Blue Highways (60 page)

“You get enough sleep last night?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I drove after dark. Almost missed New Jersey.”

“Missed Jersey? So what’s to miss?”

“New Jersey’s to miss.”

“Nobody comes to Jersey to
see
Jersey.”

“I did. I’m going into the middle of New Jersey to see it.”

“Middle? What’s this middle? You got the shore and you got Philly. Middle? There is no middle. Fort Dix is the middle.”

“The Pine Barrens. Twenty kinds of orchids growing in there, they say. Bug-eating plants too.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re on the dirty side now. Ask any trucker. You want orchids, go to a florist.”

A man next to me wore a shirt that repeatedly said,
ORO
! Around and around, the words looped his paunch, his droop of shoulders, his yellowed armpits; among the
ORO
!’s were golden things: coins, watches, medallions, coronets.

“Let me tell you about the Pines,” he said. “Maybe you heard of the
Hindenburg
—the zeppelin—but I’ll let you in on the true story of what really happened. I’ve lived here all my life, and I know what happened even if the government said they didn’t know.”

The gist was this: a storm forced the
Hindenburg
into a holding pattern (that was a fact I could check out). The airship, only a few hundred feet off the ground, circled central New Jersey for two hours. Lakehurst, where it was trying to land, is on the edge of the Pines, and everyone knows Pineys don’t tolerate anyone poking into their woods. They figured the zeppelin was a government ship looking for their stills where they turn blueberries into whiskey, so they shot at the thing and opened leaks in the fabric. By the time the
Hindenburg
started to tie up, there was enough free hydrogen to blow the ship to kingdom come, which it did.

“The official explanation was St. Elmo’s fire,” he said. “Static electricity. St. Elmo never in his life set fire to any aircraft. People can believe it was anti-Nazi sabotage if they want, but I’m telling the truth. It was potshots by the Pineys, and it was nothing new. They’re descendants of pirates and smugglers who ran into the woods to hide. Mixed in with a few Tories and Hessians.”

When I paid the waitress, she filled with motherly counsel. “Look. You’re a nice boy. Go to the shore. Go to Atlantic City. But for godsakes don’t go to no middle. The Pineys breed like flies in there. Live like animals.”

I’d heard those words across the country. It was almost an axiom that anyone who lived off a main highway was an animal that bred like a fly. An hour later, the June heat coming on, I was on New Jersey 70, heading for the middle. I stopped at Lakehurst Naval Air Station to look at the dirigible hangars, those thousand-foot-long, twenty-story buildings, where the Pineys allegedly did in the blimp. Another era of flight ended here too: Lakehurst was the last place the Navy trained carrier pigeons.

The road became a succession of gentle dips through the sandy woods; my head bounced as if my neck were a loose coil of wire. Miles of bouncy, bouncy. I was having fun in the middle. County road 563 cut through the center of the six hundred fifty thousand acres (equal to Grand Canyon National Park) of pine barrens. There were pitch pines and oaks and white cedars. Although the trees tended toward the spindly, the land was by no means barren in the sense of unproductive. Cranberry bogs and fields of high-bush blueberries opened the woods in places.

The sky was cloudless, not in the usual way, but rather bleached by glare to the color a pair of facing mirrors make between them—neither blue nor gray but rather an absence of color. Trees, shrubs, the day, all drooped dead still in the humid heat, and wherever the Pineys were, they weren’t on the road.

Somewhere south of Jenkins, population forty five (five was more believable), I gave in to the heat and pulled up under the trees by a small bridge. A stream, about half the width of the highway, moved through with a good current. I took it to be the Wading River. Bog iron (cannonballs fired at Valley Forge were made here) and tannins had turned the transparent water the color of cherry cola. This “cedar water,” as it is called, sea captains once carried on long voyages because it remained sweet longer than other waters. Even today, it is remarkably free of pollutants since all streams that flow through the Pines have their source here. I walked up a track into the woods, dead ferns and pine needles absorbing my steps. A silence as if civilization had disappeared. While the quiet was real, the isolation was an illusion: downtown Philadelphia lay forty miles west. What’s more, McPhee says that on a clear evening you can see a light in the Pines from the Empire State Building.

I came to the stream again, took off my clothes, and went in. There was no shock in the water, only cooling relief. I let the current pull me downstream toward the Atlantic, then I paddled back up, and floated off again. A black terrapin, trimmed in red, surfaced, saw me float by, blinked, and went under. I climbed out and let the heat dry me as I ate.

McPhee reports that, in the twenties, a Philadelphia newspaper gave away lots in the Pines as premiums with new subscriptions, and that during the Depression movie houses passed out deeds to small tracts as door prizes, and that realty agents offered lots here for five dollars. McPhee writes:

When prospective buyers actually came to see the land, promoters tied pears and apples to the limbs of pine trees and stationed fishermen in small boats in Pine Barrens lakes with dead pickerel on the ends of their lines and instructions to pull the fish out of the water every ten minutes.

But no one cared for the giveaways, and, even now, although the margins of the Pines were shrinking from commercial encroachments, the heart of Burlington County—the middle of the pinelands—still belonged to the quiet and Pineys. Whenever that last foot of concrete is poured to complete the Boston-Washington megalopolis, it’s likely to be in the Pine Barrens.

I went on south, through Weekstown, past a wooden sign nailed clumsily to a tree:
ALWAYS IN OUR MEMORIES
—
PETE
. I came to the southern limits of the woods at Egg Harbor City, a landlocked town fifteen miles from Great Egg Harbor. The plan years ago to dig a canal from town to the Great Egg Harbor River and thereby link with the sea did not work out. It wasn’t the first time so-called progress had got lost in the Pines.

I
N
the afternoon, when I was down along Delaware Bay and trying to find how Othello, New Jersey, got its name, I came across a story of the past, the future, the present.

As the pine belt disappeared, the state took on a Southern cast below Millville, an old glass-making town on the Maurice River flowing through the exposed silica deposits of lower Jersey. Near here, the first Mason jar was made. Outside Bridgeton, the Southern aspect showed plain: big fields of soybeans, corn, cabbage, strawberries, and fallow fields of dusty brown, and slopes of peach and apple orchards. Black men worked patch farms, and with cane poles they fished muddy creeks of the lowlands where egrets stepped meticulously through the tidal marsh.

I drove up and down. The map wasn’t getting me to Othello and neither were the county roads. I came to Greenwich (pronounced GREEN-witch), population one thousand, a village built along a broad single lane called “Ye Greate Street” (
Ye
correctly pronounced as “the”), which ran from a rotting boat landing on the Cohansey River northwest for two miles, most of the way lined with old homes and buildings. In the seventeenth century, “greate street” meant “main street,” but now, “great” in the sense of “grand” was also accurate. Of the nearly hundred homes and buildings along the three-century-old thoroughfare, about ninety percent were built before 1880 and more than a quarter dated from the eighteenth century. Even the Sunoco station was in a 1760 house. Although the old structures appeared sound, only a few had been restored.

Greenwich was a Williamsburg with a difference: it wasn’t dug out of the ground and rebuilt. There was another difference too: it didn’t have that unnaturally genteel, sanitized look of the Virginia village that turns it into a museum. Surely, the first Williamsburg must have been a knockabout frontier town, a place of skullduggery and war, where the laundry got hung out and dogs pissed in the muddy lanes, where the scent of dung and wet horses was strong. To resurrect that town and playact the past is a good thing for Williamsburg. But it wasn’t the way of Greenwich. Hidden in the tall marsh grass of the coastal lowland, the whilom seaport that once rivaled Philadelphia was remarkable.

I stopped at Arnold’s grocery, post office, and filling station (two pumps under a Southern-style canopy). Here the citizens considered it, built in 1860, a newer building. As I sorted through the cooler for a bottle of pop, the clerk eyed me suspiciously. In the tone that means, “Move along, buster,” she said, “Can we help you with something?”

“Maybe you could. I’m looking for Othello.”

“Won’t find it in the cooler.”

As I waited at the counter to pay for the soda, I noticed a frail codger outside writing down my license number. No wonder history had left the town be.

When I ordered a double-dip cone of chocolate and blueberry, the woman’s expression changed, but I was at the door before she said in an accent almost Southern, “You’ll find Othello straight down Greate Street a couple of miles. It’s not marked, but you can ask at The Griffin, the antique shop.”

From the door of the post office, the codger eyed me. “X-six-P–six-thirty-nine,” I called out, and he ducked inside as if my words were stones.

Greate Street, under big sycamores, was a road of clapboard or Flemish-bond brick structures, several in the flattened, elongated rowhouse style, with a few ornamented, wooden Victorian homes for variety. Through colonial windows I could see Windsor chairs and ancestral portraits. Some of the paintings were of men who, three days before the Christmas of 1774, dressed like Indians and savaged a shipment of tea bound for Philadelphia but temporarily hidden by the East India Company in a Greenwich cellar. Today the descendants boast about being one of five colonial towns to burn British tea.

In front of The Griffin, I found the owner talking with her nephew. I told her I was looking for Othello, and she said, “You’re standing in it.”

“Isn’t this Greenwich?”

“To some people.”

“How did it get named Othello?”

“How does anything get named? Who knows the truth?”

“Where could I find the truth?”

“I really don’t have the time,” she grumbled, “but come in the shop. I’m about to close. You’ll have to read fast.” She handed me a big book printed in the last century. I learned nothing.

Barbara Rizzo, who shared the old building, said, “Why don’t you ask Roberts Roemer? He knows about Greenwich. A dapper gent too unless you get him talking about A.C.E. Then he might lose his Southern hospitality.”

“What’s A.C.E.?”

“Ask him. He’ll give you a balanced view. He’s big enough to fight it. You ask us, we might get mad. He’s out at Cohansey View Farm.”

So I went out to the farm, a pleasant spread of land overlooking the winding river just a couple of miles above where it enters Delaware Bay. At the back of the fine old house, Roemer was painting a patio chair. He was Vice-President of Corporate Development for Wheaton Industries, a Millville manufacturer making glass containers primarily for the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, although the wire-bail canning jars had become popular in boutiques.

Roemer once wanted to become an architect, but a high school principal talked him out of it. After serving as a cryptographic technician in the Second World War, he went off to Middlebury College, where he graduated with a degree in fine arts and additional coursework in differential equations and calculus. But his deepest interest remained architecture.

I asked about Othello. “The tales I’ve heard,” he said, “I wouldn’t put much credence in. Othello is what they call ‘Head of Greenwich’ now. I’ll tell you who to ask, though. If the old historian can’t give a good answer, forget it.” Roemer wrote out the name and address. “I’ll call first and tell him you’re a teacher—otherwise he might not talk to you.”

“This isn’t why I came, but what’s A.C.E.?”

He frowned. “Look, when you get back, I’ll tell you over a gin and tonic. Dinner if you’re hungry.”

T
HE
door of the old house of the man who could explain how Othello got its name opened a few inches. “What is it?”

“I’m the one asking about Othello.”

The door opened wider. It was the man who had written down my license number. “Why do you want to know? What’s up your sleeve?”

To hell with these suspicions. I wasn’t that curious. In truth, it was only the inertia of the first question pulling me along. “It’s not important,” I said. “To be honest, I’m finding whatever the answer is not worth the asking.”

The man, thin and a little bent, said, “All right, come in then.” The yellow shades were drawn, a dark portrait hung above the mantel, and on a table lay Walpole’s
Diary
and on the sofa, Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
. I sat in a deep, velvet chair tattered about the edges as if chewed on by mice.

“Before I tell you anything,” he said crossly, “I want you to understand that if you go confabulating around our county, you leave my name out of it. And there’s another thing—before I talk, I want to hear
you
talk. Let’s see if you wear the colors. What are you doing here?”

“Driving around the country and looking into things.”

“Traveling alone?”

“People, places, things, ideas—if you call that alone.”

“
Homo viator
?” He was testing me.

“
Homo spectans
.”

He sneered. “Thoreau traveled extensively in Concord.”

“And Socrates learned nothing from fields and trees.”

The scowling almost twisted to a smile. “I take your point. You might be wearing the colors. All right, here’s how Othello got the name. Ignore other versions. In Cumberland County we have a settlement of people called ‘tri-bloods,’ people that trace their history—or legend—back to a Moorish—Algerian, specifically—princess who came ashore after a shipwreck in the first years of the nation. The Indians took her in, and, from the subsequent mixing of blood—later with a small infusion from the Negro—there developed a group composed of three races. The ‘Delaware Moors,’ they’re called. A similar branch is the Carolina Yellowhammers.