Where do the Children Play?

Routes 4 and 17 made up part of my childhood playground. There were drive-in theaters and driving ranges. There were stores but it was well before the onslaught of mall mania. Stores like Two Guys, Modells, Great Eastern Mills, Packards and Sears.

My friends and I used to explore the reeds and marshes to pick cattails along Route 4 up in north Hackensack.One of these marshes terminated at a grassy embankment behind a golf driving range. A dozen or more of the balls had been hit beyond the fence and they lay scattered at our feet, like discovered treasure. What was inside of a golf ball? We had taken apart baseballs before, peeling back the hide and stripping off the strata of woven rubber bands until you reached a small and very hard indian-rubber ball. It reminded me of pictures in the science books about the Earth: the hide was the crust, the rubber bands the mantle, the indian rubber ball, the core, but not molten like the core of our planet. But a golf ball was already small and compressed---what could it possibly be made out of?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPrBz5YiLs

As we gathered golf balls, we heard a small vehicle approach. It was a golf cart driven by a young man wearing a hard hat, and the guy stopped the cart and leapt out and began charging towards us. We were laughing hysterically, obviously for being in trouble, but on an unconscious level we were laughing at the ridiculous pose of this helmeted functionary who took golf balls and, by extension, his job so seriously.


On Route 17, at the confluence of Maywood, Rochelle Park, Lodi, we played beneath overpasses to a backdrop of highway noises, a cosmic drone that I could hear from my house a mile away. (actually that cosmic drone was the confluence of Routes 17 and 4, which I liked to call the "Belly of the Beast"). Where we played on 17 was a mixed industrial and residential area. There were the usual tires, hubcaps, shopping carriages, broken glass, newspaper and cardboard that had been jettisoned along the highway. We would find intact, seven-foot cardboard boxes that once held refrigerators. We would crawl into one of these boxes and try to flip the box over, keep it rolling. When the walls of the box finally split apart, we would tear off separate sheets and use them to slide down the grassy highway embankment---cool, sleds without snow! We'd have races to see whose sled went the farthest, and the cardboard sleds became slick with grass stains and the pressure of our weight, their undersides like a gray-green shellac that made them slide faster.

Some time around 1980 an EPA or DOE study discovered that Thorium232 had been getting dumped along this same stretch of highway for about two decades---yes, those same years that we enjoyed our cardboard box recreation, young boys frolicking in industrial waste.

For those of you who no longer remember your Periodic Table:
 
http://www.chemistryexplained.com/elements/T-Z/Thorium.html

 232 of course being a trace isotope (I read that in the link ;)

Ah Stepan Chemical, we hardly knew ye down there in South Wayward  behind all those neat Cape Cods.

http://www.em.doe.gov/bemr/bemrsites/macw.aspx

So Stepan (or Ballod) took over waste removal from Maywood Chemical Works to remove Thorium from the Lodi Brook, and what did they do? They dumped it on their property to spread along Rt. 17 and an AEC Study in 1968 said, "That's OK" So, let me see if I've gotten this right---just move the radioactive material---what, a few hundred feet? quarter mile?---and dump it on privately held, non-residential land. Wow. Sounds like The Daily Show..... Oh, that Thorium232

 
Sooooooo here is the strange black stuff we were sifting through our fingers and flinging handfuls of at one another. And I had thought it was only dust from old roofing shingles. Enough said....