When New Jersey gets to be too much, I head down into the Pine Barrens

When this old world starts getting me down -- they went up on the roof. I go down into the Pine Barrens.

You know the song. The Drifters wrote it. James Taylor made it his own. The idea is the same either way -- everybody has a place they go when the noise gets to be too much. For a lot of people it is somewhere they discovered. For me, it is somewhere I was born into. My family has been in the Pine Barrens for centuries. Not visiting. Living. Working the land, raising families, burying their dead in the sandy soil of South Jersey long before anyone thought to write a travel piece about it.

That history is part of why the Pines feel the way they do to me. But it is not the whole reason. The whole reason is harder to put into words -- and I am going to try anyway.

Johnson Place

If you turn off Route 70 near Chatsworth and follow the roads deep enough into the trees, you will eventually reach a place called Johnson Place. It is on some maps.  It's in Burlington County, but you would not know it! There is a Johnson Place Road. A small clearing. A couple of structures swallowed almost entirely by pines on the satellite image. Most people driving through South Jersey have no idea it exists.

My family knew it well.

In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, we held family reunions there. My dad's uncle had a cedar house out at Johnson Place -- no sewer system, an outhouse out back, a working garden along the side -- and every summer the family would gather. My grandmother and her sisters in their summer dresses standing around a folding table with a Frito-Lay box and the woven lawn chairs and the pines rising behind them. I was a little kid. I did not know yet that I was standing in one of the most unique landscapes in the eastern United States. I just knew it felt like something.

That feeling never left.

What the Pines actually smell like

There is no way to fully explain the sensory experience of the Pine Barrens to someone who has not been there. I am going to try and I am already aware I will fall short.

In summer, the sand on the unpaved roads gets hot enough that you can feel it through your shoes. The air smells like nothing else -- a combination of pitch pine and warm sand and something older underneath it, something that has been there long before any of us. The cedar water in the streams runs the color of dark tea, stained by the tannins in the soil, cold even in July. It looks wrong until you know what it is. Then it looks exactly right.

In winter the Pines go quiet in a way that is almost physical. You feel the quiet as much as you hear it. On a cold clear day years ago I drove out to the fire tower on Apple Pie Hill with my family. We climbed to the top and stood there looking out over what felt like the entire world. To the east, the Atlantic City skyline. To the west, Philadelphia. And in every direction between those two cities, as far as you could see, nothing but trees. One million acres of pine and oak and cedar and silence in the middle of the most densely populated state in America. I have never forgotten that view.

The Mullica River

In my adult years, when my kids were young, we took canoe camping trips on the Mullica River. If you have never paddled the Mullica between Atsion on Route 206 and Batsto on Route 542, put it on the list. You get there by following a sandy road into the trees until the road ends at the water. There is no other way in. That is the point.

The river moves slowly. The cedar water catches the light differently than any other water I have seen. The pines close in on both sides and the world outside -- the taxes, the tolls, the property tax bills, the layoff notices, the traffic on the Parkway -- simply does not exist out there. We camped along the banks. We four-wheeled the white sandy roads in a pickup truck on other trips, following trails that went nowhere in particular and everywhere that mattered.

My kids grew up knowing the Pines the way I did. Not as a destination. As a place.

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Why it matters that it is still there

The Pine Barrens cover more than a million acres across seven counties in South Jersey. The Pinelands National Reserve, established in 1978, was the first national reserve of its kind in the United States. Beneath it sits the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer -- seventeen trillion gallons of some of the purest water on the continent. The Pines have outlasted everything New Jersey has thrown at them. Proposed jetports. Development plans. The relentless pressure of being surrounded on all sides by one of the most crowded corridors in the country.

They are still there. Mostly unchanged. Johnson Place Road still shows up on satellite maps. The Mullica still runs cedar-dark between Atsion and Batsto. Apple Pie Hill still gives you that view on a clear day.

When this old world starts getting me down, I know exactly where I am going.

Down into the Pines. All the way down. As far as the sandy road will take me.