Pine Barrens

You can swim in it, hike in it, canoe in it, sleep in it, eat in it. Its ruralness is often compared with Appalachia's. Its water is among the cleanest in the nation, though it looks a murky brown. And it is less than 50 miles from Philadelphia. What is it? It's the Pine Barrens, a tract of woodland and water encompassing more than a million mostly rustic acres of New Jersey - just about one-third of the state. It is known around the world for its botanical makeup and its wildlife.

Though the name Pine Barrens conjures up images of arid and scrubby brush - hardly the place to escape summer's heat - the abundant streams and rivers of the Wharton State Forest offer the perfect spot for a unique and refreshing alternative to the beach: watercoursing. Watercoursing, or water exploration, is simply walking, wading, floating or swimming down a river, a kind of combination hike and swim. The term was coined by Bert Nixdorf, Pine Barrens expert, watercoursing guide for the Sierra Club and the fellow who claims that about 20 years ago, he and a friend "invented" the recreation.

"Remember," warned Karl Anderson, who seemed wide awake and even good- natured despite the 6 a.m. hour, "all activities are rain or shine. You can stay back in your bunk and watch TV, or you can get wet. " And with that challenge issued under a heavy sky the color of gray cotton and a mist so fine it seemed like gossamer netting, Saturday morning of the New Jersey Audubon Society's Sixth Annual Pine Barrens Weekend began. Two groups of people, totaling about three dozen, proceeded from a main clearing near the borders of Pemberton and Woodland Townships, crossed a sandy expanse known as "Rattlers Row," and separated into the woods.

One hundred square miles of majestic Pine Barrens, split by the Mullica River and enriched by pre-Revolutionary War history, give the area both charm and substance. And within, there are pockets of residences tucked away in the green cloak that covers this vast expanse of unspoiled wilderness known as Washington Township in Burlington County. About an hour from Philadelphia, the township is a prime day-trip destination for history buffs seeking Revolutionary War reenactments, hand-blown glass, and a breath of fresh piney air. A more serene spot would be hard to come by. While most are familiar with the region for Wharton State Forest and historic Batsto Village, site of a mid-18th-century ironworks, few may be aware of Green Bank and Lower Bank, the tiny communities that cling to the waterfront.

"Do you smell that?" Dave Orleans asked 125 people Saturday night as they sat on logs around a bonfire in the Pine Barrens, home of the Jersey Devil. "It smells like rotting flesh. " As they sat wrapped in blankets to ward off the damp, swamp chill, storyteller Orleans was warming up his audience for four hours of terror. "This is the place where we can let all our fears run wild," he said. Audience members, some of whom came from as far away as Bergen County, paid $10 apiece to be scared by songs, stories and a haunted hayride through the cranberry bogs on the edge of the Lebanon State Forest.

There was a time when even the Chatsworth Post Office was in Buzby's General Store on the corner of First and Main Streets. Old Willis J. Buzby, who had been running the store since the late 1870s, was postmaster from 1917 to 1923. "Then my aunt across the street took it," said Willis Buzby's daughter- in-law, Kate Buzby. Her aunt ran the post office from her own store for 25 years. Well, things change even in Chatsworth, a small village of homes with manicured yards that lies in the middle of the Pine Barrens.

Dozens of people were evacuated from their homes yesterday afternoon when a fire raging in the Pine Barrens threatened to overrun a section of the Leisuretowne retirement village along Route 70 in Burlington County. Fanned by a stiff westerly wind, the blaze pushed to within a few yards of several houses on a paved street at the perimeter of the village in Southampton Township. It was stopped there, after burning about 30 acres, by firefighters using bulldozers, trucks and airplanes to isolate and attack the flames.

Acid rain has polluted almost all of the streams in the Pine Barrens, the forest that covers nearly a quarter of New Jersey, a federal study shows. "The (acid) levels in the Pine Barrens are pretty high, not the highest in the country, but close to it," said Mark Morgan, an associate professor of zoology at Rutgers University in Camden who has studied acid rain in the Pine Barrens for the last five years. Acid rain is formed when moisture in the air mixes with sulfur oxides released by burning oil, coal and gasoline.

A wildfire forced the evacuation of a swath of the Pine Barrens today as crews tried to contain the blaze in Bass River State Forest in Burlington County, authorities said. The fire broke out near Dans Bridge Road about 3 p.m. a few miles from the Garden State Parkway, said Division Fire Warden Michael Drake, of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. By 5 p.m., the blaze had burned about 20 acres in an inaccessible swampy area of the Park, but Drake feared it could grow to about 300 acres or more.

Perhaps alchemist is the best word for artist, writer, and musician Paul Evans Pedersen Jr. After all, this is a man who digs up discarded chunks of vintage South Jersey glass and transforms them into "Pine Barrens Diamonds. " Pieces of jewelry featuring his man-made gems will be displayed next Sunday at Lines on the Pines, an artists' showcase in Hammonton. The annual event features about 50 local residents, working in a variety of media, who are inspired by the distinctive history, landscape, and culture of the Pinelands.

Nothing seemed to stand in their way last year, as they marched across South Jersey like an invading army, leaving denuded pine trees in their wake. The exploding population of Dendroctonus frontalis - the Southern pine beetle - killed 14,000 acres of pines in 2010 and was expected to destroy at least that many in 2011. But when state officials checked recently, they were surprised. Only half of the anticipated damage had been inflicted. What happened? A voracious predator, the checkered or clerid beetle, had gobbled up many of the pine beetles, helping to reduce their number.

Authorities believe the fatal stabbings of a mother and son in Hammonton two weeks ago that rattled the small town were not a random attack, and that they are, "close to filing charges. " Atlantic County Prosecutor Ted Housel said last night that although they are prepared to make an arrest, they are not sure when it will happen. They have not publicly named a suspect. "I am confident in being able to say this was not a random act of violence and the citizens of Hammonton should be made aware of that," Housel said.

Two years after Chesilhurst closed its lone elementary school to bus its children to neighboring Winslow Township, residents of the borough will be asked whether they want to end the arrangement in a court-ordered voter referendum next week. A small, predominantly African American community on the edge of the Pine Barrens, Chesilhurst has been the scene of a long-running legal battle aimed at reopening its elementary school. "Most of the people would rather have their kids in town.

The Batsto and Mullica Rivers were the key reasons that Charles Read first built an ironworks in 1766 at what became the site of the village of Batsto. The waterways supplied power to mills, had an abundance of bog ore containing iron, and were excellent transportation routes to the Delaware River, Philadelphia, and New York. But when Hurricane Irene hit last month, the rivers that were so important to Batsto's beginning became a problem. They overflowed their banks and flooded more than 20 buildings at the state historic site in the Wharton State Forest in Washington Township, Burlington County.

Walter Brower's eyes lit up as he recalled the rain-drenched day in 1939 when he and a buddy were the first to arrive at a train wreck in the thick of the Pine Barrens. "The cars were all over the tracks. . . . I expected to find people dead," Brower said as he recalled the Aug. 19 crash of the Blue Comet, a luxury train that had departed from Atlantic City with 47 passengers, headed for Jersey City, N.J. For residents of the isolated area, the accident stirred the most excitement and alarm since the crash there of the Mexican airman Emilio Carranza 11 years before.

A thick scar runs across the trunk where a lightning bolt struck, sending a charge through the tree and into the debris covering the ground. The result: a spark, slow smoldering, and then a one-acre fire that might have spread across the Pine Barrens had it not been spotted from a nearby airfield early last week. "These are easy," said Steve Holmes, a division warden with the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. "But we don't get a lot of lightning strikes. Almost all the fires we're investigating are started by people.

Buzby's Chatsworth General Store, immortalized in John McPhee's 1967 classic The Pine Barrens , is up for sale. The price: $575,000. If the building doesn't sell in the sluggish real estate market to the right kind of buyer, McPhee and townspeople worry that the true cost could be the loss of a historical landmark and a place that played a role in the preservation of a vast South Jersey woods. McPhee, now a Princeton University professor, said in a rare interview that Buzby's was instrumental in his work.

Homicide detectives were pressing her to tell everything. Her domineering older brother was intimidating her not to tell the police, their mother, anyone. Feeling her world closing in around her, Kelly Hansen sat down on Sept. 19, 2006, with pen and paper and wrote, "To Whom It May Concern: My brother, Glenn Scott Hansen, has put a bigger burden on my shoulders than ever. " Hansen, 41, wrote on, describing how her brother told her he smothered girlfriend Taneke Daniels, 27, in May 2005 to stop her from testifying against him in a domestic-abuse hearing; how he had sex with Daniels' corpse, wrapped her up, and buried her in the Pine Barrens; how she agreed to join him on two trips to the grave and heard him cry out to the woods, "I'm sorry, I love you. " "He told me he wanted me there for support," Hansen wrote in the letter she gave to a friend for safekeeping on Oct. 3, 2006.