Driving into a tableau

The older I get, the more it's proven to me: happiness comes in surprising ways, but only if you're open to it.

Sunny days seem to be the exception this year, and Indian summer wasn't looking very promising. Then the fates smiled on us last Wednesday and we were afforded a warm, blue-sky day, the perfect occasion for a road trip. Not sure of my destination, I gassed up the car and headed south. Sandy Hook, maybe? Asbury Park? I'd figure it out on my way down.

Several weeks ago I'd found my way down to the Pinelands and the mysterious non-town of Ong's Hat, and something drew me that way again. Maybe it was the daydreaming I was doing about starting a tour company of the state's lesser known historic spots. Anyway, I headed down the Parkway to Route 70 and points west.

Now that I know where Ong's Hat is, it was an easy jaunt to get there. I wanted to get a photo of the shut-down tavern that stands at the former site of the famous treed hat . That done, I drove aimlessly about the side roads, many of them not charted on my GPS. There were bunches of farms and fields of cornstalks gone brown, along with a few stands selling cranberries and surprising amounts of seafood. Even this rural, lightly developed area held relatively densely-populated enclaves of tract homes from place to place, apparently the residences of employees from the nearby military installations.

The cranberry stands got me thinking about the bogs I'd passed on my first recon of the area. No doubt they were flooded now, and deep into the harvest. That brought me down Route 72, and then one of the county roads, through Chatsworth and past the old General Store. Along the way, I stopped briefly to take photos of damp bogs through my car window.

Then I saw them. A trio of cab trucks with big bins on the back, parked on an earthen berm right next to the side of the road. As I got closer, I saw the conveyor belt and the glistening of wet cranberries floating within the confines of a big yellow floating boom. Workers in hip waders were shaking the submerged berry bushes with the tools of the trade, then pushing the crop with wooden boards to the end of the conveyor, where they were scooped up and ultimately dropped into big crates on top of the trucks, where another worker used another board to distribute the load evenly. Water streamed from the bottoms of the crates, having been transported up along with the berries.

This was all happening within feet of the edge of the road, as if it were some sort of demonstration arranged by the tourism bureau. It was like one of those Sesame Street segments on how food gets from the farm to the supermarket. Who could resist stopping to take pictures? In fact, someone else already had. I pulled to the side of the road and rolled down the window to grab a few shots.

I felt a little weird about stopping just to watch other people work, but the crew seemed okay with it and even waved over when they noticed I'd stopped on the opposite shoulder. Stepping out of the car, I crossed the two-lane road to get a better view. As one truck would be filled with berries, the worker atop would jump down and wave the next truck into position as the laden truck drove off and hook around to the county road to drop its load at the main barn. Meanwhile, the workers standing waist deep in the bog would keep the crop coming through the conveyor as long as a truck was beneath to catch it. It was a well oiled process, and it struck me that in essence, it probably hadn't changed in years. Maybe the conveyor was faster than an old one, or the booms were sturdier rubber, but there were no computers, no outsourcing to cheaper labor thousands of miles away.

Other people stopped and got out of their cars from time to time as I watched the crew, and to a person, they all had broad smiles on their faces. We exchanged greetings and brief statements about craving cranberry muffins or expecting to see the two farmers from the Ocean Spray commercial, but mostly, we were all taken in by the beauty of the tableau before us. The blue sky reflected in the flooded bogs, contrasted by the yellow boom and ripe red cranberries. The warmth of the sun, and the anticipation of Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce. I just stood there with a dumb grin on my face. Yeah, I could have been mulling over how nice it is to see agriculture still operating successfully in New Jersey, not paved over or replaced by McMansions. Yes, it's great to see that the Ocean Spray cooperative run by member farmers, is doing a heck of a job in creating new products and broadening the appeal for cranberries so the bogs will keep operating profitably for years.

But none of that was going through my mind at the time. If I was thinking at all, it was about how much fun it was to watch, and how I couldn't wait to share it. This is New Jersey.