Wanderings

Ruby of the pines

11 Comments

I think it always bears repeating that there’s more to NJ than chemical plants and turnpikes; lots of people couldn’t imagine the 1.1 million acre federally protected, mostly undeveloped preserve that lies between Philly and Atlantic City. If you can’t believe that there’s such a place in NJ, a place filled mostly with pitch pines and oaks, with only a few paved roads, then maybe a trip to the Pine Barrens is worth considering. Prepare to be amazed.

What an extraordinary sight: pinkish cranberries floating mid-harvest atop small lakes of blue water, surrounded by nothing but evergreens and oaks, under the bluest of blue autumn skies. Picture perfect, I think.

The cranberry has become one of NJ’s most important crops and the Pine Barrens are the perfect place for them to be grown commercially; the area has all the essentials for cranberries to flourish: acidic soil, sand, and plentiful unpolluted water.

I’ll ramble on some another day about how those rubies are harvested, but for now I’m just moved by how pretty some parts of NJ can be.

😉

(There’s no turnpike here.)

Remembering, Small truths

That magical muck

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The mudflats of the tidal marshes of Sandy Hook Bay or any of the brackish creeks closer to home exhale a sharp, salty smell at low tide. Some might call it rank or putrid, but to me it smells like home. I know very well the wealth of fidgety creatures that lay exposed at low tide in that slick, smelly mud.

Very few of us have the good fortune to live as adults in the same places we knew so intimately as children. Set me in some other landscape, one of rolling hills or towering evergreen woodlands, and I can imagine myself reeling and disoriented, wondering from which direction the scent of salt water will come.

The landscape of one’s childhood is all magic and heart. For me, that magic is more about the smell of seaweed than of hay. It comes from knowing where the masses of swallows will gather in late summer or when to find scoters and scaup playing at the edge of the sea or which stand of beach plum produces every year regardless of the vagaries of weather.

This deep intimacy with a place is learned slowly; little bits of wisdom accumulated by observing the rhythms of days and years until one’s fluent with the language of a place. Anywhere else I’d miss the clamor of laughing gulls and the fall bloom of the groundsel tree, the hiss of wind across the dunes and the greening of the cordgrass in late spring. I’d miss the presence of the sea and the smell of that magical muck as the tide shrinks.

What intimate details do you recall from the landscape you grew up in? Things that only a child could know… maybe it’s the sweet scent of honeysuckle, the glow of tamaracks in fall, a pale moon in the desert, or the taste of windfall apples… tell me what you remember and long for.

😉

Remembering, Travels with the flock, Wanderings, Whatever

Time for a tease

14 Comments

Susan’s counter thingy says that the Cape May Weekend is just 15 days away and I hear that Lynne has already started packing and KatDoc is saving quarters for all the tolls on the Parkway… and I’m resisting the urge to visit ahead of the rest of the flock.

I’d really like to go now while it’s still warmish and the Monarchs and Buckeyes are moving through. I’m sure Bunker Pond is still full of egrets and that there’s plenty of Peregrines soaring past the lucky people crowded in the shadow of the lighthouse and Merlins cruising low over the dunes in the late afternoon. Have a peak at some of the most recent numbers here.

Rather than that, I’ll think I’ll probably spend the next couple weekends wandering around the Pine Barrens. October is a great month to visit and there’s lots to see and do with the beginning of the cranberry harvest there.

I just got distracted with the duck numbers in that Cape May link, sorry.

Girls… you’ve got to find time to visit the Seawatch at Avalon while you’re here… it’s such a spectacle! I remember standing out in the pouring rain on Friday of last year’s weekend, wondering why you all weren’t there with me to witness the tens of thousands of scoters flying past in the fog and rain. It was just unbelievable and very wet.

😉

Something else we should all look forward to is more goofy pics of Susan playing in the surf. Though I suspect I may instead have my camera trained on Lynne as she dips her toes in the Atlantic for the first time.

So girls… what’s on your to-do-in-Cape May-lists?

Heather, you still in? John? Patrick? Patrick’s away on his honeymoon… what am I thinking?

😉

In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

Thank God we don’t have to do that

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“It’s anticipation. Hope, you know. You’re always hoping to catch more fish, hoping to make a living, you know. And that’s what keeps people going. That, and not having to go up the road… I watch all the commuters, computerized people. They have their coffee and their briefcase or their computer, they stand in line waiting for the ferry or the bus. And some guy’s fallen sick, there’s a space, you know, like birds on a wire. I said, “My God, no matter how bad it gets, thank God we don’t have to do that, you know.”

–Richard Nelson, a fisherman with the Belford Seafood Cooperative

I found this quote from a local fisherman reprinted last weekend at the seaport museum and thought it worth sharing. Most people in this area that make any kind of money have to go to NYC to do it; they have the big houses, fancy cars and all the problems that come along with that lifestyle. I wonder how they’d feel knowing the clammers feel sorry for them.

😉

In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Whatever

Skywatch Friday

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As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sailboats and cormorants in the harbor at Keyport NJ

Autumn comes to the shore with an apologetic smile. Neither the sky nor the sea has even been as blue as on an October day. Before the winds tatter and strip the trees they first tidy up the sky, pushing the dust and pollen of summer somewhere off to the edge of the world. The sun no longer warms as much, the days are shrinking, another summer is slipping away.

Have a great weekend and visit here for more Skywatch posts.

Growing up, Remembering, Whatever

Tickling the ivories

19 Comments

So far as I know, my mom’s piano – my piano, still sits in the garage of the house I grew up in. Something else we didn’t have the heart to throw away after my dad died and we sold the place.

It was a battered old upright even when I first began tinkering at it. The paint was chipped and fading, keys stuck and it was perpetually out of tune, most probably because it sat in the damp basement.

The basement was a good place for a piano student though, as it had a door that kept anyone unstairs from hearing me practice. My brother’s drum set was down there too, but the door did nothing to muffle the sound of his banging. I don’t guess piano practice is painful to listen to, except for the constant repetition, compared with say, the clarinet, which I gave up in favor of the piano. I was pretty bad on the clarinet; good at making those awful squeaky sounds, but not much else.

I took lessons for a number of years; I already knew how to read music fairly well, but then had to learn to read two clefs at once and cooordinate my eyes and hands to play both parts at the same time. It amazes me that anyone ever learns to do it; it’s that hard. I never could seem to practice enough to satisfy my very strict teacher and never did learn to play much beyond a simple version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Serenade. Eventually I stopped going to lessons, probably because of some boy…

My brother Brian seems to have the most musical talent of the bunch of us; if you think of drumming as requiring musical talent, that is. He plays the trumpet like my dad did, and the guitar some and thinks he can sing, too. What always got me though, was the way he could sit down in front of that piano and play songs just by ear. His fingers were in all the wrong places and he mostly jabbed at the keys, but he could play real music as opposed to those silly songs I had to practice or those awful scale exercises meant to improve my technique.

What about you – did your parents send you for instrument lessons? Do you still play? Like me, maybe you wish you’d stuck with it?

I’m still determined to teach myself the tinwhistle. Though it does sort of remind me of the squeakiness of a clarinet. Worse, so far.

😉

Just me rambling about birds, books, bunnies, or whatever!