kalpurna

Well, I am now back in Chicago (brevisse, your package is coming as soon as I find out where the hell the post office is, which will be TOMORROW if I DIE TRYING), and feeling rather nostalgic for my lovely home state of New Jersey. New Jersey gets an extremely bad rap from people out of state. When you tell people you are from Jersey, many people think it is clever to say, "Oh? What exit?" (This joke, ironically, misses its mark for the simple reason that it fails to specify what highway – it's not like there's only one.)

Part of the problem here is that people tend to conflate New Jersey with North Jersey, which is, let's face it, a bit of a wasteland. Central Jersey can be gorgeous, especially along the Delaware; full of old pre-Revolutionary towns and green valleys and hordes of wild deer. South Jersey is largely farms, and the Jersey Shore is a beast unto itself – and that's not even mentioning the Pine Barrens, which are utterly weird, being made up mostly of sand and seven to eight foot tall pine trees.

But even North Jersey, with its thousands of towns spilling one into the other and rows upon rows of strip malls stretching out into the sunrise, has a peculiar charm which I think only a New Jersey native can truly appreciate. It has to do with incredible ugliness, and tastelessness, and lack of class, and pollution. It's generations of people growing up with teased hair and cynicism, never leaving the town they grew up in, working in nowhere, horrible jobs, going down the shore after senior prom – and just by living it, raising that kind of life up to something like poetry.

New Jersey is a state of contradictions: the richest state per capita, with a deeply working-class ethos; an ugly state, which births artists and musicians; an industrial state, which produces more blueberries than anywhere else in the United States; unsophisticated and ranking second for education in the country. In its honor, and because I have large rodents on the mind (I successfully signed up for muskratjamboree, AND I have paid), I give you this poem, by BJ Ward.

New Jersey

Whenever friends visit from far away –
San Francisco or Jamaica –
what amazes them about my state
more than the long couch of the shore
looking at the constant television of the ocean
or the cloverleaf exit ramps swirling out
like ribbons about to be tightened
on the gift of traffic congestion –
what amazes them are the groundhogs –
"What a noble creature," George said.
"Holy crow, mon, a land seal," said Billson.
And there it is – a stubby, little, near-sighted Buddha
looking up from the county road's bank
as we stop the car, reverse back to it.
If we were all in a bar in Bayonne,
its look would say, "I'm gonna kick your ass."
In a library, it would say, "Why are you
disturbing me? I'm reading Kirkegaard."
But this is the weedy hips of the thoroughfare,
and our friend is mid-sentence in the grass's long summer novel,
navigating its own cloverleaves. It considers us
in our ridiculous car, and then something amazing –
it stands up on its hind legs – and I realize
the Jersey water has helped it evolve
into something more human.
This is New Jersey.
We're crawling on four wheels backwards,
looking at its pinched face,
the shimmering flanks, the dehydrated hands –
the short, imperfect loveliness of groundhog.

And, what the hell: have a song by Fountains of Wayne, a band named after a North Jersey strip mall.

Hackensack