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Robert Sullivan lives in Portland, one of the most beautiful places in this country, yet he is obsessed with a maligned swamp on the other side of the continent. Towns that are the butts of national jokes--Newark, Teaneck, Bayonne, Jersey City--lie nestled in a marshland that is home to garbage dumps, gangster graves, monster mosquitoes and Superfund toxic-waste sites, as well as the New York Giants football team, fashion leaders Donna Karan and Liz Claiborne, and the biggest collection of foreign translations of Gone With the Wind. The Meadowlands are an enigma wrapped in a riddle dipped in a very funky smell. Sullivan's fascination with New Jersey's Meadowlands began in the 1970s when he was a local teen-ager, crossing the vast, spoiled wetlands to attend rock concerts and sporting events in New York City. After he moved to New York, he continued to experience the area through casual visits, newspaper reports and the view from a car, bus or train. It wasn't until he moved to Portland a few years ago that he began to truly miss the "world's greatest industrial swamp." Sullivan surrendered to his obsession and began flying cross-country to dive as deeply into the marshland as anyone has since Jimmy Hoffa went to sleep there with the hideously deformed fishes. The result of his quest is a book, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City, which proves there actually is a there there. Books that explore the nature of a place are often too much like homework, or they're excruciatingly pretentious. Sullivan's is neither. The Meadowlands is everything a creative non-fiction book should be: carefully researched, chock full of fascinating details and historical facts, and rife with life's ironies. It captures the surreality of a place where the worst and best that humankind can spew battle the power of the natural world. Sullivan's research process is every bit as interesting as the information he uncovers. He is intrepid in searching the swamp for yet another facet of its sorry personality. He enlists the help of Dave, his best friend from high school. They compare themselves to a modern-day Lewis & Clark when they attempt to cross the swamp in a canoe: "Having never canoed in the Hackensack before, we were a little surprised that the canoe even floated; Dave imagined that the water would somehow eat away the bottom of the canoe, that it would dissolve the oars like acid. Nothing like that happened, though." Sullivan carries his explorer persona even further when it comes to the people he meets. Anyone he encounters may reveal a steaming heap of rich facts about the Meadowlands. "Sometimes when I'm out in the Meadowlands," he writes, "I feel as if I'm in a National Geographic special and I'm visiting little tribes of people unknown to everyone else, the traditions of whom are unfamiliar to me." He is thrilled to meet the swamp people of New Jersey: mosquito men, garbage men, mud walkers and gumshoes. All of these Meadowlands denizens convey a unique appreciation for their home that Sullivan captures. He also includes the ghosts of swamp-dwellers past, who each had a hand in making the area what it is today, for better or worse. In one of his more whimsical passages, Sullivan wishes "by magic or with the assistance of angels or with the help of a grant awarded through the Federal Enterprise Zone program, I could turn the bottom of the Meadowlands to the top and restore what was thrown into the muck back to its pristine predumped condition, the place would be instantly de-wasteland-ized." He imagines sitting at the top of Snake Hill and watching a marvelous restoration, complete with hovering barrels of toxic waste and demolished buildings miraculously rebuilt. His favorite part of the fantasy involves the plethora of illegally dumped bodies. "Among the most enthusiastic of reanimated items from down under the Meadowlands would be the small bands of executionees, roaming together--their hands patting their chests, pinching their cheeks in wonderment--through the thick fields of wildflowers, each clumsy step rousing a pheasant or a wild turkey." But Sullivan is at his best when he's simply talking trash, a commodity of which the Meadowlands is a bottomless pit. He spent every one of his travels expecting (hoping?) to see something blow up. When explosions eluded him, he found contentment gazing at wild birds swimming among the disgusting pieces of refuse floating in the brackish, sometimes Technicolored water: kingfishers, Styrofoam peanuts, herons, plastic bottles, cormorants, condoms, Muscovy duck, refrigerators. Adept at the poetry of garbage, he puts the fun in Superfund. Sullivan's enthusiasm and devotion is infectious. Yet he is not immune to some swamp snobbery when it comes to his precious Meadowlands. He refuses to venture any farther south than Point-No-Point because the chaos of the overconcentrated Meadowlands makes him feel too gloomy. It scares him. Portland is lucky to have a writer of Sullivan's caliber. Perhaps someday he'll fall in love with one of our local eyesores and persuade us to find some beauty in what is commonly known as ugly. |
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