14 July 08: All this is mine



by Nathaniel Popkin
July 14, 2008

Here on Namanock Island the river is silent. All around, hardwood forest rises from the river's edge and below the feet, smooth river rock covers the sandy ground. Vervain and monkey flower grow between the rocks, along with Joe Pye weed and St. John's wort. Milkweed makes the scent of lurid jasmine and grape vines draped over the branches of pygmy sycamore trees -- the leaves of the two plants near-identical -- evoke a dense mangrove forest. Though appearing on a map as a tiny tear drop of land detached from the New Jersey side of the narrow upper Delaware, this feels like a lost sea island. Trees are stunted and vegetation is low and thick and bones and branches seem calcified. And we, the other members of my family and I, are the only human inhabitants.

It is shamelessly beautiful. As dusk beckons, birds fill the high sky and bats swerve over the water. Tiny frogs jump and tadpoles circle. A beaver splashes. Then, with darkness, comes stillness and clatter. Fire flies and stars flicker in near seamless accord. A single bird wails. The sound is dreadful and finally, when it stops, the long heavy night begins.

The publisher Paul Dry once described to me the feeling he had walking into the National Gallery in Washington, DC. As all the museums on the National Mall are, this one is free and the feeling of being able to walk right in like you own the place, this sense of accessibility, and more, of collective ownership, swelled powerfully inside him, lending aesthetic meaning to citizenship, heritage, and nation.

There in the middle of our river, with a slow current on either side, I came to recognize this expansive feeling.



This is my river; I have lived along it all my life. It is mine and ours; it belongs to me just as I seem to belong to it. This makes me feel rich. Not only do I have my own small possessions, personal holdings, but here on public land (Namanock is part of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area), all this too, all this is mine.

To reach Namanock, we turned off the Old Mine Road at Penn Street, a rutted mud and dirt road that cuts a straight line through farm fields to the river. There, according to the map and following the usual script, the road ends at Front Street. Our car waited at the corner of Front and Penn while we spent the night in the warm belly of the river.

Just two days before, biking on the Old Mine Road, we had turned down the dirt path a quarter-mile north of Penn Street, at the marker for the Westbrook-Bell house, constructed in 1701, the oldest standing house in Sussex County, New Jersey. Westbrook-Bell is one of dozens of unused old houses and other buildings, like barns and camps and hotels, which the National Park Service has boarded up. Nevertheless, the lawn has been cut and there's a picnic table. We stop to pick berries and eat our sandwiches.

That's when Jen appears. "Don't I know you?" she asks.

We've probably run into Jen, a tall, retired school teacher with a broad smile and brown hair, a half a dozen times since 2001, when our car got stuck in the mud and we knocked on her door. Having restored an old camp building, Jen is one of the few residents along Old Mine Road and she's active in the local historic preservation society and involved with the Friends of the National Recreation Area.

The last two times I've seen her, including this one at the Westbrook-Bell house, she hasn't looked her usual cheerful self. When I spoke to her last winter she was in near tears because of the gates a farm family placed across the Old Mine Road, closing it through the length of their property. (Installation of the gates was an act of revenge against the federal government for the way private landholders were treated during the process of eminent domain to create the Tocks Island Dam, the failed engineering project that became the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Local families like this one still carry a grudge, 40 years or more on, because they feel like their way of life was destroyed for public gain. I wrote about the closure of the Old Mine Road, the nation's oldest commercial highway, on this web site in January.) Jen's house is just to the south of the gates, cutting her off from the farm family, the Hulls, her nearest neighbor, and forcing her to go out of her way to drive north. She felt sabotaged, but was hopeful then that the Park Service would sue to remove the gates.

"No one's lived here for three years," she tells me now, referring to the Westbrook-Bell house, and she's brought someone to have a look. "The Park Service bureaucracy makes it nearly impossible [to rent the place]." Jen explains that it's not just this one -- the most historic vacant structure in the recreation area -- but many others along the Delaware that are in a state of near-collapse. She lists a few others she's concerned about. "They're not doing anything about it," she says.

"It won't change until there's a change in Washington," says her companion hopefully, imagining an Obama presidency that takes these sort of domestic issues seriously.

"And the gates," I ask with trepidation, "are they still up?"

"Yes," she responds, coming closer, "and it seems like they're always going to be. The Park Service hasn't done a thing about it."

The National Park Service is the single federal agency uniquely charged with protecting and promoting the nation's patrimony. But it isn't doing so -- not in the Delaware Water Gap, nor downstream at Independence National Historic Park, where gates still block open access to Independence Hall.

Forget the ironies -- barricades blocking our nation's greatest symbol of liberty, gates privatizing America's first commercial highway -- the Park Service fails us because in both cases their inaction severs that expansive feeling of collective ownership. No longer can I, as a Philadelphian, walk through Independence Square, under the arcades and down to Chestnut Street. (The proposed and as of yet unbuilt "solution" of replacing the barricades with more pleasant looking bollards does not amend this.) A part of my patrimony has been robbed (leaving the tourists behind the barricades looking like animals in the zoo). No longer can Jen, whose life revolves around the river and its environs, the natural and man-made history, walk from her house up the ancient road to watch the birds gather on the far pond in early spring (truly a delight), not without being told she is trespassing.

It's a terrible, deflating feeling.

–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com

For Nathaniel Popkin archives, please see HERE, or visit his web site HERE.
For The Possible City, please see HERE.


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