When Daniel Boone heard a neighbor's dog bark, he moved West. But when there's no Wild West left, where is adventure to be found? Michael Aaron Rockland looks for adventure in the megalopolis, "not where no one has been but where no one wishes to go . . . across traffic-clogged cities, the parking lots of wall-to-wall suburban malls, and the sinister waterways that seep through rusting industrial sites." In these ten alternately poetic and comic tales of adventure in the New York/Philadelphia corridor, the most densely populated chunk of America, Rockland walks and bikes areas meant only for cars and paddles through waters capable of dissolving canoes. He hikes the length of New York's Broadway, camps in New York City, treks across Philadelphia, pedals among the tractor trailers of Route 1 in New Jersey, and paddles around Manhattan and through the dark tunnels under Trenton. Whereas Henry David Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond to get out of town, for Rockland, the challenge is to head into town. As he writes, "in the late twentieth century, a weed and trash-filled city lot . . . may be a better place than the wilderness to contemplate one's relationship to nature."
Author
Michael Aaron Rockland is professor of American Studies at Rutgers University. His early career was in the U.S. diplomatic service, during which he was a cultural attaché in both Argentina and Spain. He is the author of twelve books, three of which have received special recognition. His first book, Sarmiento’s Travels in the United States in 1847 (Princeton), was chosen by The Washington Post’s Book World as one of the “Fifty Best Books of the Year.” His novel, A Bliss Case (Coffee House) was a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” A book he co-wrote, Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike (Rutgers) was chosen by the New Jersey State Library as one of the “Ten Best Books Ever Written on New Jersey or by a New Jerseyan.” His latest books are Stones, a novel (Hansen Publishing Group) and The George Washington Bridge: Poetry in Steel (Rutgers). Rockland has won five major teaching/lecturing awards, including the National Teaching Award in American Studies. He has lectured in some twenty-one countries around the world. A regular contributor to "New Jersey Monthly magazine", he has also worked in television and film production, mostly for P.B.S. He is regularly interviewed on N.P.R.
