A Freeway Runs Through It

Well, I may as well take this "Freeway" thing and run with it. Writings from the first two dates, photos from 2001.  On the Greyhound from Chicago, over I-80, through Davenport, Iowa City, and Des Moines, Iowa; then through Omaha, Nebraska and onward over the Great Plains, Native America, once teaming with Buffalo, a sea of yellowish grass rippled by the wind. Signs at roadside truck stops now advertise buffalo burgers. Or they are bred with cattle: Beef-alo. We pass once thriving farming communities, now virtual ghost towns, the rails beside the silos are now rusty. I am reminded of the TV news footage I saw in my youth, of despondent farmers, hands helplessly nestled in pockets, weighing down loose overalls, watching as everything they ever worked for is auctioned off to pay off debts, trying to prevent foreclosure of the family farm that's been a source of income for generations, only to lose it to multi-national agribusiness. A prairie dog town, advertised by ...

Here's a cool slide show of Bivalve and Shellpile, New Jersey. The dates on the photos is 1915, but that is actually the year the photographer, Arthur Rothstein, was born. These photos were taken in the late 1930's by the FSA (Farm Security Administration). NJ Pinelands and Down Jersey Website Slideshow

When I was living in Philly in 1999, I visited my hometown, Millville, NJ, a  few times to do research at the local library about the oyster industry and the lives of black oyster shuckers in South Jersey. Most of the shuckers migrated up from Virginia and Maryland in the nineteen twenties when the shucking houses opened in Bivalve and Shellpile. It has always been a very segregated scene, occupationally and socially, from what I can tell. Previous to this, there were hundreds of oyster schooners based out of the Maurice River Cove. With the modernization of the fleet, the days of oyster schooners were gone, sails were replaced with diesel engines and dredging was mechanized. Many (mostly white) workers lost their jobs at the same time that the oyster packing industry grew, requiring shuckers to prepare the oysters for packing. From what I have read this contributed to racial tension, and the Klan was supposedly quite active in South Jersey in the 20's and 30's, allegedly dona...

Another photo to give you a sense of what Sandburg witnessed. My understanding is that he lived in nearby Vineland, NJ for a time.

I grew up in Millville, NJ, and I'll probably be writing more about that later, but probably not as eloquently as Carl Sandburg wrote about it in the early 1900's. Even a century later, it reminds me of the working class kids I grew up with. This is from "In Reckless Ecstasy", published in 1904 by Asgard Press, Galesburg, IL. It is public domain. Millville Down in southern New Jersey, they make glass. By day and by night, the fires burn on in Millville and bid the sand let in the light. Millville by night would have delighted Whistler, who loved gloom and mist and wild shadows. Great rafts of wood and big, brick hulks, dotted with a myriad of lights, glowing and twinkling every shade of red. Big, black flumes shooting out smoke and sparks; bottles, bottles, bottles, of every tint and hue, from a brilliant crimson to the dull green that marks the death of sand and the birth of glass. From each fire, the white-heat radiates on the "blowers," the ...

Dad at the Salem Oak Diner, Salem, NJ Visiting my Father in South Jersey. Another drinking binge for me. Sitting in the dusty living room with nothing to say to each other. Drinking though the long, uncomfortable silences. He's watching the History Channel. War after war, pictures of carnage and slaughter, and bleak human suffering. An armchair historian captivated by the glory, the calculated orchestration of mass killing. The Abrams tank, the atomic bomb, which "we had to use" on Japan to end the war. Geri, my stepmother, sits on the couch which is permanently bowed from her weight . Her breathing is labored and she gasps between burps and gurgling sounds. She is dying from emphysema, and the woman next door that may dad is paying to look after her is giving her Newport cigarettes. Geri sneaks hits off them when my Dad goes into the bedroom to nap and hides the half smoked butt in her shoe. She is committing slow smoking suicide, likely devastated by the murder of her s...

Fortescue, NJ Got to go to the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay on Sunday. Went around with my sister, Barbara, and went to a lot of the places along the Delaware Bay we went as children, places we haven't been together in close to 30 years. We used to go camping by the bay with our and Dad and first stepmother, Diane. Walking along the beach looking down at the detritus washed in by the tide: floats from fishing nets, seashells, small red sponges, blue claw and horseshoe crab carcasses; or wandering out onto the tidal flats, wading though the tide pools looking for seahorses, pipefish, hermit crabs and other aquatic life to add to our salt water aquarium at our house on Shiloh Pike. These are some of the happiest memories of my, and our, childhood. Even after 30 years my Sister and I agreed that little had changed in South Jersey, and many places still looked mostly the same, like taking a trip back in time. My friend Jeff Kelly, when visiting back in 2000, commented that it was...