Oh, all right — New Jersey reconsidered

As I was going on about New Jersey being, you know, FLAT, a small still voice kept noodging me: What about north Jersey?

I know, I know … actually, the day I went to Princeton, I drove up through the Wallkill Valley as the long way home. In glacial time, the Hudson flowed through the Wallkill Valley and went out to sea through the Passaic River channel, and I wanted to see how familiar the Wallkill Valley would be. The answer is, not much: no Palisades, for one thing (there are inland Palisades northwest of Nyack, incidentally, and if you go to Haverstraw to see how a developer can ruin a waterfront, you’ll find the development huddled into the dark, late-afternoon shadow of an east-west Palisades ridge).

(I’m sure the Haverstraw development is nice for the people who live in it … but there’s no public access, a guard at the gate, walls so you can’t see what’s inside. Actually, there’s another Hudson River site with exactly the same characteristics! It’s called Sing Sing, and it has an even better view than the Haverstraw site.)

A few images like these were waiting in my camera. The setting sun gilded dead trees standing in a marsh in the Ramapo Mountains. Do you catch a slight magenta cast to the image? It’s the way it really was. Between the evening sun, the living trees in the background with sap running close to the surface, and the dark sky reflected in the water, the overall light was in the magenta-to-blue range.

So my apologies to Bergen County: you’re not Big Sky Country. Yes indeed — Bergen County woodland is just as beautiful as if it were in New York State.

Lost in New Jersey

Today I had my once-every-three-years visit to New Jersey. Of course I am in New Jersey more often than that! I look at it every day from my apartment -- and it's what lies between me and Pennsylvania. But I mean going to New Jersey to be in New Jersey. When I'm in New Jersey, I am A Stranger in a Strange Land.

New Jersey offers no difficulties when I travel I-80. The Delaware Water Gap, and that great little bakery on its main street, lies ahead. As the highway winds down into the Delaware River Valley, and the cliffs rise up around me, driving becomes magical. But that's the Delaware Water Gap! Not New Jersey.

Part of it may because New Jersey has boroughs. Or "boros" -- ugh. But mostly, I think it's because a great deal of New Jersey is flat. Really flat. I wonder why out west places can be flat, and they are Big Sky Country. I've tried thinking of New Jersey as Big Sky Country. Does it work for you? I didn't think so. No, New Jersey is just ... flat.

And it seems that it therefore all looks alike. Stop at a traffic light, and all four corners of the intersection are the same. Here in Westchester, one of the four corners will be downhill and another will be uphill, and there will be a huge glacial erratic or tree stump near another corner. Not only that! Look at a New Jersey map. Route One cuts straight down the state like a Roman road. It's straight and it's flat. Oh, and there's a Staples and a Dunkin Donuts every two miles.

Perhaps the words "glacial erratic" provide the key. The familiar ever-varying terrain of Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester County, and points north was all shaped by glaciation. The hills and the skewed valleys and the dropped rocks everywhere are the results. Only the northernmost part of New Jersey was glaciated. Then central New Jersey, Staten Island, Long Island, and Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are formed by the glacial moraine: gentle hills filled with gravel and a sandy outwash plain.

Come to think of it, Long Island is fla..., um, Big Sky Country too. And all four corners of every intersection look alike!