Then, Now and the Green World

Then: Green moist dark trees are crowding over the road. Sandy fields on either side seem to be completely filled with tomato plants and eggplants and asparagus. Migrant camps where Spanish speaking men rest between days spent in the fields with asparagus forks bending over and sweating and cursing in staccato bursts in that foreign language I will never learn.

Now: Fading paint is blistering on thin wooden slats that were the outside walls of those decaying migrant shacks that remain. They seem to have torn most of the shacks down. It is a cycle and has been going on for years. Merle Haggard even wrote a song about it.

Leave 'em up and the kids will just smoke dope and screw in there. Frames that once housed men in search of hard wages are empty now, are scary now. Shacks with screen doors with no screens in ‘em just barely hanging on with rusty hinges do become the stuff of nightmares, imagined and real. Punks, weed and the dark space inside create a rent in reality where laws and civilized behavior fade away for a few moments or hours. More than one story has been written about someone who got killed in one of 'em.

Then: For the most part the road is a treat to open eyes. These eyes are bright and dart fast from side to side trying to take it all in. These eyes are looking at it with a focus not as yet jaded by life and its lessons.

Two lanes wind through the cultivation past farm markets and towns and cross roads that have been here for a hundred and fifty years or more. The fields and orchards are verdant and there is the smell of raw stuff of real life in the air. Big machinery unique to packing peaches or apples or other fruit stands there like an enigma for the little engineers in the back of cars whizzing by to dream about late at night when they have reached their beach side resting places.

Now: The old packing houses are folding they couldn't compete with foreign competition. Conveyor belts and other packing machines are rusting. Their orange and pitted forms remain an enigma, a very different enigma.

When you have passed through fields of South Jersey on the way to the beach you smell life. It is almost sexual the aroma. All these many years later when I smell a real tomato not one of those plastic things you find in the hypermarket (you know the ones they won't bruise if you bounce them off the floor) I am right back to a stretch of road somewhere near Bridgeton, NJ looking at those tomato plants that are everywhere.

Then: It is a hot July day and I am pulling my legs over the vinyl seats just to hear the sucking sound that follows. Leg farts. I glance out the window, open to let the air in and there is a color to the sun that is over powering. It is a yellow dusty sun that is hot and growing hotter. The road winds and I whine "How much longer till we get there?" Getting no real answer I look around and the comics of the Philadelphia Inquirer are shoved down onto the backseat floorboard. Maybe I will read "Dondi" again or "Steve Canyon" to kill another minute.

This ride is an explosion of sensual experience. There is the smell of the old gasoline mix, it is intoxicating. You don't smell that anymore do you? The heat comes from the engine and the sun and the blacktop road. A three inch speaker on the front dash is blasting out "Nowhere to Run" and it sounds good. But why is the old man letting Motown play? He doesn't like their music. And then I lie down and stare up at an angle and we hit that canopy of trees.

Green and going on for 10 or 20 miles I am not sure how long it will be but eventually we will pass the old church. Maybe we will stop and I will get to look at the old cast iron headstones. What a weird thing those are. But the Green part of the ride it is cooling and it is not long until I will be at the beach. Looking up at the trees in memory as I whiz by in Ford Galaxy 500, a long gone ghost, I am deep into the green world.