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.

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.