I very much enjoyed Sullivans writing style. He seems like the type of person that would be very easy to talk to and can’t get enough of learning about every place he goes to. He really embodies that sort of frontiersmen mindset and makes me think about the adventures of Lewis and Clark. In the book he often compared exploring the Meadowlands to those two and their journey across the American West. I find it inspirational that Sullivan and his partner Dave can find a sort of slumbering beauty lurking beneath and deep within the polluted marshes and waterways of the Meadowlands.
“Passing over more underwater fences, we felt as if we were paddling just above Atlantis.” – 82
“…the sky is the most prominent feature of the Meadowlands. The area’s undevelopability has kept it relatively free of skyscrapers and tall buildings. All over the Meadowlands, there is an uninterrupted panorama. It’s Big Sky Country East.” – 61
I love people’s reactions when Sullivan tells them that he is going exploring in the Meadowlands. It seems that most of the old people that still live in or on the edge of the area are excited to see him and love telling him stories. Then there are the rest of the people that are taken aback by his plan. For instance, when he went shopping for a canoe and equipment to row across the marshes.
“The water was chocolate milk brown.” – 79
“So I said it was the ruins of a great building that once stood proudly in New York City. She smiled and squited a little and looked in my eyes and said, ‘Oh.’” – 163
One of the most prominent things I found in the book are the constant conflicting descriptions of the Meadowlands. Sullivan describes it as a spectacular wilderness that is begging to be re-explored because so many changes have occurred throughout it that everything is almost always new. Then he returns to the more accepted description that it is a worthless area of rottenness and pollution that cannot be used for anything except to dump our waste. It’s is man-made wasteland and that grown wild by itself.
