There’s a place in New Jersey, hemmed in by highways
and humongous landfills, where a paddler can disappear into winding waterways
lined by tall reeds and be immersed in a garden of eden blessed with choruses
of bird songs, skim around a swishing grove of cattails and abruptly stare up
at the Empire State Building, looming in the Manhattan skyline.
This is the Hackensack Meadowlands, a place where
Pamela Hughes grew up playing in the dumps and falling in love with wildlife in
marshland. Returning as a creative writing professor, she discovered the poetry
of transformation.
“How does a meadow move you?” Hughes writes in Meadowland Take My Hand, her eco-poetry
collection published by Three Mile Harbor Press. “I rustle and glide/ like a
low swooping bird,/ seeking nothing but the welcome of distance,/ wild streaks
and strands/ of phragmites and birch boughs,/ the unbowed salve of green.”
Spend some time in this place, walking on the duckboards or a wildlife trail near the Meadowlands Environment Center in Lyndhurst,
and nature reclaims you.
“And you are revised/ like the sky after a
thunderstorm—/ slim summer segment of newly rinsed air/ or the thread of a
rainbow … When you turn to glow,/ you are revised/ on the edge of the suburban
wilderness,“ Hughes observed in a recent reading sponsored by the Teaneck Creek
Conservancy at the Puffin Cultural Center in Teaneck.
In an interview in Huffington Post, Hughes said “As a
poet, I’ve found that the environment has been my best muse so far. Being
grounded in place helped me create my poetry collection … I had no intention to
write a book of poems about the meadowlands, but when I immersed myself in the
actual place—the physical landscape of the Meadowlands—the book began to write
itself.”
Lamenting the loss of so much of this natural wonder
to suburban housing developments, shopping centers, industrial hubs, a massive
sports complex and malodorous mountains of trash, Hughes notes in the preface
to her poetry collection: “As a poet I ask, what palliative grace can be
summoned with poetry? What medicine to heal? This narrative and lyric hike
asks: how do we honor the land instead of turning it into another strip mall?”
Besides deploying poetry as conservation campaign
banners, Hughes invites adventuresome folks to explore the infamously polluted,
glorious remains of the Meadowlands.
An engaging
place to start is Overpeck County Park, a reclaimed landfill transformed into a
refreshing playground, rowing center and bird sanctuary just off the NJ
Turnpike exit for Teaneck and Leonia. Bald eagles sometimes hang out there in
the cottonwoods. Another memorable experience is to join a kayaking, canoeing or
pontoon boat trek through the Meadowlands organized by the Hackensack
Riverkeeper out of Laurel Hill
County Park in Secaucus.
“If I had a wish,” Hughes writes, “there would be
mandatory play-in-nature programs for adults and teens where they would have to
roll in it, lie in it, leap over it, run their palms over blades of grass, bark
and stone. It’s hard, as kids know, not to appreciate and like the one you’ve
played well with.”
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