Closed Forever
September 25, 2005
Yes, it's true, New Jersey has farms, but what it has even more of is traffic. After creeping along for a few miles in a discouraging bumper-to-bumper line-up on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, Deborah and I started to have second thoughts about our relaxing little getaway. Seeing the aggressive silver pickup that we'd cursed out a minute earlier get a ticket for driving on the shoulder was mildly entertaining, but it wasn't the kind of fun we were after. I spent the "stop" half of the "stop-and-go traffic" watching the couple in an SUV behind me argue over which CD to play in their car stereo.
"I want to scream," said Deborah.
"Go ahead. I don't mind."
She let out a shy, reserved little scream that probably didn't do much to release her frustration, but at least it made me laugh, and helped ease mine.
In the middle of the mess, we came upon a flashing sign on the side of the road: "CONSTRUCTION. EXPECT DELAYS."
Hey, thanks for the heads up.
I thought of Hurricane Katrina, thought of Louisiana, and Texas, and tried to imagine the nightmare of a forced evacuation from New York City.
Eventually, things began to move. The space between the cars stretched to a breathable distance, and the view through the window changed from smokestacks and oil refineries into grassy knolls and tall, green trees. I exited Route 78 into the charming little town of my youth. Not as charming as during my youth, of course, unless you have a soft spot for office parks, but still a pleasant little borough.
On one end of town is a steep, windy road that leads to what used to be rolling farmlands. I hadn't been on the road for years, and was disappointed to see the hills crammed with large, anally landscaped, residential communities. One lone farm still stood along the long stretch of road — two, if you consider a penned-in half-acre full of sheep a farm. We pulled up the gravel drive of Hillview Farms and finally started to get in the groove of what we were after.
Pumpkins, apples, cider, cider donuts, honey, tomatoes, that sort of thing. Too late in the season for corn, so we stocked up on everything else.
Further down the road was Archie's Resale Shop. I've spent many Sunday afternoons at Archie's, squeezing through the half-collapsed barns, combing through unsorted collections of junk. I rarely ever bought anything, but that was never the point. Furniture, books, clothes, ties, belts, glasses, dishes, old toys, older signs, things made of rotting wood, things made of rusted metal, things that you'd hold and say: "What the hell is this ?"
Archie was an old guy who looked like Santa Claus. He played it up and even had a few pet reindeer on the property. I'd heard he'd died a few years ago, and expected his wife to run the place. I described the collection of dolls that were always on display in a chicken wire pen, and hoped it was still there.
My heart sank when we pulled into the driveway and saw the message scrawled on a large chalkboard: "Closed forever."
"Shit," I said. "Forever? I can't believe it. Okay, we'll go to the swamp.”
The Great Swamp is exactly that: a big swamp. It was designated a National Wildlife Refuge the year I was born, and I've been going there ever since. A few boardwalks wind through the swamp so you don't have to step in the green muck on your way to the bird blind at the end of the trail. This time, however, the muck was so dry that it was hardly a swamp at all, making the walk through the woods on a boardwalk seem unnecessarily fussy.
Inside the bird blind at the end of the trail was a poster illustrating the birds we might see if we were "quiet and alert."
We looked out the bird blind’s tiny slits and pretended to look for birds. As we did, an old woman came into the blind and said, "There's a hawk," then turned around and left. We looked, saw the hawk, then looked at each other and shrugged.
We left the blind, expecting to see the old lady on the boardwalk ahead of us, but she was nowhere to be seen. "Where'd she go?" we wondered.
"Maybe she was a ghost," I suggested. "If you're quiet and alert, the ghost of the bird blind will come in and point out a bird for you."
After the swamp, we went to find real ghosts in the National Historic Park, Jockey Hollow. We parked the car and walked to the top of the hill, where some Revolutionary War soldiers’ huts had been reconstructed.
"I'm not really interested in Revolutionary War history," said Deborah as we walked up the hill. But she was interested in the grasshoppers that burst from the dry grass with every step we took. "I want to capture one for my cats."
Deborah had to work, so we couldn't lollygag the entire day. We had just enough time to score some late-season corn and a couple more tomatoes from another farm before heading back to New York. "Late-season corn is the best. Sometimes the worms think so too," warned the sign.
The ride into the city turned out to be even worse than the drive out of it. We sat in another Holland Tunnel tie-up, at one point travelling .2 miles in half an hour. Deborah began to stress over being late for work, and I began to stress over getting her there in time. The calm waters of our relaxing bucolic afternoon bubbled over and evaporated amidst dog-eat-dog jostling, merging, and honking.
"Why is that guy honking?" Deborah asked about the guy two cars behind us.
"Because he's a fucking idiot," I replied. And so on, through the tunnel, across Canal Street, over the Manhattan Bridge, all the way to Deborah's Park Slope apartment.
Deborah hardly had time to get ready before work, and she asked me if I'd get her a sandwich from the deli while she got changed. "Sure, yeah. Okay. What do you want?"
"Um. A bologna and American cheese on white bread with mayo and mustard."
The expression on my face was nothing compared to the expression on the guy at the deli counter. Deborah fully expected it. "Did the guy at the counter give you a funny look?" she asked when I returned with the sandwich.
"Yeah, he did actually. You gotta admit, that sandwich is about as white trash as you can get."
"I know," she shrugged. "I couldn't think fast enough. It's the first thing that came to mind."
You can take the girl out of western Pennsylvania, but you can't take western Pennsylvania out of the girl.
