I don’t think anyone has ever said the New Jersey Turnpike is beautiful. But this morning it is. An encyclopedia of painters joins me on my southward journey.
The Brueghels painted the winter sky.
Giorgione dropped in the distant towers of Manhattan, as mysterious as a Roman ruin in the haze.
Titian’s brush fills a plastic bag with air and puffs it lightly across the road.
Billboards play Jackson Pollock, flinging color and lights across the view.
Cézanne painted the geometry of the bridges.
The brush of Mark Rothko laid the soft-edged patchwork of the marshes and pools.
Piet Mondrian composed the colored stacks of shipping containers.
Giorgio Morandi chose and placed the fuel tanks, which were tinted by the sky.
An icon painter filled in the swamp grasses, which sway and bend like ranks of haloed saints.
The road weaves through what is neither land nor water, neither natural nor man-made. It is a no-man’s land ruled by an uneasy armistice; green reeds, gray water, rusted steel, water-stained concrete vie for control.
The road weaves through what is neither land nor water, neither natural nor man-made. It is a no-man’s land ruled by an uneasy armistice; green reeds, gray water, rusted steel, water-stained concrete vie for control.
Nature owned it; man dominated it.
At the moment, I root for the man-made. It fills me with the energy that places of transport and industry embody. It awakens the Walt Whitman American in me, the daughter of pioneers in the land of the “big shoulders,” the “can-do,” and the “show me.”
I love these places wherever I find them: Basel, Buffalo, Nashua, Springfield. Here, people threw down challenge gloves to nature. They dominated the flow instead of going with it. Rivers became canals, and waterfalls turned the Satanic mills. They made sand into glass, ore into steel, stones into concrete, mud into bricks, and trees into lumber.
They built homes, workshops, warehouses. They made an industrial revolution. And we believed it made America great, and Europe great, and Asia, too.
Then the iron became guns and the concrete became bunkers. We made two world wars.
Who is great after all that?
The Turnpike drives a fault line through the uneasy truce of land and water, and man and nature that surround me.
Rust dots the bridges I cross, and water eats at the blacktop’s fringe.
Underneath, the seagrass roots spread silently.
I think nature will win.