In late January my supervisor called me, uncharacteristically, with an assignment. It concerned a piece of land in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Now it was owned by the County — a park — but once it had been a telecommunications facility. There was, he said, a request from AT&T, the previous landowner, who wished to reclaim some unspecified thing from the land, which the County had since made into an ecological preserve — a rarified meadows habitat.
Between 1929 and the late 60s, he told me, transatlantic telephone calls made from the United States were usually destined to pass by short wave radio signal through this 800 acre farm once known as the “American Telegraph and Telephone International Radio Telephone Transmission Station”. The farm was punctured by hundreds of 85+ ft tall pole-antennas arranged in rhombic formations — with each projecting sounds made in Chicago, Albany, or Washington, towards London, Tangier, Damascus, or Buenos Aires.
In the 1960s some 16,000 conversations per day moved through here. By 1975 the facility had become obsolete, superseded by undersea cable and satellite communications. At the time when AT&T decommissioned the facility only one antenna remained in use, connecting the mainland to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Today one last pole remains . Although poles were usually recycled by AT&T, Charles Bryan, a farmer who purchased the land, asked to keep one. That pole, once a trans-spatial and temporal bridge to Tel Aviv, served instead as a lightning rod between 1975 and 1998.
There was, my supervisor said, little chance for an easy resolution, but it would be best “if you produced a report for the State”.
I drove towards the site the following morning. The roads are small. Though there are many of them, few lead to others which lead to the site. Many pass into yet smaller roads, gravel roads and then truncate.
I see, after some time, a sign announcing “Mercer Meadows County Park”.
I circumscribe the park with my car, referencing aerial images of the land — tracing the outer bounds whose interior I am to survey.
The terrain of the park is varied. Some entry points allow passage on narrow pathways between thorny woods. Another spills out into a wide, grassy, rolling expanse. On the perimeter are failing rural houses. A view of one is blocked by a raised pool covered with tarp which rises and sighs very much like a chest. Another house rests uninhabited, a wound in its roof yawning and pulling the structure inward.
I notice a smaller sign that directs me towards the Bryan Farm and find my place in a small gravel lot. Now on foot, my line of sight is reduced to the path ahead and the trees about. Walking past the occasional power walker and baby stroller, I notice a number of guiding displays spread throughout the pole farm-turned-nature preserve, providing descriptions of the antenna technology once used by AT&T as well as a historical chronology of the facility.
But my eyes catch on something else:
A photograph from 1950 whose subject and object I cannot confidently distinguish.
The gazes of two of the people pictured seem to repeat the gaze of the camera towards something other than themselves. My own moves beyond the group, and thereafter I cannot help but unsee them, my attention taken over by the poles — those dark incisions receding into the pale. I know that there were in that very instant a thousand or more voices in exchange — like a vectoring cloud of gnats, an exchange of energy not visible, without trace, but there nonetheless.