by Bob Bock

[This article originally appeared in American Currents, publication of the North American Native Fishes Association and is reprinted with the author's permission.]

E very once in awhile, someone makes us appreciate something that's truly miraculous, but which we've somehow managed to overlook anyway. This issue, I'd like to thank ace photographer John Brill, who told me about the marvels of the mummichog. I'd also like to thank Robert Sullivan, whose beautifully written book, The Meadowlands, allowed me to finally appreciate what I'd long ago written off as one of the most defiled landscapes on earth.

Left: Vince Lombardi rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, looking across the Meadowlands towards Newark. Photo: Bruce Stallsmith.

Last issue, we printed John's calendar of fish photographs, which included a shot of a male mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus) in full breeding regalia. Even though our reproduction was in black and white, the fish's sequined brilliance still shone through. For anyone who doesn't know about this species, mummichog are tough little killifish that inhabit coastal waters - equally at home in salt, brackish, and tidal waters. True to what Brill told me, a live mummichog, which I had rescued from a bait shop on Maryland's Kent Island, proved a diaphanous marvel. Specks of neon fluorescent green gleamed from an olive background. Mummichog, Brill explained, are an extremely variable species, with a few individuals showing spectacular colors, and others just a dull greenish gray. In addition to the neon-bright green, some of the more colorful mummichog may even show highlights of red, blue, and yellow.

Although it took me about 35 years to appreciate this species, I first learned of mummichog when I was 7 years old. Back then, I knew them only by the name "killies." I discovered them in my hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey, on the Southern fringe of the 72-mile long industrial wilderness known as "The Meadowlands." I can't remember how, but I managed to catch two of them in a small pond in the undeveloped portion of the city park, near the Hackensack River. However, I do remember carrying a mummichog in each fist through the eight or ten city blocks to my house.

The ferocious tenacity with which they clung to life still amazes me. After I got home, I filled the laundry sink with about three or four inches of tap water and dropped them in. The switch from brackish water to fresh apparently didn't phase them. Neither did the straight-from-the-faucet, chlorinated water changes: they lived for months.

Having wrested such a treasure from the Meadowlands, I couldn't keep from going back, even though my parents disapproved. The view from the bridge spanning the mown-and-paved part of Lincoln Park to the undeveloped "Back" is still fresh in my mind's eye. The red-brown dirt road glittered with shards of broken glass as it twisted off into a vast field of ten-foot tall reeds. Off in the distance, beyond the reeds, the landfill jutted abruptly skyward. And far above the landfill, the imposing arches and sharp angles of the elevated road known as the Pulaski Skyway stretched to the horizon, like some massive dull gray serpent. Past the reeds and landfill, sunlight gleamed from the dappled surface of the Hackensack River. Not another human being was in sight. To my 7-year old eyes, the utter desolateness of the place was a little frightening - but utterly fascinating.

In his book, author Sullivan explained that the Meadowlands are a 32-square mile patchwork of salt marsh and factories, inlets and overpasses, reeds and garbage dumps. This urban wilderness, he added, lies just five miles outside Manhattan. The area is rich with history. When Europeans first arrived there, the meadowlands were a wonderland of Cedar forests and verdant meadows between the shores of the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers. The area teemed with wildlife: bear, deer, bald eagles, foxes and raccoons. A short time later, pirates preyed upon unsuspecting ships that sailed into New York Harbor and Newark Bay.

From the outset, however, the settlers were at odds with the Meadowlands, felling the cedar forests for houses and corduroy roads, draining what land they could, and, always, always, dumping their garbage there. Despite humanity's best efforts to "civilize" this wilderness, the meadowlands often prevailed anyway. In the early 1800's, for example, the Swartwout brothers built dikes along the Hackensack, in hopes of reclaiming the marshy land for dairy cattle. The brothers envisioned enormous herds which would supply neighboring Manhattan with milk. The dikes, however, soon receded into the shifting mud of the Hackensack River and the land was soon flooded again. Eventually, the lone surviving Swartwout brother died penniless, still scheming to turn the Meadowlands into farmland.

Although new laws have stopped much of the dumping, humanity and the meadowlands are still skirmishing. Giants Stadium rises defiantly from the sea of reeds surrounding it; yet the roads that lead there crack and buckle as they slowly sink into the wet ground beneath them.

When I first discovered my little pocket of the meadowlands, Giants stadium hadn't been built. I knew nothing of the Swartwouts, had never even seen a cedar tree. As Sullivan pointed out in his book, if the cedars hadn't been cut, they probably would have died off anyway. In 1902, the Hackensack was dammed far up river, cutting off most of the freshwater that fed the swamps below. The River became a giant estuary, and miles and miles of freshwater swamps changed to salt marsh.

The vast sea of reeds I saw from the bridge that cold spring day probably wasn't natural to the area either. Sullivan explained that Phragmites communis - nearly everywhere in the meadowlands - is an opportunistic invader that takes over in disturbed areas, soon choking out the native grasses, shrubs, and trees that are struggling to hang on.

But still, it was in this battered landscape where I had my first real encounter with wildlife. The row house where I grew up on stood on a treeless main street. The only wildlife I saw there were pigeons and English house sparrows.

As I made my way through the piles of old leaves and mounds of trash that had been dumped in the back of the park, I saw chickadees, small woodpeckers, red wing blackbirds and mourning doves among the scrubby saplings that poked up through the dumps. When I hiked the trails through the reeds, ringneck pheasants always waited until I almost stepped on them before they exploded into a flapping brown blur of feathers that sped through the air. Near dusk, we'd often see cottontail rabbits on the trails ahead. Occasionally, we'd catch a glimpse of the eyes and nose of a muskrat as it swam in the seepage ponds. The ponds, too, were home for mallard ducks, herons, and egrets.

By the time I entered high school, my friends Tom Kudenchack, Mike Nardolilli, and I were spending much of our free in the Back of the Park. We became urban Huck Finns, walking and exploring the trails there. Once, we found a stack of creosote-treated planks. We chopped them to size with my old boy scout hand ax, then carried them to Twin Island pond, where we built a raft and sailed to the reed-covered islands. Near dusk, we'd circle the garbage piles and I'd plunk rats with the high-powered slingshot I'd sent away for through an ad in Outdoor Life. Mike began drawing maps of the area and we named its features after ourselves and people we knew: "Tom's Rock," "Mike's Peak," and "The Bock Pond Tract."

Looking back, though, the most astonishing thing about the Back of the Park is that everywhere there was water, there were mummichog. Along the oil-soaked banks of the Hackensack River, these little fish formed schools numbering in the thousands. In Twin Island and Horseleg Ponds, they were as thick as Meadowlands Mosquitoes. Eventually, mummichog even appeared in the toxic pools that formed along the landfill - just a few at first, then more numerous with each passing season.

But prospective mummichog seiners need to be cautious about the Meadowlands. Sullivan told of a man who, in the fall of 1956, set out to hike across the Meadowlands. He was found dead after the spring thaw, floating in one of the creeks. Although his body was eventually discovered, numerous bodies in the Meadowlands probably haven't been. Sullivan wrote that the New York mob has been reputedly dumping bodies there since Prohibition.

I also had my own close calls in the Meadowlands, and am probably pretty lucky not to have been a cadaver there myself. When I was 7, my friend and I were exploring a sewer-fed creek just across Route 1-9 from the Back of the Park, probably looking for mummichog. I crossed a plank straddling the creek, and stepped on what I thought was solid ground. Before I knew what had happened, I was waist deep in mud and was still sinking. This was probably my first real experience with adrenaline. I either clawed or ran my way out and the next thing I remember is standing on the bank, covered in muck from the waist down.

Another time, when I was in my early teens, I was hunting rats and any other small animals along a trail in the reeds. From around the bend in the trail, a young kid who looked a little younger than I was suddenly appeared. An old two-by-four was in his hand, held high above my head. In less than a second, the steel prongs of my Whamo! Wrist Rocket slingshot were inches from his face, the straps pulled back to my shoulder. He froze in his tracks, the beam held above my head while I wondered whether I'd need to let the glass marble in the slingshots' pouch find its target. Finally, a smile flashed across his face and he turned and disappeared off into the reeds.

When we were 17, Mike and I were sitting on the crumbling concrete bulkhead next to the Hackensack River. A rowboat was buzzing upriver, and we didn't pay any attention to it as we talked, probably about our favorite subject, girls. I heard a loud crack and at about the same time something whizzed past my ear. I heard another crack and something pinged off the bulkhead. I looked at the rowboat and saw that one of its occupants was holding what looked like a .22 caliber rifle. In the instant before we left, it occurred to me how unnaturally, terrifyingly fast bullets were. By the time you heard them, they were already where they were going.

Finally, I stopped visiting the park completely. I was 18 and between minimum wage jobs. The bottom was falling out of the marine repair business as the industry switched to southern ports and there was no work for me at the shipyards. I borrowed my father's Super 8 camera and was shooting nature footage in the Back of the Park. Abruptly, the image in the view finder blurred and as I looked away, the ground came rushing toward my face. I put my hand to the side of my head and then looked at the blood on my fingers. The two other teens I had befriended an hour ago were standing over me, two-by-fours aimed at my head and demanding the camera and my wallet. The following January, I left for college.

A couple of months ago, Mike sent me his copy of Sullivan's book. I devoured it, and even read sections to my kids. Shortly thereafter, I had to return to the Meadowlands area on weekends for a few months during a family emergency. On one of my return trips, I got on the Turnpike at the Route three ramp and put a Jimmy Buffet tape in to combat the boredom of yet another four-hour drive home. To my right, at least a hundred acres of reeds and marshes stretched out ahead of me, leading to a dormant garbage hill covered with tall grass and a few scraggly trees.

At the edge of a flooded plain, a line of telephone polls was slowly succumbing to the persistence of the Meadowlands. One or two were already lying sideways in the water. Others were leaning at 45-degree angles. Just then, it struck me - the folly that can come of people simply doing what seems like a good idea at the time. For three hundred years, civilization struggled to turn the Meadowlands into the industrial powerhouse it was never meant to be. With its three great Rivers - the Hudson, Hackensack, and Passaic - the Meadowlands probably would have been one of the world's greatest fisheries, capable of feeding much of North America.

Defiled though it may be, however, the Meadowlands is still a miraculous place. The toxic effluents and industrial poisons that flood the area have made it a crucible of sorts, from which emerge only the toughest, most adaptable of creatures. The mummichog has survived just about everything humanity has thrown at it and managed to thrive where other species have perished. Some day, scientists mining the genomes of the world's creatures may one day find strategies within the mummichog's genetic makeup for combating toxic anticancer drugs and other poisonous compounds. And in what would be one of history's greatest ironies, this long overlooked and abused symbol of the Meadowlands' resilience might one day benefit humanity.

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An account on breeding the mummichog appears on NANFA's website at http://www.nanfa.org/articles/ACFheteroclitus.htm. Although I haven't read it yet, I've just learned that native fish guru John Quinn also has a book about The Meadowlands, Fields of Sun and Grass : An Artist's Journal of the New Jersey Meadowlands. Quinn's book is available from Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com.

Meadowlands today: looking east across the Hudson towards Manhattan from the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the NJ Turnpike. The World Trade Center is visible peeking up over the grasses on the left. Photo: Bruce Stallsmith.