My foot was ankle deep in the freezing iced-tea-colored water. It’s water I know all too well from the years I spent exploring these woods as a kid. A few hours earlier, the organizers of the Pinelands Gravel ride warned us that a few small portions of the route were flooded, giving those of us riding the long 75-mile route the option to downgrade to the shorter 62-mile course. As most of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens are at or even below sea level, light flooding is common in wet weather. And it had been raining for days.
But I didn’t drive the seven hours from my home in Chapel Hill to these woods to do the shorter route. I drove up because lately, and for some reason likely having to do with being at early middle age and the father of two kids, I’ve found myself obsessed with the idea of home.
I drove up to explore these woods as I did two and three decades ago. That is: on a bicycle, often alone, and surrounded by the quiet stillness of the Pine Barrens, the largest remaining piece of a forest ecosystem that once stretched from my current home in North Carolina all the way to Nova Scotia, Canada. I drove up to see if the pull I still feel in my stomach whenever I think about or hear about or read about New Jersey is real or just nostalgia. I drove up to spend a few hours alone in the Pine Barrens and a few puddles of ice-cold red-brown cedar water weren’t going to truncate that.
And so, faced with a massive pool of water that stretched across the whole of the gravel road, I did my best to walk around it. The darkness of the water made it impossible to know how deep the puddle was and I figured a pair of wet feet was better than going over the bars in an attempt to ride through this pool of indeterminate depth.
Within a few steps, my feet were saturated. Given the day’s low temperatures, they were cold as well.
I forgot how volatile springtime in New Jersey can be.
One day, it’s 70° F (21°C) and sunny. The next, it’s 49°F with rain pissing down from a slate-gray sky, as it was the morning of the ride. When I left Chapel Hill, it was in the low 80s and the sky was dotted with perfect white puffs of cloud. By the time I arrived in Pemberton, New Jersey, the night before the ride, it was cold, grey, and wet.
I don’t think I packed the right kit I texted my wife, staring at the minimal riding gear laid out on the hotel bed before me; tight bib shorts, a jersey, socks, and that’s it. But there was nothing I could do, no open bike shop nearby where I might run to buy a thermal base layer or some full-finger gloves. It was late and the race started early the next morning.
Except it wasn’t a race. The event organizers reminded us as much in nearly every pre-event communication that landed in our inboxes. The designation of “ride” instead of “race” was further cemented by the fact that the event would have an at-will, rolling start. Check in, get your number, be on your way. See you in a few hours. Try to stay dry.
I learned about the Pinelands Gravel ride last year, just a few days after the event took place. I emailed the event directors immediately, asking to be added to the email list for the following year’s event. I’d love to drive up, I told them, as I grew up in the Pine Barrens. For a long and influential time, that place was my home, even if I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.
Gracefully, the rain slowed the morning of the ride, though the earth was saturated from a multi-day pour. I wondered how the moisture might affect the deep, loose, sandy dirt so common in the Pine Barrens known as “sugar sand.”
I hadn’t thought about that term in years, not until the race directors included a set of tire recommendations in one of the pre-ride informational emails, warning of the sugar sand and recommending 32 mm knobbies at minimum. My mind flashed back to a childhood spent riding BMX bikes throughout my corner of the Pine Barrens, where the sugar sand could send your front wheel turning a sudden, hard 90 degrees without warning. Pedaling through it was often futile, as sugar sand is so loose, your back wheel has nothing to grip. Imagine riding in the deepest sand at the beach. That’s what sugar sand is like.
It’d been years since I thought about sugar sand; decades since I’d ridden through it. After leaving the Pine Barrens, I lived almost exclusively in cities, rode almost exclusively fixed gears or bomb-proof urban commuters, raced almost exclusively in crits and alley cats. Over those years, many of which were spent in countless saddles of countless bikes, the perils of potholes and taxicab doors replaced the danger of sugar sand.
Since then, bikes have taken me around the country, sometimes around the world. I’ve ridden in Appalachia and the Alps, in California and Colorado. I’ve gone down the Blue Ridge Parkway and up the Col de Joux Plane; ridden in Rome, Paris, and New York City. But for some reason, until I signed up for Pinelands Gravel, I never thought about riding through the Pine Barrens.
Perhaps it’s because my family has, like me, left that place behind, as have many of my childhood friends. Thus, I have almost no reason to go back there. Perhaps it’s because it’s not a terribly easy place to get to, neither on the way to Philadelphia nor New York City, where my wife and I visit family multiple times each year. Perhaps it’s because the Pine Barrens are pan-flat and I prefer climbing. Perhaps it’s a place I prefer to leave behind, even if some part of me still exists there. Perhaps I don’t have the courage to examine who that person was, even though he was absolutely sure of himself.
A few nights before the ride, I examined the course map a bit. Noticing a good amount of the route was on the road, and figuring I’d rather be miserable for a few segments of sugar sand than dozens of miles on pavement, I chose to go with the smallest off-road tire I had: a set of 700 x 35c tires that I use when racing cross, rather than my fattest set of 650b x 45s.
I spent most of the Pinelands Gravel ride alone, as I prefer to when I’m riding off-road. But, as you always do whenever you enter a mass-start fondo, I found myself in groups here and there over the course of the cold and wet day. And every time conversation between strangers took hold, I explained what I was doing up there, why I made a seven-plus-hour drive to do a relatively low-key, low-stakes gravel ride.
“I grew up here. I miss this place. Seemed like a good enough excuse to make the drive up.”
But I didn’t grow up there. At least, not precisely there. After all, Pinelands Gravel coursed through the beating heart of the Pine Barrens, which sprawls across seven counties in New Jersey. And though I grew up near there, just 30 or so miles to the east, my corner of the Pines wasn’t this corner of the Pines. Rather, I grew up at the very edge of the Pine Barrens, where woods meet ocean, a place most people know as the Jersey Shore but locals just call “the beach.” That place, a tiny clamming village at the sheer edge of our continent was, for the first part of my life, home. Or was it? What does home even mean?
Where is my home? My house is in Chapel Hill, sure. But is it home? It’s yet to feel as much. Was New York City home? It certainly felt that way. Or was that just because it was where I met my wife and the sudden, grounding presence she had in my life back then that made it feel like home. What about the Pine Barrens? I haven’t lived in these woods in nearly 25 years.
But there’s something about these woods, this place, that gives me ease as few other places do. I feel it in my blood and in my bones. The smell and the sounds and the dark red-brown color of the cedar water comforts me in a way that only home can be of comfort. But I never felt at home when I was in this place. Rather, I spent every day of my youth yearning for the moment I could leave for a big, exciting city. And I did just that, moving to Philadelphia – another place that kind of feels like home to me, but kind of doesn’t – the morning after my high school graduation.
Still, there’s something about the Pine Barrens that feels right to me, as if my roots are stuck there in the unforgiving, uncultivatable soil; in the sugar sand.
I know the trees, the white cedar and the pitch pine. I know the birds, almost 300 species of which live here. I know the nutrient-poor dirt and the creatures and the people who make this place their home. I know the smell of pines, which is nothing like what the chemical companies want you to believe. It’s more of a muted mint with just a hint of sweetness. And like any other scent, it’s magnified by the rain, which meant that, on the day of the Pinelands Gravel ride, the scent burst through the air. The smell of the pines is familiar, though it isn’t the smell of home for me. I grew up at the beach, which means home smells like low tide, like the decay of the bottoms of the ocean and the bay coming up and recycling through with the daily rhythm of the waters. Still, I know the smell of these woods and it reminds me of home.
I know this place. I know its legends. I know Emilio Carranza and Jimmy Leeds.
Carranza was an icon of the early aviation age. He was a daring and dashing young chisel-jawed national hero, nicknamed “The Lindbergh of Mexico.” He set records through the sky, flying from Mexico City to Ciudad Juarez, from San Diego to Mexico City, all when those now-quick flights would take the better part of an entire day.
In 1928, Carranza was barnstorming up the East Coast on a goodwill trip. He was killed when his plane, The Mexico Excelsior, crashed in the heart of the Pine Barrens, back when these woods were even more desolate than they are today. He was 22 years old.
There’s a small obelisk in a small, sandy opening in the woods, with a falling eagle etched into its stone. The Emilio Carranza memorial. We rode right past it on the Pinelands Gravel Ride. Every year, on the July Saturday closest to the date of his death, there is a celebration for Carranza. It used to draw thousands. These days, it’s closer to a few dozen.
Unlike Emilio Carranza, there is no official monument to Jimmy Leeds.
Rather, Jimmy’s monuments live in the stories about him; the late-night sightings deep in the pines, brutal attacks on drunks stumbling home down sandy dirt roads, vigilante groups forming ragtag posses to hunt Jimmy down.
Where I come from, he’s known as Jimmy Leeds. You probably know him as the Jersey Devil. He was the 13th child of Mother Leeds, who, after Jimmy was born a devil, cast him into the Pine Barrens, where he still lives today.
Or so the legend says.
I wasn’t hunting for Jimmy Leeds on the Pinelands Gravel ride but I did want to keep my eyes and ears open, to take in this place that is so intrinsic to me. As a devout roadie, I’m often too deep in my bike computer, analyzing power output and cadence, grade and average speed. And so, for this ride, I set my computer screen to stay off, to alert me only when a turn was approaching. I wanted to experience this ride in a way that I often don’t allow myself to, that perhaps, with the wisdom of a bit of age and a lot of time away, I might realize the specialness of this place.
As I looked around, I noticed the scattered homes that abutted the deep forest, several of which looked like the home I grew up in. I passed hunting clubs and fishing clubs down desolate dirt roads and thought of the Pineys who hung out in them.
Where I’m from, we don’t have hillbillies or rednecks or cowboys or hayseeds or rubes.
We have Pineys. Pineys are people of the Pine Barrens, people who may not live off the grid (anymore) but who certainly live near the fringes of it. And even though I grew up in this place, I’m hardly a Piney. I left for a big city the moment I could. Pineys don’t leave the Pines. And they certainly don’t leave for big cities. They’re hard people. They’re good people.
I waved and greeted anyone I saw throughout the ride, some mowing their lawns, others playing catch with their kids in their front yards. Mostly, people trying to enjoy a chilly, wet Sunday.
I passed several open patches of dirt with splotches of burnt pallet wood piled here or there, remnants of what we used to call “pit parties.” Maybe they still call them that. We would circle our trucks and our Jeeps around the edges of the pits, so deep in the woods that neither neighbor nor cop could hear us, and have all-night ragers, drinking from 30-packs of Keystone Light; kegs of indeterminate beer; sweet, brown Jägermeister; and a concoction we called “Skippy,” which was some mixture of grain alcohol, Kool-Aid, and more Keystone Light. We would sleep off the booze in the beds of our trucks or on the sandy ground, right where we fell or, if we were lucky, in the arms of someone to keep you warm. Sometimes, we’d wake up soaked by a light rain. After all, springtime in New Jersey can be volatile.
I thought of the kids who partied in these pits, who burned these pallets for warmth on a recent Friday or Saturday night, and wondered if any of them were like me, desperate to get the fuck out of this place, desperate to find their way to a place of consequence. I wondered if they had any idea how special this place was.
Is.
I wondered if they considered this place their home. I wondered if they, unlike me, knew what that meant. They were lucky if they did.
As I rode, I thought of my kids through the lens of my own childhood. My wife and I moved to Chapel Hill in large part to start a family, to raise our children someplace quieter and kinder than Lower Manhattan. But I wondered: will my kids feel about North Carolina the way I felt about the Pine Barrens when I was growing up? Will they curse my wife and me for ever having left New York City? Would they be desperate to grow old enough to leave home? Will they eventually find their way to the same conclusion that I once did, to realize that they were raised in a special place and that, no matter what they do, that place will always be a part of them? It makes me wonder if that’s what home is; a place that is imprinted onto and into your very being. A place you take with you everywhere.
I stopped to snap a few pictures during the ride, which is very unlike me. Though it’s a habit I’m trying to break, I usually ride to finish. I need to stop and look around more. Lately, I’ve been trying to leave my bike computer at home for one ride a week, to open my eyes as I ride over the rural roads that surround Chapel Hill, to soak the place in, to better realize what it is and what it means and whether or not I’ll ever consider it home.
Will I take Chapel Hill with me when I someday leave? Maybe. I hope so. It’s a beautiful place and I really do love it. It’s full of good people. Softer people. But is it me the way New Jersey is me and New York City is me and, just a little bit, Philadelphia is me?
Of course, I didn’t have a family of my own in those places and yet they still, in a way, feel like home. Now, I find home in my wife and our children. Where they are, there home is. But, in that sense, home is nothing more than an abstraction. Will I ever learn what home-as-place means? Not sure. I guess time will tell.
A little over halfway through the Pinelands Gravel ride, I realized that I was moving a bit too slow, taking a bit too much time. After all, I had a seven-hour drive back to Chapel Hill waiting for me at the finish line. And so, with some 30 miles of Pine Barrens still left to ride through, I crouched into a more aero position and began to pedal with more intensity than I had all day.
After all, the faster I rode, the sooner I would be done, and the quicker I’d be able to get back to my wife and my babies; back home.
Pinelands Gravel was a ride, not a race. The organizers kept reminding us that. But I rode as fast as I could nonetheless, stopping only one time more to take a few amateur smartphone photos.
Soon, I was finished. It was nearing noon and the sky was the same slate gray it had been all morning. I texted my wife that I should be home by the kids’ bedtime. I changed out of my soggy kit, loaded my bike onto its rack, and punched in my address into our car’s on-board GPS computer. “Home” the touchscreen read, almost as if it knew me better than I knew myself.
Michael Venutolo-Mantovani is a freelance writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, and Wired among other outlets. This is his first piece for Escape Collective.
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