It was a moment of serenity leavened with dread beside the Colorado River, where the yellowing branches of the willows had already resigned themselves to fatigue in the rushing of the surface current. We drove there that early afternoon in October 1962, under alternating patterns of autumn light and shadow, briskly over the bridge from Austin to where a black man fished.

     Out of sight of the city on a clumsy bank of the river where a dirt road came to an end behind honeysuckle and forsythias a man in a white T-shirt sat on a lawn chair with an open tackle box close by and a supply of paper cups filled with dirt and worms. Beneath the large oaks he ignored the sound of his transistor radio and chose the ambling pace of day, the gurgle of water streaming over the cooling rocks, preferred the drowse of cicada buzz to the frenzy of world crisis.

     The humidity of the afternoon was unforgiving. He dozed, handkerchief in hand, limp and useless. He had been watching the cork on his fishing line, waiting for a fish. When the occasional breeze breathed voice into the dry leaves of the trees above he did not hear, nor heard the flies that hummed in circling eights over fish entrails and cantaloupe rinds. He was dreaming, no doubt, of anything but the day’s events, too unwieldy to mention.

     One boy, who was heading toward the river on his bicycle, I remember, we followed on the unpaved road from the exit of the bridge until we passed him and the conjured dust cloud pelted him gray as he rode through. He had come, we thought, from one of the clapboard houses that lined the road.

     Normally, on such sunny autumn days you might see three generations in commotion, a single family congregated in front of a house, children in their starched school-going clothes playing hide-and-seek around a dismembered car, a grandmother, maybe, on a porch swing combing the hair of the little ones setting them to rights. But not today. In passing we saw those houses different, stark and blank and thoughtful in nervous compensation, holding back their breath.

     Why did we come here, then, to this side of the river to view the muffled reflection of an ample sky in the mirror of rippling water, to breathe the heavy scent of churned mud tumbled in the river’s flow and witness the dissolution of day in mute surprise as the world was about to go out? Why come here where a black man full of days had come to mingle and share his final minutes with sleep and the nibbling fish? Why here when there were plenty of bomb shelters of solid metal and concrete there in the city’s center?

     It must have been that time on this side of the river seemed severed from city time, from world time, from the cacophony of events gone wild, and darkness that skulked about sense and sanity like a rabid dog haunting a world careening toward a unanimous undoing. Here Khrushchev and Kennedy seemed to hold no sway over the monotony of poverty and resident oppression. Cuba was far off, farther than anyone could ever imagine and the man who fished here knew of no bomb that could reduce the size of ignorance.

     Maybe that is why this black man fished in anonymous time, favored the dappled light by the river, and slept. His crisis was long and enduring, without form or flare, had no solution but patience and the development of mind. That is why, I guess, we too came here, why my father drove us to the river that autumn afternoon to wait with him in the shade amidst the repetitious lap of waves and contrapuntal quiet, when all thought of sirens was imminent, preliminary to a final flash.

©Vincent Montenegro

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