“…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

Canal and Alexander Road Bridge from Kayak - cfe

NJ WILD readers are well aware that I could wear a bumper sticker upon my being:

“I’D RATHER BE KAYAKING”.

And my site of choice, of course, is the D&R Canal.

What most of you do not know, however, is that I haven’t been in a kayak this year.  On November 9, I’ll will be having replaced this hip that won’t allow me to enter nor exit (thought I could paddle forever!) a kayak.  Hence, so few outdoor experiences in recent months.  It’s nearly over.

Meanwhile, I send you this poem, written after a day of doing what I love best.

KAYAK FOR ME!

Blessings to all, Carolyn

The latest I was ever in a kayak was November 23 - there’s plenty of time for YOU!

Thoreau upon the Merrimack

it’s 3 p.m. and a Friday

I’m stroking with urgency

within my red kayak

upon the placid waters

of the Delaware & Raritan Canal

they let us out early on Fridays

from profane corporate halls

to honor summer weekends

but I honor Henry Thoreau

who counted the day lost

when he did not spend several hours

outdoors

sometimes taking to his canoe

for day after endless northern days

I envy him both boat and brother

time, and strong arms for rowing

upriver all the way

from Concord to Concord

but most of all, I covet

his finding a “foundation

of an Indian wigwam

– perfect circle, burnt stones

bones of small animals

arrowhead flakes

– here, there, the Indians

must have fished”

in my life at its best

I row with Thoreau

Louv has prescribed kayaking, urges “radical amazement”

Our Boundary Waters - One of our unique three coasts…

NJ WILD - Our Delaware River in Flood-time — Brenda Jones

NJ WILD readers know that my key nature hero remains Henry David Thoreau.

My 21st-Century Nature Hero is Richard Louv.  I have just finished his newest book - “The Nature Principle — Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder“ – a result devoutly to be wished!, especially in beleaguered New Jersey.

You may wonder why this hugely successful author of “Last Child in the Woods - Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, as well as founder of the Children and Nature Network, needs to do another nature blockbuster already.

Because everywhere he goes to speak, –including HERE at D&R Greenway Land Trust last summer (we gave a dinner for 60 and 80 showed up, and we fed them, loaves and fishes and all that jazz…)–, grown-ups buttonhole the author and insist, “Adults have Nature-Deficit Disorder too!” All over this country and beyond, grown-ups now are actively forging antidotes to the disease Louv named.  This book is his report of that renaissance.

Cormorant-Gull Battle, Lake Carnegie, Princeton — Brenda Jones

If Brenda Jones didn’t seek nature, she would not be our Witness to the Wild…

NJ WILD readers also know that I’m never finished with a beloved book, nor author.  Henry and Richard pop up in these virtual pages all the time, and never enough - motto of the impassioned.

I’ve decided to write key phrases from “The Nature Principle” for all of you (who bring it 1300 page views a recent week, in 90 countries!) to savor, absorb, to use as carrots and sticks to get you and children out into the WILD.

I’d've bought this book if only to be in the presence of a man who would prescribe kayaking and urges “radical amazement”.

Louv really won me with his line, “Clouds are nature’s poetry.”

The point of this new book is to chronicle all that is happening to bring about what Louv, a master of word-coinage, terms “THE HUMAN-NATURE REUNION.”

He introduces Nature-as-Partner, Nature-as-Design-Partner, and urges “Nature-assisted aging.”

Among Louv’s passions is the “Rewilding of cities and suburbs.”

He wins my heart, justification for the urgency of reconnecting humans and nature, because such programs are “linked to the health benefits of nearby nature.” Nearby nature being our theme song…

nearby nature:

Enraged Osprey, Lake Carnegie, Princeton — Brenda Jones

NJ WILD readers know that, from the beginning, I’ve been insisting upon walks, if kayaking isn’t possible near you.  Louv underlines that insistence:  “We were born to walk.  We need to keep moving.”

Who wouldn’t be keen on an author who posits the importance of “FREE-RANGE HABITAT FOR CHILDREN!” Why should chickens have all the fun?

The book is rich in programs underway, already succeeding, and with simple ideas for any family to follow, such as ‘MAKE THE GREEN HOUR A FAMILY TRADITION.’

As much as I love to write, I could stop altogether and just give you the Richard Louv quote of the day.  How about: “NATURE IS NOT A PLACE TO VISIT.  NATURE IS HOME.”

Nature is Home - ‘Our’ Eagle and Sculler, Lake Carnegie, Princeton  — Brenda Jones

You’ve heard/read all this before, over and over here, interlaced with images.

But I am not a coiner of phrases.  I do not have Louv’s savvy awareness of what piques 21st-Century curiosity and catalyzes memory.

Louv has been awarded the Audubon Medal, presented by the National Audubon Society, for his work on children and nature, in 2008.  Children and Nature Network has lobbied for changes in legislation in state after state, to mandate (isn’t it tragic that this is necessary?) outdoor time for our children.

“Ephemeral Beauty” — Great Egret — Brenda Jones

This wordsmith/phrasesmith is changing the world.

When he goes out in the woods himself, Louv frankly revels in doing what he urges us to do:  “Look up.  Marvel at the ephemeral beauty.”

He’s a big fan of turning off lights, streetlights, building lights, not only because they confuse migrant birds, causing millions of needless deaths of species threatened and otherwise each year.  He calls what those mercury vapor and other lamps do “STEALING STARLIGHT”. He advocates the “DARK SKY INITIATIVE.”

Geese Pass  Full Moon — Brenda Jones

Louv proposes “the creation of restorative transportation.”

This book is by no means all sweetness and light.  There is not much good that can be said for the direction of childhood today, toward increasing technocentricity.  “Today’s culture,” he asserts, “is frozen in time, obsessed with the immediate.”  “Right now, in our culture, we believe mainly in fear.”  He quotes naturalist/philosopher, Thomas Berry:  “Degraded habitat produces degraded humans.”

Above all, he quotes the eminently quotable, such as James Hubbell, asking, “CAN THERE BE A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE WITHOUT BEAUTY?”

NJ WILD readers know that, all too often, this 21st-Century world is too much with me.  NJ nature, wild New Jersey, is my constant antidote.

D&R Greenway is working day and night and weekends to preserve more than our twenty-two miles in this state which Rutgers says could well be the first to be completely built out.  That’s why I spend the preponderance of my indoor time within these 1900’s barn walls.

With Richard Louv in the world, I feel better.  Visions of his “New Agrarians” dance in my head.  I’ve already wovlen his “NEAR IS THE NEW FAR” into a post this week, with an eye toward skyrocketing gas prices.  Nearby nature, insists Louv, is “EVERYDAY EDEN.”

He asks that we “bring back a sense of sacredness to our relationship to the Earth.” How long has it been since you’ve been asked to consider the sacred…?   Richard Louv has become, –but would by no means claim this–, nature’s high priest, reminding that Nature is not only essential, but holy, wholly to be honored.

This Thanksgiving, I will be thankful for Richard Louv.

�

FRUITS OF HABITAT PRESERVATION, COURTESY OF BRENDA AND CLIFF JONES

Essence of Spring - Robin at Hobler Park

***

NJ WILD readers know how Brenda’s stellar work enriches this blog, year-round, from the beginning.

***

Beaver Close-Up, from when we met

When I met her, Brenda and her faithful “field collaborator” husband, Cliff, all three of us seeking the beavers of Mapleton (between Princeton and Kingston.)

You may not realize that Brenda’s art has now graced the 1900 barn walls of D&R Greenway Land Trust in two art exhibitions- Birds Bees and Butterflies, and now, Born of Wonder: Childhood and Nature. You may stop by on business hours of business days to see her art in our Marie L. Matthews Galleries, and to purchase it to take home.

One of her Baltimore Oriole Pictures - it’s pulling snagged fishing line for its nest

Brenda’s first gallery appearance was in Birds Bees & Butterflies.  She brought nine works, tried to take home three at the end.  However, someone had seen her Baltimore oriole, so she had to ‘turn right ’round’ and bring it back, with new art for the current show.  We sold many of her early works twice (she’d make prints and have her uncle frame them.)  The first work to sell at Born of Wonder, Childhood and Nature, was Brenda’s of the great blue herons feeding their great blue offspring!  We sold a painting from this show for four figures last night at the Poetry Walk; and most of the art in the Upmeyer Room was sold at the April 8 opening.  However, the art will be up and available through July 15.

Mocking Bird this week at Hobler Park

And you’ve had the pleasure of her artistry, free, all along!

Diving Kestrel, right near home

Brenda and Cliff go on nature quests, beauty quests as often as they possibly can.  She sends them to me, and you are the richer for it.

American Kestrel From the Back

Spring finally came to Brenda and Cliff this week - look at these amazing images, from Hobler Park (right here in Princeton at the corner of the Great Road and 518! - I’ve written about it for you - the images of Hobler that I find could be states away, Ohio, for example, plain and sturdy barns and silos, acres of wildflowers, and no Princeton in sight!  It’s a great place to go in autumn because high, oddly enough.  The light stays longer at Hobler.  From Heinz refuge down below the Philadelphia Airport.  From Baldpate Mountain (in our state, and D&R Greenway’s had a hand in the preservation and stewardship of that land and those trails, under our new Chairman of the Board, Alan Hershey, who so energetically also heads New Jersey Trails.

Yellow-rumped Warbler, formerly ‘Myrtle’

“The Practice of the Wild” by Gary Snyder delights me right from the preface - fairly unique, in my experience.  The poet writes (in prose) of “appreciating the ferocious orderliness of the wild.”  He speaks of his own path as “connected to animist and shamanist roots.”  Snyder praises the arts as “the wilderness areas of the imagination, surviving like national parks.”  I had not seen that arts connection, although I spend my life at D&R Greenway Land Trust weaving the arts into preservation of New Jersey lands.  Snyder sums up his preface musings:  “the wild… is actually, relentlessly, beautifully formal and free.”

As I step out along the Gary Snyder trail, I learn that to him, the words “wild” and “free” are inseparable.  How tragic that freedoms are becoming more and more imperiled in our once abundant land, along with our once abundant land.  Gary, thank you for articulating what I know, but could not put into words.  Thank you for showing this Sagittarian (whose motto is “Don’t fence me in!”) why the wild is essential in my life.  Because wild is free and free is wild.

I thought I was hoping to go to Bowman’s in search of spring.  I now see, I am seeking the wild and the free.  What are you seeking?

Coursing Waters: DELAWARE RIVER, Brenda Jones

A recurrent bout of flu deleted all my weekend excursions, including, especially, my first (!) trip this year to Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, just across our Delaware River, just below New Hope, to see if anything normal, natural and native had sprouted.

WILD DELAWARE, Brenda Jones

I knew, of course, skunk cabbage would be up.  But what about bloodroot, twinflower, those fragile early heralds?  Who knows?  When will I know?

SKUNK CABBAGE, FIRST GLIMPSE, (Last Spring - March  cfe)

First Ferns, which might be up now, for all I know!  (cfe last spring - March)

Confined to quarters as I am, and despite lifelong scorn for television, this weekend I came to rejoice that NJN is spending this month on WILDERNESS.  I became a couch potato watching WILD.

ISLAND BEACH FISHERMAN DAY AFTER WILD NOR’EASTER   (cfe)

NJ WILD readers may remember my meanderings (mental) about the meaning of WILD, especially in this century, particularly in this, our most populous state.

TRUE WILDNESS, Fox at Twilight, Brenda Jones - I think Griggstown Grasslands

I’ve spent intervening years defining and redefining WILDERNESS (Henry David would have us say, WILDNESS, which is in even shorter supply).

CARNEGIE LAKE WILD - Cormorant/Gull/Fish Battle: Brenda Jones

National photospectaculars define wilderness in word and image.  With some of which I agree.  Some I seriously disagree.  For example, every scene so far has been in the WEST.

KEN LOCKWOOD GORGE, NJ, WILD - Weighty Trout, Tasha O’Neill

NJN itself is great about celebrating New Jersey.  Night after night, I see images NJ WILD has brought to you - the Pine Barrens, Salem and Cumberland Counties, the Delaware Bayshore, wild geese on the Delaware, a practiced fly fisherman in our very own Ken Lockwood Gorge, which could be the Black Canyon of the Gunnison for unrelieved wildness and the fight in those trout! (WHILE WE’RE AT IT, LET’S SAVE NJN!)

What makes me cross, couch potatoing in quest of wilderness, is that national filmmakers don’t know WE have a corner, in New Jersey, on Wildness.

STORM SURGE, LAVALETTE, Day After Nor’easter   cfe

In the Western Wilderness series, listening to boys and girls, mostly inner city, taken to WILDERNESS the first time, their first reaction is nearly universal:

“It’s so peaceful here.”  Wild = Peace.

What could be more important, essential?  Especially now that we are engaged in three wars nobody wants and nobody seems to be able to stop.  I remember when wars had to be run past Congress, something termed “the consent of the governed”, a.k.a. “the advise and consent” of our elected representatives.  I am terrified by the voicelessness of the people in our land now.

All that heals me is the WILD.

However, for boys and girls who’ve never spent a night outdoors, the WILD can be terrifying in concept.  To their amazement, over and over again, peace was the gift of the WILD.

WILD PEACE — RESTING TREE — Deep in D&R Greenway’s Cedar Ridge Preserve, cfe

What do my wild havens have in common?

Someone’s PRESERVED them!

What are you doing to keep New Jersey Wild and Scenic, as my Bucks County Congressman Peter Kostmayer once insisted our river be designated for so much of its beleaguered length such blessed terms still apply?

NJ WILD readers know my contenders for havens of WILD PEACE:

The Pine Barrens

Ken Lockwood Gorge, up near Clinton

Island Beach, especially in and after storm

Sandy Hook, especially in winter

Our D&R Canal and Towpath

Cape May

Anywhere in the Delaware River Basin

Anywhere in Winter:

WILD WINTER SKIES, Sandy Hook Light, cfe

WHAT ARE YOURS?

WRITE YOUR FAVORITES in the COMMENTS

TEACH ME YOUR Favorites!

Thank you

cfe

Brenda Jones Immortalizes Moonlight Migration of Geese

I should apologize to NJ WILD readers.  For, impassioned as I am about our New Jersey, I am not Thoreau, not Leopold, not Beston, let alone the redoubtable John Muir.  I need all their gifts to convince most people that New Jersey is worthy of constant nature exploration and preservation. I need their inspiration, to say nothing of their eloquence, as I ponder the miracle of autumn migration through and from our state.

In my ‘other life’, I spent summers in a small cottage in Chatham, Mass., where rare birds came to us.  The insistent questions of my daughters led to my buying and seriously memorizing the first Peterson’s Guide (to the birds).

Every August, as shore birds begin to move South, I am reminded of our Chatham life.  Without it, I’d not have turned into birder or amateur (”avocational”, in the words of Packet Editor Michael Redmond naturalist.  I miss our daily strides — at least one and sometimes three–, to Harding’s Beach Light.

We’d go at low tide, for the swift-walking pleasure of hard-packed sand.  We’d return by the high road, among beach heather and horned larks.  Down at the point, among streamlets and packed peat, we’d come across the vivid oystercatchers and hideous but endearing sea robins.  We could hold a blue-eyed scallop on a flat palm as we waded, marveling at all those eyes.  Then tenderly tuck him back into lapping waters, where he’d would squirt brilliantly away.  I miss tough Scrabble by firelight, moonlit wading, reading while Hudsonian Godwits tiptoes around our beach towels.  I miss my most expected young love, a bard, himself, who added lustre the Cape never required.  I miss staying up there alone in a hurricane so I could learn what it’s like.  (That one turned out to be wilder after the storm, than during.)

Henry Beston’s Cape Cod Cottage Before Blizzard of ‘78

When this mood comes upon me, I have to re-read Henry Beston.  The girls and I would make pilgrimage each year to his weathered Outermost House at Nauset - [until the blizzard of 78, that is, washed it into true outermostness.]

Beston managed what I longed to do, to see the seasons round on that upraised arm out into the North Atlantic, experience Mother Nature at her most sublime and often furious.

Right now, he was doing what I’d be doing then, as I lengthened our stays into September — watching bird migration.  Chatham taught us curlews and phalaropes, immature common eiders and long-tailed jaegers.  On our beach I learned how furiously crows protest the presence of eagle.

Eagle Intent, by Brenda Jones

Henry writes, “Early in September, Hudsonian curlews arrived at the Eastham Marsh.  To see them, I began going to Nauset through the meadows, rather than by the beach.”  He could hear them “calling, each to each”, as Eliot has written of mermaids.  “And then there would be silence,” Henry Beston notes.  “And I would hear the sound of autumn and the world.”

He writes of the first of the warblers, an invasion of juncos, a ’sparrow hawk’s’ successful capture and devouring of one of the latter.

Watching these arrivals, Beston wonders “where it was that she forsook her familiar earth for the grey ocean, an ocean she perhaps had never seen.  What a gesture of ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance of circumstance and death — land wing and hostile see, the fading land behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the bright arterial blood.”  He names and treasures all the sparrows, then announces, “Mid-October and the land birds have gone.”

Barrow’s Goldeneye in Flight over Delaware River by Brenda Jones

Beston goes into raptures over what comes next:  “Now come the sea fowl, and the wild fowl to the beach, from the lonely and darkening north…  Over the round of earth, down from the flattened summit, pour the living stream, bearing south the tribes and gathered nations, the flocks and families…  There are many streams [of migrant birds], and it is said that two of the greatest bear down on Cape Cod.”  He goes on with his watery image, inevitable upon that spit of sand he then called home:  “These streams immix their multitudes, and south to New England moves the great united flood, peopling with primeval life the seacoasts and the sky.”

In these very weeks, when you are driving about in New Jersey, keep a sharp eye on the skies and on wires, where migrants are staging for migration.  Attune your ears — song you have not heard since spring breeding season may recur in your yard, as has the peewee here this week. Waken on purpose in the middle of the night, ears as well as eyes to the sky.  Most non-raptors migrate at night, filling the airwaves and radar that tracks them, with the music of their passage.  Beston also dares to reveal, “I hear birds talking.”

Tune your ears to absences, as well.  I haven’t heard the miraculous towhees who successfully bred on my hill, not for a number of weeks.

Oystercatcher at Barnegat Light, Brenda Jones

If you can get yourself down to the Delaware Bayshore, look not only up but out, over the reeds and phragmites that fringe South Jersey rivers.  Swallows and purple martins by the YES hundreds of thousands float/drop in just before sundown.  Evening after evening, these blue-black relatives will bend the reeds, then ‘do a flycatcher’ out for one last insect before dark.  Any day now, they’ll all lift off in a blue-black river, coursing southward, southward.

Brenda’s Swallowtail on Purple Loostrife

You’ve seen them, but do you know what they’re up to, the butterflies?  The yellow tiger swallowtails and the ubiquitous but so endangered monarchs (by genetically engineered crops involving poisons that murder their caterpillars.)  They’re setting out for regions beyond belief, Mexico among their winter havens.  In Cape May and at the Kate Gorrie Butterfly House at the Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Association, I have watched delicate volunteers weigh and band monarchs before the impossible journey.  Weight, gender and a site code are entered on minuscule tags that do not interfere with flight.  These experts teach us much we could not know, including the fact that the females have thicker dark stripes, to keep the eggs warm.  To Henry Beston suddenly realizes that “the strangest and most beautiful of the migrations over the dunes was not a movement of birds at all, but of butterflies.”

Henry did not have to fret as we do this year, over ceaseless drought that has made nectar scarce, nectar needed for their voyage.

Let alone dread that the travelers will land in oiled marshes, where they need to buttress themselves nutritionally for their long flights to Mexico and South America.

I cannot summon words effective enough to convey my passion for New Jersey and all her treasures, especially what the Lenni Lenapes called ‘The Winged’ in these autumnal days and nights.  You’ll just have to go out there and see for yourselves.  Then write ME about it.

Henry and Henry and Aldo and John, I salute your miraculous ways with words!

When Ilene Dube asked me to create and maintain NJ WILD, I promised poetry.

To tell you the truth, I’ve been so caught up in the beauties of our New Jersey, and sometimes Pennsylvania,

and the urgency of the Gulf (my Packet story on plight of migrating birds toward gulf through eyes of local birders may appear on Friday),

and the essentiality of preservation, that I’ve almost forgotten poems.

I need to keep my promise to Ilene — until so recently Time Off Editor of the paper that has sustained me since 1968…

**********

Thoreau upon the Merrimack

it’s 3 p.m. and a Friday

I’m stroking with urgency

within my red kayak

upon the placid waters

of the Delaware & Raritan Canal

they let us out early on Fridays

from profane corporate halls

to honor summer weekends

but I honor Henry Thoreau

who counted the day lost

when he did not spend several hours

outdoors

sometimes taking to his canoe

for day after endless northern days

I envy him both boat and brother

time, and strong arms for rowing

upriver all the way

from Concord to Concord

but most of all, I covet

his finding a “foundation

of an Indian wigwam

– perfect circle, burnt stones

bones of small animals

arrowhead flakes

– here, there, the Indians

must have fished”

in my life at its best

I row with Thoreau

Richard Louv writes of the Last Child in the Woods. Yesterday, two friends and I became Grownups in the Woods…  May we not be the last!

My Sister, Pathfinder, on Earlier Sourlands Walk     cfe

Sunday’s weather forecast, as usual, had been dire.  But two friends I had known well in the 1980’s, recently reconnected, and I boldly set out nonetheless for my favorite Sourlands hike.  We decided to hike til the storms came down, –despite forbidding ‘heat indices’–, because we were hungry for forest time.

[Turn right off #518 in Hopewell, onto Greenwood Avenue by the Dana Building.  Go steadily uphill, past Featherbed Lane, past metal guard-rail, past Mountain Church Road and turn right at sideways brown sign - Sourland Mountains Preserve.  Space for about six cars.  Head off up the road built to remove majestic boulders, to be ground to gravel for NJ roads...  In case NJ WILD readers forgot why I'm 'in preservation.']

Sourlands’ Dappled Beauty      cfe

Beauty was immediate, on every side.  Trees towered.  Light sprinkled into the far woods.  A tiny stream whisper-trickled to our right.  Suddenly, my first wood thrush song of the season poured out in flute trills that seemed to echo on all sides.  Increasingly imperiled because deer devour our forest understory, and they are ground feeders, the song of the wood thrush stopped me in my hike-intensive tracks.  I told my re-found companions, “This was Thoreau’s favorite bird sound.”  We all understood why.

Carla, who had not been on this trail before, stopped, stunned.  “It’s a green cathedral!,” she gasped in hushed tones.  Karen, who also lives in Hopewell, hadn’t been there in a couple of years.  She turned and turned like a child at the country fair.

In the woods, actually, nothing happened.  That was the whole point.  Carla, who both lives and works in and around sleepy Hopewell, nevertheless kept remarking on the silence, the immediate stillness.  I did warn them, and NJ WILD readers — you, also, that, in hunting season, one only walks this trail on Sundays or bedecked in orange garments, because of hunters.  I am grateful to the hunters.  Their marksmanship in winter, thins the herds.  Therefore, more than I ever remember in the Sourlands, I found the leaves of rare spring flowers.  Meaning they hadn’t been munched into extinction.  Because of the hunters, there are still thrushes.  Not enough.

On either side of the trail spurted thin, bamboo-like tendrils of horsetail/silica.  The wire-thin stems separate easily.  I take this forest herb as a daily capsule to keep fingernails so crisp and tough that they can tighten screws.  The horsetail plant is good for hair, also, in ways I forget.  The Indians used a fistful of horsetail, one of the world’s oldest plants, to scour out their cooking vessels.  The silica plant was their Brillo pad.  One of the aspects of forest walks I most treasure is that there are whole sagas in a mere tuft of green…

Everywhere we found jack-in-the-pulpit’s leaf trinity.  Its pulpit is ‘gone by’ — with the forest canopy fully leafed out.  “Appropriate,” observed Carla, for a Sunday morning, –Fathers’ Day, as we would later recall.  “Appropriate,” she repeated, “in this green cathedral.”

We found cushions of another ancient plant, ‘princess pine’, which is no pine at all but a moss from millennia ago.  It seemed as though evergreen stars had fallen onto the forest floor.  Tiny pink-beige seeds waved upon long thin pale stems, nearly obscuring the faery forest from which they sprang.

I turned us at the first trail to the right, because it circulates alongside a meandering stream.  No signs reveal the name of that waterway.  Even so, it is pure joy, especially on a day when the over-90’s are forecast.  We were cool in dappled shade.  Spills of sun lit the woods as golden mushrooms do after day-long gentle rains.

Ferns of many species leapt on one side, then the other.  We were surrounded by the delicate (but to me misleadingly named) New York fern,  Its fronds widen, then narrow, at both ends of the stem - unusual in fern reality.  Next, we came upon a fatter, tougher fern whose name I do not know, which I rarely encounter, anywhere, not even in the Berkshires.  Then hefty black-green Christmas ferns created an entire grove at our feet.  Off trail, a generous glade of ferns rejoiced in sun so bright the ferns seemed yellow.  One of the gifts of the old forest, though by no means virgin, of the Sourlands, is the profusion of plants of ancient times.

We could feel the solid, centering, strengthening energy of diabase boulders on all sides, some so tall that they dwarfed us.  Some rocks presided, some loomed, some even smiled.

Rock that Smiles, Sourlands     cfe

The fun part about taking the trail’s first fork is that one is, on a hot day, deep in wood-’coolth’.  A bonus was that we were keeping company with a stream.  Sometimes, one is actually in the stream, but for a spillway of convenient stones.  Most are flat enough and stable enough for crossing.  Elsewhere our ‘bridge’ was a low lattice of downed saplings, placed by the vigilant maintainers of these intriguing paths.

Brenda Jones’ Box Turtle from Plainsboro Preserve

We searched intently for turtles.  Although I have found box turtles on Sourlands trails in the past, we had no amphibians this day.  Box turtles are terrestrial, not requiring water as do most of their relatives.  So if you find one, don’t take it to the water.  The waterstrider ballet along the stream’s peaceful surface made up for turtle absence.

Blazes were new and bright and visible, unlike the time Karen Linder and I once headed over there for a winter hike, not realizing they’d had an ice storm in the Sourlands, so near.  Unfortunately, blazes then were grey or silver at best.  So is ice.  Up at the top of the road of yesterday, Karen and I turned east, as had the sleet.  We couldn’t find the blazes.  Luckily, we can both navigate ‘by the seat of our pants’, ultimately finding our way back to the car without having to retrace our steps.  Adventure is a key factor in nature excursions with friends.

Karin-of-yesterday remembered a long-ago picnic atop iconic boulders.  I had to tell her that that trail had been closed for some years.  Partly because of people’s not respecting the rocks — from climbing  (forbidden at the info sign at entry: “NO BOULDERING” — new verb) to desecrating them with words.  To our joy, when our stream trail curved back to the road that had permitted ‘graveling’, we found the path to the boulders open.

For a long while we sat upon them, they lay on them, allowing rock energy to infuse our entire beings, weary from disparate work weeks.  Only at the end did I discover that we were surrounded by white spires of buds about to pop.  Because of the splendid black and white photography of Sourlands resident Rachel Mackow, I figured those scepters had to be black cohosh.  Only one had opened into flat petals, like tiny saucers of rich cream.  Until yesterday, black cohosh blooms had been mystery, even myth to me.  I thought they were given only to Rachel because she is such a sensitive photographer, so attuned to nature.  But there we were, on the eve of the Solstice, three women reunited after far too long, set in a crown of cohosh.

On the way down, we passed the ladder about which I had written a poem in other years, “Hauptman’s Ladder.”  The egregious Lindbergh kidnapping had taken place so near to where we hiked.  That baby had been born the same time as the man to whom I had been married, then next-door to the Morrows in Englewood.  That tragedy had been woven all into Werner’s life, as his father moved into the baby’s room until Hauptman was supposedly identified as the criminal.  Pops slept with his newborn son’s hand curled around his own, a Doberman at their sides, until the trial.  The trial took place in also nearby Flemington.

Of course, this rudimentary ladder of today’s Sourlands Preserve couldn’t be that one, but its echoes remain. Only now, the massive tree against which it had always stood, the top of which the ladder came nowhere near, has been felled by one of our many violent storms.  The rickety handmade weathered ladder lies on top of the downed trunk.  In memory and imagination, that ladder is elsewhere for me.

Ladder and Birdhouse      cfe

All-in-all, we were in the dense Sourlands Woods for 2 1/2 hours.  Most of that time, we were absolutely alone on the trails.  There was no sound but our footfalls and a cascade of flicker calls, the purr of red-bellied woodpecker, one complex veery cascade, and those heavenly wood thrush solos.  Tragic to me was hearing not one ovenbird.  Named for their oven-like nests in undergrowth, these elusive birds are far more often heard than seen:  “Teacher, teacher, teacher!”, the bird books insist they cry out.  No teacher was called yesterday.  Meaning, there are still too many deer.

Doe With Fawn by real photographer - Brenda Jones

We couldn’t have taken this walk, were it not for preservation and stewardship.

Remember this.

Go, be a grownup in the woods!

The Actual Outermost House, beforfe 1978

Early NJ WILD readers know my deep honor for and gratitude to various nature writers.  One of the first I celebrated when this blog began was Henry Beston.  He spent a year observing Nature at her gentlest and her wildest, from what came to be called The Outermost House, on Cape Cod’s Nauset Beach.  Since Cape Cod juts 30 miles out from the mainland, this is almost like spending winter on the high seas in some slight craft hewn of wood.  “Warmth left the sea and winter came down with storms of gushing winds, and icy, pelting rain.”  In his terrestrial craft, however, Beston kept a light for his Coast Guard pals, “I often made the patrols with the men of the station, for I liked to watch the beach by night…  Living in outer nature,” he exults, keeps the senses clean.  And living alone stirs a certain watchfulness.

Watch Henry did, seeing the seasons round as I did on my hill in Provence.  And we are all the richer for his “watchfulness.”

It’s appropriate to turn back to Beston, while I begin re-reading Rachel Carson, as greed pours hundreds of thousands of barrels of literally crude oil into our sacred oceans, a process no one can seem to arrest.  I often wonder, what would Henry say?  What would Rachel do?

They are not here — we are…  writing to political leaders and editors seems our only tool in our 21st-Century 3-Mile Island, our own Vesuvius.

Beston’s masterpiece first astonished when I spent summers nearby, in a tiny Chatham  cottage on Nantucket Sound.  My waves lapped where his roared.  Though I walked the beach in all tides and lights and weathers, up to Harding’s Light and back, I never walked by night.

I am stunned, however, to discover that naturalists I revere do not know Beston, have not ‘heard’ the Great Wave at his hands, have not walked the night beach with his lifesaving friends, never shared Beston’s “cloud of terns” or “dust of stars” (phosphorescence.)

I re-read The Outermost House just now, preparatory to loaning it to one of those passionate and highly educated naturalists, before he sets out for a house on the Maine coast.

As with childhood’s re-experiencing of Gone With the Wind, every time I read The Outermost House, totally different facets are highlighted.  This time, “House” grips me early on in the language of my other land, French.  I had not remembered Henry’s electrifying phrase, written in an early journal of his own life mission:, “La nature, voila mon pays!” “Nature, voila! - my country.”

Nature is OUR country, and we are destroying it.  First photographs of our globe from space showed it to be  a blue jewel, the land we inhabit insignificant within that cerulean grandeur.  It’s horrible enough that we systematically foul our ocean setting with vilest wastes.  Now, ceaseless literally crude poisons explode into La Mer.  (It is no accident that this sounds like ‘The Mother’ in French…)

Evening perusals of so called news reveal precious little on this literal tragedy of darkness when we were given light.  Is it a mercy or a tragedy that we do not have Henry and Rachel and John Muir to use their diamond-bright, diamond-sharp pens to wake up the world?

Beston during the 1920’s, from the Henry Beston Society’s Web-site

When I stayed at Chatham, my daughters and I would make pilgrimage to the actual cottage of Henry’s year, over on Nauset Beach.  The building was named to the National Register of Historic Places in dire 1968.

Tragically or fittingly, in the Blizzard of ‘78, [about which I wrote my first-ever Packet article, "Blizzards Change the Way we Live," published on the first year anniversary of that tempest, filling three pages], Beston’s Outermost House became one with the turbulent sea.

For most of us, living alone for a year, as did Thoreau (more or less) away from so-called society is a matter of courage.  But Henry’s courage, like Rachel Carson’s, ran oceanically deep, surging in countless directions.  One night, for example, Henry he slept outdoors.  This I not only have never done — it never occurred to me in the Chatham years!  Savor his experience:

“So came August to its close, ending its last day with a night so luminous and still that a mood came over me to sleep out on the open beach under the stars.”  He describes a nook in the dunes, south “of my house…  to this nook I went, shouldering my blankets sailorwise.  In the star-shine, the hollow was darker than the immense and solitary beach; its floor still pleasantly warm from the overflow of day…  The vague walls around me breathed a pleasant smell of sand.”

Outside in his ‘nook,’ Henry re-lives his Outermost Year:

“Because I had known this outer and secret world, and been able to live as I had, reverence and gratitude greater and deeper than ever possessed me, sweeping every emotion else aside.  Space and silence an instant closed together over life.”

Still musing, Henry admonishes, “Live in Nature, and you will soon see that, for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cafe of pain…  The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life — all this is its great marvel, and has an ethic of its own.”

He concludes with timeless wisdom we are all to perilously ignoring:

“DO NO DISHONOUR TO THE EARTH, LEST YOU DISHONOR THE SPIRIT OF MAN. HOLD YOUR HANDS OUT OVER THE EARTH, AS OVER A FLAME.”

The reward for this honor and tending:

“To all who love her… [Nature] gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life.

Touch the earth.

Love the earth.

Honor the earth…

Rest your spirit in her solitary places.”

Where, NJ WILD READERS, in Wild Nature, have you rested your spirit, lately?”