First snow in Passaic 1981

 

The old men that camp behind the church on Wall Street always dread this event, the first fluttering of white they know will cover the landscape and the trees and make them need to find firewood they ache to save for later when winter gets worse.They live in camps like their ancestors did, though this is hardly The Great Depression, and they are not the kind of hobos people make romantic movies about, these are not rich men hiding out among the piles of trash, but the most desperate.The snow does not come without warning, the air changes with the first frost, and those wise enough to heed the warning search out their supplies then, scrounging around for fallen limbs from autumn’s storms, or the temporarily halted construction of wood frame houses on the far side of the tracks when the watchman is asleep or off in a corner reading comics, dragging these things back to this paltry woods near the Monroe Street Bridge that later city fathers will abolish to build a park, a thin line of trees clinging over the banks of the narrow Passaic River – a river the frost has already crusted over with ice, like a lid, with geese poking holes in the surface so they might survive, the unwise geese who chose to keep the hobos company rather than take the long flight south to warmer climes.The old men – and they mostly are men, gray before their times, beaten down by life and now by weather – hunker down around trash can fires mythological as they are, their shadowy shapes huddling deep into the night against the cold, scared to go to sleep for fear they may never wake again, desperate for the spring to come when winter has just started, the breath of the season blowing over them and around them, carrying a chill no lamb’s blood can protect them from.



Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan