“Remember one thing—Kremlin is the Russian word for ‘fortress.’ If those uncivilized maniacs in the Fortress ever come to their senses, then maybe we can make some changes. It’s not real fashionable now to believe in military power, but it will be again, and when that happens, people will love those exploding cigars. I’ve seen both sides—I was in the hooligan Navy.”
“What’s the hooligan Navy?”
“Where hooligans did the dirty work. I was on Red Beach in ’forty-four. I can still hear the blue whispers coming at us. A little streak of blue smoke and a hiss and you were gone. I was so scared I wished I was dead.”
All the time we had been talking, a father on the other side of me entertained his baby with the blink of his LED watch; the baby, in a knitted cap that said PAULIE, burbled at the red numbers and reached a clumsy half-fist toward it. Paulie didn’t know, but across the way, the General Dynamics Electric Boat Company was putting his world together for him.
I said to the engineer, “Isn’t this ferry some kind of old Navy craft?”
“An LSM they brought out of the Pacific after the war and put a new superstructure on. She’s been making this crossing since nineteen forty-eight, but she’s in her last month. They got a new, specially designed boat just about ready.”
When John Steinbeck began his 1960 tour of the United States that he describes in Travels with Charley, he crossed Long Island Sound on this very boat and worried about the nuclear submarines of an earlier day. Yet a couple of decades later, that great flash of light still had not shown mankind the way out. Watching the shipyards disappear from view, the engineer said, “Maybe it’s a crazy way to be sane, but men are most reasonable when they’re scared.”
“Ever seen a cornered animal?”
“We’re not animals.”
We crossed the east end of the sound over a strip of water known as “The Race” and passed close by a small, brushy island topped with a smokestack.
“Talk of animals,” he said, “there’s what worries me—Plum Island. The Dangerous Animal Disease Laboratory.”
“What do they consider a dangerous animal?”
“It’s diseases that’re dangerous, not animals. But I couldn’t say for sure what they study there. Glanders, tularemia, plague—I’m not certain. I don’t even know if the Pentagon has a role in the research. But give me an atomic warhead any day to disease warfare. The time’s coming, though, when we’ll fight with germs. Economics will force it because it’s more efficient to kill with bugs than steel. Compared to a drum of cholera, a Trident’s a thing of beauty.”
“Myself, I’ve always preferred an earache to a toothache.”
7
IF you want to hear distortions and misconceptions laced with plenty of dogmatic opinion, you have a choice of three places—excluding domed governmental edifices and buildings with steeples—bars, sport arenas, and gas stations (barbershops have lost position because of electronics: you can’t hear over the hair dryers). As filling stations cease to be garages and community centers, as they become nothing but expensive nozzles, they too are losing ground. But, in the past, an American traveler depended on the local grease pit boys to tell him (a) the best route to wherever; (b) the best place to eat, although librarians give better recommendations; and (c) what the townsfolk thought about whatsoever. Now, it already may be too late for a doctoral candidate to study the ways that Americans’ views of each other have been shaped while waiting for the tank to fill.
Orient Point, Long Island, was a few houses and a collapsed four-story inn built in 1810, so I went to Greenport for gas. At an old-style station, the owner himself came out and pumped the no-lead and actually wiped the windshield. I happened to refer to him as a New Yorker.
“Don’t call me a New Yorker. This is Long Island.”
“I meant the state, not the city.”
“Manhattan’s a hundred miles from here. We’re closer to Boston than the city. Long Island hangs under Connecticut. Look at the houses here, the old ones. They’re New England–style because the people that built them came from Connecticut. Towns out here look like Connecticut. I don’t give a damn if the city’s turned half the island into a suburb—we should rightfully be Connecticut Yankees. Or we should be the seventh New England state. This island’s bigger than Rhode Island any way you measure it. The whole business gets my dander up. We used to berth part of the New England whaling fleet here, and that was a pure Yankee business. They called this part of the island ‘the flukes’ because Long Island even looks like a whale. But you go down to the wharf now and you’ll see city boats and a big windjammer that sells rides to people from Mamaroneck and Scarsdale.”
He got himself so exercised he overfilled the tank, but he didn’t pipe down. “If the East River had’ve been ten miles wide, we’da been all right.” He jerked the nozzle out and clanked it into the pump. “We needed a bay and we got a bastard river no wider than a stream of piss.”
Thus chastised, I went down a pleasant little road numbered 25, down the north fluke, through neat vegetable truck farms with their typical story-and-a-half houses, past estuaries and swans, to Riverhead. I followed a pickup with four bloodied sharks laid out in the bed; it looked like a tin of evil sardines packed in ketchup.
The side road ended, and I got pulled onto an expressway as if I were part of a train. I buckled the seatbelt, popped in a piece of bubblegum, put on my twelve-o’clock-high sunglasses, and got ready for the city. You’d have thought I was going to run the Gaza Strip. But it was Islip, Babylon, Amityville, Merrick, Oceanside. The Belt Roadway showed the backsides of suburbs and miles of carpet sample, unclaimed freight, factory outlet, and furniture warehouse stores—half of them gone under, the others with windows blocked by giant prices. Things raced past like the jumpy images of a nickelodeon: abandoned and stripped cars on the shoulders, two hitchhiking females that nobody could stop to pick up, a billboard EAT SAUSAGE AND BE HAPPY, low-flying jumbos into Kennedy International, the racetrack at Ozone Park, bulldozed piles of dirt to fill the marsh at Jamaica Bay, long and straight Flatbush Avenue, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, the World Trade Center like stumps in the yellow velvet sky. Then a windingly protracted ascent up the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (the Silver Gate of the East coast) with its world’s longest center span, and below the bay where the Great Eastern, the Monitor, the Bonhomme Richard, and the Half Moon sailed.
The low sun turned the Upper Bay orange. Freighters rode at anchor or headed to the Atlantic, and to the north, in the distance, a little glint of coppery green that was the Statue of Liberty. I slowed to gawk and got a horn; the driver passed in a gaseous cloud and held aloft a middle digit opinion.
The lanes descended and shot me across Staten Island; just before it was too late, I pulled out of the oppression of traffic and drove down Richmond Avenue to find the bridge across the Arthur Kill into Perth Amboy, the city (if you follow your nose) that gets to you before you get to it. I don’t know how I lost my way on a thoroughfare as big as Richmond, but I did. I could smell Perth Amboy, but I couldn’t find it. Instead, I found Great Kills, Eltingville, Huguenot Park, Princess Bay, and Tottenville. I asked directions from a nervous teenager who was either tuning his engine or stealing someone’s distributor.
Just as darkness was complete, I reached New Jersey and decided to take U.S. 9 to get through the congestion and into the Pine Barrens, the last great natural interruption in the Boston-to-Washington megalopolis. John McPhee’s book on the Pines had convinced me that anyone wanting to see it should do so immediately, what with subdividing realtors, industrial parks, reservoirs, and supersonic jet ports.
Forty minutes later I was already in Lakewood, midway down the state. I stopped for the night, still surprised I’d begun the day in Rhode Island. I had forgotten to think in the compressed distances of the Northeast.
8
IT isn’t widely known in America that the descendants of Jolly Roger pirates put an end to dirigible flight. So I heard at breakfast
in a diner. Actually, it was a full restaurant, but it had started as a diner. It was done up in red drapes and coachman lanterns, and at the door a concrete Cupid stood in a dry fountain surrounded by a polymer privet hedge. The eggs had been fried in Vitalis, and the potatoes carried a crisp woody flavor. I felt fine anyway.
The waitress, with a grudge of a face and a golden chain cutting into a puffy ankle, complained her way around. Everyone seemed to like her although she had no good tidings for anybody.
“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.
9
IN 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 qu
arter 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.