I never liked New Jersey, which isn’t surprising because the only way I’ve known it is from four decades of driving through it. Despite living adjacent to it for most of my adult life, the only night I’ve ever slept in the state was almost exactly forty years ago. That wasn’t the best perspective since it was when a college friend and I hitchhiked from Sarasota, Florida to New York City during Christmas break, and when kicked awake by Port Authority police rousing the homeless, we phoned the only person we knew in the area, a bus away in New Jersey, and crashed on their couches1.
Consequently I equate New Jersey with lumpy sofas, gridlock, grimy toll booths (trying to toss quarters into the basket after waiting forty-five minutes in line, watching one bounce off the rim, and realizing you don’t have any more to make the exact change and being beeped at by a cacophony of angry drivers), industrial stench, all smothered in a rude antagonism that radiates hostility.
When I was hired by Salomon Brothers in the early ‘90s, with offices in the World Trade Center, I didn’t know much about New York City, but I knew I didn’t want to commute from New Jersey or Staten Island. I’d thought of doing that to save money, because I was in debt, and was certain my high-paying job wouldn’t last, but when I told relatives about my plan, one quipped, “No one writes romantic poems about New Jersey. Is that how you want to live your life? In Jersey?”
That fit, and so I settled in the borough of poetry (Brooklyn). Whenever I went through New Jersey during my two decades in New York, usually going far too slowly, I was reminded that I’d made the right decision.
I knew that was unfair, but still I never walked New Jersey, despite having walked almost the entirety of New York City (excluding Staten Island, of course), because it didn’t seem to offer anything other than a more logistically challenging, and lesser, version of the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn. It was another borough, but empty of poetry, with a different (and lesser) metro system, and disjointed.
That disjointedness was the biggest obstacle. Urban New Jersey is carved up into a jumble of segments by inlets, rivers, industrial zones, expressways. Getting from one to the other is often impossible for pedestrians, or so Google Maps says. I’d thought of long routes before, but all seemed too complicated, until motivated by being stuck here at home, I looked closer and realized I could now walk across the Goethals and Bayonne bridges, which meant I could get from Passaic to Fort Lee, via Newark and Elizabeth. Forty-five or so miles, over three days.
So that is what I set out to do, to hopefully right all the wrongs I’d assigned to an entire state, with the slight modification of starting in Nutley, and then spending my first night next to Newark Airport (literally), and my second in Bayonne, before ending in Fort Lee.
Driving into Jersey, I began regretting my decision. New Jersey has pockets of Manhattan’s density, but with LA’s reliance on cars, so it’s in a quantum superposition of the two, and that means it has two outcomes, or two different realities. For people who like it, that reality contains the best of both (Manhattan’s localized variety with LA’s space and freedom), and for those who don’t, it contains the worst (Manhattan’s crowding, with LA’s traffic).
Like any quantum state, which it collapses to depends on the viewer, and the black Escalade, inches behind my bumper, manically flashing its brights, despite me going sixty-five in a forty-five zone, despite us both being behind a line of cars on both sides that would require quantum tunneling to pass, reminded me it almost always collapses to the negative reality for me, at least when in a car. Getting the other perspective is what I hoped to do by navigating it on foot and by public transport.