The Clement Oak and the First Air Voyage in America

my first Pine Baron tour

My friends Johnny and Cheska have been pining for a tour of the Pine Barrens, and we finally consummated this act together. It was a frabjous day, meeting good friends and visiting places both new and familiar, fording washouts in the pines and exploring ruins, with a delightful repast at the best bar in the Pines, the Lower Bank Tavern.

We met at Playa del Pluck, which is currently preparing for the summer season. The pool is getting shocked and the hot tub titillated, the grackles are feeding their fat gray babies, the squirrels are tormenting Louie the cat, and the sump pumps are protecting the Lounge Pit now that we know the deficiencies of the water table here in the sandy loam of the intercoastal region. We all piled into the Squatcharu and headed into suburbia for our first stop, which I discovered thanks to the magnificent Historical Markers Database!

You know those signs you see everywhere? Often painted brown, with white lettering? Well, those Historical Markers are cataloged at the HMDB, and you can find all the ones near you. That’s how I learned that I currently live near the landing site of The First Air Voyage in America! In 1793 French balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard launched from a prison yard in Philly, with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe in attendance, and landed in New Jersey. (At least, according to Wikipedia.)'

The site is now behind a Walmart, next to The Clement Oak, a three-hundred-year-old tree that served as a landmark for the Lenape, and then the colonists who displaced them. Now, it’s a nest for raccoons! We didn’t get a photo of the little trash panda who peered at our car from the hole in the wide trunk. Much of the tree has fallen, but it is still alive. There once was a sign directing you to the spot, but it has been removed. These fancy metal balloon signs remain:

From there we drove to my favorite haunts in the Pine Barrens. We began at Atsion Mansion off Route 206, where there’s a ranger station, a Port-a-Potty, and several trails that head deep into Wharton State Forest. The road to Hampton Furnace is a right turn off the highway just north of the mansion, and the recent rain had filled in some of the dried-out washouts, so my passengers got a wee taste of what the Subaru Outback can ford. The forest has been very dry, so I was able to show them how deep the washouts get, which is considerable. Hampton Furnace was an iron forge and a cranberry picking operation, famous for when its owner’s motorcar was robbed at gunpoint in the early decades of the previous century. The ruins below are either the mansion of the overseer or the offices; if you visit, you can see a concrete slab where a vault was bolted down, long gone.

From there we took Glossy Spung Road toward High Crossing, but due to the rain I avoided taking the infamous Park road along the Jersey Central Rail Line, where I’d gotten stuck in a deep mudhole last July. We took the paved Carranza road to the memorial of its namesake, Emilio Carranza, the Lindbergh of Mexico! I’ve written much about him. The American Legion, who carried his remains out of the pines over ninety years ago, reenact the event every year with American and Mexican statespeople in attendance, as well as Carranza’s surviving relatives. I attended the reenactment last year, and wrote about it here:

That was intended to be published in Weird NJ magazine, and may be in the future. There were tokens left at the memorial when we visited in April. I may attend this year’s memorial again. It is a moving ceremony.

From Carranza’s memorial, it is a short bouncy ride down the road to the ruins of Friendship, a cranberry bog village that was donated to the state by the owner family. The bogs are now beautiful lakes full of wildlife, and hiking trails are being blazed around them. I volunteered with the Department of Environmental Protection to help blaze a new trail there. This day, we listened to the birds who make the ruins home and poked around in the cellar holes. We also met a couple of guys in a pickup truck who wanted to know how to get the hell out to the highway, as they had no signal. I told them to make a left at Friendship, which takes you down a washboard road through Speedwell and gets you to highway 539. Any car can make it; we passed the truck at high speed, on our own way to another adventure. The Subie is hardly rally-ready but it still has car suspension, which often handles gravel and washboard better than a quarter-ton. Deep ruts, however…

Our adventure ended at the Lower Bank Tavern, which has quickly become one of my favorite bars in southern New Jersey. They have a limited beer menu, but keep Hop Devil by Victory Brewing and Swamp Donkey IPA by Pinelands Brewing on top alongside Yuengling, and they have a solid road food menu. Corn fritters, onion rings, cheese steak egg rolls—a south Jersey staple, whether at a diner or a white napkin steakhouse—are all done well, and their burgers are tops. I went right for the Piney Pâté burger, with slices of fried liverwurst:

It was a masterpiece. I washed it down with a Hop Devil and yakked with the owner and cook, who also drives a Subaru and mountain bikes through the Pines! We talked so much that my friends had to stomp my wide feet under the table to get me to pay the check and skedaddle. I will be back to nosh and talk, probably this Saturday (yesterday, as this is a scheduled post for Sunday).

From there, my friends Johnny and Cheska got the outdoor bug, and we headed to REI to get them some gear. The Subaru’s natural habitat, along with Costco. I only mention this because the only wildlife photo of the outing was this redtailed hawk we found hunting near the REI parking lot:

Hopefully this will be the first of many Pine Baron tours with visiting friends. It’s a good time and gets you out of the house. Please feel free to share this post as it is free, as always. If you want to chip in for gas money, and get access to my short story archives, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It is always 20% off for a yearly sub, or $40, vs. the five bucks a month usual rate.