just passing through

But you weren't reading this blog for the photos, anyway.

I.
Riding up to New York this morning on the train, I passed woodframe houses with above-ground pools in their narrow backyards, weed-choked empty lots, abandoned brick factories, empty asphalt parking lots stretching on for acres and acres, bent chain-link fences topped with barbed wire to protect nothing from no one, concrete-block auto-body shops, warehouses backlit through broken windows, enormous metal spools belonging to unknown machinery, a roofless brick shed tagged with graffiti, rusted shipping containers, rusted roofs, rusted piles of junked cars, rusted truck chassis stacked ten high like cordwood.  At Elizabeth, young men leaned forward against the railing, arms crossed, squinting in the heat.  The sumac trees rustled but the station was still - waiting, waiting.  Kudzu tumbled down embankments as though poured, blunting everything beneath it. Very occasionally, I glimpsed what passes for nature (matchstick trees felled across a muddy creek, patches of water like snakeskin on the surface of the bay, an egret placing its legs deliberately in shallows that shone metallic pink with spilled oil).  I have always considered this trip sad evidence from the long-ago era when America actually made things: from steel and iron, wood and cotton and plastic, things riveted and things sewn.  "Trenton makes, the world takes!" the sign still says proudly, and (my father tells me) it even used to be true; to Trenton, moreover, you could add other cities (Newark, Camden) that have been, for many decades now, shells of poverty and violence and political dysfunction.  I rode the train through our very own Rust Belt - literally, it forms a band between the renovated, renewed city and the green commuter suburbs that every day send people to labor at desks and screens.

Excepting the power plants, which are starkly beautiful in their own way, it is now almost all abandoned: stopped, stilled, overgrown.  It is wasted - and ironically so, because much of the land was marshland once, filled in before midcentury by people who could not see how the reedy waterways could otherwise meet man's needs of industrial or agricultural productivity.  The Meadowlands - what a beautiful name, and how beautiful* it must have been when my dreadful ancestors sailed into the Raritan Bay, centuries ago, when the waters around New York were filled with oysters.  If New Jersey is the butt of a thousand jokes, the Meadowlands sets the scene for the crowded highways and belching factories and mob murders. Everybody knows what happened to the Meadowlands - it was filled in with dirt and gravel, crisscrossed with rail tracks and roads, studded with factories that clouded up the water with an oily sheen - and then all of it was left to rot, the land used as a dumping ground, no more valuable than the wrapper in your pocket.

II.
When you take a train from, say, Berlin, southwest toward Potsdam, or southeast to Dresden, or straight out east across the flat, disputed borderlands toward Warsaw, you will often see, on the outskirts of the cities, allotment gardens pressed up against the tracks in neat rows or clusters, each one with its own shed-sized summer building.  Here a man might pad around in black socks and birkenstocks, and decorate with as many garden gnomes as he pleases.  It does not seem so very luxurious or desirable to me, these plots of garden up against the tracks; but I suppose that if you live in an apartment, it can be your own little paradise, a space to grow flowers, greens, fruits and vegetables to pickle or preserve for the winter months, and small strawberries to pop directly into your mouth.

I know of nothing quite like that here, including our community gardens and the locavore, grow-your-own-greens-on-a-rooftop movement.  The prospect of hipsters or retirees taking the train down to Trenton to cultivate raspberries and sit trackside in lawn chairs seems, for now, unlikely.  It is not just that the land may be too toxic, tainted; it is not just that the Meadowlands have long been a place to dump human bodies and truck chassis.  It has to do with the very way that we think about land. We want our land either virgin or urban, and we have little use for this used-up, degraded space that runs alongside the train tracks in between city and suburb.  New York and New Jersey may have much greater population densities than Germany or Italy or Poland, but here (I think) more land is wasted.  Here there has always been more - more space farther out, more land to be worked and ruined through industry and then casually abandoned, so that you do not even see it, really, when it flashes by your window.






*Marshlands can indeed be beautiful, but maybe you have to grow up with them to see the beauty in grass, shaded green or russet-and-gold depending on the season, and not to be repelled by the smell of the tides.  Last night, at my parents' house, I went running over the narrow bridge where the river slows and muddies; and I saw, in the eerie pink light that often precedes thunderstorms, a line of ducks, literally all in a row (!) as they headed in to shore, silhouetted in black against the calm silver water.  The marsh smell was strong, enhanced by the humidity, and I thought: To me, the smell of marshes will always mean home - more so, even, than the scent of salt air mixed with asphalt that is the hallmark of summer in New Jersey.