Photographs

FINDING THE PASSAIC

Tyler J. Kelley T

here is a boulder at the bottom of the Great Falls in Paterson, New Jersey, that Matthew Jensen particularly likes. It looks like an early computer graphic, where three-dimensional objects are made out of a series of flat planes, he said, adding, “I’m getting more and more into rocks for some reason.”

One summer day Matt and I stood on the rocky beach below the falls, where the Passaic River plunges seventy-seven feet through a sheer rock gorge. Matt took off his shoes, put down his bag, and waded around to photograph the rock. Meanwhile, I studied the beach, looking for objects that might tell me the story of this place. Coal, slag, a jug handle, a thick lump of gray glass, and a 1950s toy tractor—when Matt came back, I presented my efforts. Encouragingly, he gave me a plastic bag to hold what he called my “artifacts.”

Then, with the eye of a connoisseur, he looked at the ground. “This is transferware,” he said, picking up a blue-and-white pottery shard. “See the dot pattern? It’s from the era after hand-painted pottery. They would make the design and press it on.” He picked up a round disc of glass, like the bottom of a big bottle. “This is a pontil mark,” he said, showing me a scar on it. Created when the glassblower disconnected the rod, the mark dated the artifact to the mid-1800s, before the advent of molded glass. “Probably no one has really looked at what’s on this beach in a long time,” he said.

Walking back to my car at the end of the day, we detoured into one of the big abandoned textile mills, powered by the Passaic in the previous century. It was a predictable warren of weeds and graffiti-covered rubble now, but I did find a brick that said “Signack” on it. I dusted it off and put it in my trunk.

When I was a kid I used to pick up screws and wires that had been run over by cars—anything I found in the street, I would save. I called it “rustymetal junk.” Later, as I traveled through the United States, Mexico, or Europe, I would grab a rock, a nice chunk of wood, or a feather. Many people do this, but most are not proud of their tendencies to accumulate valueless things, especially with the unfortunate rise of the term hoarder overflowing from reality TV.

For a long time, I tried not to find things, or at least not to keep them. It felt pointless. Chipped marbles and broken glass serve no purpose. Then I fell victim to brick collecting. I realized there were hundreds of brands of brick produced in the Hudson Valley during the early twentieth century; now those bricks lie in piles along the city’s waterfront. After three years of collecting, I now have around two hundred bricks. Yet every time I bring one home, it seems to lose its meaning. It’s the same brick that excited me when I spotted it on the ground—stamped with “Mayone,” say, in an italic font set in a dynamic parallelogram—but after I clean it and put it in my pile, I might never look at it again. Why? If the bricks aren’t the point, what is?

After hearing about my brick obsession, a friend invited me to dinner with Matt at a Mexican restaurant in SoHo. Matt has elevated finding to an art form, maybe even a religion. He mostly walks near water. As he walks, he takes photographs and collects objects. He has a closet full of this stuff, stored in archival cardboard boxes, organized by location. But unlike what the rest of us find, Matt’s artifacts can end up in a museum, private collection, or art gallery. It seemed like he had found a way to validate and even value the impulse to collect worthless stuff.

I was flattered when Matt invited me to go walking with him. Eventually, we spent eight days on the Passaic, walking about forty miles all together, or half the river’s length. Never once, in all that trudging, did Matt say, “What’s the point?” or “It’s not worth my time,” or “I’m too busy,” “Hurry up,” or “We’re late.” Nor did he complain about heat, cold, wet feet, thorns,

hunger, ticks, dead animals, walking on the shoulders of highways, or getting lost.

As a kid, Matt spent a lot of time walking along the Quinebaug River in Connecticut, which he often compares to the Passaic. “Same smell of dried rocks and off-gas from the sewage plant,” he said affectionately. “I grew up in an adverb, a very depressing adverb.” Killingly, Connecticut—the region claims to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, with hydropowered factories built in the 1700s. “It’s called the Quiet Corner now, but it used to be the Beijing of the U.S.”

Upstream from Paterson, Matt photographed a sign that read: “Pardon our appearance but, the world’s only family destination gun range needs to accommodate more family! Welcome the family—Gun for hire.” At that moment, the world’s only family- destination gun range was a weedy field behind a low black plastic fence. “200 parking spaces. 7,100 square feet. 60 ports. Opening 2017.” In the rendering on the sign, the building looked like a trendy gym or a Whole Foods Market. “I learned to shoot a gun before I learned to shoot a photo,” Matt told me. Almost like a marksman, he clicks the shutter between breaths. His father is a rifle coach and Matt grew up fishing, shooting, and being dragged to gun ranges. “Most people would assume that the way I work, being outdoorsy—that I’m a very cliché straight boy. But I wouldn’t make the work I made if I wasn’t gay. I’d be a different person.

“I wouldn’t have had to be kicked out of the world and come back to it with a better understanding of things. I think that’s the beginning of a lot of things for a lot of gay people. You’re always a little bit on the outside of that former world.” Matt stopped to photograph the name “Fred” spray-painted in elegant script on a rough stone wall.

As a married straight man his age, I can see the outsiderness in Matt’s photographs. Although you never see his body, you can feel him looking. He is the stranger standing on the sidewalk in front of your house; the one staring out the window of the airplane when everyone else is asleep.

“Anxiety is isolating for a lot of people,” Matt said. “It keeps them from going outside, keeps them from engaging with humans and talking and walking in a place they’ve never been. The most depressing thing about walking in places like we’re walking is the lack of children playing. All summer long I walk and I don’t see kids anywhere. Is everybody dead? Are they all old now? Quietly living inside of me is a fervent environmentalist who tries to reconnect people with landscapes.”

Ecologically, the Passaic is in bad shape. The lower reaches contain Agent Orange. Signs along the bank tell people that the river’s blue crabs “may cause cancer and may harm brain development in unborn and young children.” Shouldn’t Matt be moved to anger or frustration by what we see? He told me that he can imagine the river cleaned up, improved, but he doesn’t pine for a prelapsarian Passaic. He doesn’t bother with the folly of wishing things were different, he said, “because the past cannot change.”

According to Matt, the beginning of the Passaic’s fall is a mysterious pile of stones. I first saw it on a printout from Google Maps that Matt took from his backpack while we stood below the Great Falls. On the printout, a V of whitewater stretches across the river. A weir, Matt said—a low dam-like structure built by colonists or Native Americans to trap fish.

Tantalized by the thought of an ancient structure in the middle of these chain stores and crumbling frame houses, we set off to find it, following streets when we had to and clambering down along the water where we could. In Paterson, this meant walking through mud or over a squishy footing of rotten carpet and Styrofoam. Later, it meant skidding down steep slopes covered in poison ivy.

We spotted the weir from the Maple Avenue bridge and walked along the shoulder of McLean Boulevard to get closer. There were no signs for it— the weir is not landmarked or preserved in any way, even though it is almost certainly the oldest manmade structure for miles in any direction. Just before Home Depot, we stepped over the guardrail and whacked our way through a stand of knotweed. And there it was: a perfectly symmetrical V made of stacked rocks, eighty feet from bank to bank, the water a little higher above, riffling white below. Matt leaped gleefully from stone to stone, shooting pictures.

The weir has a magnificent sense of purpose. Here, in the river, it has been doing its job for three hundred years or more, even if no one wants the fish it traps. It is also strikingly fragile; any bored teenager might be tempted to kick it apart.

The industrialization of the Passaic, of which the weir is the tiniest little germ of a beginning, finds its apogee at the river’s mouth, in Newark, where Matt and I found ourselves one December day. Walking past low warehouses in the chilly wind, we arrived at an incredible network of overpasses and highways—six or seven roads, high and low, lanes zooming around us in different directions.

Passing beneath the New Jersey Turnpike, we entered the world of trucks. There are no houses and very little that is human beyond the Turnpike. Everything is truck-sized. Here we first encountered the boom and shake of heavy vehicles blowing grit in cold gusts, which lasted for most of the next three hours; the grime got into the creases at the corners of our eyes. Beyond the guardrail of the Lincoln Highway Bridge the sand was many feet thick, deposited by trucks passing as regularly as a desert wind. Matt photographed a dune sunflower growing, despite the cold, out of the middle of a tire set in a berm of grit.

When you’re with Matt, you have permission to pay attention to everything. It’s all valuable, simply because it’s part of the walk. Though the collections of objects and photographs are what Matt displays, for me, the walking itself became the point. Matt wore a little Buddha statue around his neck. Asked about it, he said, “My ritual is the art that I make, the meditations within the work: quiet walking, pensiveness, nature worship.”

In the shadow of a taco truck, we noticed fragments of older trash under the pee bottles, truck parts, and plastic. An ash pile, Matt said, maybe from the late 1800s, when people burned all their garbage: oyster shells, glass, slag, ceramic. Matt bent down to pick up a blue-and-white pottery shard. “Willow ware,” he said, and put it in his plastic bag.

I’m from Minnesota, and when I find myself describing where I grew up—small neat houses, lakes, pine trees, prairies—I can feel the word boring peeking out. I think New Jersey has the same problem. But where I would try to justify or evade the “boring” label, Matt cultivates the mundane. “A boring photograph will keep your attention; you’ll be looking at it until you figure out why it was taken,” he said. “The longer you look at something, the more exciting it gets. In fact, there’s really nothing boring.”

Tyler J. Kelley is a freelance journalist living in New York City. He also teaches printmaking at Parsons School of Design. His feature-length documentary film, Following Seas—which he co-directed with his wife, Araby—will be released in 2017.