we'll always have the meadowlands, or will we?

A name can be a very strong signifier of a quality of place.  Travel outside these paved flatlands and whisper New Jersey to strangers and watch the nodding heads announce the onset of mental images floating to the top of their musky brew of stories, true and false, of the people who choose to brave the stereotypes and call this place home.  I am one of those people and this is my story.  Well actually I am not B&R (born and raised)  which I need to come clean with immediately, because depending on which side of  Hudson County  you live, this is truly, truly significant info. Any interaction I had with Hoboken authorities, when I lived there in the nineties, would start out with a birthplace question.  Today, in Jersey City, when anyone in our house calls 'Downtown' the city employee on the other side of the phone frequently sums up their response with, " Well, you weren't born here where you?"

But what if I could shift your perception of New Jersey in a short afternoon?  What if it involved no magical powers and no transferring of large sums of cash?  I had just such an alteration this weekend that I would encourage to everyone.  I took a boat ride on the Hackensack River through the innards of the Meadowlands marshes and it was gorgeous!...and weird...but gorgeous.   It is truly surreal to be quietly floating within miles of NYC, surrounded by placid water and waving marshes, while in the distance the NJ Turnpike whooshes by, leaving nearby snowy egrets unfazed and uninterested. 

The Meadowlands was once a  21,000-acre glacial lake, home to great woolly mammoths, much later followed by Lenape Native Americans and eventually Dutch settlers.  The area seriously tanked, post World War II, when industrial debris initiated the process of filling in/destroying the salt marshes. The building of highways I-95 and I-80, along with mountains of illegal dumping gave the Meadowlands the stench inducing image made concrete in Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose, and countless NYPD tales of high profile bodies gone missing.  Today the water is significantly cleaner than it was in the 1970's, in part due to grass roots organizations like Hackensack Riverkeeper, and their legal efforts to make polluters accountable for the destruction.   Unfortunately many of the toxic chemicals have not been permanently eradicated, merely temporarily plowed over until money can be found to do more lasting and costly clean-ups.  But don't tell that to the nearly 300 bird species that have been seen enjoying the floating views of NYC, framed by fiddler crabs, marsh grasses, and long forgotten industrial sites.  You can rent canoes and kayaks from April to October through Hackensack Riverkeeper, or spring for a boat tour of the marshes with captains Bill or Hugh.  The crowd is not exactly Loisaida on a Saturday night, but you could always book an entire pontoon boat with a group of fifteen friends, pack your Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches, sunscreen, and a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and feel the open natural space, Great Blue Herons and abandoned moth ball factory vibe.

Further reading:
The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan:  information and character filled read on the Walden Pond of northern NJ

Comments

[Mike]

The meadowland marshes seem surprising serene from NJ Transit trains, bursting forth from under Manhattan and the Hudson. This is much contrasted to the sight and smell of the Linden plants as you exit the Newark Airport and head south on the Turnpike.

[The Contrarian]

I live in the shadow of those Linden plants. They keep our gas cheap, and I am only reminded of that when the wind blows in from the North-Northeast.

That being said John R. Quinn's Fields of Sun and Grass: An Artist's Journal of the New Jersey Meadowlands is a far superior book to Sullivan's work, which to me, read more as an outsider's story of the place.

Bill Sheehan is a great guy. I toured the Meadowlands with him on his pontoon boat back in the mid-90s and as we sailed down the Hackensack just west of Jersey City's Route 440, I saw old trash dumps eroded by decades of wind and tides with layers of 20th-century garbage arranged in a strata like, well a layer cake.

[sean808080]

i've done this paddle and i too would highly recommend it to anyone that thinks that the meadowlands haven't come back from abuse swinging.