“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
– Norman Maclean
The title of this post is from the novella by Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
I can relate to those things, but what I’m writing about today is about rivers that run through my own little Paradelle that I know well.
Verona Park is a small, suburban park near my home. It is 54 acres (219,800 m2). It is a place I often go for a walk around the lake. I think I know it pretty well by now, so I easily can see small changes in it. I notices trees that lost branches, new signs, and things in the water that don’t belong there. I have watched the seasons change there many times now.
Like Maclean’s story, I took my sons fishing there when they were quite young. My oldest son is now quite a good fly fisherman. So, I can’t help but recall those days when I circle the lake now.
Some of my observation skills came from reading a book by Annie Dillard the year after it was published when I had just graduated college and started teaching. It had a big impact on me.
I have written before about how her stories of an anchorite by a creek changed how I taught my students writing. It also changed my ambition from understanding and exploring the world and the wilderness to wanting to know smaller, more knowable places where I lived.
Some of those places are in the small woods near my home. This is not forest or wilderness. These are places I went to a hundred times with my sons. I felt like if I could really understand a small piece of the world, I could understand myself and the larger world better.
In literature class, we call it close reading. Close reading is a careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. Such a reading places great emphasis on the single particular over the general. You pay attention to individual words, the way Dillard spent looking very carefully and writing down what she saw in nature and the seasons.
The title of her book suggests a pilgrimage, but like the labyrinth walk, she does not have to journey far from her home near the creek. This pilgrimage is not religious, but the pilgrim does seeks to behold the sacred.
The lake at Verona Park was once a swamp, and the lake was formed in 1814 when someone dammed the Peckman River for a grist mill. The lake with its weeping willow trees and paths was a place to escape to before it became a tamed county park with landscape plans prepared by the famous Olmsted Brothers.
The Peckman River is small. It flows in New Jersey northeasterly through my hometown until its confluence with the Passaic River. The Passaic River itself is the remnant of Glacial Lake Passaic.
New Jersey’s longest river is the Hudson River at 315 miles/507 km long. But like the Delaware River (second longest, 301 miles/484 km) they are beyond our borders so we share them with New York and Pennsylvania respectively.
The Raritan River (121 miles/195km) runs through the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick where I spent four years. That river runs through those four years.
Next on the longest list is the Wallkill River at 88 miles/142 km.
Then finally, comes the Passaic River at 80 miles/130 km. It’s the big river that plays the biggest role in my current life. I taught at Passaic County Community College and ran the writing program there for five years and I now work for the Poetry Center there in Paterson. I have followed many sections of this troubled river over my lifetime. I have followed the Lenape Trail that follows the river in some sections the way the Lenape Indians followed it long ago.
Knowing all that, I can’t walk in these places and not feel the past.
The section of woods that is my “pilgrim creek” land is called Mills Reservation. It is 157 acres and more than I can ever understand in detail. It was also a minimalist design by the Olmsteds while they worked for Essex County, but most of it has never been developed.
On a clear day, I can see Verrazano Narrows Bridge to the south and the New York City skyline and even the Statue of Liberty to the east. From one lookout point on a cliff of this First Watchung Mountain, there is Hawk Lookout atop a 500-foot basalt ledge. People join the Audubon Society birders who gather on that ancient ledge to watch the migration mixture of both coastal and ridge flights every autumn.
Basalt is a common extrusive igneous, volcanic, rock formed from the rapid cooling of lava. Pick up any piece of it lying near the trails and you are holding something that is about 200 million years ago. Can you grasp that amount of time? Of course not.
If you followed the Peckman River on its journey, you would come to the Great Falls in Paterson where the lava flows that formed the basalt hardened after the North American and African plates pulled apart about 200 million years ago.
Continental drift & plate tectonics… I understand those things from my reading but imagining Pangea tearing apart as the North American and African plates pulled apart, causing lava flows, that hardening formed the igneous basalt bedrock you see today at the Great Falls – somewhat incomprehensible.
The expansion & contraction of Glacial Lake Passaic 25,000 and 14,000 years ago and the retreat of a massive glacier to the northeast allowed the huge body of water trapped by the mountains stretching southwest to flow from beyond what is now the Great Swamp and Far Hills past my Paradelle and Paterson.
If you follow the trail out of the Mills Reservation to the southwest, the yellow trail blazes will lead you to a trail along an old Erie Railroad line and back into Verona Park. As Maclean wrote, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” Everything comes around.
Weekends in Paradelle 
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