Intern 101
1975
Alphonso Hernandez pulled the van off the road and we parked. "Now we walk." We grabbed the canvas bag out of the back, pulled some sampling tubes and set out into the reeds.
A tidal creek usually snakes its way in from the river. In the meadows, the creek source is too often a pipe beneath a road, a dead-end or a hidden outfall. I followed Alphonso through the tall phrags along a path he knew but the spring growth had hidden. Soon the ground was wet and we were squishing along. I noticed something had begun to stink. "That's the creek" he said. "Now we follow our noses." It was 1975, five years from the first Earth Day, and I was doing what I had been wanting to do for a while. I was saving the environment.
And this environment needed saving.
Cromakill was not one of our favorite sampling spots. We couldn't see much of it but what we saw was a mess. An industrial pipe, poking out from a creek bank, might only discharge at night. Sewage flowed in from barely functioning primary treatment plants. Our sampling said that this creek was dead.
Only it wasn't.
We saw killies whever we went. Hearty Killifish in swarms. Mud crab holes. Mussels. We saw men putting in crab traps with chunks of chicken tied to them pulling out blue-claws. And egrets and heron snacking along the banks of Mill Creek, Berry's Creek and Saw Mill Creek.
Heart and Lungs
One of the most startling conclusions to come from the work done by the environmental team of the HMDC in the 1970s was that the Hackensack River is upside down. Most think of rivers as flowing from upland to lowland to sea. The Hacky was cut off at a dam at Oradell built in the 1920s. Upland runoff from the estuarine basin isn't enough to make a river. The river isn't so much a river as a tidal basin and the beating heart is the tide, pulsing twice a day up from the reaches of Newark Bay and reaching into the backwater creeks like Cromakill all the way to Oradell.
What kept it alive? A beating heart needs lungs. At low tide, hundreds of acres of the the Saw Mill Creek Wildlife Management Area are a mudflat teeming with algae. Water rushes over this flat as the tide rises and brings oxygen into the river. Pockets of Spartina Alterniflora and other oxygen-generating estuarine plants were always there -- if you knew where to look. The water sweeps out and in, pulsing its effects into the farthest reaches of the estuary.
In the eight years I worked with the team at the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission, I would spend a lot of time learning from that river.
Sampling the backwater creeks in the Hackensack Meadowlands Estuary in the 1970s
Killies in my hands