Hiking Walden Swamp

The power of seeing is celebrated in The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City. A book review by Sherri Vance

Across the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan is an area of New Jersey that has been piled in garbage, laced with turnpikes, poisoned with mercury, choked in concrete, and crisscrossed by chemically tinted waterways that often smell like a foul borscht. So why would a man who lives in Portland, Oregon-an place that is no slouch for natural beauty-fly repeatedly to Newark, drive through the Lincoln Tunnel, and spend days hiking and rowing through this seeming wasteland? Pick up a copy of The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City and you'll find out.

Out of his desire to "commune with nature and what have you" in this urban wilderness, Robert Sullivan has created a insightful and entertaining celebration of social ingenuity and stupidity, human eccentricity, and the power of abused nature to endure. Along the way, he sees just about everything-the drowned remains of cedar forests, freshwater springs and seeping garbage hills, the home of the world's largest collection of foreign translations of Gone with the Wind, islands of reeds, the remains of the original Penn station, and the reputed burial site of Jimmy Hoffa.

Sullivan's book is about more than the way nature endures, more than the clumsy struggle between a city's waste and a patch of stubborn marshland. Indirectly, it's about our ability and need to see. By jumping in and seeing everything fully, Sullivan helps readers see in a new way. By venturing into the reeds (and canals, towns, and living rooms) of the Meadowlands, Sullivan helps us see the awkward loveliness that can inhabit bare places, like the "jittery groves of garbage-supported aspen" that grow on its dumps. The two introductory quotes on the first page spell it out. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God, / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil, " Gerard Manley Hopkins sings. The response is a quote from an animal control officer in Secaucus, NJ: "I tell you one thing. If you dig out here, you sure as heck are going to find something."

Sullivan digs, and he finds a lot. The human and natural history of the Meadowlands is full of startling facts and strange beauty. On the human level, the Meadowlands seems to attract brilliant and obsessive eccentrics like a reed-festooned magnet. There's Sam Boyden, whose fertile mind invented the electric clock, the boxcar, a method of using cotton to pull electricity from the earth, the procedure for creating malleable steel, and dozens of other inventions, all from his home in Newark. There's Robert Swartwout, who spent his life and his fortune attempting to reclaim marshland and run dairy farms on it-and who, after his wife died and his money was gone, resorted to handing ardent love notes to random women in the streets. There's Victor the Mosquito King, a living legend among mosquito control officers because of his ability to catch more mosquitos on his body than anyone else. And there's 83-year-old Leo Koncher, explorer of the Meadowlands, who uses homemade marsh mud-walking equipment (old shoes in plastic buckets, secured to plastic milk crates) and underwater observation devices (plastic sewer pipes connected to watertight flashlights) on his expeditions.

On the natural history side, the primary character is the Meadowlands marsh itself-taunting progress, stubbornly and gradually sucking down roads, radio towers, and business ventures. It is a place where garbage hills once burned for decades and a leachate of pure pollution still trickles off those hills. And yet, as Sullivan writes, as he touched his finger to the "espresso of refuse" seeping off a garbage hill, "a few yards away, where the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam alone." It is now a place where, even in the midst of trash and industrial odors, one can see herons, grebes, and eighteen species of ladybugs.

What to do now with the Meadowlands, after we have already done too, too much in our obsession for inventing new uses for it? The answer isn't a settled one. Near the end of the book Sullivan tells the story of the two most prominent environmentalists in the area, who both love the Meadowlands but disagree on how to care for it. Over a tense lunch, Don Smith (a naturalist with the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Corporation) argues for planting a salt marsh grass called spartina, undertaking a variety of reclamation efforts, and allowing some limited development. Bill Sheehan (founder of HEART-Hackensack Estuaries and River Tender Corporation) argues for leaving the Meadowlands alone, including the phragmite reeds that are now its most prevalent species. Bill says the marsh can take care of itself, recover in its own way. Don argues that "we broke it-we gotta fix it." Neither one converts the other.

Regardless of our efforts or lack of them, Sullivan's book helps us see that both nature and the human imagination have a resilience, an ability to create beauty in the midst of decay and trouble. We get by. In Sullivan's words, the Meadowlands shows "nature tested and returning in its own scrambled order."

This knowledge that nature will return (and the realization that it should have been left alone in the first place) comes in part from the ability to observe details that Sullivan demonstrates throughout The Meadowlands. The point is made best as Sullivan describes a moment of unexpected clarity which delighted Leo Koncher one day:

The day on the marsh that Leo talked about more than any other is the day that the water in the Kearny Marsh became suddenly clear. All of a sudden, Leo saw the bottom for the first and last time. He was amazed and he paddled around feverishly, seeing all that he previously had only imagined, as if it were a dream. "You could see great huge trees lying on their sides," he said. "Those were the trees in the cedar forest. I spent the whole day out there."

By looking all the way to the bottom, Sullivan helps us see the Meadowlands in a way that reclaims it, in a way that changes our perspective on those patches of wilderness that hug our cities in an awkward embrace.