Lost in the woods again

 

 
July 15, 1982
 
Louise is gone; back to the scene of the crim: Ken’s Woods.
She and her best friend, Chris (still unlaid since October), Ruby and Shawn, pitching that blue tent of theirs on the semi-level ground, setting out their cooking things on the table for the flies, chipmunk and ground squirrels.
They’ve gone from Scranton again (it seems the least excuse will do to avoid that place). Yet Louise never really abandons it, like a perennial flower, returning every year or two for her burst of sunlight.
She has put down pegs to her tent in Scranton, and to pull them up means more pain than just to leave them planted, accepting the pain she knows for the uncertain pain elsewhere.
Yet even now, Louise is changing, adjustments coming after years of failed relationships, the men she’s know having used her repeatedly, but never loved her.
Her child (our child) clings to her like an albatross, growing heavier with every passing year, holding her back from the absolute freedom she craves, a haunting need that goes back even to 1975 when she asked me what I thought if she decided to put Ruby up for adoption.
I wonder if she still thinks this, and whether or not she ever told Rudy, the two of them sleeping side by side at that camp site like hibernating bears, Louise dreaming of leaving Scranton, Ruby praying her mother doesn’t get wander lust again.
Even with its college, Scranton is a trap, a decaying world with no options for advancement, walled in by its limitations, growing each day into a ghetto like where I live in Passaic.
Rudy asked what I see in all the books I read, and doesn’t completely understand when I reply, caught up in some oversimplification of the world the way Wordsworth was in his perception of nature.
Louise doesn’t question it, satisfied with the limitations of her world, haunted by it as the same time, not complete understanding how books can be key to their way out.
In this, I agree with Pauly, when he says every human being has about the same amount of potential. Some tap it in differed ways, some not at all. Some spend their lives dedicated to finding themselves, some accept being permanently lost.
 
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The end of Time

 

October 2, 1981

 

Twisted maple trees lean in on the river here, heads heavy with still green leaves, like nature’s answer to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but dying slowly as their trunks split, exposing their empty interior time with rot out and send each limb into the fast-moving water below.

All this makes me feel sad, thinking how many footsteps my ancestors took here, having no doubt passed this place when these trees just took too root, as scattered as the seeds the tree has cast, flowing down a river of time that inevitably leads us all to the sea.

Back then, we all believed the roots we put down would keep us here, bound to this land and outlining our future, my grandfather and his grandfather before him foolishly believing if they delved deep enough into this red soil nothing would move them, surviving all the storms that came and went since them, much as these trees have, giving root to new saplings destined to inherit this earth when our time passed.

A gentle rain comes this morning, giving a shimmer to the leaves on the new trees and old, the last gasp of an Indian Summer before the deep freeze comes, all sharing the same bounty, all thinking they will survive until the spring.

Nobody knows if any of us will, these trees leaning in from the side of the river, roots drinking from the rising and falling tides, struggling through each drastic change they can never predict, even though they live with the changes of season, the rise and fall of the river, the freeze and the melting, the falling of leaves and their rebirth, aware if at all, of the other trees going through the same ritual.

My grandfather used to bring his sons here to fish, eating what they caught before anyone realized just how deadly that was, the product of the old German chemical plant upstream feeding poison into the water for so many years it has sunken deep into the mud for the bottom crawling cat fish to absorb, we all somehow living through it all, watching the change come so subtly we do not realize what has happened until it has happened, at which point it is too late for alter it.

I keep thinking of these trees as silent witnesses to it all, watching the world pass, and our lives passing through it, watching the gulls that swirl above us, the fish the swim below, and all that flows along with surface, or cling to it, the leaves that fall and float downstream, the turtles that ride old pieces of driftwood, characters in a drama we too share.

Now at the end of their lives, these trees still watch the river sweeping by, the madness of the falling leaves, the detritus washed down the banks from River Drive and the Wall Street Bridge with every rain, the muddy flood that looks sometimes as red as blood, trees that serve as sentinels to our lives even as the river and the rain conspire to undermine them, digging out their roots, causing the rot inside trunks we all assumed would be there forever, even after we have gone.

I come here every day, standing where my family stood, seeing what they could not see, the end of time.

 

 

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Lion and the lamb

 

 

March 6, 1982

 

The old adage seems to be true that March comes in like a lion; hopefully it will go out like a lamb.

The wind is up, with winter still clinging to its edges as I job up River Drive in Garfield. Above me, a vivid blue sky hosts scores of puffed-up clouds that seem immune to the movement here on the ground, sunlight still pink around the tips of trees, gulls and geese crying forlornly around me as if they have lost their way, having come back too soon from the south, or having never left, stranded in this chilly day.

The tall grass, still yellow from last fall, sways along the sides of the river where the night releases its hold reluctantly, revealing slowly the imprint of footsteps that have passed between the tree trunks – fishermen who poke their bait through the cracks of ice, or the homeless from the camp on the Dundee Island side searching for firewood they can burn to keep warm – crossing the rail bridge near Monroe Street where the freight trains once crossed to feed the ever-hungry appetite of the German chemical plant, rusted rails showing along the street on this side, pointing the way to an industry long gone or on the verge of extinction, me striding in the footsteps of my ancestors as if a ghost, haunting this space each morning as I make my way up from Passaic, pausing at the riverside near the silver-sided Service Diner for coffee before retracing my steps back to the comfort of my cold water flat, embracing March as the arrival of a new season that won’t become evident yet for weeks, windy March stirring up in my blood the ache for warmth, stirring me the way it does the reeds, as if we are all somehow connected, each waiting for the lamb to arrive once the roar of the lion ceases.

 

 

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Counting reeds in winter

 

 

January 15, 1980
 
Who counts the reeds in winter, these stiff soldiers standing near the shallows of the Passaic River where Washington crossed in his retreat, leaning forward, heads heavy with the frost, swaying stiffly with the gusts of wind, the sound like the crackling of fire or breaking of ice, lined up across the river from where I sit with my morning coffee, gulls swirling near the back of the Service Diner where the vents sent out waves of heat along with the scent of fried eggs, bacon and coffee the truckers consume.
For all the sounds of the city around me, there is a strange silence, winter muffling the usual diatribe of traffic, and yet lets loose the smaller sounds coming from under the bridge across the water, the sound of falling icicles as the trucks rumble over from the mills on one side to the road leading to the highway on the other.
A few ducks and geese compete with the floating coffee cups and bottles in those rare spaces of water the ice has yet to cover, oak roots building little lean-tos over them, an old dock with splintered wood and rusted hinges providing shelter, the clatter of the moving reeds like music around us, an unintended soundtrack for a winter we struggle to endure, mocked with the shrill voices of the laughing gulls who swirl overhead, and me, in the midst of them all, counting things that do not need to be counted, wondering where I fit in all of this.

 
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