With an oar on my shoulder:

May 26, 1980

The curtains flutter in the wind as a rise, testifying – along with the cracked shade – to the poor condition of this cold water flat I live in. The shade knocks against the still cool glass, brisk outside even this late in season. The sun strobes into the room as I dress for jogging.
Outside, Passaic comes alive with the whine of starting cars and the bump of trucks up 8th Street as traffic barges towards the Monroe Street Bridge to cross into the Garfield side of the river because repairs on the Wall Street Bridge are not yet done.
The angry voices rise and fall in a ritual so familiar I no longer fear a shoot out or the wail of sirens.
I love when a spring day starts out cool, letting me start my jog without breaking a sweat, seeing the long stretch of the River Road running along the straightest part of the Passaic River – both strolling side by side for miles like lovers from the great turn north of Paterson near Hawthorne until the great blending far south near Newark, Jersey City and Bayonne where combining with the Hackensack, it ceases to be a river at all.
My pounding sneakers take me back through time, passed the icons of my own life and the life of my family, my mother, uncles, grandfather, and his father and grandfather, all having resided on these shores, swimming in these waters, making their livelihood on the banks. They even used to eat the fish out of the river during The Great Depression, when they lived near or in, Grandma Jenny’s Hardware Store on Passaic Street.
This river runs through my blood line the way the air rushes in and out of my lungs, its tide the tide of our lives. There must be some reason why my grandfather became a boat builder after a heart attack forced him to cease building houses?
I know that I run through a landscape that still echoes their lives, closed car lots, foundations of old buildings rotting out in search of new development. The gravel under my feet the same gravel my family walked when these institutions still functioned, some taverns – including the dives on Monroe Street – filled with men and maybe women who even know my family, the old timers clutching bottles of beer as their peer out smoke-stained glass at the last of the factories and mills, brick faces forming strange palisades along the Passaic and Clifton shores.
Each part of this river has its own personality, this narrow slice between Wall Street and Service Diner above Outwater Lane the calmest, and oddest, since it is unlike the river I knew as a kid – the wetlands near the Route 46 bridge, the place me and Dave Fetterman spent our days pretending we lived in a Mark Twain novel, arguing over which of us was Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.
These days, I feel more like Odysseus, a wandering sailor with oar over my shoulder, seeking some way to escape the waves, condemned to come back here each day to witness what once was.

Living on the Isle of Dundee

May 28, 1980

Jimmy said they would have the bridge fixed by Valentine’s Day but here near to Memorial Day and it’s still a skeleton, steel beams only now taking flesh as the contractors put down the slams of concrete for what will be the road from the Passaic side to the Garfield side when complete.
They are months away from finishing it, and I find it funny, partly because of the disruption such things cause. I remember reading about a storm in the early 1880s that took out all the bridges north of Belleville, forcing wagons to travel down the west shore over our side’s less well-trodden roads from the farms north of Paterson to reach the markets in Hoboken and Jersey City.
These days it is office and factory workers that grumble, spouting ill words for the construction workers and the county government that struggle to replace the bridge too unsafe to keep open. I would grumble, too, except that they county kindly left the sidewalk open for foot traffic, so that I can jog across rather than hike up to Monroe Street or down Eighth Street or Market Street to the bridges into Wallington.
Most of us who live in this part of Passaic don’t realize we live on an island called Dundee, which white settlers bought from the local Indians for a handful of chickens. You can still find the chickens living here, but not the Indians.
Jimmy hates the bridge being out because Jimmy hates to walk, even for the two blocks up Passaic Street in Garfield for breakfast as Pure Foods diner or the longer walk along the east bank of the river to Quick Chek, and he mocks me for my morning jogs, and this love affair I have developed with this watery, temperamental river – my limbs aching after each daily run as if I have spent the whole time making love. Sometimes I hate the stench – especially near where the chemical plant pipes spew poison into the water, green slime dripping down the stones like urine, but even the ruins seem grand, significant, part of some great history I know so little about, even though most of my family lived a good part of it, fishing off these shores, swimming off the shores of East Paterson and Fairlawn. I run across the bridge and then turn north on River Drive, following it as if in the footsteps of my forefathers, aching to have seen what they saw, aching for the simple life I know they really didn’t have – my more complicated life making theirs seem simple.

Passaic River: Cycles and politics

9/17/80

Ducks and Geese roll over head in an endless flight out, leaving the river and the drought, the rocky surface of brown puddles where water used to flow.
The water stinks of chemicals, as if the summer sun has boiled down the liquid to the most vile in time for fall.
The leaves of the trees have turned too soon, hinting of an early winter, lessening the demand for water the river cannot give.
This year will be a thin line on the cross-section of the trees when future woodsman cut them down, a tiny tight circle that marks in their living history a bad year.
Forget the newspapers and the politics on TV, the river trees know best, and last longest, having suffered most.
Those ducks brave enough to stay peck along the water side for catfish eggs, moving forward among the reeds like an invading army, pushing everything out of their way. They feed now in hurried desperation, knowing bad summers lead to bad winters, a winter they might not survive.
While newspapers moan and groan over hyper inflation, a slow deflation starts here, wilting leaves, fallen trees, roots torn up by the wind.
Two stiff-neck cranes drop out of the sky, spying some movement in the thin water, one snatching up something silver while the other crane cries foul!
Everything is hungry, even the carp that crawl along the river bottom in search of food, their web-patterned backs visible to me fifty feet away, each struggling to keep deep in water than had shrunken into wading pools. Children throw rocks at them, and hit.
Someone's radio stirs up news, quotes by Reagan or Anderson or Carter over the hostages in Iran.
"It's sunk pretty low," a red-faced over-headed business man says, stepping up beside me as I stand near the Service Diner drinking my coffee.
I am not sure if he talks about the recession or the river, and whether or not he blames the Democratic president for the drought.
A rat rushes along the stony side, stopping and sniffing, aware that we are standing in its path to the trash, and disturbed over it, squeaking as if to tell us to move along, its small paws gripping the moist green stones, its shiny gaze turning this way and that way for signs of danger.
There is always danger. There are always cycles. The river rises and falls, then rises again, sometimes going too far one way or the other, and we, the rat, the businessman, the gulls and geese, all struggle to make sense of it, as if we could predict it, as if we could do anything about it if we saw it coming, with none of us better off despite our ability to vote.

Bridge song (1985)

The cold wind rattles bridge like a set of chains, shaking loose the rust down onto the quiet surface of the water, as if both the bridge and the trees needed to discard their leaves, with swallows dancing one last dance before vanishing -- they disliking the ice and snow as much as I do, leaving the ducks and gulls and geese to take up habitation in the rusted eves.
This early in the morning before rush hour traffic comes to make the bridge groan, I hear music played in those rattles, sad songs that seem to mellow me as I walk between jogs, and make my way over to the other side for the long jog home.
Each morning, I want to sing along. But I don't know the words or the tune.

Passaic River Dock, June 2, 1980

June 2, 1980

The rain trickles down through the wide brimmed hats of leaves, rolling off their shimmering leaves in steady drips, drops of water showing on the brown backs of ducks that hovering in this eddy for protection, each posing as if for a water color, leaves bobbing in their wake.
Tiny dots mar the surface of the calm water, giving it scars it would otherwise lack, my reflection and the reflection of those who look down into it changed into distorted versions, each of us looking like prize fighters after too many bouts in the ring.
The landscape is marred, too, by the bending reeds and weeds, that struggle to keep straight in the rain, each moving to conflicted urges, the rain from above, the catfish from below, ready to topple as the catfish dig out the soil beneath in search of food.
The leaves and trees protect the grey dock where I sit, the rain working its way through the cluster of leaves so that most of the planks where I sit remain dry, though the seasons have reached it in the past, sun and storm beating on its blistered face until the wood turned grey.
It is an old face, this dock, one that has seen many seasons here, and many people like me who've come to the river side to stare, old enough and sagging enough to have stood here for when my grandfather used this river to swim. The purple mark of mulberries mars its face, too, giving it a blotched expression that rain cannot wash away, purple working deep down into the cracks, berries dropping down even now, as birds pick at the fruit above.
The dock will not survive long. The state has plans to renovate the Outwater Lane bridge, figuring to knock down the small factory on the other side of the road, and landscape this side -- which means removing this testimony to the past as well. The factory is owned by the mayor of Totowa, a small manufacturing plant that made him his retirement. I do not know who owns this dock, though many people use it, as evidenced by the clear path down to it from River Road.
Hearts and initials have been carved into many of the planks. Names spray painted onto the concrete base that holds this up. I resist the urge to write my name here, too, partly because I know it will not last long, partly because I think no one will notice, and that the only true immortality lies in the flow of the river, the dripping leaves feeding the flow from here into the ocean.
If I could put my name on that, I would. Instead, I sit here, hovering over a wet piece of paper, struggling to write down what I see, knowing that in a hundred years, the dock, the paper and I will be forgotten.

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.

Passaic River: Written in Concrete

Sunlight flickers off the crests of waves creating tiny crowns as the water gurgles through the rocks from the falls, white heads among the gray stones and concrete blocks and protruding pipes contractors dumped here over night, one more unexpected change to the landscape I had not expected.
On these days, I have become a quality control inspector, studying the details of the river to make sure no one has misappropiately used nature, and here, one more abuse appears in this so-called age of environmental enlightenment, shards of concrete laid down on the river bottom like too many chocolate chips stuffed into this moving brown cookie.
From here on the dock or from above the falls, I have contantly admired the texture of the land below the falls, where the stony bottom forces the surging water to spread out and seek avenues unimagined before, where trees root right in the middle of the water anchored by the stones. I have always found a symitry in that jumble, shaping patterns of behavior for the water and the wildlife that have settled around it, red-wing black birds, wrens, even occassional egrets setting up shop at convenient locations, dipping their beaks in the water as the fish swim by.
These newly deposited retangular objects have no place in that world, already drawing pieces jetsum that would have passed through at other times, fallen branches suddenly tangled in the narrow passages, causing more things to clutter behind them, and then eventually the water to back up. While the water will never get so deep as to swallow the falls, the pattern has altered and the foot holds birds used have vanished, leaving many winging over the top, settling on the too-high perches to work out the details of these new horrors.
Stealthly, the river rats work their way out, finding this more condusive to their way of life, giving them new angles behind which to hide. Even the muscrats make their move, stirring from under their reed protection to peer out, as perplexed as the birds.
Over time, life will work around the intrusion, the birds will find some new way to use these as they had used the stones. Even the water will eventually make smooth the hard edges, sculpting the odd shapes into smoother, more acceptable images. Yet, something fundamental has altered. The tree-filled, stone-cluttered world of yesterday has vanished, and even time, chiseling at the concrete, can never bring that place back.