Folks,
fear not.
You are witnessing a brief bout of “periglacial fever.” Something like this hasn’t occurred here since Peter Wolfe’s 1953 paper Periglacial frost-thaw basins in New Jersey. This isn’t that wimpy glacial/proglacial/paraglacial stuff from Upstate New York. It's the hard stuff. Yes, I mean permafrost.
There, I've said it, in public. Happy now?
I will attempt to capture the essence of our most wicked creature who lurks amidst these forgotten cold-climate, nonglacial landforms, the famed Jersey Devil. Knowledge of the cryospheric realm is requisite if we are to feel the intimate “sense of place” in which locals view these wetland features.
Check out the illustration of Satan’s laird (a spung) opposite page 179 in Beck’s (1945) Jersey Genesis: The Story of the Mullica River.
“Where stunted pines of burned-over forest are revealed in darksome pools, the Jersey Devil lurks.”
You have been warned...