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Zusatztext "Provocative! audacious . . . by looking observantly! without trite moralizing! at the natural world . . . this book suggest a challenging new model for how we ought to pay attention." --Robert Pinsky! The New York Times Book Review "It's full of add! compelling stories and is often hilarious. In short! it's a delight." -- Men's Journal Informationen zum Autor Robert Sullivan Klappentext Imagine a grunge nort Jersey version of John McPhee's classic The Pine Barrens and you'll get some idea of the idiosyncratic, fact-filled, and highly original work that is Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. Just five miles west of New York City, this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station--and maybe, just ,maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa. Robert Sullivan proves himself to be this fragile yet amazingly resilient region's perfect expolorer, historian, archaeologist, and comic bard.Whenever I'm in New York and have a little time on my hands, I grab a backpack and some maps and a compass and maybe some lunch and I hike through Times Square and up the stairs of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where I catch a bus out to the Meadowlands. The bus winds down the terminal's three-story ramp and dives into the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, which surrounds the bus with darkness and thick gray exhaust until it spits it out on the other side. As the cars around us scramble to be the first onto the highways of New Jersey, the bus struggles up the eastern side of Bergen Hill, while the skyline of New York seems to shout at the bus's back and ask it where it's going. The leaves of the scraggly ailanthus trees wave in the wind of traffic as the bus passes through the cut in the red rocks that separate New York from New Jersey and the Meadowlands from the rest of the world. And then, in just a few minutes, as we drop down the other side of Bergen Hill and cruise into a low, flat land of lush grays and greens and pockets of rust and more and more circles of concrete, the bus seems to genuflect at the landscape before us. When the sky is clear, the water in the far-off creeks and rivers shines through the reeds like a sheet of aluminum foil that has been crumpled and then spread out again. When the sky is gray, the clouds mingle with the smokestacks' clouds of steam and smoke so that it is difficult to tell which is which. After the bus courses down through cloverleafs, passing fields of cars waiting to pay tolls, turning onto smaller and smaller ramps and roads, and finally onto little local streets, I get out at the bus stop that is in a mall which was once an old cedar swamp, or at the stop in a grove of outlet stores, or maybe at one in the center of Secaucus. The bus can be empty or it can be crowded with people who are on their way to the discount shopping outlets in the Meadowlands or to the giant sports and entertainment complex that is also known as the Meadowlands, or even to the little towns and cities along the edges of what remains of the old swamp. These people go to the Meadowlands for a deal on a dress or a pair of slacks or for a good time or to go home and have dinner and go to bed, while I go to the Meadowlands to explore. When I leave the bus, I will often head for the towns around the edges of the swamp or for ancient industrial sites that are now rusting or fading away. In the cars on the highways all around me, or in the planes that take off from Newark Airport, people have packed their trunks or their backpacks or their carry-on luggage with travel books or maybe brand-new water-repellent hiking clothes or PowerBars and polypropylene underwear, and they are heading West to travel and explore. But I am creeping slowly ba...
