Gray World

May 25, 1980

It is a grey world, touched up by the grey fluff in the sky. Water, once blue and green and gold, now harmonizes with the restricted hues, with only a touch of brown and dark, dismal green for variety, reflected at the shore.
The day suggests rain, but the air denies it, with clouds too thin to sustain such an embrace.
Even the factory smoke stacks looked paler, their brick faces like washed out water colors, bleeding at the edges as they billow white, like dull flames caught in thickening ash, soon to die.
A black bird -- a crackle or a crow -- flaps its way to the water's edge in a clumsy landing, snapping at the vines before being startled by the 8 o'clock whistle, a whistle that moans across the water like some monster from the deep, wounded in some previous scene and coming finally to eke revenge.
Then, both moan and bird vanished, leaving only the sound of the river water gushed over the man made falls, the brown foam forming at the bottle and spreading among the reddish rock, the bubble and pop telling secrets of where the water has been in its long travel from Lake Passaic.
The stench tells more, of entrances and exits in and out of dark factories, the Little Falls Laundry, Marcal, Garden State Paper, and then that, too, fades.