Downstream

‘See, here’s a beach!’
exclaims an American
woman. ‘Look at the sand!’ ‘I
wanna go on it,’ says her son.
‘You can’t go on it.’ ‘Why?’
he whines but his mother has
already walked away and so
half-heartedly he starts to cry.
For a moment, in the sun,
it’s easy to imagine children
cooling off here on a hot day,
not caring about pollution or
even if they could swim. An
1842 lithograph by William