Looking at the map, I realized me that if I pushed it hard I could be home in one long day of driving, but my deadline for finishing the trip (Joanna’s birthday) wasn’t until the end of the week, and I wasn’t ready to stop my wandering. A route home to Vermont would take me close to New York City, then up the Hudson River, but I wanted to give the congestion, stress, and truck traffic of the metastasized metropolitan area as wide a berth as possible.
The Delaware River cuts straight through the Appalachian Mountains, defining the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When a river carves its way through a mountain range they call it a water gap. I’d heard of the Delaware Water Gap since I was a child, but even though I grew up in New Jersey, I’d never visited.
The National Recreation Area there seemed like a perfect place to find a hike and enjoy the scenery on a December day that promised to be crisp but not bitter cold. On my map I could see a tangle of trails and footpaths winding around the mountain flanks on both sides of the river, with a National Park Service visitor’s center smack in the middle of it. Looking forward to a drive into mountain greenery I punched Kittatinny Point Visitor Center into Google Maps.
I followed the cheerful, patient woman’s voice that had been my constant companion and advisor for the last month directly into the most hellish drive of the entire journey. A friend’s advice to “avoid Allentown like the plague” arrived too late. I would spend the next few hours gripping the wheel as if my life depended on it which it probably did.
I pulled on to the highway behind a tractor-trailer rig. As we crested a hill I was impressed to see how the driver used a gravity assist to reach an alarmingly high speed on the long downhill slope that followed. I tried not to fall too far behind, eying my speedometer and pushing a bit past my comfort level. We rolled through a small valley, where the rig slowed, and then slowed some more as the road turned uphill. Soon the truck was groaning and creaking, creeping along in a way that reminded me of a favorite childhood book, “The Little Engine That Could.” I flicked my turn sign and prepared to pass, only to encounter the aggressive SUV and pickup truck drivers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These gentlemen and ladies appeared to see me as a trespasser on their personal highway lane. They showed little interest in ceding this prize piece of real estate to some hick with green license plates and a face displaying a mixture of frustration and terror. Occasionally an 18 wheeler would be rolling with them. These brethren of the slow-creeping monster that filled my front windscreen managed to keep up with the left lane of traffic; they must have been empty, on what truckers call back-hauls. Or maybe they were carrying feather pillows or Marshmallows or some other lightweight cargo.
I eventually found a gap in the shrieking wall of metal and rubber on my left, clenched my jaw, and eased the steering wheel over. Breathing once again, I smiled as I saw the truck that had been my captor and nemesis fading away in my rear view mirror. But the this same rear-view mirror was now dominated by the grill of a massive Audi. Or at least the upper part of the grill; They were too close to see all of it. The SUV (which I was now calling The Bismark 1) stayed on my tail as we crested the hill. The captain of the Bismark took the “passing” part of “passing lane” very seriously. As we sped down the hill it was impossible to ignore the message he was sending me: “We who are privileged to occupy this space have an obligation to pass you. Compact cars, grannies, and other Hoi polloi must return to their proper lane.” I was now exceeding not only the speed limit but the limits of my courage (and maybe the performance limits of my brave little Subaru). There followed what was probably just a few minutes but felt like hours as I zipped past the wall of tractor trailers on my right, helplessly flashing my right turn signal as a kind of apology. Over the next crest, we all careened into the valley that followed at warp speed, me desperately hunting for a gap in the lane I had just left.
Muttering the old joke about the difference between an Audi and a porcupine (“The porcupine has pricks on the outside.”), I saw a crack in the wall and made it safely back to the slow lane. Comedian George Carlin had a wonderful line about driving: “Have you ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone driving faster than you is is maniac?” This morning I felt that I somehow was able to be both an idiot and a maniac.
The next circle of hell began somewhere on I-81, or I-78. Though it might have been on US-22 E or PA 33. It’s all a concrete and adrenaline blur to me now. Signs warned me of an upcoming construction zone. Then the white line on my right was replaced by those wedges of reinforced concrete called Jersey barriers. Another row of them blocked the median. I noticed signs that read “Trucks Must Use Left Lane” As I watched the big rigs merge dutifully to the left left (hoping that one had clipped The Bismark, now miles ahead of me) I wondered what fool had come up with this arbitrary, irrational and dangerous rule of the road 2.
I never like passing on the right, especially passing an 18 wheeler that could easily squash me like a bug, but here I had no choice. I was speeding along sandwiched between a barricade of big rigs and a concrete barrier. A pickup truck in front of me spewed fumes of diesel and toxic masculinity. Behind me was a Dreadnought-class SUV that may as well have had a bumper sticker reading “F– The Planet.” I was wedged in with no escape: port, starboard, fore, or aft. It didn’t even feel like moving through space. I was trapped in some kind of endless rolling Gehenna, my only glimpses of the world of the living those I could see by peeking over the Jersey barrier to my right. I cursed this concrete tool of Satan, and for good measure cursed the state of my birth for giving it a name. I held my grip on the wheel and stared at the taillights of the vehicle ahead, ready to brake at any moment.
Like all nightmares, the morning drive eventually ended. I pulled off onto lesser, more peaceful roads and rolled up to the Delaware Water Gap. The Visitors Center was locked and looked abandoned. Though the sign read “temporarily closed,” it wasn’t clear if this was because of winter, COVID, or something else. I wouldn’t be getting hiking advice from a human. But there were signs pointing to the trails and a decent map posted at the trailhead parking lot. I decided to climb up Tammany Mountain.
The trail was slippery, with a thin layer of fallen leaves on top of the muddy churned-up path, but it was well-maintained and well-marked and the day was clear and bright, cool and beautiful. As I huffed and puffed up the switchbacks I wondered to myself if the name of the mountain had anything to do with New Yorks’ notoriously corrupt and powerful political machine – Tammany Hall.
That evening the Internet gave me the answer. Tammany was a Chief of the Turtle Clan of the Lenni-Lenapi nation. His name (sometimes written as Tamanend, Temane, or Taminent) meant “The Affable One” in his language. In the 1680s he signed a peace treaty with William Penn. In time he became something of a folk hero, a legend of peaceful coexistence between the first nations and the Quaker settlers, who called him “King Tammany” or even “Saint Tammany.”
Later colonials formed social clubs named in his honor. These clubs persisted and grew as the nation changed dramatically in the 1800s. As immigrants flooded into America in the 1800s, New York’s “Tammany Hall,” became the center of the rising Democratic Party. In time those new arrivals and their party took charge. By the 1850s Tammany’s leader “Boss Tweed” had an iron grip on every aspect of the city and state’s political life. Eventually crusading newspapers uncovered his worst shenanigans. Tweed died in jail in 1872, as reformers were slowly wresting back some level of control. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that Tammany Hall was no longer a power to be reckoned with in the city.
I reached a long ridge with a sharp cliff face to my right, and looked out across the gap. The silver thread of the Delaware cut through rounded green mountains that reminded me of my beloved Vermont. Not entirely, though. For one thing, I couldn’t see any snow. And running alongside the river was I-80, traffic backed up, cars and trucks at a standstill. There were birds flying along the ridge and riding the thermal updrafts from the valley. At first I took them for ravens or vultures. Then I noticed the flat line of their wings and the way they were soaring. I’m no birder, but I could see that these were some kind of raptor. Some seemed to me to have white heads. I’d always assumed that Bald Eagles were solitary creatures. Maybe those were kestrels or some other bird of prey, and the white head was a trick of the lighting. I found myself wishing I had learned more about hawks and eagles and as I hiked I found myself wishing that I would meet someone with more local knowledge than me.
Back at my car, my clothes muddied from a slapstick slide down a leaf covered section of trail, I followed the guidance of my fickle friend in the phone to the familiar New York State Throughway. I seem to have made peace with her. She directed me to a shiny new chain hotel at the edge of a shopping mall outside Albany. It hit me that that this would be last bed I’d sleep in before my own.
Tonight was the Christmas party for my old employer. COVID meant that the event was a teleconference, so I was invited to join. My former boss offered to pay for my dinner that night, and even placed the order while I drove, so I arrived at my room bearing a good New York style pizza and pack of local beer. My erstwhile colleagues and I managed to make a kind of strange COVID-era party of the evening, playing games, joking with each other, raising toasts on the video screen and catching up. Brains work in strange ways; as I drifted off to sleep I felt, for the first time on this trip, a little lonely.
- After the famed World War II German battleship whose sinking inspired the Johnny Horton song of my childhood that I was now humming quietly as I held the steering wheel in a white-knuckled death grip.
- I’ve since learned the reason for this: When construction forces a road and its traffic to be shifted right, the shoulder has to handle the traffic in the right lane. Shoulders are not engineered to be as strong as the main roadbed, and can’t support heavy trucks.
Thanks for telling the tale of your walkabout and allowing me to see the country through your eyes.