The subtitle of this great book is “Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of the City.” That’s exactly what it is. Sullivan immerses us in a thirty-two-square-mile marsh that is just five miles from the Empire State Building. The area is known as the Meadowlands. It’s not as pastoral as it sounds. It used to be the largest garbage dump in the world. It’s full of abandoned junkyards, polluted canals, and anonymous factories. It’s crossed by a web of highways, bridges, overpasses, culverts, cloverleafs, railroads, and unmarked trails. Sullivan calls it “the world’s greatest industrial swamp.” He loves the place. He drives it, hikes it, canoes it, explores it. He even digs in it. Why? What draws him to it? Early in the book, he hints at an answer:
I marvel that the land before me was called “a swampy, mosquito-infested jungle ... where rusting auto bodies, demolition rubble, industrial oil slicks and cattails, merge in unholy, stinking union” by the authors of a 1978 federal report, and that now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-billed grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs, even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can often times be the color of antifreeze.
I think it’s the blend of first and second nature that grabs Sullivan. One of the environmentalists he speaks with has a term for it – urban nature. It certainly grabs me. I love his descriptions of it. This one, for example:
The very idea of being in a canoe in the waters off the New Jersey Turnpike was viscerally thrilling, but this thrill was counterbalanced by a gnawing consideration of the toxicity of the environment, the end result being a kind of nervous tension that gripped us as we paddled through the marshes. Dave was the first to voice concern; he spoke after we inhaled a dank, sewery smell that seemed to have been stirred up by our paddles. “I feel like I just knocked a couple of years off my life,” Dave said. But as we spotted more and more birds, we grew more at ease, even if many of the birds seemed as anxious as we were. We began to notice the tail ends of muskrats as they paddled for cover in their huts. In addition to the traffic sounds of the turnpike, we soon heard splashing sounds, which we eventually determined to be spawning carp. Thrashing around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.
And this:
Around us there were green hills of grass-covered garbage dumps. We saw more carp, more muskrats, mudflats covered with sandpipers, and the frozen-in-time remains of a snapping turtle that appeared to have been decapitated by a train just as it had crawled up out of the marsh. We also saw a Thermos, three unopened cans of Pepsi, a beach chair sitting on another island, and a Seven Seas Red Wine Vinegar salad dressing spill. Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis. At precisely one hour and fifty-two minutes into our trip, we saw our first abandoned appliance, a refrigerator.
The book abounds with the kind of active first-person narrative sentence I devour:
One day I drove across the Meadowlands to Newark to find Seth Boyden’s grave.
One spring, I flew to Newark, rented a car, and checked into a hotel with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me
One day, while meandering along the edge of an area in the Meadows known as the Kingsland Marsh, I knocked on the door of the rectangular-shaped control room of the broadcasting facility for WINS, a New York news radio station.
I strapped the canoe to my rental car and started out early on the morning of our first adventure.
One afternoon I drove back through a field of abandoned cars and walked along the edge of a garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its topography to the waste of the city of Newark.
One day I went out in Leo’s canoe and we were specifically hunting for treasure.
I met Sheehan for a boat ride in Carlstadt one day, at the dock behind the Golf center that he calls his home port.
That “with the idea of touring around and just seeing where events would lead me” captures Sullivan’s approach to his subject perfectly. He’s sort of a Meadowlands flaneur. For example, he reads in an old guidebook that the Kearny Library is home to the world’s largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind. He visits the library, hoping to see the collection. While there, he views an exhibition on Kearny’s world-renowned reputation for soccer. This leads him to Kearny’s Scottish American Club, where he meets “a Scottish gentleman who was sitting on a stool at the bar with a half-gone pint of ale and who promptly and amiably discussed the secret of Kearny’s soccer success with me.” Sullivan can’t make out what the Scottish guy is saying. He writes,
This was simply because I don’t speak either Scottish or drunk Scottish. During our chat, I picked out the words television and Kearny and soccer. He punctuated his remarks with the phrase “Thaws sheet!”
“Thaws sheet!” he said.
“I’m sorry?” I said, begging his pardon and indicating that I hoped he would repeat himself.
“Thaws sheet!” he said again.
I nodded and ordered up a beer.
Sullivan talks with all sorts of Meadowlands people: Dan McDonough, Secaucus historian; Anthony Just, mayor of Secaucus; Tom Marturano, Director of Solid Waste for the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission (HMDC); Chris Dour, solid waste engineer for HMDC; Anthony Malanka, operator of the Malanka Mall Landfill, on the shore of the Hackensack River in Secaucus; Leonard Soccio, chief inspector in the mosquito control division of the Bergen County Department of Public Works; Victor Deserio, mosquito inspector; Steve Pavel, mosquito inspector; Leo Koncher, a Kearny resident, whom Sullivan describes as “an unofficial poet laureate of the Meadowlands”; Jeanette Abels, operations manager of the remediation program at PJP landfill; Harry J. McNally, Pennsylvania Railroad’s chief engineer, now retired and living in Florida; Paul Amico, former mayor of Secaucus; John Watson, retired detective from Kearny; Bill Sheehan, founder of the Hackensack Estuaries and River Tender Corporation (HEART); Don Smith, naturalist with the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission.
My favorite chapter of The Meadowlands is “Walden Swamp,” an account of two canoe trips that Sullivan and his friend Dave take across the Meadowlands. The first trip is across the broad, almost impenetrable Kearny Marsh. Here’s an excerpt:
We entered our second marsh, which was similar to the first, except perhaps more reed filled. I later learned that these small bodies of impounded water were formed at random, by the construction of railroad lines and the new and old turnpikes, but from the vantage point of our canoe at that moment, this seemed as natural a way to form a body of water as any. It was here, in the second swamp, that we came upon our first stumps from the Meadowlands old cedar forest. The stumps floated like corpses, their roots disappearing in the dark water. We poked at their tentacles with our oars, as a couple of red-winged blackbirds looked on suspiciously. A few minutes later, in a spot far from roads and highways, we discovered little islands, composed wholly of reeds. One island was surrounded by bright yellow police emergency tape: CAUTION, the tape said. Another island was inhabited by a lonely six-foot stepladder. In the next marsh, before an audience of terns, we canoed past a submerged control room of a radio transmission station, its giant antenna felled in the water like a child’s broken toy. In the water below our canoe, we could just make out fences topped with barb wire. I knew this to be the remains of one of the oldest radio antennae in the Meadowlands, thought to be the first to ever broadcast the voice of Frank Sinatra. When we approached Belleville Turnpike, we pulled our canoe and all our gear up over a four-foot-wide pipe that carried the water supply of Jersey City, and then, with the boat on our shoulders, we ran, timing our dash across the highway with the break in the waves of cars and trucks.
The second expedition is via Berry’s Creek and its manmade tributary, Berry’s Creek Canal, to Walden Swamp in the northwestern part of the Meadowlands. Sullivan writes,
The day was hot and clear. We put in our canoe on the Hackensack River on the northern end of Secaucus between an apartment complex and a cement plant. While we were gearing up, a man in his late fifties parked his car next to us and tried to convince me to leave my car keys on top of my front tire. He assured me they would be perfectly safe there but I kept my keys in my pocket and watched the man mutter and pace back and forth on shore as we began paddling south – passing ducks, the backs of outlet stores, and a set of Hess oil tanks, both protected by floating yellow link-sausage-shaped oil spill containment devices. Once again there were roads all around us but the river was quiet. We passed beneath a highway interchange and lay on our backs admiring the sky as it was outlined by three elevated highways: I saw an arrowhead, Dave saw the pointer that you move around with a mouse on a computer screen. When we turned off the Hackensack and onto Berry’s Creek Canal and began our trip into the north-west, we steered the canoe toward the banks and secretly observed the migratory patterns of the cars.
One of the great pleasures of The Meadowlands is the writing – specific, concrete, vivid. Examples:
The water was chocolate brown; I saw bits of wood and Styrofoam, two juice bottles, and clump after clump of broken reeds.
The current was quiet but ferocious; it swirled around our oars as we fought against it to cross under a railroad bridge with a charred-steak black frame.
The old dump had been capped with clay, sand, and soil; the vents of a gas ventilation system dotted the surface of the rolling hill like periscopes.
We continued to hike through the dumps, on unmarked, reed-hidden trails, through jittery groves of garbage-supported aspen.
Smith grew up in Little Ferry, on the north end of the meadows, eating meals with pig farm-salvaged silverware that had the Waldorf-Astoria’s markings on it.
But after a while, he let me look into the big wicker basket he carried on his back: it was filled with muskrats. The muskrats had long thick black tails and long yellow teeth that were curved like uncut fingernails.
The Meadowlands is a superb exploration of a vast, complex industrial swamp. In future posts, I’ll discuss it in more detail – its action, structure, description, and so on. But first I want to review the third book in my trio – Ian Frazier’s extraordinary On the Rez. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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