'I just absolutely think it's a beautiful area,' says director Jon Cohrs
"Waking up on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike is a really weird feeling," says Patrick Southern, emerging from a tent pitched just outside the Vince Lombardi Service Area in Ridgefield.
So it would be for many -- even native New Jerseyans. Yet Southern and six other souls had just set out on a very Jersey voyage. Their guideposts, however, had less to do with mile markers and Turnpike exits than errant shopping carts, capped landfills and turtles stuck in a fisherman's trap -- the inhabitants of a land behind and between the state's well-worn roads.
Jon Cohrs, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, recruited the group for a 10-day canoe trip through the Meadowlands. The results of their journey can be seen in a documentary called "Back Water," screening at the New Jersey Film Festival on Feb. 12.
Even with all the garbage that litters their wetland path, Cohrs lingers on slow-burning sunsets punctuated by industrial elements like railroad tracks and power lines.
"The Meadowlands has a cliche, is known as this sort of dumping ground, and I didn't want to play into that too hard," he says. "It's much more nuanced than that."
Cohrs, 37, often works on projects devoted to social issues and most recently has started an effort devoted to exploring chronic pain. He originally set out to make a film that would revolve around the artificial flavoring industry's roots in North Jersey and the Meadowlands, but ended up focusing on the landscape itself -- specifically "the changing nature of wilderness."
"There are areas like this all over the world," Cohrs says. Although dumped tire and a muskrat head are among the group's first findings, the quiet moments channel any good camping trip.
"I just absolutely think it's a beautiful area," he says. "It has this big, massive sky like you have out west."
He raised $7,000 for the film on Kickstarter in 2010 and found additional funding through a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cohrs actually took several trips through the Meadowlands in anticipation of making the film. For the final journey, in late March of 2012, he recruited a bunch of willing subjects to lend their expertise to the canoe voyage.
Cohrs says he envisioned his project as a "traditional expedition -- like a sort of Lewis and Clark kind of thing."
There's Erin Tolman, the camp cook; Nicola Twilley, the writer; Southern, the sound man; Derek Hallquist, the lead cameraman; Sara Jensen, the hunter; and Gillian Cassell-Stiga, a lawyer.
Cohrs himself lends a fair bit of expertise, having previously worked as a sea kayak guide in Alaska. A severe spinal injury caused by a tree falling on him during a camping trip put an end to his kayaking days, but he's still an outdoorsman.
A scene from the expedition's time on land. (Jon Cohrs)"I've always kind of been interested in these spaces that had kind of been feared by humans," he says.
Twilley, the expedition's resident wordsmith, a contributing writer at The New Yorker who hosts Gastropod, a podcast about food science and history, says she finds the Meadowlands fascinating. By venturing into a space most drivers gloss over -- "this place where all the forgotten things go," she says -- the group was able to absorb the poignant cross-section of industry and nature.
"Normally you see the Meadowlands from the window of your car on 95 from the Turnpike or from the train coming in," she says.
Somehow, the group, emerging from the reeds to sleep near rest stops and run to the supermarket for fresh water, didn't turn heads.
"The thing I was surprised by was how desolate it felt," Cohrs says. "We really felt invisible."
As Southern, the sound man, ponders the bizarre scene of waking up to the Turnpike, he wonders why the rush of modern life seems so removed from the group.
"Even though we were in such close physical proximity to civilization, we were in another sense incredibly far away," he says in the film.
The Meadowlands explorers encountered some resistance from the authorities. (Jon Cohrs)And while the crew might make 10 days canoeing through the Jersey wetlands seem feasible, most everyone had their breaking point, Cohrs says. Twilley says she found three ticks on her shortly after starting the trip, which began with a storm warning telling them that their campsite would be flooded. It's not every day that you see a group of people emerging from the brush to do do yoga stretches -- another memorable scene -- but Twilley says human behaviors aren't the main theme here.
"This was not meant to be reality TV," she says. "The point is not what happens to six people when you dump them in the Meadowlands. The point is the Meadowlands itself."
Wedged in between shots of mostly tranquil estuary are sobering statements that flash on screen, delivering some Meadowlands history.
"From the 1950s to the '70s, mafia-run waste removal companies dumped unknown chemicals into the Meadowlands' unregulated landfills, igniting subterranean fires that burned for decades," one reads.
One of the group's destinations is an Agent Orange storage site. They also camp on top of an old dump capped with an impermeable liner.
The group spots a fire in the distance. (Jon Cohrs)Though the general public whizzing by in their cars did not pay the trekkers any mind, those who work in the Meadowlands -- and police -- did. One officer shows up and tells them they can't be near the Transco gas pipeline. A construction worker bans them from drifting through so they can get aground to buy water at a store, insisting that the passage is private property.
"We were aware that we were kind of towing this line, but water is a public space," Cohrs says.
At film's end, Cohrs plays recordings of several messages left by an FBI agent inquiring about what he was doing in the Hackensack River.
"It was very funny to be talking to Homeland Security and the FBI over a canoeing trip," he says.