Feeding Frenzy: 1981

The catfish move, digging through the bottom mud, breathe bubbling at the surface as they fumble for food, reeds shifting as the push through the reeds.
"You can watch where they go by watching the reeds," one of the fishermen tells me.
It has a haunting qaulity, as if some invisible Christ were walking across the surface of the water, pushing reeds out of His way.
"Last night those fish was really hopping," the fisherman said, one of the many poor blacks who feeds his family by catching fish, despite the state's claim the Passaic River is polluted. "Those cats is lazy suckers for the most part, and it takes something to make them move, getting hungry or cold, and last night we had a real chill on us, and they sat so long they got hungry from waiting."
A burst of water at the falls makes that fisherman turn, and he points to the grey striped fish struggling to keep itself from rolling over the edge with the gushing water.
"Damned fool don't got no sense," he says, then sits down on a large grey flat-topped boulder to watch. The kids have left their mark on the stone, scratched out names I cannot read: initials tof a gang, blood oaths and death curses. On the slanted side, some local teenage artist has painted the relevant segments of the female anatomy complete with indications of what he plans to do if he ever finds a girl.
The sun has warmed the stone, making it easy to sit on, making me and the fisherman seem as lazy as the fish, though the black man talks about how good life is here by the water, how the water has helped and provided for him, and how much he thanked God it was put here. I'm not totally comfortable with this talk of God, thinking maybe the Mormon preachers got here to talk with him first, and I mumble something that makes him frown.
"You don't believe in God?" he asks.
"Not exactly," I say.
"What do you believe in, then?"
I look down at the water, just as I had when I was a kid when I came down here after cutting school, or church, and the water answers for me with its wide expanse of light, silver and blue and brown all at the same time, flush with fresh fish even this close to winter, wind swaying through the reeds making each look like a drunken sailor.
I watch the black man take out his pipe and stuff it with Buglar cigarettee tobacco, the warnings of the Surgon General no more of an account than the warnings about the fish. He puffs and sends smoke out over the water, a free man taking his pleasure.
He laughs, and takes stock as a flock of geese struggles to rise from the water's surface, a honging, flapping maylay that reminds me of young children splashing in a bath tub, too much madness for what needs to be done. They do not fly long, but float back to the surface of the water, upstream, near the bridge, where the popcorn lady is issuing their morning meal, popcorn the primary course, though she gives them other things she can talk the supermarkets out of: stale bread, beans from broken bags, rice and other things. She is the Salvation Army of the river, but doesn't demand her clients pray before they eat.
No one would take her surmons seriously if she did.
And fisherman beside me laughs, as if reading my mind, shaking his head and he takes another toke:
"It's all God," he tells me. "Every damned bit ot it."

Fishing the Ice: 1980-81

I don't see the faces at first, only the steam from their expelled breath, huffing and puffing between the trees on the far side of the river. An hour earlier, before dawn, I could not have seen them at all, those sad, old fishermen too skitish to chance the ice. The change of season putting them out of their usual easy habits. They don't cut holes in the ice the way the eskomos do, but find the few open spaces where the water still laps the shore, dipping their lines in with the hope the fish will be as desperate eat as the fishermen are.
These people aren't supposed to eat the fish they catch here, but it's free food for their families after the food stamps have expired a week before the next batch are issued. I once asked one why he does it, and if he knew that polluted fish could kill him over time.
"What's the point of worrying about cancer next year if we starve tomorrow," he said.
A stillness pervades their act today, the land and city locked in an embrace of cold just as the river is. Few things move, like me, but these men don't, performing their duty, slender silver lines taunt against the sky as the men huff and puff and wait for the fish to bite -- despite the ice.

Hipboot stomp: 1981

It is hard to tell where the hip boots end and the man begins, the river water licking at the very lip of rubber as the man wades out into the deeper eddies where only the ducks go.
I have not seen many dressed like him before. Most fishermen here are content to stay on shore or drop their lines from the top of the bridge. But this one seems to want to fight his fish hand to hand, getting as close to his enemy as possible, challenging the cats and carp to drag him down to their level -- and they do, tugging at his line, making him stand back on his heals to get his weight behind his pull, they struggling to escape him, he drawing them in, inch by precious inch, life and death on either end.
From my vantage point on the upper shore, I see the dangers, the bottom littered with communication cables and empty abandoned bottles from beer, each step a potential stumble. On a clear day like this, the glass at the bottom glitters, jewel-like, a distraction from the real prize at the end of the fisherman's line.
I never see the conclusion, just the dance, one partner dressed to the hips in rubber, the other in scales.

The impatience of Spring: 1981

A strange harmony of tweets, chrips, caws and yips greets me as I arrive at the river side this morning, the airwaves full of rush hour reports I cannot translate.
Down street, the falls add static with their constant hiss, white water tumbling down its six narrow steps to the stone-strewn bottom where ducks and geese add their complaint about the lack of fish.
Even the frisky swallow complain, stirred up into their spirling reaction by the repeated rumble of trucks in and out of the the mills, each heavy-wheeled vehicle bumbling across the potholed bidge iiiin a series of whacks, cracks and thunderings. Perhaps the birds complain about the constant rain of dust, coating the surface of the water with the remains of rust.
The truck drivers made few friends among the feathered population when they lean on their hors to make slow-moving drivers hurry through the light on the Garfield side of the bridge, or scream obsenities out the window so shrilly that even the sea gulls shudder.
Yet in some ways, I understand their frustration and the moody overtones of the birds and trees. We all fee infuriated by how slow the ice takes to go, tree struggling to push out their buds, birds impatient for the fruit those buds will bear.

Jog 5/26/80

Up at `em!
The hardest part of morning is getting from the bedroom to the toilet. Once that's done, a five-mile run up River Drive is nothing. After a year or more of morning jogs, the muscles don't complain. It's the brain and the bladder, those parts least involved, which would rather keep to the warm pile of blankets currently littering the bed.
But the call of the geese from the river top has already gotten into the blood. It's spring, damn it. Not winter. The cycles of life in Passaic play havoc with the soul. One barely survives the cold wind thundering at the walls, hands preying back the poorly painted planks. Even in the shower with hot water on full you can feel its touch.
Yet now, the mullberries and the willows have already stretched their arms out across the water and bridge, have already extended their welcome to their winter children, young swallows, baby rats, ducklings floating in the shallows just down stream, and me, pounding out the pre-breakfast ritual as if I am really part of this scene.

One June day by the Garfield Falls: 1983

I don't know who made the falls, or why, though time has warped them beyond the original intent, spreading them green with vegetation the designers would have been appalled to see, making their six steps slippery from the top of the eight foot drop to the bottom, red brick and concrete worn out from the passage of water over them, each crack catching some of the refuse dumped in the river upstream in Paterson or Elmwood Park.
On ordinary days, the brink is not a threat. Even young children take the challenge to walk its breath, from this side behind Service Diner to the far other side where the canal separates from the river proper designed once to aid the processing inside the paper mills, children like tightrope walkers, their arms stretch out to either side, their shoes tied around their necks by the laces, laughing or complaining each time their times come into contact with something slimy.
Some stoop to yank up the greenery, holding it up the way fisherman hold up fish, as a conquest, waving at those less brave souls stuck on shore, dropping the item down into the white froth of the stony bottom where the slow water from the top suddenly picks up speed, thousands of small rivulets working through the scattered masonry and cropping of rocks.
Rats roam freely here, under the open mouths of drainage sewers, feeding off the dead things that accumulate in the shallows, climbing the low limbs of the trees that overhang the far side, or the mounds of trash left by cheap-scake home improvement gurus, too lazy and greedy to take the stuff to the city dump where they have to pay by the pound.
But even the fisherman don't care, dumping beer cans into the water for every fish they fail to catch, silver bodies floating beside their boats as they grow weary, each boat edging closer to the edge of the falls before they notice, and turn their engines on to creep back, beer cans left in the wake like duckling children.
Over all, the gulls scream from their loft vantage point, immune to the curses of the fisherman from whom their steal fish, immune to the rock tossing children, and the rush of waters into the rat den below, dirty gray eagles of this sad water, competing only with the sound of trucks along River Road and the whistle of the factories, and the sad music of the pickup bars, immune, too, to the sad tales the newspapers tell, of scandal in the White House and Wars in the East, floating, floating, as if without concern.

Dry Spell: 1980

The trickle of water from the Garfield Falls looks as thin as straw-colored hair, each strand exposed as it tumbled to the sprawl of stones beneath. I never saw the low side so naked, with branches and rocks shaping a bleak landscape over which I could almost walk without getting wet. On either short, the dry season devours the trees, digs the earth from benath their foots so that both banks seem like webs waiting for the unwary traveler.
The sport fishermen stand beside the shrinking puddles, staring down at the helpless hump-backed cat fish, men needing only two good hands to have them in their nets -- these puddles so muddy and murky each might contain soup. Carp carwl in the deeper eddies, hugging the bottom, feeding off the roots of reeds.
Only the toads and turtles and crickets seem unphased, croaking as the temperature rises or sunning themselves on flast stones, while at the splintered dock, my thin legs stick out over the side, two more pink roots reaching for rain.