The Allegheny River
The Allegheny flows thru Pittsburgh into the Monongahela to form the Ohio. In the 1970s & 1980s the rivers were badly polluted by industrial waste. But poor kids like my friends and I loved those filthy rivers. In the summers we crossed over the tracks by the coal power plant to the Allegheny where we swam or fished for the monstrous carp and catfish that gorged on the waste factories dumped with impunity.
As we grew into troubled teens we gathered on the banks of the river at night around oil drum fires to drink, gossip and blast music on our huge portable radio / cassette players as rats and raccoons watched us from the scrub woods. But despite how badly the water was tainted some life still thrived there. I haven’t been back to Pittsburgh since I moved to Canada in my late teens. I’ve read that the rivers have been cleaned up a lot. I’d love to see them in their current state, but I’ll always be grateful to those defiant filthy waters that gave us kids a refuge and a place to grow.
The poem below, The Allegheny River, was published in my poetry collection Allegheny, BC by Nighwood Editions. https://nightwoodeditions.com/products/9780889712744
What a filthy river! Lined with steel mills
and factories, to swim in it was to smell
for days the oily stink against your skin,
a nausea-twist in your stomach,
uneasy reminder of the river’s phlegmy,
dark green clutch. It was as dangerous
as it was dirty. The bottom dug out
for gravel, unnaturally and unevenly deep,
held invisible currents, eddies, undertows
that could pull, suck and hold you down
until you drowned, or throw you up again
to limb-flash, flail and suck for air.
Each summer it claimed a child
from the cancerous towns along its sides,
as if it were an angry, wounded god
demanding tribute. Each summer
we gathered there to fish for monstrous carp
and catfish no one would ever eat, to swim
and dunk each other beneath the blinding water,
to watch the rich kids carve into the current
white tipped waves, bronzed bodies balanced
on single skis behind small, sleek powerboats.
By the docks we bobbed in water warm as blood,
the sunlight marching like fire across the oily surface
to burn away all but summer’s touch.
We swam beside the hulk of coal barges
black as the bible’s curse that tore the earth.
All summer we swam it. What a filthy river!