The Pine Barrens of New Jersey

This past Sunday was another roadtrip day for me. The van and I picked up my ex-roommate, Valerie, at 8 am. We grabbed coffee and hash browns from Dunkin’ (they have some accidentally vegan shit, yesss) and headed for the forest. Wharton State Forest, to be exact, which is less than an hour from the West Philly apartment where I lived for two years, pre-vanlife. The plan was for a morning of hiking, then to head farther east to the coast, maybe check out a beach or two and get vegan sliders from the Tom’s River White Castle.

Did you know White Castle has vegan options?! They have slider patties from Dr. Preager’s, which were very tasty, but didn’t quite have that junk-food je n’ais se quoi, know what I mean? The other option is the Impossible slider…which looks, smells, and tastes meaty enough to freak a vegan out real quick. The Impossible sliders were fucking epic. I’ve had them once before as well, and they were absolutely as good as I remember…maybe even better, since this time around I remembered to order them without the “real” (aka, dairy-laden and gross) cheese.

I’m getting ahead of myself though…let’s go back to the woods. So, we set a random GPS coordinate for Wharton State Forest, not really knowing what we’d find there. As we got farther from the city and deeper into New Jersey, the sides of the road suddenly started looking like sand banks, and more and more evergreens cropped up in the surrounding woods. The Pine Barrens (or Pinelands) is an area in southeast Jersey that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a coastal plane of thin, sandy soil, where there are lots of, you guessed it, pine trees. I like the Pine Barrens. It’s not very interesting hiking, as it’s flat as fuck and covered by medium-height, slightly scrubby looking trees. But there’s something cool and wild about it. It’s different from the vast, intimidating forests of Maine, or the leafy woods of Rhode Island with their waist-high tangles of brambles.

The Pine Barrens area looks like the love child of a giant beach and a new-growth evergreen forest. The sand, especially on the winding, unpaved roads, is white, deep, and treacherously soft in some spots. As we drove down one such road, I could have sworn we were about to roll out onto an actual seaside beach. Then I tried to take a turn, got stuck, and we didn’t roll anywhere for a while.

I have a small dustpan and brush set, and some random squares of cardboard in the van, which came in pretty handy. Valerie and I dug the dry, top-sand away from the tires with the dustpan, and wedged pieces of cardboard underneath, between the tread of the tires and the damp under-sand. A guy in a SUV (much smarter vehicle choice for the conditions) pulled up alongside and offered us a hand, but I told him we were “figuring it out.” Figure it out we did, after about 20 minutes of moving slices of dirty cardboard around, backing up the van and moving it forward again in painfully tiny increments, and tossing sand into the air with our flimsy would-be shovel. When the van finally started moving out of the sandtrap, we were nothing short of fucking elated! I can’t help but imagine the SUV guy coming back down the pathway, and being impressed with our resourcefulness when he found nothing but our deep, dug-out tracks.

Crisis averted, we turned around and left that part of the woods, driving on to another park within the Pine Barrens area, Brendan T. Byrne state forest. We went for a long, flat hike. It would have been a little boring, but we had unknowingly entered a spider wonderland. The big, hairy ones were squatting fatly on overhanging branches, and scrambled away when we got close, drawing our attention and deeply creeping us out. Smaller, delicate spiders had thrown invisible strings of web across the path, and seemed content to sit still and let us walk into them with our faces. Valerie and I each found a stick along the side of the path, and swung them back and forth in front of us as we went, hoping to avoid such intimate experiences with the locals. After over an hour of this, Valerie suggested we turn back, and I agreed with no small amount of relief. I don’t fuck with spiders, bro.

Sweaty, kinda tired, and done with bugs, we headed to the strip-malled hamlet of Tom’s River. As I mentioned above, this is one of the places where White Castle lives. We stuffed our faces with greedy abandon, and then went to the beach to sit and digest. We walked on the boardwalk for a bit, got extra sleepy under all that bright sunshine, and finally headed back to Philly.

All in all, it was a good day. I learned that my van sucks in the sand, and will probably suck even worse in the snow this winter, but at least that’ll give me something to write about later on.

Thanks for reading, xoxo.