Jersey Pike portrayed as hell in Easter sermon
Posted Sun, 2007-04-08 13:39
Susan Paulwick, a writer, professor of English and an episcopalian lay preacher in Nevada has an Easter sermon on her website with this about hell:
"And what would Hell look like?
"Some sort of industrial wasteland, most likely, the air blighted by smokestacks belching toxic fumes, the ground pocked by bubbling pools of green sewage.
"Think of Mordor in Peter Jackson’s film version of The Lord of the Rings.
"Think of Chernobyl.
"Think of the grimmer stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike."
People say this of the Jersey Turnpike all the time, especially writers, but it's a bum rap.
It's baloney.
The Jersey Turnpike, especially its northern half, is one of the great drives in America.
There's a splendor about the vast scale of the Turnpike itself and huge visual excitement as you move from one urban spectacle to another that you can't get anywhere else.
Between Hightstown and New Brunswick you see writ large the modern logistics that underpin our rich standard of living and vast choices, the fruit of globalism, mile after mile of modern warehouses where goods off the docks are unpacked stored packaged and shipped. This admittedly is visually mundane because it is lowrise. Lots and lots of flat roofs. But the scale and spread is awesome.
Just a bit further up the road, around Rahway and Carteret there's the great nightime spectacle of flares from a wonderful collection of petrochemical works and oil refineries and sometimes a gentle aroma of oil in the air.
Hitting Newark on the left beside the Turnpike's 14 lanes in four roadways is Newark Airport with great airplanes landing and taking off right alongside you as you drive.
To the right rear up the vast container cranes tending to the ships in the port of Elizabeth, and then overhead is the elaborate and immense iron trusswork of the splendid old Pulaski Skyway, and soon over the glinting waters of the Meadowlands rises up the skyline of Manhattan.
It's a splendid spectacle that should be on the itinerary of every visitor to America. I regularly take visitors to see it.
You have to drive it multiple times to comprehend the full richness of this stretch of road. I was fortunate enough to drive it every weekend for nearly a year 1982-83 when I was working the week in Washington DC but visiting my family in Tarrytown NY weekends - usually driving Friday nights northbound and Sunday evenings southbound.
The southern rural section of the Turnpike by contrast may be fine for ducks and turtles and some species of deer but for the traveler it's BORING - yes hellishly boring - by comparison. Flat, featureless, grey, nothing to grab the senses.
The susanpaulwicks of this world are entitled to find heaven in such natural landscapes. But theirs is just one esthetic judgment.
The industrial north of the Turnpike is for me life in all its spectacular diversity, a reminder of the tradeoffs in human existence, perhaps not heaven but certainly not hell.
see http://improbableoptimisms.blogspot.com/2007/04/harrowing-of-hell.html
Photo credits to E Oshinsky at flickr.com
TOLLROADSnews 2007-04-08
"And what would Hell look like?
"Some sort of industrial wasteland, most likely, the air blighted by smokestacks belching toxic fumes, the ground pocked by bubbling pools of green sewage.
"Think of Mordor in Peter Jackson’s film version of The Lord of the Rings.
"Think of Chernobyl.
"Think of the grimmer stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike."
People say this of the Jersey Turnpike all the time, especially writers, but it's a bum rap.It's baloney.
The Jersey Turnpike, especially its northern half, is one of the great drives in America.
There's a splendor about the vast scale of the Turnpike itself and huge visual excitement as you move from one urban spectacle to another that you can't get anywhere else.
Between Hightstown and New Brunswick you see writ large the modern logistics that underpin our rich standard of living and vast choices, the fruit of globalism, mile after mile of modern warehouses where goods off the docks are unpacked stored packaged and shipped. This admittedly is visually mundane because it is lowrise. Lots and lots of flat roofs. But the scale and spread is awesome.
Just a bit further up the road, around Rahway and Carteret there's the great nightime spectacle of flares from a wonderful collection of petrochemical works and oil refineries and sometimes a gentle aroma of oil in the air.
Hitting Newark on the left beside the Turnpike's 14 lanes in four roadways is Newark Airport with great airplanes landing and taking off right alongside you as you drive.
To the right rear up the vast container cranes tending to the ships in the port of Elizabeth, and then overhead is the elaborate and immense iron trusswork of the splendid old Pulaski Skyway, and soon over the glinting waters of the Meadowlands rises up the skyline of Manhattan.It's a splendid spectacle that should be on the itinerary of every visitor to America. I regularly take visitors to see it.
You have to drive it multiple times to comprehend the full richness of this stretch of road. I was fortunate enough to drive it every weekend for nearly a year 1982-83 when I was working the week in Washington DC but visiting my family in Tarrytown NY weekends - usually driving Friday nights northbound and Sunday evenings southbound.
The southern rural section of the Turnpike by contrast may be fine for ducks and turtles and some species of deer but for the traveler it's BORING - yes hellishly boring - by comparison. Flat, featureless, grey, nothing to grab the senses.
The susanpaulwicks of this world are entitled to find heaven in such natural landscapes. But theirs is just one esthetic judgment.
The industrial north of the Turnpike is for me life in all its spectacular diversity, a reminder of the tradeoffs in human existence, perhaps not heaven but certainly not hell.
see http://improbableoptimisms.blogspot.com/2007/04/harrowing-of-hell.html
Photo credits to E Oshinsky at flickr.com
TOLLROADSnews 2007-04-08