jersey pine barrens debrief 
(continued & concluded)

    

     

     

            "It is a haunted place where the blood

            of the red waters of the Mullica River

            rise in the bogs of a [Pine Barrens] town

            once known as Long-A-Coming...Wild irises

            grow with their feet submerged in the

            calm, cedar-stained waters...

            "Stunted pitch pines stand motionless, 

            their shallow roots anchored precariously 

            in gleaming white sands. Silence reigns...

            silence as complete as the bottom of a

            well."

                     -- Written in 1994 by Helena

                        Mann-Melnitchenko, who grew

                        up happily in the Pine Barrens

                                                      

              You may feel my writing about the Pine Barrens is off-topic, off living with scleroderma and such, and I suppose it is. I assure you, though, that Colleen was integral to our excursion, riding shotgun for the entire trip, intrepid, seated next to Leslie in the driver's seat. Colleen's tall, green, uber-oxygen tank, a backup to her lighter portable tank, came along with us like a security guard. Colleen helped chart our course beforehand, diving into the wildly inadequate maps alongside me. But feel guilt-free to read no further that I may feel guilt-free to go on.

      For Jersey residents, and even for those living across the state border in Delaware and Philadelphia, the Pine Barrens are our Boo Radley, who is the mysterious, reclusive character that haunts the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" and who lives in the forbidding, decaying house next door to Atticus Finch and his two young children Scout and Jem, who have never laid eyes on Boo. Dark rumors about him abound in their town. Uninformed speculation swathes the fictional Boo Radley in layers of creepiness. And yet, as the story unfolds, Boo's essential goodness and human warmth are revealed. And so with the Pine Barrens, which have been similarly stigmatized as dangerous and creepy for over a century, having not so much to do with its swamps and bogs and pathless woods as with its reclusive residents, many from families that have occupied the Pine Barrens since the American Revolution and even before. 

      I DIDN'T KNOW THIS UNTIL NOW: The Pine Barrens once thrived as a place of industry. "There was iron in the Pine Barrens. Most of the now vanished towns in the pines were iron towns--small, precursive Pittsburghs in every part of the forest...From [the Pine Barrens bog iron], ironmasters made cannonballs by the thousand and sent them by wagon over the sand roads and on to the Continental Army at Valley Forge and elsewhere...they ordnanced the War of 1812 as well as the American Revolution."

     OR THIS: According to local lore, in 1778 the British were so concerned about the iron furnaces supplying the colonial forces with munitions that they threatened a raid on Batsto, a former iron-making village in the middle of the Pinelands that is now a New Jersey Historic Site.

                    

                        Batsto River

     OR THIS: Ironworkers in the Pine Barrens made the wrought-iron fence that once surrounded Independence Hall.

     OR THIS: A wood industry flourished alongside iron. "Woodcutters supplied great amounts of cordwood to New York and to Philadelphia...Sawyers, working mainly with white cedar, made shingles, clapboards, lumber, lath, and shipboards. Cedar panelling from the Pine Barrens had been used since before the Revolution in the homes of the rich of Manhattan."

     OR THIS: The cabinetmakers in the pines had high standards. One of their best, who lived in Speedwell, one of the now-lost towns, made the writing desk that Thomas Jefferson used when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

      But fate intervened. A superior grade of iron was discovered in Western Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh and its environs, which ended the era of iron in the Pine Barrens. The serious depletion of the wood supply didn't help. "Each [iron] furnace used a thousand acres of pine per year, and the trees could not grow rapidly enough to permit an equilibrium. As early as 1846 [a land report stated that,] 'The wood is generally gone, so the people are poorer than they were a few years ago and are likely to remain poor.'" By 1850, no ironworks remained in the pines. "People either left the pines or stayed and began to lead self-sufficient backwoods lives...the Pine Barrens all but returned to its pre-Colonial desolation, becoming, as they have remained, a distinct and separate world." And, thus, the early prosperous life of the Pine Barrens came to a radical end, becoming all but forgotten, a vivid piece of American history lost in time. For me, it's particularly poignant that Jersey citizens remain, for the most part, ignorant or oblivious to what transpired so long ago in their own backyard. In my six years of schooling here, the Pine Barrens were never mentioned, not once, neither with respect to its significant history, nor the uniqueness of its wild ecosystem. 

    

    Once everything changed--from around 1850 on--the Pine Barrens, over time, became marked by outsiders as a menacing, sinister, and even grotesque place. The people of the pines came to be known as "pineys"--a derogatory term--as current today as it was at the turn of the century. Enter the Pine Barrens and you do so at your own risk. That was, and still is, the predominant attitude toward the pinelands.

     Fear evolved within the Pine Barrens as well. "After a generation or two had lived in isolation, the pineys began to fear people from the outside...While isolation in the woods was bringing out self-reliance, the pine towns lost touch, to a large extent, with the outside world, some of the people slid into illiteracy, and a number slid further than that. Marriages were pretty casual in the pines in the late nineteenth century and early in the twentieth...Given the small population of the pines, the extreme rarity of new people coming in, and the long span of time that most families had been there, some relationships were extremely complicated and a few were simply incestuous. To varying degrees, there was a relatively high incidence in the pines [then] of what in the terms of the era was called degeneracy, feeblemindedness, or mental deficiency...The result of all this was a stigma that has never worn off. A surprising number of people in New Jersey today seem to think that the Pine Barrens are dark backlands inhabited by hostile and semi-literate people who would as soon shoot an outsider as look at him...The stigma of degeneracy has been concentrated in the word 'piney.'" But, writes John McPhee after visiting and studying the Pine Barrens in the sixties, "Pineys are, for the most part, mild and shy...loners...with an attractive spirit of live and let live." However, he adds, "their resentment is deep, and they will readily and forcefully express it," resentment of the piney stigma.

     When Mom, Camille, Colleen, Leslie and I took the lefthand turn into the the interior of the Pine Barrens at Speedwell-Friendship Road, I don't think any of us were completely free of foreboding, having been inculcated like every other Jersey resident with trepidation. But I don't think that shiver of fear, for us, outweighed our curiosity and desire to see the pinelands for ourselves.

      We drove forty-five minutes or so into the woods without seeing a signpost or anything to tell us where we were. Collectively, we began to think we had somehow gotten lost and our doubts grew about the maps we'd consulted and brought along with us. Camille tried her smartphone to find an alternative map and that's when we discovered we had no cell phone coverage. We had seen no other vehicles at this point. We start to converse about the situation. What should we do? Suddenly, we spotted a sedan moving toward us at a steady pace from the other direction. We watched it intensely for the few minutes it took the car to approach us, but then, for some inexplicable reason, we we hesitated and let it go right on by without asking for directions. A long beat of silence ensued inside the van. My eighth grade nun at Sacred Heart School in Riverton, Sister Leo David, used to drill us with aphorisms that we had to recite orally over and over with gusto. Two of them, after all this time, I have never forgotten. "Speak clearly if you speak at all; Carve your words before you let them fall." And the second one, "He who hesitates is lost."

      Not too long afterward, though, we had a second chance. This time it was a pickup truck. We watched it round a bend and then head straight toward us down a straight stretch of the sand road. The pickup didn't look particularly alarming. It didn't appear all rusted or beaten up as one might expect in these backwoods. As it got nearer, we all clamored at once at Leslie, "Ask him where we are! Ask him where we are!" (Any of us who may not have clamored aloud was doing so inside her head.) We could see the driver was a man.  

       Leslie came to a slow stop and opened her driver's side window to beckon to the oncoming stranger. At this point, I think the apprehension among us was a toss-up between wariness of the stranger we were about to meet and fear that the green flies would surge through the open window and bite us to death. The truck slowed down. Our van and the truck--maybe a dull red--were now side by side, the hoods pointed in opposite directions. 

      "Hi," Leslie called out, real friendly-like. "How far are we from a paved road?" 

      "Oh, I don't go by time," the man said with a half-smile through his own open window. He doesn't go by time. His answer was just enigmatic enough to exhilarate, to make us fairly certain we were having a close encounter with a piney, a true resident of the pines. If he didn't mark how long it took to go from here to there, I supposed it was unlikely he would count the miles. The man looked to be middle-aged and a bit stout. I wish I could remember his face. He added something like, "I go by the turns and bends in the road." In other words, he knew the road like the back of his hand. None the wiser, we thanked him and after he went on his way, we five had a confab in which we decided to press ahead rather than go back the way we had come. We decided to take our chances.

      I don't know how she managed to drive and take photographs too, but Leslie took some great ones throughout the entire trip, like these pix below, even when we felt most lost.

Speedwell-Friendship Road

                                  Few remnants remain of the vanished
                  towns of Speedwell & Friendship
             

                                             

 

Streams abound in the Pine Barrens, within which flow

four major river systems. The largest is the Mullica

Watershed, which includes the Mullica River, Wading

River, Batsto River & Oswego River. These rolling rivers empty, ultimately, into the Atlantic Ocean.

  

 

23 kinds of orchids         The Pine Barrens are home
grow wild in the            to endangered butterflies, 
Pine Barrens                like the Karner Blue
                            Butterfly, which Leslie  
                            may just have captured 
                            in this photo. Her hawkeye
                            spotted this solitary
                            beauty resting on the
                            sand amidst pebbles in
                            the road.
                            


               We kept driving. From time to time, we hit patches of softer, deeper sand and feared getting stuck. I can't say how long it was before we came to a paved road, but it seemed to all of us much sooner than we had pessimistically expected. I have to admit there was a sigh of relief at returning to civilization. And yet, I think we all knew we had gotten only a taste of "the forest lovely dark and deep," to borrow from Robert Frost.

      At this point, disappointed at having missed seeing evidence of either Speedwell or Friendship--although we learned later that we had driven right by the abandoned sites without knowing it, their telltale remains too inconspicuous to recognize--we decided to try finding one more site on our list. Apple Pie Hill, the highest point in the Pine Barrens at a whopping 208 feet. 

      Once again, we dove off the paved road, this time onto a narrower, more primitive sand road. We came to a fork and decided, arbitrarily, to go left. Fortunately, we came to a dead end before going miles in the wrong direction. We turned around and this time took the other fork. By now, even though not that much time had passed, intensity was building inside the van again. All eyes were glued straight ahead. We bumped along, keeping the faith, sorta, that we were on the right track. We laughed about the "mountain" we were pursuing. Eventually, we reached a denser thicket of woods and underbrush and felt pretty sure we'd succeeded in finding Apple Pie Hill. The road appeared to encircle the hill, but the sand looked way too deep for a regular-tired vehicle, so we opted to park where we were and tumbled, eagerly, I would say, out of the van. It had been hours. All thoughts of bugs must have been forgotten, because we practically dove into the open air. Oddly, but happily, no insect assault whatsoever ensued. The heat, however, was another matter. It hit us like a heavy club. Colleen lasted under five minutes outside. The rest of us under ten. We got a few photographs though. Here are Col & I.

       Those are pitch pines behind us, ubiquitous in 
     the Pine Barrens, sloping up to the top of Apple        Pie Hill, where a 60-foot orange fire tower 
     stands that we were able to see looking up 
     through the trees.

    


      Before heading home, we made a brief stop in the existant, tiny Pine Barrens town of Chatsworth, current population 926. We took photos on the steps of the original Chatsworth General Store built in 1865 on a corner of what is now a main drag, Route 563, the same two-lane road we took to the Pine Barrens, and the same one we were taking back. We said goodbye to Chatsworth and headed south through bright green, pre-season cranberry bogs. My family couldn't believe I had never seen a cranberry bog before. Ignorant of the autumn cranberry ripening season, I had been all set to see liquid seas of red on this trip. My yen to see the cranberry bogs was as great as my yen to see the Pine Barrens. So I was a bit disappointed at seeing not red but green fields spread out before me, but not completely. With my own eyes, not in a photo, not in a TV commercial, I got to see growing cranberry beds that will be flooded in preparation for harvest time in October.

                         We stopped to take a photo of this cranberry               bed still in its summer growing season

             The cranberry bogs will look scarlet
             like this one in October

     

 

                           Route 563 approaching Green Bank Bridge,
           which crosses the meandering Mullica River;            
           Leslie took this shot at the very 
           beginning of the trip from behind the wheel  

      

       We arrived home safely and a good time was had by all. We learned afterward, however, that Leslie had experienced heightened fear during our escapade with respect to three things: Will Colleen run out of oxygen while we are incommunicado, lost in the Pine Barrens in lung-crushing heat, and about as far from a hospital as you can get? Is the man coming toward us in a pickup truck going to shoot at us with a shotgun? Do my grocery coupons expire today?

                    __________________

FINAL WORDS

on the PINE BARRENS

                

      You can see on this map of New Jersey going back to 1878, that the Pine Barrens are vast, 1.1 million contiguous acres, "much larger than the thousand or so square miles of them that remain wild. Their original outline is formed by the boundaries of a thick layer of sand that covers much of central and southern New Jersey--down the coast...[all the way] to the Cape May Peninsula, and inland more than halfway across the state."

          "The coastal plain [that comprises the

          Pine Barrens] is essentially a huge wedge

          of sand that has accumulated over 5 million

          years of sedimentary deposition from the

          Appalachian Mountains and southerly                    

          flowing rivers, such as the Hudson."

                           --  from "A Forest on Glass Beads," 2011 

MORE I DIDN'T KNOW: The New Jersey  Pinelands are the largest pine barrens complex in the world.      

AND: The Nature Conservancy named the New Jersey Pine Barrens "A Last Great Place."       

AND: The size of the aquifer underneath the Pine Barrens is as astonishing as the size of the Pine Barrens itself. "In the sand under the pines is a natural reservoir of pure water that, in volume, is the equivalent of a lake seventy-five feet deep with a surface of a thousand square miles. If all the impounding reservoirs, storage reservoirs, and distribution reservoirs in the New York City water system were filled to capacity...the Pine Barrens aquifer would still contain thirty times as much water."

AND: The water of the Pine Barrens is soft and pure. The U.S. Geological Survey did a hydrological report on the Pine Barrens in 1966 and found,"[The water in the Pine Barrens] can be expected to be bacterially sterile, odorless, clear; its chemical purity approaches that of uncontaminated rainwater or melted glacier ice." Around the same time, John McPhee wrote that "All of the major river systems in the United States are polluted, and so are most of the minor ones, but all of the small rivers and streams in the Pine Barrens are potable," that is, drinkable. 

AND: There are many hundreds of sand roads that run through the pines. "A number of these sand roads have been there, and have remained unchanged, since before the American Revolution. They developed for the most part, as Colonial stage routes, trails to charcoal pits, pulpweed-and-lumber roads, and connecting roads between communities that have disappeared from the world."

AND: "The volume of freight and passenger travel was considerable in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the pines. One major route was from Philadelphia to Tuckerton...The Philadelphia-Tuckerton stage stopped at Long-A-Coming, New Jersey (now Berlin)...A large part of this road still exists...and has not been paved...In some places the road divides because the wagon and stagecoach traffic was so heavy and it was necessary to have eastbound and westbound lanes in what may have been the first dual highway in North America."

AND: The locals call their sand "sugar sand."

AND: The sandy soil, marshlands, and streams have given the Pine Barrens some of the best cranberry bogs in the country--New Jersey is the nation's #3 cranberry producer because of the Pine Barrens. Millions of wild blueberry bushes also thrive. "In the vernacular of the pines, huckleberries are blueberries, wild or cultivated...'Hog huckleberries' are huckleberries and "sugar huckleberries' are blueberries."

AND: The Pine Barrens are characterized by highly acidic, sandy soil that is almost completely "infertile" when it comes to traditional farming--thus, the word "barrens." The pristine headwaters are also highly acidic. But it is because of these unique conditions and others that the Pine Barrens is home to an uncommonly diverse ecosystem and a high concentration of many rare plant species "too numerous to name...a unique assemblage of flora and fauna both."

AND: Congress declared the Pine Barrens an ecologically sensitive area and established the protective Pinelands National Reserve in 1978, the first National Reserve in the country and still in existence today. (John McPhee's book played an influential role in this.) In 1979 the State of New Jersey stepped up as the steward of the Pine Barrens in partnership with the federal government. State stewardship also continues to this day.

AND: Because of its ecological importance--as one of the few remaining naturally functioning biospheres still in existence--the Pine Barrens was designated a U.S. Biosphere Reserve in 1983 by UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations. In 1988 the United Nations enlarged that recognition to International Biosphere Reserve. 

AND NOW THE HARD NEWS: The Pine Barrens are under federal and state protection, yes. However, there's flexibility for "compatible" development, which is a concern for any wilderness area today. Slow, steady, encroachment of suburban development is a worry that hasn't gone away. Increased development is especially a threat to the pure water of the vast but shallow Pine Barrens aquifer. "The loose, sandy soil of the Pine Barrens, [unlike ordinary soil], can imbibe as much as six inches of rainfall per hour." Apparently, this is a lot. And it makes the Pine Barrens "one of the greatest natural recharging areas in the world." But the very same feature of permeable, sandy soil that allows the continual filtering and refreshment of the aquifer is the element that makes the aquifer vulnerable to pollution. "Permeable soil is not readily capable of filtering or degrading contaminants sufficiently to return it to clean groundwater quality." The Pine Barrens, with its unique ecosystem and aquifer, are vulnerable.

                                                                          

THE END

Credits:  All photographs but one (the red cranberry bog) are by Leslie McCarthy Phillips. The vast majority of quotations, as well as the black & white sketches, are taken from "The Pine Barrens," by John McPhee.

Note to Self:  Find out if and when there is a bugless season in the Pine Barrens so I can go back and walk the sand roads and trails in the open air. This wish may turn out to be a fantasy. Ticks, in particular, might be a bug-for-all-seasons. Are they? And on the phone today, Mom speculated about chiggers in the Pine Barrens. Chiggers?