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.

Rainy days and Mondays

Monday, April 29, 2013

Today really is one of those rainy day Mondays everybody is always going on about, enough to quench the brief warm spell we had over the last few days – not scalding, but enough to singe the bones a little and make me remember what summer is all about.

I walked around the waterfront in Bayonne this morning, strolling out into the place here where nature defies all to declare itself independent and still powerful, egrets rising from the river top like ancient dinosaurs with me feeling as primitive as a cave man, glimpsing its pale shape against a pale sky in envy at its majesty – chilled to the bone by what it has to offer, knowing it will always be out of reach, a stark shape in the water, and a pale shape above with no common ground.

Sometimes, this is all we get, to watch life lift off from the surface of the water, the rain blurring our vision, and chilling our bones.

Nearer at hand, ducks mate, paddling through the shallow water to feed on the tiny fish the mudflats expose, their beauty disguising a terrible struggle for survival, we safe humans tend to miss, their eloquence and grace part of something more savage we do not see.

This place is too pretty and they colors too grand, making me miss the more honest conflict I used to see in the waters of the Passaic, where animals struggled against man’s interference, and yet somehow thrived.

I miss the walk along the river bank that this part of the river (it is actually the same river at this point but wide at the mouth of the bay) where I could look things in the eye and see their majesty and their pain, they glorious elevation and their sad demise. I once watched a fish rot over several days as nature sent its little army of maggots to devour it, a strange beauty of its own wrapped up in the way things are, although all my friends at the time thought I was nuts because I admired it.

Decay, demise, deterioration all part of a cycle of life that goes unappreciated as old makes way for new, young taking their place in the cycle of life, often at the expense of the old, with me a silent observer studying the outcome, slowly coming to realize that I’m part of the same cycle if only extended out over a number of years.

I met a 100 year old man on Saturday, who told me he had lived his long life free of the usual medical obstacles. He had no reason for it, no secret formula, not great scheme I might steal and use to take advantage of his good fortune. Luck or good genes, or some combination, puts one person on this path and others on another, and I come to places like this, watching nature at its most raw, trying to figure out, how which got onto which path, and I never can.

I must remain always a silent observer, watching the world go by

People must think me crazy

February 7, 1980

The world must think me craze for my early morning runs up River Drive, passed Rosey’s Bar at Passaic Street where Babe Ruth drink in and eat hot dogs, passed the tiny brick estate no one has lived in since the police put up the crime scene tape around it, now full of ghosts and decay, passed the always percolating chemical plant with high gates and signs warning ordinary people to keep out as green liquid oozes out its pipes into the river, passed the Tavern at Monroe Street, the line of neatly kept houses, the insurance agency, Outwater Hardware where Pauly used to work until he got lazy, passed the lot the after empty lot of one-time used car dealers whose inventory has long since been shipped over seats, passed the Cameo catering hall and its rather suspicious mob-like twin which changed its name every few months but never loses the dark cliental that does business there, some of whom still linger there at 5 a.m. when I pass.

Some forever-serving mayor of West Paterson is said to own land long this river side near the Outwater Lane bridge, passed the gas stations and the overgrown property whose use had long vanished with the name on the signs, property that state needs to steal if it is to rebuild the bridge, but can’t get because the mayor won’t settle on a price.

Sometimes I cheat and stop at the newly constructed Dunkin Donuts on Outwater Lane for coffee rather than wait for the next stop a mile more up the river at the silver-sided Service Diner and the Dundee Falls.

On most days, I stop there and walk a block before jogging on with the old dock right across the street. It’s just too big a temptation to resist letting myself down onto its gray planks to sit and sip my coffee.

People job in other places like Rutherford, but I seem to be the only one brave enough to take on Garfield, and so catch the curious glimpses of people as I pass, some like the secretary at the insurance agency flirting with me on my way back, most are either shocked or want to mock me, calling after me in terms my grandfather’s father might have understood, like “get a horse,” my routine as regular as the ducks although unlike the ducks or geese, I do not fly south in the winter except on weekends.

The river is more of a lover to me than many of my lovers had been, the rhythm of my life locked in its embrace, my heart beat and breathing moving fast as my feed pound asphalt and gravel along her banks, the oil-backed winged creatures my siblings and my friend who greet me every morning.

Today, I look like a turtle, bundled in knit hat and gloves, and with a scarf up around my neck so even my mother might not recognize me from any distance. But those who know me and my daily routine, wave: postman, barber, salesman, even some sad young women driving by in their warmth of their cars, faces of the world locked up in boxes of metal and glass, missing out on the intimate embrace the river give me, even on mornings as cold as this.

Pappy

January 9, 1981

“Some animals are born to handle the cold better than others,” Ben says as he puffs on his pipe, releasing smoke the way the factories across the river issue steam. “Some won’t survive when it gets this cold.”

He’s peeved because he saw someone dumping pet cats along the other side of the river last night, and though he shouted the people didn’t stop, and the cays were gone when he got there, though he found one frozen to death this morning, and he thinking the others will die soon, too.
“Fools think any beast can live out here like this,” he says, spitting bits of tobacco out before he takes another puff.

It near 7 degrees out and below us the river top has become one large level piece of ice. Some where nearby a car starter grinds in an effort to start. Bundled up workers hurry over the bridge to work, steam billowing with each breath, the vibration of traffic shaking loose dagger icicles from the bridge’s rusted arches, sending them down to stick in the frozen islands in the river’s center. Thick white clouds overhead hint of more snow, absorbing the exhaled breath of people, factories, even the warmth spewed out with the green poison from the chemical plant’s dumping, or the substantial contribution to air pollution Ben’s pipe makes.

At times, Ben seems to blend into the landscape, his thick beard painted the same color as the sky, flowing down onto his chest the way river foam does off the fall – although his thick hair does not keep him from shivering when the temperature falls this low.

“I used to have a dog who could handle this kind of cold,” he says. “I found him out here as a puppy and raised him. Old Pappy followed me everywhere and sometimes wandered off on his own. Most of the local store owners knew he belong to me, but still fed him regularly.”

Ben called the dog “Pappy” because he missed his father, but could never figure out how that came to mind.

“He was as loyal as hell, but sometimes, he would wander off for weeks at a time,” Ben says. “The first few times it happened, I was worried sick, and I came out here to look for him – a real knucklehead roaming through deep drifts, getting myself ill over a dog I was convinced would not come back. The store keepers told me I was crazy, and maybe I was. But after having him at home, I felt pretty lonesome without him. Then just when I gave up, there he came, scratching at my back door to get let in.”

Eventually, he gave up worrying about where the beast went as long as he came back, which he always did – except for that last time.

“I had that animal for 18 years,” Ben says. “When he went away, I didn’t scold him. I was too afraid he wouldn’t come back if I did, and when he didn’t come back, I kept telling myself it was something I did that sent him away. Then I got convinced someone had killed him, other wise he would have come back. I took to searching for him, and when I wasn’t searching, I waited at the back door for him to scratch. Then after a month or two, I gave up and figured he’d died – though I kept an ear open just in case he scratched – still do, I guess, though after all these years, he’s most certainly dead. Nothing lives THAT long.”

He pauses, puffs on his pipe again and stares out over the ice in silence, his smoke flowing out over the river ice, then it rises and vanishes into the puffy gray sky above.

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?

Can you feel it?

Thursday, April 25, 2013

I come to this place, a pauper, searching the reeds and muddy weeds for something I think I lost. I’d not come here for years, and so the scars of the recent storm stand out in my mind against what I once saw, a corruption of memory that I ache over, but can do nothing to cure, giving my sympathy to the wild creatures that roam these waters, and who have endured the worst of the storm serge. The old adage about bending to the wind seemed apt here, where the fox tails wave in the breeze, even in those places where wooden planks had fallen to ruin, leaving no connection to platforms egrets now occupy, but no human. Far out from the shore, beyond where the gas line runs under a berm of green and brown, the mud flats start, but are covered this morning with a glistening water, while across the highway, the tops of Laurel Hill shows, closer than the haze would indicate, no distant mountain, but a mole hill. Nearer, with curved necks, swans dig small fish out of the muck, and spoil their illusion of beauty by having to do all that is necessary to stay alive in a world where nothing is clean for long, and that the true measure of virtue is staying alive and somehow remaining faithful to some vision only each creature sees. I draw from them power that I do not myself possess, walking along the berm, looking at the branches that are budding with new life, powerful message poking out at me as I search my soul for some sign that I have stayed true to my own vision, while somehow, hopeful in this wet world, we can help each other, draw strength from each other, when we cannot directly help each other. Somewhere deep under foot, under the surface of water and deep in the earth, there is a source of strength we all draw from together, and each time I come to places like this, and see everything that is struggling together, I feel it.