This is a journal of my journey to Mount Katahdin in Maine in July and August, 2009.  My itinerary began with a road trip to Mount Desert Island, Maine, where I keep a house.  The trip is about six hundred thirty miles in distance.  I began in New Jersey.

NEW JERSEY COUNTRYSIDE: FLORA AND FAUNA

Reluctantly leaving my wife in Cherry Hill New Jersey on the afternoon of July 17, I drove alone toward Summerville in that state.  First I scooted up route 295, a superhighway, to Lawrenceville; then I chose to make my way North on secondary roads that turned out to be circuitous and thus extended the time of my travels in the first day.  Yet the roads were pretty, winding through some of the finest rolling farmland in the state, small towns with their photogenic white porches and flower boxes sporting small red and blue buds in the afternoon sun.  I say farmland, for it once was; yet today this land is largely inhabited.  Much of it is houses, yards and driveways, separated as if to relieve the eye by fields, some of which extend to a wooded horizon.

It is one thing to be in this idyll; it is another thing to drive through it.  Gone are the days of Thoreau’s wagon rides through the Maine countryside.  At a horse’s pace, Thoreau was able to catalogue every fence post and flower if he wanted to.  Often he noted a species by the side of the muddy road; once he even insisted on stopping the wagon to pluck it, much to the irritation of the driver and fellow passengers.  There is a feeling of belonging to the scene in a wagon, but this receives the back of the hand when driving a car in New Jersey. 

As I passed over small crests and into modest dips in the road, through sharp curves and bearing into gradual ones, my sensation was dominated by the movement; I did not intuit the place through which I passed.  It was as if either the place or I were no more than a television image, fleeting, sunsplashed, then an instantaneous memory.  The remembered image of that drive is like a Kalaidoscope. 

Though an idyll, much of central New Jersey is a spoiled one at best.  Overviewed from the flight up its roads, this lush countryside is dense with people and their objects, no more prominent of which is demonstrated than the multivariate species of automobiles streaming incessantly throughout.

The traffic artery is clogged with a variety of sports utility vehicles, clearly the car of choice in New Jersey.  Every manufacturer in the world makes them.  There are many big bruising Brunos with belligerent grills that seem to project a kind of bar room power.  There were modest, but not diminutive suv’s that carried their still considerable bulk for the safety of some drug executive’s wife - and there she was, driving that big thing with all the aplomb and security of a babe in a carriage.  Then there were the little big things - the suv’s for folks who wanted more space and transport capacity, but were slightly embarrassed by the rolling riches they had bought - and especially by the global environmental impact they were wreaking by buying and driving a vehicle regulated leniently as if it were an industrial truck, but used casually like a motorcycle with a side car for seven.  These little ones are boxy cars (trucks) with the patina of the fine foreign label and little of the testosterone rich decoration that the meaty American based companies lavish on their monsters.  The little suv says, gently: “I know this is an suv, but, look! - it’s a small modest one.  I still care about the environment!”

Though the suv is de riguer in New Jersey, the road is populated with various other machine forms that give the stream of traffic much color and spice.  More than once, I observed a two seat sports car - Jaguar, Mercedes or Volkswagen - zipping down the road (or tailing me like a teenager with grey hair on Saturday night).  These, along with the occasional Camaro, reminded me of the days when your wheels were your story, and kids with style would flaunt their cool with their hair in the air and the Beach Boys blasting.  There were songs about these cars, sung with abandon by the pretty girls they attracted to the lucky guy’s front seat - and by egg heads like me secretly, alone, as I drove my mother’s grey four door Chevy sedan carefully on down the line.  I saw one muscle car, a Thunderbird with bulging headlight eyes, and an endless racing stripe on the side.  I got out my Springsteen CD and put it in the slot.

Thus entertained with the soft lensed memories of a simpler time, and with the blasting, old fashioned rock and roll in my abused ears, I flew, New Jersey driver style, through the small towns and fields in the center of the state, into a massive snarl of two lane traffic near Somerville, where converge several of the signal arteries of the land - Routes 206, 202, 22, 28 and 287.  202 angles in from Flemington and the Northwest; 206 forges North from the Trenton area and storied South Jersey; 22 and 28 slice through this area from the West and head on to New York City, where all roads are said to reach their glorification at last.  287 was my objective this afternoon, for it would take me directly North through the center of the State, and over the border into New York State, where I would proceed. roughly parallel to the Hudson River, thence to the East and into Connecticut. 

This plan seemed straightforward when traced on the map; however, to avoid the traffic snarls of a Friday on the Turnpike and the (Garden State) Parkway, I was destined to brave the rough water of the Somerville Convergence, where six mighty streams, draining travelers from the four corners of this drivers’ homeland, empty into a single traffic circle, just before the entrance to route 287.  Gone was the elegy of Terhune’s world.  I left behind the quaint porches and hawk hunting fields.  My car was my armored tank; the horn was my cry, and I entered this great circle with the ferrous determination of Achilles meeting Hector at last.