I named this blog after Providence, but New Jersey taught me to see providentially.

I grew up not far from Great Adventure, and for years I lived a couple of miles from Exit 9. Get over it.

I was born in the suburbs with cow shit in my nose. Not grass or apple blossoms: cow shit is the smell of spring to me. My father was not from the burbs. He was from Newark, voted the most unhealthy American city several times before World War I. My grandmother, the classic Italian lady in black, lived there as long as she lived with Americans, Medigans, she called us, and every month my father and I drove up the Garden State Parkway to visit. If we took the Turnpike, we'd hit The Smell around Elizabeth. The Smell emanates from that burg like ultraviolet from the sun. You can't see it, but it peels the skin. To this day I don't know what The Smell is, and being the boy with cow shit in his nose, I was otherwise occupied. What I do know is that The Smell looks like Mordor, the Land of Death in The Lord of the Rings. Driving through Elizabeth, the traveler quails at grey towers belching smoke and flame. When Peter Jackson gave us a glimpse of Mordor proper, it looked wickedly familiar. I wonder if it has a Budweiser plant somewhere behind Mount Doom.

I know this is how people imagine Jersey, and there's something to it . The folk who live in Elizabeth, who must not smell The Smell, have, to say the least, a higher cancer rate than folk in general. The land of death is real. But, to follow the Tolkien jag, I like to think I'm from Ithilien, the land south of Mordor which was a great garden, and will be again. This is the Jersey only locals recognize. It is still the state with more Superfund sites than any other, but also a place with deliquescent soils and the best tomatoes anywhere. South of Mordor there are horse farms; to the west there is a river, the north fork of the Raritan, where trout and bass dodge glacial rocks no one ever pushed around. Down the block from Sauron, Inc., is the Meadowlands, the great swamp immortalized in Robert Sullivan's book of the same name. It's not a sports complex; it's the soul of planetary bounce. If the world is going to survive the next hundred years of climate change, species extinction, industrial pollution and the bass-ackwardsness of humanity as we hit 9 billion, the Meadowlands will be the acme of endurance. It's not pretty, but, to quote Celie in The Color Purple, it's still here, despite our best efforts to kill it. Death, Pestilence, War, Famine: the Meadowlands has seen the End over and over.

So, when you drive past doom on the Turnpike, keep going: acres of swamp grass wave in the wind, each stalk giving the finger to apocalypse. It's our contribution to the cause. No need to thank us.

By American standards, Providence is an old city, older than the country itself. Nature and modern culture have had hundreds of years to mix. The Industrial Revolution in the United States began here, in the northern suburb of Pawtucket, at Slater Mill, when a factory was built according to specifications stolen from England. Water has been important here as a power-source for industrial mills and as the host of a major port city. But that’s why it is so polluted here, too. Last year I helped in a cleanup day along the Woonasquatucket River in the poor neighborhood called Valley, right behind the Providence Place Mall. The Woonasquatucket has been an industrial river since the nineteenth century, and its silt is filled with dioxin, a powerful carcinogen, and its water teems with E. coli, a bacterium whose source is the human intestine. When I helped with the cleanup I wasn’t allowed in the water without waders that covered my legs and torso; yet the neighborhood children, whose families are too poor to afford air conditioning, play in the river during the heat of the day in the summer. I myself live in a mixed blue-collar/white-collar neighborhood, Fox Point, which is close enough to Route 195 that my window sills become grey with particulates from car exhaust. Every time I clean my windows I wonder if my lungs look like a dirty paper towel.

That’s why I called this blog The Nature of Providence: the paradox of this phrase is the contradiction inside this favorite city of mine. The concept of God’s Providence, the beneficent order of the universe that makes everything turn out okay in the end, comes from Roman religion via Christianity. In one of his moral essays, “On Providence,” Seneca asks why bad things happen to good people: “You have asked me, Lucilius, why, if a Providence rules the world, it still happens that many evils befall good men. This would be more fittingly answered in a coherent work designed to prove that a Providence does preside over the universe, and that God concerns himself with us. But since it is your wish that a part be severed from the whole, and that I refute a single objection while the main question is left untouched, I shall do so: the task is not difficult—I shall be pleading the cause of the gods.” Good old Seneca. Sometimes when I come home from work, I stand at the bus station waiting for a ride up College Hill, and the blue of the evening sky, a little deeper than a robin’s egg, makes a backdrop for the dazzling-white steeple of the First Baptist Church, which frames the bare branches of a tree—an ailanthus, I think—bending over the entrance to the bus tunnel. Some nights, a tired moon rises into the picture. Then I think that I am lucky to be alive in such a place and time, and the wait for the trolley becomes a moment of meditation. But when I think of the kids playing in a sick-making river, I am forced to wonder about the nature of Providence. Beauty is not enough to justify the ways of God to men, as Milton, that Puritan bastard, knew very well. Still, I’m rooting for this town. If it’s not the New Jerusalem, it’s a pretty good start. The pizza isn’t bad, either.