The City Made You So Boring

A fresh blueberry milkshake in early June is everything great about this beautiful trainwreck of a country. Equally paltry and sublime, a vat of ambrosia swirled into just another barely washed blender, just some cheap ice cream and a clutch of Jersey blueberries, likely plucked in a hurry by some underpaid laborer who doesn’t have health insurance. Preach. God bless. We can do better, maybe.

But you can’t stop me. You can’t stop me from loving this savage void of heartland Americana, especially the so-called “boring” parts. The rural areas like the Pinelands of New Jersey. The parts where whatever is growing out in the fields is the talk of the day; forever this unending salt of the earth unfurls. If you roll up from the city into the heartland, it doesn’t matter how you’re dressed or what car you drive; they can see the lengths you go to escape boredom. They smell your desperation, can see your 2-hour haircut, how you fill all silences with words; they hear about your endless reading list, your boorish ideas, they can tell from the way you talk that you’re desperate for something to happen – all of it just a distraction from the sun of Wednesday hitting the blueberries just right; all of it a bonfire of years to escape the contentment of days simply coming and going, days sun-plumped and burnished by night.

I wanted the milkshake because I could tell that it would be good. I’ve gotten to the age now where I can smell culinary greatness from forever away. Bookin’ it down another Jersey highway, fraught with enthusiasm, I was overcome by the sight of some anachronistic road-side drive-in. Half the damn thing was covered by a circus tent, complete with bad photos of the food. A lone spot beyond the disgusting clutch of corporate America. Jackpot. But it had to wait, there was hiking (what I call “technical walking”) to be done in the Wharton Forest in this great bookend of a state, filled with beautiful women mobbing out in endless suburbs and little ranch houses.

Pines and sand. The rollicking beauty of flatness, loving the sun. You can sense the ocean nearby, a scant hour down the road, but you don’t smell the salt yet. The terrain itself suggests an opening nearby purely by the walkability, a crest to oblivion. I rolled down the road in my tiny chevy, approaching the gate to enter Batsto village, an enclosure of state-owned buildings surrounded by echelons of green field and bordering a trove of recently charred pines known as the Wharton Forest, a clutch of pristine land cultivated by the state.

A man with hair long enough to be in a metal band waved to me at the gate and pushed his glasses up to his nose: “It’s free for this month! But. You’ll have to pay starting in July. We’re just letting everyone know. Are you from New Jersey?”

I glanced up at him: “No, I’m a PA guy. I suppose I’ll have an upcharge? How much you gonna make me pay for this in the future?”

He smiled. “Just seven bucks instead of five.” and waved me through the gate, where I soon parked and walked over to the edge of the trail.

The woods tower in your sight. You’re surrounded by patches of emerald Virginia fern, spots of jeweled moss, and aching troves of all kinds of pines. Dotted everywhere among the landscape are satchels of seeds, pinecones crunching under your feet. The land speaks of heavy industry, of late-night drives with cigarettes smoldering, of choppers roaring into twilight, mustaches in-tow. The land speaks of open invitations.

As you crunch down over the sand and pinecones, you look around in any direction and see a true expanse of silence. Since the recent forest fire only a few years ago, only a scant few animals have returned. The odd blue-jay chirp. A few squirrels chittering above. Mostly though, it’s easy walking among green underbrush and blackened pines. The sun fleurs above. You’ve got little respite from it, being only among fire-bruised limbs and trunks. Each tree, a heavily shingled giant, a soot-soaked tower. It’s strange walking through what feels like a scene of a crime, as if the land swallowed a little hell. But within that cascade of silence, you can feel time dissipate from your fingers. Even the smartwatch on your wrist seems comical, a world-torn relic from another age that makes no sense. The sun keeps warming you. The brush underfoot keeps speaking through every step. You can trust it to hide every thought in plain sight.

Why the hell was I out there, alone in the pines? I already have no friends, barely any social time. I’m a casualty of the “loneliness epidemic” sweeping our modern world, most acutely afflicting single men who can’t bring it in them to say “I need help. I’m lonely.” But the only place I have to say that is into the void of my phone, the primary culprit behind the whole mess. Or maybe its me. Maybe that’s why I went into the pines. Maybe I wanted to stop feeling so wrong for all the chasing of meaning, so promised and never delivered. Maybe I needed to go somewhere where people can’t bullshit themselves that they are the second coming of Christ with a pen and an ego. Writers.

I stumbled over a big pinecone into the world.

I’ve been running. Aching. I kept thinking about that damn sign for the milkshakes. I wanted one. Bad. I rushed through the last mile of the hike, thinking only about how much I’d love the refreshing taste after miles in the woods.

And I didn’t even know it, but that’s been the game since day 1: learning to appreciate a fresh blueberry milkshake, nothing more, nothing less. That goal of contentment with days simply coming and going, it becomes apparent when I travel outside of the city into the real world like the Pine Barrens, where the trucks are lifted high to your step and the American flags are humongous, 20 feet by 20 feet. It’s more real out there because the distractions wither. You can’t pretend consuming things is a personality. You can’t ramble through days without producing something. You can’t pretend you’re not an alcoholic when everyone in town knows it’s true. The city hides itself. Hides you, too. No difference between slumber and shadow. The city is a golden cage with the best prison slop. The city whispers: “Stop thinking. This is paradise. You should probably buy that small-batch cinnamon cruffin.”

The problem is that cities are places where people do things incredibly well but life itself flows out poorly; the opposite is often true of the country. The problem is you must decide what is more important. Choose.

And what are you doing? Don’t get vanilla. What’s wrong with you? We’re in blueberry country. The entire economy around Hammonton runs on the purple nectar. Farms stretch across the expanses of sandy ground with men and women who depend on it. Sit down. There’s no escaping this feeling that you’re never enough, because you keep thinking enough is a town just down the road. Enough is a medium-sized blueberry milkshake for less than 8 bucks.