That last Christmas with father

Dec. 12, 1980

It might be the gray sky laden heavy with the promise of snow that puts old Ben in the Christmas mood.

He has no use, he says, for the silly stuff he sees sprawled across some of the houses along River Drive.

His gaze studies the ducks on the nearby shore, whose swish their wet butts as they stagger from water to the muddy bank, as silly as circus clowns, he says, and they are silly – even if what they do is not.

They plop in and out of the water in pursuit of a fading livelihood we can’t see until they gobble one of the silver slivers.

Most of the trees are close to bar so the sky above seems cracked, shattered into a thousand crazy pieces like shards of ice.

Ben’s memory of Christmas is different from the one we celebrate, less full of “useless stuff” he sees while walking along the road, stuff sticking out the back of cars on their way home from the malls. His Christmas is full of little things. The river, he recalls, had many more trees along it, when as a boy, his father brought the family down to find a small pine tree they could bring home each year – not the oversized ones people kill in order to stick them up in their living room for a few weeks, but a seedling they could put in a corner so they could sit around it on Christmas Eve.

But Ben says he knew times were changing that one year when he went out and could not find one right away. Ben’s younger brother, Jim, was just old enough then to take the long walk around the river, but complained the whole time about the cold.

Ben’s dad, a wiry man, had grown ill over the previous year and Ben’s mother did not want him to make the trip. But the man insisted and went anyway.

Ben says he knew the older man would die soon. So did the man, and would not deviate from the ritual hew knew might well be his last.

Ben remember them leaving a train of footprints in the snow, and how smooth the frozen surface of the river looked, and how the sky looked then just as it looks today, and how hard he prayed for them to find a tree – and they did, the old man letting the boys cut it down and carry it home.

Ben remembers, too, the relieved look on his mother’s face when they three of them got home safe – and how she, Jim, Ben and little sister, Susan and the old man decorated the tree with a few strands of glittering tinsel and a few small white candles, and how for the last time, he shared Christmas with his father, who passed away the following spring.

Two Bridges Road

November 30, 1980

I don’t often job along this part of the river.

To get to Lincoln Park, the river twists so many times from where I usually run in Garfield, it almost seems like a different river, more gentile on the surface, but much more dangerous underneath.

This part of the river lives above all the principle falls, Little Falls, The Great Falls, and the Dundee Falls behind the Service Diner, and is hidden behind trees so dense people forget the river exists except to cross it on the various bridges or when the rains come and it rises above its banks to put them out of their homes.

This part of the river has great mood swings, swelling and then shrinking again, often for reasons few of us can comprehend in an endless string of contradictions.

Today, it is low and muddy, wearing an almost reddish-brown face that defies anybody to call it a body of water.

I barely see any of it as I jog along Two Bridges Road from the first bridge near Willowbrook Mall to the highway bridge in Pinebrook under which old black men fish, a scene so surreal with its droopy willows and summer batches of mosquitoes I might have jogged back through time to a post Civil War Savannah, Georgia.

Like in Rutherford, where I also sometimes job, this place has a park-like quality where trees line the road, but in a less rigid arrangement than Rutherford where concrete defines the boundaries of the river and civilization thrives high above the high water marks as to take a 100 year storm to cause serious flooding.

Here river and residents live side by side almost on an equal plain, struggling with each rain to define their right to exist.

The trees differ, too.  Rutherford is so prim and proper, spaces filled with trimmed hedges and lawns, while here, everything feels wild, like unkempt hair, spread out like an nature preserve the more conservative Rutherford would not tolerate.

Boulders left by the glaziers rise out of the water here like balding heads, weeds clustered around them and out of the cracks, and upon which seagulls roost.

These make this part of the river special to me since such boulders do not exist downstream along the Clifton or Garfield sections, and I often simply gawk at them like a tourist, and imagine the fun Dave and I would have had here during a river adventures as kids.

The air is cleaner here, too, lacking the all night spewing of factories or even the deceitful perfumed scent of the chemical factories which tries to hide the stench of the poisons they dump into the water when they think no one sees.

This place has plenty of traffic along the narrow two lane road that many use as a short cut around the often clogged Route 46 or Route 80. But walls of trees protect the river on the highway side while trees on this side seem to suck up the bad air with their canopy, and muffles the sounds so that this road is far quieter than River Drive in Garfield.

I jog in a dream here, and in some ways, it is distracting. In some ways, this isn’t the river I know and love, but some spruced up imposter who claims to be a distant relation and to me is not.

German potato salad

November 27, 1980

The water rides high between brown banks. Sea gulls cruise the gray sky, a sky pregnant with the promise of oncoming snow. The crisp wind rips at my face and snatches each plume of smoke Ben’s pipe produces as we sit along the riverside waiting for the snow to arrive.

A few ducks float on the oily water as brown as chunks of wood, and strangely silent – except for their cousins across the river who yap as they root through the reeds in search of food, flapping their wings when they find it to discourage others from taking it away.

Holidays make me nostalgic, and surprisingly, Ben, too.

He talks about how he used to visit his family in Pennsylvania this time of year, traveling by train through the Delaware Water Gap and up through the Pocono Mountains to some point near Scranton, and how much food waited for him when he arrive, mounts heaped as high as the mountains he had to pass through to get there, he says.

His family, like my grandmother’s, came from Germany, and more than a few of the dishes he recalls were German, although he says he missed German potato salad most.

“Quick Chek has German potato salad but it’s not the same,” he says.

He also says he misses the mountains as he stares out across the river at the distant cliffs that overhang Clifton, cracked rock laid bare by the coming of the cold and the waiting for snow to pain the brown rock white.

I ask Ben why he never went back, why he spends his days clinging to the side of this river when he misses other places so much.

“This is all I got,” he says, puffing hard on his pipe so that even the wind can’t steal all the smoke that gathers around his face. “All the rest faded away long ago.”

“Not the mountains,” I said.

“No,” he admits in a low voice. “Not the mountains.”

Escaping disaster to find salvation

October 24, 1981

This is one of those mornings of one of those days when the world just doesn’t sit right with you and you need something, but don’t know what, a day, week, maybe a life time vacation.

But I can’t stand Florida and I can’t afford to retire back to California without breaking into somebody else’s safe – and the last time the mob nearly got me, so that kind of thing is out. But I miss palm trees, and I would love to make the trip just to glimpse them again

But I’ve settled in a little too heavily into my place in Passaic, too many possessions to carry on my back, and too many to leave behind.

So I’m stuck.

Of course, I could take time off and make the trip the way ordinary people do, go back to Hollywood to see what has changed there, and if I’ll still cringe over some of the more painful memories I have of wandering those streets, those days when I thought I could deal drugs or that other stuff under the heavy heat of a movie camera for movies that no legitimate theater would ever show.

I’m not ashamed – but maybe embarrassed.

Although all in all the place was an incubator for a new me, someone who had gone there a naïve kid with a bundle of cash and came out broke, but rich in experience.

These days, I come here to find myself – collecting new memories or perhaps recalling earlier memories when this river was my life and my salvation, when I ran here not from mobsters with guns, or even the more serious pursuit of police. I came here to duck the impact of some prank gone wrong, and from the lawmen who wanted to drag me back to my uncles where they knew I would get heavier punishment than any court could administer.

What I got here surprised even me, less hide out than revelation, some sense of world beyond me.

While this place has changed greatly from when I wandered here as a boy, these changes are less severe than the changes to other place, somehow managing to heal itself in ways more civilized places cannot, restoring much of what once was after a fire when nothing is the same up the hill, or more the more intention destruction disguised as redevelopment.

I like this place because time has less impact here, and that the footprints of forefathers might well still be found somewhere in the muddy banks, or merely imitated by my own sneakers as I come to close to the brink.

The gulls that spread their wings as they soar over head are not the same gulls as my grandfather might have known, but they cry with the same hunger and needs, and I feel it in my bones because I cry inside for the same things they do, for comfort and satisfaction.

Sometimes I sit here and pretend I am Wordsworth, or some other natural poet seeking to preserve all that I see each day when I come here as if it is as important as the stuffy stuff that gets recorded in history books, the changing of leaves, the color of water, the dribble of rain or fleck of snow, on me, on the leaves, or the fallen leaves, on the surface that sometimes glittered with light and sometimes is so dark I could feel it suck me into its depths.

I come to water like this for rebirth, to shed not possessions that I fear to carry elsewhere, but the internal possession I have collected and cannot simply dump in the trash, not memories, but a parcel of feelings that have weighed me down more firmly than years living in one place, filled with guilt of mistakes I’ve made or things I have not done or will never do, and that other stuff such as words I should have said, but missed my opportunity, words like love or adoration that have such a short life span that unless you cast them into the wind they evaporate and leave only ashes in your hand and this weight like a stone inside you that you can’t just cast away – except in places like this where the world welcomes you, and draws these things out, and leaves to wander off with much less heaviness so that you can return to your life as if you have just come back from a place full of palm trees and have washed your feet in distant exotic oceans you cannot reach for economic or other reasons.

It is all here, lapping at the shore with lazy brown waves that are stirred up by the rise of a flock of geese or some kid throwing stones into the middle from the top of the bridge – kids like I used to be, escaping disaster to find salvation here.

Flush days

May 28, 1980

“It’s nice the see this place in day light,” Ben says as he puffs his pipe.

He means of course bright light rather than the dim place this river had been for months, a dried up, dismal landscape that had seemed more like the surface of the moon than a place of flowing water – drought exposing its ribs so as to look like a starving version of the man William Carlos Williams claimed he could see in the Great Falls downtown.

In spring, when wet, this place comes alive, and upstream – maybe as far west as the mythical Lake Passaic – April had indeed brought showers so we could see May flowers popping up around here.

I remember my first time coming here with my grandfather and how amazed I was by what I saw, not the Great Falls here, but a tiny eight or ten foot variety that made me claim it as my own, with white water tumbling over it down onto the flat surface filled with stones below – and moving fast again towards the arches of the Outwater Lane Bridge down stream, a twisting current that made me think of it as a silver serpent and still does.

My boyhood imagination, along with the nasty tales Leonard Suresky told about the river made me actually believe real monsters lived among the trees or in the deeper water, so that I gripped my grandfather’s hands until my knuckles turned white.

But if there is a beast here, it is in the flow of water and how it beats the shores with both fists when it is in full bloom, as it is now, a lush, flush powerful water that sometimes – if the sun is right – looks green, reflecting the trees that are only just beginning to blossom as well. My favorite trees, the mulberries, just showing off their new green dress, while my second favorite tree, the willows, barely turn green at all, or a variety that seem godlike and golden, even before autumn turns their leaves to bright yellow.

Geese and duck float now over places they waddled only a few months ago, looking cleaner than they did, though the water hides their legs and washes away the mud from their feathers. They dip their beaks into the surface and come up with silver fish they had to dig in mud before to get.

But they are still restless, wondering when exactly the good times will end and force them back into old nasty habits they only reluctantly take on. Survival is a mean mistress that makes us all do things we might be shamed of in better times.

For a short time many years ago, I lived homeless on the streets, begging for coins and feeding off the kindness of a donut maker who gave me the stale end of the day remains. I still hate lemon-filled donuts on that account.

I laugh at Ben, and tell him beauty is a thin veneer, and beneath its surface lurks dangers unseen, claws that will rip a man to pieces if he makes the wrong move. Even the water is not innocent, and I recall two boys who drowned in the puffed up water when it first came, kids, who like me at their age, presumed they could handle nature and assumed the landscape would remain unchanged, and did not account for the deeper water when they waded out into it.

When Dave and I came here, we survived by luck, making the same mistakes those kids made but somehow saved from the worst. We were even more foolish, looking for the big dangers that did not exist, like wild wolves, while failing to see until almost too late, this loose bit of stone or the glass over which our bare feet walked, mistaking sometimes the broken pieces of soda bottles for jewels some imaginary pirate left – or the pearls my grandfather once told me actually could be found here in oysters the size of dinner plates.

We found no treasure – or at least not the kind we could bring to the bank.

But I still come here, searching not for fortune, but for peace, and strangely in the midst of seasons, be they flush or not, I find it, and so does Ben between each puff of his pipe.

End of season

Nov. 22, 1980

Five days until Thanksgiving and the loudest sound here comes from the falls, inflated by recent heavy rain so that it seems to sing of spring just as winter threatens us.

All other sound seems muffled, even the persistent and annoying flow of traffic down River Drive.

The wind alone seems unbridled, whispering in my ears with its chill voice as it pushes old cardboard boxes along the roadside, boxes that catch on the trunks of trees or exposed weeds for a moment and then move on.

The wind catches the feather duster willows, rattling their already yellowed leaves, casting many into the slow flow of water at my feet, unaffected n this eddy by the foam flowing down from the falls.

Frost dots the river banks and creeps out across slow water like the edges of some child’s coloring book filled in first at the edges before the serious freeze starts.

Most things here have already surrendered to the inevitable, closing up or burying deep for when the snow and ice seals up this world. The falls are always last to accept fate, and slow on even after all else has succumbed, its gurgling voice smothered with ice before it concedes

I feel at loss this time of year, aching for signs of life among the dead and dying, for some omen that life will reappear later when all the dying is done, knowing down deep this world will seem different, stranger as a result, suspecting that the me that sees that rebirth will be different and stranger, too – and I am as reluctant as the falls to give in.

Beware the badger

 (from Imitation Nature)

July 20, 1980

The badger is a very clever animal, having learned over the course of millions of years, how to set himself up for life – holes in the ground to live out the day, freedom above ground at night, with no natural enemies to give him grief.

He’s always elusive and wary, and very rarely seen – though I’m sure someone must see him from time to time to know he still exists – still alive and healthy.

Sometimes, he shares his hole with a fox or even a rabbit; sometimes he lives alone.

Unlike humans which are the only beast who cares to bother him in a destructive way, the badger likes his solitude.

He isn’t the kind to sit out front of the local tavern and ogle ladies that stroll by.

Bear-like, he is usually very quiet, reacting to danger or excitement with a series of violent snorts. His hair tends to stand end which makes him blow up to twice his normal size.
Like a human, he has five toes – which distinguishes is track from that of a dog’s (which is a four-legged animal that often goes “bow wow” which I’ll explain later when I’m good and drunk.”

The badger has a short tail, short but powerful legs, and when seen may be waddling down a dark path.

If it happens to get attacked by a foolish enemy, he has very sharp teeth with which to strike back, and knows how to defend himself at need.

He should never be manhandled, as humans are wont to do just for the fun of it.

For the most part, he avoids humans and tends to enjoy his own rituals – unlike my best friend, Hank, who had a lot of habits, such as over staying his welcome despite many hints for him to leave. He lives in a hole, too, but there the similarity ends.

The badger has a black and white striped face, and has thick warm fur when healthy.

In other words, the badger can be a tough hombre but lives a peaceful life when left alone, but can turn and fight and destroy as well as any beast of the wild.