Caught My Eye: Fieldnotes from the Pinelands Folklife Project

Earlier this year, I had the chance to delve through the fieldnotes from the Pinelands Folklife Project for a post celebrating American Wetlands Month. I used a number of quotes from these accounts, but there were many more that I wanted to highlight and didn’t have space for. The prose – some humorous, some profound, all of it providing insight into both the area of study and the fieldworkers themselves – was too wonderful not to share. The Pinelands Folklife Project took place over the course of three years, which means there is a lot of information to pull from. The following excerpts come from the first few months of the Pinelands Folklife Project fieldnotes:

Mary Hufford
“The days are colder now, and the nights unblanketed. The morning’s heat comes from the Dutch mocha coffee that Nora Rubinstein keeps in our refrigerator. Having downed a cup of that by 7:30 I set out for some victuals at the Presidential Lakes grocery store, taking a great shortcut from headquarters to route 70. […] The store at Presidential Lakes did not have whole wheat bread or plain yogurt so I finished that trip at the Acme in Browns Mills.” – September 17, 1983

“From the back of the truck, Joseph and I could see where we had been, and we watched what seemed like miles of narrow sand road framed by short pine trees and scrub oak dwindling in our wake. Occasionally our heads were tousled by pine boughs, and often I wondered whether my jaw would need to be readjusted after having been so jostled. At any rate, we travelled at a good clip, at least as fast as some sneezes go. Sneezes, I’m told, have been clocked at 100 miles per hour.” – October 7, 1983

Christine Cartwright
“The woods fill in between the farms and fields, bigger and older than this old community, surrounding it with their quiet presence. Grapevines overgrow its roadsigns and telephone poles; scrub pine and oak overshadow its homes and roads. People know they are surrounded: a burnt-out farmhouse on Indian Mills Road is already lapped by tall grasses and long vines, and will soon be swallowed up as whole towns have been in the fast-growing forest of the region. The woods have a resilience and permanence unlike that of climax plant ecologies, for it burns and its cut again, growing back thicker than before, nourished by its high, deep table of pure water, renewed by its fire-triggered reproductive cycle. Human life and its creations are less resilient, more susceptible to irreversible change, and more capable of causing it as well: the old cemetery building will not return to its original purpose and construction, and only the green and white historic marker reminds the 1980s that it was once the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, where John Brainerd gathered white and Indian worshippers to Quaker services in 1788. The new housing development of Muskegum Woods will not give place again to the trees and homes bulldozed away to clear a space for its foundations. But forest fire and chainsaws and the crescent sickles of the cattail gatherers do not bruise the land forever.” – September 22, 1983

“It is more than the love of country people for the county; more than the fear of change or the initial response to new, encroaching forms of culture. Space to breathe, woods rich in resources for those who know how to use and protect them, are only the articulable tip of the iceberg. The ease of relationship between people and place is deeply felt, routinely enacted, but it slips from the grasp of words like water through the hands. ‘Piney’ is an epithet worn with easy pride by some, defensive pride by others, but it is a verbal sign for a deep and complex ethos: a love of space and quiet; a feel for the woods; a knowledge of the land’s resilience and fragility.” – September 22, 1983

 

Carl Fleischhauer
“I ended up with only three unhappy feelings about the media equipment: first, we clearly do not have enough cameras. Except for Jens, the team members do not have enough personal camera gear (usually one camera, perhaps with two lenses) and want to use ours. But we have only three “kits” (two bodies and four lenses each) and that’s not enough to really go around. We have therefore declared them “pool” equipment. (With the Nagras, there was one for everyone.) Once the associates arrive, all hell is going to break loose.” – September 18, 1983

 

“We drove straight back, stopping at a McDonald’s for a small supper. Mary clearly has no enthusiasm for such places, but gamely joined me. I had a hamburger and she tried Chicken McNuggets, carefully peeling the fried breaded coating off of each piece before disdainfully consuming it.” – October 8, 1983

“Sal Sr. noticed that I was eating left-handed. He made a joke about left-handed people. The right side of the brain controls the left hand, the left side controls the right: thus only left-handers are in their right minds.” – November 17, 1983

“When Mary and I had edited pictures the other day, I noticed that we had no shot that ‘said’ scrub-pine-forest. I remembered in 1982 that I had tried to take such a shot at the G-Carranza Memorial; 25GT and failed. And someone had quoted Joseph Czarnecki as being frustrated on the same front. Well, I got out of the car and made some exposures (as noted above, no black and white here or at Batsto). But failed again. Making a usable picture of these woods is damn near impossible.” – November 17, 1983

Nora Rubenstein
“It was odd driving back to the forest last night, in the mist after the rain. The air was so thick it was hard to see the yellow lines at times, and approaching cars came at me like distant animals. It was almost impossible to tell the reflectors on the mailboxes and reflections in the discarded tin cans from the eyes of animals on the side of the road. Jean and Bill had warned me about driving slowly because of the deer.

But curiously I felt at home at last. It’s all been a slightly unreal return to the woods, to my new-found home. I feel more and more like the cultural hybrid I have become in the past three years in the Pine Barrens, comfortable both in the city and in the woods, but satisfied in neither place. The shifting back and forth and the lack of a home is clearly taking a toll on my psychic resources and energy, but in some ways it may be that I have in fact chosen to be attached completely to neither place, that the freedom and choices provided by two environments somehow satisfies needs of which I am only partially conscious.

Now that I am preparing to return to New York for the coming week, it is almost as though I am drinking in the green space, filling myself with the sights, sounds and smells outside the windows, like someone gorging before beginning a fast. My mind is racing to the pine bough outside the kitchen window, and to the leaves outside the window at which I am typing. My mind keeps running back to the slender shadow that jumped across the road last night in the headlights of the car, a young deer, by its size. I suspect that I will gorge also on my New Yorkness before I return, on Thai and Japanese food, movies and book stores, and the easy sense of patterns familiar from childhood.” – September 18, 1983

“What constitutes a memory scape?

The ability to know that a place is there without having to go and see it. Simply the knowledge that it is there, and the series of images themselves make a landscape live in the mind.”

And then, later on the same page, “Can a memory scape be constituted of images of places that do not exist/have never existed?

Does a ‘psychic homeland’ constitute an example of an image or memory scape that has no foundation in actual experience? If so from what does it come and what purpose does it serve? Can one person convey their memory scape to another? And can their memory scape be adopted as in the case of a child that has heard his or her parent express a longing or attachment for a particular place and incorporates that sense into their own cognitive image or memory scape? Can there be a future counterpart to the memory scape, a futurescape? Is that the psychic homeland?” – October 9, 1983

Elaine Thatcher
“Jens and I went up on the fire tower today. I’ve never seen such flat country. It’s easy to see how people can get lost in the miles and miles of dense pines. It is also very beautiful and green with lots of variety in the species of plants – oak, different types of pines, the low brush. There is little that is ugly here. Even run down houses and stores have more charm and beauty because of the natural beauty around them. It is not the harsh beauty of a western forest, with the bones of the earth poking through the vegetation. The starkness of a western plains landscape emphasizes the drabness of many less-than-pleasing edifices. Here, the moist green atmosphere is nurturing and perhaps distracting.” – September 15, 1983

Further Reading

Click here to learn more about the digital presentation for the Pinelands Folklife Project collection

For more Folklife Today posts featuring items from the Pinelands Folklife Project collection, check out the following:

• Railbirds, Cranberries, and Eels: Foods of the New Jersey Pinelands – Stephanie Hall (November 23, 2021)
• Caught My Ear: The Pineconers Live at Albert Hall, 1983! – John Fenn (January 27, 2023)
• Finding Balance in the bogs and bayous – Meg Nicholas (May 17, 2024)