Across the Watershed - Fall 2000 - Meet Robert Sullivan

Robert Sullivan, guest speaker at this year's Annual Dinner, is an accomplished author whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Outside, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue, and other magazines. In 1998 his book The Meadowlands, was published; it describes his adventures exploring an infamous New Jersey industrial swamp. Sullivan was born in Manhattan and spent his childhood years on Long Island, but as an adolescent he lived in Madison and made frequent visits to Great Swamp. Following are excerpts from an interview:

Q: How often did you visit Great Swamp when growing up?

A: I visited it a lot as a kid in high school. We'd go on the weekends. It was one of the first places I ever enjoyed going to over and over again, from season to season, just to see how it would change. I loved the spring when the water was really high. I can still see the dark water pooling, and the underwater green grasses all around. Sometimes the water was so high that you'd just have to turn around as soon as you went in, and that was upsetting, though also kind of cool. Whenever I went there, I would just walk. I visited Great Swamp all the time after I went to college, which is to say every time I came home for vacation or even a short visit. Just as swamps and estuaries have a cleansing effect on the water of a river system, so Great Swamp began to have the same kind of cleansing effect on my psyche.

Q: Why are you so interested in the Meadowlands?

A: The landscape in the Meadowlands, or the panorama, is postindustrial and industrial, and it is by some definitions a kind of blighted view, a polluted view-- a view that is no longer natural. But for me it's a view that has within it stages or progressions of natural changes as well as changes in the way humans have viewed progress. When you look out at the Meadowlands from, say, the top of Snake Hill, you're looking out on a bunch of dumps and former dumps that are there because at one time people didn't care about swamps; people thought that swamps stood in the way of progress. You are looking at an area pretty much devoid of homes because the place is at the bottom of what was once a glacial lake and, as such, was impossible to develop for many years. The Meadowlands was considered unhealthy as a landscape even before it was dumped on, and yet it was the region's great cleansing mechanism. It acted like the digestive system, the place where life grew from decay. It's an amazing place to contemplate.

Q: Did living near Great Swamp affect your interest in the Meadowlands and environmental writing?

A: Yes. I guess Great Swamp taught me how to really love a specific area in a very particular way. I can still remember the first pictures I took with my first camera, and I remember the colors of the grasses and the reeds; I remember thinking how beautiful they looked. I love Great Swamp.

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Fiona Somers, a Madison high-school senior, served as a staff writer for the Madison Eagle last summer.

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