Folks:
Although this account of a bicycle ride through the Pines is a bit short on historical substance, it is, nonetheless, a pleasant read and I have included all of the illustrations that accompanied the original article.
Outlook, Volume 26, April 1895, pp. 32-40
WE had loaded up the camera, and the luggage carrier was filled, and almost every time we turned over in our beds that night we turned out to examine the sky. Our hearts sank within us. For weeks we had been plotting and dreaming of this trip into the pine barrens of New Jersey; were we to be disappointed now that the camera was loaded with supersensitive films and all our old clothes were ready to receive us into their comfortable embrace?
The earth seemed to be asleep and wrapped in a cloud of fog. We wheeled into the mist and were silent. The watery vesicles beat our faces with a spray that would have been cool and delicious if our hearts had been less heavy. A water-break across the road gave me an unexpected shock because I was gazing at the sky. I fear the artist was doing the same thing, for he bounced over a stone and cut some curves in the dust.
“Do you see,” said he, “the cobwebs in the grass are threaded with drops of water? It is a sure sign that it will not rain to-day.”
The toll-gate woman was awake and on the alert. “Encourage us a little, won’t you ?” I said.
“The fog is coming down. It is a certain sign of good weather,” she answered. “The sun will be out directly.”
She and the artist were good prophets. Like a ball of polished copper the sun burned behind the mist. The trees ahead of us gradually appeared less unreal and huge. We could see the dripping grass blades. A soft wind seemed to spring out of the cloud.
“There is blue sky,” said the artist; “now see what that old ‘bike’ of yours can do on this good road.”
I laughed silently behind his back. He had never seen the roads in the New Jersey pine barrens. I was aching to introduce them.
Another toll-gate. The turnpike was ended. Swing quickly around the corner and look sharp for those interesting little gullies that the enterprising farmer takes such delight in cutting across the path.
We were in the open country. The fog was gone. Locusts bordered both sides of the road, and their branches met above us, drooping under their burden of delicate foliage and the weight of the waterdrops that dripped on us as we slowly glided beneath. The flowers that come with the summer blazed in a yellow glory along the path. Tall blossoms stood in the grass like magnificent sentinels attired in the radiant purple of royalty. Great clusters of the gorgeous orange - yellow milkweed pricked the eyes with their vivid color. A crimson butterfly sat and swung on the highest tuft. Bees hummed about it. A catbird stood on the fence and examined us. Broad shadows that lay across the road were cut sharply and regularly by the brightness of the morning sunbeams. An indescribable sweetness, the perfume of untamed Nature, breathed over us, and we are sunk in a sea of delicious fragrance.
We wheeled across the bars of sunlight and shadows as if climbing a gigantic music-staff, where the notes were birds and flowers and the brown trunks of trees. We climbed a vacant spot where the composer had rested for a moment to add a burst of melody all the sweeter, all the more impressive for the sudden pause. The artist was beginning to think things. His wheel wabbled.
“Put the brake on that old wheel of yours,” he called. “I must have a camera shot at this.”
Out again into the still and dewy morning. The road was becoming less and less familiar; the footpath was growing less and less distinct, as if traversed by few feet. The trees were changing in character and in appearance. Chestnuts, old yet full of vigor, stood singly in the fields, or here and there in groups, the pale-green clusters of their flowers sprinkling them as if Nature's only thought had been of their welfare. Oaks began to straggle along the highway, and pines became every moment more and more abundant and conspicuous. There was something suspicious, too, about the road. I saw the artist looking at it frequently, as if he found it interesting. Presently he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. I could do as I pleased, for he was ambitious to lead and never looked back.
Other roads began to come into ours, and ours began to give off branches with unpleasant frequency. Finally it divided into four; but bless the guide post! It stood at the forking of the way in the shade of the pines and of the scrub oaks, kindly extending its four fingers, each with a label that to us was more beautiful than any jewel could have been.
It was slow wheeling along here. We had lost much of our freshness, while the road was gathering itself together to show what it could do in the shape of bicycling horrors. Stones ? O, no, indeed. Dust? Not a bit of it. Ruts, sun-baked into ridges of brick? Happily, no. But something worse, something that suggested welcome thoughts of walking. It was the Jersey sand. The road was wandering, too, in a strange way that the roads of civilization would scorn. The shade was getting denser. The trees were more and more of the evergreen group. Huckleberry bushes were becoming conspicuous. The artist jumped off. “I think I will walk a little way,” he said. I had been walking behind him for some time as he struggled and wabbled in the sand. The soil of the New Jersey Pines and the rubber tire of the bicycle are not on good terms.
“Just think what a grind it would have been with the old fashioned tires!” said I, to encourage him.
A rabbit passed leisurely across the road. A pine lizard ran up the trunk of a cedar tree, its ridiculous tail trailing after, and peeped at us from the other side. A wood-pecker clung to the rough bark of a dead pine. It was so still that the sighing of the tires as they crushed softly through the sand was the only sound except an occasional murmur of the wind in the pines and the oaks. The road was only as wide as a carriage. In certain places the trees that stood too close to the edge had been hollowed out to allow the hub to pass. The sand became deeper. There was not a trace of a foot-path. Obscure and uncertain tracks passed at bewildering intervals across our road. Should we take any of them and abandon this sandy way perhaps for a worse one?
“Are we going in the right direction?”
“I don’t know. All the roads in the Pines are alike; the majority of them lead nowhere; many of them wander on for miles and then run up a tree. I have been here a dozen times, but I always get lost.”
The silence of the wilderness wrapped us about. It was the untamed luxuriance of the out-of-doors that we love. Pine trees towered above us with their naked trunks tipped by their cluster of leafy branches sharply outlined against the blue sky. Scrub oaks and huckleberry bushes, thorny vines, dense clumps of ferns, low shrubs, flowers in profusion surrounded us; a hedge of “the white spiked Clethra flower” for miles marked out each side of the road. There was no dim distance, unless we gazed into the sky. The short stretch of the road was soon lost in its own windings. We trudged and pushed the bicycles through the yielding sand. There was not a human being in sight. Not a house. Not a human sound. We would have been thankful for even the barking of a dog. The warm and aromatic breath of the pines filled us with delight. We cared not one penny whether we were lost, for it was all beautiful and strange.
But listen! There it is again. Surely it was the musical clink of an anvil! Isn’t that it again? Stop, and strain your ears. Faintly, yet sharp and distinct, the merry tattoo of the hammer on the iron came singing through the forest. It was the sweetest sound we had heard to-day. I was willing to admit, now that another human being was near, that there were two bicyclists in the world who were getting discouraged. But now we pushed forward with lighter hearts, although the sand seemed every moment to get deeper and heavier. The collection of silex grains that for courtesy we called the road made a wide sweep whose curve showed us the blacksmith shop.
It stood in a little clearing of pine forest, alone except for another house, apparently a second edition of itself. Nowhere in the known world but in the New Jersey Pines can you discover such a blacksmith shop. Around it the dense woods of pines and scrub oaks, with the sandy road in front, the second house beside it and the blue sky above; a shanty built of logs chinked with mud, a slanting roof of slabs discarded from the saw mill, inclosed a space scarcely large enough to shelter the anvil, the bellows and the tools of the owner's trade. A wide door opened toward the road, and a single window, closable by a wooden shutter, completed the structure. The roughened sand under the trees showed where the shoeing is done. The little dwelling house was a counterpart of the shop, except for the glazed window on each side of the front door, and the barefooted children playing in the sand. The blacksmith stops his work and looks up as we come to the door. Then he laughs till the woods ring, and the children come tumbling toward us, and a woman looks out of the window.
“You’ve come from up country; I know by them spidery things,” he said. “Do you expect to ride them in here? Where are you going, anyhow?”
“To Blankston's Cranberry Bog. Are we on the right road?”
“Straight on, six miles through the woods. But if you try to ride them bicycles any deeper in here you will never get out alive. Better leave them with me till you come back.”
“All right,” I said; “but do you lock up at night? Our bicycles represent a good deal to us. We are very fond of the spidery things.”
“I can’t just say that I do lock up; I fasten up, this way.”
He closed the door, thrust the prongs of a pitchfork into the wood and forced the handle into the sand.
“There!” he said, “that’s enough. Nobody don’t carry off many anvils down here. But maybe you’d feel safer with more than that?”
I intimated that we should.
“Hello, you other fellow! Goin’ to take my picture? I hain’t had one of them took since I got married and went to Brindletown to my wife’s Aunt Susan’s. All right, now. Let her fly.”
The shutter flew, and the happy blacksmith was “took” as he stood there and as he stands here.
We rode onward through the forest aisles, dim with the shadows of the pines. Purple orchids bloomed in the path. Ripening huckleberries dotted the bushes beside the way. Huge flies were beginning to make themselves unpleasantly familiar. Mosquitoes with light colored stripes around their legs were getting too numerous for our entire comfort. I brushed a tick from my knickerbockers. The roughened sand, impressed with marks of bare feet, gave signs of a human habitation near by. I could see a chimney through the trees. We pushed our bicycles into a road-side clearing where the house was a palace when compared with the general style of its neighbors in the wood, for it had risen to the dignity of clap-boards. A log shanty chinked with mud was now used as a stable, although the family had not long abandoned it for the more palatial story and a half clap-boarded house, where they seemed to be the aristocrats of the region. The little cleared space beside the unshaded door was crowded with what appeared at first glance to be a seething mass of children of all sizes, some of them black as night, some white except for the tan and the dirt on their cheeks, and others speckled with great copper-colored blotches. A black woman stood in the door; a white man was wheeling a speckled child in a toy wagon. I fear that such combinations are not rare in the region.
My one objection to the Pines is that the wheelman must become a pedestrian as he approaches them. At one time, perhaps at many times in the geological history of New Jersey, these regions were sunk beneath the ocean, which, regardless of the land that was in the future to become a great State, sifted her sands through her wet fingers and let them drop wherever they might fall. As the result of this carelessness, New Jersey is sand. The roads are as deep in a soft and shifting mass of silex as one’s ankle bones are high above the common ground; and the sweet air that in the summer is fragrant with the warm and spicy breath of the pine trees is often dusty with little sand-grains.
Nature seems to be exceedingly fond of these sandy wilds, and to resent any attempt to encroach on her favorite possessions. She has minute vines, that run in and under and through the sand, and grow faster as they are maltreated. She has oaks that spring up and grow like evil weeds ; she has bushes of all kinds and shapes and all degrees of hardiness, that fight with her and for her; and between these assistants and the original owner that, although silent of speech, speaks in the loudest of tones, the trespasser has a struggle that he remembers long after he has conquered, and even when Nature has turned about and is fighting for him as bravely as she once fought against him.
At the entrance to the forest-clad lands we bid farewell to the bicycle until we come out of the woods. Its advent even into the region of scrub oaks has been a surprise to the natives, familiar only with the slow and staid charcoal carts and with the clam wagons that pass through their little clearings and by their doors; but to the inhabitants of the pine woods the bicycle is much as it was to Rudyard Kipling’s Hindoo. What they would say if they should see the panting wheelman trying to force the machine through the deep and heavy sand is a problem unsolved.
No matter how often the wheelman may have come this way and have shuffled a yielding journey with weary legs, it is ever new. Some unknown insect runs staggering across the path; some bright blossom is blooming that he never saw; some bird is twittering in the thick bushes that he has never heard; it is always fresh and sweet.
The pine barrens of New Jersey are not cool in midsummer. The explorer must face that fact before he dismounts in the sand at the forking of the roads that enter from the open country he is leaving. When the breezes are obstructed by the density of the foliage the woods are sultry and hot. The air is then heavy with the balsamic odors of the pine trees, and with the perfume of the flowers. It is spicy and delicious, it is invigorating and stimulating, yet it is hot, and the heat is dry; it withers the city man, it scorches him and makes him weak in his knees.
Traveling alone through these pines is not entirely so safe as it appears to be. To lose one's way is easier than to keep it or to find it. The roads in the pines of New Jersey have passed into a proverb on account of their endless length. They seem to wander on and on through the thickly growing trees until they get discouraged and stop as suddenly as if the world had ended. The barrens are full of short stretches of unfinished pathways that lead into the wildest forest. There are few that lead anywhere, and the pedestrian or the horseman, or the shuffling-wheelman that is not wise in woodcraft, or not familiar with the region, is more likely than not to be lost before he has fairly entered into the depths of the woods. Once lost his condition is pitiable. Round and round he wanders in the shifting sand that falls into his footprints and almost obliterates them before his foot has fairly left its mark. And the plainest road has the obnoxious habit of forking at any spot where it takes a notion to divide, and the branches are so exactly alike, and the landscape ahead is so unvarying, and the pine trees and the scrub oaks and the underbrush are so nearly the facsimiles of every other pine tree and oak and bush, that he is lost at the most conspicuous part of the road, the forking of the highway.
There is no house in sight. Huts are scattered far apart in the little clearings that make themselves known only when the traveler comes upon them unexpectedly. They are only one or two-roomed cabins built of the rejected slabs of the saw mills, nailed together irregularly, or of logs with the chinks stuffed with mud, or with the bog moss that chokes every small stream and fills every swamp. The chimney is mudplastered, yet if the owner be very wealthy there may be a coat of mortar between the logs; but the chimney, a door, and a window with a single board shutter, complete the building upon which the traveler comes unexpectedly as he walks through the wilds of pines and scrub oaks and straggling underbrush. Tow-headed children in abundance play in the sand and the sun about the door; a slatternly woman and an unkempt man with one suspender, or none, complete the household ; while a well, possibly with the old-fashioned windlass, adds what charm and comfort it can to the out-of-door possessions of the owner.
A patch of sand with a few potatoes, a few watermelons, perhaps, or a scanty growth of corn, yields the crops. What need have these people of crops? Are not the huckleberries plentiful and free to all that choose to pick them? And will not the store-keeper in the village a dozen miles away, buy them for cash or take them in exchange? And the cranberry bogs that are springing up in the region, will not they give an abundance of light labor, with the best of sure pay? The Pines people have few wants, and these are easily supplied with the little money that they can obtain from the picking of the wild huckleberry or the more than half-tamed cranberry. They seem to be happy; yet I cannot tell. The heart knoweth its own bitterness. Trouble comes to the hut of the pine hawker as easily, I suppose, as it does to the palace of the city gentleman, and is as poignant. Death bears as sharp and as severe a weapon in the barrens of the New Jersey Pines as he does in the greatest city, and the wounds that he makes are as deep and as long in healing. And the temptations, I imagine, are as hard to be resisted.
The water of the streams and of the swamps is an infusion of the cedars and the plants that border them and dip their roots into them. The color is a dark, transparent amber that in deep places is almost black, but when dipped in the hand shows every ridge and furrow of the skin as clearly as does the water from the city faucets, often with a greater distinctness and beauty. It is as spicy to the taste as are the cedars to the smell. Sparkling and sapid, it is the prince of the water that flows as Nature started it. To the lover of all out-of-doors it is as stimulating as wine. Sweet and beautiful, bright and clear, the dwellers within these regions are to be envied by us that only on rare occasions can have a draught from its cool and delicious depths.
To dip it in the hollow of the hand when the tongue is parched with the breathless air under the pines, and the throat is dried by the flying sands that are hot in the sun, is an experience to be remembered. The dark waters lie still and placid in the shade of the wooded banks; the shallows of amber show through them the pale sands below; aquatic plants wave long arms in the slow currents, and the thirsty wheelman stops to look before he stoops to drink. His submerged hand is an amber hand, pale, its outlines uncertain, its moving fingers curved and bent and distorted in the ripples that they have made; a pink petal from an azalia floats over; with his sudden movement a shower of such petals falls about him, the amber flood is bearing on its ripples a fleet of pink, and the bewildered wheelman forgets his thirst. The faint breeze of the woods sweeps over the stream; the bushes on the bank tremble, the weeds in the water nod and bend; amber waves dash themselves against the shore; the water lilies stir and tremble as the ripples lift them, and the breeze is spicy with their delicate perfume; magnolias like waxen stars gleam in the thickets; the tall pines have marched to the water’s edge. The clouds skurry across the dark and inverted image of the heavens; the breeze comes again and stronger; the pines sigh with that peculiar and indescribable moan that they always utter when the winds hurry through them; the sunlight is lost in a moment behind the black cloud that brings a sudden shower with its gentle dripping of warm tears. The water is dimpled by the touch of each drop; minute foam bells and bubbles of thinnest water-film stud the surface, eddy, touch and burst into drops of spray. The rain patters on the leaves and rolls over the sand in little dusty balls; the air is still except for the soft rustling of the dripping trees and the swish of the rain against the water. The sun bursts through the passing rain cloud as quickly as it retreated; the drops still fall for a moment, then the birds begin to chirp, the dimples on the stream float away, and the astonished wheelman remembers that he was thirsty. The oppressive warmth has given place to a sweet coolness. The wheelman is happy in the loneliness and the stillness of the secluded path across the woods. Glimpses of blue sky gleam through the trees; the air is fragrant with the dewy perfume of a thousand flowers. The artist in advance stops and leans on his wheel.
“Oh, ho! tired out, are you?”
“Listen!”
“Bob, Bob White—Bob White.” A little creeping sensation of exquisite delight steals up into the hair and shivers about in an ecstacy of pleasure. The cover is full of quail and the air is vibrant with their distinctive piping. A pine snake, bloated and glistening, wriggles across the road, and a rabbit for a moment peers from the bushes and is gone. The road turns suddenly, it widens, and over the low trees a chimney of civilization appears with terra cotta top, and the wheelman is again within sight of a two-story house with a tin roof, and within the limits of the artificial.
There is something exceedingly attractive about the New Jersey pine barrens. There can be no other spot in the world, I think, except perhaps in Florida, where Nature has so lavishly scattered certain of her choicest treasures. And according to my limited experience in Florida, the floral treasures of the pine woods are not nearly so abundant nor so rare, nor so fragrant, nor so beautiful as they are in the pine barrens of New Jersey.
As the mental picture of the New Jersey Pines and of the pines of Florida come to me, there seems to be a great resemblance. Perhaps if I could place a section of the one beside a slice of the other, this would cease and the difference become conspicuous. It may be only the enchantment that distance gives to each that makes the chief charm as I recall its beauties and its attractions.
And their differences are as great. In the forests of Florida the deciduous cypress trees that stand in great clusters around the clear-water lakes and ponds add a feature to the landscape that is peculiarly impressive. To the Northern visitor who sees them for the first time their feathery foliage is little short of startling; their expanded bases, their tall and straight boles tipped by the conical mass of delicate leafage, give the very swamps a mysterious aspect, and serve as a fit setting to the clear-water lakes that like brilliant jewels rest beneath them. In Florida as elsewhere, Nature rests in the winter, but the superb climate with its gentle warmth and the sweetness of its air, the softness of the clouds, and the feeling that one is almost within the tropics, so that at nightfall he instinctively looks to the heavens in search of the Southern cross.
All this is lacking in the Pines of New Jersey. There the summer air is as warm as it is in Florida, but the warmth is indescribably different; it is not that soft and balmy atmosphere that the Southern State has to offer in the winter, although if the wheelman will trudge through the mixture of sand and snow that covers the roads and the uncertain paths in the Pines of the Northern State in winter, he will discover that the air within the forest is less frigid, less stinging than that of the winter outside; and it will instinctively bring to the mind of a visitor to Florida the remembrance of that region.
But it was with no thought of Florida that we gave our bicycles the final push and leaned them against a paling fence that marked our return to civilization; it was rather with thankfulness that the journey was ended. The house that we hoped would welcome us for the night, had broad piazzas and comfortable rocking-chairs, and a view across a hundred acre cranberry bog, where the plants were blooming with the luxuriance and the profusion that only such a plantation can show. The white blossoms sparkled over the great fields as if they were snowflakes sprinkled there.
We had reached the end of the trip. We had now only to sit in our rocking chairs and see the evening shadows wrap the forest in their soft embrace. The pines stood black and shapeless against the sky, where burned and blazed a dust of quivering stars. Fire-flies stabbed the gloom with their darting flame. A cool breeze sighed and moaned through the pines, yet the world seemed as still as if death had touched it; .then a tree toad started its croaking, and as we went to bed a whip-poor-will began to cry for an unmerited punishment.
* * * * *
“Bob, Bob White—Bob White.” The morning had come.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
Although this account of a bicycle ride through the Pines is a bit short on historical substance, it is, nonetheless, a pleasant read and I have included all of the illustrations that accompanied the original article.
Outlook, Volume 26, April 1895, pp. 32-40
WE had loaded up the camera, and the luggage carrier was filled, and almost every time we turned over in our beds that night we turned out to examine the sky. Our hearts sank within us. For weeks we had been plotting and dreaming of this trip into the pine barrens of New Jersey; were we to be disappointed now that the camera was loaded with supersensitive films and all our old clothes were ready to receive us into their comfortable embrace?
The earth seemed to be asleep and wrapped in a cloud of fog. We wheeled into the mist and were silent. The watery vesicles beat our faces with a spray that would have been cool and delicious if our hearts had been less heavy. A water-break across the road gave me an unexpected shock because I was gazing at the sky. I fear the artist was doing the same thing, for he bounced over a stone and cut some curves in the dust.
“Do you see,” said he, “the cobwebs in the grass are threaded with drops of water? It is a sure sign that it will not rain to-day.”
The toll-gate woman was awake and on the alert. “Encourage us a little, won’t you ?” I said.
“The fog is coming down. It is a certain sign of good weather,” she answered. “The sun will be out directly.”
She and the artist were good prophets. Like a ball of polished copper the sun burned behind the mist. The trees ahead of us gradually appeared less unreal and huge. We could see the dripping grass blades. A soft wind seemed to spring out of the cloud.
“There is blue sky,” said the artist; “now see what that old ‘bike’ of yours can do on this good road.”
I laughed silently behind his back. He had never seen the roads in the New Jersey pine barrens. I was aching to introduce them.
Another toll-gate. The turnpike was ended. Swing quickly around the corner and look sharp for those interesting little gullies that the enterprising farmer takes such delight in cutting across the path.
We were in the open country. The fog was gone. Locusts bordered both sides of the road, and their branches met above us, drooping under their burden of delicate foliage and the weight of the waterdrops that dripped on us as we slowly glided beneath. The flowers that come with the summer blazed in a yellow glory along the path. Tall blossoms stood in the grass like magnificent sentinels attired in the radiant purple of royalty. Great clusters of the gorgeous orange - yellow milkweed pricked the eyes with their vivid color. A crimson butterfly sat and swung on the highest tuft. Bees hummed about it. A catbird stood on the fence and examined us. Broad shadows that lay across the road were cut sharply and regularly by the brightness of the morning sunbeams. An indescribable sweetness, the perfume of untamed Nature, breathed over us, and we are sunk in a sea of delicious fragrance.
We wheeled across the bars of sunlight and shadows as if climbing a gigantic music-staff, where the notes were birds and flowers and the brown trunks of trees. We climbed a vacant spot where the composer had rested for a moment to add a burst of melody all the sweeter, all the more impressive for the sudden pause. The artist was beginning to think things. His wheel wabbled.
“Put the brake on that old wheel of yours,” he called. “I must have a camera shot at this.”
Out again into the still and dewy morning. The road was becoming less and less familiar; the footpath was growing less and less distinct, as if traversed by few feet. The trees were changing in character and in appearance. Chestnuts, old yet full of vigor, stood singly in the fields, or here and there in groups, the pale-green clusters of their flowers sprinkling them as if Nature's only thought had been of their welfare. Oaks began to straggle along the highway, and pines became every moment more and more abundant and conspicuous. There was something suspicious, too, about the road. I saw the artist looking at it frequently, as if he found it interesting. Presently he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. I could do as I pleased, for he was ambitious to lead and never looked back.
Other roads began to come into ours, and ours began to give off branches with unpleasant frequency. Finally it divided into four; but bless the guide post! It stood at the forking of the way in the shade of the pines and of the scrub oaks, kindly extending its four fingers, each with a label that to us was more beautiful than any jewel could have been.
It was slow wheeling along here. We had lost much of our freshness, while the road was gathering itself together to show what it could do in the shape of bicycling horrors. Stones ? O, no, indeed. Dust? Not a bit of it. Ruts, sun-baked into ridges of brick? Happily, no. But something worse, something that suggested welcome thoughts of walking. It was the Jersey sand. The road was wandering, too, in a strange way that the roads of civilization would scorn. The shade was getting denser. The trees were more and more of the evergreen group. Huckleberry bushes were becoming conspicuous. The artist jumped off. “I think I will walk a little way,” he said. I had been walking behind him for some time as he struggled and wabbled in the sand. The soil of the New Jersey Pines and the rubber tire of the bicycle are not on good terms.
“Just think what a grind it would have been with the old fashioned tires!” said I, to encourage him.
A rabbit passed leisurely across the road. A pine lizard ran up the trunk of a cedar tree, its ridiculous tail trailing after, and peeped at us from the other side. A wood-pecker clung to the rough bark of a dead pine. It was so still that the sighing of the tires as they crushed softly through the sand was the only sound except an occasional murmur of the wind in the pines and the oaks. The road was only as wide as a carriage. In certain places the trees that stood too close to the edge had been hollowed out to allow the hub to pass. The sand became deeper. There was not a trace of a foot-path. Obscure and uncertain tracks passed at bewildering intervals across our road. Should we take any of them and abandon this sandy way perhaps for a worse one?
“Are we going in the right direction?”
“I don’t know. All the roads in the Pines are alike; the majority of them lead nowhere; many of them wander on for miles and then run up a tree. I have been here a dozen times, but I always get lost.”
The silence of the wilderness wrapped us about. It was the untamed luxuriance of the out-of-doors that we love. Pine trees towered above us with their naked trunks tipped by their cluster of leafy branches sharply outlined against the blue sky. Scrub oaks and huckleberry bushes, thorny vines, dense clumps of ferns, low shrubs, flowers in profusion surrounded us; a hedge of “the white spiked Clethra flower” for miles marked out each side of the road. There was no dim distance, unless we gazed into the sky. The short stretch of the road was soon lost in its own windings. We trudged and pushed the bicycles through the yielding sand. There was not a human being in sight. Not a house. Not a human sound. We would have been thankful for even the barking of a dog. The warm and aromatic breath of the pines filled us with delight. We cared not one penny whether we were lost, for it was all beautiful and strange.
But listen! There it is again. Surely it was the musical clink of an anvil! Isn’t that it again? Stop, and strain your ears. Faintly, yet sharp and distinct, the merry tattoo of the hammer on the iron came singing through the forest. It was the sweetest sound we had heard to-day. I was willing to admit, now that another human being was near, that there were two bicyclists in the world who were getting discouraged. But now we pushed forward with lighter hearts, although the sand seemed every moment to get deeper and heavier. The collection of silex grains that for courtesy we called the road made a wide sweep whose curve showed us the blacksmith shop.
It stood in a little clearing of pine forest, alone except for another house, apparently a second edition of itself. Nowhere in the known world but in the New Jersey Pines can you discover such a blacksmith shop. Around it the dense woods of pines and scrub oaks, with the sandy road in front, the second house beside it and the blue sky above; a shanty built of logs chinked with mud, a slanting roof of slabs discarded from the saw mill, inclosed a space scarcely large enough to shelter the anvil, the bellows and the tools of the owner's trade. A wide door opened toward the road, and a single window, closable by a wooden shutter, completed the structure. The roughened sand under the trees showed where the shoeing is done. The little dwelling house was a counterpart of the shop, except for the glazed window on each side of the front door, and the barefooted children playing in the sand. The blacksmith stops his work and looks up as we come to the door. Then he laughs till the woods ring, and the children come tumbling toward us, and a woman looks out of the window.
“You’ve come from up country; I know by them spidery things,” he said. “Do you expect to ride them in here? Where are you going, anyhow?”
“To Blankston's Cranberry Bog. Are we on the right road?”
“Straight on, six miles through the woods. But if you try to ride them bicycles any deeper in here you will never get out alive. Better leave them with me till you come back.”
“All right,” I said; “but do you lock up at night? Our bicycles represent a good deal to us. We are very fond of the spidery things.”
“I can’t just say that I do lock up; I fasten up, this way.”
He closed the door, thrust the prongs of a pitchfork into the wood and forced the handle into the sand.
“There!” he said, “that’s enough. Nobody don’t carry off many anvils down here. But maybe you’d feel safer with more than that?”
I intimated that we should.
“Hello, you other fellow! Goin’ to take my picture? I hain’t had one of them took since I got married and went to Brindletown to my wife’s Aunt Susan’s. All right, now. Let her fly.”
The shutter flew, and the happy blacksmith was “took” as he stood there and as he stands here.
We rode onward through the forest aisles, dim with the shadows of the pines. Purple orchids bloomed in the path. Ripening huckleberries dotted the bushes beside the way. Huge flies were beginning to make themselves unpleasantly familiar. Mosquitoes with light colored stripes around their legs were getting too numerous for our entire comfort. I brushed a tick from my knickerbockers. The roughened sand, impressed with marks of bare feet, gave signs of a human habitation near by. I could see a chimney through the trees. We pushed our bicycles into a road-side clearing where the house was a palace when compared with the general style of its neighbors in the wood, for it had risen to the dignity of clap-boards. A log shanty chinked with mud was now used as a stable, although the family had not long abandoned it for the more palatial story and a half clap-boarded house, where they seemed to be the aristocrats of the region. The little cleared space beside the unshaded door was crowded with what appeared at first glance to be a seething mass of children of all sizes, some of them black as night, some white except for the tan and the dirt on their cheeks, and others speckled with great copper-colored blotches. A black woman stood in the door; a white man was wheeling a speckled child in a toy wagon. I fear that such combinations are not rare in the region.
My one objection to the Pines is that the wheelman must become a pedestrian as he approaches them. At one time, perhaps at many times in the geological history of New Jersey, these regions were sunk beneath the ocean, which, regardless of the land that was in the future to become a great State, sifted her sands through her wet fingers and let them drop wherever they might fall. As the result of this carelessness, New Jersey is sand. The roads are as deep in a soft and shifting mass of silex as one’s ankle bones are high above the common ground; and the sweet air that in the summer is fragrant with the warm and spicy breath of the pine trees is often dusty with little sand-grains.
Nature seems to be exceedingly fond of these sandy wilds, and to resent any attempt to encroach on her favorite possessions. She has minute vines, that run in and under and through the sand, and grow faster as they are maltreated. She has oaks that spring up and grow like evil weeds ; she has bushes of all kinds and shapes and all degrees of hardiness, that fight with her and for her; and between these assistants and the original owner that, although silent of speech, speaks in the loudest of tones, the trespasser has a struggle that he remembers long after he has conquered, and even when Nature has turned about and is fighting for him as bravely as she once fought against him.
At the entrance to the forest-clad lands we bid farewell to the bicycle until we come out of the woods. Its advent even into the region of scrub oaks has been a surprise to the natives, familiar only with the slow and staid charcoal carts and with the clam wagons that pass through their little clearings and by their doors; but to the inhabitants of the pine woods the bicycle is much as it was to Rudyard Kipling’s Hindoo. What they would say if they should see the panting wheelman trying to force the machine through the deep and heavy sand is a problem unsolved.
No matter how often the wheelman may have come this way and have shuffled a yielding journey with weary legs, it is ever new. Some unknown insect runs staggering across the path; some bright blossom is blooming that he never saw; some bird is twittering in the thick bushes that he has never heard; it is always fresh and sweet.
The pine barrens of New Jersey are not cool in midsummer. The explorer must face that fact before he dismounts in the sand at the forking of the roads that enter from the open country he is leaving. When the breezes are obstructed by the density of the foliage the woods are sultry and hot. The air is then heavy with the balsamic odors of the pine trees, and with the perfume of the flowers. It is spicy and delicious, it is invigorating and stimulating, yet it is hot, and the heat is dry; it withers the city man, it scorches him and makes him weak in his knees.
Traveling alone through these pines is not entirely so safe as it appears to be. To lose one's way is easier than to keep it or to find it. The roads in the pines of New Jersey have passed into a proverb on account of their endless length. They seem to wander on and on through the thickly growing trees until they get discouraged and stop as suddenly as if the world had ended. The barrens are full of short stretches of unfinished pathways that lead into the wildest forest. There are few that lead anywhere, and the pedestrian or the horseman, or the shuffling-wheelman that is not wise in woodcraft, or not familiar with the region, is more likely than not to be lost before he has fairly entered into the depths of the woods. Once lost his condition is pitiable. Round and round he wanders in the shifting sand that falls into his footprints and almost obliterates them before his foot has fairly left its mark. And the plainest road has the obnoxious habit of forking at any spot where it takes a notion to divide, and the branches are so exactly alike, and the landscape ahead is so unvarying, and the pine trees and the scrub oaks and the underbrush are so nearly the facsimiles of every other pine tree and oak and bush, that he is lost at the most conspicuous part of the road, the forking of the highway.
There is no house in sight. Huts are scattered far apart in the little clearings that make themselves known only when the traveler comes upon them unexpectedly. They are only one or two-roomed cabins built of the rejected slabs of the saw mills, nailed together irregularly, or of logs with the chinks stuffed with mud, or with the bog moss that chokes every small stream and fills every swamp. The chimney is mudplastered, yet if the owner be very wealthy there may be a coat of mortar between the logs; but the chimney, a door, and a window with a single board shutter, complete the building upon which the traveler comes unexpectedly as he walks through the wilds of pines and scrub oaks and straggling underbrush. Tow-headed children in abundance play in the sand and the sun about the door; a slatternly woman and an unkempt man with one suspender, or none, complete the household ; while a well, possibly with the old-fashioned windlass, adds what charm and comfort it can to the out-of-door possessions of the owner.
A patch of sand with a few potatoes, a few watermelons, perhaps, or a scanty growth of corn, yields the crops. What need have these people of crops? Are not the huckleberries plentiful and free to all that choose to pick them? And will not the store-keeper in the village a dozen miles away, buy them for cash or take them in exchange? And the cranberry bogs that are springing up in the region, will not they give an abundance of light labor, with the best of sure pay? The Pines people have few wants, and these are easily supplied with the little money that they can obtain from the picking of the wild huckleberry or the more than half-tamed cranberry. They seem to be happy; yet I cannot tell. The heart knoweth its own bitterness. Trouble comes to the hut of the pine hawker as easily, I suppose, as it does to the palace of the city gentleman, and is as poignant. Death bears as sharp and as severe a weapon in the barrens of the New Jersey Pines as he does in the greatest city, and the wounds that he makes are as deep and as long in healing. And the temptations, I imagine, are as hard to be resisted.
The water of the streams and of the swamps is an infusion of the cedars and the plants that border them and dip their roots into them. The color is a dark, transparent amber that in deep places is almost black, but when dipped in the hand shows every ridge and furrow of the skin as clearly as does the water from the city faucets, often with a greater distinctness and beauty. It is as spicy to the taste as are the cedars to the smell. Sparkling and sapid, it is the prince of the water that flows as Nature started it. To the lover of all out-of-doors it is as stimulating as wine. Sweet and beautiful, bright and clear, the dwellers within these regions are to be envied by us that only on rare occasions can have a draught from its cool and delicious depths.
To dip it in the hollow of the hand when the tongue is parched with the breathless air under the pines, and the throat is dried by the flying sands that are hot in the sun, is an experience to be remembered. The dark waters lie still and placid in the shade of the wooded banks; the shallows of amber show through them the pale sands below; aquatic plants wave long arms in the slow currents, and the thirsty wheelman stops to look before he stoops to drink. His submerged hand is an amber hand, pale, its outlines uncertain, its moving fingers curved and bent and distorted in the ripples that they have made; a pink petal from an azalia floats over; with his sudden movement a shower of such petals falls about him, the amber flood is bearing on its ripples a fleet of pink, and the bewildered wheelman forgets his thirst. The faint breeze of the woods sweeps over the stream; the bushes on the bank tremble, the weeds in the water nod and bend; amber waves dash themselves against the shore; the water lilies stir and tremble as the ripples lift them, and the breeze is spicy with their delicate perfume; magnolias like waxen stars gleam in the thickets; the tall pines have marched to the water’s edge. The clouds skurry across the dark and inverted image of the heavens; the breeze comes again and stronger; the pines sigh with that peculiar and indescribable moan that they always utter when the winds hurry through them; the sunlight is lost in a moment behind the black cloud that brings a sudden shower with its gentle dripping of warm tears. The water is dimpled by the touch of each drop; minute foam bells and bubbles of thinnest water-film stud the surface, eddy, touch and burst into drops of spray. The rain patters on the leaves and rolls over the sand in little dusty balls; the air is still except for the soft rustling of the dripping trees and the swish of the rain against the water. The sun bursts through the passing rain cloud as quickly as it retreated; the drops still fall for a moment, then the birds begin to chirp, the dimples on the stream float away, and the astonished wheelman remembers that he was thirsty. The oppressive warmth has given place to a sweet coolness. The wheelman is happy in the loneliness and the stillness of the secluded path across the woods. Glimpses of blue sky gleam through the trees; the air is fragrant with the dewy perfume of a thousand flowers. The artist in advance stops and leans on his wheel.
“Oh, ho! tired out, are you?”
“Listen!”
“Bob, Bob White—Bob White.” A little creeping sensation of exquisite delight steals up into the hair and shivers about in an ecstacy of pleasure. The cover is full of quail and the air is vibrant with their distinctive piping. A pine snake, bloated and glistening, wriggles across the road, and a rabbit for a moment peers from the bushes and is gone. The road turns suddenly, it widens, and over the low trees a chimney of civilization appears with terra cotta top, and the wheelman is again within sight of a two-story house with a tin roof, and within the limits of the artificial.
There is something exceedingly attractive about the New Jersey pine barrens. There can be no other spot in the world, I think, except perhaps in Florida, where Nature has so lavishly scattered certain of her choicest treasures. And according to my limited experience in Florida, the floral treasures of the pine woods are not nearly so abundant nor so rare, nor so fragrant, nor so beautiful as they are in the pine barrens of New Jersey.
As the mental picture of the New Jersey Pines and of the pines of Florida come to me, there seems to be a great resemblance. Perhaps if I could place a section of the one beside a slice of the other, this would cease and the difference become conspicuous. It may be only the enchantment that distance gives to each that makes the chief charm as I recall its beauties and its attractions.
And their differences are as great. In the forests of Florida the deciduous cypress trees that stand in great clusters around the clear-water lakes and ponds add a feature to the landscape that is peculiarly impressive. To the Northern visitor who sees them for the first time their feathery foliage is little short of startling; their expanded bases, their tall and straight boles tipped by the conical mass of delicate leafage, give the very swamps a mysterious aspect, and serve as a fit setting to the clear-water lakes that like brilliant jewels rest beneath them. In Florida as elsewhere, Nature rests in the winter, but the superb climate with its gentle warmth and the sweetness of its air, the softness of the clouds, and the feeling that one is almost within the tropics, so that at nightfall he instinctively looks to the heavens in search of the Southern cross.
All this is lacking in the Pines of New Jersey. There the summer air is as warm as it is in Florida, but the warmth is indescribably different; it is not that soft and balmy atmosphere that the Southern State has to offer in the winter, although if the wheelman will trudge through the mixture of sand and snow that covers the roads and the uncertain paths in the Pines of the Northern State in winter, he will discover that the air within the forest is less frigid, less stinging than that of the winter outside; and it will instinctively bring to the mind of a visitor to Florida the remembrance of that region.
But it was with no thought of Florida that we gave our bicycles the final push and leaned them against a paling fence that marked our return to civilization; it was rather with thankfulness that the journey was ended. The house that we hoped would welcome us for the night, had broad piazzas and comfortable rocking-chairs, and a view across a hundred acre cranberry bog, where the plants were blooming with the luxuriance and the profusion that only such a plantation can show. The white blossoms sparkled over the great fields as if they were snowflakes sprinkled there.
We had reached the end of the trip. We had now only to sit in our rocking chairs and see the evening shadows wrap the forest in their soft embrace. The pines stood black and shapeless against the sky, where burned and blazed a dust of quivering stars. Fire-flies stabbed the gloom with their darting flame. A cool breeze sighed and moaned through the pines, yet the world seemed as still as if death had touched it; .then a tree toad started its croaking, and as we went to bed a whip-poor-will began to cry for an unmerited punishment.
* * * * *
“Bob, Bob White—Bob White.” The morning had come.
Best regards,
Jerseyman
