Blue Highways: Othello, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) does a little searching for a mystery:  Why is Othello named as such. The answer causes me to think about my own, newly discovered mixed ethnicity and what it means for me.  It also shows how complex and interesting the United States and its people can be.  If you wish to know where Othello is located as you "with greedy ear devour up my discourse," (Othello, Act I, Scene III) then "you best know the place." (Othello, Act I, Scene II)

Book Quote

"'In Cumberland County we have a settlement of people called 'tri-bloods,' people that trace their history - or legend - back to a Moorish - Algerian, specifically - princess who came ashore after a shipwreck in the first years of the nation.  The Indians took her in, and from the subsequent mixing of blood - later with a small infusion from the Negro - there developed a group composed of three races.  The 'Delaware Moors,' they're called...'

"'In the thirties and forties, governmental bureaucrats - especially in Delaware - they had a time trying to classify tri-bloods because the people considered themselves neither white, red, nor black.  Usually they ended up in their own category, one so small as to be forgotten.  To this hour, the people remain what you might describe as aloof, and they maintain themselves as independently as they can.  Clannish, even secretive.  But they always have been landowners and farmers.  Never slaves.  Still, they are - to use the phrase - 'men of color' and consequently suspect, especially in border states, despite their features usually being more Indian than Negroid.  Aquiline nose, straight hair, high cheekbones.'"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 10

Othello, New Jersey

The story above, from a man who is giving LHM a history of a portion of the town of Greenwich, New Jersey, also known as Head of Greenwich, is interesting in that it answers LHM's query about why that particular section of town is also named Othello.  Othello, as you may know, is the title of a Shakespeare play, and therefore the mixed-ethnicity between Arabic and African peoples in the town is part of the reason for the town name.  It is also an elaborate joke because, as the man goes on to relate, the play is about a black man having a romantic relationship with a white woman and therefore a commentary on the intermixing of ethnicities within the town.  The story, however, resonates with me because of what I've learned recently about my own heritage.

Up until about three years ago, I thought my ancestry was Irish, English, German and French Canadian.  That's always what I've been told.  The wrinkle in that story was that I'm adopted, and nobody knew anything about my real roots.

It turns out that the French Canadian was correct, and I've learned something of the rich history from my newfound relatives on my biological father's side.  But there was so much more to me than I could have imagined.

Through an interesting series of events about five years ago, I met a woman online who helped me discover my birth history and changed forever the way I view myself.  Not only did my heritage become richer, but I suddenly felt more interesting than just being another white guy of European descent in America.

I discovered the history of my biological mother's side of the family, which was more complex than I'd ever thought possible.  My bio-mother's last name was Mayle, and she was from West Virginia in a coal mining, mountainous area.  It was hard work, and the Mayle's were one of the coal mining families.  There were around six other families spread out over this area and the Mayles and these other families were collectively and derogatively known as "Guineas."  In other parts of the US, the term guinea was often used to refer to people of Italian descent, but in this part of West Virginia it was used to informally classify families that had mixed race descent.  Because of their long history in that area of West Virginia, there had been some intermixing with blacks and the Delaware Indian (Lenape) peoples who lived there.  The intermixing was apparent in the variation of skin color and features, even within families.  I was given a picture of a great great great uncle who, even in the black and white photo, appeared African-American but obviously had blue eyes, like mine.  When my wife saw it, she also noted similarities in his facial features to mine.

Guineas were the target of discrimination.  Like the story in the quote above of the Delaware Moors, census workers would come and count people in families, and mark them down as being black or white depending on their color and features.  Thus, people in the same family unit might be marked as different races, condemning one brother or sister, for example, to further discrimination while enhancing the other's prospects if only barely.  Guineas had their own schools because they wouldn't attend the schools created for blacks, and couldn't go to the schools that only served white children.  They were in some kind of in-between limbo between black and white.  I heard stories that some private motels in the area would refuse service to people whose last name was Mayle or that of one of the other families known as Guineas, even as late as the 1970s.  Even so, these families provided the workers who mined a lot of coal in the area.

When I began talking with my biological family, I learned that this was a touchy subject.  The older generation was not willing to talk about their mixed race.  They saw themselves as whites with some Indian blood, but weren't willing to acknowledge their African-American ancestry at all.  They were offended and even angry if it got mentioned.  The people in my generation were curious, exploring a little about their mixed heritage and at least accepting it.

But at a family reunion in Ohio, I saw evidence of how the world changes.  In the youngest generation, I saw a couple of the family members bring their black wives and girlfriends.  While this was uncomfortable to the older generation, it was the reality and I was happy to see it.

These revelations changed me.  I became much more interesting to myself, if that makes any sense.  Suddenly, even though I would never be part of the African-American or Delaware Indian communities and would not try to use my heritage to claim that I could be, I now feel a wider and deeper connection with the world.  My sister in my adopted family has had a great time calling me "my brother from another mother" with emphasis on the "brother."  She pronounces it "brutha" when she really gets into it.

But what my newfound heritage really confirms is what I always knew I am.  I'm an open, interested, curious, and accepting person.  I love the fact that my heritage just isn't white, but something much more inclusive and with a richer history behind it than I ever dreamed.  I now have a whole new ancestral history that I feel is completely mine.  I want to visit West Virginia to see where my biological mother's roots are located, and I want to visit the places in Canada where my biological father's roots grew.

Above, all, I know that if people look at me, they may see just another white guy, but I'm so much more than that.

There are other stories and communities of multi-ethnic and somewhat isolated communities in America.  Add these groups to the Delaware Moors in New Jersey and Delaware and the Guineas in West Virginia:  the Melungeons of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky; the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina; the Carmel Indians of Ohio; and the Redbones of South Carolina and Louisiana.  I feel a part of a more complex history and genealogical makeup than is generally known.  And I am really damn proud of it.

Musical Interlude

By searching for songs on being of mixed race, I found this song.  Every Day, by Tricky, is on his album Mixed Race (he is of Jamaican, Ghanaian and English heritage).  The song's lyrics sort of describe my new feeling about myself, and Tricky's music embraces all sorts of different styles, genres and countries, just like I think I do.  I might seem "every day" to most people, but I'm really not.  Just scratch under the surface.  I encourage you to do so!

If you want to know more about Othello

There is very little about the town of Othello, also known as Head of Greenwich, on the internet.  However, there's a bit of information on the Delaware Moors.

Cumberland County Towns
Great Grandmother's Blog (blog entry about a person's Delaware Moor great-grandmother)
Mitsawokett: The "Moors" of Delaware
Moors in America: Othello's Children in a New World

Next up: Greenwich, New Jersey

Blue Highways: Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is making his way through southern New Jersey, and finding a little bit of the South there.  I use the opportunity to reflect on what makes the South, the South.  To see where Millville and Bridgeton sit as we begin our trip westward and back to the beginning, go to the map.  The illustration at right is by Bob Hines, hosted at Wikimedia Commons, and is of the New Jersey state bird, the American goldfinch.

Book Quote

"As the pine belt disappeared, the state took on a Southern cast below Millville, an old glass-making town on the Maurice River flowing through the exposed silica deposits of lower Jersey.  Near here, the first Mason jar was made.  Outside of Bridgeton, the Southern aspect showed plain: big fields of soybeans, corn, cabbage, strawberries, and fallow fields of dusty brown, and slopes of peach and apple orchards.  Black men worked patch farms, and with cane poles they fished muddy creeks of the lowlands where egrets stepped meticulously through the tidal marsh."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 9

Downtown Millville, New Jersey. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

There is a difference in the South.

I'm not sure exactly what that difference is.  Maybe it's the light.  In the North, the light seems either really really hot and intense, at least in the summer months, or cold and harsh in the winter.  That is, if you see the light at all in the winter - when I lived in Milwaukee we would often go a month or two with gray, overcast skies.  In the South, especially as you get closer to the Gulf Coast, the light takes on a muted aspect, and it seems like the colors, especially toward sunset, become pastels.

Maybe it's the land, which takes on a rural aspect.  Certainly there are large cities in the North, but the South has been and will be known primarily for its agriculture.  I think that perhaps an offshoot of this idea is also based on ethnicity.  When I lived in the North, the African-American population was mostly found in the cities.  Once you drove into the country in the Midwest or Northeast, the farmers were mostly white or the farms were large cooperatives or corporately owned.  But in the South, African-Americans are much more represented in the rural populations, and as owners and workers of farms.  Perhaps this has to do with migration - in escaping slavery, and later the hardships of sharecropping as well as looking for well-paying jobs, many African-Americans moved north to the factory jobs in the cities.  This created a population that moved into cities and stayed and that only reconnects with its farming roots perhaps when some people from the North come back to visit their extended Southern families, many of whom have roots and branches that still farm as a way of life.

Maybe the change is in the stereotypes that we have of the South.  Who hasn't heard a version of the "sleepy South?"  Who doesn't take note of the different accents one finds there.  Who doesn't note the change to primarily country music and Christian stations on the radio when one crosses the imaginary line (the Mason-Dixon line if you will) that demarcates the South from the other parts of the nation?

Perhaps it is the food?  The slow-cooked comfort food, with those qualities that we consider Southern.  Barbecued, fried, often with vegetables, like okra, that those of us in the North have never tried.  Grits, biscuits and gravy for breakfast, Collard greens and fried chicken steak for dinner.  Good, wholesome and often artery-clogging food.

It might be that the change is also in pace.  To me, the North seems busy.  People constantly moving, meeting, getting places.  They bark orders and arrange things on their various communication devices...smart phones, IPads and other tablets.  In the Northern cities, people put on headphones and crowd the rest of the world out with music from their IPods and MP3 devices.  In the downtowns of places like Chicago and New York, the clattering of the subways and elevated trains create, at least for me, moments of loud distractions as they rumble overhead and underneath, squealing to a stop with the scratchy announcement of loudspeakers, and then rumble off again, sparking away into the distance of tunnel or track.  But in the South, the days seem to go longer, especially in the summer.  My one experience of living in the South, in New Orleans (which admittedly is Southern and yet not Southern but in this experience I think it is very Southern), the night brought more quiet.  I could hear the insects even as I sat on a porch outside my home.  In fact, where did I ever sit on a porch in the evening regularly other than in the South?  The smells of night-blooming jasmine filled the air.  Music, actually played and not filtered through cords and earpieces but actually transmitted straight to the ear, seemingly such an important part of the Southern soul, filtered out of houses where someone practiced, or out of clubs where bands entertained.  The days were often hot and lazy, leading to a sort of lethargy of body and reflection of mind.

I don't really want to paint the South in one broad brush, just as one can't paint the North accurately in similar strokes.  The differences abound from Georgia to Louisiana, from Florida to Tennessee.  A people and place cannot be captured in a few words as there are complexities and regionalities and all of those things that make us all individuals, each deserving of notice individually in our own right.

Yet it is our tendency as humans to avoid the complexities and generalize.  We want to make things simpler in order to grasp only the essences of what we need to know.  And for that reason, we can point to the pace, and the food, and the rural, and other aspects of the South that jump out at us, or are reinforced in other ways, so that minds so capable of grasping the most complex ideas don't have to work as hard.  This is a danger, as if we oversimplify, we run the risk of dismissing a whole region based on isolated facts, or making too much of cosmetic differences instead of celebrating our whole country.  As we know tragically from history, over and over again, generalization can lead to some very bad consequences.

Yes, there is a difference in the South.  And I like a whole lot in that difference.

Musical Interlude

I first heard R.L Burnside in New Orleans, on a CD that had a re-mixed version of his song Miss Maybelle.  I really liked it.  We think of the South as a bastion of country music, but the south is also the birthplace of jazz and the blues.  R.L. Burnside was one of the the last of the old-time blues players who took the Delta blues and made them even more raw by electrifying them.  I wish I had seen him live in New Orleans before he died in 2005.

If you want to know more about Millville and Bridgeton

Bridgeton Area Chamber of Commerce
City of Bridgeton
Glasstown (Millville) Arts District
Millville Chamber of Commerce
The News of Cumberland County (newspaper)
Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center of Millville
Wikipedia: Bridgeton
Wikipedia: Millville

Next up: Othello, New Jersey

Blue Highways: Egg Harbor City, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

Our stop at the edge of the Pine Barrens, in Egg Harbor City, lets us peruse about things that get lost in the Pines.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) identifies one thing as progress.  But other things might be lost in the Pines as well, including the Jersey Devil.  To see where this cryptid may haunt the dreams of folks, delve into the darkest corners of the map.

Book Quote

"I came to the southern limits of the woods at Egg Harbor City, a landlocked town fifteen miles from Great Egg Harbor.  The plan years ago to dig a canal from town to the Great Egg Harbor River and thereby link with the sea did not work out.  It wasn't the first time so-called progress had got lost in the Pines."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 8

Look at that! Egg Harbor City has an old five and dime, a Ben Franklin building, that is still being used! Photo by Jenneli Mueller and hosted at City-Data. Click on photo to go to host page.

Egg Harbor City, New Jersey

Cryptozoology.  I hadn't heard of this term until a few years ago but chances are everyone who reads this has come across cryptozoology before.  Cryptozoology is the search for animals whose existence has not been verified or proved.  If you've ever wondered about the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot, or the chupacabra, you've been delving slightly into cryptozoology.  I remember when I was young, camping in the woods of Northern California, and being frightened to death by the possibility that Bigfoot might have been out there, watching me, tracking me, perhaps even intending me harm.  Shadows in the day often became an apelike creature observing me from the edge of the forest.  The cracking of twigs in the forest at night, in my imagination, presaged the rush of a hairy, smelly beast upon me.  Yet, as I have written elsewhere, even in my fear I wanted Bigfoot to exist.  I wanted this relic of the genetic evolution of humans to be real.

Why does this come up in the context of a post about Egg Harbor City?  Because Egg Harbor City is located at the edge of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and the Pine Barrens is supposed to be the habitat of a cryptozoological specimen - the Jersey Devil.  Thus, and I'm writing somewhat facetiously here, LHM might have possibly run across this creature in his trip across the Pine Barrens.

What is the Jersey Devil?  Well, according to numerous sources I've read, it has wings, a large head that resembles a horse, stands on two legs, sports wings, and hisses and screeches in a blood-curdling manner.  The earliest legends were started by Native Americans, who believed that a dragon-like creature lived in the Pine Barrens.  Later, according to Wikipedia (take it for what it's worth) Swedish explorers thought enough of the legend to name the channel in the area the Drake Kill, "drake" meaning dragon.  Apparently, the Devil has been spotted a number of times in the past 100 or so years, including in 1909 when a Trenton councilman claimed to have heard wings flapping outside his window and found tracks of cloven hooves in the snow outside his house, and in 1978 when two boys ice-skating on a frozen lake smelled an odor of rotten fish and saw a pair of red eyes staring at them.  Even the brother of Napoleon saw the Devil while hunting on his New Jersey estate in 1820.

Cryptozoologists believe that the Jersey Devil could be a new kind of creature, or an animal previously thought extinct.  Some cryptozoologists believe it could be a dinosaur such as a pterosaur or a dimorphodon.

I used to be all over this kind of stuff.  I thrilled reading about creatures that might be out there that we haven't discovered.  The fact is that we are still discovering new species all the time, and rediscovering ones that we thought were long gone.  The coelacanth is a famous species that was thought to have gone extinct approximately 65 million years ago, but was found in 1938 to be happily living off the coast of South Africa.  In Oregon, a new species of spider was recently found living caves, and a new species of lemur, the GERP mouse lemur, was discovered in Madasgascar.  Cryptozoologists simply argue that there are new species (and old ones) out there that have eluded us.  Bigfoot/Yeti, Nessie, the Jersey Devil are all waiting to be discovered.  I remain hopeful that more interesting and exciting species are just waiting to pop out at us. 

However, I remain a healthy skeptic.  One major reason that I am not sure that we'll find the Jersey Devil or creatures as wild and fantastic as that is that human encroachment on what used to untrammeled territory grows.  Huge swaths of the Amazon are being cut down daily, possibly driving species, most of which we'll never know, into extinction.  In the Pacific Northwest, the possible home of Bigfoot, huge areas of forest have been clear cut.  The Pine Barrens are being encroached upon by the mega-urban areas around it, giving a Jersey Devil less room to roam.  Polluted waters, climate change, and other environmental factors caused by humans have consequences foreseen and unforeseen.  If you're a believer in the wild and fantastic creatures, you have to ask if they can survive the massive changes being perpetrated on their ecosystems.  If you're skeptic, well, they were all figments of overactive human imaginations anyway.

Regardless of what happens, I think that we'll always find mysterious phenomena, and we'll find ways to explain them.  We might actually discover what makes them or, if not, we'll use our imaginations.  It's the human way.  Being from Northern California, I've decided that I much prefer Bigfoot to the Jersey Devil, but I'm glad they are still around even if it is only in our imaginations.  And who knows.  A small part of me hopes, against hope, that they just might really be out there.

Musical Interlude

What better song to accompany this post and its topic than the Theme to the X-Files?  That show was a favorite of mine - I watched it starting with the first episode of the first season, and because I watched it I was cool before others knew about it.  Of course, the subject matter dealt with aliens, but also with unexplained phenomena like the Jersey Devil and Bigfoot.  It was a great show!

If you want to know more about Egg Harbor City

Egg Harbor City
Egg Harbor City Historical Society
Egg Harbor City: New Germany in New Jersey
New Jersey Tourism: Egg Harbor City
Wikipedia: Egg Harbor City

Next up:  Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

Blue Highways: Weekstown, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

Common violet (viola sororia), the state flower of New Jersey.How many times, like William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) below, do you pass by little roadside memorials?  Do they register on you or do you, like me many times, hardly notice them?  I will do a little reflection in this post about roadside memorials, including the ghost bicycles that are now springing up to memorialize cyclists who have suffered tragedy on the road.  To discover where Weekstown is located, see the map.

Book Quote

"I went on south, through Weekstown, past a wooden sign nailed clumsily to a tree: ALWAYS IN OUR MEMORIES - PETE."

Blue Highways:  Part 9, Chapter 8

I couldn't find a decent photo of Weekstown, so here's a photo of the Pine Barrens in which it is situated. Photo by Jim Lukach and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Weekstown, New Jersey

I see them when I'm driving, usually on rural roads.  I might be swinging around a turn and then at the top of the curve, or perhaps somewhere in the middle of it, a floral arrangement out of character with the landscape.  Flowers that just don't grow there and on second look appear to be plastic to withstand the elements.  Often a white cross blazing through the flowers.  Another roadside memorial.  Another place where a person, usually young, met an untimely end.  A place where someone looking forward to a full life - maybe a marriage or a baby, or celebrating a new job, or on a first drive with friends after getting a drivers license - breathed their last in a maelstrom of twisted metal and broken glass and to the sounds of the jaws of life frantically trying to pry an opening.

At one time, I thought such displays were stupid.  Aren't there graveyards where we can remember our dead?  Didn't the shrines themselves cause a distraction.  The truth is that most people, including me, drive right past them with nary a thought.  We have become used to seeing them and we don't know the people.

But occasionally I do think about it.  I think about the lives lost and the impact on other lives all in the name of the freedom we have to drive factory-assembled packages of metal and fuel.  I think about how that freedom sometimes comes at a cost.  And I think back to my own brush with destiny - a night where I too could have ended up memorialized in a shrine of plastic flowers and a cross between two large cypress trees on the Northern California coast.

I was in college, home visiting my family.  I had been in town doing something.  Maybe I was at the bowling alley playing video games.  I hopped into the family car, a small and sporty Capri, and headed north of town on a windy, rainy night to visit my friend John.  I was traveling at the speed limit or maybe a little above but, on a wet rainy night, I was probably going too fast.  I headed around a turn, hit a wet patch that was probably icy, and began to slide.  I most likely overcorrected.  All I remember was that feeling of not being in control, a crunch, a strange roller-coaster like feeling and then silence except for the radio which was blaring out Eddie Murphy's Party All the Time.  It took me a moment to realize that I was hanging upside down in the seatbelt, draped over the steering wheel.  I was able to push the door open and crawl out and look at what was left of the car.  It had flipped over and was nestled between two giant cypress trunks, lights on, engine running, with Eddie Murphy serenading the surreal scene.  I didn't know what to do, so I ran to the nearest house and called the police, my mom, and John, all in that order.  The police came and later a tow truck.  John arrived and took me home, where I had to face my mom and tell her that I wrecked her favorite car.  It took the wearing off of the shock and adrenaline for me to understand how close I came to death.  Later, when I got a ticket and a $50 fine for "Failure to maintain control of the vehicle" I was slightly insulted.  That line didn't seem to add up to the enormity of what happened and how close I had been to departing this reality.

Lately, around New Mexico, I've seen a new type of memorial appearing.  You see them in medians or along sides of roads, put where they can be seen and registered.  Ghostly, white bicycles without riders, silently marking a place where a day's ride in the open air and sunshine turned into, usually thanks to an inattentive driver, a ride into the hereafter.  In Albuquerque, the second trial of a young woman who killed a bicyclist just wrapped up with her conviction of careless driving.  The bicyclist was out riding with his wife of over thirty years.  He was just getting into cycling as a form of exercise, and was riding a path alongside of and separated from a busy route.  Ordinarily he should have been safe but on this day, the young woman lost control of her car, swerved across two lanes of traffic and went off the road.  The man's wife, who was riding ahead, heard the noise and turned around to see her husband's life disappear in a cloud of dust.

The ghost bikes resonate with me because my bicycle is now my primary source of transportation.  I use it daily to ride to and from work.  When I'm traveling on the street, I can keep pace with the cars between the lights, and I don't usually think about how I am simply weak flesh and bone on a slight metal frame with wheels.  I don't usually think how I don't stand a chance if I make a mental miscalculation or am distracted, or a driver is distracted and doesn't signal or someone in a parked car opens a door just as I'm racing up alongside.  But every time I see a ghost bike, I think of it.  I also think of a friend, a reporter on National Public Radio, whose fiance was killed after being hit by a truck while cycling through Illinois, and how her life was unutterably altered in sadness.

Roadside shrines and ghost bicycles mark the places where the lives of people that I never knew were extinguished in tragic circumstances.  So mostly, I just drive by.  But occasionally, they make me think, reflect, and pull me back into reality.  I'm not invulnerable, I'm not immortal.  Each day carries a risk that such a memorial will be put up for me, even if I'm careful.  If that's what they are supposed to do - make me stop a moment and take heed - they are doing their job.

Musical Interlude

I found this song, Roses by the Roadside by Steve McGinnis, about roadside memorials.

I also put Eddie Murphy's Party All the Time as the musical interlude this week not because I particularly like the song, but because it was the song playing when I had my own brush with roadside death.  In a way, that's both sad and funny at once.

If you want to know more about Weekstown

Sorry, folks, but you'll have to look it up.  There isn't much on the Internet about Weekstown.

Next up: Egg Harbor City, New Jersey

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Wading River, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

Are you feeling a little warm?  Here's a nice river...why don't you jump in?  The coolness of the water will feel so good.  Yes, there's nothing like a swim in a river, and William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) takes advantage of it.  I've been lucky enough to have my own river, as I'll write below.  If you wish to see where this particular river flows, trickle over to the map.

Book Quote

"Somewhere south of Jenkins, population forty-five (five was more believable), I gave in to the heat and pulled up under the trees by a small bridge.  A stream, about half the width of the highway, moved through with a good current.  I took it to be the Wading River.  Bog iron (cannonballs fired at Valley Forge were made here) and tannins had turned the transparent water the color of cherry cola.  This 'cedar water,' as it is called, sea captains once carried on long voyages because it remained sweet longer than other waters.  Even today, it is remarkably free of pollutants since all streams that flow through the Pines have their source here.  I walked up a track into the woods, dead ferns and pine needles absorbing my steps.  A silence as if civilization had disappeared.  While the quiet was real, the isolation was an illusion:  downtown Philadelphia lay forty miles west....

"I came to the stream again, took off my clothes, and went in.  There was no shock in the water, only cooling relief.  I let the current pull me downstream toward the Atlantic, then I paddled back up, and floated off again.  A black terrapin, trimmed in red, surfaced, saw me float by, blinked, and went under.  I climbed out and let the heat dry me as I ate."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 8

The west branch on the Wading River, near where I think William Least Heat-Moon jumped in and swam. Photo by Bob Engelbart and featured on Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on the Wading River, New Jersey

When I was growing up, every summer I spent weekend afternoons next to my swimming hole.

That's right, it was my swimming hole.  I've written in Littourati before about my troubled childhood and my dysfunctional family that has colored my adult life up to now.  But even in the midst of all the trouble, there were moments of the blissful and the idyllic.  And much of that bliss came from the fact that I had regular access to a swimming hole.

My father owned a bit of property on the Noyo River in Northern California.  It is still in our family.  The river constituted the eastern boundary of our thirteen acres.  We never knew if the middle of the river was the true boundary line, or if the east bank was.  It didn't matter - we claimed a little sandy spit on the east bank, called it our "beach," and hung out there most weekend afternoons.  The swimming hole was a 4-5 foot deep patch formed where water, spilling down some rocks, carved a gouge at their base.  We augmented the depth, probably illegally, by constructing a dam of railroad ties and plastic every year.  Our efforts probably added a foot of water.  We had a diving board and, for a time, a rope swing.  We had inner tubes to float on.  Every weekend, my parents would bring me and my sisters, and a passel of cousins, and we'd tan (or burn) and swim in the afternoons.  Because our property had a railroad right-of-way through it, we'd wave at the regular passenger trains on their way to and from Willits and they would sound their horns in return.

It wasn't until I moved away that I realized just how lucky I was to have that.  There is nothing like it, on a hot summer day, to be able to swim in a river.  Our water was intensely cold and the shock of a sudden immersion could give me a cold headache for a moment.  But after that, it was pure bliss.  The sun at certain angles either hit the water directly causing beautiful sparkles or, coming through the leaves of the alder trees lining the bank, created a dappled pattern.  I loved going in, but what I loved even more was floating on top, on an inner tube, and looking down.  The sand and rocks at the bottom became my own personal geography.  I constructed whole worlds in our swimming hole and populated them with the little beings I saw moving about down below.  Fish became airships.  Little bugs which we called helgamites (I have learned that the true term is hellgrammite) were cars or some type of moving equipment.  Rocks were hills and mountains, and the crevices in them were valleys.  It was like I was on a high flying plane or spaceship looking down upon a world only I knew.

Then, the nuclear explosion as one of the other kids jumped in, stirred up the sand, and I would have to wait for the river to clear once more before I could go back to my reveries.

Today, my opportunities to swim in rivers have been fairly limited, reduced to times when, like LHM, I can pull off the side of a road and plunge in somewhere.  I have had occasional chances to jump into mountain streams where the water was deep enough to allow me to float or stroke, but not often.  One gives up some of one's access to such things when one lives in a city environment.  I also live far from my home, and it has been a couple of years since I have been back to my swimming hole.  Because of my childhood experiences, I've been somewhat spoiled.  Lakes and pools are nice, but they just aren't the same thing as my swimming hole.  I associate swimming with reverie, rather than activity or exercise.  Even when I find a river that I can swim in, it's not the same because they are often crowded.  Swimming holes are a sought after commodity.

The last time I was back to my property, it had been a while since it was extensively used.  The swimming hole was reverting back to a natural state.  The pool was in an almost constant shade due to the proliferation of alders.  A large log, floating down during the winter high water, had deposited itself on the spit we used to call a beach.  The river hadn't been dammed there in a long, long time.  I realized how much work it took my father to create that little sunlit area of heaven - to alter the landscape for us.  He cut trees, he built dams, and he placed rocks in places in an effort to keep the banks from eroding.  I remember that he dug buckets of sand to deposit on the spit to make the beach wider.  He kept the inner tubes inflated and even built a raft for us. 

Nature has it now.  She's taken back what was hers, and that may all be for the good.  But she can't have all of it.  In my memory, it is still my swimming hole and somewhere in the past, a child floats on an inner tube creating worlds in his imagination.  I can almost touch him sometimes.

Musical Interlude

I couldn't find a swimming hole song or even a swimming in a river song that captured my mood, so I'm giving you instead a very deep cut from Peter Gabriel - I Go Swimming.

If you want to know more about the Wading River

A Day on the Wading River
Wikipedia: Wading River

Next up: Weekstown, New Jersey