by Mary Bruno
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For the first 18 years of my life I lived along the final 17-mile stretch of the
Passaic River. That’s the dirty, ugly part of the river that passes through the
most crowded, industrialized part of the United States.
The
Passaic forms the western border of my home town: North Arlington, New Jersey,
a tiny borough just a few miles north of the river’s mouth in Newark. Our house
sat on a steep slope above the river. In the winter, when the oak and maple
trees were all bare, I could see the water
from our front porch. Sometimes in summer, when a flood tide overwhelmed the
river’s sluggish current, the Passaic would smell faintly of the sea.
The
Passaic was my home town river, but I didn’t have much to do with it as a kid.
I crossed over it often enough, every time we visited my mother’s family, who
lived on the other side. But I rarely played by the Passaic. I never fished it
or took a boat out on it. I certainly didn’t swim in it. I didn’t really know
the river. I just knew that it gave me the creeps.
The lower Passaic flows through the most densely populated, heavily industrialized area in the country.Photo: Mary Bruno
Like the
state it flows through, the river has a serious image problem. The Passaic is
as historic as New York’s storied Hudson, and in some places—the 77-foot-high
cascade in Paterson, for one—it is just as majestic. But most people, even
some New Jerseyites, have never heard of the
river. Those who have know it only as one of America’s most polluted waterways.
It’s hard to bond with a river like that.
The
Passaic is a poster child for rivers—for nature—everywhere. The river had
been the lifeblood of the region, the source of food and power, the playground
of the rich, the avenue of transportation, communication and commerce. The
first white settlers sailed up the Passaic in 1662 and founded Newark, the
nation’s third oldest city, on its banks. The river’s abundant charms fueled an
explosion of growth and industry that transformed the fledgling United States
into a global manufacturing powerhouse. But in time the industrial revolution
it spawned would poison and betray the Passaic. By 1952, the year I was born,
the river’s beauty and majesty were dim and distant memories. Its lower stretch
was a toxic canal. The Passaic wasn’t a source of wonder and delight, or even
interest anymore. For a whole generation, my generation, it inspired fear, revulsion,
and denial instead.
The
river wasn’t fearsome in any traditional sense. It didn’t rage or thunder. It
didn’t loll along and then suddenly turn into a boil or hurl itself over a
cliff—not this far downstream anyway. It wasn’t icy cold or booby trapped
with eddies. It wasn’t even that wide; a dog paddler like me could make it all
the way across. But the river scared us just the same. It scared us in a deep
down creepy kind of way.
We
were afraid of its impenetrable darkness. We were afraid of its industrial smell.
We were afraid of the things that lived beneath its surface and the things that
had died there. We were afraid of spotting a hand or a head bobbing in the
rafts of garbage that floated by. We were afraid
of submerged intake valves that sucked water into the factories along the
banks. We were afraid of the river’s filth. It wasn’t the kind of filth that
came from playing football with your friends. It was grownup filth. The kind
that scared the blue out of water and coated the riverbank with
oily black goo. It was the kind of filth you could taste; the kind that could
make you sick, maybe even kill you. We were afraid of getting splashed with
river water or of touching river rocks. We were afraid of falling in or of—God forbid—going under. We were afraid of the river’s anger
at being so befouled, and afraid, most of all, of the revenge we felt certain
the river would exact.
Surely,
I thought, there must be more to my home town river than the oily, garbage-strewn
slough that I remembered.
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“Our job is to make advocates of people,” said former NY/NJ Baykeeper executive director Andy Willner.Photo: Mary BrunoAndy
Willner, recently retired Executive Director of the N.Y./N.J. Baykeeper
Association, is passionate, generous, cocky, fearless, and a bit bombastic. I
love him. He says the N.Y./N.J. Metropolitan Area is a “big region” with “low
environmental self-esteem.” His mission is to awaken citizens to regional treasures
like the Passaic. He says that people don’t know the Passaic anymore, that the
river is a stranger to them, and that you can’t care about something that you
don’t know. He invited me to join him on a Passaic River boat ride.
Our
boat was a 16-foot Aqua Patio. It looked like a floating hot tub, all white
with a high freeboard and banquette seating, ideal for the civilian river trips
that the Baykeeper regularly runs up the Passaic. The two-hour tour took us
about three miles upriver, from the mouth in south Newark to the New Jersey
Performing Arts Center at the north end of downtown. It was the first time I
had ever actually been out on the Passaic.
I took
a seat in the bow with a pair of environmental engineers from Pennsylvania and
three attorneys from the Rutgers Environmental Law Center. Janice and Martin, a
retired couple from New
York, were squeezed into the stern alongside two researchers from the New York
Academy of Sciences, who were studying the ecology of New York Harbor.
Skipper
Bill Sheehan had the helm amidships. He was sturdy and gruff with a shark tooth
necklace and a bushy red moustache the color of sunset that completely obscured
his upper lip. He leaned against the gunwale, just in front of Janice, one hand
on the wheel. He had the look of a cop, or a bartender, or the ship’s captain
that he was. The look of someone who is comfortable being in charge.
Andy, our
host, was a sunnier presence. He had a full gray beard and a thick shag
of salt and pepper hair. A seafaring rabbi. A 35mm camera swung from his neck.
He used his free hand—the one that wasn’t gesticulating—to brace the camera
against his middle-aged paunch. He had made this trip upriver on many, many
occasions, but he snapped pictures with the eagerness of a first-timer. He
pointed out his favorite bridge. He marveled aloud at the play of sunlight on
the glass facades of the new office towers along the shore. Wonder lives next
to outrage in his heart.
We set
out from the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission’s massive sewage treatment
plant on the shores of Newark Bay. The 172-acre complex of circular tanks,
pipes, pumps and stacks processes waste for 1.3 million residents in New
Jersey’s Passaic, Bergen, Essex, and Hudson counties.
Once
we cleared the dock, Andy unfurled a nautical chart and located our position in
the labyrinth of bays, tidal inlets, islands, and marsh. Raritan Bay was below
us, linked to Newark Bay by the Arthur Kill, a tidal strait that separates New
Jersey from Staten Island. Across Newark Bay to the east lay the Meadowlands,
the vast salt marsh that is home to the Hackensack River. Above us, and well
within view, were the mouths of the Hackensack and the Passaic. The two rivers
flow down from the north and squeeze the last bite of land between them into a
chubby, muddy “V” called Point No Point before they disappear into Newark Bay.
Andy
straightened up, and with a sweep of his right arm, lassoed up the entire view.
“All these bays were much larger,” he said. “They were all extraordinary
wetlands. The Passaic was one of the most bountiful rivers in the whole system,
this estuarine stream with tributaries coming into it and a marsh system all
around it.”
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I
strained to picture the scene that Andy was describing. Like so much wild
habitat in New Jersey, the wetlands that surround Newark Bay have been
manhandled over time. In most places their transformation is so complete that
discerning the natural features of the landscape is an exercise in extreme
imagination. The once sinuous outline of Newark Bay, scalloped by coves and
inlets and the mouths of its tidal rivers and creeks, is now ruler straight
thanks to a century-long parade of large scale public and private development
projects. “You can see how geometric
the shoreline is,” said Andy, tapping the chart. “These are big fills.”
The
transformation of the Newark Meadows began in 1914 when the city of Newark,
hungry for real estate, began reclaiming the marshland along the western shore
of Newark Bay. Port Newark came first. The city dredged a mile-long shipping
channel in the bay. They mixed the dredgings with garbage and ash and heaped
the malodorous blend on top of the salt marsh until the landfill was firm
enough to support the docks and warehouses that followed. By 1974, the Newark
Meadows had completely disappeared, buried beneath the Port Newark/Elizabeth
Marine Terminal, the Newark Liberty International Airport, and the New Jersey
Turnpike. Similar landfill operations soon claimed much of the eastern shore of
Newark Bay too. Signature stands of
white fuel storage tanks now occupy acres of former salt marsh in Bayonne.
Welcome to the Garden State.
This
massive industrial footprint is the first impression that most visitors to the
state will have, certainly the millions who arrive and depart by way of Newark
airport. And it’s a lasting impression. The industrialization of the Newark Bay
marshland has done more to stereotype New Jersey than all the jokes about big
hair and the mob. Newark Airport, Port Elizabeth, the N.J. Turnpike, and the
Bayonne and Elizabeth fuel tanks are, alas, the icons of my home state.
My
fellow Aqua Patio passengers seemed unfazed by the industrial sights and
smells. Most were there on business. The environmental engineers were
reconnoitering the Passaic for a client that just bought riverfront property;
the scientists were exploring the Passaic, Hackensack and Hudson River
estuaries for a larger survey of New York Harbor; the lawyers were compiling an
inventory of structures and businesses along the Passaic. Janice and Martin
were just looking for something interesting to do on a pleasant autumn
afternoon. “Marty loves to be out on the water,” said Janice. The couple read
about the Baykeeper tours in the newspaper, and drove out from their home in Manhattan.
They
couldn’t have picked a better day. The sky was an aching, cloudless blue, the
temperature a delightful 75 degrees F. It was the kind of Indian summer evening
that can make even the Passaic River look good. And it did look good. The water
was actually blue. Its surface, miraculously free of debris, rippled and
sparkled with every breeze. The sun was slipping lower in the sky. Three
fingers from the horizon. Now two. The
light was sharp and golden. We were sailing through honey.
Shipping containers are just one of the industrial eyesores along the Passaic River in Newark.Photo: Mary BrunoWe
passed abandoned factories and rotting docks on the Newark side of the river,
and a junkyard with towers of pancaked sedans, and acres of red and blue
shipping containers stacked seven high. Backlit and spectral, each eyesore had
its own sad beauty. Together, they recalled a vanished era, the mid-19th century,
when Newark was the king of U.S. manufacturing and the banks of the Passaic
teemed with commerce.
About
three miles upriver, just north of the Benjamin Moore paint factory, we came to
the Diamond Alkali superfund site. The address, 80 Lister Avenue, is on the far
eastern edge of Newark, in the city’s historic Ironbound district. Bill
maneuvered the Aqua Patio in closer to shore, and shifted the engine into
neutral. Most of the passengers stood—to take pictures, pay respects. Diamond
isn’t the only superfund site along the Passaic, but it is by far the most
notorious. For Passaic River advocates, 80 Lister Avenue is a battle cry.
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From
1951 to 1983, the Diamond Alkali plant manufactured pesticides and weed killers
and close to a million gallons of Agent Orange, the defoliant that U.S.
military aircraft sprayed onto the jungles of South Viet Nam during the war.
The process of making Agent Orange generated huge quantities of dioxin, a
poisonous byproduct that remains the most carcinogenic substance known to man.
Diamond’s dioxin poisoned its workers, its plant site, the surrounding
neighborhood, and the river too. We were right to be afraid of the Passaic.
The six-acre, concrete grave for the remains of the Diamond Alkali plant. RIP.Photo: Mary BrunoThe
remains of the Diamond Alkali plant were entombed beneath the grey concrete
mound we floated past. It was the highlight of the tour. Fifteen feet high and
about the size of a football field, the mound was secured behind a concrete
bulkhead and a steel fence, sealed with multiple layers of clay, and capped
with an impermeable “geofabric” membrane. The mound is a six-acre grave within
which lie the remains of the deconstructed Diamond factory buildings and 932
shipping containers filled with 66,000 cubic yards of dioxin-contaminated dirt,
dust and debris that environmental cleanup crews vacuumed from the streets,
stores, schools, houses, playgrounds,
and empty lots near the property.
A few
thousand years from now, remarked Bill, archeologists studying this site will
conclude that the people of the late 20th Century “built monuments to their
pollution the way the ancient
Egyptians built monuments to their pharaohs.” With that, he kicked the engine
back in gear and we continued slowly upstream. The skyline of downtown Newark
was just ahead. Sunlight lasered off the smoked glass windows of the FBI’s new
riverside tower.
“How
come there are no other boats on the river?” asked Janice. Her face was hidden
beneath the peak of her white cotton cap, which was pulled low against the
harsh sun. It was a good question, direct and obvious, and it cut to the heart
of things. Even the poison mound and the Mad Max landscape and the occasional
doomsday commentary from Andy and Bill hadn’t managed to spoil the simple joy
of being out on the water.
My
mother would have enjoyed this boat ride. She always dreamed of living by the
water. Whenever she would mention this, my father would tease her: “You do!”
he’d say. “You live on the Passaic River.”
In a
way, he was right. There was a time when people would have coveted our home above
the river. The Passaic was valued once, even beloved. Civic leaders harnessed
its power to fuel their industrial revolution. Artists immortalized its beauty
in paintings and verse. The river’s clear, navigable waters sustained the
settlers, who farmed and fished its fertile basin, and built cities and towns,
like mine, along its banks. But those days didn’t last.
The
Passaic’s beauty had been ravaged and its bounty spent long before Janice posed
her question. The river view mansions were boarded up. Riverfront hotels shut
down. Rowing clubs disbanded. The benches in riverside parks were turned to
face the street. By the time I was born the Passaic’s lower stretch was a garbage can, a cesspool. The river was
poisoned and it was dead and even a kid like me could see it.
No one
in my large extended family ever mentioned the state of the river. No one
seemed to mourn it. The Passaic was something we crossed over or drove along,
but it was never something we engaged. The river was like an elephant in the
living room of my childhood. Its death was a ho-hum fact of life, like Friday
night shore traffic on the Garden State Parkway or Hudson County politicians on
the take. Some people must have fought for the river once. But the battle was
long over. People moved on. Like those park benches, they turned their backs on
the Passaic.
My
mother, the water dreamer, told us not to play by the river, but she didn’t
have to. How come there were no other boats on the Passaic River on this
perfect late-September afternoon? I knew
the answer to Janice’s question.
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The Passaic River at Millington Gorge.Photo: John Bruno
There
are hundreds of thousands of waterways in the continental United States, 3.5
million miles of endlessly moving liquid. How many of these waterways are
technically rivers is a rather tricky
question. “River” is not a scientific term. Indeed, science is a little laissez
fair when it comes to classifying a waterway as, say, a stream versus a river.
My
Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary defines a river as “a natural stream of
water of considerable volume.” What constitutes “considerable volume” is left
to someone else to decide.
So it’s not surprising that rivers vary greatly in size and habit. Some are
quite small; the D River in Oregon flows just 120 feet through Lincoln City to
the Pacific Ocean. Some rivers are
massive like the wide Missouri, which at 2,450 miles is America’s longest. Some
rivers are ephemeral, surging into being after a desert downpour only to vanish
with the rain, leaving behind a lacework of empty washes that hold the promise
and threat of rushing water until the next big thunderstorm. A few rivers, like
Florida’s Kissimmee, form gigantic puddles that sheet in slow motion, like the
gentlest flood inching across a grassy sea some 40 miles wide.
Taken
together, America’s rivers drain the countryside like a giant open vascular
system that collects water from the interiors of the continent and transports
it to the seas. Their precious cargo is pirated along the way for drinking,
bathing, irrigating, recreating, and for powering millions of homes and
industries. Rivers bring life, and they can take it away too. Such is the
strange arithmetic of water: too much or too little is deadly.
Like
the Passaic, most rivers are the raison d’etre for
the communities and industries that have sprouted along their banks. There are
thousands of river towns in the U.S. – Minneapolis, St.Louis,
New Orleans, Augusta, Savannah, Albuquerque, el Paso, Cincinnati, Wheeling,
Great Falls, Bismarck, Kansas City, Sioux City, Jefferson City, Omaha, Trenton,
Toledo, Fort Wayne, Wilmington. Those are just some of the larger ones. The
Passaic spawned Newark (1666) and Paterson, N.J. (1791), two erstwhile
industrial powerhouses, as well as dozens of smaller communities like my home
town. Like most rivers, the Passaic has paid dearly for its largesse.
In
strictly physical terms, the Passaic is a fairly small river, just 90 miles
long. Nevertheless, it is New Jersey’s longest river, edging out the Raritan by
about five miles. The name Passaic means “peaceful valley” in the language of
the Lenni Lenape, the Native American tribe that occupied northern New Jersey
before the white settlers arrived.
The
Passaic is many rivers: swift and clear in its upper stretch, sluggish and swampy
in mid-section, a thundering cascade at Great Falls, brackish below the Dundee
Dam, and so industrial in its final miles that New Jersey poet laureate William
Carlos Williams declared it “the vilest swill hole.”
The
river rises in Mendham, an historic township in north central Jersey. It heads
almost due south at first, then veers sharply north, then northeast, then due
east and then south again, making two final northward loops before emptying
into Newark Bay. This erratic path traces a sloppy, upside-down U that winds
through, over, under, and around seven New Jersey counties, 45 of its cities
and towns, three swamps, three dams, four meadows, four waterfalls, a pond, a
lake, 49 bridges and seven highways, and past countless homes, parks, playing fields,
parking lots, diners, junkyards, office buildings, shopping centers, gas
stations, warehouses, and factories. The drive from Mendham to Newark is about
30 miles. The Passaic takes the long way around.
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At 90 miles, the Passaic is the longest, crookedest, and most historic river in New Jersey. Map: Passaic River
The
Passaic’s 90-mile journey can be divided into three long stretches. The Upper
Passaic is a largely downhill romp through meadows and forest and along the
southeastern edge of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. The Central
Basin is the long, flat, flood-prone mid-section
that flows north through an ancient lakebed. The Lower Valley, where I grew up,
is a 35-mile-long corridor with sides that curl like plumped pillows as it
sweeps down from the cliffs of Paterson to the sea level marshes of Newark.
In its
convoluted journey from pristine headwaters to the superfund site at its mouth,
the Passaic mirrors the triumphant and tragic relationship between nature and
industry in America. The wildness
and beauty that awed the first settlers some 400 years ago turned America into
an industrial titan. Rivers like the Passaic powered the mills, farms, and
factories that produced clothes, food, steel and electricity, a robust
international trade, and a large and solid middle class. But along the way, the
mighty frontier that helped forge American enterprise and character fell victim
to an industrial fervor that seemed, at every turn, to sacrifice natural
resources for financial gain.
The
power and much of the breathtaking natural beauty of our national mountains,
forests, rivers, and seas survives today only in the isolated patches of our
national parks, and then just barely. “Our tools are better than we are,” wrote
naturalist Aldo Leopold in his 1949 environmental classic A Sand County Almanac.
“They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice
for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without
spoiling it.” My great grandmother Emily Sullivan had a saying: “Don’t shit in
the nest.” The Passaic River is an object lesson in what can happen when we
ignore that simple, salty advice.
The
Passaic changes character in the Lower Valley. Seventeen miles upstream of the
river’s mouth in Newark Bay, the Dundee Dam crosses the river. The Passaic is
fresh water above the dam. Below, the river becomes a swirl of fresh water and
seawater whose salinity varies with conditions of weather, river flow, and ocean
tide. Water levels in the river fluctuate about five feet with each daily tide.
During extreme high tides, the Passaic can rise as much as 11 feet. When
conditions are right—a high tide during the dry summer season, for instance—the
tongue of saltwater from Newark Bay can lick the Dundee Dam, a full 17 miles
upstream.
The
Aqua Patio passengers were all quieter on the return trip, even Bill and Andy.
I wondered what they would all take away from this experience. Andy used the
Passaic River cruises to shake people up, open their eyes, confront them with
the tragedy and the possibility of the Passaic. Later that year, he would take
the mayors of Newark and Harrison out for a ride on the river. Baykeeper hosts
cruises for local business leaders, for the press and for the general public
too.
“Our
job is to make advocates of people,” said Andy. He was giving me a lift back to
my car, steering his Subaru Outback slowly along the paved streets that wind
through the PVSC plant from the riverside dock to the visitor’s parking lot at
the main entrance. “Remember Moby Dick?”
he asked, out of the blue. “The first chapter is all about Manhattan. When
industry and pollution kind of took the water away from people, the people
responded appropriately: they turned their back on the waterway and took on
other interests. Same thing with the Passaic. When
the Passaic became foul, when it was no longer a place to picnic and boat and
swim, it became less known to everyone except the people who worked on it. And
those people used it as a highway and a toilet, and when it started to smell
bad and people started to hear warnings about it, the Passaic became an unknown
place.”
I left
Andy standing in the parking lot, deep in conversation with the two
environmental engineers from the cruise.
My maiden voyage on the Passaic River had the desired effect. Andy would have been pleased. I didn’t get
over my fear of the Passaic. But after the boat ride that fear mingled with
curiosity and a kind of compassion. The river had touched me.
This is the first of a two-part excerpt from This American River: From Paradise to Superfund, Afloat on New Jersey’s Passaic.
Stay tuned for Part Two: Paddling the Passaic from its pristine beginning to its dioxin-laced end.
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Grass That’s Truly Greener
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