Photo of the Day: Somewhere in the Swamps of Jersey

When Bruce Springsteen sings, in “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” how “my machine, she's a dud, out stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey,” everyone can just imagine the predicament. Except that sometimes, swamps can be rather arresting sights—as in the case of the one in this photograph that I snapped this weekend in the Teaneck Creek Park, managed by the Teaneck Creek Conservancy. It took a lot to preserve this parcel of wetlands from the ravages of development—and, even at one point, from he desire to turn it into a landfill.

Reclaimed from the worst that twentieth-century man could throw at it, this ground is not just a last vestige of a delicate ecosystem deeded by a Lenape Indian chief to a Dutch colonist, but also, I’d suggest, a thing of contemporary beauty in its own right, eminently worth preserving, less than a two-minute drive from a highway exit.