The Jersey Devil
The Pine Barrens is said to be the home of a creature so inexplicably out of sync with the world around it that it was even featured as a “Monster of the Week” on an episode of The X-Files. One of the people of the pines swears the creature is anything but a cryptoid and uses metaphor to explain his rationale:
“A mist came up, laying out in their like a blanket. You’ve seen those nights. Fog was rising like a thing coming through water. My hat flew off my head. I ran home through briars my arms with all cut up when I got home.”
The Hand of God in the Pines
Fire is a natural disaster capable of devastation that must nevertheless be tolerate in the pines because that’s what wood does: it burns. And sometimes it takes an equally powerful natural state of affairs to restore equilibrium. Such a cosmic boxing match requires metaphorical imagery to fully convey the magnitude:
“People who watched the fire from the distant hills say that the storm moved across the woods like a dark, reaching arm, and coming to the reddest part of the fire, killed it.”
Dwarf Forests and Planetary Heads
The eastern part of the Pine Barrens is dominated by dwarf forests; pines that rise little more than five feet into the air rather than the fifty feet of their cousins. The result can produce a disturbing sort of vertiginous perceptual disconnect which takes its form as metaphorically being, well, not quite right:
“A snapshot of the Plains will often seem to take in huge expanses of fores, as if the picture had been made from a low-flying airplane, unless a human being happens to have been standing in the camera’s range, in which case the person’s head seems almost grotesque and planetary, outlined in the sky above the tops of the trees.”
The Separate World
In a chapter titled “The Separate World” the author describes how the Pine Barrens can come to see to outsiders just that: a place fully within the borders of America, but somehow seeming to exist outside it as well:
“A visitor who stays while in the pine barrens soon feels that he is in another country where attitudes and ambition are at variance with the American norm.”
Fifth Avenue
The author writes: “In one lonely place in the woods today is a street sign marked Fifth Avenue.” This unexpected image is the punctuation mark which brings one long paragraph covering three pages to a close. That long paragraph is a litany of all the speculative land deals (both sincere and those nothing but a con) intended to bring progress to the Pine Barrens since 1850. Cheap land for cheap homes and a wild dream called Magic City lined the pockets of many, dashed the dreams of many more and ultimately impacted the “pineys” calling the woods home not one single bit. The Fifth Avenue sign becomes the metaphor for all of that.
