The Jersey City Independent "

Photo courtesy of Warner Wada

“When I was 14 or 15 years old, that was just the way life was back then,” says Jersey City native Johnny Rohweder. “I went to a tackle shop and I bought a double barreled shotgun for 40 bucks — nobody is going to ask you for a license or anything.”

It was in the late 1930s, when he was just entering his teenage years, that Rohweder, who now lives in East Rutherford, began hunting and trapping muskrats and other animals in the Meadowlands, in order to sell their meat for food and fur for coats.

Inspired by a book he read as a child, he and his brother went to the Jersey City library to learn as much as they could about hunting. At that time, trapping and selling animal hides had yet to become the contentious issue it is today. Instead, the practice was just part of this area’s culture.

Rohweder’s decision to begin trapping sprang from not only the young man’s interest, but from a survival instinct. When he was just a teenager, he was left responsible to practically support his entire family. Both of his parents, while not jobless, were barely making enough to scrape by during the final years of the Depression.

His stories paint not only a story about a struggling family, but about an entire culture of hunters and trappers that set out into the Meadowlands to make a living. The life he recalls in Jersey City, Union City and Secaucus during the early to mid 20th century is almost impossible to imagine today, against the backdrop of industrialized North Jersey.

Now Rohweder — and his stories — have been put to celluloid in the new 28-minute documentary, Muskrat John: Urban Trapper. The film, which was directed by Ramapo College professor Warner Wada, screened for just the second time ever last month at the New Jersey International Film Festival in New Brunswick.

In addition to the film, Rohweder’s remarkable life is chronicled in two large unpublished autobiographies and numerous maps. His daughters, who understood that the memory of the original beauty of the Meadowlands needed to live on, spurred him to write down his experiences.

Wada says he was impressed with Rohweder’s vast knowledge of the area, one he dubs a “hidden world in plain sight” just miles from Manhattan.

“I’ve driven, bused, or otherwise traversed the Meadowlands for over 3 decades. It always appeared vast and rather foreboding,” he says. “Johnny Rohweder, on the other hand, was born, grew up, and 80-some years later, still traps the ‘meadows.’ Once I met him, read his manuscript, and marveled at his hand-drawn maps — showing old cabins, long lost bars, oyster shell mounds — he became my ‘photo-location’ guide, taking me to sites inaccessible to most.”

Rohweder’s familiarity with the Meadowlands stretches back nearly a century, to when the area was a lush environment teeming with life that has since been virtually wiped out. Wiped out not by the men who hunted the animals for sport and life, but by the companies that moved in and built plants there, and the highways that tore through the middle of the swamps. Even at the height of the trappers’ seasons, they never annihilated the species quite as quickly as modernity did.

In fact, the life of hunting and trapping that he and his friends led was built on respect for the wildlife, even as they killed them off in the thousands each year. Rohweder claims a friend of his once trapped 8,000 muskrats in one season (his own personal high was approximately 2,700).

Yet as lifetime hunters, they understood — at least within the context of their profession — that a natural life cycle had to be maintained to allow the muskrats to thrive. For instance, they wouldn’t hunt when the muskrats would mate, leaving them to repopulate and live, so by next year they could hunt again.

That holistic sense of connectivity was not shared by industry, however.

“[They] came in, poured the sand and the dirt in, killed the muskrats by the thousands. There were pheasants and rabbits … and I was just saying in five years I didn’t see a pheasant, rabbits, forget about that,” Rohweder says. “Once the cattails were gone, so were the muskrats.”

He regretfully acknowledges that the beauty and the life of the Meadowlands that he knew is gone forever. When he reads in the newspaper that the wildlife is coming back, he says he has to laugh.

“They don’t know how good it was back then,” he says. “80 percent of it is shot.”

Even at 82 years old, he recounts his life with a vivacious and youthful energy, as he remembers the characters who would traverse the swamps, hunting for animals ranging from muskrats to rabbits to pheasants. There’s the man who lived in a shack in the middle of the swamp, or the other who found an entire human skeleton while casually walking through the swamps one day.

Rohweder, who himself was shot in the back once while trapping, has internalized so much of his life experience that memories seem to come to him naturally, as if they happened just yesterday. He can point to photographs of the Meadowlands that are nearly a century old, for example, and tell you exactly what used to be where Giants Stadium stands now.

Of the hundreds of people who used to trap in the Meadowlands, he believes only about 5 remain alive. And needless to say, the job hasn’t been taken up by new generations with much enthusiasm. All in all, it is a profession of a bygone era, borne out of the natural beauty that once resided in the North Jersey swamplands.

But despite all the changes, and his old age, Rohweder shows no signs of changing his lifestyle. He still braves the swamps, hunting the few muskrats that remain.

“This hunting and trapping, it’s a dying breed. Nobody does it anymore — only kooks like me,” he says. “It’s like drinkin’ and smokin’, it gets in your blood and you gotta do it … It’s habit forming and you can’t break it.”

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