Water Works 23 - 4/14/03

The Reality Check Tour Continues and We Renew an Old Acquaintance

In Water Works 22, we left plucky Little Lockatong navigating the perilous Zones of Interference in the Straits of HN0005 and HN0017. Since our story is about to take a more theoretical turn, you should settle in. This will require two episodes.

Wilfredo Pareto may be unfamiliar to you, but “Pareto’s Rule” is one of those iron laws of How the World Really Works that seem too obvious to have ever been new, a pioneering insight into our habit of clinging to preconceptions no matter how routinely evidence proves us wrong. Wilfredo was the first to “run the numbers” on the rest of us in ways corporate America considers indispensable today. Long after his death, Pareto’s reputation received a well-deserved revival 20 years ago when his spirit haunted America’s car manufacturers for a while. He helped inspire a sudden respect among the Big Three for the liberal arts then, on the heels of the drubbing they received from Japanese university graduates who had passed over volleyball for elective courses like epistemology, regarded by most of their engineering and business school counterparts here as useless drivel.

That was while my undergraduate epistemology students were learning that any demonstration of a proposal for the maintenance – and on our really good days the improvement – of any portion of “the world,” however you want to parse that, will inevitably beg questions under close examination. We also learned that proof is most often a figure of speech, meaning sets of significant and systematic observations, encompassed by more or less precise explanations, at least until the intrusion of some awkward new evidence and “Let’s see you explain that one.” Including incidental embarrassments, the “conduct of inquiry” always proceeds that way, in the geologic sciences no less than the theory and practice of keeping an old Honda alive.

Which returns us to Quakertown, on the road west from the General Store toward Pittstown, where some awkward old evidence lies unexplained by the NJDEP. Before we look into any of that, let’s review the history of the well on my village lot here. I grind no axes. My well has never failed to function exactly as it should and has passed every test it ever met, with honors. I only use Old Faithful as an example of our local public water supply system in action.

My formerly artesian well once ran year-round, before it eventually stopped overflowing in summers. When further drops in the local water table finally caused a neighbor’s shallower well to fail, he located his new one farther from Quakertown Road, behind my back yard. The moment that drill rig hit water, I no longer owned an artesian well. After the still robust gusher ceased surprising us, the driller remarked off hand that a neighborhood well might run dry. He knew the exuberance he had tapped there could make the difference, for any shallow well nearby, between a steady flow of water and a steady supply of nothing.

Where we stood then was just north of the summit of the Lockatong watershed, on the Capoolong side of that ridge, in what amounts to a common back yard for several homes on the south side of the road between Quakertown and Pittstown. There a succession of small fields runs west from Croton Road and the General Store. The northern side of that extensive swale rises to meet Quakertown Road and abruptly forms a field-wide rampart above the road on that side of the village, ending in steep drops to Capoolong Creek. That broad ridge peaks near the high ground by the General Store and the Lockatong’s summit a few yards south of the store, creating a small plateau on which Quakertown sits, perched on the highest ridge of a much larger plateau, at one of the highest elevations in New Jersey’s entire Piedmont physiographic province. (Map) (i)

We will return to our little village in the sky, to Muller’s magic spring and the tall tale of Trout’s pond, after we finish our survey of the upper reaches of the Lockatong and Capoolong watersheds – in which Quakertown Road now heads west down a long hill to Pittstown, where it crosses Capoolong Creek. On the other side, Pittstown Road follows the path of the creek south, up through a steep hollow. Then it leaves the creek for a sharp climb out of that hollow, up into broad fields ending in distant lines of trees, the church spire marking Quakertown now a mile beyond the trees to the east.

From the crest of the hill the road descends gently southward, through the common landscape at the top of the Hunterdon Plateau – a flat stump of bedrock thrusting up from the high Piedmont, below the first Highlands ridge: a stubborn Triassic mass seven miles wide, looming hundreds of feet over the hollows that drop from its borders in every direction – leaving me with far too many places to leave you until our next episode. So until then, while we leave our plateau massing on its borders, Mr. Pareto and I will just leave you alone.

Ron Gutkowski