Soon after we arrived in New Jersey, Hurricane Floyd hit the East Coast. The storm stayed far enough out at sea that the greater New York area did not get its full force, only its endlessly rainy periphery. Warm rain fell in sheafs, in swaths. From low, ill-looking gray clouds it spilled like a flux. The suburb we had moved to is hilly, and every place that wasn't level became a waterfallâstreets, front steps, sidewalks. Every downward-sloping driveway was a torrent debouching into the street. Basements of houses at the bottom of hills flooded. A house we had not been able to afford in a neighborhood nearby appeared on the news partly underwater. When I got up in the morning and turned on the TV, its first words were “Coming up next: Celebrities' reactions to the hurricane!”
Weather notwithstanding, I went into Manhattan on the commuter bus to have lunch with my book editor. I'd been in New Jersey only ten days, and I was footloose, eager to see the city. As I walked downtown from Forty-second Street, very few people were around. The emptiness of the city's public spaces made the storm's demonstrations all the more striking, with skyscraper-high curtains of rain blowing everywhere. Some of the storm clouds were only six or eight stories above the ground, and they looked otherwordly as they traveled down the city's canyons on the wind at forty miles an hour.
After lunch I wanted to go to the Public Library, but it had closed, so I headed home. The bus, too, was almost empty. The driver hitched up his trousers, shut the bus doors, and
backed out of the Port Authority bay with an air of intrepitude. Rain was, indeed, falling harder than before. The swampy plain of the Meadowlands in Jersey just past the Lincoln Tunnel was a storm-darkened North Atlantic seascape with scattered lights here and there that seemed to bob. Low points on Route 3 had turned to lakes with islands of stalled cars. The bus made it through one lake after the next without even slowing down too much. After it turned from Route 3 to the street I live on, however, it came to an obstacle that made it pause. Up ahead, churning across the road, was a creek or river that had jumped completely out of its banks and over the little bridge that spanned it. Foaming like a class 4 whitewater, it flooded around the bridge supports and poured milky brown through the lower parts of the bridge railing. I heard it thrumming against the side of the bus as the driver sucked in his breath and powered through.
The storm passed. I made many more trips into the city, none as filled with raw nature as the first. After Montana, nature as I had gotten used to it seemed in disappointingly short supply. I had never before lived in a suburb like thisâa bedroom communityâand I walked all over trying to get my bearings. Remembering the creek or river that had almost stopped the bus that day, I sought it out, explored it. On a normal day it flowed much more sedately than at my first view of it; its shallow water ran clear, at no more than walking speed, through a concrete channel behind a swimming club, and in its own bed again around a wide bend at the edge of a meadow in which stood tall radio-transmission towers. On sunny days the correct designation for it seemed to be the friendly one of “brook.”
Nobody I asked knew what its name was. No sign at any of its bridges identified it. I followed it through the neighboring
suburb of Brookside, where I questioned passersby. The first person I asked was a tobacco-wizened lady puffing on an extra-long who looked at me as if I were nuts. Though standing on a bridge above it, she apparently could not conceive of wondering about its name. Two more people I stopped also didn't know. Finally I went into a business called Brookside Florists, whose back lot adjoined the brook; I figured that if they couldn't tell me, no one could. I asked a guy behind the counter the name of the brook, and he gave me a look that would shrivel weeds. “It's not a brook,” he said uncheerfully. “It's a river. It's called the Third River.”
At home I checked a local map, and found it: a hair-fine blue thread, the Third River, hard to see among the density of New Jersey streets and highways. It started in the hills at the north end of our suburb and wound among the hills of our suburb and many others to the south and east until it joined the Passaic River, which in turn ran into Newark Bay. I had never known a numbered river before. It was the Third, but I could not find the two preceding, or any that came after. Why it's called the Third River is still a mystery to me.
Every river has to have a name, however. Knowing this one's inspired me to like it more. I started spending a lot of time along its mostly-but-not-all-concrete shores. “I'm off to the Third River,” I'd tell my wife as I headed out the door. I saw how it went behind McDonald's restaurants and muffler shops and Italian bakeries and industrial parks and parking lots, and under an on-ramp for the Garden State Parkway, and through a vine-clogged gully at the edge of a high school football field. I never came across even one kid playing in it, or any sign that its neighbors noticed that it was there at all. I especially admired it after a heavy rain, when it filled with water and roared, still unnoticed, over the rocks and cement and
shopping carts in its bed. And all the stuff that floated on itâat occasional brush entanglements across the river, the current deposited its floating detritus, its Styrofoam cups and partly deflated soccer balls and plastic Wiffle bats and chopsticks and packing peanuts, to accumulate in heaps like froth.
Just down the hill from my house is an unnamed (as far as I know) rivulet, a branch of the Third River. On my walks, I often stopped at a little bridge over it, at first mainly from a perverse affection for urban junkiness. The creek seemed just the sort I dreamed of playing in as a kid, if you took away the bright-orange traffic cone someone had thrown in it, and the pair of corduroy pants, and the soda cans. Like a creek in old-time Ohio, it flowed through second-growth forest of long, skinny hardwoods vying with one another for the light. Though the lawns and houses of suburbia encircled it all around, for this short distance it appeared to be a woodland stream, disappearing beyond a brushy bend as alluringly as I could imagine. And despite the trash, I often saw birds there. Once, a cardinal was singing from a branch over the creek, fresh-paint red in its feathers and black around its eye; and once I peered over the bridge railing directly down into the eye of a mallard duck paddling below. He turned his head flat to the water to see me, expressed an intense ducklike level of surprise, and rocketed away through the trees.
Once you get the habit of looking for good places for fish to be, you never lose it. Even in the most unpromising water, you mentally note where a fish would hang out, if it could. At the little bridge over the Third River tributary I always did that, scoping out a place just down from the bridge where the creek had carved a bend that someone had reinforced with a wall of concrete. The water was about four feet deep there, a comfortable-looking lie, with a small, tumbling rapids just upstream.
Under other circumstances, fish could live happily in that bend. Storm-sewer inflow iridescent with road oil entered the creek from a drainpipe nearby, however, and a decrepit power lawnmower tossed in for good measure, its chrome handle glistening above the water, seemed to reduce the possibilities still further.
But one day, as I was idly looking into the water at the bend, something moved. I looked again and saw only the creek bottom's irregularities. I kept looking. There was movement again. Then I saw a little fish holding almost still at the edge of the deeper water. I would have been almost as surprised to see a fish in the stream from my garden hose. As I got closer, I saw more. Fish of four and six inches were facing upstream in the current, moving slightly, sometimes darting around. Farther back in the pool I saw a flash. An even bigger fish, perhaps a foot long, was turning on his side to kind of root on the bottom, the way I've seen feeding whitefish and even trout do sometimes in Montana. He came through the pool, doing that sideways nudging, oblivious of me. I don't know what kind of fish he was, but clearly he lived here, a hundred feet from the traffic jam, just a fish going about his job. As I watched him, I had no awareness of being in New Jersey, or specifically anywhere. For those few minutes I was occupied and at home.
(2001)