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.

Stripped Fruit

June 8, 1980

Someone ripped the leaves off the mulberry tree branches that over hangs this forgotten dock – a dock just up stream from the Outwater Lane Bridge near Dunkin Donuts.
I always thought of this place as secret because no one could see if from the road, branches blocking the narrow path down the back. But I knew in my heart someone else came here, and now I have evidence that it’s true.
I feel as bad seeing this destruction as when a burglar broke into my apartment on Passaic Street, violating the place, leaving it to feel less safe.
This was no random act – each branch has been cleared so that none overhang the dock.
Perhaps they did it because the tree routinely dumped its purple berries onto the surface, staining the wood so that anybody coming here would find it difficult to sit or stand without getting stained, too.
Now, no berries are left, although they still have several weeks of fruit bearing left.
I know of other trees I can go to along the river and still feed my face full, but I feel cheated by this.
I always wondered why the river had so many of these trees, and an old fisherman named Ben told me.
They were planted deliberately as a 19th century get rich quick scheme after Paterson became the capital of silk mills and area residents thought they could help supply the silk by feeding silk worms that feed on mulberry leaves.
“Silk worms feed on mulberry leaves,” Ben said.
The Passaic River has routinely suffered such schemes.
Local tribes of Native Americans used to feed on fresh water oysters, some of which grew so large in these waters that their shells were the sizes of dinner plates.
I thought Ben was pulling my leg when he told me this since me and Dave had wandered these waters since just after we could walk and never saw one oyster in them or any size.
Ben said greedy white settlers harvested the oysters to extinction, not because they wanted them for food, or even to use the shells for jewelry or money the way Native Americans did. Most of the time, they dug up the oysters, opened them, and then left them to rot in much the same way their families would later do with the Buffalo out west.
Some fool claimed to have found a pearl in one which started a frenzy that did not end until all of the oysters were gone.
Some people come to the riverside for mushrooms, harvesting them all. Some it seems have come to strip the trees of mulberries, too, maybe the homeless men, down on Dundee Island, I think, most likely spoiled Garfield kids, seeking simply to cause destruction.
I hope it was the homeless.
I clean the leaves from the dock for a place to sit and then I sit, sending the leaves down into the fast moving water below, a kind of sailor’s funeral, with me as the only mourner.

Feeding no one -- 1981

Brown muck runs where water once did, the drought drying up the corners of the river like shriveling bread.
I can almost walk on water that is not water.
But I can’t make fish live or find bread for hungry men too proud to ask for food stamps. I can only give them spare change.
The dry twigs crack under each step I take, making me ach all over, making me believe that if this river dies, so will I.
The geese come, land, linger, then they fly away after exhausting what is left to eat.
I ache to feed them the way the old woman did before she died, but there are too many and no promise that hungry men won’t follow my trail of crackers, devouring all of it before the birds can.
The sparrows alone seem satisfied with the muck of the river, since the mud draws flies, midges and mosquitoes they can feed on even when none others along the river can – save for the bats, who come out, only at night.

What lurks beneath?

Murky water wrung with reeds,
I sit among these,
Like child with fingers poised to strike a stone
Or curl up toes
The sticky underworld must know
What lurks below.

Angry June waves its heat
Curdles the muddy bottom’s feet
Fickle fish nibble roots
The water moves
Shifting reflected clots of cloud
Rippling with my face above
What lurks beneath?

The flapping of fat gull wings
Fly from shore but never sing
They cry of crimes that they have seen
Of guzzling, screaming pipes of steam
Of black-eyed fish afloat at sea
With ships of trash that bob between
The frowning brows I know as me
What lurks beneath?

The broken bridge beats back the waves
With wavered steel and concrete shades
Fingers arched but not to pray
As reflections float and pass away
And leave an ageing face of gray
What lurks beneath?

Dirty river in Spring

April 2, 1981

The peace draws me here.
And the glitter of sun on the river top – though it is not only water that glitters with the morning sun: broken glass does on the dock, giving unnatural shades to a place decked in brown and bits of green.
Wood and plastic floats down street from still melting places nearer to Lake Passaic.
This is a river that coils across the landscape so that I cross it four maybe five times traveling one highway going west.
I have lived through the floods of Pine Brook with me and Frank Quackenbush on the back of an airfreight container lid, poking up way up stream like Huck Finn and Jim, seeking freedom from a life of labor over someone’s back lawn, tall pokes poking holes in the ground so that irate office owners yell for us to stop.
In 1972, it rained for three straight days in a down pour so fierce the Passaic River rose over its banks in places it had never flooded before, filling the curved McBride Avenue in West Paterson and Totowa so that only boats could go where the cars once did.
But this is a dry year and I walk along the stony sides of the river in Garfield in Garfield where the water is low even in Spring, exposing all the flaws, the weed-ridden shopping carts, the abandoned tires, and protruding spikes of glass.
Power cables of some sort run down the deepest point of the river like ribs I do not normally see until the river reaches starvation.
This is a tough time.
The homeless set up a village behind the church on Wall Street in that wooden area bordering the railroad bridge and Monroe Street. The dirty men fish by day and shiver by night, their brown and stained faces illuminated by the fires they build in old oil drums.
They remind me of the hobo camps my grandfather told me used to inhabit these same places during those years when our family too took refuge in houses he built but could not sell, moving out to live with his mother when even that became too much a burden.
The river is so low even fishing is sparse and I see the men cooking baby fish I know won’t satisfy their hunger, many local merchants complaining about the panhandling, blaming the stench of the low river on the dirty men – while the chemical plant on the Garfield side continues to spew its slime into the waterway, feeding poising to the fish that the dirty men eat.
I have walked through this camp during the daylight, seeing some of the weaker, ill men, lying exhausted on brown-stained mattresses they have dragged out of abandoned houses elsewhere in Passaic.
Some mumble about jobs they can’t get, or never had, complaining about the closing of the mills and the companies who have fled to the Carolinas to avoid the unions, jobs they can’t or won’t chase, and live by the river until the city or state cleans their villages out.
I’ve seen some hunting the ducks and geese which flock to this part of the shrunken, green-coated stream, each also seeking salvation from a river near to death itself, while a new president far away in Washington DC ponders doing away with the Environmental Protection agency, claiming there is no need for it.

First Heat

October 14, 1980

To hell with the twenty first of December, winter in Passaic begins when I turn on the heat. It's part of the game we play, delaying the inevitable for a long as we can-- and the steady drain of money heat bills mean. Rocky prides himself on holding out until Nov. 1, but I gave in today. There was frost on the ground outside when I woke and the irascible wind gusting through the alley between buildings. In the dead of winter, the room on that side is impossible to bear. I've closed it off and slept in front of the stove. Even my hamster, Merlyn, has complained in his way, curling up into a ball at the corner of his cage, ready to hibernate.
There are some advantages just the same. The noise level sinks in winter. No more kids screaming through the car port with their games of tag. Nor radios blaring from open windows. Of course, the old lady upstairs will move around from time to time, pacing from one side of the frigid building to the other, her grandchild stomping up the stairs as if there was already snow.
And the gulls cry as the rise up over the buildings from the river, moaning the loss of summer and the fish. Next door the neighbors argue over who will walk the dog, and by the time I get out to run, the sun has risen, melting down the frosted edges of the river, leaving only the colored reflection of changing leaves that will soon turn brown. Bums huddle behind the church, making fire out of paper and discarded furniture, their wind burned faces lost in the steam of their own breath.
Watching them, I'm glad I have the option to turn on or off the heat, sink hole as it is, hoping I don't find myself in their place some sad October.

Tears of a bridge

Rust marks pour out of the concrete arches near where the old men stand with poles stuck out, the old bridge seeming to cry red tears under their fishing lines.
I stand in that undedicated ten foot by ten foot park somewhat up stream from them, watching the rippled dance of the water beneath the bridge, how the shapes of the tears and the arches changes in the water's mirror, how the faces of the men seemed plotted out there, mere maniquins posted in this impressionist painting as reference points.
In the reflection, the whole world moves, from sky and trees to cars and buses, always beyond their intended destination, traveling a little down stream before lost to those tears.
I can see the glint off the hats of the fishermen where special trophy flies are stuck in anticipation of a special catch, each dedicated to some legend of the deep for which only the fishermen have names. How many times did this one get away, or that? How many lines did that one break in his escape? I've heard their talk of line test and reel power, and have no translation, though in such lazy days as these, no one really seems to mind which fish gets away when the world is constantly oozing under the bridge's tears along with time.

After Months of Drought

June 5, 1980


The water gurgles as if in an bathtub not quite sealed, rising, then sinking into a weary whirlpool as the river pushes ease from the falls and presses its stringed pattern upon the reflected trees and stones to either side, gulls hanging above everything in a gray Spring sky.
The water sloshed onto the island, telling its tale of two days worth of rain, dripping green leaves rich with the nitrogen seeping up from the roots. Lightning and thunder vanquished under the pink sunlight bleeding over the edges of Passaic.
These falls divide Garfield from Clifton, the poor from the rich, with Route 21 stalled in route north where bridges should have risen, the factories spewing gray poison into the air, paper mills still pumping out toilet paper for the masses.
The river runs at the feet of the factories like a human servant no longer used, the 1972 federal Clean Water Act closing up the pipes that used to pour forth with additional vapors. Now, only a trickle seeps out, drip by drip, leaving floating fish in small pools, washed away by the infrequent rain.
Each leaf drips on me, on this gray dock near the bridge where I pause to write, purple stains of mulberries now water colors at my feet, washed, but not so thoroughly as to erase them, purple in the cracks as if blood in wounds.
And down below, the mud thickens again, and grows watery, and takes on life as the catfish crawl, stirring up the roots of the reeds, but two days hardly appeases this thirst after months of drought, and I can hear the sucking sound as the earth itself drinks, and sighs, and drinks again, this river, all rivers, only one sip in an endless quenching over time.

Silk worms, maggots and me

In some ways, they are not fruit at all, tight green or plump purple, hanging in clumps from the branches of the trees, free food provided me by mother nature for my stops between bouts of jogging.
Ever since I was a kid, I wondered about how the river side came to have so many mulberry trees, both the purple kind and the white kind, lining both the Clifton and the Garfield sides, all the way from Passaic to the Paterson Falls.
Recently I learned that silk worms feed on the leaves of these trees, and the world made sudden sense to me. A silk city like Paterson must by default also become a mulberry capital, even a century after the silk industry died.
Now these trees feed me as I run from one cropping of trees to another, me, spinning my own thread out around the river: the tree near the grey wooden dock, the tree near the diner, the trees along the highway where the turtles sun on their logs.
For about two weeks this summer, I jogged passed the body of dead muskrat that had been struck by a car on the highway but had managed in its death throes to drag itself up onto the side where I jog. For those two weeks, I grit my teeth to pass the beast as it rotted, maggots crawling over it after the first day, stripping it to the bone, they feeding on its carcass the way I fed off the trees: silk worms and maggots and me.

The Hunt

They watch the water for signs of life, bows and arrows in their hands, like 19th century Native American Warriors in hip boats and Green goose down vests, posted on the bridge between here and Garfield. They humped backs to the skyline of old red brick paper mills. When they release, shafts shoot straight into the water, answered by a wail of fear.
"Missed the mother, damn!" the slim boy shouts, his voice breaking with puberty, his small hands gripping the rail too tightly out of frustration, waving it at the swallows and the gulls that distracted his friend's aim from the fish.
Far below, stirring up the muddy water, the catfish and the carp swirl around the ripples where the arrow wounded the water, fish alarmed only by the vibrations.
"I know I missed!" the other boy yells, his face partially hidden in the shadow of the tree that line both banks of the river. He takes in the thin line attached to the rear of his arrow, pulling it up hand over hand, the dripping arrow flapping guiltily at the end instead of a fish.
This boy turns, his face suddenly revealed by a shaft of light through the leaves, painted rose from the sprinkle of red lights and the first blush of dawn, as well as a good helping of sunburn from whole days of hunting catfish.
"I know I missed," he said again, in a lower voice, a scolding voice, a voice aimed at some inner part of himself, his gaze searching the spotty bottom where the stones free the water from the mud, glaring at the web-backed catfish as if they betrayed his aim, glancing at the birds that flutter to either side, warning them not to try and upset him again -- he at war with all of nature at once, seeming to hate the fish, birds, trees and water with an equal intensity, but unable to kill them all with his thin shafts.
"So what are you going to do?" the other boy shouted, he gazing at the water, too, at the lively mist above the ten foot water fall near the diner, where the fish sometimes flip back to avoid falling. Bloated, wounded bodies of previous victims bob at the edge, their deaths preventing them from falling or flipping, left in a continual state of suspension.
"You can't leave those fish floating like that," the thin boy says.
The boy gripping the bow turns, looking as if he wants to shoot his friend, too, his tattered hat floating on the back of his curly hair like yet one more dead fish. In the advancing light, red scars show on his face, from endless scratching. The light also reveals more than bodies bobbing in the water, but dead shafts, too, never tied up, never recovered, a criss-cross of sticks and fish as if modeled after some ancient battle.
"Leave them!" he shouts to the thin boy.
"But momma said..."
"To hell with Momma," the first boy says, and scratches and turns his back on the slaughter and slowly walks up the road from the river.
"Damn you," the first boy shouts and rushes after him to catch up.

Wrens

Wrens dabble at crushed chestnut and shallow water pebbles, each bird wet to its belly like perverted ducks.
I hardly noticed them at first for the glitter of the river as sunlight played over its ripples. But near the foot of the dock, the beaks bobbed like Singer sewing needles working over the fabric of the land, stitching or unstiching, I could not tell.
Theirs is a terrible chore, holding together the tread-bare world, shaping its reality with their ritual. This close to winter they should have flown south, if wrens go south, I rarely see them in the cold.
They seem oddly delicate against the crude habits of the sea gulls who hang out here year round picking the bones of the trash piles people leave at the river side during the night. The gulls will come to anyone's dinner and hover over the wrens now, curious at the activity, wondering if the food is worth all the effort. These gulls like all gulls are better thieves than laborers, better beggars, too, showing up when the old women come to feed popcorn to the ducks and geese, staying long after their welcome has worn out.
Me and the gulls observers today of wrens picking at chestnuts, each small wren eyeing me and the gulls, as if telling us both to go away.

Raft

This, of course, is the wrong riverside, the view of green and brown mountains against the sharp blue sky, a distortion of the truth I am used to seeing.
My shoulder was always facing the hills, my gaze shifting from side to side, studying the reeds between me and the water, like a Tom Sawyer dream I never really realized when I was young.
Oh, we did managed to build a raft here, from the lid of an old airport shipping container we found dumped on the embankment where a careless truck driver had dumped it after ripping out the contents for re-sale in Passaic, our vehicle literally falling off the back of the truck the way the secretative sales person would say later about the merchandice the container contained.
Me and Dave even bravely mounted that piece of trash, procuring poles from the fallen branches from the nearby wreckage of trees, shoving ourselves out into the slow flow near the highway bridge, our destination Passaic and beyond, neither of us remembering the six step Garfield Falls inbetween -- though we never even made it that far.
One corner of the crate caught on a stone from which we could not budge it, snapping our poles in the effort before agreeing to abandon ship, the two of us, swimming from the ruins in fear of rats and snakes, seeking the warm bed we had left at home, thinking how we would explain our dripping brown water on the carpet in the hall, climbing those dusty hills to where we lived, both of us, oddly happy.

Rain, masks and reality

Sept 15, 1980

The radio weatherman reported rain today, static rising over his glum voice and news station jingle as if to confirm the arrival of some late season thunder storm. Outside, along the river, the clouds hang heavy and sad over the chunks of broken concrete that line either bank. White-bellied gulls overhead, flitting from tree top to tree top with the same hungry complaint, eyeing me and my thin jogging wear as if I'm crazy.
Don't you know it's going to rain, boy?
They ask with their hard round eyes, turning their heads to see me better among the tumble of weeds and reeds and fast food wrappers.
The summer was so dry that I ache for rain, needing to see and hear it pound the earth the way it did when I was a kid, leaving flowing torrents down the gutters from the street. The worst rain came in July and it passed without fury, splattering the arid payment without wetting it, leaving that rusty metal scent behind. That smell is in the air now, hot earth and cool rain meeting in a clash of wills. A flash rips across the sky, blue or white among the gray body of clouds. The whole sky seems to shiver from it, ripped by the sound of distant thunder: a rolling kind of sound that has no beginning or end or direction. I cock my head and lean against the swaying trunk of a sumac, feeling the wind pressed against its other side, feeling and hearing the rustle of its dying, brown leaves. Only September and the leaves have turned straight from green to brown without haunting middle colors that had attracted me as a kid.
Rain comes in whisks of wind, striking the concrete face of the Outwater Lane bridge, ripping across its top like a thousand drumming fingers. They pass and another curtain of wet follows. Then another. Like an invasion from the Clifton side of the river where the red front of the old mill is already deep in mist, as if that side had made a deal to receive this wet gift first, yellowed reed heads pressed down to the earth, flattened by the attack-- that vanishes as quickly as it comes.
Suddenly, the sky grows lighter, and the rain turns to a drizzle that moistens but does not cool my upturned face. In Europe, people complain of floods and news reports waver between the fate of their rising rivers and the American hostages in Iran.
A man yells down from the top of the bridge, his face blurred in the still-misty air. I cannot make out what he is saying or who he is talking to. Maybe he talks to himself the way Leo does at the library. The smell of the muddy river bottom is the same, stinking of sewers and chemicals dumped into the flow from upstream. The thin green central line suggests more pollutants than water, shimmering with the reflection of trucks that rumble across the bridge. Even the drivers seemed disgusted, rolling up their windows against the smell despite the heat, sad-faced men with wrinkled brows that look all the same, the way the business men on the New York City buses look the same, as if life has created singular molds for certain kinds of people: truck drivers, businessmen, store keepers and others.
I seem to be caught between molds, unable to make up my mind which face I should wear for the rest of my life, living with a student's face for the moment with other faces like layers of paint beneath this current mask, a hippie face, a factory worker face, a wandering deadbeat dad face and a child's face beneath them all. It makes me wonder just how many layers I must strip away before I find raw wood.
The gulls laugh at me as they circle in the air between me and the bridge, my small wooden dock rotting even as I sit, stained black and red from months of fermenting mulberries. They have long since given up their sweet stink to that of the river's. Gulls, mulberries and a river stripped down to its muddy roots. All those things utterly real with me, a cartoon figure among them.

Raceway

Red-leaved maples stretch over the water here, this sluggish alternate route dug out of this side of the land as a race way for the mills, now overgrown, lost in weeds and reeds and fallen trees, a civil engineer's nightmare where fishermen and kids dangle their feet from the low wall.
Unlike the main river where the brown water charges down from the Garfield Falls, this compost, this syryp oozes along concrete banks rising and falling with the level of rain, sometimes inching over its restraints to creep out onto the road leading to the bridge, leaving a small lake before the high doors of the ancient paper mill, leaving store keepers from the shops up the street on islands of parking meters and traffic lights.
Even in dry times when the main river thins to a creek, revealing its ribs of countless communication cables strung along its bottom, this passage remains plump, bolstered by two hundred years of leaves and residue, that primorial slime out of which the next generation of human kind might some day emerge, touched now by the sudden shift of seasons, as ice begins to crystalize its edges.

Praying to the river gods

I pray to black-clouded gods today, watching them belch, their bulging bellies heavy over the river as I jog. A green oily slick reflects back at me from the water's surface through the trunks of trees and leaves and branches.
On the far side of the water, the mills start, and so does the litter, the bottles and cans, the styrofoam cups, collected on the other side as if the bank was designed for that purpose.
Hungry gray men huddle around trash can fires, even though the temperature has not yet dropped enough to justify the practice. They look like trolls, wrapped up in jackets and blankets and other people's discarded rags.
Traffic ignors them -- that constant parade of cars, buses and trucks along thin River Road. The drivers hardly see the river at all, except as an inconvenience, something they must steer around with too few bridges to accomodate their rush to work in the morning and their rush back home at night.
Few if any see the purple heads of fire weed bursting up from the reed cover in the spring, or the turtles that sun themselves on old long over the summer. Even the ducks and geese get little attention, except by the golf course people who complain about their droppings.
If an unexamined life is not worth living, then these lives here have no future, though I struggle each day to give them a little of my attention, hoping my limited effort will be enough.
I pray to the cloud gods and the mill gods and the gods that built the road upon which I run, seeking their favor in preserving at least a little of what I see, praying that the warm water that boils out of the power plant pipes do not kill all the fish, and that poison spilled from the chemical plants at night won't kill me.
I jog on, passed the used car lots, the Dunkin Donuts, the police station and diner, jog passed the last outposts of civilization on this side, to where the old lady leaves out food for the geese, where the foot of the old bridge takes my step and delivers me to the highway side so I might jog home again.
I pray to the bridge god, too, thanking him for the favor, and for the sight of the outstretched river beneath, where river reeds lift up their heads in praise, leaving me chilled, but not from cold.

No Trespassing -- 1984

They mark the river side with "no trespassing" signs and barbed wire fenses to keep people like me from wandering to the river's edge, crawling, brawling brats with bottles and bats fresh from the Saturday barroom baseball, their eyes made dreamy by the six packs devoured after their victory on the base paths, each soul searching for something among the river stones, bent like river rats, touching the leaves of trees and the slimy stones, weaving through the pieces of concrete dumped here by the highway department when the nearby section expansion of Route 21 was complete.
Along the shore, up from the water, River Drive runs like a boundary line for wild-life, a death penalty for those foolish enough to make the crossing during the wrong time of day, though God only knows what a raccoon or Opossum might want on the civilized side, where paper mills and chemical plants spew poison into the air, each with its greedy pipes poking into the water via routes beneath the street, sucking in living water, blowing it out again dead.
Hidden by boughs of evergreen and thick vine cords, the pump house dynamo moans, something rising in pitch as the demand grows upon it, sometimes only a whisper after dark as mandated by some local ordinance with the glad sunnies swimming in their vibrating water, oblivious to the danger, carp seeking frog's eggs among the roots of reeds, as slow leaves float down from the trees in a multi colored rain.
Most days, I bend back the wire and duck under the sign, making my way down the path from the road to the water, following the trail of discarded beer bottles and abandoned dreams, searching as the drunks had searched, yet not quite knowing for what.

Mulberry: Progress report: 1987

The bulldozers plowed down the mulberry trees where I used to stop to watch the river during my early morning run, burping, bumbling, bubbling machines widening the lane for the new bridge. Although Post's Ford remains untouched, the grey dock has vanished, with a pile of splintered wood slid into the back of a dump truck.
The pile drivers pound down the huge steel frame that will foot the new bridge and keep it from rocking the way the old one did, accomodating two lanes of traffic each way where as the old one barely had one, though what traffic does after it gets over the damned thing, is anyone's guess, one lane leading up to the bridge on one side, one lane leading away on the other.
After hours, when the union workers punch out for the night, I take a walk to the blighted bank, staring down to where the water runs, no tangle of trees or leaves or stone, but a flatten hump over which grass seed will get strewn and signs posted to keep people like me from sitting there, or fishermen from casting their lines.
I used to grab handfuls of the mulberries as I jogged by, my small reward for making it so far along the route with coffee at Service Diner my next stop, then the water fountain at Nash Park after that, with breakfast at home on my final stop.
How could anyone be so careless as to plow down something so precious to so many, poor people crossing the old bridge from the ruined river-side houses on the Passaic side, spending all day collecting the fruit, their fingers as purple as if they had beaten the concrete sides of the new bridge for that long with their fists, their clothing covered with the smell of berry.
Even now, with the sun sinking, and the branches gone, I catch a whiff of that fading fragrance, gone to progress.

The order of things (date unknown)

The July heat scorches the leaves and grass along the shore. The carp near shore rub their backs on stones like cats looking to stay cool. They nibble on the roots of things, while foolish turtles hang out in the sun, baking themselves on rotting old logs as if preparing themselves for soup.
Jealous me, for the first time in my life, wishing for a shell, needing an umbrella to keep the bridge dust off my head as tractor trailers thunder over.
The smell of the mills hangs over the river top with a layer of smoke, making the misery of the heat seem worse, with mill workers on break standing along the bridge rail wondering what I'm up to down here, scratching their heads over why anyone would want to hang out along this soiled river.
They can't see the ducks or don't want to, but that's why I came, catching sight of the ducks and their ducklings all in a row. They were on the old dock when I first caught a glimpse, then plopped one after another into the water as I came for a closer look.
I'm told duckingling follow their mother in the order they were born in, if so, this explain why they all did not jump in at once, but lingered at the edge, waiting their turn.
I'm jealous of them, too, of the strict family life they enjoy in their youth, an orderly existance I've never been able to acquire.
Over head, the gulls howl with their own hungry complaint, annoyed by the mill workers on the bridge, seemingly afraid to make their usual dive towards the water top with those people watching. They seemed to hate the heat as much as I do, and their call seems to catch the month stretching it out, making it echo off the concrete face of the bridge: "July, July, I hate July."
Then, the mill workers leave, laughing as they make their way back to the huge doors on the other side, and the gulls hover in the air, as unorganized in their preparations as I am in mine, making their dives without apparent order, ripping open the belly of the river and drawing from it the shivering silvery slippery fish they'd craved for, then fleeing as other gulls chased them, trying to take their treasure away.
Not much different from human kind, I think, then make my way back up the bank to continue my morning jog.

The mistakes we've made

Nov. 3, 1980

A gull splashes in the water, hoarding some precious edible discovery as other gull crowd in, the surface of the river rippling with wide, wandering waves, each searching for the banks.
A duck honks from the far shore, complaining about the poor accommodations, leafless trees marking his out of season trip south.
The moving water echoes at an elevated pitch as it comes to and gurgles over the lip of this man-made dam, sharp stones stretched out the whole width of the river at the bottom. Only the willows remain, crying over the edges of the water with their golden tears, each leaf floating on the surface like a tiny ship, clogging up the gaps between the stones.
Old man Ben grins, smoke billowing from his pipe as if he was captain to each ship, smoke catching on the wind, thinning out, mingling with the great clouds of white steam escaping the paper mills high above us.
"We used to talk politics here," Ben tells me, his gaze caught on the endless variety of activities going on at once, from a sparrow squawking on a fallen branch to the race of swallows, each imitating a World War Two dogfight in the sky over our heads. "We'd sit here and argue about who was best for what, everybody taking a different side, saying how they themselves could do a darn-side better job than the folks we'd elected downtown. Even I thought so at the time, caught up in the arguing as if what we said mattered more than a thimble full in the long run, me, trying to make things interesting by egging the others on, sometimes pushing them to make them come out and say they didn't know squash from beans."
Ben pauses, takes a deep puff on his pipe as he listens to the ringing of the nine o'clock bells from across the river, Sacred Heart church's steeple one of many brick towers sticking out of that side, stark statues among the waving leafless limbs of trees. Ben's face turns towards the morning sun, giving his gray hair and brows and beard a yellowish tint, his nearly colorless eyes squinting, registering some piece of knowledge I'm too young to understand, something he knows or knew but sees now passing away.
"Now, I mostly sit here by myself," he says, "wondering what's going to happen to us. I mean we keep electing these people and they keep letting us down."
He shivers and glanced upstream as a flock of geese takes flight from the flat surface of deeper water there, wings flapping with great fury to lift them into the air, waves of their effort slapping on the stones at our feet. Ben lifts his pipe as if to wish them well, smoke rising from his mouth and the mouth of his pipe. I can smell the smoke and the river.
"Even people who think they know so much today don't know as much as they think they do tomorrow, or even when they pull the lever in the voting booth," Ben says. "The whole world might just crash down on all our heads."
A gull cries, and we both stare out at the water as the white wings rush down and the black beak slashes at the surface to come away with a silver, squiggling prize. The tumbling hushed whisper of the falls continues, the foam at the top drips down bit by bit from some factory waste upstream. Ben stares for a long time at the surface of the water, at the foam and the ripples, and then, he laughs.
"We used to argue here about all the mistakes those politicians were making," he says. "Maybe we were wrong. Maybe we're the ones who make the mistakes by never getting ourselves elected instead."

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."