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.
No comments:
Post a Comment