Reflections from an Afternoon of Trespassing

One of my favorite abandoned corners of the world is a little island. It's hidden from view and nearly inaccessible—I can't recall why I ever walked past the Hastings dump, and continued walking onward until the road turned from asphalt to the only dirt anyone in southern Westchester county can drive on. Just there is a bridge, barriers set up to suggest that passerby avoid the other side. Naturally, I walk on through. There is a fence—but one side has a hole cut out of it, just big enough for a teenager to fit through and just small enough to retain an enticing forbidden quality. Below the bridge the waves of the Hudson lap up against graffiti. Someone has hung a punching bag from the girders; I always give it a kick for good luck. Beyond is only an empty field, the solitude of an undeveloped spot, and the conversation of any compatriots deemed close enough friends to join me.

Beneath the soil lie the toxic remains of an Exxon Mobil chemical plant. Construction is forbidden—if the dirt below were moved, the river would die, and the cancer rates that fall every year as the old become better educated and get better health advice would begin to rise once again. Thoreau's eternal declaration, "thank god they cannot cut down the clouds!" rings a little hollower when the ground beneath my feet is killing me slowly (sufficiently slowly to warrant a trip back next week, no doubt). But my air is clean—other people's clouds themselves are no more than the wasteful byproducts of capitalist greed and consumption.

I open my window to the smell of a hot summer's day on an empty street; PM2.5 enters through the windows of Beijing, or Dehli, or the parts of the Bronx crisscrossed by the highways that bring in the goods to sell in stores in Midtown. The more melanin in the skin of those who breathe in the houses below, the more likely the clouds are simply coated in a thick smog. Children in less urban settings may breathe comfortably—but the water they drink comes out the brown of wastewater, exported from the rust belt to the sun belt (or Hanoi, or Guangdong) as the factories fled south to escape the unions.

The tragedy of my island is not that it is toxic—it's that it's a success story. The Hudson Valley demanded superfund sites to bury its industrial past away from the suburban future of those rich enough to commute to Manhattan. When those whose clouds have been cut down live without money or power, the waste is interred inside their communities instead.