Tag Archives: bergen county

I was born in the upper right corner of New Jersey, just to the west of the Hudson River and a few miles south of the New York state line and the Rockland State Hospital, an asylum famous for once housing Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon.

That corner of the map is Bergen County, the most populous county in the state and where I spent the first 17 years of my life, before I managed to escape. It is unrelentingly suburban and, to my young sensibility, numbingly banal. In my senescence, six decades later, I have moderated my disdain and now recognize it as my hatchery — and a part of my psyche that I cannot ever fully extirpate. Like Quentin Compson speaking about his native Mississippi, I can say of my own native state, “I don’t hate it. I don’t. I don’t hate it.”

The Hackensack River

Bergen County is split by two rivers, the Hackensack and the Passaic. The later forms part of the western border of the county and the Hackensack ran through the town where I was raised and drained, finally, into Newark Bay to the south, between Newark and Jersey City, two old cities that show their age.

To the east of the Hackensack, the land rises abruptly until it reaches an edge high above the Hudson River, called the Palisades, a 20-mile long series of basalt cliffs that rise to 500 feet above the water. This bit of America, from Paterson to Manhattan is the landscape of my Umwelt — etched into my psyche.

Since I grew up there and knew no better, I assumed that all rivers must be as wide as the Hudson, and when I first came South to go to college, was less than impressed with what passes for a river there. The Deep River, near my Guilford College, I could have jumped across. That’s not a river, that’s a brook (or, in Southern parlance, a creek).

But the Hudson was noble, wide and impressive. Historically, it ran through the home land of the Lenape Indians and the county is filled with towns and rivers given versions of their Indian names, including my home town, Old Tappan, which was named for the Tappan tribe of Lenape people, which may mean “cold water.” All of New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York were originally Lenape lands.

Other Bergen County Native American names, however twisted by the ears of the early colonists, include: Hackensack; Ho-Ho-Kus; Mahwah Moonachie; Paramus; Teaneck; and Wyckoff.

Names can get quite twisted. In central Jersey the name of Cheesequake was originally the Lenape name Chiskhakink, which meant “cleared land.” Other New Jersey names, some harder to pronounce than others, at least for non-native Jerseyites, include Hoboken, Hopatcong, Manahawkin, Mantoloking, Metuchen, Neshanic, Netcong, Pahaquarry, Parsippany, Pequannock, Piscataway, Ramapo, Secaucus, Squankum, Succasunna, Weehawken, Wickatunk. And that doesn’t count the lakes, rivers and creeks: Absecon; Assunpink; Assiscunk; Hakihokake; Hockhockson; Kittatinny; Luppatatong; Machesautauxen; Metedeconk; Muksukemuk; Musconetcong; Picatinny; Pohandusing; Rancocas; Shabakunk; Waackaack; Wawayanda; Wickecheoke — and that’s about 10 percent of the list. I believe I’ve heard my cat say “Waackaack” at times.

If you’re from there, these names roll easily off the tongue, if not, well — I once heard a newscaster pronounce Parsippany as “par-suh-PAN-ee.”

Then, there’s Kinderkamack Road, which sounds like it should be among the many Dutch names in the area, but is really a version of the Lenape for “Place of the Ceremonial Dance.” But you would be forgiven for mistaking it. After the Native Americans came the Dutch, with their own names for things, such as Kill van Kull, Polifly, Paulus Hook, Schraalenburgh, and Tenafly.

There’s a lot of history in New Jersey, although most Jerseyites pay little attention to it. Not only Native American and Dutch history, but New Jersey was once a slave state. My county, Bergen, was the largest holder of enslaved people in New Jersey, with 20 percent of its population in bondage in 1800. New Jersey was the last of the Northern states to outlaw slavery. At the end of the Civil War, there were about a dozen slaves still owned in the state, eventually freed by the 13th Amendment. By the way, the state voted against Abraham Lincoln both in 1860 and in 1864.

When my father was clearing land in our back yard in Old Tappan, he dug up an old brick foundation that a local historian identified as the remains of an 18th century slave quarters.

The stony ground of the state has seen a lot of history. One of the most famous and consequential battles of the Revolutionary War was fought in Jersey, as George Washington crossed the Delaware River in the winter of 1776 and surprised British forces at Trenton. He did it again a year later.

During the Gilded Age, New Jersey was a comfortable home for corporate monopolies. Before being broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1911, Standard Oil of New Jersey had controlled nearly 90 percent of refined oil in the United States.

Oh, New Jersey. Wikipedia lists more than 50 New Jersey politicians convicted of crimes and corruption, most famously in recent years, Sen. Bob Menendez, who was found guilty of taking bribes after investigators found Menendez had illegally received a Mercedes-Benz car, 13 gold bars, and $486,461 in cash.

The Chin

In my own home town of Old Tappan, Mafia boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante had a house a little more than a hundred yards from where I grew up. I didn’t know that at the time, but imagine my surprise when, at college in 1970, I turned on the radio one morning and heard the NPR announcer say that the entire police force of Old Tappan had been arrested for taking cash from Gigante’s wife, Olympia.

Other high points in New Jersey history:

It was the home, in Menlo Park, to Thomas Edison’s research laboratory, later moved to West Orange.

New Jersey was the first state to ratify Prohibition.

In 1927, the Holland Tunnel connected NJ to Manhattan, followed by the George Washington Bridge in 1931 and the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937.

In 1932, the baby of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow was kidnapped from their home in Hopewell, NJ., and later found dead. A nation-wide manhunt eventually led to the arrest two years later of Bruno Hauptmann, who was convicted of and executed for the crime.

The dirigible airship Hindenburg, a German Zeppelin, exploded in flames upon landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in 1937, killing 13 passengers and 22 crewmen. “Oh, the humanity!”

In the infamous Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938, Orson Welles claimed that Martians had landed in Grovers Mill, NJ.

And on Sept. 23, 1949, Bruce Springsteen was born, in Long Branch, on the Jersey shore.

The state tends to get divided into three parts, Northern Jersey, Central and South Jerseys. The north is all suburbs of New York City; the south is oriented to Philadelphia and Central Jersey is orphaned between.

But really, there is another way of splitting up the map that is more reflective of the cultural realities. There is suburban and industrial New Jersey, which is a ribbon running from the northeastern part of the state and cuts diagonally across to the southwest, near Philly. This includes not only my Bergen County, but also Newark, Trenton, Camden, and the Oranges — pronounced locally as Onch, East Onch, South Onch, and West Onch. There is no Nawt Onch.

The second part might be considered Appalachian New Jersey and is in the northwest, largely rural and wooded, with the Kittatinny Mountains and the Delaware Water Gap. My summer Boy Scout camp was there, where I was first camper and later camp counselor.

The third part of the state might be called Confederate New Jersey, technically below the Mason-Dixon Line and composed of farm land, swamps and the infamous Pine Barrens, supposed home to the Jersey Devil, a legendary flying demon, said to have been born in 1735 as the 13th child of local woman Deborah Leeds. The child, though born normally. immediately grew wings, tail, and claws and flew out to the Pine Barrens, where, like Big Foot, it is occasionally claimed to have been spotted.

South Jerseyites can even speak with a drawl, separating them culturally from those farther north. The familiar Joisey accent has a pronounced rising “dawg” while in the south, they are closer to a descending “doag.” (The North Jersey accent is quite distinct. We once had a plumber come to fix our “terlet.”)

There is a fourth important component to the state. Some consider it part of South Jersey, but it is distinct enough — and famous enough — to warrant its own regional name. It runs down the eastern margin of the state, from Sandy Hook to Cape May and it is the Jersey Shore. It is not like any other section of the state and has gained notoriety for the empty-brained drunkenness and pointlessness of the MTV “reality” television program. The less said, the better.

The broad stripe that runs diagonally down the center of the state is the heart of what people think of as being New Jersey. Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Union, Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties and parts of others, are both the suburban and industrial centers of the state, and the source of most of the enduring cliches.

But it is the center filet that has all the housing developments, mcmansions, oil refineries and chemical plants — to say nothing of the Pulaski Skyway and the single most trenchant metaphor for the state: The NJ Turnpike. (“Where do you live?” “Exit Four.”)

When I left New Jersey as a teenager headed off to college in North Carolina, I shook the dust off my sandals and said good riddance. I despised the bourgeois banality of it all and couldn’t wait to get to the “real” stuff that higher education would show me: art and poetry and music, and — well, beer and sex. But over the years I came to realize both that New Jersey was not exceptional in its inanity — that was everywhere — and also more importantly, I had to accept that New Jersey had built my insides.

The pace, the smells, the population density, the architectural styles, the speech, the ethnic and religious diversity I had known had all become the universal norms by which I judged the world.

It came as a shock, for instance, that there were so many churches and so few synagogues in the South. In Old Tappan, there was one Protestant church and one Catholic church and the nearest synagogue was in Closter. Here in my neighborhood in Asheville, there are three churches all in walking distance. Oy.

The Trinity Reformed Church in Old Tappan was presided over by the soft-spoken Louis Springsteen whose basic message to the congregation was that good is better than evil because it’s nicer. No brimstone, no hellfire. My Catholic friends went to St. Pius X at the other end of Cripplebush Road. Some of them went to parochial school and were taught by nuns. It was all just normal, and built that normal into me. Religion made no more difference to me or my friends than hair color or freckles.

I remember my father, raised in Cliffside Park, NJ, telling us that when he was drafted at the beginning of World War II and shipped off to Camp Wheeler in Georgia, he was shocked to find out the camp was segregated. The idea had never occurred to him.

And when I was at college a group of us decided to crash a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Liberty, NC, where the main speaker was the sheriff of Forsyth County, and I was surprised to find out that among the enemies they despised were not just Black folk, but Catholics and Methodists as well. Huh? Humanity never seemed such a narrow concept where I came from.

My Boy Scout troop was presided over by Paul Weinstein and his two assistants, Vern Riportella and Arch Curry. Basically, one of each.

It all, good and bad, became the unexamined bedrock of my personality. I remain somehow in New Jersey, even though I haven’t lived there in 60 years.

The highways I knew in Paramus seemed the normal highways; the shopping malls the size of Delaware were the norms; the traffic was normal; the oil refineries burning off their excess in the night sky was normal; the bus service, the delicatessens, the pizza, were all the baselines I took elsewhere with me.

I mean, come on — you call that a pastrami sandwich?

And New Jersey set the inner tick-tock of my sense of time, a quicker pace. As I’ve aged, the clock has slowed a bit, and living in the South for the majority of my life has moderated the tempo, but it still moves too fast for some. My Anne complains that I talk too fast, according to her North Carolina metronome.

Perhaps it is because my New Jersey innards prompts me more to favor efficiency than courtliness.

And while I grew up thinking of my home state as intellectually stultified, I have to grant that there are random points of light. I hesitate to include James Fenimore Cooper among them, after reading Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” — “Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” — but New Jersey was also the adopted home of Walt Whitman and the very subject and marrow of the poems of William Carlos Williams. There were also Stephen Crane, John Ciardi, Joyce Kilmer, Philip Roth, Amira Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), George R.R. Martin, to say nothing of the Ginsbergs, père et fils. The Jersey Shore town of Long Branch alone has given us Springsteen, Norman Mailer, Robert Pinsky, and Dorothy Parker.

Springsteen, Pinsky, Mailer, Parker

New Jersey gave birth to, or was home to George Antheil, Gerard Schwarz, Astrid Varnay, Eileen Farrell, Dorothy Kirsten, Jerome Hines, Sherrill Milnes, Michael Tree, Stephen Paulus, Judith LeClair, and one-third of the Beaux Arts Trio. And that’s not even counting Count Basie or Frank Sinatra.

And visual artists: Charles Addams, John Held Jr., George Platt Lynes, Robert Smithson, Reginald Marsh, George Segal, Tony Smith, Irving Penn, Marion Post Walcott, Cindy Sherman, George Tice, and, most famously, Alfred Stieglitz.

So, there is a serious element in the state, past the saltwater taffy, Miss America contests and Giants football in the Meadowlands. I’ve read work by all the authors, listened to music by all the singers and instrumentalists, either live or on recordings, and seen and often written about the visual artists. I hope that has also seeped in to the brainbox.

After all, maybe I don’t despise New Jersey like I used to, and perhaps I am not alone in having ambivalent feelings about the places that gave us birth and nurtured us. After all, Henry Thoreau complained about the torpor of Concord farmers and townspeople at a time when that village was also home to Emerson, Hawthorne and the Alcotts. Hmm. Might make for a good sonata.

Speak, Memory

August 3, 2016

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313 DeGraw Ave. 1927

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble getting to sleep, I take six decades of my living and slide them aside, like a Japanese door, to open on the landscape of my childhood. I remember the house I lived in when I was five or six years old, trace its floorplan, walk out its door and wander the streets. What is most surprising is how much there is stored in the neurons, untouched for half a century, that can be re-animated. Each door I open opens into a room with new doors to open, that open on other rooms with other doors.

Mom, Sue and Stan as kids And so, I remember the front room of the house where we lived with my grandmother, Nana, in New Jersey just after the war. It sat directly on the town boundary between Teaneck and Bogota at the point Degraw Avenue began its long westerly descent to the Hackensack River. It was the house where my mother grew up, where her father died when she was seven, where she then had to raise her younger brother and sister while her mother worked in Manhattan. It meant that my mother never really had a free childhood, and perhaps as a result, adulthood always seemed to feel like a burden.

313 degraw ave 1927 in snow That two-family house divided at the front door. To the right was the front room of our apartment. Straight behind the front door were the stairs to the second floor, where Nana’s sister and her husband lived. Tante Esther and Uncle Gerry. That front room led through a wide arch to the dining room, at the far end of which were two spring-mounted swinging doors — one on either end of the wall — which led to the kitchen. Off the dining room to the left, underneath the staircase to Tante Esther’s, were the bedrooms and the hard-tiled bathroom with its claw-footed bathtub. At the back of the house, tucked behind the kitchen, was an addition my father had built where Nana’s mother came briefly to live and finally to die. She was a formidable woman, born Anne Gurina Kristiansen in Norway, but so old by the time I knew her she seemed almost like death already. The fact she died in what became my bedroom hardly registered on me. I was too young to understand.

Usually, I get drowsy by this time, and I descend into a nether world.
The basement, reached by the dark stairs behind the kitchen, was a dungeon in which a large beast of many white asbestos tentacles resided, sitting in the middle of the cavern roofed with rafters and ducts. A coal chute gave some light beyond the golem, and what was once a window to the backyard near the top of the wall was now dark, covered with the addition where the old lady died. A cat once gave birth to kittens in the crawlspace accessed by that window. My father hated cats. I don’t know what happened to the kittens, but it is unlikely he harmed them. More likely he called the dogcatcher to come and get them. At any rate, they disappeared as quickly as they arrived.

That golem, the furnace, played in the cast of the adventures I devised in the cellar, turning used Reddi-Wip cans into space ships, which I shot through outer space with noises I generated in my throat, shooting each other into oblivion. Some days later, my mother wondered what the bad smell was and discovered the remaining cream in the cans had soured, stinking up my cosmos. Reddi-Wip was invented the same year I was born.

Captain Video

That interest in outer space came from a mahogany box in a corner of the dining room, which had a tiny curved glass window in it on which I religiously watched Captain Video, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, to say nothing of Captain Midnight. Television was new, quality was dubious, reception iffy, and programming spotty. We all knew the familiar “test pattern” that burned into the cathode ray tube before the day’s schedule began.

My father aided and abetted my fascination with space travel by fabricating for me and for my younger brothers what we called “space boards,” which were masonite panels we could hold on our laps, filled with various buttons and switches we could flip and push, in imitation of the control panels of our space heroes. It is amazing how easy it is to amuse a young boy with an active imagination.

But it wasn’t only space that captured my imagination, it was also cowboys. Because there was so little programming available for the early TV stations, they recycled endless movie re-releases to fill up the time. Many of these, at least on morning TV, were Westerns from the 1930s. I came to know and love Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Bob Steele — the “Three Mesquiteers,” and above all, Hopalong Cassidy. William Boyd had struck a coup by buying up the rights to his old movies and now refitted them for television, and later making a whole new series of TV adventures. Boyd was my favorite.

At the age of three or four — at any rate, before I began school — I remember my grandmother getting on my imaginary horse, Whitey, with me and riding her from the kitchen to the front door to see her off to work in the morning. Cap guns and cowboy hats were always the preferred Christmas presents.

Richard Newburgh 1949 copy This isn’t about nostalgia, however, but about how a small boy experiences life. As an adult, one has a well of experience to draw on, a series of related moments forming a net, so that each new occurrence has some resonance with its past. But as a child, each thing is new and as yet unconnected to the rest. There are things taken as given: family, the house, the yard; later, the school, the way to the grandparents house. All these things ultimately mesh together, but those early memories are discrete; it is only as I pull them together while trying to doze off, that they begin cohere.

In those first years, the world was largely circumscribed by the house and yard, with the rooms, the mystery of the understair closet, with its odor of dust and uncovered lathe, the cavern of the cellar, the apple tree in the back yard from which Nana made a yearly batch of applesauce, and the vacant lot next door, which was our cow prairie or our moonscape, depending on what we were playing that day. Or, for that matter, our jungle when we took our shirts off and “went native.”

Beginning with kindergarten, the world opened up. I walked the mile to school each day and the mile back, and the streets became tentacles of geography on which I built my picture of the world. Each street was a different reality. To give a summary picture of that geography: Degraw Avenue ran basically east-west; the few blocks on which our house sat was a plateau; down the west side, into Bogota and Hackensack, the road went downhill; and in the east, from Queen Anne Road on, it went downhill the other way toward the Meadowlands, Overpeck Creek and Fort Lee. That was the spine of my earth. Crossing it, almost like shoulders and hips, were Queen Anne Road and Palisade Avenue.

Home territory map

Our house was on the corner of Degraw Avenue and Farrant Terrace, which was the street that ran along the side of our house, took a 90-degree turn and continued down to Queen Anne Road as a kind of anastomosis, leading the same place as Degraw Avenue. My best friend, Tommy, lived in a house where Farrant Terrace bent. The Clems lived in the house next door to us; they were an older couple who treated us like an aunt and uncle. Their back porch had jalousie windows, a fact that much fascinated both me and my little brother.

The other arteries in this circulation all came off this main armature. It is difficult to express just how central this picture of the world was to one in the process of piecing together a whole self. At that age, I knew nothing of Nebraska or Timbuktu; it was the spine of my streets that were the core, the seed on which the crystal grew. From those first certain streets grew an internal sense of how the entire globe might be pulled together in a single flash of connectedness.

Ricky 20 mos copy Out the front door of our house and across the street was Crestview Place, which ran uphill steeply to Fourth Place in Bogota, where Nana’s mother-in-law, Aase, lived, upstairs in a house where her sister lived downstairs — Tante Marie. The two were very old, very wrinkled and very powdered. When I was still pre-school, Aase lived with her ancient husband Thorvald, who wore thick black wool suits with a vest and a pocket watch, had wire-brush whiskers and the distinctive smell of old man. He died early on in my life and Aase — whom we called “Bestemor (Norwegian for “grandma”) — lived on into her nineties. I spent many a day at Bestemor’s house, climbing into the attic to play with the toys she still had from the childhood of my mother’s brother, painted lead cars and airplanes.

Down the hill to Palisade Avenue is where my father had his hair cut by a barber named Dick, who wore a white coat and had one of those pencil mustaches one knows from Hollywood movies of the 1930s. It also led to Olsen Flooring Company, where my father worked as office manager and accountant.

Down the other way, to Queen Anne Road, led to the A&P, the delicatessen where we bought potato salad, and across the street from the deli, the bakery where we bought “mudballs” — a round, chocolate covered cupcake that we loved as kids.

At the point Farrant Terrace ended at Queen Anne Road was a tiny private grocery store whose floor was covered in sawdust — a common occurrence back then, now frowned upon by health codes — and a stationery we called the “candy store,” where I spent my nickels on Three Musketeers bars, Necco Wafers, and a particular favorite, a packet of five sweet jellies called Chuckles, whose flavors were cherry, orange, lime, lemon and licorice.

Chuckles Candies

By the time my mind wandered around to the candy, I would probably be asleep. But if not, if I still couldn’t drop off, I will wander around that circumscribed world as I did when I was in kindergarten and first grade. I walked to school every day and home afterwards, doubling that inner map of the world. A friendly policeman stopped traffic on Queen Anne Road to let me cross the street. I recall Mrs. Winters and my kindergarten class, the naps we took, the milk containers we drank from, the rhythm bands, the finger painting. I remember the playground around Longfellow School (now closed and turned into a church) and my Aunt Sally who was the school nurse, and little Willie Shydecker, whose fifth birthday party I went to in a house just two away from where Aunt Sally and Uncle Bernie lived. I sometimes wonder what ever happened to Willie.

Longfellow School today

But it was walking home from school that left its biggest mark on my being. I wandered. I didn’t always take the same route. I took what I called “short cuts.” These led me miles out of my way, exploring where other streets might lead. If I have traveled much as an adult, it was only a habit set in motion when I wandered down Fort Lee Road, past Amman Park with its small fountain, and up the hill and back down to Bogota and the broad mainline railroad tracks — at that time six tracks wide; now most of the tracks are ripped up and gone — which I would stand over on the bridge and watch the trains pass, shaking the ground. The boy is father to the man.

My wanderings amazed my parents, who thought it odd that I would walk so far out of my way, but they never seemed to think it might be dangerous for me to do so. I think they were quietly proud of their boy for being able to find his way around so easily. They also showed me off to the adult world for my prodigy ability to name all the cars on the street by make from the time I was two or three. One Fourth of July at a fireworks display over the Hackensack River I was carried around by my father on his shoulders who showed me off to uncles and grandfathers by pointing at cars parked in the lot and having me name them: “Pontiac, Studebaker, Packard, Rambler, De Soto, Kaiser, Crosley …”

1949 Frazer

Other times, he would test me, sitting on the front porch of the house and I named the cars as they passed on Degraw Avenue. From that time on, tests at school were never frightening; rather, they were a chance to show off again.

The odd thing remains that these memories of Teaneck seem to have a different reality from later memories, almost as if they were of a different person. I can draw a straight line from me at 68 back to me in fourth grade, me in college, me during my first marriage, me when I became a writer. But there is a kind of memory lacuna between that me and the me of these earliest thoughts. It is as if I have to dig down into the layers of soil separating me now from me then, like an archeologist, to discover this fragment or that, and then piecing together the shards into a full pot.

313 Degraw Avenue today

We all have a story-line in our memories, that continuous ego, that who-ness that we are. It is a novel told straight through. But these earliest memories are more of a collage, the bits and pieces reassembled in no particular order, the scents, the memory of being picked up and held, the doors swinging open to the kitchen, the golem in the basement. They are a preface to the story, oddly unconnected, yet, still of a piece. Tributaries to the river.

The box still has many pieces unrecollected here. I can take them out and play with them again next time a churning brain keeps me awake.

The engraved landscape

August 19, 2014

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Time is fierce

May 25, 2014

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We travel in time as much as in space.

And just as there are moments when you stand on the top of a rise and see grand vistas and the lay of the land suddenly becomes clear, there are moments when you climb up out of the hollow of local time and the years spread out in front of you as one vast temporal landscape.

I had such an experience this summer in New Jersey.

I was born and raised in the Garden State in several communities between the Hackensack and Hudson rivers. I left for college and have rarely been back in the intervening quarter century — family and friends had all died or moved away.

But on this trip my wife and I passed through Bergen County and managed to stop by some places I knew well as a boy.

Now I’m not about to wax nostalgic. I abhor nostalgia; it is a kind of morticians’ wax applied to the dead face of the past, distorting everything we once knew. Times were not better then and never were.

But things clearly have changed.

The first change is purely psychological: Everything has shrunk. The landscape that was so sprawling to my boy’s eyes is now condensed to a few tight city blocks. What seemed like an expedition is now walking distance. Skyscrapers are now bungalows.

Many people have experienced a similar sensation.

But the second change is more profound: The snapshot of New Jersey in my brain has remained static while time has bounded forward, so that when I revisit Teaneck or Old Tappan, I’m seeing what is in effect time-lapse photography: All the changes are accelerated so that what has moved invisibly day to day is now telescoped into a rush.

It isn’t just that there is more development. Bergen County has for a long time been the very model of suburbia; there are tract homes everywhere and more spring up every day. But nature has somehow kept up with the construction: Housing developments that were raw muddy wounds 30 years ago are now green and shaded under sprawling trees. For all the decay of time, there is a matching fecundity.

And when a quarter century exists between frames in your movie, it is a small step to move back yet another quarter century and then another, so that the history you learned in school no longer sits inkbound on the page of a book but begins to breathe as another scene in the movie you are a small part of.

So you can slide the film back and forth in your mental Moviola only a dozen equal frames and you are in the era of Peter Stuyvesant and Dutch colonialization. It’s a blip from now to 1655 on the time line.

The Old Tappan I grew up in was dotted with farms and old stone houses, built during the Dutch era. The houses are thick-walled and covered in lichen, moss and ivy; they are overarched by spreading oaks. They have, as it is said, settled.

Such houses were constructed of brown sandstone quarried by slaves.

It isn’t often remembered that slaves are a part of New Jersey’s history: In pre-Revolutionary times a settler was given 175 acres of land for every slave he imported. By 1737, slaves accounted for 8.4 percent of Jersey’s population.

Slave insurrections — in Hackensack, Raritan and Elizabeth, among other places — were a continual occurrence and citizens felt themselves stuck with the damnable institution. In 1772, a law was proposed ”obliging owners of the slaves to send them all back to Africa at their own expense.”

The law came to naught, but by that time free labor began to replace slavery and indenture.

I mention all this because when my boyhood home was built in 1956 in Old Tappan in northern New Jersey, the excavation turned up the stone foundation of slave quarters. It had been buried in woods for centuries and was now opened up to the sun for the first time.

It seemed little more than a curiosity then, and it was soon buried once more under the landscaping in our back yard. Its reawakening was brief.

The house has had two or three owners since I lived in it. I doubt that any of them knew what was buried under the Zoysia grass. But I thought of it again as I visited on vacation and saw how much the old house had changed: new paint, grown-up trees that were once bushes, a new bridge over the creek that cut through the property.

You play the film through the Moviola: The whole of northern New Jersey was once covered by a forest of oak and hickory. That was cut down for agriculture; the slave quarters behind my childhood home was evidence of that. But the fields grew once more into trees and were once more cut down to build the house.

The field next to the house was still pastureland when I was a boy. Now, it is dense with willows, birch and maple, on its way once more to growing oaks. If I look into its future, I can see more housing.

Time is fierce; it consumes the world.