The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City Book

This was brisk and entertaining and reminded me of Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. I grew up in NJ, I know the Meadowlands as seen from car and bus and train and plane. It never occurred to me (until I discovered this book) that you could actually traverse the Meadowlands by foot or canoe! I thought I would learn more about it than I did, though. I also thought there would be photos - I was disappointed.

Sullivan does a great job of describing each of the people he comes across during his investigations into the wetlands. He does a passably okay job describing the wildlife he finds there; it's mentioned, but I was hoping for a bit more detail. (And photos! I was definitely hoping for photos.)

Sullivan's finest moments are when he manages to gently poke fun at New Jersey, while still making it clear that he loves it there. New Jersey is the easy butt of jokes from outsiders, but outsiders don't understand that this state - the most densely populated state in the country - is a very odd mix of: shoulder-to-shoulder-people-everywhere, and then a mile down the road you can suddenly be in the middle of fucking nowhere, and down the road from fucking nowhere is a farm stand and hubcap shop. Because New Jersey. There are beautiful wildernesses side-by-jowl with charming historic villages elbow-to-elbow with dank industrial zones - that's the weird wonder of New Jersey.

I like to think of the Meadowlands as an undesignated national park, where you can visit all the sites, or as a more classic tourist destination, like Paris, where instead of roaming through old streets and wandering aimlessly through cafes and shops I wander along the edges of swamps. 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. Like the Grand Canyon, with its North Rim and South Rim and their respective concentrations of lodgings, the Meadowlands pools its motels into two areas. Along the eastern edge of the Meadowlands are the seedy motels that cater mostly to truck drivers. These motels look out at the huge, flat center of the Meadowlands as if they have all just woken up and are still tired and really need a cup of coffee and a shower. Along the western edge, the hotels and motels stand tall and crisp and glass-covered; these are the business person-oriented hotels. To these hotels and motels the landscape is incidental, if not insignificant; they try to pretend the Meadowlands are not there.

I was also hoping he would devote a few paragraphs (or a chapter) to the immense environmental benefits of wetlands. Wetlands are very efficient water filters, and they are doing the best they can to keep up with humankind's toxic waste dumps; without wetlands, we'd be in a bigger world of hurt than we are today. And, possibly even more importantly, wetlands are nature's buffer zones and bumpers, they take the brunt of hurricane forces and protect the inland zones from destruction. It's our destruction of wetland areas that is causing more destruction during hurricanes (well, that, and hurricanes are getting more powerful - thanks, global warming!). It's clear that Sullivan is not a naturalist, because he doesn't mention these two big issues at all (and as previously noted, he doesn't spend as much time on the nature part as I wished). His focus is on the quirky people, both past and present.

There are some odd sentences that could've used an editor's hand, such as: "When humans arrived in the Meadowlands, in about 10,000 BC, and went from leaving huge piles of oyster shells to dumping increasingly poisonous waste, from homes, then from workshops, then from factories." And okay, when they arrived ... What happened?? This sentence is missing its conclusion, it's all intro and no meat.

And when he notes that the Meadowlands were once home to abundant wildlife, including: " ... catamounts, hares, martens, flying squirrels, bears, and mountain lions..." I'm left scratching my head, because a catamount IS a mountain lion.