Tributaries (eBook)

2

Natal Streams

“Now this was the way in which the boy came in to possession of his undreaded rod. He was by nature and heredity one of those predestined anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as ‘born so.’ His earliest passion was fishing.”

-Henry Van Dyke, Little Rivers

I recently made a temporary move back to Pennsylvania after a seven-year stint in Oregon, for reasons too complicated to discuss here. By necessity, I had to acquire new health insurance and get assigned to a family physician in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania. On my first visit to the doctor—more of a meet-and-greet and review of my medical status than any treatment—we got to talking about our pasts. It turns out we were both born at Frankford Hospital, though he at the annex in Langhorne in Bucks County, and I in the original hospital in the gritty, blue collar Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia. We discussed the metrics sociologists use to forecast outcomes based on current statistics and concluded that there was a better chance of finding a chess champion than a fly angler in my old 19124 ZIP code. That neighborhood, the place where my father was born and raised, was white working-class when I was born. Picture dart bars with cheap beers on tap and patrons cursing at the Phils on the black-and-white TV perched on a corner stand on a Friday evening, where the pay checks get invested before groceries are bought. Inhaling fumes at Barrets Chemical bestowed a certain leniency to those who might judge. That was one of the better jobs, with compensation tied to the danger quotient. The plant is still there after a succession of owners, though the neighborhood has more skin complexions than just white these days. Most of the other mills and factories have shuttered and either moved south or just closed. The Frankford Creek would have been my natal stream. One of its tributaries, the Wingohocking Creek, has had much of its length converted to a storm sewer, getting channeled underground through round concrete pipes while streets were paved above it. Other tributaries suffered a similar fate. The Clean Water Act was not even imagined when all this occurred. Needless to say, I doubt I would have taken up fishing if I had to bike past raucous foundries, avoiding broken beer bottles and errant stray dogs to sling a line in a slime-filled lagoon. It’s not the kind of nature one finds to immerse the soul for spiritual healing, let alone an edible meal.

According to my father, my grandfather (his dad) was a gifted saltwater angler, gifted in the sense that he was extremely adept at locating fish in the Barnegat Bay, the favored saltwater fishing location where catching and keeping were the order of the day. I never got to fish with my paternal grandfather. He died of a heart attack at age 47, when I was just a toddler. Smoking and a bad diet will do that to you. At the age of eight, my family moved from Frankford to the almost-middle-class district north of Philadelphia known as Bensalem Township. My father took me and my next older brother on yearly trips to the Barnegat Bay starting when I was nine until about the age of fourteen. He never had the knack of finding fish the way his dad could, though some trips brought bounty while others proved almost futile. Then the trips suddenly stopped. But not to worry, I had plenty of opportunity to explore the Neshaminy Creek, a mere 300 yards from our modest home.

The Lackawanna River carves through the anthracite coal region in northeastern Pennsylvania, along the old mining towns of Carbondale, Archibald, Jermyn, Peckville, and Oliphant, before meeting the North Branch of the Susquehanna River in Scranton. The towns, connected one after the other without noticeable boundary, are almost entirely made up of two-story, aluminum-sided, working-class residences, all painted white at one time, but now sullied with the with the distinctive stain of benign neglect that conveys a lack of distinguishing character. There’s a sense of muted desperation about the place that evokes a feeling of estrangement, that suggests morbid fear hides behind the tarnished entrance doors. While we were driving through there one time, my wife pronounced it as “what it’s like to be in a place without art.”

The river itself has made an amazing recovery from coal silt, mine acid, and industrial pollution to become a pretty fair trout stream, though when you go there you can still see the remnants of its derelict past. Culm piles and abandoned railroad lines parallel much of the stream. Although a two-and-a-half-hour drive away from my home waters, I went there one May for—on the surface—a fishing outing to an unfamiliar stream. The regulations booklet, as well as some favorable press, suggested that some large, wild trout inhabited those waters. Hindsight being 20/20, I think the purpose of the trip was retrospective. My mother grew up in Peckville among those dreary coal towns. She shared a lot of fond memories about being raised poor in a merged family of twelve brothers and sisters from thrice-married parents, marriages of economic convenience more than romantic interludes. But the toll of dirty coal work and hard times bears an unfair price to pay. Her father died of black lung disease when she was eleven, and the widow who couldn’t afford a shoe, let alone live in one, moved the family downstate to Philadelphia when World War II broke out to take advantage of better opportunity. It’s where my mother eventually met my father, and the rest, you might say, is more destiny.

I did get to find out what influence a place has on molding personality and character, a question that often surfaced whenever I thought about what possibilities may have unfolded for me—the me with a different father, dissimilar genes, and disparate culture—had my mother’s family stayed in the coal region and she married otherwise. During a break from fishing the Lackawanna, after a pleasant midweek morning that yielded a sizable brookie and two browns— all wild, healthy fish—I decided to wander over to the local luncheonette for a quick bite before moving on to another section of the river. Though I was dressed a step down from causal, the waitress barely looked at me as she stated gruffly that I could sit wherever I wanted. I chose a booth in the front, by the door, and took the seat facing the rest of the dining room. At first, I thought she was reacting to my unkempt, unshaven fishing demeanor. In a few minutes, the place became more revealing. The fluorescent lighting in the dining room cast a dull luster on the Formica tabletops, busy with plate exchanges of hamburgers, goulash, and other bland comfort foods ordered by the local clientele. The place was three-quarters full on a Wednesday afternoon—regulars, I quickly surmised. Whenever I looked in the direction of another person, their eyes quickly averted, as if making eye contact would throw them severely off balance. Yet when I looked down toward the table at my menu, I could feel their eyes calculating instantly on my being. My fair skin and amiable expression contrasted starkly from their weathered, defeated demeanors. I felt instantly unwelcome, like some bearer of bad news from the front. This was more than the usual punctuated snubbing you get from intruding into rural haunts. Their piercing, unapproving glances stabbed me every time I peeked above the menu. Theirs was more of a silent resentment pervading sullen, drained eyes. For the first time, I viscerally understood Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, discounted almost out of existence by the townsfolk I was encountering. Diminished on one level, yet I could feel an unspoken bitterness and fear residing in their estimation of my presence. It appeared obvious that the white working-class crowd, dreary of inane soap operas and losing lottery tickets, with no appetite for outsiders, had little appreciation for any revelations that might be offered by blue-jeaned messengers like me. It seemed as if my presence alone was forcing them to come face to face with their other selves which had no knowledge of the cultural and economic forces that turned their lives into narrow, dark passages. When mines close and work ends, days pass while opinions retreat to safe, familiar dungeons. It was an accidental discovery for me, but I will pass it on for what it is worth. Don’t underestimate the latter in the nature versus nurture argument of what shapes us all. I could have been one of them.

Although it might not seem like it from a micromanaged level, the world appears to me to be governed by a higher spirit, one that influences your destiny before you are born. That’s not to say you don’t have any choice in the whole thing, but there seem to be powerful forces that shape who we become. It’s not so much by roles or scripts that we assume, but paths that we follow that are carved by those before us. These paths are not necessarily clearly defined or well-marked, and they venture near treacherous chasms both psychic and corporeal. I’ve not led a reckless life, yet I’ve had five brushes with death, ones that yielded to me by a split-second change of course, or fraction of distance. Those fortuitous events tend to remain in your subconscious, as some hidden markers that remind you how tenuous and important the fragile adventure of life suspends in the balance. I’ve often wondered about the things I’ve had no control over and the what-ifs: had my mother made different decisions, had we not moved out of the city, had the neighbor kid’s father not taken...