Matthew Jensen: Park Wonder by Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

PARK

WONDER

MATTHEW JENSEN

PARK

WONDER

MATTHEW JENSEN

PARK WONDER PHOTOGRAPHY & MAPS BY MATTHEW JENSEN

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY Mary Birmingham . Ian Frazier . Ruth Canstein Yablonsky Karl Fenske . Hazel England . Tyler J. Kelley

VISUAL ARTS CENTER OF NEW JERSEY

PARK WONDER PHOTOGRAPHY & MAPS BY MATTHEW JENSEN

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY Mary Birmingham . Ian Frazier . Ruth Canstein Yablonsky Karl Fenske . Hazel England . Tyler J. Kelley

VISUAL ARTS CENTER OF NEW JERSEY

TRACKS AND TRACES Mary Birmingham Curator, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

Wonder is the linchpin behind inspiration and inquiry. —Jesse Prinz, On Wonder

hen something beautiful, unexpected, or inexplicable triggers a feeling of surprise mixed with awe, we use the word wonder to define both the feeling and its cause. To wonder is also to think about with curiosity, to marvel, or to feel amazement. Each of these facets of wonder is essential for Matthew Jensen. A Brooklyn-based, multidisciplinary artist, Jensen begins his landscape-based work by wondering about a specific place and then exploring it on foot in search of something marvelous, mysterious, or unknown. Although he starts his projects without knowing what that “something” is, it inevitably reveals itself and becomes the focus for a work of art. The word wonder may connote something extraordinary, but Jensen is adept at mining it from the ordinary and making it accessible through his art. Much of Jensen’s artistic practice involves immersive walks in public parks and landscapes. Through repeat visits, patient observation, and extensive research, he develops an intimate knowledge of the places he investigates. Taking photographs and collecting discarded objects, Jensen uses these materials to create exhibitions and related publications. Although his artwork accurately reflects the geology, history, and flora and fauna of the places he visits, it also reveals many small surprises hidden within the landscape—unexpected and captivating artifacts that would otherwise remain overlooked. I have been intrigued by Jensen’s work for several years, especially his investigations on the fringes of urban areas. Curious about what he might uncover walking in our area, I invited him to develop a project for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit. Jensen mentioned that he had been fascinated by several precolonial stone fishing weirs in the Passaic River for some time, and that he wanted to explore them as well as other parts of the Passaic’s extensive

waterway system. From there the project grew, with Jensen identifying several additional historic New Jersey landscapes that also piqued his interest: the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, the Gateway National Recreation Area at Sandy Hook, and the Watchung Reservation, a county park that borders Summit. Park Wonder is a multidimensional project drawn from Jensen’s experiences in these public parks and landscapes, culminating in a site-specific exhibition at the art center, a series of artist-led walks, and this book. The exhibition brings visual traces of the surrounding landscapes into the gallery through photography, sculpture, found objects, and historical research. This companion publication offers visual and written reflections on the four places highlighted in the exhibition, and includes walking guides with suggested paths in and around each landscape as well as representative photographs selected from the thousands the artist shot. Jensen envisioned the book not only as a tangible record of his time in the landscapes but also as a resource for those who might wish to learn more. A small supplemental brochure provides installation views of the site-specific works in the show, documenting the exhibition and linking it to the book. The book also incorporates the voices and viewpoints of others with personal connections to these landscapes: Ian Frazier, a best-selling author and staff writer for the New Yorker, has been walking, sketching, and fishing on Sandy Hook for more than fifteen years. Ruth Canstein Yablonsky, the staff naturalist at the Watchung Reservation, has spent over three decades teaching children and adults about the geological history of the region. Karl Fenske is a New Jersey lawyer whose childhood home bordered the Great Swamp; his mother, Helen Fenske, was

TRACKS AND TRACES Mary Birmingham Curator, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

Wonder is the linchpin behind inspiration and inquiry. —Jesse Prinz, On Wonder

CONTENTS Introduction by Mary Birmingham

SANDY HOOK Lines of Sight by Ian Frazier 12 Photographs 19 Sandy Hook Walk, Port-to-Port 44

WATCHUNG RESERVATION A Conversation with Ruth Canstein Yablonsky 48 Photographs 53 Watchung Reservation Walk, Station-to-Station 70

THE GREAT SWAMP My Swamp by Karl Fenske 74 Teaching the Great Swamp by Hazel England 78 Photographs 83 Great Swamp Walk, Station-to-Station 98

PASSAIC RIVER Finding the Passaic by Tyler J. Kelley 102 Photographs 107 Passaic River Walk, Station-to-Station 136 Index of Artifacts & Photographic Spreads

138

Acknowledgments & Artist Biography

139

CONTENTS Introduction by Mary Birmingham

SANDY HOOK Lines of Sight by Ian Frazier 12 Photographs 19 Sandy Hook Walk, Port-to-Port 44

WATCHUNG RESERVATION A Conversation with Ruth Canstein Yablonsky 48 Photographs 53 Watchung Reservation Walk, Station-to-Station 70

THE GREAT SWAMP My Swamp by Karl Fenske 74 Teaching the Great Swamp by Hazel England 78 Photographs 83 Great Swamp Walk, Station-to-Station 98

PASSAIC RIVER Finding the Passaic by Tyler J. Kelley 102 Photographs 107 Passaic River Walk, Station-to-Station 136 Index of Artifacts & Photographic Spreads

138

Acknowledgments & Artist Biography

139

one of the early environmental activists who led the successful effort to save the land from development as a jetport in the 1960s. Ecologist Hazel England is Director of Outreach and Education at the Great Swamp Watershed Association and a lifelong promoter of environmental stewardship. Tyler J. Kelley, a freelance journalist who often writes about waterways, accompanied Jensen as they walked half the length of the Passaic River. This sampling of texts and images provides multiple points of entry and encourages further wandering in the unexpected wilderness of New Jersey. Park Wonder is Jensen’s first comprehensive project in New Jersey and his largest undertaking to date. Spending time in four landscapes over the course of a year allowed him to visit various locations within the larger areas and to experience them in different seasons. As always, Jensen’s process of walking and looking informs all of his resulting work. Signifying his intimate and personal engagement with place, walking is central to Jensen’s practice. It is also a public activity, and that is partly the point—anyone can go where he goes (and Jensen hopes they will). His walker’s guides and maps document some of the paths he has taken, encouraging people to follow in his footsteps or wander along routes of their own making. Jensen’s working methods are simple and transparent. For the most part, he takes public transportation to and from the places he visits. He never excavates, picking up only what lies in plain sight. He doesn’t have a smart phone and doesn’t carry a GPS device. Although he uses the Internet in planning and preparing for his trips, he is not digitally connected during his walks, believing that “getting lost in the landscape” is an important part of his process. Jensen pays attention to manmade structures like roads, buildings, abandoned railways, and any detritus that will help reveal the history and usage of the land. With a practiced eye he sees things that are easily overlooked or hiding in plain sight, and his knowledge of

a place’s past helps him recognize the significance of what he finds. I once visited the Brooklyn Bridge Park with him, and as we stood talking under the bridge he spied a pottery shard among the rocks on the shoreline and dashed down to retrieve it. This tiny discovery seemed as much a wonder to me as the great graniteand-steel span above us. In New Jersey—the most densely populated state in the nation—the ongoing cycle of destruction and regeneration has left marks on the state’s ancient forests, landforms, and waterways, providing Jensen with a rich source of artifacts and locations to photograph. In the Watchung Reservation, he explored the remains of an abandoned nineteenth-century factory village and a Revolutionary War–era cemetery coexisting beside a ridge of basalt rock formed more than 200 million years ago. In Fort Hancock, a former U.S. Army fort at Sandy Hook, he surveyed the ruins of artillery batteries in an old-growth holly forest, an empty house with an osprey nest balanced on its chimney, decommissioned Nike missiles, and a patch of flowering cacti. He found a new-growth forest reclaiming the ruins of an abandoned bridge over the Passaic River, and on his route to the Orange Trail in the Great Swamp, he picked up a discarded slice of a Christmas tree trunk with saw marks still visible on its surface—a curious object embodying the relationship between people and the nearby wildlife refuge. Although he takes many photographs in the landscape, Jensen is not a landscape photographer in the conventional sense of the term. He has noted that in traditional landscape photography, the pictures often bear the burden of representing the places they illustrate—usually privileging the iconic view. Jensen is less interested in showing the expected vista than he is in discovering something unexpected or surprising about a landscape. Encountering and capturing this kind of view replicates the “ah-ha” moment he experiences when he finds an interesting artifact— both are modes of discovery about place. For the artist, the phrase “taking a picture” signifies the same

sense of acquisition and possession as the “taking” of the discarded objects he collects. There is something perplexing about Jensen’s photographs, which never reveal all the features of the environments they depict and rarely include a horizon line. Like the scraps and fragments the artist finds while walking, they provide small clues to his investigation of the landscape. In this way Jensen’s images display an affinity with the work of Eliot Porter, a twentieth-century photographer renowned for contemplative and intimate landscapes that convey a strong sense of place. As Porter famously remarked, “Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject.” Like Porter, Jensen also uses tiny subjects to tell large stories, sometimes leaving part of the story up to the viewer’s imagination. Photography is only one aspect of Jensen’s practice; historical research, walking, and collecting found objects all play important roles in constructing his nuanced portraits of place. Each of these individual elements has intrinsic value, but they gain new meaning when displayed together. For viewers, Jensen’s exhibitions contextualize all of his finds and help elucidate the places he has investigated. When mounting exhibitions, Jensen must choose representative images and artifacts from among the thousands he takes and collects. This challenge is similar to that of filling a time capsule with small objects and messages to represent the present time and place. A time capsule is an intentional conversation with the future; Jensen does something a little different, encapsulating the traces of a place’s present and past to compress and distill history for a contemporary audience.

wonder in small things—of quite literally “making mountains out of molehills.” This paradoxical idea of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary resonates with Jensen’s work. The objects and images he finds while wandering in public spaces often spark wonder: a cloud shape inside a translucent quartz pebble, a solitary sunflower growing on a sand dune, a centuryold military button, a vine encircling a treetop. These pictures and objects ignite our curiosity: Who wore this button? How did he lose it? Why is that flower growing in this place? Jensen hopes his work inspires people to similarly explore their environments—to wonder and to wander. As Chesterton concluded in his essay, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” With a subtle yet profound eloquence, Jensen’s work reveals the ultimate marvel: that wonder itself is always so accessible, always so nearby.

In his essay “Tremendous Trifles,” British writer G. K. Chesterton marveled at “how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.” Noting that an onlooker’s point of view determines what he sees, Chesterton suggested the possibility of finding

SANDY HOOK

LINES OF SIGHT Ian Frazier

andy Hook is a five-mile-long peninsula that extends from the New Jersey shore like the arm of a person in a commercial gesturing toward a new car. The object of the gesture is New York City, whose distant towers rise on the horizon in a funk of brown smut beneath an enormous ascendance of sky. The Ambrose Channel, the shipping route leading to New York Harbor, runs past Sandy Hook and then under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Seen from Sandy Hook, the bridge is a few faint, deftly drawn lines. I go out to Sandy Hook when I want to look at things far away. In the past, humans looked into the distance all the time; line of sight used to be the only instant connection we had with the physically remote. Now I try to imagine what that yearning was like. On a recent December 21st, the shortest day of the year, I drove to Sandy Hook from my house in a New Jersey suburb. I left in the dark and arrived with still an hour left before sunrise. The wind was blowing briskly offshore. From the parking lot I walked down to the water; the waves could be heard but not seen. New York City was a few flickering lights in the darkness. A plane climbed from one of the city airports and set off across the Atlantic, blinking. Cold, and wind, and quiet, and nobody around. To the west, on the New Jersey mainland, the town of Atlantic Highlands set a high-rise apartment building’s bank of randomly lit windows against the sky. Just to the south stood the Navesink Twin Lights, a double-tower lighthouse. One of the beams was flashing on and off; the other tower remained dark. I paced around on a small section of beach and left a cluster of tracks in the sand. The lights of a second plane detached themselves from the city and I watched for a while until they disappeared in the east. The horizon became pale and the nearer whitecaps were visible; then sanderlings, little shore birds, were

running along near my feet. As each wave came in they hurried up the sand ahead of it. The dark-blue and rather dreary winter clouds brightened at the spot where the sun would come up. I was thinking about my son, who is in Russia, and who would not be home for Christmas for the second year in a row. He’s twenty-four, and when he was nine I traveled in Russia myself. I used to call on my satellite phone late at night, because of the difference in time, so I could talk to him after he got home from school. In the clear Siberian sky I saw the passing satellites and imagined one of them was bouncing my call around the semicircle of Earth to him. He likes to explore, as does Matt Jensen, whose work this essay accompanies. He and Matt are much closer in age than Matt is to me. I almost always explore by myself but I always have fellow explorers with me in my mind. As I stood there, missing my son, I was proud of him, and of Matt, and of all restless, exploratory types. Jensen (to speak of him by his last name, as one should of any artist) explores in super-sharp focus. When he walks he looks hard and intelligently at the ground. I don’t know anybody else who does that. Sometimes he finds amazing objects. I first got to know him after a friend who had met him on a walking tour of Broadway told me that once, in Highbridge Park, at the northern end of Manhattan, Jensen was rambling in a wooded place after a windstorm, saw a knocked-down tree, went in close to the exposed dirt at the upturned roots, noticed a fleck of red, and found among the rootlets a bunch of red beads. He had uncovered a cache of what most likely were Indian trade beads, buried who knows how long ago. I thought I had never heard anything so cool in my life, and I got in touch with Jensen. Later, on a walk with him in Inwood Park, in upper Manhattan, I even found two beads myself, in a little pocket of sand

LINES OF SIGHT Ian Frazier

and dirt that had washed down from a hillside. Jensen explained that beads are not extremely uncommon to find in New York City, because of Manhattan’s original business, the fur trade. For a century or two, beads were money; then one day they weren’t and people threw them away. Jensen’s eyes when he is looking for stuff remind me of Picasso’s in that famous picture where he is staring at the camera with his dark eyes burning. Among the clouds the sun rose as a red disk. The time was 7:16. Pink tinged the shore and lines of annunciatory splendor radiated outward. The foam on top of the breaking waves sparkled and leapt in the incoming horizontal light as if there were something alive moving underneath. In another half minute the pink had left the shore and the sun’s effect on the breaking waves was over. Ordinary daylight had arrived. Farther down the beach the big rollers collided with the breeze, which took spray off their tops and threw it in coxcombs behind them. A stick figure of a surfer tried the waves, standing on his board and wielding a paddle, then sliding along the front of a breaker for a long ride. In the channel, container ships in a line heading to the city carried their piles of boxes to market. Does everything we do nowadays have to be so efficient and humdrum? Comparing the profile of a modern container ship with that of any sail-powered merchant vessel from the past shows how romance in general has declined. Sand bars used to complicate the passage into New York Harbor, and ships often stopped and anchored off Sandy Hook before trying it. City dwellers with spyglasses could see which ones were waiting. In June of 1776, when the American Revolution was about to begin in earnest, the largest fleet of British warships ever assembled in one spot showed up off Sandy Hook. The very sight of them was intended to instill fear. I took in the expanse of ocean and its careless early-morning gulls and imagined what the place had looked like with hundreds of British ships preparing the greatest single military invasion of North or South America that has ever happened, before or since.

On this shortest day of the year I had about nine hours before the sun would go down. I walked back to the parking lot and drove farther along the peninsula. Sandy Hook is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, a national park. Visitors pursue regular seashore activities here in the summer, but in the cold months contemplation of great distance is Sandy Hook’s main attraction. A good place to start is the 103-foot-tall Sandy Hook Lighthouse, whose light (it’s said) can be seen nineteen miles away. Built by New York City in 1764, the lighthouse does not advertise itself as one of the greatest works of architecture in the New York area, although it is; if you contemplate it awhile, its quiet and simple beauty wows you. Its light shone for the British fleet in 1776 (the Americans had tried to capture it, but failed). Since then it has been shut down only during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II. It’s the oldest operating lighthouse in the United States. A New York City mason named Isaac Conro built it from stone and mortar in an octagonal configuration that tapers toward the top. At that time the Sandy Hook peninsula ended five hundred feet from the lighthouse. Today, the tip of Sandy Hook has moved a mile and a half away, as the sand has shifted. U.S. Coast Guard personnel keep the 45,000-candlepower light shining day and night. I asked the park ranger in the museum that used to be the lightkeeper’s cottage if I could go up in the tower and he unlocked the door for me. Ninety-five metal steps wind around the inside to a landing with a ladder that goes higher, into the cupola housing the light and its beehive-shaped Fresnel lens. Before electricity, the lamp burned kerosene, and before kerosene it burned fish oil or whale oil. We think of lighthouses as warm because of their beams. In fact, lighthouse towers usually were unheated, and bone-cold in winter. As I held on to the stairs’ metal railing, it was as chill as the wind blowing outside. A longtime keeper of the lighthouse

recalled that sometimes the whale oil was so cold he had to cut chunks of it from its cask before toting it up to the lamp. In storms, the lamp had a tendency to go out in the drafts, and the keeper had to check it and make multiple trips to relight its many wicks. The Sandy Hook Light was created for utility, but somehow it also possesses beauty in a way that the container ships (who no longer need the lighthouse, thanks to GPS) never will. The Sandy Hook Light saved unknown numbers of lives and its keepers were solitary, sleepless heroes. Their service ennobles the tower even today. At the top, from the catwalk around the Fresnel lens, I could see a panorama of three hundred and sixty degrees, with ocean curving over the horizon. Near the tower’s foot the buildings of old Fort Hancock, a former artillery base that once guarded the entrance to New York City, spread out according to sensible military order. Some of the buildings are falling down; others have been converted into labs for oceanographers or a New Jersey high school or offices of the park. During its military phase Sandy Hook also served as an artillery range, where ballistic experts set up bunkers and emplacements and cannons and tested huge projectiles by shooting them out into the water or to the other end of the peninsula. The ruins of this period are scattered in the beach grass and the sand, tilting over slightly and crumbling and rusting but still defying the only actual enemy that would ever confront them—time. They seem in it for the long haul. The Park Service, not knowing what else to do with them, has presented them as interesting artifacts of the past and put up historic markers explaining them. The markers have since aged and weathered; some are no longer legible. The historic ruins will outlast the historic markers, for sure. Back in the 1950s the army also installed a Nike missile base to shoot down Soviet bombers should they somehow approach New York City. Now abandoned, the Nike

buildings, with their formerly whirling antennae, look like their obsolete counterparts in Siberia. Walking around the ruins I searched for small relics on the ground, but found none. I am a blind amateur compared to Matt Jensen. When he had explored in and around Sandy Hook a few months before, he found bullets, old porcelain, and one of my all-time favorites of all the things he’s found. On a beach he picked up a piece of a blue glass bottle with a part of the word Congress on it. Why it moved me, when he showed it to me one afternoon at his studio, takes some explanation. He said it was a piece of a bottle that held Congress water, a kind of mineral water popular in the nineteenth century, like Perrier today. Congress water, a widely distributed product, came from springs at Saratoga, New York. My mind searched for why the name Congress water sounded familiar. Then I realized it was from something I had never understood in Huckleberry Finn. In chapter 15, Huck is pretending to be the English valet of the King and the Duke, the con men who have co-opted the raft belonging to Huck and Jim. For the purpose of stealing an inheritance, the two crooks are impersonating the English relatives of a family of sisters whose father has just died. Out of earshot from the adults, the youngest of the sisters, skeptical of Huck’s charade, asks him about the sea baths he has claimed are in his alleged home of Sheffield, England. She knows that Sheffield is not on the sea. Huck thinks a minute, then replies, “Did you ever see any Congress water?” She says yes. He says, “Well, did you have to go to Congress to get it?” She says no. Then he explains that the seawater is brought to Sheffield in barrels because it’s a more convenient location in which to heat it up for the baths. Perhaps my Protestant childhood, with its lack of sacred relics, made me unusually keen on physical, tangible connections to the invisible world; that fragment of a Congress water bottle dazzled my understanding and seemed to create a hologram of Huck Finn standing beside me.

On the subject of cool stuff Jensen has found— and as I’m wandering and finding nothing among the beach grass and gun emplacements of Sandy Hook—I will describe what I believe is the most remarkable of all Jensen’s discoveries. In MacNeil Park, in Queens, near a small stretch of beach on Long Island Sound, Jensen found a Spanish silver coin dated 1746. Known as a real (pronounced ray-al), the coin is of a type once used throughout the Americas. The Spanish had rich silver mines in Mexico and abundant silver to mint their coins, which were accepted widely. Reals like this one spill out of pirate treasure chests in the imagination, flashing beams of avarice and splendor. Jensen’s real has a few tiny spots of green paint, which he thinks may have splashed on it when the city’s parks department was painting the bench near where it lay. Tarnished to a matte dullness, the coin could hardly be distinguished from any of the countless toosmall-to-pick-up pieces of micro-rubbish that form a sort of mat over our public grounds. For comparison Jensen showed me a plastic disk from the inside of a soda-bottle top. The disk and the coin are of identical size, and the surface of the weathered silver and of the weathered plastic look almost exactly alike even at second glance. Passing by, Jensen had thought the coin was just another of those plastic disks. But he had stopped and looked at it twice, and then again. With growing exhilaration he picked it up. In the tiniest detail lies the most enormous implication. The coin that Jensen found implies the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and the discovery of rich veins of silver in Mexico’s northern mountains, and the destruction of entire peoples in slavery in the mines, and the expansion of commerce throughout the hemisphere, and the convulsive springing-up of New York City, and the creation of its parks, and the decades of pedestrians who somehow failed to see the coin wherever it lay. On one side the coin bears the inscription Utraque Unum, which means “Both and One,” a motto referring to the connection between the Old World and the New. The small letters in Latin

capitals connect the hemispheres, as the vast and panoramic view from Sandy Hook yearns across the distance between them. From the artillery emplacements I drove and then walked to the end of the peninsula. The sun had moved past its zenith and was descending toward the southwest. In the sand I saw tracks of a big deer, perhaps the six-point buck Jensen had spotted among the beach plum bushes and photographed when he was here. Where Sandy Hook concludes in a blunt curve of beach, two buoys marked the shallows. A line of foam, the seam where the ocean current met the eddying water of the bay, continued northward out of sight. Gulls and terns sat on the foam line, maybe because there were baitfish swirling in the friction between fast and slow water underneath. The birds fluttered up and resettled themselves, sometimes splashing headfirst into the foam and bouncing up again, but I never could see if they had fish in their mouths. A sort of ramshackle cairn composed of a broken baby stroller, some Styrofoam board, several pieces of driftwood, and a black plastic crate had been assembled at the peninsula’s end, just up from the high-tide line. I accepted the cairn’s slapdash, modern-day demarcation of land’s end as a definitive geographic statement. Then I turned around and trudged through the sand toward my car. Loitering with no purpose, by car and on foot, I worked my way back up the peninsula along its bay side. The sun had declined to shoulder level and it painted the salt-marsh grasses the ginger color of grizzly bear fur. Approaching the Nike base again I noticed a crosstree flagpole set in a mortar-and-fieldstone pedestal by the road. A plaque on the monument said that it commemorated the deaths of First Lieutenant Hamilton Douglas Halyburton, son of the Earl of Morton, and thirteen others who drowned in a storm in December, 1783, and were buried on this spot. A more recent marker nearby added that Lieut.

Halyburton and his men were looking for deserters from their ship, the Assistance, when a blizzard came up. From later research I learned that Halyburton was only twenty years old. His grief-stricken mother had a marble monument erected on the site of the mass grave—no doubt the first historic marker on Sandy Hook. In 1808, during the Napoleonic wars, a French vessel anchored off Sandy Hook, and when the French sailors came upon the monument they destroyed it. Lost for a century, the grave happened to lie in the path of construction in 1908. After workmen uncovered the bones they were reinterred at Cypress Hills National Cemetery, in Brooklyn. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the present marker here in 1937. No history says what happened to the deserters whom Halyburton was pursuing. What can be known of them for sure is that they are now dead, too, as is Halyburton’s poor mother. Suffering upon suffering; the ancient place absorbs the worst and shows almost no sign. If the direst climate predictions are correct it won’t be too long before all of Sandy Hook is under water anyway. Later in the afternoon I returned to the spot where I had watched the sun come up. The tide had erased my previous tracks and then ebbed again. I felt a certain satisfaction to have followed the sun’s course from sunrise. Days pass by and you don’t mark them, but this one I had paid attention to. I owned it—December 21, 2016. The evening clouds were so thick that I had to guess where the sun was; then for a moment its pale circle shone through. Mount Mitchell, the highest point on the Atlantic seaboard between Maine and the Yucatan, rises two hundred feet above Sandy Hook in the west. Behind that high horizon the sun’s brightness flared, then slowly dimmed. A winter dusk hung on, with a chilly, red sky in the east; by five o’clock the land and sea were fully dark. Lights came on in that earlyevening way they do in winter, with their comfortable domestic purposes of home and dinner and TV and bed.

We spend our lives staring at screens. Jensen has told me that in his many explorations he almost never sees kids playing outdoors. The artificial world of screens just inches from our faces has replaced the actual, living world. What I got from a day on Sandy Hook were vistas I could summon later, to overpower and erase the screens. Almost nobody does what Jensen does—look, and look, and look again at what’s out there, in the sky, on the pavement, in the water, on the ground. Right now the actual world is begging us to look at it. Profound messages are out there if we have the patience and lonesomeness to watch for them. As I drove home I took a small detour to stop at the observation point on top of Mount Mitchell. From there, Sandy Hook was a scattering of lights, with the distant city beyond. A sign, which I read by the light of my cell phone, said that the Sandy Hook Light could be seen in a direct line with the Empire State Building. I could see the Empire State Building. But peer as I might, I could not make out, among the many lights on the peninsula, the old lifesaving beam of the Sandy Hook Light.

Ian Frazier is an American writer and humorist. He is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father, and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He graduated from Harvard University. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Forest Scene 19

Circles, Wall, Growth 20

Hercules Missile 22

Dune Sunflower 23

Hercules Missile 22

Dune Sunflower 23

Horseshoe Crab Molt 24

Missile Monuments 26

Asters at the Edge of the World 27

Missile Monuments 26

Asters at the Edge of the World 27

Eight Projectiles Arranged 28

Red-brick Fragment in Dunes 32

Velleda Lappet Moth 33

Red-brick Fragment in Dunes 32

Velleda Lappet Moth 33

Postcard Sunset 34

Striper Decal 36

Palm Beach, Highlands, NJ 37

Striper Decal 36

Palm Beach, Highlands, NJ 37

Radar Station 38

Time Being Told by Wind, Roots and Sand 39

Radar Station 38

Time Being Told by Wind, Roots and Sand 39

Moonrise over Sandy Hook 40

The Myth of a Corner Store, Highlands, NJ 42

S AND Y H O O K WALK , P O RT - T O - P ORT Sandy Hook is one of the dreamiest places to walk: quiet light, warm fields, holly forests, two shores, dunes, architectural wonders, empty spaces, and wildlife that changes with the seasons. Prickly pear cacti grow everywhere. Despite being part of Gateway National Park, access to the landscape presents seasonal challenges. During the summer, the Seastreak Ferry docks at Fort Hancock twice in the morning and once in the afternoon. The next stop is the town of Highlands, where the ferry makes routine and frequent stops all year round. What most people do not realize is that the walk from Highlands to Sandy Hook is short and the experience is as rewarding as starting from Fort Hancock. Peak: When the Seastreak is running to Fort Hancock, almost everyone disembarking is headed to the beach. Beachgoers, with their overstuffed bags, chairs, and coolers, board a school bus that drops them off at the beach parking lot. Remaining near the dock, you will be among the buildings of Fort Hancock—just you and the bike-rental guy. Decisions need to be made. If you walk

away from the water and follow roads and paths that lead to the left, you will head toward the northernmost point of the hook. It is beautiful, quiet, and offers amazing views of New York Harbor. This sidetrack is an extra mile each way. If you continue straight instead, you will end up at the Atlantic. Everyone loves a long walk on the beach but the rocky sand here never firms up and makes the trek slowgoing. At the very least, be sure to visit the Nine Gun Battery, Battery Potter, or the Sandy Hook Lighthouse. The parking lots near the beaches have food trucks during the summer months; otherwise, pack what you need. At some point you must head south toward Highlands. The walk is about nine miles of meandering paths, roads, and shoreline and a map really is not necessary. Standing at the ferry dock you are among the historic buildings of Fort Hancock. Head south along Hartshorne Drive and the yellow-brick buildings of Officers’ Row. One of these buildings functions as a house museum and is occasionally open; the others are boarded up and full of dreams. Hartshorne Drive continues along the bay and eventually

the roads and lawns converge at a cluster of memorials and scale models of Nike missiles. Hartshorne Drive is the central road for driving, and is flanked by a bike path and foot trails. The shore on the bayside has a number of crumbling military installations, which can lure you off trail. The bayside landscapes have names like Skeleton Hill Island, Spermaceti Cove, and Plum Island. The distance from Missile Monument to the pedestrian bridge over the Shrewsbury River is five miles as the crow flies. Not being a crow, you will want to follow the many footpaths leading to points along the bay, through the holly forests or over to the Atlantic side. At the pedestrian bridge, cross the river, enjoy the views, and descend on the right-hand side toward the marinas. Shore Drive and Bay Avenue run parallel to each other, but Bay Avenue has most of the historic buildings and local establishments. At Waterwitch Avenue (if you have been on Bay Avenue), cut left through Huddy Park to Shore Drive. Continue up Shore Drive a few blocks and the Seastreak port is on the right.

Off-peak: There is nothing off-peak about the landscape here. Spring and fall are the best times to walk, but starting at Fort Hancock is not an option. Do not be deterred! Disembark at Highlands (not Atlantic Highlands), head out of the parking lot, and take a left onto Shore Drive. At Waterwitch Avenue—which offers great, packable food and coffee—take a left, and then a right onto Bay Avenue to walk down through town. As you approach the one and only bridge, head up and over the Shrewsbury River and, like magic, you are on Sandy Hook. At this time of year, there are no afternoon ferries to greet you at Fort Hancock, so you should pick a midway point or a time limit and eventually double back. The advantage of this starting point is that you can detour up the hill to the Twin Lights Historic Site and Hartshorne Woods Park before crossing the Shrewsbury River to Sandy Hook.

Hig

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Fort Hancock

Walking Route Trail or Park Road Ferry Dock 44

Hig

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Fort Hancock

Walking Route Trail or Park Road Ferry Dock 44

WATCHUNG RESERVATION

A CONVERSATION with Ruth Canstein Yablonsky

atchung Reservation is about two thousand acres of forest with miles of winding trails. One of those trails, the Ruth Canstein Yablonsky Geology Trail, was designed to give visitors an introduction to geological features worthy of attention. I first read about Ruth and her thirty years as an educator at Watchung Reservation while researching the geological forces that collided to create the Great Swamp, Passaic River, and Watchung Range. A short online article announced the naming of the aforementioned trail. I thought it was particularly interesting that a park in this region had a resident geologist. And I knew anyone with thirty years of experience in a single landscape would have stories to tell. When you mention Ruth’s name to anyone connected to the park, you get a knowing, assured glance before the declaration, “Well, you have to meet Ruth!” I did, and this is an edited excerpt of what we discussed. — Matthew Jensen Geology is a conglomerate of many ancient forces coming together. What aspects of geology seem to be the most engaging and aweinspiring? What do people ask the most questions about? There are so many intriguing aspects of geology that most people don’t think about—the fact that the modern landscape was not always the way it is now, that lava once poured out of cracks along the East Coast margins and accumulated to depths of hundreds of feet, that the continental masses have been distributed differently around the globe, how the Himalayan Mountains formed and how they are still growing, and the almost incomprehensible amount of time it has taken for events like these to occur. I also, of course, get lots of questions about dinosaurs. When one studies geology do they start thinking in geological time all the time? Does it transform your outlook on life at all?

Geological time is so incomprehensibly long! At the rate of an inch of accumulation per year, how long does it take for 250 miles of sediment to be deposited? If the continents move apart at the rate that your fingernails grow, how long does it take for the Atlantic Ocean to form? For the Himalayan Mountains to rise above sea level? I think that a study of geological time alters one’s sense of relativity and perspective. What about geology piqued your interest? Did you have a rock collection as a child? As a child, I was always interested in nature, and I spent a lot of time out of doors. I collected whatever struck my fancy—seeds, pebbles, leaves, shells, feathers. My interest in geology was sharpened in college. It was fascinating to develop a new understanding and perspective of the natural world. The beauty of geology is that when you have a little bit of understanding, you can look at a rock or landmass and say, “I know why. I know how.” You don’t just go, “Oh, hey, there’s a mountain. There’s a really big rock.” You know why the big rock is where it is, why it doesn’t match anything around it. That’s what, to me, makes it exciting. When you were working on your master’s degree, did you have a particular focus? My courses at the University of Michigan provided a broad background but focused on fossils and sedimentary processes. I had an assistantship in the paleontology laboratory helping a professor who was studying the fossils of . . . I think it was Wyoming. When we reported to work the first day, he gave us a little bowl of what looked like sand, and a quadruplezero paintbrush, which is extremely fine. “Okay, take the paintbrush and move the sand around, and if you 49

A CONVERSATION with Ruth Canstein Yablonsky

find a shell in it, you put the shell over here, and if you find a bone in it, you put the bone over here.” You’re talking about a little, infinitesimal scrap of bone or shell? It was from a mouse, from a shrew, so they were really small, and the shells were mostly snails, also tiny, tiny. You pushed this little bit of sand around and went through the whole thing until you got out all the organic material. I finished and brought my bowl back to him and I said, “Okay, I’m done. What do you want me to do now?” “Well go get some more.” He had a row of garbage cans lined up against the wall of the lab, full of the sediment. I spent the whole year sifting sand. The Geology Department at the university was also involved with producing a detailed map of the geology of the United States, and they were sending most of their grad students to Colorado to do field mapping. There was only one other woman in the program—her name was Karen—and everyone expected that our theses would involve working with the collection of fossils in the university’s museum. I said to Karen, “The guys are doing work out in the field. Why can’t we do that?” She said that was a good idea, so we went to the director and asked if we could go, too. The faculty was somewhat nonplused, but our proposition was accepted, and we went off to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. We had a tent. We had sleeping bags. We had a Coleman stove and a Coleman lantern and a .22. I figured if there were bears out there, a .22 would be a good thing to have. When the ranch foreman saw our gun he said, “Ladies, if you meet a bear he’s going to eat that thing like a lollipop!” So you and Karen were literally trailblazers. We were. I was a student just as the Women’s Movement was starting to gain momentum, but I was pretty much immersed in my work. I do remember that I was asked to pour the coffee at the department meetings, but there was no condescension involved. 50

To the grad students in the department, I was “one of the guys.” It’s interesting—I still get the bulletin from the school and many of the graduate students are women now. They’re out in Antarctica, in Tibet . . . they’re all over the place doing all kinds of stuff. Karen ended up getting her PhD in Colorado and she’s just recently retired as a state geologist in Montana.

that have been exposed by stream erosion in several places. The chasm across the stream from the old dam at the Deserted Village and the scenic overview from above Seeley’s Pond are impressive. And semiprecious pebbles of the mineral carnelian can be found in the Green Brook below Seeley’s Pond.

What kind of work did you do in Colorado?

Is there evidence that Blue Brook was ever more powerful, or did the quiet flow carve out the valley over thousands of years?

We were mapping and collecting fossils that would determine the age of the rocks. The whole concept of mapping was completely different then. Imagine doing any kind of mapping without aerial photography, without computers! All the lettering was done by hand. Five years after we were finished, the Geological Society of America produced a new geologic map of the United States and our work was included on it.

Stream flow can change dramatically in this region, especially by glacial blockage or tilting of the earth under the weight of the ice. Blue Brook, the main stream through the park, was the outlet for Lake Passaic—a glacial lake once thirty miles long, ten miles wide, and two hundred feet deep that filled the area that is now the Great Swamp. The stream carved its valley beginning with the last ice age 25,000 years ago.

How did you end up on the East Coast?

What are the geological connections between the Great Swamp, the Passaic River, and the Watchung Reservation?

I grew up in New York City, in the Bronx, and I went back to New York after I finished my degree. I taught high school in New York. Then when I got married, we moved to New Jersey and I taught geology at Rutgers. That was nice because I got to do a lot of fieldwork with the students. What makes the Watchung Mountains unique compared to other landscapes on the East Coast? The geologic history of the East Coast is long, and in many areas highly complex. The generations of movements of the continents have produced many different combinations of rock types and structures. There are Triassic fault basins similar to the one in New Jersey all up and down the East Coast. On the other hand, the rock types in New England are totally different, considerably older and far more complex. Are there points of interest in the Watchungs that were too far off the route to include on the Geology Trail but are worth visiting? There are interesting structures called “pillow lavas”

All were affected by the great continental glaciations. A million years ago, climate changes caused vast sheets of ice—up to a mile thick—to form in Canada and move slowly south, profoundly altering the landscape. The forward motion of the ice scoured and planed the rocks it passed over, and the ice terminus blocked many existing streams and rivers, causing them to change their drainage patterns. As the ice melted away, large piles and banks of rocks and debris bulldozed up by the glaciers further altered drainage and uncovered new outlets for the huge glacial lakes to drain. The Great Swamp is the soggy remains of the glacial Lake Passaic. As the ice retreated, spillways for this tremendous volume of water were created. As the ice retreated still further, the Passaic River resumed its northern flow, much of it now blocked by 250 feet of glacial debris. It follows a wandering path of least resistance through the remains of the lake bottom.

Do you have any favorite geological spots in the New Jersey or New York region? With a basic knowledge of geology, any road trip is interesting! There are Cape May diamonds on the broad beaches of the southern coast. Remains of huge glacial lakes that occupied much of northern New Jersey. The Delaware Water Gap. The Highlands. The site of the first dinosaur discovery in the New World. A mine containing a suite of minerals found nowhere else in the world. Virtually every spot has some aspect of interest, whether it be rock type, history, or commercial use.

Ruth Canstein Yablonsky is Park Naturalist at the Trailside Nature & Science Center at the Watchung Reservation, where she has been teaching children about the natural world for almost three decades. Yablonsky grew up in the Bronx, attended Hunter College, and earned a master’s degree in geology from the University of Michigan. In 2009, she won the Patricia R. Kane Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in environmental education from the Alliance for New Jersey Environmental Education. 51

What kind of work did you do in Colorado?

Is there evidence that Blue Brook was ever more powerful, or did the quiet flow carve out the valley over thousands of years?

How did you end up on the East Coast?

What are the geological connections between the Great Swamp, the Passaic River, and the Watchung Reservation?

Canopy Light 53

Lean-to-Much 54

Fern in Chasm 56

Ruth’s Desk 58

The Next Exhibit 59

Ruth’s Desk 58

The Next Exhibit 59

Stables Interior 60

Folding Trees 61

Stables Interior 60

Folding Trees 61

Pythagorean Spring 64

Vine Hoop 66

Ice Stars 68

Multi-flora Rose Stem 69

Ice Stars 68

Multi-flora Rose Stem 69

Summit

WAT CH UNG RE S E RVAT IO N WA L K , S TAT ION - T O - S TAT I O N

Walking Route Highway Stream or Lake Trail or Park Road Train Station

The train station in Summit, New Jersey, is less than a mile from the start of Watchung Reservation. I think this is supposed to be a secret. Watchung is an expansive woodland park hemmed in by a four-lane and a six-lane highway. It has fantastic outcroppings of basalt, quiet streams, a ghost town, two museums (history and natural), horse stables, and miles of meandering trails. This walk cuts through Watchung Reservation at an angle from Summit Station to Fanwood Station.

Fanwood

The Walk: When you arrive at Summit Station exit toward downtown if you need food or supplies. Otherwise, exit the side that faces the Village Green. Veer right through the grass to Maple Street. Stay on Maple Street until it runs into Mountain Avenue. Continue forward on Mountain Avenue and take a left onto Primrose Place, which ends at Oak Ridge Avenue. You are, in fact, on a ridge with oaks. There is a plot of forest at an angle from the street sign with an unmarked trail into the woods. Take the trail down through the sloping hillside. It will end on Glenside Avenue and you will see a Watchung Reservation sign at the edge of a soccer field.

Walk down into the parking lot and keep walking to the end of the lot toward a cement retaining wall for the adjacent highway. This uninviting passage is the continuation of the unmarked trailhead into Watchung. Signage in the park is plentiful. This entrance, however, is kept on a need-to-know basis. Follow the trail down to Surprise Lake and continue right, following the trails along the lake. Scattered throughout the forest, closer to the highway, are a number of old lean-tos and outhouses from a scout camp that was discontinued when the highway was put in. The wooden structures have been collecting inscriptions, declarations, and marks since the early 1960s. Surprise Lake was once the site of much more seasonal activity, with swimming, boating, picnicking, and camping drawing thousands of people all summer long. The biggest surprise I have had along the lake was a hawk striking the ground a few feet from where I was standing. There are trails on both sides of the lake and it does not matter which side you choose. Eventually there is a dam and Blue Brook continues on from its base. Blue Brook might not seem like a mighty river, but in the mid1800s it was strong enough to power a mill that supported a community of 175 residents. The trail along the right side of the brook rises up and offers great views through the tree

canopy and across the valley. If you’re traveling on the west side of Blue Brook, you will eventually reach the “ghost town” of Feltville. There is a small history museum, with bathrooms, and two of the historic homes are residential, so there is hardly room for many ghosts. A few structures have been given over to time and pincushion moss. Find one of the trails behind the houses and cross Blue Brook on the wooden bridge. There is one accessible gorge near the brook that is a great place to look at ferns, mosses, and lichens and to listen to the quiet trickle of water that flows through the rocks. Continue past the gorge and up toward the Sierra Trail and veer right. Eventually the Sierra Trail runs through a picnic area and then crosses Sky Top Drive. Two attractions in the opposite direction are the Trailside Nature Center and the Watchung Stables, which are some of the most picturesque horse arenas and barns in the state. Fifty years ago there was also an installation of Nike missiles at Watchung and the launch control site was adjacent to the stables. Continue on the Sierra Trail to the scenic overlook. The view offers a chance to see the contours of the landscape;

the precarious edge is lined with oak trees that have formed around the basalt trap rock. Continue in the direction leading away from the vista. As the trail approaches residential neighborhoods take one of the spurs and you will exit the park on Scotland Street across from “The Reserve” condominiums. The other spur will spit you out alongside Route 22 not far from Scotland Street. Either way you are abandoned as a pedestrian. You are on the wrong side of the Jersey barrier and have two choices. If you look to the right, up ahead, you will see a bridge going over Route 22. If you walk to the bridge and follow the off-ramp you can swing up and over Route 22 and land on Park Avenue. Or you can wait for a long pause in traffic and scoot over the barrier to the other side of Route 22. Either way, go left (you can only go left) onto Park Avenue, which becomes the main drag of Scotch Plains. Park Avenue turns into North Martine Avenue and eventually runs into Fanwood Station, about a mile and a half from the intersection of Route 22 and Park Avenue. Trains leave every hour, so chances are you will have a few minutes to catch your breath. 71

Summit

WAT CH UNG RE S E RVAT IO N WA L K , S TAT ION - T O - S TAT I O N

Walking Route Highway Stream or Lake Trail or Park Road Train Station

Fanwood

THE GREAT SWAMP

MY SWAMP Karl Fenske

am now almost sixty-seven—old, creaky, busy with work and problems. But I was a young boy once. I was wild and free, and outside all day, when I wasn’t in school. I have lived in and around the Swamp, my Swamp, my whole life. I wouldn’t call it the “Swamp,” but that is what you call it—the “Great Swamp,” the name of the wildlife refuge and the federal wilderness area. To me, it is a living, breathing thing, a friend that talks to me through its streams and creatures and trails and smells and ever-changing vistas. It soothes me when I am upset and centers me when I feel disconnected. It always has. The entity you call the Great Swamp constantly reminds me of skinny preteen me, running through the woods barefooted, having adventures and encountering mysteries that now have become the foundation of a long, fecund, and often turbulent lifetime. I am still that boy. These 3,000 acres (actually much more) of woods, fields, bogs, ponds, trenches, rivulets, and secret places are the backdrop of my existence and the canvas on which my life has been painted. It’s not quite finished yet. Is this place special? All those people—my mother, the officials, the donors, the consumers of environmentalism—perpetrated a great hoax that the Swamp was some super unique, endangered stretch of land. It was creative marketing at its best, crafted to save my Swamp from the Port Authority, who wanted to build a jetport on it in the 1960s. Were they lying? Not really—maybe embellishing is more like it. And it worked. It’s a swamp. But to us, it was our spirit friend. Maybe I can help you understand what I mean with a few anecdotes. Then you must go and see. You will be amazed. The biologists my mother worked with, like our neighbor Grace Hand, as well as Sister Ana Catherine of the College of Saint Elizabeth and Dr. Florence Zook of Drew University, say that swamps are the

cradles of our living world. Many humans find them inhospitable, but not the creatures and plants that start their lives there. I am one of those creatures. My Swamp teems with life. It is vibrant with birds and deer, turkey and fox, snakes and squirrels. Snapping turtles lie in wait for the unwary frog. The tree peepers watch and discuss the wild pigs rutting down below. As kids, we tried to catch these animals—not to kill them or for sport, but rather to hold them and feel their skin and see their faces so we could understand through osmosis what they were about—like learning about a new friend at school. So, in the summer, when school was out and the tar blisters bubbled up on Green Village Road, which had maybe one car an hour go down it, we would go to Joe’s Brook running through the meadow along Dickson’s Mill Road. There was shade under the willows next to the brook, and when you were lucky, you would pick up a big rock and find a red or yellow salamander under it. We called them “sallies.” They were so fragile, you couldn’t keep them. They would die in a jar or box in less than an hour. But it was wonderful to touch their smooth, wet, slimy skin and marvel at their beautiful coloring. They would initially squirm in our hands frantically, but then, as if they realized we didn’t want to hurt them, they would go very still and not even try to get away. Until we put them back in the brook and then they would hustle away under the nearest rock. Safe. We would fish with handcrafted fishing poles or, maybe a birthday present, a level-one-technology fishing reel that hadn’t broken or gotten lost yet. In the deep parts of the stream were sunnies and trout and smallmouth bass. We caught them using worms we dug up in the field or juicy bugs, but the best bait was crayfish. We caught the crayfish barehanded, put them on a hook with a sinker—guaranteed you had a

MY SWAMP Karl Fenske

fish in less time than a seven-year-old’s tiny attention span. But there was also big game in the streams— carp! There were monster carp measuring feet rather than inches, light yellow and languidly cruising the wider parts of Black Brook and Joe’s Brook. For some reason, they weren’t interested in worms or crayfish, so we would try to shoot them with bows and arrows. We tried for years. We lost so many arrows in those streams and never came close to getting one. They all got to die of old age. In many ways, I am like those big old carp—solitary, a bit elusive, and content to swim around in the murky muddy depths of a stream that dead ends in a wide marsh of cattails. Shoot your arrows. You won’t catch me. Years later, when I was out of law school and living in Morristown, my roommate was a rock-androll drummer who played in a local band. I knew him my whole life. I had left my first law job and started my own practice. I had been a hermit in law school, with few friends and no girlfriend, but I hired a young woman as my first secretary—a friend of my brother, ten years younger than me. One summer night, the band was playing out in Stanhope. I asked if she wanted to go with me to hear the band. Late that night, after dancing and drinking and hanging out backstage with the band, I drove her home. We went down Dickson’s Mill Road, along Joe’s Brook. I pulled the car over. We kissed down there under a willow that still had a rope hanging from a branch that you could use to swing out into the stream. We swam in our undies and lay on the wet grass under that tree. She was the prettiest thing in the moonlight. She was my salamander. I could hold her, but only a short while. My childhood home was on Green Village Road—an old farm with a barn. It was marshy and wet in spots, but I never thought of it as a swamp. I was nine when the Port Authority—run by Austin Tobin—decided they wanted to put a jetport right there where we lived and played and had our forts and fishing holes. They wanted to bulldoze and

blacktop over everything. My mother was a noisy, brash woman and she wasn’t going to go quietly into the Port Authority’s long good night, so she sent them a telegram. Imagine—a telegram! It said “No,” but of course it was ignored. For the next ten years, my mother and our neighbors and the aforesaid biologists and botanists and the rich people scattered amongst us fought and strategized and had meetings. We raised money. It was our cause célèbre. It was the dramatic battle royal for our home, our woods and streams and fields. To say that it became a cornerstone to my growing-up years does not do it justice. There are books about our struggle and now a movie—Saving the Great Swamp. For us it was life and death. My mother had a way of overdramatizing everything. What could a kid do? I had no money or skills, except catching crayfish and building tree forts. Well, my mother had the answer for that. My brother, sister, and I became her loyal servants. We licked stamps, we folded pamphlets, we ran the mimeo machine, we attended the garden-club meetings. We got dressed as Lenni Lenape Indians for Great Swamp Day at the Green Village Firehouse. And we listened as the struggle unfolded, to hear if we’d lose the fight and with it our home and our stomping grounds. Today, decades later, I run down Dickson’s Mill Road on Saturdays with my running club, the Rose City Runners. “Rose City” is Madison’s nickname, for the rose greenhouses that were all up and down Green Village Road. It is an eight-mile loop that starts and ends at the Duck Pond, in my Swamp. As I run down Dickson’s Mill, the brook whispers to me, asking if I remember. “Yes! I remember, my brother! I remember your sallies, your turtles, your cool waters, and my girl in the moonlight. Thank you, my brother, I still love you.” And I run on, back to the Duck Pond.

Karl Fenske is an attorney who lives and works in Morristown, New Jersey. A triathlete and marathon runner, he is an avid user of the state’s parks and trails. Fenske is the son of the late Helen C. Fenske, a Green Village resident who spearheaded a grassroots campaign to save the Great Swamp from development as a jetport in the 1960s and for whom the visitor center at the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is named. 77

TEACHING THE GREAT SWAMP Hazel England

y first experience of the natural world in New Jersey was the sharp nasal tingle of bonechilling air assaulting me as I exited Newark airport on a frigid Christmas in 1990. I was excited to be visiting my parents during winter break, as they had recently relocated to the other side of the Atlantic for my father’s work, and were now ensconced in a shady colonial house in Basking Ridge. As a student studying botany and zoology at the University of Dundee back home in Scotland, I was eager to brave the December cold to explore the natural areas near my parent’s new home. A glance at the New Jersey state highway map turned up a reassuring number of patches of the green and brown colors I knew represented open space. This was in sharp contrast to my pre-visit expectations of New Jersey—I had been earnestly forewarned by American exchange students that New Jersey was “nothing more than a huge sprawl of factories and highways.” In fact, according to the map, large holdings of state, county, and federal land seemed to surround Basking Ridge, and the town was perched on the western edge of a marshy entity labeled the “Great Swamp.” It seemed to beg discovery. I set out that Christmas to explore. I still have vivid memories of hiking the trails at Lord Stirling Park that first time. Pillar-like ice crystals had formed in the waterlogged wetlands of the park and caused the soil and mulch of the trails to heave upward; the ground gave loudly underfoot with every crunching step I took. The rear boardwalk sections of the trail by the Passaic River creaked as the opaque, bubble-filled ice cracked and shifted under my weight. Most impressive were the trees: Cloaked in moss at their flared bases, they wore ballerina-like tutus of wafer-thin ice, formed during a freeze at higher water levels.

During subsequent visits I enjoyed many seasonal snapshots of the Great Swamp: The varied hues of budding maples, willows, and oaks in the spring. The cheery, speckled trout-lily leaves I learned to identify (wildflower guide in hand), and the piercing trill of spring peepers and chorus frogs. On a humid, twilight walk I took one summer, thousands of fireflies suddenly began to signal their amorous intent, accompanied by an orchestra of bullfrogs and wood thrushes. A few years later, I finally had a chance to learn more about the natural and cultural history of the Great Swamp when I took a job as a greenshirted naturalist at the Lord Stirling Environmental Education Center in the Great Swamp Basin. A good environmental educator must endeavor to be a compelling teller of tales. As yellow school buses daily disgorged their groups of sweaty, eager students, I learned how to help kids directly engage with the secrets of the Great Swamp. To answer endless questions on why the swamp is always so wet, I would gather the students closely together, bent elbows jostling as they squished against one another, trying to mimic the fine, close-packed clay particles of the ancient glacial lake bottom on which they now stood. Then I would pick an enthusiastic volunteer to pretend to be a drop of rainwater falling onto the “clay particles.” Struggling to penetrate the jostling, tightly packed “clay particles,” the “water droplet” could only slowly make her way through, mimicking how rainfall can only slowly soak into the lakebed. As I hiked the trails of Lord Stirling like a backpack-clad pied piper with a throng of student followers, we would often remark on the many short boardwalk bridges that we encountered, each named for a denizen of the swamp—Aphid Bridge, Firefly Bridge, Katydid Bridge. Because the lakebottom swamp is so flat, the streams that make up the

TEACHING THE GREAT SWAMP Hazel England

headwaters of the Passaic River meander and spread out as they gather water from the surface of the land on their slow, inexorable downstream journey. This makes for valuable habitat—marshes, swamps, sodden forests and meadows—all filled with a diverse assemblage of wetland-loving plants and animals, including rare blue-spotted salamanders, endangered bog turtles, and wetland orchids. Exploring the Great Swamp today, it’s easy to imagine that the region has always been the way it appears now, so natural does the habitat seem. But a careful reading of the landscape reveals many clues to the area’s past as a patchwork of colonial farms and homesteads that came after settlement by Native American tribes such as the Lenape. A springtime walk along the Orange Trail of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge reveals drifts of gaudy garden daffodils and the occasional oriental peony growing among the highbush blueberry and witch hazel. The random growth of the oaks and hickories is punctuated by soldier-straight twin rows of giant evergreens, the overgrown remnants of a tidy hedge bordering a property long ago demolished to make the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge Wilderness Area. More obvious is what we park naturalists refer to as “Plymouth Wreck”—a rusty blue postwar car that lies thirty feet off the trail, hemmed in on all sides by large trees. How did a car come to sit in the middle of a forest, with no clear path to have driven it through? This is what we ask students on our walks. After offering ideas involving tornadoes, aliens, and more, the students finally arrive upon the truth—that the car predated the seemingly ancient forest surrounding it. It was put to rest at the edge of a farm field—out of sight, out of mind—after giving up the ghost fifty or sixty years ago. Over those decades, the field it lay in grew up into scrub, then into a young grove, and finally into the full-fledged forest that now surrounds it. In 2004, after a decade working as a park naturalist, I found my way to the other side of the Swamp as

the director of Education and Outreach for the Great Swamp Watershed Association, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect the water resources of the Great Swamp region and along the Passaic River. Still telling stories to engage, I now have an audience of homeowners and municipal officials, along with families and students. Not all realize that the Great Swamp is more than the lands of its protected areas. In fact, the Great Swamp watershed is like a bathtub, with the Millington Gorge being the region’s drain (becoming the Passaic River proper past this point) and the Watchung ridge to the south and the Mendham and Bernardsville hills to the north and west being the bathtub walls. In this analogy, the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge forms an invaluable green bathmat at the low point of the watershed, and my organization works to steward those as-yet-unprotected bathtub lands upstream of the refuge. The Great Swamp Watershed encompasses fiftyfive square miles, with only a quarter of that area being protected open space. That leaves a lot of homes, roads, businesses, schools, and parking lots for rainwater to flow across, picking up pollutants on its way to the streams of the Great Swamp Refuge and Lord Stirling Park. These “non-point source” pollutants—winter road salt, oil and grease, pet wastes, fertilizer, pesticide, and trash—pose a great threat to the Great Swamp. It is death by a thousand cuts. Each pound of road salt entering a stream degrades the habitat just a little more. Each oily rainbow makes it incrementally less desirable for brook trout and their insect prey to live and breed. Each extra handful of fertilizer thrown onto a lawn will choke streams and ponds with excess algal growth. Rallying people to the defense of the Swamp is challenging when the threat of development approaches one house at a time. More than a million New Jersey residents obtain their drinking water from the Passaic River as it flows from source to sea. Miles of pipe lead from the water treatment plant—which pulls water directly from the

Passaic River into reservoirs situated near the Short Hills Mall—to household faucets in the state. It is a constant battle to keep the waters of the Great Swamp and the Passaic River clean and safe to drink—for both the humans and wildlife that populate the area. The compelling story I must convey here is about the power individuals have to keep the lands and waters of our region healthy through simple changes in their daily actions. This is the environmental stewardship tale that I still endeavor to tell, after a quarter of a century living and working around the edges of the Great Swamp. I’ve found that the best way to change people’s behavior is to help them connect directly to their local environment. And the best way this longdisplaced Scottish ecologist has found to make people care is to help them experience the region firsthand.

Hazel England serves as the Director of Education and Outreach for the Great Swamp Watershed Association, where she develops and conducts educational programs on water quality and natural history for students and the broader community. She is also the land manager for the Great Swamp Watershed Association, coordinating stewardship for the organization. A native of Scotland, she holds a master’s degree in ecology and environmental management. 81

Islands and Ice 83

Roadside Swamp 84

Modernist Blinds 85

Roadside Swamp 84

Modernist Blinds 85

Spring Squared 86

Viewing the Swamp 88

Georgette from Washington Heights, Raptor Trust 89

Viewing the Swamp 88

Georgette from Washington Heights, Raptor Trust 89

Bird Decal, Reflection of the Great Swamp 92

Reaching Oak Branches 93

Bird Decal, Reflection of the Great Swamp 92

Reaching Oak Branches 93

Mended Wing, Raptor Trust 94

Black Raspberry Shoots 96

Map of the Known Universe 97

Black Raspberry Shoots 96

Map of the Known Universe 97

GREAT SWAMP WALK, STATION - TO - STATION

Many features make the Great Swamp special, but what might make it “Great” is that it is one of the first landscapes in the United States saved from development by citizen action. If the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had gotten its way, the Great Swamp would currently be an international airport. Thankfully, instead of a network of tarmacs, the soggy landscape is a lattice of streams and brooks that converge to give the Passaic River a fresh start. For its size, the enormous land mass has comparatively few trails and is bisected by only one road. Few people access the landscape solely on foot but maybe that will change; the trails of the Swamp can be used as a long “short cut” between the Madison and Gillette Rail Stations. Madison

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Walking Route Road Stream Trail Train Station

The Walk: This route can be walked in either direction with no real change to the experience. From Madison Station, walk to Main Street and take a left and then another left onto Green Village Road. At Shunpike Road, cut across the ShopRite parking lot in order to stay on Green Village Road. This is also the last possible place to get a bottle of water. Continue on Green Village Road (not Southern Boulevard) until you arrive at a quaint intersection and park with a giant boulder serving as a monument next to a flagpole. Veer left onto Meyersville Road and stay on it until it ends at the start of the Orange Trail. Patches of the Orange Trail can be waterlogged and muddy during spring months. Visitors circumvent these spots by walking through the adjacent forest or using the trail as a chance to test out their waterproof shoes. Off of the Orange Trail are the Green, Beige, and Silver Trails. Each of these is a spur or loop so you cannot get lost because you end up back on the Orange Trail. On the spurs you will find a few landmarks like Black Brook at the end of the Silver Trail and an unmarked stone foundation from an old field house. Any rock that you see in the swamp is worth a pause because it likely served an important function as a boundary marker or tether for a horse. Rocks are not common on the surface of a swampy landscape. Much of the landscape, like other riverine East Coast environments, functioned as a hay farm in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is hard to imagine that all the mills in a city as large as Paterson were powered by the flow of the Passaic while at the same time the hay from the river’s floodplain went to power the horses moving people and goods.

Eventually the Orange Trail ends on White Bridge Road, which shortly intersects with New Vernon Road. Other trails in different parts of the swamp have rising boardwalks and large room-sized blinds for bird watching. A number of smaller roads wind through sections of the swamp and are well known to area bicyclists. If you have the time and stamina, the Raptor Trust, a bird rehabilitation center, is a mile and a half down White Bridge Road and is the most famous institution in the area. Otherwise, take a left onto New Vernon Road and then a right onto Meyersville Road. At this intersection, there might be a deli or restaurant still in operation. Meyersville Road is not pedestrian friendly, so walk around the bends with caution and walk on lawns when necessary. At the intersection with Long Hill Road continue straight onto Mountain Avenue down to Gillette Station. The station is nothing more than a parking lot and a few benches across from marshland but the lack of architecture seems appropriate after a walk through the Great Swamp.

GREAT SWAMP WALK, STATION - TO - STATION

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Walking Route Road Stream Trail Train Station

PASSAIC RIVER

FINDING THE PASSAIC Tyler J. Kelley

here is a boulder at the bottom of the Great Falls in Paterson, New Jersey, that Matthew Jensen particularly likes. It looks like an early computer graphic, where three-dimensional objects are made out of a series of flat planes, he said, adding, “I’m getting more and more into rocks for some reason.” One summer day Matt and I stood on the rocky beach below the falls, where the Passaic River plunges seventy-seven feet through a sheer rock gorge. Matt took off his shoes, put down his bag, and waded around to photograph the rock. Meanwhile, I studied the beach, looking for objects that might tell me the story of this place. Coal, slag, a jug handle, a thick lump of gray glass, and a 1950s toy tractor—when Matt came back, I presented my efforts. Encouragingly, he gave me a plastic bag to hold what he called my “artifacts.” Then, with the eye of a connoisseur, he looked at the ground. “This is transferware,” he said, picking up a blue-and-white pottery shard. “See the dot pattern? It’s from the era after hand-painted pottery. They would make the design and press it on.” He picked up a round disc of glass, like the bottom of a big bottle. “This is a pontil mark,” he said, showing me a scar on it. Created when the glassblower disconnected the rod, the mark dated the artifact to the mid-1800s, before the advent of molded glass. “Probably no one has really looked at what’s on this beach in a long time,” he said. Walking back to my car at the end of the day, we detoured into one of the big abandoned textile mills, powered by the Passaic in the previous century. It was a predictable warren of weeds and graffiti-covered rubble now, but I did find a brick that said “Signack” on it. I dusted it off and put it in my trunk. When I was a kid I used to pick up screws and wires that had been run over by cars—anything I found in the street, I would save. I called it “rustymetal junk.” Later, as I traveled through the United

States, Mexico, or Europe, I would grab a rock, a nice chunk of wood, or a feather. Many people do this, but most are not proud of their tendencies to accumulate valueless things, especially with the unfortunate rise of the term hoarder overflowing from reality TV. For a long time, I tried not to find things, or at least not to keep them. It felt pointless. Chipped marbles and broken glass serve no purpose. Then I fell victim to brick collecting. I realized there were hundreds of brands of brick produced in the Hudson Valley during the early twentieth century; now those bricks lie in piles along the city’s waterfront. After three years of collecting, I now have around two hundred bricks. Yet every time I bring one home, it seems to lose its meaning. It’s the same brick that excited me when I spotted it on the ground—stamped with “Mayone,” say, in an italic font set in a dynamic parallelogram—but after I clean it and put it in my pile, I might never look at it again. Why? If the bricks aren’t the point, what is? After hearing about my brick obsession, a friend invited me to dinner with Matt at a Mexican restaurant in SoHo. Matt has elevated finding to an art form, maybe even a religion. He mostly walks near water. As he walks, he takes photographs and collects objects. He has a closet full of this stuff, stored in archival cardboard boxes, organized by location. But unlike what the rest of us find, Matt’s artifacts can end up in a museum, private collection, or art gallery. It seemed like he had found a way to validate and even value the impulse to collect worthless stuff. I was flattered when Matt invited me to go walking with him. Eventually, we spent eight days on the Passaic, walking about forty miles all together, or half the river’s length. Never once, in all that trudging, did Matt say, “What’s the point?” or “It’s not worth my time,” or “I’m too busy,” “Hurry up,” or “We’re late.” Nor did he complain about heat, cold, wet feet, thorns,

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FINDING THE PASSAIC Tyler J. Kelley

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hunger, ticks, dead animals, walking on the shoulders of highways, or getting lost. As a kid, Matt spent a lot of time walking along the Quinebaug River in Connecticut, which he often compares to the Passaic. “Same smell of dried rocks and off-gas from the sewage plant,” he said affectionately. “I grew up in an adverb, a very depressing adverb.” Killingly, Connecticut—the region claims to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, with hydropowered factories built in the 1700s. “It’s called the Quiet Corner now, but it used to be the Beijing of the U.S.” Upstream from Paterson, Matt photographed a sign that read: “Pardon our appearance but, the world’s only family destination gun range needs to accommodate more family! Welcome the family—Gun for hire.” At that moment, the world’s only familydestination gun range was a weedy field behind a low black plastic fence. “200 parking spaces. 7,100 square feet. 60 ports. Opening 2017.” In the rendering on the sign, the building looked like a trendy gym or a Whole Foods Market. “I learned to shoot a gun before I learned to shoot a photo,” Matt told me. Almost like a marksman, he clicks the shutter between breaths. His father is a rifle coach and Matt grew up fishing, shooting, and being dragged to gun ranges. “Most people would assume that the way I work, being outdoorsy—that I’m a very cliché straight boy. But I wouldn’t make the work I made if I wasn’t gay. I’d be a different person. “I wouldn’t have had to be kicked out of the world and come back to it with a better understanding of things. I think that’s the beginning of a lot of things for a lot of gay people. You’re always a little bit on the outside of that former world.” Matt stopped to photograph the name “Fred” spray-painted in elegant script on a rough stone wall. As a married straight man his age, I can see the outsiderness in Matt’s photographs. Although you never see his body, you can feel him looking. He is

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the stranger standing on the sidewalk in front of your house; the one staring out the window of the airplane when everyone else is asleep. “Anxiety is isolating for a lot of people,” Matt said. “It keeps them from going outside, keeps them from engaging with humans and talking and walking in a place they’ve never been. The most depressing thing about walking in places like we’re walking is the lack of children playing. All summer long I walk and I don’t see kids anywhere. Is everybody dead? Are they all old now? Quietly living inside of me is a fervent environmentalist who tries to reconnect people with landscapes.” Ecologically, the Passaic is in bad shape. The lower reaches contain Agent Orange. Signs along the bank tell people that the river’s blue crabs “may cause cancer and may harm brain development in unborn and young children.” Shouldn’t Matt be moved to anger or frustration by what we see? He told me that he can imagine the river cleaned up, improved, but he doesn’t pine for a prelapsarian Passaic. He doesn’t bother with the folly of wishing things were different, he said, “because the past cannot change.” According to Matt, the beginning of the Passaic’s fall is a mysterious pile of stones. I first saw it on a printout from Google Maps that Matt took from his backpack while we stood below the Great Falls. On the printout, a V of whitewater stretches across the river. A weir, Matt said—a low dam-like structure built by colonists or Native Americans to trap fish. Tantalized by the thought of an ancient structure in the middle of these chain stores and crumbling frame houses, we set off to find it, following streets when we had to and clambering down along the water where we could. In Paterson, this meant walking through mud or over a squishy footing of rotten carpet and Styrofoam. Later, it meant skidding down steep slopes covered in poison ivy. We spotted the weir from the Maple Avenue bridge and walked along the shoulder of McLean Boulevard to get closer. There were no signs for it— the weir is not landmarked or preserved in any way,

even though it is almost certainly the oldest manmade structure for miles in any direction. Just before Home Depot, we stepped over the guardrail and whacked our way through a stand of knotweed. And there it was: a perfectly symmetrical V made of stacked rocks, eighty feet from bank to bank, the water a little higher above, riffling white below. Matt leaped gleefully from stone to stone, shooting pictures. The weir has a magnificent sense of purpose. Here, in the river, it has been doing its job for three hundred years or more, even if no one wants the fish it traps. It is also strikingly fragile; any bored teenager might be tempted to kick it apart. The industrialization of the Passaic, of which the weir is the tiniest little germ of a beginning, finds its apogee at the river’s mouth, in Newark, where Matt and I found ourselves one December day. Walking past low warehouses in the chilly wind, we arrived at an incredible network of overpasses and highways—six or seven roads, high and low, lanes zooming around us in different directions. Passing beneath the New Jersey Turnpike, we entered the world of trucks. There are no houses and very little that is human beyond the Turnpike. Everything is truck-sized. Here we first encountered the boom and shake of heavy vehicles blowing grit in cold gusts, which lasted for most of the next three hours; the grime got into the creases at the corners of our eyes. Beyond the guardrail of the Lincoln Highway Bridge the sand was many feet thick, deposited by trucks passing as regularly as a desert wind. Matt photographed a dune sunflower growing, despite the cold, out of the middle of a tire set in a berm of grit. When you’re with Matt, you have permission to pay attention to everything. It’s all valuable, simply because it’s part of the walk. Though the collections of objects and photographs are what Matt displays, for me, the walking itself became the point. Matt wore a little Buddha statue around his neck. Asked about it, he said, “My ritual is the art that I make,

the meditations within the work: quiet walking, pensiveness, nature worship.” In the shadow of a taco truck, we noticed fragments of older trash under the pee bottles, truck parts, and plastic. An ash pile, Matt said, maybe from the late 1800s, when people burned all their garbage: oyster shells, glass, slag, ceramic. Matt bent down to pick up a blue-and-white pottery shard. “Willow ware,” he said, and put it in his plastic bag. I’m from Minnesota, and when I find myself describing where I grew up—small neat houses, lakes, pine trees, prairies—I can feel the word boring peeking out. I think New Jersey has the same problem. But where I would try to justify or evade the “boring” label, Matt cultivates the mundane. “A boring photograph will keep your attention; you’ll be looking at it until you figure out why it was taken,” he said. “The longer you look at something, the more exciting it gets. In fact, there’s really nothing boring.”

Tyler J. Kelley is a freelance journalist living in New York City. He also teaches printmaking at Parsons School of Design. His feature-length documentary film, Following Seas—which he co-directed with his wife, Araby—will be released in 2017.

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Dune Sunflowers and the Pulaski Skyway 107

Night Heron at the Base of the Falls 108

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Night Heron at the Base of the Falls 108

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Circle on a Wall Near the Passaic 110

Contrails and Cumulus 111

Circle on a Wall Near the Passaic 110

Contrails and Cumulus 111

Another World 112

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Another World 112

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Bridge Growth 114

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Bridge Growth 114

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Forest at Great Piece Meadows 116

Phone in the Passaic 117

Forest at Great Piece Meadows 116

Phone in the Passaic 117

SUV Limousine 118

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SUV Limousine 118

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Plow Memorial 120

Three Arrangements 121

Plow Memorial 120

Three Arrangements 121

Four Amaranth Stems 122

Passaic River Sign 123

Four Amaranth Stems 122

Passaic River Sign 123

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Lamp over Passaic 126

Lazy Carp 127

Lamp over Passaic 126

Lazy Carp 127

Passaic River Park, Pulaski Monument, Rainbow 128

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Passaic River Park, Pulaski Monument, Rainbow 128

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Roadside Skeleton 130

Sunset over Slough Brook 131

Roadside Skeleton 130

Sunset over Slough Brook 131

Mouth of the Passaic 132

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Mouth of the Passaic 132

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Mouth of the Old Stone Weir 134

PASSAIC RIVER WALK, STATION - TO - STATION The Passaic River winds through a wide range of scenic, historical, industrial, and residential landscapes on its ninety-mile course to the sea. Exploring the river in its entirety is nearly impossible on foot because only small sections have accessible parks or trail systems. A pedestrian must be ready for a journey that offers only occasional glimpses of the river, usually from bridge crossings, while moving through the neighborhoods that line its banks. This walk visits three majestic and moving places contained in a single day of walking: the Great Falls, the city of Paterson, and a precolonial stone weir. The Walk: When you arrive at Paterson Station, walk to Market Street and take a left toward the one tall modern glass building. As you walk down Market Street, foot traffic increases and historical architecture abounds. Market Street bends at Washington Street, and in the distance you can see the start of the mill district and Garret Mountain. Where Market Street ends on Spruce Street, take a right and you are just a few blocks from the Great Falls of the Passaic. At the corner of McBride Avenue there is a small National Parks Headquarters with a few vitrines, postcards, and well-informed parks staff. Across the street is the parking lot and picnic area facing the Great Falls. A hundred years ago, when the falls were a wildly popular tourist destination, this was the vantage point used for the postcards. Before heading up and over the falls, consider walking a block down McBride Avenue and taking a left onto the trail along the dry canal. The trail has several footpaths that lead to a batch of factory ruins with very impressive street art. Remove the garbage piles and it is a ready-made outdoor museum. The footpaths lead back to the picnic area. Continue up the hill and over the falls. The pedestrian bridge over the falls is a fantastic vantage point and has been one of the main attractions since the falls became a destination. The newly redesigned park on the top of the falls also lets visitors get close to the edge. Continue on toward the street and bear right down the paved bike path. There is a short dirt path that leads to the Passaic River and if the water level is low enough, you can edge around for a view of the base of the falls. The paved bike path continues along the river and through the Valley of the Rocks, which is now overgrown but still holds true to its name. The path turns into Ryle Road and the first intersection is at Ryle Avenue.

Walking Route

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City Street or Path Passaic River Train Station Take a right here and then shortly another right onto West Broadway and over the Passaic River. After passing Memorial Drive, turn left onto Broadway, and after one mile turn left onto Madison Avenue. The city of Paterson is built on a hill rounded on three sides by the Passaic River. Walking down Madison Avenue gives you an understanding of the topography. There are also buses frequently running down Madison if you want a lift. After about a mile, at Fourth Avenue, turn right and walk down the hill toward the Home Depot. The Passaic River runs along McLean Boulevard. To visit the precolonial stone weir in the river, go left one block to Third Avenue, cross the road toward the river, step over the barrier, and traipse down to the water’s edge. The visibility of the weir changes with the seasons. During the spring you might see only a few ripples from the larger stones but by summer it becomes very apparent. The fall months usually bring very low water levels and one can walk out to the center of the river where the two arms of the weir channel the water through a narrow passage. It is a true monument of the Passaic. Back on McLean, walk toward the Home Depot and take a left over the bridge onto Fair Lawn Avenue. The ironwork on the bridge is fantastic and so are the views of the river from the pedestrian walkway. Fair Lawn Avenue is a straight shot to the historic Radburn Train Station, just over a mile from the bridge.

Paterson 137

Walking Route

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Paterson 137

INDEX Artifacts & Photographic Spreads SANDY HOOK Porcelain Plate Fragment with Ocean Scene 20 Shard from Bottle of Congress Water 24 Uniform Button, 13th Field Artillery Regiment, World War I 29 Bittersweet Frame 30–31 Brass Bullet Shell (left) Bullet without Casing (right) 34 Fishing Lure, Bite Marks 40

WATCHUNG RESERVATION Plastic Bug 54 Porcelain Transferware Fragment with Leaf Pattern 57 Late Autumn in Blue Brook Valley 62–63 Deer Tooth 64 Porcelain Doll Head, German 67

THE GREAT SWAMP Sliced Base of a Christmas Tree 86 Split Logs, Woodpecker Holes 90–91 Remains of an Enamel Bowl 94

PASSAIC RIVER Willow Ware, Bridge Scene 108 Venus of the Passaic (Porcelain Pincushion Half-doll) 112 Plastic Tractor with Headless Driver 115 Sawed, Hollowed-out Bone 118 Roadside View of Lower Passaic 124–125 Clay Skeet Fragments 128 Porcelain Plate Fragment, Floral Design 132

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Melanie Cohn

Executive Director, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey On behalf of the Visual Arts Center, I’d like to express our deepest gratitude to the many people whose talent, effort, and enthusiasm contributed to the success of this book and exhibition. Our thanks go to Matthew Jensen, whose artwork opens up new ways of experiencing the world around us. Those of us working with Matt have learned the power of observation. Once you have spent time with Matt and his work, you discover the joy of looking more closely, especially at those things most familiar to you. Thanks also go to everyone who contributed to this publication. We were fortunate and honored to work with a stellar group of authors—Ian Frazier, Tyler J. Kelley, Ruth Canstein Yablonsky, Karl Fenske, and Hazel England. Along with Curator Mary Birmingham, who wrote on Jensen’s work, each brought an insight that makes this book a great joy to read. We are also indebted to Matt Barteluce and Paper Crown Press (in Guttenberg, New Jersey), who co-published and designed this beautiful volume. This book would not have reached completion without the dedication of these individuals. We are very grateful to the staffs of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge; the Gateway National Recreation Area, Sandy Hook Unit; and the Watchung Reservation. Special acknowledgment is owed to Pete McCarthy and

John Warren at Gateway National Recreation Area, Sandy Hook Unit, for their early support of this project. Matt Jensen wishes to thank Jesús López for editing, troubleshooting, and moral support, and Mia Fineman, Thomas Padon, and Eugenie Tsai for their support and encouragement with the project. He also wants to recognize all those who have made it possible for him to work in parks over the years. As always, the team at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey has worked tirelessly to bring this exhibition and book together. Thank you to the staff and board of the center, with special thanks to Mary Birmingham, who curated the show, Assistant Curator Katherine Murdock, and Grants Coordinator Bonnie-Lynn Nadzeika for over two years of guidance and assistance. We are indebted to the many funders who have made this book and exhibition possible. We thank the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of the exhibition; the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation for their support of this book; the Union County Office of Cultural and Heritage Affairs for their programming support; and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Peter S. Reed Foundation, whose support allowed Jensen to complete this work.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Matthew Jensen Matthew Jensen (b. 1980) lives in Brooklyn, New York. Jensen’s site-specific projects and walks have been supported and commissioned by the High Line in New York, the Queens Museum, the Kenpoku Art Festival in Japan, the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, Wave Hill in the Bronx, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park, among others. In 2016 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and a Peter S. Reed Foundation grant for photography. He has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts for his projects Park Wonder (2016) and The Wilmington Center for the Study of Local Landscape (2013). His solo show Feels Like Real debuted in 2015 at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York. Jensen’s photographs are in major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum. 139

WATCHUNG RESERVATION Plastic Bug 54 Porcelain Transferware Fragment with Leaf Pattern 57 Late Autumn in Blue Brook Valley 62–63 Deer Tooth 64 Porcelain Doll Head, German 67

THE GREAT SWAMP Sliced Base of a Christmas Tree 86 Split Logs, Woodpecker Holes 90–91 Remains of an Enamel Bowl 94

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Melanie Cohn

This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Matthew Jensen: Park Wonder, on view at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, April 14 – July 23, 2017. Major support for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is provided in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the WJS Foundation, the Wilf Family Foundations, and Art Center members and donors.

This publication and exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Funding for this publication has been provided in part by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Co-published by:

68 Elm Street Summit, New Jersey 07901 P 908.273.9121 www.artcenternj.org

Paper Crown Press, 6903 Jackson St. Guttenberg, New Jersey 07093 P 201.868.8585 www.papercrown.press

© 2017 Visual Arts Center of New Jersey All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the VACNJ, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Photography and maps by Matthew Jensen www.jensen-projects.com Book design by Matt Barteluce Edited by Casey Ruble Printed by GHP Media, West Haven, CT Edition of 500 ISBN: 978-0-925915-55-9

68 Elm Street Summit, New Jersey 07901 P 908.273.9121 www.artcenternj.org

Paper Crown Press, 6903 Jackson St. Guttenberg, New Jersey 07093 P 201.868.8585 www.papercrown.press

Matthew Jensen: Park Wonder

Articles inside

Photographs

Watchung Reservation Walk, Station-to-Station

A Conversation with Ruth Canstein Yablonsky