Water Works 24 - 4/21/03

The Mystery of Walnut Creek

On the road again, with Pareto still driving this thing while I look around and point, our tour continues south on Pittstown Road, where an adventure with Kid Lockatong, now two miles old, may lie ahead at the Oak Grove crossing, but won’t. The small bridge that announces our arrival is almost easy to miss in the “common landscape” of Oak Grove, our text for this sermon.

Our subject, which you passed last week before that stubborn Triassic mass began looming, is critical to our story. Those striking rural views that made our trip down the Hunterdon Plateau so congenial also make an excellent guide to the probable conditions in the rocks below. (i)

Wilfredo liked “probable,” probably expecting some number crunching soon, but we will stick to “common,” broadly understood as “prevalent” or “shared,” which tell us nothing new about the landscape between Quakertown and Oak Grove, consisting almost entirely of farms we all see every day. My particular use of common means “vernacular,” the way architects speak of vernacular buildings, or we speak vernacular languages. What make our local common landscape of farms vernacular are agricultural management practices that attend closely to traditionally critical characteristics that determine the productivity of any tract of cultivated land, including elevation, topography, climate, soils and water supply.

Add some of New Jersey’s best land for growing things, as any farmer or soil map will tell you, and the result is the distinct character of our local landscape of farms. Don’t let “vernacular” mislead you. There is more engineering behind some of that scenery than you would guess. But even among the most sophisticated systems of agricultural management here, that succeeded the older generation of farms, most still share the same USDA approved ethic of use as the originals. Many of the older farms have been preserved as privately held, living public monuments to the histories of hard working families, our local version of statues in parks. The rest are at least tax-encouraged to remain farms. Of any generation, preserved or not, they shape the terrain of most of the Hunterdon Plateau and one-half of Hunterdon County.

When we compare the landscapes of Oak Grove and Quakertown, two differences stand out. The land around Oak Grove is much flatter and riddled with water, easily spotted as tell-tale green trails in the grasslands after early spring rains or summer dry spells. After storms, water is less obvious here in streams, hidden below their banks, than in slow running pools in swales and ditches, bright wet slivers in plowed fields, and low lying stands of trees unmistakably boggier than those near Quakertown. It all lends an almost eerie grace to the flats around Oak Grove that can get downright spooky at dawn or early evening, when it might not seem surprising if a twitch in the roadside woods spit a few gnomes across the pavement, along with the predictable deer.

Our story now heads east from Oak Grove, to an old church and a turn south on Croton Road there, the rise where we first saw the Lockatong headwaters now two miles behind us. We’re bound for Flemington, where evidence of the NJDEP’s attempted theft of New Jersey’s drinking water lies near a park just outside of town.

Pulling up in Croton, we can take Old Croton Road east, or take Route 12, a few yards farther south. We can see the older highway slowly climb the back of a tall bluff on the Hunterdon Plateau’s eastern rim before it vanishes, dropping 250 feet in long sweeps across a broad hollow. Route 12 descends more slowly, to a horizon wide view of the Amwell Valley and Sourland Mountain, then curves around the face of the bluff, down to a turn north onto the lower end of Old Croton Road and the same destination.

We went both ways to acquaint Wilfredo with the sheer bulk of that bluff, high above a junction of streams now bending into one course along Old Croton Road, then easing past us down a nearly straight path to the low lying park. What we see says trouble ahead, far worse than anything we suspected, even from the NJDEP. We should have spotted it coming, up on the old highway, where even the land nearly topping the bluff was more like Oak Grove than anything near Quakertown. Now, one look upstream tells us Barton Hollow is a good place to hole up in a drought, and suddenly we realize we are completely surrounded by large hills leaking water, judging from the brisk abundance displayed by Walnut Creek.

Wilfredo is understandably upset. If you don’t know why, you can read the testimony in Water Works 9 (Mar. 17), or wait until I tell you, back at Muller’s spring in Quakertown, next week.

Ron Gutkowski