Exploring the Mysteries of the Pine Barrens

This summer I’ve moved to a place that was never too far, but nonetheless a place that I am very unfamiliar with. This place would be the Pine Barrens, where pitch pine canopy the sky and toads sing at night. These woods span a large portion of New Jersey, with backroads and random diners nestled at crossroads with nothing else around. The Pine Barrens are the root and place of Jersey Devil myth, the infamous demon from which the hockey team got its name. Though these woods, while seemingly small at points and surrounded by modern civilization, are still vast and enigmatic–bearing mystery after mystery between the pines. Since I’ve lived there it’s been a consistent effort of mine to investigate and navigate the pine barrens against the clock of leaving again, experiencing and witnessing the odd and eerie characteristics of this charming region.

A large portion of my exploration surrounds an abandoned sand quarry, without any buildings or equipment left; it is now just a lake with ponds and streams outlining the old mounds of clay and sand that were excavated long ago. The sight of the old quarry, now flooded with groundwater to make a lake is something to behold–with the ponds and streams forming a pseudo-like marshland at the far ends. The sand is soft enough to keep the tracks of anyone or anything travelling through the lands, and very often I took to tracking and tracing the animal prints. Though not too soon beyond the distractions of beauty, you eventually get the feeling that the lands are alive and something beyond the pines is looking at you: hiding something. It’s an eerie sensation that crawls along your spine when you are the only person miles into the woods, when occasionally a gunshot may ring in the distance–or rain clouds wander south. It’s a sensation that seems to cling to me, especially when the horizon grows dark with the night sky.

Walking west at night, I watched the Buck Moon rise over the quarry lake and wandered around the immediate tracks and scattered ashes of bonfires which always carried the smell of weed among their ashes. The hum toads and nighttime critters filled the air and I clicked on my police flashlight, as bright as a car’s headlights, illuminating the path’s before me. Then realizing the dangers of this secluded beauty before me, the quicksand that formed along the paths and its outskirts–and the plethora of wolf spiders that made webs at the height of your forehead. Though despite the risk of it all, I was enamored by the folklore of darkness: like the Jersey Devil. Though more so, the image and scenery remain vividly painted through the illumination of the flashlight. Beyond the ashes of old bonfires and in the quarry lake itself was a buoy, floating in a place where the water is dangerous to swim in for reasons such as: hidden debris, contaminants, underwater currents. While the answer to how the buoy ended up alone in a quarry is most likely mundane, it nonetheless plays upon the speculative questions of what if and how–and it is just the first oddity of many.

Days later I found a rusted 2008 Ford Crown Victoria (old cop car) deep in the woods, shaded from the sunlight by the pitch pines. I didn’t feel the need to touch it, or open the trunk–but there it was. Abandoned in a place where it shouldn’t be, but because it’s there it’s all the more interesting. The lichen spread across the hood alongside unsettled dust, and you could tell it’d been there for a long time. I liked to think that the car was a part of something bigger, that has now faded into obscurity completely; it could be an enticing story about vices and loss or something about the supernatural and Jersey Devil. Though admittedly I don’t think I’d ever find out the complete story towards how or why it’s there, but it’s a living mystery and that’s part of the charm.

Beyond the rusted car, there were hundreds of dollars of supplies and cooking wares all unopened and strewn about as though somebody left in a hurry, the labels of most of the cans were all weathered away to the bare metal. A charcoal grill, and a pair of adidas shoes left alone in the woods. It was an old scene, months old by the weathered appearance of the unused and unopened supplies–it doesn’t take an imaginative mind to think of how or why the scene was left like it was. Likewise to the car, it is eerie in some fashion but also contradictorily mundane–as there isn’t a clear cut answer either settings and their reasons. The place itself is one of many living memories that fades into obscurity and joins the enigmatic gaze of the pitch pines and their darkness.

I asked for the opinion of a trusted friend and colleague of mine, Peter Mayfield. We walked together through the pine barrens and talked about the living memories of the woods, which proposed “becomes a conglomerate consciousness of experience or lack thereof continued by the imagination of passing time – The scenes that we see so secluded in the woods stand out the most because we can only ever see a glimpse into the character and reality of what it really is. Some scenes are easier to understand than others, evidential and what not. Though the beauty is witnessing something beyond the possible mundane, something that could be anything with only a glimpse into what it was, and when that happens it is a part of the forest around you. No longer autonomous to itself and its memories, and what not.”

Peter Mayfield and I departed that day, seeing another abandoned railway line overgrown with juvenile pine and graffiti. We ate wild blueberries, and in those moments appreciated the wonder of it all before I’d leave at the end of the summer.