Whenever my friend, photographer, Tasha O’Neill and I kayak our D&R Canal, I am bowled over by New Jersey’s seamless wild beauty.  Everywhere we look, the world is lush and dense with tangled woods, the waters limpid.  Turtles so trust us in passing that they do not even slip off their basking logs.  Skies call for Sisley, Pissarro, Monet, –or Turner, when we’re out there at sunset.  New Jersey Nature takes my breath away.  But not everyone shares this passion.

Frankly, I’ve had it with people terming New Jersey Nature an ‘oxymoron’!  That tired Exit joke, also, should be retired.  It only convinces people that our state is a snaggle of highways, bordered by chemical tanks, metal cranes looming like dinosaurs.  Can’t commuters look up from the bad news to count morning’s and evening’s great blue herons and great egrets?  No one seems to perceive these antedeluvian birds, wafting regularly over quietly restored marshes that separate us from the Hudson River and that other sort of wild, Manhattan’s.

Lately I learned that people don’t even consider the Jersey Shore nature.  No, it’s sunburn and boardwalks; thrill rides and cotton candy; lifeguards and pick-ups and beach-blanket bingo; casinos and high rises, high idlers.  Who notices dauntless piping plovers, –so endangered, yet raising diminutive young between fragile dunes and relentless wave action?  Does anyone marvel at black skimmers, hunkered down on wet sand, trying to ‘cool it’ along our real and timeless shore?

People chuckle when I mention our mountains, although the Sourlands over in Hopewell shelter the last swath of contiguous forest in the state.  That woodland, –much of it preserved with the assistance of D&R Greenway Land Trust, where I work–, is vital to neotropical migrants, otherwise known as migrating songbirds.  They settle there to feed (and many to be banded by the Birdwoman of the Sourlands, Hannah Suthers), in spring and fall.  Some honor us with their presence in vital breeding/nesting season.  For nothing but the Sourland Mountains, New Jersey nature should be praised literally to the skies. 

If people know the Pine Barrens, it’s to carry on about the Jersey Devil.  The 13th child of Mrs. Leeds of Leeds Point, this myth ‘has legs’, –encounters with him having been reported ever since the 1700’s.  These sagas include serious letters on the subject from Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, at Point Breeze in Bordentown, to scientists and political colleagues abroad. 

What the Pinelands has that should be exalted by all is some of the world’s healthiest water!  17 trillion gallons, to be exact.  Filtered through pine duff and oak leaves, darkened and purified by time and tannins.  Without it, our state wouldn’t be famous for its berry industries, both blue- and cran-.  Without it, early whalers wouldn’t have had fresh water in Atlantic white cedar casques on three-year whaling voyages.  Cape May was founded by whalers and is our nation’s fifth busiest fishing port.  Does anyone “hold these truths to be self evident?”

Our Ur Nature Secret, however, is that New Jersey is the only state with three coastlines.  The Atlantic, people do acknowledge.  The Delaware River, they’ll grudgingly accept, especially when our impervious surfaces cause her to flood anew. 

But nobody even a county or two away realizes that we have a third, the Delaware Bayshores.  Salem and Cumberland County are as lost as Lyonesse, as Brigadoon, and as fascinating to visit.  There, people still live by the seasons and the tides.  There, helmet-like dark horseshoe crabs, –the few we’ve not grabbed for bait–, come ashore on May moon tides to lay hundreds of thousands of eggs.  Without those prehistoric creatures lumbering up onto the sands, we wouldn’t have red knots and ruddy turnstones, who must feed along the Delaware Bay in order to reach Arctic breeding grounds ready to mate and raise young.  We may still lose these glorious shorebirds, unless we’ve convinced our neighbor states to join us in permanent horseshoe crab moratoriums.

Few realize that our state saw roughly 75% of Revolutionary War Battles, including the three most pivotal early ones, –the two Battles of Trenton, the one of Princeton - but that’s another story.

Why is New Jersey the Cinderella of States?  What does she need - a fairy godmother or a press agent or both? 

What she needs most is for each of us to open our eyes, and then our mouths, concerning the rare wild beauty our state still holds.  Not only the empty roads of the Pinelands, Salem and Cumberland; not only Island Beach and Sandy Hook, especially off-season, –welcoming osprey, dolphin, seals, eagles and whales. 

There is wild beauty along every roadway - Queen Anne’s lace, chicory and brown-eyed Susans weaving a Unicorn Tapestry even along US 1 as I write this. 

Wild nature walks through your own back yard.  From my Canal Pointe balcony, I hear foxes, red and grey; watch foraging skunks and raccoons; hear owls in winter, furious peepers (frogs) of spring.  Yesterday, at full moon midnight, three gangly deer fed elegantly at the edge of the flood plain.

Don’t let New Jersey continue to be a joke.  She’s only Cinderella in that she’s waiting to be asked to dance.  Go out there with all senses wide open.  Accept the gifts she’s holding out.  You and your children will be richer for this beauty.  You yourself might go to new lengths to save New Jersey Nature — ensuring that never again is that phrase considered an oxymoron! 

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