Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [34]
There is one loss that I think I will never overcome, and that is the loss of the landscape of my childhood. My relationship with nature is woven into my earliest memories, the first being the very distant image of myself seated on a branch in the elbow of a cherry tree full of white blossoms. How I came to be looking at myself in the memory—rather than out at others—is a conundrum, but there I am in the tree, peering through the blossoms at other children and far more interested in the flowers than in them. It seems to me significant now that I remember having set myself apart from the other children and that I’d already placed myself in the role of observer, including the observation of myself. The memory is vivid; the location of the tree was Monroe Township, New Jersey, near the house we’d lived in when I was born. That would have made me about three years old. So the engagement with nature was there from the beginning, and it grew as I moved through my boyhood, living an unsupervised youth made up mostly of fishing for catfish and pickerel, paying close attention to frogs and turtles, catching and examining minnows and shiners and otherwise making my own natural-history survey of central New Jersey’s slow brooks and ponds.
When I was about thirteen, after a three-year interlude of urban life, which I had coped with by joining the Boy Scouts and teaching myself to fly-cast on the city grass, we moved to the Jersey shore, and it was there that I made the natural landscape my own, and brought it into my life so firmly and intimately that it became part of who I was, and who I am. It remains there today, embedded in my consciousness and sensibility, but unfortunately that is the only place where it remains, at least in the abundant way in which it once existed. The South Jersey littoral was a landscape destroyed by development, and while pockets of it remain as parks and preserves between housing tracts and marinas, the great expanse of it has disappeared. A sandy spit and scrub oak upland where I once had set up a duck blind each November to greet the lines of bluebills that would arrive from the north is now a small park with an environmental center for children. There visitors can see photos and dioramas of an ecosystem that once was rich and so common as to be taken for granted. This is true of most treasures until they are lost.
Until the beginning of the last century, the east coast of the United States was a thriving and interconnected string of bays, inlets and estuaries that were nurseries for the ocean’s fishes and wintering shelters for ducks and shorebirds beyond counting. The marshes and broad mucky fields of rushes and reeds were home to mink, muskrat, raccoon, fox and deer. I remember an old Piney (as the longtime locals are known) telling the story of a swamp buck that hid in tidal lagoons during the gunning season with only his nose out of the water. The tides in these marshes rose and fell like a yogi’s calm breathing and bathed the cordgrass in their gentle saline waters to feed countless tiny creatures that were the fecund foundation for a rich and mysterious web of life. My little piece of this miracle was the upper end of Barnegat Bay, a shallow stretch of fresh and salt water behind the barrier beaches that stretched from Point Pleasant to Little Egg Harbor. It was a place of cedar-stained estuaries and warm-water lagoons. The bay was inhabited by blowfish, blackfish, bluefish, striped bass, fluke, mummychogs, minnows, spearing, flounder, herring and garfish—all of which were a focus of my predatory impulses as a boy. I hunted quail and rabbits in the uplands, shot ducks from the shoreline in the fall and fished almost constantly from March through the end of October.