NEW JERSEY DEBRIEF

    Grateful: My flight back to California this time--from Colleen's door to mine--took only 12 hours as compared to 24 hours in late May. Less Grateful: Only 2 of this trip's 10 Jersey Shore days had thermostat readings suitable for humans. Mais, que sera. Colleen and I made the best of our indoor incarceration: naps, Words With Friends, long stretches of reading, time spent with Mom & Camille & Leslie & visiting first cousins Mary & Sheila from the town of Olean in upstate New York where Mom & myself & Colleen & Camille were born, and drop-ins from friends. Most days near nightfall, Colleen and I took our spin around the neighborhood never without the charming accompaniment of cicadas and lightning bugs. After dark we watched great television, usually until quite late:  "The Killing" on Sunday nights; "Forbrydelsen" which we streamed online, the original Danish version of "The Killing"; "Endeavor" on PBS, the prequel British series to "Inspector Morse." We even traveled back into the past with the very first episode of "Inspector Morse" with actor John Thaw playing Endeavor Morse as a fully fledged adult and Oxford-educated police detective. None of this would have been possible without air-conditioning.

      At the outset of every visit to Colleen's over the past few years, she asks me what I want to do while I'm there. I never have an answer. However, this time I did--the New Jersey Pine Barrens--a mysterious, massive swath of South Jersey which has tugged at my curiosity and imagination for decades but which I had never laid eyes on. Colleen and Camille both started their families in the small rural community of Dorothy, but I didn't know until last week that Dorothy sits on an outer edge of the Barrens. I also didn't know until last week that my high school boyfriend lived on the edge of the Pine Barrens as well, further north. On no visit to his rural hometown of Pemberton did I hear a whisper about the Pine Barrens. I had heard of the Jersey Devil, yes, like every other New Jersey child and adult. But I had no clue that the legendary home of the Jersey Devil was so nearby, even to my family's own suburban town of Cinnaminson back then. I knew nothing about the Pine Barrens, real or imagined. And, actually, this ignorance persisted for quite a long time, even after I set out for California when I was 20.

                       Photo: The Jersey Devil


     The Pine Barrens didn't capture my attention until much, much later when I learned sometime in the eighties that my favorite nonfiction writer then, John McPhee, had written a short book, one of his first, on the Pine Barrens. John McPhee never writes on anything insignificant, about anything that doesn't fascinate. I bought a copy of the book for myself and my mother, who drives alone through the Pine Barrens regularly--even now at age 90--to see her longtime friend Dorothea. (She never leaves the paved road and always travels with a cell phone and only in daylight, she tells us. Nonetheless, we daughters don't exactly rest easy when she takes these solitary trips into the pines.)

      
      Before my trip east this time, I felt compelled to take the aging book off the shelf and start reading. I continued reading on the plane, and finished the book at Colleen's. In spite of its being a 45-year old firsthand account of the Pine Barrens, McPhee's short book was all I needed to whet my appetite to finally go there myself.

     "You know how you always ask what I want to do when I visit?" I said to Colleen on Day 1.

     "And you always say 'Nothing,' Colleen said, obviously expecting more of the same.

     "Well, this time I do." 

     Colleen's eyes opened wide. 

     "I want to go to the Pine Barrens," I said. "Do you want to go with me?" I asked her. "Do you think you could physically do it?"

     "Yes" and "Yes," she answered.

                                  to be continued