neurospiciness” as the kids say). Teaching me to drive in a pre-GPS world, my dad shared all his strategies for coping: highways will tell you what cardinal direction you’re going. Street numbers increase as you move south to north. You can reliably make two right turns to turn around. Use landmarks (like eagle statues). And most importantly, words of comfort: if you made it there, you can make it home, because you can always drive back the same way you came.

Obviously, these comforting principles quickly fall apart in Pittsburgh, and as I’ve said before, it’s by god’s grace I’m still here. When my parents visited me for the first time, I remember them asking with some dread, “Why can’t we take the same route there and back?”

Of course, in genuinely answering this question, the usual suspects are to blame. First is Pittsburgh’s topography. A traditional street grid that would allow similar return routes only works up to a point when mapped onto steep hills and river valleys. I still remember Olga George, press secretary for Mayor Ed Gainey, describing Pittsburgh as a “city of mountains” during a visit to City Paper. (We live a mountain town!)

Add our topography to the city of Pittsburgh’s historically piecemeal expansion, which was less the result of central planning and instead annexing former boroughs and municipalities, many before cars existed. After residential clusters formed around geographic features, neighborhoods separated along railroad tracks or ethnic groups, with the city’s ward bosses negotiating for specific roads and parks. The groundwork for a hodgepodge road system was laid long before the 90 neighborhoods we know were officially (and inexactly) created.

Even the region’s parkways built in the 1950s and ‘60s aren’t really built like modern interstate highways, which tend to link up with a city grid and are used less for short local hops. Instead, we have oddities like Boulevard of the Allies, which is somehow a freeway and a local road — and was plopped down amidst the city’s existing streetcar lines. Different eras of urban redevelopment also keep confounding what could be simpler routes. Ironically, Court Place is a remnant of Renaissance II in the 1980s, and was reconfigured to simplify Downtown traffic patterns.

This is all to underscore a lesson I learned early. It’s not just that driving in Pittsburgh isn’t for the faint of heart (still true), but rather that to make it here, you have to shed old strategies and learn to embrace the adventure. For me that means waving to the weirdo eagle in the one direction I get to see it. It’s not a reliable landmark for navigating, but it has to come symbolize something about the city’s nature for me. In Pittsburgh, you can go home again, just not the same way.