Pictured: Greg Cooper and Colleen Sohn outside of their former home in Bellevue.

By Colleen Sohn, Guest Blogger and Former Pittsburgh Resident

Shortly after ringing in 2015, in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke to an acrid burning. In the moment of dread and terror before shaking my husband and hopping from bed, I thought: We've only lived here a month and haven't even unpacked all the boxes.

Lightning quick, we dashed around the house, upstairs and downstairs, finding no flame. My husband unearthed a flashlight, and champion that he is, ran outside, clad only in underpants. There, he realized it was neither the house, nor the garage, but the sky, our neighborhood cloaked in a cloud of toxic air.

We were born and raised in Colorado, and had spent the previous 16 years living in Portland, Oregon. It was not as though pollution was entirely foreign to us. Denver's brown cloud of our youth was an ugly brute that often kept kids inside and friends and relations from burning fires in winter. We'd caught dreadful whiffs of air from the paper plant located upriver from our home in Portland. Sadly, these were mere kittens to the beast we would experience in Pittsburgh.

My husband and I consider ourselves to be adventurous and easy going. We love to travel, to experience new places. After spending the first half of our lives in the West, we decided it was time to better know the East. From all we read online, it seemed Pittsburgh was the place to do it. Like Portland, it is a river city, fancies itself "green," and has a burgeoning restaurant scene. There's great architecture, a gorgeous skyline, and world renowned institutions of learning. It's also a mere day-long (or less) drive from practically every city and town we hadn't yet had the opportunity to explore. Perfect on paper.

I arrived in October to buy a house. The skies were clear and bright and the winds were favorable. I never caught so much as a whiff of the air that would come to be my tormentor. I looked at houses in practically every neighborhood, too distracted by the task at hand to notice the chemical plants and factories along the rivers. I settled on a 1908 brick beauty in the borough of Bellevue. We could walk to the library, shops and restaurants, and zoot easily downtown. Again, perfect on paper.

Then, that fateful night, everything changed. At first, we thought it was a fluke. Then, we were taken aback, again and again, out to get groceries, visiting friends, a myriad of awful scents on the breeze. We asked around. "I don't smell anything," they said. "It's pollution from Ohio," they said. "It's trains passing," they said. And then we saw it, Neville Island, and knew.

We learned about black carbon, part and parcel of PM2.5 - known to increase risks of lung cancer, asthma, and heart attacks, Pittsburgh's dirty open secret. We also came to know what we called the Pittsburgh mantra: "You should have seen it before. It's better than it was!" We heard the "hell with the lid off" stories, the businessmen who changed their soot stained shirts at lunchtime stories. And so it was better, and yet so awful.

As our interests and circle of friends widened, we further explored the city, secretly hoping we would find that magic spot where the pollution would not find us and perhaps move there. We had fun evenings in Mount Lebanon, saw movies in Regent Square and Lawrenceville, ate burgers on the South Side Flats, perused the murals of dahn-tahn, walked in Frick and Schenley Parks, and were assaulted. We met friends at an outdoor classical music concert on the most gorgeous of summer days in Highland Park, spreading our blankets in the warmth of the sun, only to be assaulted, yet again. We complained amongst ourselves and were on the receiving end of the evil eye from surrounding concert-goers. How dare we speak the truth out loud.

We kept a calendar, rating the air from zero to four. Zero was a lucky day, one where we could walk the neighborhood, dash off to the Phipps or the cookie shop and not feel our nostrils burning. A four had our HEPA filter on full blast. Our calendar showed more one to four days than zeroes, a whole lot more.

And so it went, any time we questioned or saw anyone else question the polluted air, we heard the Pittsburgh mantra, it was blamed on Ohio, or were told, "Hope the door kicks you on the way out." And so we left, just over a year after moving into our lovely home. We're back in the West, Colorado Springs. The air is some of the cleanest in the country, and each day we breathe a literal sigh of relief that we were among the lucky ones. We could leave.

Colleen Sohn is a bit of a renaissance woman. A former teacher, she is a photographer, writer, gardener, and ace cook. Born and raised in the West, she's happy to be back in her home state of Colorado. She and her husband lived in Pittsburgh for one year, between 2014 and 2015.