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

Blue Highways: Riverhead, New York

Unfolding the Map

The turn of a phrase can mean so much, or so little.  But when it means something, it can often fire the imagination and give life to what would ordinarily be description.  I reflect on the literary description, and compare and contrast it to photography, as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) passes through Riverhead.  At right is the New York State flower, the rose.  Photo is by Atoma and found at Wikimedia Commons.  To find Riverhead, point your finger upstream on the map.

Book Quote

"...I went down a pleasant little road numbered 25, down the north fluke, through neat vegetable truck farms with their typical story-and-a-half houses, past estuaries and swans, to Riverhead.  I followed a pickup with four bloodied sharks laid out in the bed; it looked like a tin of evil sardines packed in ketchup."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 7

Vail-Leavitt Music Hall in Riverhead, New York. Photo by americasroof and posted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Riverhead, New York

I love it when writers pull out an image that really stirs imagination.

I have no idea what evil sardines are, but thanks to LHM, I now have a mental image of what I think they might look like.  And for some reason, I find the image humorous.

It is for these types of images that I read, and continue I will reading for these types of flourishes for the rest of my life.  LHM could have just described the pickup truck, with the four bloodied sharks on the bed and left it like that.  Instead, he added the picturesque description to accentuate its grotesque attributes, or maybe to put us inside his head a little as he processed what he was seeing.  Whatever the reason, his description is much more colorful and evocative of the imagination than the simpler description.

Sometimes that's all we need.  For me, I can digest the evil sardines in ketchup, smile about it, and move on as we continue the journey.  However, sometimes the descriptions leave you wanting more.  I wrote a complaint of this nature when I was blogging Kerouac's On the Road.  Sal Paradise, somewhere in Iowa, gets picked up by a man who is driving, in Kerouac's description, "a toolshack on wheels."  The mental image of this truck made we want to know more about the man driving it.  What does he do?  Is he a handyman who drives the truck to make repairs, or does he use the tools for his own purposes?  What kind of person is he?  Unfortunately, Kerouac does not give us any answers on this.  In the next paragraph Sal gets out and starts looking for his next ride.  I felt myself a little cheated, though I began to realize that Kerouac's intention was to not linger at overlong descriptions of things.  Still, I wanted more about the toolshack on wheels, partly because I knew people who drove similar contraptions in the town where I grew up.

I love photography, or actually I love looking at photography but I don't consider myself a particularly artistic photographer.  An image, when it captures the essence of something, can often have a similar effect in people as a good metaphor or simile, or a longer description.  But I remember, after having read John Berger or Susan Sontag or perhaps both, that photography may remove one from the experience of truly seeing the world around them.  The image may be a faithful, more or less, representation of a person, event or object at that certain instant in time, but it is the writer and the description that truly describes object, or person, or event and fleshes out meaning, symbol, or other intangibles that may not have been caught by the photograph.  The life story of the person is available, should the author choose to explore it, and may only be hinted at by the lines on the person's face or the trappings of their life around them or the expression that they wear in the photograph.  Sontag argues that the photographer is removed from the scene and cannot intervene, but the author, if he or she so chooses, can simply describe, like a photo, or take a more active role.  In LHM's case, he goes one farther, not only reporting what he sees but interpreting it for us.  Sometimes, the intervention can include the author inserting him or herself into the story.

This is not meant as a criticism or a condemnation of photography.  Sometimes, I want to see simply what the camera sees, and sometimes, especially with posed pictures or still life, the photographer does insert his or her own viewpoint into the frame.  That is why professional photographers are artists, though I do sometimes wonder if they ever allow themselves to put the camera down and really participate in the events around them or if they choose to always look at the world through the barrier of their lenses.

I thought about this topic recently on a hike through the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico.  I found myself stopping to take photos at certain points, and realized that I was so focused on getting the perfect shot of this or that, I was missing the world around me.  I started taking a photo and then lingering in the place to experience.  The photo of my wife walking through seven foot high vegetation in the late sunlight became even more real to me when I viewed it later.  The sunlight, on a more horizontal slant in the late afternoon, turned the plant flowers and leaves translucent, and gave the path a quality of a passage from some less vibrant reality to something more colorful, bright and transcendent just beyond.  The paw print I photographed, in the mud next to a river, went from a mere curiosity to a large, possibly feline monster watching from the bluffs above and waiting for its chance.  The stand of pines became a formation not unlike a line of soldiers or perhaps a sloppily arranged high school band during the last mile of a long parade.  Now, when I see the photos, they have much more meaning for me, and the extra dimensionality of my imagination turns them from faithful two-dimensional representations of the world into something even more alive and vibrant than my camera could ever capture, even were I the most accomplished and artistic photographer in the world.

But on the whole, give me an evocative piece of writing.  Give me a description that really sears itself into my imagination.  Whereas the picture does some interpretation for me, writing makes me work.  It makes me come up with the image in my head, and then interpret it.  If it makes sense to me, I am moved in some way.  If it doesn't, then it is either beyond my understanding or the author has some more work to do to capture me and gain inner attention.

Photographs fade or, now, their pixels get lost in the ether.  My imagination stays with me throughout my life, and even without the photographs, I will recall not only the image, but the smells, the sounds, the sensations and how I felt at that point in time and place.

Musical Interlude

I could only find a song, by a band I don't know, born in a time period of music (the 90s) that I usually stay away from, that relates to this post.  There are a lot of songs about photography, but the lyrics in this song, Fades Like a Photograph by Filter, have the most relevance.

If you want to know more about Riverhead

Riverhead Chamber of Commerce
Riverhead Local
Riverhead News Review (newspaper)
Town of Riverhead
Wikipedia: Riverhead

Next up: Islip, Babylon, Amityville, Merrick and Oceanside, New York

Blue Highways: Mystic, Connecticut

Unfolding the Map

If you are feeling a presence that you can't quite explain, something mysterious and unknown, yet full of meaning, it may mean that you have entered a mystical place, or what you think might be mystical.  We'll find out in this post if Mystic is mystical.  To find this place where the name might mean everything, do some divining at the map.

Book Quote

"I headed toward New London, through Mystic, where they used to build the clipper ships."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 6

Downtown Mystic, Connecticut. Photo by boboroshi and posted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Mystic, Connecticut

I like movies, and my first introduction to Mystic, Connecticut was through the movie Mystic Pizza.  Before that movie came out, I had not been aware of the place.

The word "mystic" has always been, for me, one of those words that almost completely describes what it touches, and yet doesn't describe it at all.  Mystic is a mysterious word (notice that it has the same root, "myst," as mysterious), that conveys a lot of below-the-surface meaning.  It is a word that I have been drawn to every time I read it in print or hear it in conversation.  I think that it probably has that effect on many people.

The title Mystic Pizza therefore caught my eye.  I didn't quite know what to expect, but it turned out to be a coming-of-age film about three young women.  Julia Roberts had her first notable role in it, as did Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor.  It was a nice movie, and I enjoyed it.  I later learned that my wife did a play as a young girl with Annabeth Gish (who is about her age) in Iowa, and we have recently seen Ms. Gish's parents at events in Albuquerque, where we and they now live.

This tale feels somewhat disjointed, but there's a point here somewhere.  On a trip to visit friends in Connecticut in the mid-1990s, I decided, on the basis of the name of the town and the fact that I had seen Mystic Pizza, to drive down to Mystic and see what all of the fuss was about.  Mystic, as I remember it, was a pretty little town trading on its historical shipbuilding heritage.  I bummed about, looking at things, and of course eating at Mystic Pizza.  Perhaps I thought that the beautiful young starlets would still be hanging about, ready to serve me a plate of hot, steaming pizza slices.  Of course, they were long gone.  But the town was still there, and its name was still an attraction, though it didn't seem any more mystical to me than anywhere else.

But what is a mystic, and how might this moniker fit to Mystic, Connecticut?  After all, mysticism and mystics are very specific things.  Mysticism is the attempt to reach different states of awareness awareness, and sometimes a union with the Divine or a Supreme Being.  In this sense, a mystic is a person who practices mysticism.  All major religions that have existed have had elements of mysticism in them.  Anything that brings one to different states of consciousness, or anyplace beyond what we normally see and hear, is mysticism.  Simple prayer is a form of mysticism, as the goal is to somehow come in contact with a deity or deities.  Meditation can be another form of mysticism in certain faiths.  In my imagination, this definition of mysticism conflated itself with the naming of Mystic, Connecticut.  New England was one of the flashpoints of religious confrontation in the New World as it was being settled, as various forms of Christianity, including forms of mysticism based on Christianity, battled among themselves and also with the harsh environment and the native traditions. I just assumed that Mystic, Connecticut reflected that history.  I also made assumptions based on the literature and history of the times, where people who might have been practicing mysticism were denounced as witches and either driven away or often killed.

Well, it turns out that Mystic, Connecticut sits at the mouth of the Mystic River, and is named for the river.

That still didn't disabuse me of my notions.  In fact, it made my imagination wander even farther.  The Mystic River sounds even more fantastic, more magical, more mysterious, than Mystic, Connecticut.  Certainly, all that history and religion came together to lead to the name of the river.  I tried to imagine how the name of the river came about.  Perhaps settlers, newly arrived to the area, saw the Mystic River heading into the dark forests and hills of Connecticut, areas where mystery reigned, shadows concealed unknown terrors and perhaps wonders and realities that only the imagination could conjure.  If you've ever read Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, you know that the areas beyond the settlers' front doorstep were unknown and sometimes terrifying.  Thunder could easily be giants bowling, men could fall asleep for 100 years, and the Devil, bad spirits and witches roamed the dark forests.

Alas, however, I was was to be disappointed.  The Mystic River was a derivation of the Wampanoag Indian word for, quite simply, "big river."  The only mysticism attached to the river and to Mystic, Connecticut was the imagination that I attached to them.

Despite my disappointment at learning the truth, I have to admit that places where our minds wander are often influenced by place and by the labels we attach to them.  Would Mystic Pizza,  Mystic, Connecticut and the Mystic River have captured my imagination if they were entitled Big River Pizza, Big River, Connecticut and Big River River?  Probably not.  In that sense, I got my money's worth out of Mystic even before I saw it and if the reality didn't match my imagination, well, that happens in life.

On the other hand, often the name of a place belies the mystical and amazing experiences there.  For the incredible natural wonder that it is, the name "Grand Canyon" seems to be a little under-descriptive for a place that inspires such awe and wonder that it can almost put one in another level of consciousness.  The near religious experience I had hearing the call to prayer for the first time in Istanbul (was Constantinople) was not something I prepared for in going to a country called Turkey.  Romantic encounters that send one to unimagined heights of love and pleasure often occur with people whose names are simply Fred, Mary, Joe, or Karen.  Names are only identifiers, and the true mysticism of a place or person will come through despite how they are called.  I may have found that Mystic did not live up to my vivid imagination, but I know Mystic is mystical to many.  It certainly is a lovely town with a wonderful seaport museum.  Every place and everyone has the potential to be mystical to someone, and that is what makes our universe special.  You never know when something or someone will bring you to a higher level of awareness, and make you feel like you've touched the Divine.

Musical Interlude

If one song captures the mystic for me, it's Van Morrison's Into the Mystic.  It is one of those songs that feels like it just came out perfect from the beginning, and that it was conceived somewhere on a higher plane.  Simple, but multiply layered and beautiful.

If you want to know more about Mystic

Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce
Mystic Aquarium
Mystic Country
Mystic Seaport
Old Mistick Village
Wikipedia: Mystic

Next up:  New London, Connecticut