Category: Travel

“…everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hidden from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall…”
                                                         – Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

The drive from Laurel Maryland to New Lisbon NJ might appear on the surface to be uneventful — and it would be — unless you instruct Google to pick the route that avoids toll roads.  In this case Google sends us through downtown Baltimore in a twisty path designed to consider some of that fine city’s less visited neighborhoods.  At some point I realized that while I was actually driving the car, I was also a kind of passenger.  I wanted to ask the kids, “are we there yet?”  This route did take us right by Johns Hopkins Hospital, a place I recognized from some work I did in the 90’s whilst in Singapore. 

You may be wondering why we are headed to New Lisbon, NJ.  In 1961 Pop transferred from Laurel to a forestry research center in southern New Jersey, near the town of Pemberton in the tiny village of New Lisbon. And by tiny I mean a grouping of a few houses that these days might be lucky to be called a neighborhood. Brother John had joined the Air Force immediately upon graduation from Laurel High School, so the family in New Jersey was Mom, Pop, Bill, myself and assorted animals. The four years I lived there remain indistinct in my memory, as if remembering a book written about events that happened to someone else. These are the years when I entered puberty and became a teenager with all that implies, so I may have suppressed some of it for the sake of my sanity – and yours.

New Lisbon and its surrounds are one reason why New Jersey is called the Garden State. The region is a patchwork quilt of farms large and small which might surprise given its proximity to Philadelphia. I was oblivious to this while growing up there — I truly cannot remember thinking about the farmland surrounding me. To the east lies the mysterious and forbidding pine barrens, home of the legendary Jersey Devil.

I can remember one hot summer picking blueberries for the Tru-Blu-Berry Cooperative which, besides the forestry research center where Pop worked, was pretty much the only employment in town. Bill and I worked side-by-side with the migrant workers, dropping berries into metal pails hung around our necks with thick rope straps. The berries were large and sweet and eating them was allowed as long as you accepted the cruel calculus that each berry consumed is one less for the pail.  The migrant workers are professional and relentless, rapidly stripping berries from the tall bushes and filling their pails like a scene filmed using time-lapse photography.

When our pails were full we would trudge back to the shed where the company reps would weigh our pickings and pay you per pail by weight. More than once Bill caught the guy (“The Boss”) putting his foot under the scale to cheat us. We were rubes in the business of harvesting and therefore prime targets for deception in this capitalistic rite of passage. At first Boss would get mighty peeved when his game was exposed but Bill never backed down — we got paid in full and garnered hard-won field cred in the process.

In thinking back, that job was physically the hardest I ever worked for what was really minimal income, but I valued every dollar I made out in the fields, under the unforgiving sun.

Fifty-five years later here we are, driving past the long abandon Tru-Blue property in New Lisbon, the roof of the warehouse sagging and broken, the loading dock rusted and gray.  Time in its linear way has moved on for the Cooperative as it has for the migrant workers who toiled here so many years ago and the two Fenton boys who briefly shared their space. The people who live in New Lisbon today and the cars that drive through this unremarkable little town give scant attention to one old neglected warehouse. But it has a story to tell, as do we all.

We parked in front of the old house which was our home for nearly four years. It seemed smaller somehow, diminished as though the years had begun to take back what had been given.  Had I been more bold I would have knocked on the front door and introduced myself, but that seemed a little strange even to me so we just took some pictures.

The field across the street where I played baseball and touch football now had a sign saying “Property of US Government: No Trespassing”, making me wonder what exactly was being protected there and if a squadron of black helicopters were hovering nearby.

(The next chapter will complete the New Jersey part of our journey, and send us off to New Haven, Connecticut)