Forty-five minutes ago, the cobalt sky above the Atlantic Ocean began to fracture, opening a gash of weaker blue that gradually morphed into a blend of fruity hues along the horizon. In the terminology of timekeepers, it’s now the start of “civil twilight,” those moments before literal sunrise that the poet Anthony Hecht called “the first, soft, peach decree of light.”
Into this vague illumination come walkers and joggers ready to put the Belmar boardwalk to work. Across Ocean Avenue at the unambiguously illuminated Dunkin’ Donuts, customers trickle in, some having skipped their morning exercise. The woman behind the counter hustles between the register and the doughnut racks and calls out orders—“Coffee, black!”—to a co-worker the moment a regular hits the door. “What a great day,” she says to no one in particular. “I don’t know why yet, but I’ll think of something.” A coffee, black, wearing Garbo sunglasses and apparently unready for conversation, indicates with her pinkie that the coffee lady has some powdered sugar on her upper lip.
The coffee lady looks out through the walk-up service window just in time to see the sun piercing the membrane between sea and sky. A ball of almost unimaginably saturated orange, it initiates the day with flourish. The coffee lady is riveted. “It takes my breath away every day,” she says.
“We’re lucky to have this,” agrees Hank Hayden, travel mug in hand. A retired insurance company worker with a ruddy face and glacier-blue eyes, Hayden often comes down from Old Bridge to jog the boards, but also for “this”—a phenomenon available around the globe but enjoyed nowhere more than at this spot along the Jersey Shore.
Is this New Jersey? It is, just as the billions of moments that occur each day between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware River define the state. Neither transcendently beautiful nor unspeakably bland, New Jersey is as much about watching a late-fall sunrise at the beach as it is hunting for a parking space while a friend holds a table at a Hoboken restaurant. It’s having a fine meal while clusters of humanity—younger and cooler than you remember yourself ever having been—saunter past the restaurant window. It’s getting back onto the Turnpike feeling hipper than you’ve felt since college, while Sinatra serenades you from the car stereo.
New Jersey is a Saturday night at the Saint in Asbury Park, where the incomparable Graham Parker puts on a solo show and afterward sits at the bar signing autographs and posing for pictures. It’s the collection of musical instruments that composer Harry Partch built to bring his 43-tone scale to life, priceless instruments kept at the Montclair Art Museum and played by music students at Montclair State University. It’s a performance by the world-class New Jersey Symphony Orchestra in Newark, a jazz concert at William Paterson University, bluegrass in the Pine Barrens, Engelbert Humperdinck or Los Lobos in Atlantic City.
New Jersey is the always marvelous sight of a jetliner gliding into Newark Liberty Airport—okay, so it might not be on time—against a glittering backdrop of lights; it’s traffic snarled at the Lincoln Tunnel, in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline. New Jersey is office parks and industrial parks and neighborhood parks. It’s small cities and Newark, a giant perennially struggling to recapture lost glory. It’s your neighbor clearing his precious lawn with a leaf blower until your ears can’t take it anymore, and it’s all those houses with rusting cars in their yards, the ones that make the lawn guy seem not so bad by comparison. It’s the headlines about corrupt public officials or neglected children, but it’s also the local newspaper clipping of the school sports wrap-up that includes your niece’s name.
New Jersey is too many deer and too many bears and too many squirrels, and the tragic ways in which their numbers are reduced by too many cars and too much development. New Jersey is two professional football teams that pack their home games with exhilarated state residents and get primo coverage in hometown newspapers, yet cling to the ludicrous fiction that they reside in New York.
New Jersey, as my father used to say, is two pounds in a one-pound bag.
At 7,417 square miles, it would take nearly 500 New Jerseys to equal the area of the United States, and yet 3 percent of the nation’s population is crammed into its borders, giving it a density unrivaled across the country. And those numbers don’t tell the half of it; nearly 40 percent of the state is undeveloped, meaning 8.4 million people are shoehorned into the rest.
We’re home to an astonishing 566 municipalities, and unlike vast stretches of America with their unincorporated locales, here you’re always in a city, village, town, borough, or, that catch-all for sprawl, a township. New Jersey is a state of idiosyncratic clusters, each with its own look and feel, its own identity. And in many places, they’re jammed right up against one another.
You can travel from Short Hills to Newark’s Central Ward or the reverse and experience an astonishing ride on a socioeconomic roller coaster. We have the highest median household income of any state in the nation, according to the 2000 Census, yet our largest city still has Third-World levels of infant mortality. Across the state, Hispanic immigrants and eighth-generation African-Americans live in some degree of poverty. We spend more per student on public education than any state, yet a landmark court case initiated on behalf of students in poor school districts is now slogging through its fourth decade. A 1999 study by Harvard found that our schools were among the most segregated in the nation.
Even here, though, it’s possible to get away from it all. Traveling the lower central part of the state or in the northwest corner, occasionally you’ll have the road entirely to yourself. Take the Parkway to Exit 52, then make your way around the breathtaking Wading River to Route 563 and head north. For 20 or so miles due north to Route 72, the road takes you through the eastern flank of Wharton State Forest. Out here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, there’s a bicycle lane. If you don’t have a bike handy, you’ll wish you did.
There’s little other than pine forest and cranberry bogs interrupted by towns that aren’t towns any more than your house and the one next door constitute a town—unless you happen to live in a place like Hedger House or Speedwell. You can lose yourself in the expansiveness of it, and there are trail markers inviting you to do just that. You can sense the vestiges of a lost world—just one reason for keeping it the way it is. This is the Pinelands National Preserve, whose 1.1 million acres encompass an area nearly 50 percent larger than Yosemite National Park and account for more than one-fifth of New Jersey’s acreage. You won’t find this much uninterrupted nature in any other single spot along the continuous megalopolis from Boston to Richmond. As few as 10 people per square mile live in the interior—true Pineys. It’s hard to deny the notion that this is a place whose days are numbered, even though laws protect the Pinelands and the giant aquifer below it. Development comes fast and furious in New Jersey, and soaring new-home prices elsewhere have made the region a relative bargain. Along the margins, there are more than 4,000 residents per square mile in places where a decade ago there were hardly any.
Between the settled places and the wild, cultural and economic forces occasionally collide in bizarre ways. A stone’s throw from some thoroughly car-strewn yards in the wooded Cassville section of Jackson Township is St. Vladimir’s, a stunning, onion-domed church rising out of the scrubland; a lifesize model of Sputnik itself wouldn’t be more unexpected out here. Not far from St. Vladimir’s are developments of large new houses.
South and west of there is Pemberton, a borough that evokes the phrase frozen in time. Stroll its main drag on a weekday morning and you can hear the plaintive strains of Porgy and Bess coming from an upstairs window of one of the town’s old wood-frame houses. Down the street at the Hanover Deli and Grocery, the man behind the old-fashioned luncheonette counter deflects a visitor’s questions with polite cat-and-mouse evasiveness over the course of 40 minutes, while no other customer enters the premises. Does he own the place? “No.” How long has he worked here? “Not long.” Where did he work before this? “The CIA.” Who shops here? “Little people.” The sign out front says you sell Chinese food. Do you? “I don’t know.” When does it get busy here? “It doesn’t. I’m serious.” Ask for his name and he’ll tell you his first name but insist that you don’t print it. Must be a CIA thing.
Heading north past the intersection of Juliustown-Georgetown Road and Jobstown-Juliustown Road, you may miss Juliustown itself, but then again, you might find yourself in farmland worthy of central Ohio. Look to the east toward Fort Dix, you might see an enormous military aircraft lumbering its way up to altitude over a panorama that includes a silvery silo.
Not far up routes 206 and 130, you’re soon into the land of clotted signs, broad-sided, windowless buildings, and chain everythings—motels, bookstores, fast-food joints. The Garden State’s economy was long driven by factories, but the switch to service-based industries begun three decades ago is now nearly complete. And even though two of our biggest industries, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals, have been in a defensive crouch for five years, the economy continues to throw off enough cash to pay off mortgages on McMansions—never mind that these days office workers fear layoffs the way factory workers did in the 1980s.
New Brunswick, a town built on Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid money, has found multiple ways to rebound from the decimation of its manufacturing base, playing host to a burgeoning Rutgers University and sprawling healthcare industry. A visitor to the downtown today must fight gridlock to find a parking space but then can wander in a city that bustles with foot traffic. New Brunswick is also packed with arts offerings: The State Theatre, George Street Playhouse, and Crossroads Theatre reside next to each other in the heart of town. “It’s impossible to get any more diverse than New Jersey,” says Courtney Merlo, a college-age employee at a downtown smoke shop—demographically, she means, but the diversity extends to states of mind, which can at times seem schizophrenic.
Ours, after all, is a state of contradictions—chutzpah coexisting with rampant oversensitivity to Jersey jokes. This inferiority complex has been developing like a pearl on a grain of sand for a long time. Benjamin Franklin called New Jersey “a barrel tapped at both ends,” though maybe that was more of a compliment back in his day. David Wilder, a Rutgers professor of psychology, cites the state’s location between two major cities and its lack of a major city/cultural center as elements that foster the idea that “New Jersey is kind of a slice of white bread between two good slices of corned beef.”
It would be nice to have a home-state city we could all embrace. But until Newark’s recovery is more widespread, a visit to its predominantly Iberian Ironbound section is a guaranteed way to transcend this world, especially if you like rodizio or paella. Vast deserts, majestic mountains, and red-rock canyons may be natural wonders, but an ocean isn’t any less impressive, and we’ve got 127 miles of beachfront. We’ve got the Meadowlands—yes, the stadium and all that, a rather efficient consolidation of sports and concert action, but also the swamps that give the place its name; an essay last October in this magazine extolled the unexpected pleasures of kayaking in the Meadowlands, whose onetime usefulness as a place to dispose of garbage and Mob victims has had an enduring impact on the state’s image but whose rebound toward ecological health is a fine metaphor for where we hope we’re headed. We’ve got the breathtaking cliffs of the Palisades on the west bank of the Hudson River, and, across the state, the Delaware Water Gap, an enchanting valley of steep, hard rock adorned by nature’s greenery. In Paterson, a billion gallons of Passaic River water a day tumble over the spectacular Great Falls; east of the Mississippi, only Niagara is larger.
But our touchiness about late-night jokes is easily overstated. “Issues about New Jersey’s reputation probably aren’t very important to people—even people who live in the state, for that matter—in their everyday lives,” says Wilder. Most New Jerseyans would probably agree with Sayreville-raised fiction writer Junot Diaz, who quoted the late landform sculptor Robert Smithson—himself a product of Passaic—in referring to New Jersey as a “permanent elsewhere,” an in-between place from which great art quietly emerges, as opposed to the “somewheres” that might be expected to generate the goods.
It’s also not a bad place to watch a sunrise.
Contributing writer John T. Ward wrote about New Jersey film settings last October.