Guest post from local Camden resident and Retreat Coordinator of the Center for Environmental Transformation, Michael Zier. Photograph by April Saul. See more of her work on her Facebook page, Camden, NJ: A Spirit Invincible.

Excluding shorthand texts from a T9 phone and a never-ending stream of work emails, I don’t write much anymore.  I used to though; I used to write stories, awful stories that made their debut on Xanga.  That’s a bit of a tautology, isn’t it?  No, I don’t write anymore because every time I penned stories, they found their way to readers without me.  I couldn’t add details, couldn’t see their reactions, couldn’t answer their questions.  So I started telling my stories in-person instead and moved from the blogosphere to the bar room.  Adjectives pulled from stuck-together pages of a thesaurus gave way to wild hand gestures and lots of cussing because after four rounds of whiskey, wainscoting really is just fancy-ass wood paneling.  

I’ve kept to being a storyteller and not a storywriter for some time, but there’s a cup of tea by my side, I’m home alone, and I promised a friend I’d write about Camden Night Gardens.  So here I am, breaking character almost two weeks after the event because I finally have a story to tell.  If you haven’t read about the event yet, I’d recommend doing so.  Joseph Russell did a nice write-up last week.

I putzed around the site CNG was held on yesterday afternoon to get a sense of the space after the fact.  Nights earlier, there had been electricity, a stage, blossoming trees illuminated by beautiful lights, live art, crowds, mini-BMX ramps, guys serving up tacos from a trompo, and a campfire encircled by youth desperate for warmth.  Like a crowded, ad-hoc Jersey boardwalk with half its storefronts closed for the season, Camden Night Gardens was a disjointed, chilly celebration of life and vibrancy.  Yesterday, however, the waterfront North of the bridge only felt small and overlooked.

There aren’t any larger-than-life projections of twelve-year-olds boasting dance moves I’ll never be able to reproduce on the pump station anymore and the half-dismantled BMX ramps aren’t welcoming daredevils to their slopes.  Those chain-linked fences aren’t boasting creative, colorful art on canvasses shaped like ‘C-A-M-D-E-N’ anymore; they’re just rusting.  There certainly aren’t any romantics snapping Instagram pics in front of brilliantly lit backdrops anymore, because they’ve turned back into simple, leaf-covered trees with plastic bags and cigarette butts scattered about their roots.  And this is how stories about Camden always end, right?  Once beautiful, now broken and abandoned…

On my way home, I saw those twelve-year-olds playing baseball next to the cul-de-sac at the end of Point Street, four blocks away.  The daredevils?  Well, I guess they traded their BMX bikes for 4-wheelers, moved up-river, and started racing up and down Harrison Ave.  Unwilling to be confined by such small, letter-shaped canvases, the artists took up shop on Carman Street, between Federal and Route 30.  As for the romantics, they were sitting on a matching pair of lawn chairs next to their stoop on Erie.  They’re well into their 70’s though, enjoying glasses of sun-tea, smiling, and watching their grandchildren play in the lot across the street.

Camden Night Gardens wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t some version of the future Dickens’ ghosts revealed to us at just the right time.  No, it was a glimpse of what already is.  For one night, Camden was invited out to her own waterfront, given a stage and spotlights, and revered for all her goodness.  I hope we grow to recognize her beauty more often.