Author Finds his Everest in North Jersey
Wednesday, April 15, 1998

Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City
by Robert Sullivan

By Tina Traster
Record Staff Writer

Robert Sullivan dodged a garter snake on his trek up Snake Hill in Secaucus. It was the third snake of the day, which surprised him, because he had climbed the vertiginous outcropping, now known as Laurel Hill, at least a dozen times over the preceding year without seeing one.

Perhaps there are things about the Meadowlands that still surprise Sullivan, but it's hard to believe: The 35-year-old freelancer has written a travelogue, The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City, following a yearlong exploration by foot, car, and canoe. His account is based on interviews with hundreds of locals, countless maps, and volumes of material in local libraries and archives.

"Some people climb Mount Everest and write about it; I wrote about the Meadowlands," said Sullivan, who spent his late teens growing up in Madison in Morris County and now lives in Oregon with his wife and two children.

Why the Meadowlands? The author, despite the grandeur of the natural world in Oregon, said he longed to write about a place that was part of his past; a place he had criss-crossed 100 times en route to sports events and rock concerts; a place with a past; a place that is part industrial, part natural, and part wilderness; a place that could fill his notebooks with stories, because Sullivan, first and foremost, is a storyteller.

"Everybody's got great stories, and if I can get paid to write about other people's stories, well, then, that's just a consolation," Sullivan said.

Tony Hiss, author of "The Experience of Place," compares Sullivan to authors Ian Frazier and Joseph Mitchell. Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angela's Ashes," said of the book: "It's a story about [Sullivan] -- his high spirits, his sense of adventure, his good humor, his compassion for all God's creatures, his sense of ease whether he's in a library, a bar, or a swamp."

The first-time book author, who peppers every response with self-effacing humor, doesn't know how many of his books Scribner is printing. He doesn't want to know. And he's not sure how the royalties work on the $23 book, in stores now.

What he cares about is making the wilderness come alive in 11 chapters by weaving through the lives and anecdotes and memories of the people who live there. As he says in the first chapter:

"In the process of hiking, canoeing, digging, and just otherwise exploring the area, I learned a lot about what happens inside old mountains of trash, about all of the inventions that were invented in the Meadowlands, about a great mosquito trapper, about people who enjoy spending as much time in the Meadowlands as possible, about of lot of old crimes."

And some of the Meadowlands' controversies are highlighted. In the chapter called "The Trapper and the Fisherman," Sullivan brings together Don Smith, an environmentalist from the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission who grew up in the area and trapped muskrats, and Bill Sheehan, an angler and river keeper for the Hackensack River.

The two are at odds over the future of the Meadowlands. Sullivan invites them to lunch at Eagan's in North Arlington to debate whether nature alone can restore stretches of phragmites -- common reed patches -- in the Meadowlands. Or whether nurture -- by way of developers' dollars -- is needed to return water and plant varieties to the marshes through environmental restoration projects.

Sullivan's book appears at a time when the fate of the Meadowlands is being vigorously debated by federal and state officials, environmentalists, developers, and residents of the 14 towns that fall under the jurisdiction of the HMDC. However, the writer takes no position on the issue. His mission is not to save a threatened urban wilderness.

Climbing up Snake Hill, Sullivan alternates between waxing poetically about a hawk overhead and speculating on the toxicity of the dirt road beneath his cleated sneakers.

The author spends one chapter on digging up old bones (including a failed search for Jimmy Hoffa), and another on pieces of New York's old Pennsylvania Station that he found.

"Here, here, look at this," Sullivan exults, showing a piece of pink, sparkling marble in his palm. "This is from a column that was part of Penn Station."

Sullivan, who began his writing career at The Herald and News in the early 1980s, writes frequently for Rolling Stone, Vogue, and The New Yorker. He is not accustomed to the spotlight. He is shy when a photographer asks him to pose. He says thank-you incessantly and incredulously when someone mentions enjoying a part of his book.

His book garnered attention following the appearance of an excerpt in The New York Times Magazine in February. In fact, the Meadowlands have probably not been given so much attention since Giants Stadium was built more than two decades ago. Sullivan has done the talk-radio circuit, including National Public Radio, and has written a piece about the Meadowlands for Conde Nast Traveler's April issue.

Copyright © 1998 Bergen Record Corp.