Tag: nature

notbecauseofvictories:

notbecauseofvictories:

Update from the Pine Barrens: I was not eaten by the Jersey Devil, but I definitely understand why a bunch of Europeans in the 18th century took a stroll through that endless, unnatural forest that was already blackened from wildfires and groaned when the wind was high, and went “….yep this is definitely a place where some malevolent, clawed horse-thing lives, no further questions.”

The entire thing looks like this:

You might say, “But Sarah, that’s lovely, that looks like an idyllic woodland scene, what are you talking about?” Well, that’s where you’d be WRONG.

Unfortunately, photograph can’t convey sound, so I want you to imagine that it’s a cold, windy day. All those red pines are tall and spindly enough that they sway and groan in anything heavier than a light breeze. It almost sounds like the sea, but it doesn’t ebb and flow, and it’s not a consistent rushing, the way a river would be. (During the first part of the hike, I was looking for the Mullica River—I don’t know how many times I heard water and looked around in hopeful anticipation, only to have the trees shower me with dead pine needles.)

But not only are you surrounded by the rush and whispering of the trees, no—that’s the only sound. This late in the year, there’s very little birdsong or buzzing insects; the Wharton State Park shuts down to just one office in September, and the campground nearby was closed when I went to check it out. I crossed paths with only enough people to count on one hand. You are, for all intents and purposes, alone.

And the trees are still creaking, whispering.

Everywhere you turn is a maddening combination of clear sight lines—it’s mostly underbrush, you could see anything taller than a foot—and a feeling of being hemmed in. A hundred yards away, the trees are no thicker, but they seem to be, blocking any attempt to peer through them. There’s no straight path, even the one I was walking on snaked around copses of trees or imaginary curves in the land. (The joke is, the entire area is flat, flat as salt and sand. There are no curves or hills to follow.)

In some parts, the trails are hard to pick out, just a faint indentation in the land. They criss-cross with service roads and dried river banks. You’ll have to look around for the yellow markers you’ve been blindly following for miles, hoping they’ll lead you somewhere, and that they won’t change places when you turn back to check:

Additionally, Wharton State Forest is littered with evidence of that time before it was a state forest—New Jersey only bought the land in the 1950s, and prior to that it was a center for ironworks and glassblowing. These train tracks mark the route of the Blue Comet, one of the most famous luxury lines for the New Jersey Southern Railroad. They haven’t been used since 1957:

So there you are. Alone. Wandering blindly through a forest and trusting in fading yellow paint. Amid the ruins of a people who are only a generation or two removed from you. There’s no one else on the path, and the forest is silent.

Except, of course, for the trees.