Going back to the place I’d found only a few days earlier was much easier this time. The subtle bends in the trail, and the ever-more hidden track off to the right of the lake shore that led to my bridge was all but completely covered in dense tree roots, almost as if daring one to cross, and doing their best to prevent the discovery of the place that lies some 100 feet from this naturally occurring fence. A few steps farther and I’ve reached my weathered bridge that blends a little too well into the surrounding soil, but as I sit down, I find myself looking back the way that I had come.
The roots visible from the lakeside had been lined up parallel and on a slight incline to each other and the path, as if creating a border for the trail. However, they were also one of the minute details that had led me to my spot in the first place, because the increase in height as they grew farther and farther from the trail had resembled a staircase. It was as if the roots were piled high to block people from coming, but at the same time they were beckoning people to cross over to the other side.
From that other side, however, the same roots reached around trees like claws trying to rip through and escape to the lake below. From my perch I can also see precisely where the roots meet the ground, and it’s a lot less elegant than I would have expected. Thick and knotted, the wood seems to bubble up from the ground and divert the path of everything around it. However, I knew this was not the case.
Why the side by the lake grew straight and narrow and side facing the woods seemed tangled and angry, I have no clue. But I do know that trees grow lengthwise before they begin to get thicker, and roots burrow down into the ground from the surface, not the other way around. This meant that the destructive nature of these roots started at the very beginning, when the tree was still barely able to support itself. The knots in the wood were laid out like faulty foundation for a building – the more you build it up, and the longer you let things develop without fixing it, the more pronounced and destructive the problem will become.
I’m reminded of the city of Camden, New Jersey, which was initially a thriving city, beckoning people to live in this place with its booming shipbuilding industry, soup canning business and music production, as well as busy main street with its classic cars, movie theaters, and grandiose hotel, inviting people in just like the staircase of roots from the lakeside drew me to my spot on the bridge.
Once inside, however, where the city is allowed to grow and develop, the little knots that were nearly invisible in the roots now become glaringly obvious. World War II ended, and so did shipbuilding. Manufacturers left to find cheaper labor in the south and abroad, an inevitable issue as people’s standards of living increase when they live in a nice town and begin to demand more money for their work. The sad thing is that these things were doomed to fail from the start. No industry can continue working in the same place forever. Cities can’t evolve without changing some of their core infrastructure, and it just so happens that the sacrifices made in Camden were the very industries that kept the city afloat.
Imagine if I removed all the roots from the side of the tree where I sat – even if the side by the lake, the seemingly well structured and organized part of the tree, managed to stay intact, the whole thing would still topple over from lack of internal support. Despite all the efforts made to improve the city, the overarching problem lies much deeper than any local project can fix, within the very reason for the town’s foundation. Camden was built around its strategic location on the waters outside Philadelphia, and when the location lost its appeal in favor of other cities or the suburbs, there was nothing anyone could do to stop the tailspin.
It makes me wonder if this could happen to all cities one day. My own hometown, located about half an hour outside of New York City on the Long Island Sound, is pretty well off, but right next door sits what could be considered the Camden of Connecticut. The power structure of the area is complicated, because we’re surrounded by the infamous Gold Coast, with commemorated towns like New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich and Westport to the north, east and west, and yet right on the water is a town that even the crude comedy of Family Guy condemned.
Fairfield County ranks among the wealthiest in the nation, and yet Bridgeport sits right in the middle, a hub for those lacking an invitation from Gatsby. Poor and dilapidated in many areas, the town is an object of fear to many of my high school classmates. When I was little, however, I took swim lessons at the Bridgeport YMCA because we couldn’t afford the Fairfield prices, and then I went on to swim with the local club team for the next 10 years until I made my high school team. The people I met in those years, from coaches to fellow athletes and their families, remain to this day some of the hardest working and most down to Earth people I have ever known, and I continue to work as a lifeguard with some of my old teammates at the Y where I first learned to swim.
Because of my experience, I sometimes refuse to see how the town has deteriorated over the years. This past summer, when I was helping my best friend from kindergarten move out of her childhood home, finally escaping the run down house that had plagued her family for generations, we went back to our elementary school not far from the YMCA. The playground looked bleak on a sunny summer day, and all I could think of were the games of kickball in the now overgrown field, the knockoff Tamagotchis that we hid from the teachers on the now rusty and broken swings, and the countless games of Spud and Four Square on the badly cracked blacktop. I can’t recall one day as a kid that I had ever felt unsafe at the school, on the small enclosed grounds that now looked abandoned, and yet a high school friend of mine was too afraid to go to a restaurant right down the street, despite my reassurance. How times have changed.
Bridgeport may be dangerous, but the sad thing is that I’ve become so jaded as to expect it, and accept the violence with a grain of salt, and simply try and live my life despite it, just like the people of Camden but on a smaller scale. My friends that grew up in Fairfield, however, are like the rest of New Jersey is to Camden, ignoring the town’s existence the best they can, locking their car doors when driving through, if not bypassing it altogether on I-95, and diverting any and all state funding in favor of their own towns.
After reading about Camden, I was blown away by the number of similarities to my neighbor city, from the early settlers taking advantage of the large harbor not far from New York, and the 500 factories that once populated the area, to the industrial fall after World War II. While I know Bridgeport is in slightly better shape than Camden, with numerous development projects currently underway, it still shows how much the roots of initial development doomed the city from the start. In the early days, society is the tree itself – we lay the foundation to draw people in, but then neglect the actual substance itself, so as the city develops into a full grown tree, the knotted roots just get thicker and dig deeper, making them harder and harder to pull out with each passing year. Nowadays, I could be the metaphor for society – I saw a staircase and couldn’t help but climb to the other side, and then I just sat there on my bridge and watched helplessly, hoping against all hope that the tree could support itself and would not fall down and destroy my sanctuary, but unable to do anything of use since the damage has already been done.