Jersey Pine

  Wharton Water Perps

 The Wharton Bottle Water Company wanted to bottle up a hundred thousand acres of this cedar water to sell to Philadelphia. Shipped beneath the Delaware from a  reservoir piped to Camden, these putative reservoirs failed from some pine ball politicat. Wharton then turned his water farm into a preserve,  baptized himself a conservationist, turned loss to profit, Noblesse oblige, and named business schools and forests after him. Pigge-hog, wilt thou be mine! No lie.

The hogwallow hearts of the Wharton water perps are a higher form of the fugitive pine robbers only surpassed by the azaleas that Armstrong and Aldrin planted on the moon, near the laurel, holly, indigo and the cherry, that so inspired later hunter gatherers to extract the moon waters from their natural resource. Also somewhat acidic, by his own reckoning Neil Armstrong  learned the moon had an aquifer from the branches taken from moon bogs. He took a thermos to the moon to drink in those lunar ceremonies common to the studio of that day and brought it back filled with moon water. This was drunk at conclaves the White House convened also on the seventh level of the Vatican. One dropper or droplet was enough. Much of this was fabled at all costs as apocryphal on the news where they said that if a cranberry won't bounce it is a bad cranberry.   

Esau made a comeback among those gents in this penchant in turning white people red. The cedar water dyed the skin  so you could see the cilia hairs on the skin, from which repute the iron oxide film made bog iron or metheglin for pineys, when they were not busy, and water mead and herbs among blue berries, cranberries, holly, laurel, wild indigo, cherry ilex and huckleberries, all putative moon crops. These were further used to attract lapsed and lost Quakers from Philadelphia in that catch basin in reverse Amish pietists, by contrast,  go all the way to Tampa to escape. Sea captains stored cedar water in bulk on their voyages because it would stay sweet and clean on ship for a long time, as Armstrong learned on the moon. Rain runs through the pine needles and leaches tannic acid out and takes iron out of the sand producing rust blue oil slicks on the water among the orchids. Cedar water marketed for suburban escape and vacation destination boasted hopes of a therapeutic cure.

Pine Barren Aquifer

Atlantic White Cedar/Cypress

Not to get away from the feeling that this is all about water, for water has a memory, it is called cedar water with the properties of tea and the color, literally from the cedar in it, but it is as much pine.  Red maple and black gum trees are often found in the canopy along with Atlantic white cedar which grows on the hummocks and in the depressions surrounding.  The pooling brown hue of the water, cedar as much as from the pine, and the naturally occurring iron in the soil, plus the tannic acids from the trees, make the wetlands acidic from their submergence in the Atlantic Coastal Plains, once under the Atlantic Ocean. These sandy soils of potable water the color of tea brew up storms on the lakes in the in a short space and turn to large waves. I would go out in a canoe in the beginning of these to test the elements, get back just before the brunt lightning and lunger large sheets of sleeting rain, people huddled under awnings in adoration of light in a summer storm. Half a million acres bigger than Rhode Island, pygmy forests, 17.7 trillion gallons of the cleanest and most abundant source of water in the world,  the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, has enough water to cover all of New Jersey 10 feet deep, and equal to nearly half the water consumed each year in the U.S. The Cohansey Formation of sand above, the Kirkwood silt and clay beneath form a water-confining layer below the aquifer that connects the top water-bearing sands with surface water at 360 feet in active wells, the largest seaboard open space between Maine and Florida of sandy, acidic, and nutrient-poor soils. In the late 1800s there was a plan to build reservoirs in South Jersey and sell water to Philadelphia.  Fortunately, the New Jersey State Legislature failed to pass that legislation and prohibited the exportation of water outside state boundaries.  Today this area is known as Wharton State Forest.

Metheglin Mead. Water and Herbs

Cold iron and Sulphur springs,  sailboat regattas on mirror lake,  1920 – James B. Reilly erected a new dam on Mirror Lake. Suffering from tuberculosis (?)  – Dr. Newcomb opened the first licensed sanatorium in New Jersey in 1913. Europeans could not cultivate their familiars there, their corn, they were anyway afraid of  the carnivorous plants and orchids, the pitch pines in sugar sand, like Hansel and Gretel should have been, not to speak of fleeing the U.N. label, International Biosphere Reserve. No heavy or extractive mining cheered them on from there. There was nothing to mine except the natural reservoir of bacterially sterile, chemically pure H₂o the U.S. Geological Survey compared to “uncontaminated rain-water or melted glacial ice.” Eugenicists today contaminate the way the waters and  land affected charcoalers,  paper millers, saw millers, and gristmills. A case study of the old town  Kallikaks, a pseudonym, was presented as a model for AI by Craig Venter who seeks to preserve himself in sphagnum moss like a CA bog man. Scholars today understand from the genetic inferiority of dwarf pine that the facts  were misrepresented. Photographs were altered to make them appear more backward than they really are.The trees themselves were good for siding, paneling, boat building and shingles and when they fell were good for turtles on logs. The Indians used them as a laxative without a doubt. 

 

Joseph Wharton 1902

 Joseph Wharton also owned the Nickel Mines and its subsequent massacre. "In 1849, the Gap Mining Company attempted to work the mines for copper, again unsuccessfully, but discovered the presence of nickel in late 1852 or early 1853. (The ore had previously been misidentified as iron sulfide). Gap Mining then worked the mines for nickel until 1860, when they were closed as unprofitable. It sold the mine to Joseph Wharton in late 1862. Between 1862 and 1893, 4.5 million pounds of nickel were extracted from the site, up to 25 percent of world production in some years. Wharton refined the nickel in Camden, New Jersey and was the first industrial producer of malleable nickel. He was influential in persuading the United States Mint to issue the first five-cent nickel coins in 1866, using nickel produced from his mines." (Wikipedia).  With all this putative glory why did the NJ legislate not allow the water to leave the state? That's another conundrum for glory. The wonders of the healing spring water were tisane teas among the sassafras. This is what makes the body the very advent of consciousness (Levinas. Existence, 69).

 I say I inherited this from my grandfather, but with the gift of the external social world a poet has another path, as Levinas weaned from the internal world of fixation: Commenting on Psalm 139 and Jonah: "In other words man's humanity would be the end of interiority, the end of the subject. Everything is open. I am everywhere looked through, touched by the hand" (Nine, 167).

 Let us say of the cedar water of the acid pine barrens that whenever two people look into each other's faces the eyes of others are present. There is a trace of a third person present in every face we encounter.  Let us therefore compare these waters with the limestone alkaline water of the Edwards Plateau, or the ecstasy of light of the southwestern deserts. We exist for each other as the start of breath that begins speech in our throats and must know that we are either in the process of protecting the world or not.  The power to open or close thousands of myriads of forces and worlds makes us responsible for its maintenance. This is the intimate trace of consciousness we wake in the public nature of our words and of language itself, turning every meeting between one person and another into a meeting that must include the whole of humanity, living and dead.  It goes without saying that not one detail from any moment is lost of our deeds, words and thoughts. Each one goes back to its root to carry on in the height, in the worlds and among the pure superior lights (160). Unknowing, beyond the said, I am responsible with my grandfather for the event. What powers this concludes is the unalterable conviction that what I am worth the other is worth, which recreation evidences, none better, in the substitution of Messiah for my death, therefore life. It is not conviction but revelation that I am original and unique, hence the other is myself. He gave to man dominion of his hands