The Meadowlands is a place to pass through and forget on the way to someplace else. Not unlike a neglected child, The Meadowlands has grown up without guidance, constantly unsure of what the future holds. It is this loneliness and solitude that continues to bring me back year after year. These disparate images tell different stories; like songs on an album that build upon each other. Each one may be about something specific. More often than not, the specifics are less important than the feelings conveyed.
Essay by Robert Sullivan
The Meadowlands is that giant swath of swamp and space that separates New Jersey from New York City, or, put another way, from New York City and the rest of the United States of America.
The Meadowlands is a landscape that is, no matter where you are within it, more panorama than single place; it is widescreen, 3-D, and IMAX all rolled into one, regardless of whether you are seeing it in its clear blue sky version or in its smokestack-fueled gray. Exactly how big the Meadowlands is depends on what you consider to be the Meadowlands.
Are you thinking about the parts that look like swamp, with reeds and herons and mud? Are you talking about the areas that the state government deems Meadowlands, which is that area that is part swamp and part what might be called developable landscape, whatever developable means? Are you talking about the places that are Meadowlands-esque, for lack of a more precise phrase: those business that are beat up, factories that are deteriorating, plants that produce things that are one giant note, such as electricity, or gravel, or smoke and fumes from burnt trash? Are you talking about the places that seem not quite like any place, places that, if you get lost and run into them accidentally, somehow seem a little lost themselves: parking lots without cars, bus stops without bus passengers, a castle filled with knights and maidens that are all out of time and—officially, anyway—without a king? Are you thinking of those roads that seem a lot like the opposite of the New Jersey Turnpike, the Turnpike being the Meadowlands’ Amazon River: little beat-up, one-lane, barely paved and sometimes even dirt paths, as opposed to the sixteen or so lanes of superhighway that separate the airport in Newark from the giant Swedish home furnishings outlet in Elizabeth?
Those roads that wind up taking you to an old broken-down pier, a place, if you are driving or even walking, where you are forced to look down off of a crumbling shoreline and see the cold, fast-flowing Hackensack River as it wells up, just before melding with the Passaic River in Newark Bay and then becoming New York Harbor and then the Atlantic Ocean?
One of the reasons that I think the Meadowlands is forever fruitful as an area of study and exploration, or as a place where artists can go and devise art, is that I see the Meadowlands as a lot of different things, and at this moment, after walking from my typewriter to my daughter’s bedroom in the apartment we live in on the top of a little hill in Brooklyn, I see the Meadowlands as a big, almost imperceptibly curved shallow bowl that encom-passes two states, three rivers, numerous small municipalities in New Jersey, a vast interior ocean of a bay, as well as two kills, the Arthur and the Kill van Kull. (Somehow foreseeing that the Meadowlands would become an important setting for the crime family television drama The Sopranos, the Dutch, who came to the Meadowlands in the seventeenth century, referred to their streams and river channels using the word kill.)
Today, I see the Meadowlands as what you get when you drain a glacial lake for thousands of years but don’t quite finish the job and then bring in a human settle-ment that likes to leave its trash in big piles in old lake beds, a kind of human community that prefers to pump its sewage into the old marshes and cut down the cedar forests and just generally muck the place up. I see it as a place where this kind of thing goes on for years, despite a large but less influential number of people who quietly ramble in or through or even just enjoy seeing the area, as it was or—semi-perversely, as in my case—as it is.
In some cultures, ancestors tell of great floods, of ecological moments that were so dramatic as to be recounted in stories told over and over again over the course of generations.
In my family, I was often told by my father of the time his family drove in a car from New York City to Red Bank, New Jersey and, in so doing, passed through the Meadowlands. He was young. It was a momentous event. His siblings complained loudly, as did he. He pressed his face into the back of the front seat of the car, using self-suffocation to ameliorate the wretched stench, the stink that seemed to stick to his clothes. It was a horrific ride, as my father recalled it—fires, fumes, the stuck-in-your-nostrils odor of the pig farms that filled Secaucus, that made Secaucus for many years a word that worked as a joke if you said it, which means that geology and human settlement preferences matter in humor, even if it doesn’t seem like it. This is an interesting thing about the relationship between humor and human settlement patterns, as well as land use. Because of the glacial lake, in other words, because of it draining, because of the resulting swampy and less-liked land, because pig farmers were exiled out of the city proper to the swampy outer edges (the pigs were exiled even further when we invented refrigerated trains and trucks to carry them in from even farther away), because of Secaucus’ relative isolation as an island in a giant swamp even up until today—because of all this, Johnny Carson, on the old Tonight Show, would have people in hysterics with that one word: See-caucus! “That smell!” my father would say. “That horrible smell.” This must have been in the 1940s. As trash built up, as more hills of garbage were legally and illegally set on fire, as new things that shouldn’t ever be thrown away were invented and thrown away in the fifties and sixties and seventies, the smell got worse, the air darker. This is what retired dump workers used to tell me when I was out in the Meadowlands and I would run into one of them. Retired dump workers sound like retired Virgils, having walked too many miles through the Inferno.
It’s not just artists, though, who are drawn to the Meadowlands. It’s not just birders taking advantage of it as the great still greenish flyway on the coastal route from Halifax to the summer place in Florida. It’s not just illegal dumpers or those giant tow trucks that are specifically designed to tow trucks, which disappear off the New Jersey Turnpike exits and rumble into the mists, stopping at last at giant but secret-seeming truck farms. It’s not just the people who are buying housing on tracts of swampy land that get filled permanently, even though the land is more likely filled temporarily, no matter what the developer tells you. (I remember driving down a “new” road, put in in the eighties, that was, by the end of that decade, like a beat-up dirt road to a ghost town that I once drove down in the mountains of Colorado, only not so smooth.) It’s not just ferocious aedes sollicitans, the pit bull of Mid-Atlantic mosquitoes, that is drawn to the Meadowlands, a Meadowlands feature that is eventually drawn to you. It is everyone, as far as I am concerned.
Yes, of course, you will meet people who say they have never thought about the Meadowlands or the Newark Meadows or the Hackensack Meadows or the Jersey Meadows or, as Bruce Springsteen once called them, the swamps of Jersey. But they are wrong. You can’t avoid the Meadowlands, even if you think you can, just given its location. All those who enter and all those who leave New York City are bound if not to notice it then to experience it. The meadows are the gateway to the giant metropolis, the moat of the megalopolis that must be crossed. From a car, you may not give the Meadow-lands a lot of thought per se, unless you are stuck in traffic, or backed up to get into the giant outdoor sports and entertainment arena that is called the Meadowlands (a place where, incidentally, there was once a high cancer incident among players). But while in the Meadowlands, you will certainly notice that you are not in your suburban town or your apartment building-filled city neighborhood. The Meadowlands is something else altogether, and your personal landscape recognizer, though perhaps inaudible to you, or on mute, notices.
If you are on a train, you will notice and most likely comment—train takers are the greatest fans and even devotees of the Meadowlands, the migratory group that is most Meadowlands-curious. If you are on a plane, you will see the Meadowlands as you come in for a landing, or just after takeoff.
It’s an intense Meadowlands experience—you are sideways to the ground and looking hard to your left or right, which is disconcertingly straight down, and you are getting a blinkered but bird’s-eye view straight down into a marsh, where the old cut lines are otherworldly, like the canals on the surface of Mars. These cuts were made throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the idea being that if you made cuts and kept the water moving, there would be no mosquitoes. Reports of mosquito clouds invading Manhattan from Jersey were as terrifying in the 1930s as Orson Wells’ broadcast of War of the Worlds, the great Martian invasion hoax. By the way, when Orson Wells made people believe that Martians had landed on earth, one of the reasons it sounded so believable was that Wells told everyone that the Martians had landed in New Jersey. Where else would Martians land?
But the other thing about the Meadowlands that draws people to it is that it represents a kind of hopefulness. The white of an egret wading through a trash dump-impounded marsh is a startling testament to something, and even if you are not wildlife biologist enough to know exactly what, your gut tells you it is on balance pretty good. The Meadowlands is full of what the nineteenth-century priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as “dearest freshness deep down.” “[N]ature is never spent,” he writes. There is life in the Meadowlands, a life that seems more resilient than regular life. The Meadowlands is not generally revered as a landscape the way Arches National Park or the Grand Canyon is. It doesn’t seem to be pristine enough. It is lower on the scenic totem pole. It’s not wilderness. All this thinking is a mistake, though. There is some classical wildness—a few swamps have not been completely destroyed, birds pass through, streams threaten to get cleaner, and plant species return. But there is also lots of other wildness, a hybrid kind that is, I would argue, just as important: old bridges with stalagmites of pigeon dung, abandoned living room furniture sets, the junkyards that, aside from leaching battery acid, say something to us, even if we don’t want to hear it—for me, the experience of a Meadowlands exploration is akin to looking for old breeds of roses in cemeteries or walking through Roman ruins. The big problem, a problem that is mixed up in our view of the Meadowlands, is that there is a scenic totem pole. The ranking of natural wonders is what got us into trouble to begin with. We didn’t pollute our vacation lakes, but we dumped fifty-gallon drums into the Meadowlands in Kearny, New Jersey, on a fairly regular basis.
