Rainbow Before Sandy, The Berkshires     cfe

NJ WILD readers know, at October’s wild end, I was led to the Berkshires, in Western Massachusetts.  i was only to stay two days.  My purpose was to hike in wooded hills and re-experience the finest arts at the Clark Institute, the Williams College Museum and Bennington’s,  As complex 2012 wound down, mountains, art and limitless vistas had become more essential than usual.

Sandy had other ideas.

Green Mountain Trees Await Sandy    cfe

My brief mountain getaway stretched to more than a week, with no heat or water in this Princeton dwelling, and major trees down along routes I needed in order to return home.

Long-time friends from corporate America laughed in unison when I referred to myself as a refugee.  But what else are you when you can’t go home?

The mountains had many messages for me, which I assiduously reported in my journal.

Sandy Approaches Williamstown     cfe

Above all, ‘Sandy’ is far too trivial a name for a natural event of that magnitude.  Even though this Storm King lived up to its moniker, burying Jersey Shore cars well inland in sand like blizzard drifts.

Though cradled in the Green, the Berkshires, the Catskills and in the shadow of Mt. Greylock, this Jerseyan was haunted by a Shore town’s name, “Sea Girt.”  Girdled by the sea.  I do not know the fate of that oceanside haven, but it probably is not good.  The truth is, we could change the name of New Jersey to Sea Girt.

NJ WILD readers have ‘heard’ me all these years, insisting, “It’s not Mother Nature, Folks.  It’s US!”  This has now been demonstrated to the entire world, irrevocably, inescapably.  On the heels of a political campaign in which catastrophic climate change and environmental perils, let alone carbon footprints played no role.

Are we facing the truth now?  Or are we all caught up in REBUILD and THE NEW NORMAL?

What ‘Sandy’ revealed was the fate of all our coasts.

What Sandy scrawled was the signature of sea-level rise.

Vanishing glaciers mean more water in oceans, which means more ‘fuel’ for storms whether rain, snow or wind.

Where I Read Storm News, Williamstown: The Chef’s Hat    cfe

In the mountains, reading local papers and the New York Times, welcomed like a local, comforted as the refugee I had become, the scariest reality had to do with my beloved trees.  One estimate, early on, was that we lost, in those few Sandy hours, 2 million trees.  Think “2 million carbon sinks” everyone, two million living, breathing entities that used to absorb the CO2 we insist on pumping into the greenhouse called Earth.

What the mountain newspaper asserted was, “This was not a storm of floods nor even of winds — this was a case of trees-turned-weapons.”

Sandy Fury North   Williamstown   cfe

Drive anywhere, without even leaving Princeton.  Toppled tree roots tower over dwellings of increasing magnitude.  Even Morven itself is dwarfed by roots of the downed conifer in its front yard.  Get out of the car to meet friends in the most privileged enclaves.  Hear the tumultuous ripple of ‘tarps’ over roofbeams.  Try to speak and hear above the roar of chain saws and tree-devourers.

Calm Before Storm, Bennington VT    cfe

Sandy is no respecter of history, pedigree, address, or life station.

Years ago, I completed Tom Brown’s Tracker School.  Ralph-the-Seneca was one of the participants, needing to learn Indian ways, especially foraging for wild foods, as intensely as I did.  Ralph had been brought there to teach us the art of bow-making.  At the end of making fire, Ralph took me aside, in the opening of a sturdy barn.  “We are poisoning Mother Earth,” he intoned solemnly, back in 1983.  “And she will do what any healthy animal does under those circumstances.  She will vomit us out.”

Although I was far from Tracker School and our beloved Jersey Shore - in fact, from New Jersey’s three unique coastlines — that battered Shore, the Delaware River and the Delaware Bay, i experienced Ralph’s prophecy’s being fulfilled.

FATE

Climate change has never been a factor of ‘belief’!  It’s here, now, big-time.  Are we big enough to face it?

Sandy Approaches Williamstown, Mass, bearing Rainbow    cfe

All through my unexpected refugee time in Massachusetts mountains, –held there by hurricane, downed trees on the routes home, and no power at home–, I NEEDED to re-read Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

A friend has since loaned me her teaching copy.  My craving has proved powerfully apt.

As the storm approached even the Berkshires, Vermont’s Green Mountains, crept toward Melville’s Greylock, I found myself wondering, if Will were here, how would he cover it?  The answers were swift in arriving:

SANDY IN WILLIAMSTOWN   cfe

His headline would read, “The world has suffered a sea change, into something rich and strange.” As ever, the profundity of Will’s long-ago lines surges far beyond mere words into prophecy itself.

These sea changes on our shores (remember, New Jersey is unique in having three shores) are not merely of this storm, nor of this season.

Whether we find Sandy’s legacy ‘rich’ is a moot point.  There is no question about change, and sea as agent.  And man with his ceaseless carbon emissions the ultimate deus ex machina, far beyond Caliban, in this drama.

The earth, that “brave new world”, WAS “rich” before our depredations. Now, the emphasis, on all our coasts and well inland, even to towering waves off Michigan and Illinois/Chicago, must be on “strange”.

And, unlike Shakespeare’s, many of our changes are permanent, and all are harbingers.

As though Shakespeare were interviewing residents of the Jersey Shore, he has Sebastian observe, “Foul weather?”  “Very foul,” Antonio replies.  They speak of their boat and their sailing companions as having been “sea swallowed.”

WE are being sea-swallowed.

SANDY OVER GREEN MOUNTAINS    cfe

Shakespeare’s tempest was called forth by the mage, Prospero, and carried out by his willing air sprite, Ariel.  Our storms were well beyond Ariel, with more and more severe tempests waiting in the wings.  There is no Prospero to halt ours.

What we had with Sandy was dress rehearsal for sea level rise.  Where the waters went for a few hours is the land they’ll claim permanently, with every passing day of glacial melt and warming (therefore expanding) seas.

Ironically, since we had a snowstorm on the heels of the “Super Storm,” Will includes Trinculo’s noting, “Another storm brewing.” Trinculo further describes, “yond same black cloud — alas, the storm has come again.” As I concluded up in the mountains, this unwilling voyager concludes, “I will here shroud ’til all the dregs of the storm be passed.”

Calm Before Storm, Bennington, Vermont    cfe

In another part of the island, Shakespeare/Prospero is deep in conversation with said Ariel, who refers to “the never-surfeited sea.” New Jersey waits between maw and paws of our never-surfeited sea.

Reporter Ariel paints the picture: “The powers delaying, not forgetting, have incensed the sea and shores.” The spirit exits to a stage direction, “He vanishes in thunder.”

In “The Tempest” , as in our recent lives, the storm of election was tangled with flying evergreens, sea spume, housing debris, sand-smothered vehicles.  During Sandy as in our 21st-century lives, politics and literal seachange are inextricable.  Trinculo frets, “If the other two be brained like us, the state totters.”

Reading Shakespeare’s tempestuous masterpiece, to the sound of buzz saws on all sides and the roar of tree-devouring-devices, I realize anew that this spectacular writer was far more than author.  Like the hero of the Tempest, Will was a prophet.

In a chant which I picture as in Lear, delivered high on a hill with turbulent slatey clouds ripping about on all sides, Prospero describes the storm he called forth:

“I have bedimmed the noonday sun, called forth the mutinous winds.  And twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault have I given fire and riven Jove’s stout oak with his own bolt.  The strong-based promontory have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up the pine and cedar.  Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth my my so potent art.”

Those harrowing lines describe our own town.  I could declaim them before the forest outside my window on Canal Road, which lost six majestic tree between house and driveway.  I could carry this volume and read it to uprooted monarchs among Battle Road mansions.  I could pace up and down, choosing descriptions to share with century-old conifers flung about like ninepins and jackstraws all along the Ridge.

One cannot set out in any direction without evidence of the effects of the winds of sea change.  One can often not drive down a local street, even now, without passing strangles of lowering wires, phalanxes of utility trucks, spilling workers to begin their feverish heroic tasks.

But none of this is cure.  Most of it is palliataive.  Some areas near to us, including sacred wildlife refuges, may never open again.  Who knows how many sea birds perished?  What will the ospreys do, when they return to breed, with all their platforms sea-swallowed?

Up in the mountains, I read that the destruction of this storm was not a catastrophe of wind and water, as that which Prospero and Ariel had called forth.  Ours is a tragedy of trees turned weapon.

As a poet, I find poetic justice in this reversal of roles.

Our storm, also unlike Prospero’s, included the deaths of dear and valued neighbor Bill Sword, II.

Our storm birthed shipwrecks beyond counting — some of them literal; many of them, former houses, built upon sand, upon barrier island sand.

In “The Tempest”, everyone’s life changed once the waters stilled and the people gathered.  In “The Tempest”, reason and magic prevailed.  Wounds were healed, lovers united, voyagers set out anew upon that sea for home.

We are home.  We are drowning our home.

It’s up to us whether we change our planet for the better.  But now, we are all Caliban, stumbling about having drunk the spirits tossed ashore by wind and wave, complaining, altering nothing.

To mix metaphors, egregiously, we are all Nero, fiddling while our planet burns.

It’s not Ariel out there surging salt waves into baywater, rivers, creeks and streams.

It is we, who have turned from tending earth as did the Indians, to using it, exploiting it, sea-changing the planet for all time.  We, who have turned from citizens to consumers, and will not be stopped.

We must all become Prospero, create sea change within ourselves, still the water, still the swallowing sea.

Window View After Sandy - Berkshires, Williamstown     cfe

“…unreconstructed and necessary wildness…”  Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

Enraged Osprey of Carnegie Lake, Brenda Jones

Michael Pollan in general, and his Botany of Desire, in particular, is one of those authors everyone means to read.  I hear protestations of intention all the time, always tinged with a kind of wistfulness.  Recently, Public Television gave people a visual taste of this man’s paradigm.  For me, the visual alone never suffices.

I’ll go so far as to insist that Pollan is an author to re-read.  His subject matter is so unexpected (apples and ‘cyder’, marijuana, tulips and potatoes) and his thinking so original.  It’s worth taking Pollan in hand, even if you don’t give a fig about nature.  Just for the privilege of journeying with him.

Fierce Flight (Great Blue Heron), Brenda Jones

And savoring his pithy phrases, such as “Plants are the true alchemists.”  His lament that now, “It is as though nature is something that happens outside,… as if we are gazing at nature across a gulf.”  As he sets out in a canoe in quest of Johnny Appleseed’s seminal (couldn’t resist) journeys, Pollan relishes trusting in the river to take him wherever he wants to go.

WILD DELAWARE RIVER, Brenda Jones

In my case, re-reading The Botany of Desire reveals a delicious (pun intended) emphasis upon the WILD.

Trenton’s Apple Bounty,    cfe

People can and do tease me for prating of the WILD in New Jersey.  In the first segment of The Botany of Desire, Pollan takes an even more unlikely tack — seeking the wild, as did Thoreau, through apples.  One of his theses is that Appleseed’s success came because he was not peddling mere fruit, but ‘cyder’ to the pioneers.

West Windsor’s Apple Bounty — cfe

Michael sets the tone with phrases such as “A handful of wild apples came with me” (on his Johnny-Appleseed-Quest.)  He insists that “sowers of wild seeds are to be prized.”

Cedar Ridge Preserve Meadow,    cfe

Cedar Ridge Wild Mushrooms    — cfe

Pollan laments that “we live in a world where the wild places where wild plants live are dwindling.”  You’ve heard this line from me in ‘posts’ beyond counting, coupled with urgings to support your local land trusts, especially D&R Greenway, to preserve New Jersey’s wild remnants and to plant New Jersey Natives wherever we can.

Baldpate View, Ted Stiles Preserve, Brenda Jones

Let Michael define “the best of all possible worlds”:  “WE’D BE PRESERVING THE WILD PLACES THEMSELVES.”

The next best possible world: “ONE THAT PRESERVES THE QUALITY OF WILDNESS ITSELF.”

Female Harrier Aloft, Pole Farm, Brenda Jones

Male Harrier, “The Grey Ghost”, in ice at Pole Farm — Brenda Jones

The generating thesis of NJ WILD is that the wild exists right in our own back yards:

Wild erupts with the whiff of fox along mown paths of The Griggstown Grasslands.  This lovely lofty set of trails, with its compelling Sourlands and Watchung views, awaits but a mile or two north of me on Canal Road, before/beside Griggstown’s Causeway.

Fox Alert, Griggstown Grasslands, Brenda Jones

The wild surprised me last week In burgeonings of wildflowers, deep in the duff of the forest floor, on Bull’s Island in the Delaware.  These petite fleurs lifted up the blinding waxy yellow of buttercups.  8 to 10 petals rayed out from yellow centers.  These premature spring heralds were nevertheless inviting pollinators.  On my hike, they seemed like pieces of eight flung onto the leaf-strewn forest floor.

Why call a delicate plant WILD?  Because they arrived there on their own, blooming despite winter on the calendar, pushing through flood detritus that resembled the graphite dust of Thoreau’s pencils.  A key quality of the wild is RESILIENCE — New Jersey specialty!

Sourland Mountain Rocks and Water, Brenda Jones

WILD in New Jersey, for me, requires Lenni Lenapes.  The land was tended by these peaceful tribes, at least 10,000 years ago.  Their vanished presence is palpable on many of my hikes, most especially among Sourlands boulders.  Also on trails near Mountain Lakes House, and at Ringing Rocks just across Delaware at Upper Black Eddy.  In each case, majestic boulders that render Stonehenge puny rest exactly where they were revealed by water wind and time, before time.  The huge stones are frequently encountered in a massive ring.  I FEEL Indian councils there, planning tribal actions for the season about to begin.  Seasons which, for Lenni Lenapes, triggered travel either to or from hunting to gathering.

Mink at Play, Brenda Jones

In the Hamilton/Trenton/Bordentown Marsh, the Lenapes convened with selected other tribes, before leaving central Jersey hunting grounds for Shore gatherings.  This journey and the seasonal constellation of other indigenous peoples was triggered by natural phenomena.  Spring’s took place when pickerel weed pierced still waters like arrows.

New Jersey’s Apple Bounty,    cfe

Michael Pollan plants a wild tree in his own home garden.  His hope - “that such a tree will bear witness to unreconstructed and necessary wildness.”

What can you do about wildness right now, as elusive winter gives way to spring?

Go in search of it.

Buy only native NJ species for your gardens.

Read Michael Pollan

and Thoreau

and Abbey

well, you know….

REMEMBER, WILD IS ALL ABOUT HABITAT!

Rare Box Turtle, Camouflaged in Natural Habitat - Cedar Ridge     cfe

Generously support D&R Greenway and other Land Trusts, preserving New Jersey’s wild wherever it exist.

Lake Oswego Peace — South of  Chatsworth,     Carolyn Foote Edelmann

Desperately seeking the wild, I’ve returned to my Edward Abbey collection, making my way through his work and others writing about this literary rebel, this self-proclaimed ‘desert rat’.  It is essential right now that I live for awhile with ‘Cactus Ed’.

I need his crusty refusals of ‘growth and development’.  I require his ecstasy in the face of cactus and rattlesnake.  My healing leg ‘walks’ with Ed in these books — in his red rocks and among his cherished junipers, occasionally coming upon desert primrose, respecting the ever-present spider and viper.

But enough of this prickly Paradise.  I have my own.  And it’s in our state - in the spirit of Abbey, I defy myself to define Paradise, because mine is in New Jersey:

Lake Oswego Summer, South of Chatsworth, Pine Barrens   (cfe)

timelessness

tranquillity

shared with one attuned person or blessedly alone, sometimes with camera

there is sand, and/or marshland

Afloat, Lake Oswego — (cfe)

long silken grasses are kissed and rearranged by very varied tides

birds are ever present or possible: on the ground, in trees, ruffling the leaves, troubling the shrubs.  Birds are overhead.  They pierce tidal flats.  Wings flat out, they harry and raptor.  Some murmur, some croak.  Everywhere I walk, there are whistlings, whisperings and rustlings.  I am ever on the lookout for rails and bitterns, whether I ever find one or not.  A bird is downing two snakes in the time it takes to type this (as did a great egret at ‘The Brigantine’ some years ago).  A minuscule pied-billed grebe gulps a January frog, as happened a few weeks back.

Thistle Shimmer, Lake Batsto    (cfe)

back roads get me to Paradise — hushed roads, where I am often the only car.  Road edges are dusted with sugar sand.  Forest understory (which must contain evergreen and the luminous black jack oak), switches from laurel to blueberry to fern to pine seedlings and oakthrusts, and back again.

New Jersey Paradise is especially defined by its people - who live by the seasons and the tides.  The Abbey in me asserts, “not by the clock; and, by God, not by the Dow Jones Stock Index!”

the roads that lead to Carolyn’s Paradise must hold a beauty of their own, for at least 2/3 of the way.  Pine Barrens and Salem and Cumberland County provide such aesthetic conduits, away from commerce, to wildest nature

Idyllic Batsto Lake, Pine Barrens   (cfe)

roadways and destinations involve freshwater, saltwater, varying salinities, peatwater, whitewater, the stillness of the bays       darkling streams wind alluringly back under the dark pines, tugging at the kayaker in me

the regions I am exploring involve bogs and fens, spongs, groves and copses

rare plants lurk right around the next bend — curly grass fern, swamp pink, carnivorous flowers who must lure insects for protein due to the strange ph of soils in Carolyn’s New Jersey Paradise — sundew, pitcher plant — those ravenous ones…   when least expecting it, I am to be knocked over by wild fragrance, such as sweet pepperbush, along the peatwaters of Lake Oswego south of Chatsworth    rare lilies bloom in ditches as I drive       goldenclub erupts behind a dam I would otherwise despise with Abbey - but it did create this ideal habitat for a plant I’d only known in the splendid nature books of Howard Boyd

Among the Rare Lilies, Brigantine Wildlife Refuge  (cfe)

often in my wanderings to and through Paradise, I must come on mosses and lichens and occasional fungi.  Although I long to devour each mushroom, this foraging remains virtual, ignorance being quite the barrier where these savories are concerned

Leeds Point - Hard-Shell and Soft-Shell Crabs    cfe

quaint names are essential — alongside the back roads and out in front of farms, beside the waters:

“Troublesome Acres”   “Heaven’s Way Farm”  “Farrier”  Dividing Creek “Bears, Bucks and Ducks”   Shellpile   Bivalve   Caviar   Ong’s Hat — some of these names go back generations and centuries, and only the locals may know how to find them, by a crumbling foundation or some domestic plant run wild in another kind of wilderness   Applejack Hill’s name has been changed, for the tourists, to Apple Pie Hill — Abbey, are you listening?  Applejack, of course, — talk about terroir!– was/is New Jersey Lightnin’ — each Piney tending his own still with attention, experience and a shotgun.

Sneak Boat Ready to Sneak - Leeds Point   (cfe)

History must have happened in my Paradise — especially Native American and Revolutionary

Here a battle must have been fought and lost, such as the fiery Revolutionary fate of Chestnut Neck.

Here locals must have defied and overcome proud dazzlingly uniformed British, taking their ships and their stores inland from the coast, along the storied Mullica River - without which waters and watermen we would not have a nation today!

Clouds in the Water, Chatsworth Bogs  (cfe)

Here salt hay must have been harvested by man and horse in the steamiest of seasons, and great whales tugged ashore and ‘tried’ for their various riches.

Here traitors must’ve conspired, smugglers rowed by night, bootleggers brought contraband ashore to sell and to imbibe.

Leed’s Point - Smugglers’ Haven - Living Fishing Port    cfe

Here clammers still tug their rich provender onto deck and into seafood restaurants tethered to waterways, creaking boards hinting of sagas of old, as at Oyster Creek Inn at Leeds Point.

It helps that Leeds Point is the home of the Jersey Devil, whom I am still requesting to meet.

“Ready to Roll”  cfe

Intriguing restaurants must be nearby.  Farmers’ Markets must be open, and people must be selling the spring’s first asparagus, sliced from that meagre soil, at roadstands with a little box for the money for this treasure beyond price.  Russo’s Market in Tabernacle must have its spicy applesauce apples outside in thick plastic bags, next to the honesty box, at the beginning of winter.

Only people who treasure timelessness and tranquillity need apply for such journeys.

A day in the Pines will require about 200 miles of driving, longer if we detour to Tuckerton, formerly Clamtown.  Why Tuckerton?  Because great and little blue and tri-colored herons may stud the grassy reaches, depending on the tide, as we tool along Seven Bridges Road.  Because there’s a place along there, –out on a somewhat suspect roadway–, where one can stop for the freshest clams, unless one has wriggled them out personally, using one’s own toes.  Because at the end of this road, (and HOW I LOVE Land’s Ends!), there used to be an island village, now sea-claimed.  Here, in season, one can find the vivid oystercatchers in full breeding plumage, turning over the few rocks on the sandy approach to the bay.

Life of the Seasons and the Tides    Leeds Point   cfe

Because closer to town, one can happen to be there when evergreens are studded with black-crowned night herons, squawk-murmuring to one another as sun drops into autumnal waters.

Carolyn’s New Jersey Paradise has to include kayaking possibilities, for her physical therapist is promising ‘back in the craft’ by April.  If so, there is above all the Wading River to paddle and many ‘liveries’ to make these delicate journeys possible.  There is always the exquisite Barnegat Bay in Island Beach’s back reaches - those paddles used to be free, with naturalists leading us among the Sedge Islands.  There a feast of shore birds includes black skimmers not only skimming, but doing their odd sand squiggle on their bellies, when it’s just too hot.

Black Skimmers in Flight, Brenda Jones

I deeply understand Cactus Ed’s passion for the sere landscape of Arches and Canyonlands.  I relish, with him, the silence.  I don’t have rock formations in my Paradise, nor the song of the canyon wren and the slither of sidewinder.  His Paradise is red and pink and magenta and ochre and burnt sienna and irreplaceable.

Mine is mostly forest green, toasty oak, sometimes ruddy blueberry leaves, interspersed with limitless stretches of flooded cranberry bogs, throwing back the sunset.  In the distance, there is salt tang.  Close up, there is the sibilance of peatwater.

If Ed had known the Pine Barrens, –especially her crusty inhabitants–, I think he’d've approved.  Maybe only if he found it before Arches and Canyonlands.  He might’ve kayaked the Sedge Islands, and even boarded the restored oyster schooner down at Bivalve, and helped tug the sails into the sky while singing sea chanteys.

Revolutionary Massacre Site - Alloway Creek, Salem County — (cfe)

He’d probably hang out overnight, black flies and greenheads or no, on the sands of Reed’s Beach when it’s studded with courting, mating horseshoe crabs and whatever red knots and ruddy turnstones remain on our planet.

Bucolic Salem County, where Rebels Countered Redcoats and Prevailed    cfe

Paradise — for Ed and for me — seems to require a dearth of humans.  It need not be awash in critters, but there needs to be that ever-possibility.  Even the new health of New Jersey oysters, “Cape May Salts.”  Even the restoration of sturgeon to the Delaware River and elsewhere along this state of three coasts — once so enormous and plentiful that there is a mystery town still known as Caviar along the Delaware Bay.

An essential quality of Paradise, however, is that it cannot be explained.

So, inexplicably, I assert, New Jersey, especially South Jersey (and also Sandy Hook) holds varying versions of Paradise, all of them yours for the seeing.  And none of them seasonally-dependent.  Go for it!

Salem Preserved     cfe

AND, ABOVE ALL, SEE THAT ALL VERSIONS OF NEW JERSEY PARADISE ARE PRESERVED!

Lest, like Thoreau, we find out we had not lived…

Henry David Thoreau re Walden Year(s):

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

— Henry David Thoreau

The First Thanksgiving Painting, Jean Louis Gerome Ferris

Brenda Jones’ image of Geese Overhead echoes Charles Goodrich’s signature phrase

Fellow poet, Penelope Schott, sent me this delightful essay from someone else wise and wild in her new home town, Portland, Oregon: Charles Goodrich.

I e-mailed Charles, receiving merry permission to share his (diatribe, polemic, or just plain delicious excursion?) with NJ WILD readers.   I relish his unique sign-off/signature - don’t you?

Charles knows what to do on the days of Thanksgiving.  That feast did not come into being so that people could shop.  At 4 a.m. in beautiful New Jersey, people could be out tracking in a wood, following a river, coursing over the bounding main, seeking wild creatures– not elbowing aside other frenzied humans in mad excesses of materialism.

Wise Indians talked surviving Pilgrims into setting aside days of thanks for the harvest, much of which would not have been in hand without the steady assistance of the so-called savages.

Thanksgiving is meant to be a celebration of gratitude.  In the wild world, gratitude can be engendered by watching wild turkeys, in this case, battling - rather than fighting off fellow shoppers.

Brenda Jones’ Battling Turkey Cocks

Here is a fellow nature enthusiast, engendering thankfulness the real way.

Thank you, Charles, and I look forward to your new book, GOING TO SEED: DISPATCHES FROM THE GARDEN, due out in April from Silverfish Review Press.

Use Charles Goodrich’s web-site, to track down other thoughtful musings.  Meanwhile, take a stroll in wild Oregon with this fine thinker and writer.

“Black Friday”

Deep in the brambles, a winter wren scavenges insects for her supper, talking to herself in buzzing little syllables. Otherwise, things are quiet in the woods.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, signs everywhere of recent feasting. Beside the river, a scrubby willow has been clipped off, the clean impression of beaver teeth indented in the stump.

At the base of a cedar, a fresh owl pellet, chock full of white bones and gray fur.

And here, in the center of the trail, splayed out in artful array, the scrub jay’s wings sail on through a scatter of gray and blue breast feathers, right where the fox left them.

I’m sure it will be a busy day at the mall. There are supposed to be bargains galore.

I can believe it, because the catkins of the wild filberts are already an inch long. And now the wren flits to a branch above the trail and scolds me for undisclosed offenses. Prosperity abounds!

*

Brenda Jones’ Wren of Summer

evokes Charles’ Goodrich’s winter wren in another season

Spring Creek Project

The challenge of the Spring Creek Project is to bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the clarity of philosophical analysis, and the creative, expressive power of the written word, to find new ways to understand and re-imagine our relation to the natural world.

***

�

Pine Barrens Wild Water, cfe

It won’t surprise NJ WILD readers that, for this reader/writer, there is no such thing as too many nature books.  The best gift yet arrived last week from sensitive friends, another book case…  Most of the ones in my home, however, I have read and re-read, highlighted, underlined, quoted and read again.

For all these full bookshelves, there are never enough nature books for yours truly.  One of the nice things about working at D&R Greenway Land Trust is that we have a nature library upstairs.  You might think I’ve devoured every page between covers on nature subjects, due to both passion for and insatiable curiosity about Mother Nature in all forms.  However, in the course of filing new books in our D&R Greenway library, I discovered two that have nourished me in recent rainy times.  One is a compilation of early writings by women on what was then called “Birdwatching.”  Report on that experience to come…

A Place in the Woods, by Helen Hoover, was new to me, although I’d read her The Gift of the Deer in the early years of my long-ago marriage.  Helen and her husband, “Ade”, “took to the woods” without so much as a wilderness survival course, and precious little familiarity with cooking.  They lived there in all seasons between the years of 1966 and 1973.  This was not simply Minnesota (whose bitter winters, one entire month without thermometer’s ever rising above ZERO, daunted me as a bride and new mother), but NORTHERNmost Minnesota.

Tantalizingly near to my beloved Lake Superior, these two spent little enough time in or on the lake, most of it in their log cabin and/or summer house, surrounded by towering evergreens.  Everything seemed to go wrong, including a bear in the cellar on Helen’s first day alone in the house while Ade made his way to a remote town for mail.

Interestingly, their spirits rarely flagged and their love evidently increased.  As did their competency.

Her husband’s pen-and-ink drawings recreate that rugged Eden, even in this, another century time.  Helen herself was driven to begin writing articles and books because everyone they’d left behind with their sophisticated Chicago professions kept asking when they were coming home.

For the Hoovers, the woods were home.  As for me, here in this Princeton woods, –mostly deciduous but some white pines–.  Unlike Helen and Ade, I don’t need all my Tom Brown’s Tracker School skills in order to thrive.

Reading the words of Helen Hoover reminds me why I work for D&R Greenway and why I write these blogs for the Packet and Princeton Patch.

The author declares that their challenges, –especially in winter–, “brought us deep awareness of the strength and courage to be drawn from the steady renewal of the forest.”

Keep preserving New Jersey lands so that we, ourselves, in this region, in this state, may be steadily renewed.

Helen Hoover goes on to reveal [as NJ WILD readers know from earlier posts about, for example, the fox whose snow-tracks delighted me in the worst of last year's ceaseless blizzards,]  “helped us understand, within our human limitations, the living creatures who shared the land with us.”

Helen Hoover evokes the past which NJ WILD readers are accustomed to hearing me lament:  “In those early days before the power line, lights went out and boats came in early, so that summer nights belonged to the murmur of wind in the pines; the patter of rain; or the booming of thunder; the lonely, lovely voices of the loon.” Even in daunting northern Minnesota, there was quiet summer magic to remember and to miss.

In New Jersey, there are still places where quiet reigns.  I write to you about them as often as I can: Salem and Cumberland counties, always; back-bay Cape May; anytime on the Towpath, especially south from Quaker Bridge Road and over toward the Brearley House. The Pine Barrens even on major Holidays.  Island Beach, Sandy Hook, especially in but not limited to winter.

Keep on supporting your local land preservation organizations, so that pine-clad, sand-drifted, bird-shadowed, water-blessed New Jersey can continue to exist.

We don’t have to go to northernmost Minnesota to find the wild.  We have it right here.  PRESERVE IT!

Drama in Your Own Backyard

Fox Listening for Vole, Pole Farm, Brenda Jones

NJ WILD readers know my enthusiasm for everything wild, everything nature in our state, which is far more beautiful, natural and wild than anyone realizes.

Fierce Great Blue Heron, Brenda Jones

You’re also pretty familiar with my choice in reading: anything about nature, especially New Jersey, and always lately, catastrophic climate change.  Now even the Weather Channel is admitting that “This year, everything is a record.”  Of course, they’re still blaming that on Mother Nature, not on human greed…

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/extreme-weather-events-continuation-of-global-warming-marked-2010-climate/

Never lose sight of the importance of countering climate change - particularly for the sake of New Jersey’s wildflowers and elegant pollinators:

Cabbage White Butterfly Nectaring, Brenda Jones

On the subject of that partnership, a new publication crossed my D&R Greenway Land Trust desk this week.  It’s the spring newsletter of The Native Plant Society of New Jersey:  www.npsnj.org. They were kind enough to give inside front cover placement to a vivid description of our April Native Plant Sale here, which was so well attended and patronized.  Princetonians are eagerly taking to heart our Native Plant Nursery’s lessons on natives in the home garden.

Dogbane/Indian Hemp   Brenda Jones

Pamela Ruch authored the newsletters  column, titled Learning Tolerance for Native Weeds.  Her first line grabbed me:  “Keeping a field journal is a discipline that does not come easily to me.”  Frankly, it never occurred to me.  Even though a birder, I am not ‘a lister’, what the Brits call ‘a twitcher’.  But wouldn’t it be grand to have a notebook chronicling the arrival of each flowery sign of spring, against which to compare next year and next year and next year?  Admittedly, it could give evidence of catastrophic climate change. But how valuable and pleasurable such a diary would be!  And the process carries hidden benefits at many levels.

Pamela discovered that “observing, drawing, putting details into words,” she made surprising discoveries. Such as the fact that many of the plants that we term ‘weeds’ are native plants, not to be sneezed at, pun intended.

Yellow Warbler with Insect, Brenda Jones

Your plants that feed the insects feed the birds and their young…

NJ WILD readers have ‘heard’ me ad infinitum on the value of native plants.  Our Stewardship Staff here at D&R Greenway spend hours ‘in the field’ in all seasons and most weathers save ice, removing invasives and planting natives.

Black Swallowtail Among the Loosestrife (Invasive…), Brenda Jones

One of the main reasons for doing so is that native plants evolved with our regional animals and insects.  Our Stewardship Staff has taught me that,  if you see leaves uneaten in the fall, they’re invasives and of no use to the creatures who evolved to be nourished and sheltered by them.

Other reasons include the fact that natives can withstand drought, as intensifying climate change renders this facet more and more crucial.

Natives can better deal with other extremes, as well, such as needing less water and less nourishment, because they were ‘born’ to these soils.

The one factor with which natives cannot deal is invasives, who crowd out everyone by a whole ‘raft’ of means and measures.  Who, having no enemies here, soon eliminate even young hardwoods.  Japanese stilt grass alone can prevent the hardwood forests of our future.

Native plants attract pollinators, such as butterflies,  worthy rivals of the vivid flowers upon which they suckle, then go on to propagate.

Courting Cabbage Whites, Brenda Jones

Our compromised bees need the flowers of native plants, as well

Birds need natives as nest sites, as well as food suppliers.

Puffed December Mockingbird, with Berries, Brenda Jones

Migrant birds depend upon inner compasses, forged millenia ago.  You could see birds as winged GPS systems.  Birds chose their routes in ancient times, based on the presence, for example, of native berries.

Ripe native fruit, signaled by early red leaves, provides crucial calories/stamina/sustenance/energy for autumn migration.

Birds count upon native insects,  who count on native plants in spring migration, and to feed vulnerable young after successfully breeding here.

Home gardens can be as important as woods and fields to certain avian species.

And, according to Native Plant Society of New Jersey’s columnist, Pamela Ruch, if you keep a Field Journal of your garden, you’ll make discoveries:  What the French call la richesse, richness, of plants will be revealed, that you never otherwise might have known.  She writes, for example, of discovering, describing and researching wild lettuce, which provides pollen for bees and seeds for finches.

Pamela reports a major advantage of Field Journaling:  “I took away a more thoughtful posture toward my landscape.”  She vows not to focus so exclusively upon her “garden vision that I would refuse [natives] space to provide for the many creatures, seen and unseen, that live among us.  I will also try to refrain, starting now, from calling them ‘weeds’.”  …Noble discoveries and declarations which any of us can emulate, for the betterment of the natural world in New Jersey.

Golden-Shafted Flicker Feeding Young, Brenda Jones

What Pamela teaches is that, what seem weeds to us are life preservers for wild creatures.  Even aged and compromised trees, become cradles for life.

Pamela ought to know:  She serves as horticulturist at Morven Museum and Gardens, where the Stocktons presided before and after our sacred Revolution.  You’ll likely see the fruits of her studies and labors if you visit Morven for a quiet, historic celebration of  Fourth of July.

Lambertville Fourth of July, 2010, Brenda Jones

You may also meet and even purchase native species here at D&R Greenway’s Native Plant Nurseries — sometimes we sell between our major seasonal sales; and always at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve below New Hope.

Peaceful Delaware, accessible by The River Line, Riverton     cfe

It’s a flawless Saturday in June, the kind of just-washed morning that simply requires an excursion.  Luckily, a friend and I have one all planned.  Debbie and I meet at the Light Rail Line station in Bordentown, because it’s nearby, pretty, free and safe.  I particularly treasure the miracle of waiting at the River Line Station, studying the nearby Delaware, sparkling, enticing — the reason for for this train.

Artisanal Tiles Tell the Story of Each River Town    Riverside      cfe

Once upon a time, commerce in New Jersey (and across-the-Delaware Pennsylvania) took place under sail along this glimmering and capacious body of water.  Today, Debbie and I will hop aboard, with our validated two-hour tickets tucked in a handy pocket, in case some official might ask to peruse them.  The beautiful weather puts us in such a dreamy mood that we don’t care which way we go - north or south.  Whichever train comes first.  There are printed schedules on the walls of each shelter/station, showing that trains arrive (like clockwork - well, they were built by Swiss), and you never have long to wait for the next one.  When your ticket runs out, which it will, no big deal - our tickets were 70 cents — because of our venerability! — others are probably $1.50 or so, and each ticket grants two hours of light rail magic.  The trains have hooks for bicycles, so people can bike to the train, train far and wide, lift up the bike and bike off again.  Terribly civilized.  Terribly European, it all seems to me.  But it’s actually very New Jersey.  A reason for great pride in our state.

Ready to Roll, on the River Line     cfe

What arrives is the northbound train, to Trenton.  We know not to stick the little purple tickets into the validation machines until we see the beaming headlight of the Little Engine That Really Can!  Brightest Blue and Sunflower Yellow, these zingy Swiss two-ended, two-engined trains zing up and down from Trenton to Camden and back all day and a little bit into the night, carrying people to new jobs and restored towns all along the route.  After a certain hour, the tracks revert to carrying freight.  Until the next morning, and the next round of commuters.

I’ve watched a woman in medical attire intensively studying all the way from Camden to Trenton.  This day, we would be across the aisle from a young exhausted mother, who managed sleep the whole way with babe in arms, –modern madonna, modern pieta.  Her slumbrous child was wrapped as in some ancient land, but in a blanket decorated with tiny soccer balls.  I’ve listened as greetings conveyed to new arrivals with the eagerness and delight of family reunions.  The train serves as a kind of moving neighborhood.  I’ve heard youngsters practicing their drumming from Camden to Trenton, where a competition awaited.  I’ve taken the train myself twice, though unsuccessfully, to try to enter Whitman’s house in Camden, to see the room where our legendary poet who changed poetry forever wrote, entertained visitors, even died.  But the house is not open when I’m there.  Nevertheless, it was important to make the pilgrimage.

Inside the River Line     cfe

Today, Debbie and I luxuriate in a timeless sojourn, beginning with north through the Marsh (The Hamilton-Trenton-Bordentown Marsh).  Here I’ve hiked, relished birding walks with Ornithologist Charlie Leck and Lou Beck of Washington’s Crossing Audubon, as well as legendary bird author/artist David Allen Sibley.  I’ve relished wildflower journeys with Mary Leck, emeritus professor of biology at Rider.  Here we’ve scouted for beaver-breath at 20 degrees, curling white and frail above their scattered-looking lodges,  Here I’ve found the great horned owl nest although so well hidden in its tangley vines, just before sunset.  In the Marsh I’ve  followed dawn’s fox tracks.  We could tell when he was sauntering, hunting, just going back home in light fresh snowfall.  I’ve kayaked the creek we now begin to cross, Crosswicks, then nipped off onto Watson’s Creek and strange encounters under highway abutments, where cave swallows have made the most of all that concrete.  Ultimately, we’d emerge in wetlands (freshwater tidal) belonging to egrets, herons (green and blue), wood ducks that look like Picasso designed them, owls being mobbed by ferocious crows, and American bald eagles themselves, nesting again in the Marsh where he belongs, now that DDT is behind us and them.

All of this in the heart of New Jersey’s State Capitol.  And nobody knows its there.  But you can ‘to and fro’ through the magical Marsh on New Jersey’s enlightened River Line Train.

Turning south, I find an egret for Debbie off to our right, where the Marsh gives way to the Delaware herself, and pickerel weed at low tide is standing tall as toy soldiers, the water a long long way from those bright green pointy leaves.  In the afternoon, full moon tides having come back in, big-time, those leaves are nearly submerged.

Swiss Designed River Line Car at Station     cfe

The train is cool but not cold, its windows large and gleaming.  I like to sit the same way the train is going - with an engine at either end, half the passengers are always riding backwards, not my favorite way to travel.  A written led display and a formal woman’s voice announce each new station.  Roebling arrives, coming back to life after its years as one of the first company towns, much of its amazing industrial might still in situ, and a new museum being spiffed up off to one side of the tracks.

River Line tracks arrow straight through the center of these Delaware-side towns, these former ports, these formerly abandoned villages.  Evidence of New Jersey’s industrial past is on either side, sometimes still thriving, sometimes thriving anew, sometimes in ruins as evocative as Tintern Abbey.

We puzzle over the large abandoned building beside the Riverside tracks — a few years ago, it had been festooned with signs promising condominiums there by the train.  There’s the Madison Pub beside the train stop there, just below the eagle statue with the River Line train painted on its back - mixed emotions here…  Madison Pub, I was told, has been there since before Prohibition - medicinal purposes only, I guess.  Now it has more than doubled in size, fed as it feeds passengers on the River Line.

But our goal is sleepy little Riverton, almost to Camden.  Flower-bedecked, Victorian-restored, it’s a newer town than 18th Century Burlington, but their histories are equally palpable.  We’ll lunch at Zena’s, right beside the track, noting that the train comes at 7 after and 37 after the hour.  But first, a stroll.

Flower-Bedecked Riverton     cfe

‘Down By the Riverside’, Riverton     cfe

Shorebird Breakfast, Riverton Yard    cfe

Riverton Yacht Club, on the Delaware    cfe

Moored in the Delaware    cfe

Riverton Yacht Club Through the Sycamores    cfe

What Used to Be — Riverton, Restored    cfe

Rooftop Garden, Riverton     cfe

Zena’s - our Mecca    cfe

I’ll save the story of our superb lunch, the ride back north, our sojourn in Burlington - which was the capitol of The Jerseys when we were two provinces separated by Province Line Road — and our antiquing in the building where many-masted ships were formerly repaired, for another day.

If you can’t wait - take the River Line right now.  Any time.  Any direction.  For a day you will never forget.

It’s ‘unseasonably’ hot this morning, and I don’t have to be at work until 2.  D&R Greenway is hosting an archaeology talk at D&R Greenway tonight, on the Lenni Lenapes and the Bonapartes-of-Bordentown, who lived above  the Hamilton-Trenton-Bordentown Marsh.  (Call 609-924-4646 to register for free 6:30 program: The Cultural History of the Marsh.

When I’m the food stylist for evening events, mornings take place at home, –at my speed, my priorities.  Of course, I head straight to the Towpath [near #518 off Canal Road where I now live.]  D&R Greenway began as a non-profit to save land near the D&R Canal and Towpath.  Friends for the Marsh exists ‘under our umbrella’, and we’re featuring their juried photography exhibition this summer, on our circa-1900 barn walls.  I walk this trail and ponder the miracles of hard-won preservation.

What literally strikes me first, as I clamber from the car and move onto the more or less authentic canal bridge, is the force of the sun.  It sears like August sun in Provence.  One of my Provence poems complains, “August strikes its flat sword blade”.  One fled the sun of August in Provence, as though it were a vindictive sword wielded by a heedless barbarian.  I feel this way in this light on this trail, even though I am awash in fragrances headier than those distilled from Provencal petals in Grasse over the hill from my villa.

I want to capture what was given on this morning’s hot towpath, before all so rudely ended.

A bower of berry blossoms - hence, heady, even dizzying scents on all sides

Fern groves; hefty skunk cabbage clusters in the hollow.

First swathes of bright yellow ‘flags’, wild iris, –very very native.

Mockingbird trills, –over and over and over again.

PHOEBE!  PHOEBE! - this tiny bird shouting its name, and answered to my right and to my left.

Bullfrog bellows.  Sometimes they call to mind Casals or Yo Yo Ma - but this is too earthy and flat-out territorial for classical reference.

“Pretty pretty me!”  “Pretty pretty me” - the sweet narcissism of the yellow warbler.

Two fragrances now - honeysuckle vying with berries, –too much sweetness, really, until I long for a whiff of fox, of skunk, of something rank decaying into the trail.

But I find myself flinching every time I move out of treeshadow into sunglare.  Now, I remember hot Memorial Days, even in Michigan, definitely in Princeton.  Even so, there is a suffocating inescapable quality to this sultriness, even so early, that thrusts me right into the subject of catastrophic climate change - something NJ WILD readers might suspect I came out on the trail to forget.

Spring is at its zenith.  Summer, that predator, is literally at my throat.

Everything is that too-green that it will stay until the first coppery glints of woodbine and poison ivy remind,  “Don’t worry.  Fall is coming!”

At first, others on the Towpath are captivated by the miracle of running through this tunnel of blossoms.  Their gaze meets mine, even the men whispering in passing.  Then, as heat takes over, runners flash past without greeting.  “Ha!,” I think, bitterly, “fitness is more important than fellowship.”

But my soundlessness and timelessness are short-lived.

I become aware of frenzied traffic, hurtling like missiles along the road that used to be Tranquillity Central.  Then, the sound I hate above all others, back-up beeps of trucks.  I don’t know where I am, because the green and blossoms are so thick here — so I don’t know how to avoid these trucks, which clatter, clang and growl frontwards and shriek backwards, while the hard-hatted men who tend them shout above their own cacophony.  Overhead, first one helicopter.  Then another.

I turn, pick up the pace, head back to the bridge.  Damn!  I probably can’t ever hike this part of the trail again.

It holds everything I flee - what NJ WILD readers have heard me decry over and over, DESTRUCTION in the name of CONSTRUCTION.

Others turn, also.  We’re a human traffic jam fleeing human traffic.

The only blessing is a birdsong I almost know but haven’t heard yet in 2010 — and then I see it in silhouette, right over my head.  As I focus my ‘glass’ upon the unknown soloist, orange and black that out-Princeton Princeton flash in the hot white light.  First Baltimore Oriole.

Worthy of the journey…

Equal of the Eastern towhee who blessed my departure for work yesterday morning.  I want to see Nature as the victor…

Can she be, with us in the equation?

Barnegat Bay, April, Carolyn Foote Edelmann

OK, it’s cold, dreary and rainy in our New Jersey today.  Even so, we remain the only state with three coastlines.  So, I am thinking of beaches.

Nobody seems to realize that we are tri-coastal:

the Shore, of course.  As in ‘down the Shore’.  As in Atlantic Ocean washing our barrier beaches and our mainland.

Island Beach April Solitude, Full Atlantic   cfe

the Delaware River.  A few do remember ‘Del.’  Right now she’s surging with healthy shad, hurtling upriver for spring’s re-creation rites, while pale shadbushes bloom along her banks.

and, our most unknown blessing, the Delaware Bay.  Where there used to be more millionaires per block than anywhere in the world — because of our oyster industry.  Shellpile.  Bivalve.  Caviar — where we shipped sturgeon roe from our waters to Russia to turn into that most luxurious commodity.  The Delaware Bay, where increasingly scarce red knots, ruddy turnstones and more plentiful laughing gulls and others and some sandpipers, must feed on horseshoe crab eggs at a crucial moon of May, in order to reach their breeding grounds.  Without doubling their weight in that two-week sojourn on our Delaware Bay (Reed’s Beach especially), they cannot make the journey.  Or, making it, they cannot successfully breed.  Rising waters, shrinking beaches, to say nothing of overfishing horseshoe crabs for bait and fertilizer, seriously compromise red knots and ruddy turnstones.

Ted Cross, whose art is at D&R Greenway Land Trust here, immortalizes his favorite red knots

It is possible to live in or near New Jersey for decades without meeting her spectacular unspoiled beaches.  Just as outsiders think oil tanks when they hear our name - they also think gambling, boardwalks, honky tonk and cotton candy.  These do not constitute destinations for me, rather travesties, tragedies, of what used to be WILD NJ.

Bayfoam, Barnegat, April    cfe

Public beaches generally cannot hold a candle to Sandy Hook and Island Beach, where dunes and sands and bayberries vie with holly and lichen and poison ivy, never pruned except by salt-laden winds, all these centuries.  On certain points of ‘the Hook’ and all points of Island Beach, it is possible to be where there is not sign of the human except for the road or the trail through the dunes…

On a recent Sunday, I spent an idyllic day trekking Island Beach’s many sideways, dune-sheltered paths  –first to the Bay, then to the Ocean.  I did not set out due south for Barnegat Inlet and its seminal view of ‘Old Barney’, Barnegat Light, because the wind was too high.  Flags straight out, which usually means 25 - 30 miles an hour.  The secret of I.B. is that one can escape winds in all seasons by heading east and west through those towering dunes.

“Heather Bald” — Hudsonia and Lichen    cfe

My idea of a perfect beach day includes beachside greenery, especially Island Beach’s rare Hudsonia, and its (to this Midwesterner) always unexpected but so native prickly pear cactus.  Ten years ago, June, I met highbush blueberries along the Spizzle Creek Trail.  Each bush offered berries of a different hue, size, juiciness, and above all savor.  It was like a wine tasting, each new handful of sunwarmed berries.

Tomorrow’s Blueberries, cfe

My paradise must include osprey - and this Sunday they were everywhere, on feeding platforms, on nests, building nests, guarding nests, changing the guard on nests, carrying fish in that aerodynamically flawless position, head first into the sea winds.

My heaven days, again because of having grown up in Michigan, includes the distant sound of surf.  Our  ’surf’ rolled in on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior beaches — (I had little patience for the other great lakes.)  Michigan didn’t have salt air or tides, and tides continue to baffle me to this day.

If one is, as I am, of a certain age, one is given, with no trouble atall, a free lifetime pass to Island Beach - merely by filling out a quick form in the entry area.

They’ll also hand you a stern reminder that it is absolutely forbidden to feed the foxes.  A pale fox, nowhere near red - rather strawberry blonde — met us immediately after we read the notice.  Hours later, another blonde fox bid us farewell.  I have been told that normally nocturnal foxes are bleaching now, because the spend so much time in the sun.  Their rose-petal footprints are everywhere in the far dunes — straight and determined, knowing, eternal explorers.

Place of Fox Tracks, Reed’s Road to the Bay   cfe

My favorite first walk is almost immediately on the right.  It meanders through a handsome split-rail fence, then slices through dunes and wends through evergreen woodlands to the Bay.  For all the world, this could be Good Harbor near Lake Leelanau on Lake Michigan in childhood.  There is no vista dearer to me than first spying blue water through evergreens - in this case, red cedar.

I met this walk, Reed’s Beach, years ago at 20 degrees with 20 mph winds, in quest of Bohemian waxwings among the cedar waxwings and robins.  As a dear friend and fellow birder taunted, at the end, “Carolyn, you are 0 for 5!”  (Number of total trips to Island Beach and Sandy Hook for never-found Bohemians, although I discovered the flock in literally blinding fog on excursion #5.)  Those journeys were as important as any bird.

And one of those quests, at Island Beach, brought me a Northern Shrike.  I didn’t even know there WAS such a thing — thought it a masked mocking bird.  Home, describing its field marks, more importantly its behavior and setting, I was not only told the species (very rare in NJ) but also listed on the Audubon Hot Line for having (1) discovered it; and (2) noted all essential particulars, about which I knew nothing.

Walking a side trail at Island Beach, I came upon this snake — evidently, being cold-blooded, it had perished in those sudden winds.  Its last supper was apparent in the midsection.  Someone thoughtful had laid a reed over the snake, an offering, a eulogy…

Snake’s Last Meal    cfe

Spring’s First Oak,   cfe

Island Beach is full of gifts, as is all of WILD NJ, in all seasons.  See (sea!) for yourself!

And remember, this paradise is the gift of PRESERVATION in our State.  See to it that preservation here expands!

“Clouds From Both Sides Now”  Spizzle Creek, April, cfe