I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree . . .
—Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”
There were no trees in evidence as our school bus lumbered through a tall chain-link gate, topped with a coil of razor wire, and onto a long strip of asphalt flanking a line of drab army barracks. This was to be my school for the 1966–1967 academic year: four long, U-shaped, cinder-block buildings converted into twenty-one classrooms on a two-plus-acre portion of Camp Kilmer, a former US Army installation located in Piscataway Township, New Jersey. Although my home lay within easy walking distance of two established elementary schools, the school board had elected—as large swaths of the township’s farmland were developed into tract-home subdivisions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with an attendant surge in school-age boomers—to bus several classes of children from around the township many miles away to a makeshift temporary campus they named the Ethel Road School, after the road along which this stretch of Camp Kilmer lay.
My sister and I, about to enter the fourth grade and fifth grade, respectively, had been excited about the prospect of taking a bus to school for the first time. We had dressed nervously that morning, in new plaid dresses our mother had made, and set off for the corner of Rivercrest Drive and Perrine Avenue with our lunchboxes and small bouquets of marigolds for our teachers. We joined a gathering of some other fourth, fifth, and sixth graders from our neighborhood already milling about. When the large bus approached and groaned to an idle, my sister and I climbed up and found a seat to share. I squeezed her hand and gazed out the window. What would the day hold?
What followed was a circuitous, nearly hour-long ride through parts of Piscataway we had never seen before. Wending our way through a warren of cul-de-sacs and freshly paved, grid-like streets lined with newly built ranches and split-levels like our own, we stopped in the parking lots of various garden apartment complexes before rumbling down rural roads, past fields with dilapidated farms and a seemingly misplaced, red-roofed bar called The Carousel Lounge. Its parking lot was empty at eight o’clock in the morning, but older bus-mates would later whisper that “go-go girls” danced there in the afternoons and evenings. What “go-go girls” were, I could only guess.
As we rolled along, we picked up children waiting at the ends of driveways that led to some of the township’s many historical homes. (Piscataway Township had been founded in 1666, one hundred years before the founding of the United States). One long stretch of road, School Street, took us past a motley assortment of small houses, outbuildings, and uniquely cobbled-together structures set among thickets of scrub and glinting streams that looked like a page out of a Mother Goose storybook. Years later, I learned that the street had been named after a progressive school built along the road by one of two Utopian communities founded in the area in the early twentieth century. Folks in the commune built their own houses, often without experience or plans, which might explain some of the eccentric architecture.
As the miles rolled by on that hot September morning, the bus filled with the smell of lunchboxes: bologna, bananas, peanut butter. The pong of exhaust mingled with the sharp, cinnamon odor of our marigold bouquets, which—held tightly in our fists, stems bound in wet napkins and Saran Wrap—had begun to wilt. After passing through the prison-like gates and getting our first look at the shabby row of buildings and the macadam parking lot that doubled as the “playground,” all bordered by a ditch of waste shrubs and more chain-link fencing, my sister and I exchanged uneasy glances. This was a far cry from the clean, modern elementary school we had walked to in the past. Our spirits sank.