This amazing morning in May

May 27, 1980

An aqua sky glows with the rising light this morning, tainted only by trails of long thin clouds. The stark tan towers of Passaic mills stand tall on the far shore, remembrances of my uncles’ war time stories when they used to wet old newspapers so they might weigh more and bring home more money so the family could eat.

Thirty five years after the fact that towers glow in the sunlight as if new, painting by the cool air and the morning, and some need in me I can’t yet explain. Even the waste the factories dump into the river seems clean and wholesome today, though neither is true. It is an illusion created by mood and moving water, and my imagination.

I ache for renewal as cool air swirls around me after my jog up from Passaic Street and I pause to sip coffee as the new day begins.

Hints of winter still linger at moments like these, even though Spring has fully embraced the landscape with green and the fragrant scene of pine and cherry blossom.

The leaf-heavy trees lean across the water here, bought of light green tears nearly touching the surface in places – water racing over stones and through gaps with a loud, persistent gurgle that makes traffic up the bank from me seem tame.

The rush even cracks twigs, carrying bit of the fallen down stream.

The whole surface is smeared with colors of this excited movement, a smeared impressionism no painter can fully copy, yellow, green, tan and crimson rippling everywhere especially at the most excited river’s center where the reflected towers shift shape and add a more somber element to this amazing picture.

I can’t get close enough to see my own reflection and what odd part I play in this collage, but I feel part of it, and know I have been invited to separate myself from the moan and groan of abused shock absorbers over the bridge, and to resist becoming one of the mass of humanity leaning on car horns to keep from being late for work.

Yet these terrible things also leave their mark on the water, each rattle over the bridge sending small shock waves across the surface from the foot of the bridge, repainting the picture still again into something other than what it might have been, repainting me because I know in the end I have to leave this world for the more imitating one above, less frustrated for being here perhaps, but no less trapped.

Waiting for winter

November 19, 1980

The river rose over night from snow or rain upstream – mysterious Lake Passaic so distant from Dundee Island here in Passaic, I don’t always know about events until they spring upon me.

The exposed cables and much of the river bottom are covered again, clotted by the brown water I know so well – shimmering with reflections of a very blue sky and the dark buildings that line both sides. Most brown is the high water tower that stands out against the sky, rusty tears dripping down all sides. It is a perpetual observer of the human fallow that goes on down here, its long years having seen much, but mum about it all.

Someone painted the old apartment house on the Dundee side, the rear porches exposed to view from where I stand on the Garfield side of the bridge. One porch is bright yellow and green, a stark contract to the browning world around it, although for a short time in spring and fall, it somehow blends in with the changing tree.

But now, its reflection danced on the surface of the water with the false hope of spring, when it’s winter that we wait for.

The factories and mills with their sooted sides are more suited for this dismal time of year, vast mills of dark brink with smoke stacks billowing black fumes into the air, huffing and puffing dragons who still manage to make their way in a world now devoid of fairytales.\

Their reflections in the water seem ominous to me and more appropriate to the mood and season that approaches, the snow up stream, the forecast of a deep chill will shortly suffer.

Even the church and youth center with pealing paint and exposed brick offers no relief, part of some old and vanquished hope whose reflection floats side by side with the favorites in the once more bloated river at my feet.

The weeds or us?

June 26, 1980

The leaves blow, rustling and clicking like voices of a crowd, thousands pushing and shoving, thousands speaking trying to be heard.

The sun is so bright it seems to blister the grass, painting it dry and yellow, like hay spread across the landscape waiting for horses or cattle from some past incarnation to devour it.

At the same time, it is quiet here, a quiet not from lack of sound, but lack of noise.

All this seems in harmony, even the cars that moan along River Drive, bringing on their own assortment of clicks and rattles, each with its own distinct sound.

I hear voices, too, human voices rising form out of the nearby warehouse, white noise since I can’t hear what they say, only the drone of their speech – boasting maybe, such men engage in amongst themselves, telling tall tales that mean nothing to the trees or the river, a variation on the tales I used to hear the fishermen tell in my grandfather’s boat store, about the fish they caught or let go or that got away, and the story of the struggle, most of which had little to do with truth, yet felt right, even in the telling.

The trees care nothing about such tales or the concept of honesty – they simply live or die, with very little need to bolster the journey with boasts.

The wind does not search for honesty the way I do, it blows, varying its gusts, stirring up leaves or weeds, blowing hot sometimes, and other times cold.

It has no concept of success or failure, the way people like I do, feels no need to be more than it is, when I always feel that need.

If I listen hard, I can hear the highway and its hustle and bustle, that ever polluting part of the planet this place seems to deny, so rushed the people engaged there have no time to glance around and step aside, or to look here or stop here or feel this lazy, unhurried space, whose pace moves at need not out of artificial necessity.

Nothing here is more important than anything else.

I impose it on them being here, looking at the flow of the water and picking out those details that strike me, the ducks, the catfish, the empty bottles floating down stream and over the falls.

Even the brick face of the old mills and the cracked concrete wall along the road seem to fit into this jigsaw puzzle, as I rest here, and wait, the then move on, getting this jog in before I head off to my job, and the bosses who do think they are more important than everything else, especially those of us who actually do the hard work their positions allow them to avoid.

There is something dream-like in all of this, carrying a kind of haze that somehow protects the fragile things of the world, the blades of grass that struggle to survive, the white butterflies that float against the gusts of wind, the blooms of strange purple flowers that rise up in clumps near my feet, purple flowers that look a lot like faces staring up at me as if I’m the odd one in this place, hoping that my clumsy feet do not crush them in my passage, we humans thinking less of them because they are wild or free or even merely weeds. They are honest and real when in many ways I’m less so if at all, we humans reeking havoc on the world, despoiling the ground we walk on, drinking away the virtues of places like this, leaving our waste behind, never stopping to think which is more important the weeds or us.

A quiet day on the river

 July 26, 1980

“It’s quiet here today,” Old Ben said, making me jump from his suddenly speaking behind me.

He had waited for me to finish the chapter and close the book, as I routinely do when I come here other times than when I jog. Sometimes I just stare out at the falls, thinking of how good I have it even when I don’t have much in the way of material goods.

Ben had come up behind me like an Indian, his steady step avoiding twigs or loose stone, not meaning to sneak up.

I looked at him and grinned as he sat down beside me on the red stone that stuck out at the edge of the falls like a pointing finger.

“Sometimes we get mornings like these,” he said, pulling out his pipe from his pocket in a ritual so familiar I could predict every gesture with my eyes closed, his patting of his pocket for the pouch that held the tobacco, his slow opening of this, his pinching out the appropriate amount, then stuffing this into the bowl. Then, he would repeat patting his pockets until he found matches with which he lit the piped, and puffed.

After a few powerful tokes, his face was surrounded by smoke, this peeled away today by a strong breeze from off the river.

“It’s on mornings like this that the cats come up to feed,” Ben said, meaning catfish, not feline cats, fish that usually linger in the mud at the bottom.

Ben pointed a bony finger towards the shallow water.

“Can you see them?” he asked. “It’s those fish with the chicken wire for backs.”

All I saw were humped black shadowy shapes moving just under the surface of the water, wraiths that caused ripples, but little more.

“There’s carp, too,” he said, his finger moving towards the top of the falls where fish flipped to keep from falling over the lip, large silver shapes catching the sunlight as they plopped back into the brown water and swam back up stream.

We both laughed, the way we might watching clowns at a circus.

Ben knew this river just about as well as anyone did; he knew its quiet moments and its music, it loud voice and the whispering, seductive voice that lured younger people like me to this place. He knew the old raven that lived in the metal web of support beams under the Parkway Bridge, and the host of strange duck-like birds that devoured the offerings of cracked corn, cornmeal bread and popcorn offered up by the river lady up stream.

“She’s a strange one,” Ben said “But I guess that can be said about anyone of one of us, eh?”

He gave me an odd look, his white brow rising over the eye nearest me.

But today, he didn’t seem so mischievous as he sometimes did, merely thoughtful, as he looked out at one of a new visitor to this part of the river, a white swan stark against the brown water and reeds near the far side, a swam that floated majestically down the smooth surface of the river like an ice skater with no ice, its twin reflected in the brown water.

“But the river lady is stranger than most of us,” he mumbled. “She loves this river and hates to see it change, and so she and her husband hire a bunch of lawyers to keep the state from doing anything. She’s even sued the state for not doing anything about the polluters, like that could do anything to move those corrupt people.”

He spat out a bit of tobacco, but it was the bad taste he was trying to get rid of.

“The river lady ain’t rich,” Ben said.  “Maybe they win some of those lawsuits, I don’t know. Maybe that’s how they can afford to keep feeding all the birds, and other things, all year long.”

Then, Ben fell silent, as if hearing his own voice wearied him, and he squinted to make out a shape on the far shore, a shape of something living, but I could not tell if it was a bird or one of the other riverside inhabitants that wandered in and out of the reeds, making their living off the fish that came too close to the surface. But I knew Ben was really lost in some memory, one of those tales he wouldn’t tell, left out from all those he often told, too tender or painful to reveal to even someone as sympathetic as me, part of some truth about himself or his life that time had finally revealed to him, but shame or embarrassment would not allow him to speak of openly.

So he saw there with his pipe bowl cupped in the palm of his hand as he puffed, his gaze shifting from spot to spot, on the swan, then on the parkway bridge, and then on the carp leaping or the catfish in the water near our feet.

When he closed his eyes, he seemed to listen to the whisper of the falls, that siren’s call he could not yet respond to, birds screeching over the white tumult, birds seeking the silver fish to help fill the raging hunger in their bellies.

“We need to listen to this place better,” Ben suddenly said.

And then he fell silent again, and so I stayed silent, too.

The river did the talking. The river said all that needed to be said.

Upstream, the geese honked and flapped their wings for takeoff.

Upstream, others fed off another one of River Lady’s free meals, grateful for her charity for as long as it lasted.

Two realities

March 31, 1981

I live with two realities, never certain which one is real, my day life preoccupied with the rage of every day living: rent, utilities, band drivers and the prospect of war.
And then, I come here each morning and think: “This can’t be real.”
No whisper of the falls behind the Service Diner.
No stooping trees with arm-like branches reaching out into the river.
No bird song, bird flight or fish stirring up the mud.
The bridge is real and the traffic rumbling over it, reflected not in the thin sliver of wet the drought has left, but in what must be glass, an illusion to fool fools like me into believing that nature can thrive or even survive with all else that goes on around it, dumps into it, or drags out of it.
Maybe all this is a Wordsworth or Coleridge exercise, a mysterious transient thin I call up out of my imagination each time I come here.
I need to see the sea gulls feeding, so they feel, wings outstretched as they dive towards the reflected surface and come up with a slithering silver shape.
I need the trees, the reeds and the rocks, so they exist – though I fear they will vanish if I blink.
I have always needed this river to exist, to cross when I was a boy scout, to sail on with a home make raft, to come back out to after a long underground trip through the sewer we called Emerald’s Cave, the mouth of which still steers Curry Park Brook water from the center of Clifton passed School #11 to this place.
My uncles, grandfather, his brothers and uncles and their father, all needed this place to exist, too, from the land speculation of my great, great grandfather who tried to sell chunks of its shores to my grand parents who swam its water off a Fair Lawn beach, or fished from the bridges crossing it to feed our family during the Great Depression, before we all learned it was too polluted to safely swim in or eat out of.
These days I share this dock with shards of glass, the shattered aftermath of teenage drinking, boys and girls coming to this place, to this river for reasons of their own, leaving behind testimony to the shattered age in which we live.
So are the charred remains of the small island half way across the river between here and Clifton, the old trees and reeds someone set to blaze during the worst moment of the drought, a brief glow in the middle of the night kept from spreading by the vastness of mud.
None of that is real either, not the night glow or the remains, not even the time when Dave and I set foot there, claiming it as our own the way Columbus must have done when reaching America.
Or perhaps it is, and the rest – all that preoccupies the rest of my day – is not real.
If only it was so.

Eyes wide and bright

February, 1999

They couldn’t keep their eyes off of it, city kids staring out at wide open spaces that they’d been told for years was nothing more than some kind of garbage dump, where even to breathe the air meant almost certain death.

City kids from Union City, Weehawken, Guttenberg, West New York, Hoboken, North Bergen and – yes, even Secaucus, all nearly stricken blind the disparity of what they thought they would see when they agreed to come out onto the water on this sunny but brisk day in February, and what they actually were seeing close up – a winter wonderland with bits of ice, but life, too, exotic to their way of thinking and gently swaying fox tail and cat tails and other stalks of brown grass taller than the tallest of the kids in the boat, and strange streams whose secrets were being slowly revealed as the boat edged each.

And these fourth graders were the gifted and talented kids from nine schools throughout the county, not the dullards that played hooky and got detention, so learned little even from books.

These kids were smart kids, book-learned kids, and yet this two day seminar in the Hackensack Meadowlands opened whole new chapters none of their school books provided, chapters read off to them by the education staff of the Meadowlands Environmental Center in Lyndhurst, for whom this was only one of many moving image books they could provide, from one of a variety of programs for children and yes – even teachers – in the region, teaching them lessons on this wondrous mysterious world within ear shot of their front doors – a wilderness many kids had glimpsed from their back end of the Palisades in places like North Bergen, Union City and Jersey City, but never for one instant realized what was really here.

“This really is a journey of discovery for most of these kids,” said Gabrielle Bennett-Meany, education specialist for the Environment Center. “They are amazed that this place is home to so many creatures and they really love getting into the marsh, dipping their nets in the water, and pulling up fish and shrimp. It’s different and it’s exciting for them.”

And the fact that this is right in their own backyard makes it even more thrilling, Meany said.

“This wetlands and estuary system is not a remote, far-off place. It’s right here and it’s accessible. The kids are amazed to find they are sharing the region with egrets, hawks, turtles, snakes and other animals they have only read about in books,” said Meany, looking at their faces, and mine, although seeing on my face a slightly different expression, of a different kind of city kid who had spent as much time on a river as in the streets of Paterson where I grew up, and yet, even I – who thought he had seen it all, had dipped my toes in the most polluted river in America – was amazed.”

This seemingly odd juxtaposition of expansive natural preserve with densely developed areas was not lost on the children, said Rosalyn Nussman, director of the Hudson County Gifted and Talented Consortium of educators, who coordinated the workshop with the staff of the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission – the body charged in 1969 with the orderly development of this area and preservation, although at times these two concepts collided, and left them in the awful position of having to choose which to emphasize. On this trip, they were focused on preservation, and boasting about how much life had returned to the Hackensack, which had come close to competing with the Passaic River I grew up on for pollution.

Manufacturers on both rivers had seen the waterways as a kind of toilet into which they could flush what they wanted, a cheap and easy disposal for a variety of nasty things that later proved deadly, not merely to those things that lived in the water, but the walking, talking, and breathing people who lived along side of it.

As the boat chugged on, some of the eight and nine year olds gasped – at some large white bird I later learned was an egret and at the top half of a familiar building poking over the tops of the reeds and beyond the cliff-like Palisades upon which many of them lived, a building nearly everyone saw every day across the other side of the Hudson River, The Empire State Building, but here, lost among the reeds as if someone had picked it up and dropped off here, the way developers once did pieces of the old Penn Station Railroad Terminal.

“That makes an absolutely wonderful picture for them,” said Nussman. “And they will remember it.”

After a day-long trek through the marshes during which the kids kept journals of what they saw and how they felt, collected samples, and made tree rubbings the students returned the next day for an artists’ workshop where they could describe their new-found knowledge using the performing or visual arts. The students chose from workshops on pottery, mask making, drama, printmaking, dance, puppetry, water colors and experimental orchestra.

Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission staff helped he students express themselves in new, artistic, ways.

Swaying tall reeds were captured through fluid dance movements; the sounds of gurgling water and ruffling grasses were expressed through music.

The dance instructor, Michael Schiocyl, from the Calabro School in Hoboken had them create the environment of the salt marsh through dance and had the children moving like fish. These kids learned a whole new meaning of applying dance to communication.

“They learned it doesn’t have to be ballet in order to be effective, it just has to represent something,” Nussman said, noting also that the most valuable aspect of the two-day workshop was the total integration of art and science. “Kids tend to isolate things, but this experience showed them that there are correlations between the two subjects.  It was interdisciplinary -- a total learning experience -- far above the normal.”

Nussman expects many of the students will return with their parents to walk the trails and river banks of the Meadowlands District.

“They have been introduced to a resource most did not know existed. I am sure they will be back,” she said.
I knew I would be.

Four days to Christmas

December 21, 1980

The wind is up this morning, spreading its chill across the river top with ice forming in those places where the water stagnates.

No flies greet me here as they usually do in summer, but bits of leaves play tag in the wind, sometimes clinging to the ice-encrusted branches from which they fell last fall.

Christmas is four days away and I sit here on the river side celebrating the first day of winter with my river friends, none of them human.

A few pedestrians brave the cold, but they don’t know me. Most people street their cars up River Drive to one of the highways for the long but apparently necessary trip to Willowbrook Mall with no mall open on this die of the river on Sundays.

Cracks grin at me in the ice, each surrounded by tiny brown wrens that stand knee-deep in the stony cold water, strafing for scraps, previous prizes that the bottom still holds and each bird needs to survive.

Wrens occupy the tips of stones that stick up from the ice in deeper water, too, while barn swallows slice through the air above them, snatching the few remaining insects from the sky.

Above these, gulls cry in their hunt for larger prey, cat fish or crap that take to deeper mud at first chill, immune to this aerial bombardment until hunger brings to the surface and the villains pounce.

Several ducks float in the open water between the cracks, a white mating pair and a lone one of black and white with a red beak, who stays so still he seems a monument, unmoved by cold wind or current, making no effort to scavenge, the way all others around him do.

A strange calm pervades this place, even with the shrill voices of the gulls and the steady flap of water seeking to escape the ice. Even the huff and puff of cars above does not disturb this peace.

The sun winks down through the bare tree limbs but provides no warmth. It merely emphasizes the flaws, giving shadows to the old tires and car bumpers, and glitter to the shards of glass.

I shiver and ought to hate the child that nips at every inch of skin I expose. But there is something special about the river at times like this, the cold erasing the stench, stripping this place to its most necessary elements – the bones of its most barren existence revealed.