February,
1999
They
couldn’t keep their eyes off of it, city kids staring out at wide open spaces
that they’d been told for years was nothing more than some kind of garbage
dump, where even to breathe the air meant almost certain death.
City
kids from Union City, Weehawken, Guttenberg, West New York, Hoboken, North
Bergen and – yes, even Secaucus, all nearly stricken blind the disparity of
what they thought they would see when they agreed to come out onto the water on
this sunny but brisk day in February, and what they actually were seeing close
up – a winter wonderland with bits of ice, but life, too, exotic to their way
of thinking and gently swaying fox tail and cat tails and other stalks of brown
grass taller than the tallest of the kids in the boat, and strange streams
whose secrets were being slowly revealed as the boat edged each.
And
these fourth graders were the gifted and talented kids from nine schools
throughout the county, not the dullards that played hooky and got detention, so
learned little even from books.
These
kids were smart kids, book-learned kids, and yet this two day seminar in the
Hackensack Meadowlands opened whole new chapters none of their school books
provided, chapters read off to them by the education staff of the Meadowlands
Environmental Center in Lyndhurst, for whom this was only one of many moving
image books they could provide, from one of a variety of programs for children
and yes – even teachers – in the region, teaching them lessons on this wondrous
mysterious world within ear shot of their front doors – a wilderness many kids
had glimpsed from their back end of the Palisades in places like North Bergen,
Union City and Jersey City, but never for one instant realized what was really
here.
“This
really is a journey of discovery for most of these kids,” said Gabrielle
Bennett-Meany, education specialist for the Environment Center
And
the fact that this is right in their own backyard makes it even more thrilling,
Meany said.
“This
wetlands and estuary system is not a remote, far-off place. It’s right here and
it’s accessible. The kids are amazed to find they are sharing the region with
egrets, hawks, turtles, snakes and other animals they have only read about in
books,” said Meany, looking at their faces, and mine, although seeing on my
face a slightly different expression, of a different kind of city kid who had
spent as much time on a river as in the streets of Paterson where I grew up,
and yet, even I – who thought he had seen it all, had dipped my toes in the
most polluted river in America – was amazed.”
This
seemingly odd juxtaposition of expansive natural preserve with densely
developed areas was not lost on the children, said Rosalyn Nussman, director of
the Hudson County Gifted and Talented Consortium of educators, who coordinated
the workshop with the staff of the Hackensack Meadowlands Development
Commission – the body charged in 1969 with the orderly development of this area
and preservation, although at times these two concepts collided, and left them
in the awful position of having to choose which to emphasize. On this trip,
they were focused on preservation, and boasting about how much life had
returned to the Hackensack , which had come close
to competing with the Passaic
River
Manufacturers
on both rivers had seen the waterways as a kind of toilet into which they could
flush what they wanted, a cheap and easy disposal for a variety of nasty things
that later proved deadly, not merely to those things that lived in the water,
but the walking, talking, and breathing people who lived along side of it.
As
the boat chugged on, some of the eight and nine year olds gasped – at some
large white bird I later learned was an egret and at the top half of a familiar
building poking over the tops of the reeds and beyond the cliff-like Palisades
upon which many of them lived, a building nearly everyone saw every day across
the other side of the Hudson River, The Empire State Building, but here, lost
among the reeds as if someone had picked it up and dropped off here, the way developers
once did pieces of the old Penn Station Railroad Terminal.
“That
makes an absolutely wonderful picture for them,” said Nussman. “And they will
remember it.”
After
a day-long trek through the marshes during which the kids kept journals of what
they saw and how they felt, collected samples, and made tree rubbings the
students returned the next day for an artists’ workshop where they could
describe their new-found knowledge using the performing or visual arts. The
students chose from workshops on pottery, mask making, drama, printmaking,
dance, puppetry, water colors and experimental orchestra.
Hackensack
Meadowlands Development Commission staff helped he students express themselves
in new, artistic, ways.
Swaying
tall reeds were captured through fluid dance movements; the sounds of gurgling
water and ruffling grasses were expressed through music.
The
dance instructor, Michael Schiocyl, from the Calabro
School in Hoboken had them create the environment of
the salt marsh through dance and had the children moving like fish. These kids
learned a whole new meaning of applying dance to communication.
“They
learned it doesn’t have to be ballet in order to be effective, it just has to
represent something,” Nussman said, noting also that the most valuable aspect
of the two-day workshop was the total integration of art and science. “Kids
tend to isolate things, but this experience showed them that there are
correlations between the two subjects.
It was interdisciplinary -- a total learning experience -- far above the
normal.”
Nussman
expects many of the students will return with their parents to walk the trails
and river banks of the Meadowlands District.
“They
have been introduced to a resource most did not know existed. I am sure they
will be back,” she said.
I knew I would be.
I knew I would be.
No comments:
Post a Comment