BERGEN COUNTY, NEW JERSEY: HISTORY AS NOSTALGIA, NATURE AS REGRET an Artist Looks at Historic Sites, Space and Time Despina Metaxatos Bergen Community College
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BERGEN COUNTY, NEW JERSEY: HISTORY AS NOSTALGIA, NATURE AS REGRET An Artist Looks at Historic Sites, Space and Time Despina Metaxatos Bergen Community College My interest in space was prompted by my return to New Jersey following three years spent in the wide-open spaces of Western Australia. I experienced firsthand the ways in which physical space impacts many aspects of our lives – our daily routine, our perceptions, and especially our mental space. On my return home, I developed a renewed interest in the history of my town, Teaneck, and in the history of Bergen County in general. If low population density and physical distance affect the ways in which people relate in Western Australia, these factors may have played changing roles in the development of my town from its colonial-era roots to the present. That the expansive sense of space, time, and wild nature I associated with Western Australia had once existed in New Jersey was a revelation in broad daylight, while also provoking a curious sense of loss. “History is experienced as nostalgia, and nature as regret – as a horizon fast disappearing behind us,” writes French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space. Gradual shifts in our perception of space and time began to appear radical as I investigated and photographed historic Bergen County sites such as Paramus’ Red Mill or Arcola Tower, now imprisoned in a Route 4 cloverleaf, thus becoming a locus for Lefebvre’s discussion of “dominated space.” As physical space is usurped by virtual, abstract screen space, the concrete acquires that aura of nostalgia in places where the past punctures our present grid. At the museum he operates on Sundays in his retirement, Fritz Behnke shows me a vintage map of the farmland his grandfather acquired in the village of Paramus, Bergen County, New Jersey, in 1886. On the rectangle fronting Paramus road is written “Behnke” in a beautiful cursive script (Bromley). The land on the map has a 2 Metaxatos: Bergen County, NJ personality, surrounded by other family names. I try to picture the acres of black soil celery farm shown in museum photographs in place of the malls and highways that Paramus is known for today. It’s a peculiar form of time travel. In the 1970s, the Garden State was “the first state to be declared to have no rural areas remaining based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of population density” (Wortendyke). When Mr. Behnke was born in 1919, coming to Paramus might have meant rabbit or turkey hunting along Sprout Brook, not bargain hunting at Paramus Park Mall. Between 1950 and 1960, The Garden State: “... no rural areas remaining.” following the construction of Routes 17, 4, and the Garden State Parkway crisscrossing the ten square miles of Paramus, Behnke and many of his neighbors sold off most of their land for malls. The sale of their land, he tells me, meant real money, as opposed to the penny an ear of corn would bring – and the labor required to earn it. Geography being destiny, Paramus’ location as the hub of a road network twenty miles from Manhattan ensured that farming would become “passé” (Wells, qtd. in Behnke Paramus xvi) – a situation heralded by the opening of the George Washington Bridge in 1931. A few years before opening his museum in 2002, Behnke wrote a book entitled Paramus, The Way We Were, 1922-1960. The cover features “one of my proudest pictures … of me as a young man, plowing the fields behind a team of horses. … hard work but I loved it” (Behnke, Paramus xiii). The author considers himself a “Paramus historian by avocation” yet with a broader mission: In my quest to preserve history I have frequently visited schools and civic and community groups to make my slide presentation. I have also The Mid- Atlantic Almanack 3 maintained the original Behnke Family Barn as a historical site; over four hundred school children a year come to see it. As they stand in the yard I ell them, “Look around as far as you can see (of course there are houses there now). All of this land was our family’s farm. I show them around the barn and explain all the old tools and implements of farming, including the harnesses for the horses, which did all the work before the tractor was invented. (Paramus xii) Of his photograph behind the plow, Behnke observes, “I can’t help but feel how odd it is that some of the simple ‘chores’ of yesteryear have become the recreation of today” (Paramus xiii). The repetitive, labor-intensive nature of chore may well carve its own path, according to Freud. Like a wound which does not heal, “The memory of an experience (that is, its continuing operative power) depends on a factor which is called the magnitude of the impression and on the frequency with which the same impression is repeated” (Freud, qtd. in Derrida 201). Freud further observed that “pain leaves behind it particularly rich breaches” (qtd. in Derrida 202). We sense Behnke’s regret for farming as “the best occupation I have ever held” (Paramus xiii), and his need to come to terms with this loss through his contribution to local history. Is it farming per se or that routine perambulation on the land which is lost? On the other side of the country, Fidel Ybarra, “eleven months retired from forty-four years as a Santa Fe [railroad] section hand” (Least Heat-Moon 231) exhibits a similar intimacy as he sits at his dining table drawing a map for William Least Heat-Moon in PrairyErth: [Ybarra] draws twin parallel lines across the top that are train tracks and then freehands in curving parallels that are the diverging routes, and he begins talking as he draws in sidings, bridges, the control tower once at Elinor junction, cattle pens, the Strong City hotels…the section hands’ houses there (putting roofs on each one). 4 Metaxatos: Bergen County, NJ He labels every item and gives measurements and distances, even the mileposts around Gladstone and Matfield, and he lists the trackman’s tools and defines them: Spike maul—to drive spikes Claw bar—to pull spikes Lining Bar – to use to raise track also to line track and other various uses. (233, italics his throughout) When asked “whether he has driven a spike in every mile of track in the county,” Ybarra responds, Way more than that. …I could take you out and show you just about every place I drove a spike, and the idea is that it was a hard task, the kind of work you remember. (233-34) What unites both Behnke and Ybarra in their perception of place is a sense of presence. Their physical investment of hours, days and years of labor in specific natural settings has worn treads. Fidel’s “primitive … first time” map (Least Heat-Moon 236) is a memory of his walking the terrain for decades – as unmediated in its way as explorer García López de Cárdenas’s discovery of the Grand Canyon described in Walker Percy’s essay “Loss of the Creature.” The worst of it is that today’s tourists don’t even realize their “impoverishment” (Percy 54). In his book, Behnke tells readers that his father, a “jack- of-all-trades” like neighboring farmers, built every building on the farm, where he himself developed the construction skills that would serve him post-farming at the Behnke family-run retail lumberyard, Paramus Building Supply (Paramus xiii). He shows me tools at the museum that family members had personally developed to handle specific farm tasks, such as a patented egg-candling machine (Personal Interview), whereas today Paramus has at least one Home Depot. The terrain that Behnke knew well enough to map in his head would soon be carved into new roads leading to housing developments, malls, and municipal projects which would necessitate the revision of existing paper maps. The burgeoning The Mid-Atlantic Almanack 5 population in turn created a pressing need for more and organized community services – police, fire, postal, maintenance, newspaper, houses of worship, library and recreation – previously shared ad hoc in a “jack of all trades” farming community (Paramus 73-96). We can see Percy’s “complex distribution of sovereignty” taking root here, where formerly farm co-ops doubled as social centers; sawmills, gristmills, blacksmiths, ice houses, home canning and sewing served farm and family needs; and midwives and home remedies preceded hospitals (see Behnke, Paramus 47-52, 152). “In 1948, five hundred eighty homes were built during what was the height of the residential-building boom in Paramus.” This in a community “sprinkled” with a few 19th or early 20th century farmhouses, whose occupants knew, relied upon, and often even married each other (Behnke, Paramus 163, 142). Behnke is fond of lists; the following were built to handle “the rapid growth of the school-age population during the period 1950-1962”: Memorial School, 1950; Spring Valley School, 1950; Stony Lane School, 1954; Ridge Ranch School, 1954; High School, 1957; Parkway School, 1958; Westbrook Middle School, 1960; Eastbrook Middle School, 1963 (Paramus 69, 67-68). Behnke centers the list on the page, prefacing it with the comment that returning veterans starting families spurred these and other building projects, which “led to another decline of rural life in town” (Paramus 67). One might poetically see Behnke’s simple list of schools as an epitaph to the way of life he was born into but which was taken from him in his prime of life. The nostalgia, if not regret, is palpable even through his dry style.