Canoeing the Jersey Pine Barrens

At the approach of our canoe two snapping turtles, each as big as a dinner plate, slid soundlessly off a cedar log and into water the color of tea that had been steeping too long.  The snappers along the Mullica River are far more shy than the great blue herons - on two occasions, during this first day on the Mullica, the great gawky birds had let us slide to within ten feet of where they stood along the bank.  A snowy egret had been similarly nonchalant.  That's what it's like on the dark, narrow rivers that thread through New Jersey's Pine Barrens, a place so remote and tranquil that even avian skittishness takes a holiday.

Words like "remote" and "tranquil" seldom ring true in any part of the Garden State.  But the Pine Barrens give the lie to the hackneyed Jersey stereotype of old gray cities, concentric rings of suburbs that fray out into McMansionland, oil refineries and petrochemical plants, all bound together by the twin constrictors of the Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway.  The Barrens are a thousand square miles of serene isolation, where only a few sand roads thread a nearly impenetrable forest of white cedar and pitch pine, where the loudest noise is the nightly chorus of whippoorwills - and where two nearly parallel rivers, the Batsto and the Mullica, give up their secrets only if you venture in by canoe or kayak.

My old canoeing and hiking companion Rich Mara and I set out from his home in Bayonne - not far from where we met at college in Jersey City, over forty years ago - at six in the morning.  The Turnpike and the Parkway delivered us to our exit in south Jersey three hours later, and by eleven we had gotten our parking and camping permits at Wharton State Forest headquarters, in Batsto, spotted one car at our planned takeout point, and launched my sixteen-foot wood-and-fiberglass Merrimac at Atsion Bridge, near the head of canoe navigation on the Mullica.  A  sixteen-footer is as much canoe as you'd want on these twisty little rivers, which in much of America would be called creeks.  They're deep enough - occasional soundings with a paddle put their typical depth at between three and five feet - but they're so narrow that a larger boat would serve doubly as a bridge in many places.  There are a lot of sharp turns, too, and the water often runs fast enough to require some quick maneuvering to avoid smacking into the opposite shore during a hard right or left.  In two and a half days of travel, in my bow position, I doubt if I used a conventional paddle stroke for more than a couple of miles.  It was all sweep, push, and pull strokes, constant quick maneuvers to keep from ramming underwater deadfalls and toppled boughs overhead.  A volunteer patrol saws away impossible obstacles, but there are plenty of times when you have to duck - and make sure you sluice over to a spot where there is ducking room.