Washington Rock

**Written on Wednesday, published today**

After being stuck at home all day, my friend Megan texted me and we decided to go to Washington Rock in Greenbrook. Megan lives down the road from Washington Rock, and though I had been to her house many times before for fire pits and Rock Band and other things that you do when you're bored in New Jersey, I had never been with her to Washington Rock.

On the way there, I passed a large crowd in front of a funeral home. The man who had died was the uncle of a family friend, and my parents had been at the wake earlier in the evening. Sometimes, a town is so small and your family has been there for so long that you know exactly who has been born and who has died.

As I drove to Megan's house, I couldn't help but remember an awkward moment from a few years ago. When I was younger and couldn't drive, my dad was taking me to Megan's house and we passed Washington Rock. He pointed out the window at it and said in a 'back in my day' voice, "My girlfriend from high school and I used to make out at Washington Rock."

And I said in that 'I didn't really need to hear that' voice, "Oh..."

Now, I can't help but remember what happened when I was reminded about making out with somebody on a rock during the trip to the Bridgewater Reservoir--how I got all weirded out by remembering. I wondered if it made my dad uneasy to remember the Washington Rock thing over forty years later.

Apparently, however, the tradition of making out on Washington Rock hasn't died since the '60s because Megan and I definitely interrupted a couple having a moment when we walked up to the series of rocks.

Washington Rock (although there are multiple rocks, as well as a man-made wall and a huge maisoned block with an American flag sticking out of it) was a look-out for George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Now, you can't really see anything above the fern-like trees that have grown up along the hill and blocked the view of present day Route 22 and the areas beyond. Back then, though, you could apparently see the British coming.

I made Megan take a bunch of pictures for the blog, so these are all courtesy of her. Megan stood up on one of the huge rocks that enabled you to look deep into the forrest below, and I crawled along cautiously--the fear of heights taking over me once more.

A lot of the rock was grafittied. I was a little disappointed. I'm pro-grafitti, but I'm not really pro-grafitting-historic-landmarks. But if you are going to do that, at least write something better than the names of you and your high school sweetheart above the place where you, undoubtably, made out... just like half of the state has apparently done before you.

Megan climbed up to a rock on part of the look-out that had the American flag sticking out of it, in order to take pictures from the highest points. I was too short to be able to get myself on top of the block, so I stood below, watching a few lights flicker in the horizon, poking through the gray fog and setting sun.

Later on, we went in search of a trail to walk on, but chickened out cause the sun had set. You never know what kind of crazy person you're going to meet in the woods in New Jersey at night. You just don't.

Eventually that night, Sharon, Megan and I met up in the local Dunkin Donuts in Long Hill. The Dunkin Donuts is the only place that's open 24/7, so it collects a lot of teenagers and 20-somethings. We used to refer to the people who hung out in there for hours as the, "Dunkin Donuts people." Although, I think we've sort of become those people, since tonight we were in there for about three hours.

Megan had her guitar in the car, and we debated going into the park near the Dunkin Donuts to listen to her play. We decided to go to Sharon's house instead. On our way out to the parking lot, Megan gave Sharon the keys to her car. Sharon just got her license today, because she put it off for 2 years.

"I want you to drive us around the parking lot," Megan said, and nervously, Sharon got in. I squished in the back next to Megan's guitar.

"I feel like this is illegal," Sharon said as she drove from the Dunkin Donuts parking lot into the larger parking lot of the strip mall where the Dunkin Donuts was. "But it's not."

"Actually, it kinda is. 'Cause you're driving two people." I said. Even though she's 18, New Jersey state laws make it so that any new driver of any age has to have a provisional (or Cinderella license) for their first year behind the wheel. During that time period, you're only supposed to have one other person in the car and, like Cinderella, be off the road by midnight.

Sharon laughed, "Oh, yeah..."

Megan looked at the clock, "And it's past midnight. Double illegal!" Sharon drove us in front of an Old Navy, a TJ Max and a Pathmark. I couldn't stop laughing, and I couldn't really figure out why it was funny. At one point she drove while ignoring which side of the lane she was on which prompted Megan to shout out, "You're driving on the wrong side. Triple illegal!"

Eventually, Sharon started driving around in a huge, fast circle.

"Alright, you can park now!" Megan said, starting to sound a little frantic since this was her car, afterall.

Megan resumed the driver's seat, they dropped me off at my car, and we all went en route Sharon's house. I had to stop at my house first, and by the time I got to Sharon's, Megan was sitting in the middle of the cul-de-sac on her street, illuminated in the orange light of a flashlight with her guitar.

Megan broke into a Strokes song, and Sharon and I began singing along with her:

In many ways, they'll miss the good old days

Someday, Someday

The Bridgewater Reservoir

After our failed attempts to find interesting things in Long Hill, Sharon and I ended up at a reservoir in Bridgewater. I got confused trying to get there, since my sense of direction is subpar and I pulled into the parking lot of a Quick Stop/Check/Mart, frantically flipping through my map of New Jersey trying to find Chimney Rock Road.

The windows in my beat up Taurus were open, since my air conditioner only works when it feels like it, and an older man in the car next to mine heard me cursing loudly at the map, wondering where the fuck Chimney Rock Road was.

"Do you need help?" He yelled over from his car. When I asked him where Chimney Rock Road was, he smiled a little and said, "You're on it."

And with that, I felt embarrassed, thanked him, and got back onto the road. The parking on Chimney Rock Road is basically non existent, and I squeezed my car in between two larger vehicles and Sharon and I crossed the street to enter the reservoir.

We walked through the open fence door next to a sign that said, "No Swimming or Diving- Subsurface Rocks" in big letters. I read the sign out loud absent mindedly as we passed.

"There's swimming here?" Sharon asked.

"No... that means there's no swimming here," I said matter-of-factly.

She looked at me with a 'where's your sense of adventure?' look and repeated, "That means there's swimming here."

We continued up the path for a little, and ended up on a bizarre overlook that I wish I could label with a name. There was a caged portion, and a walkway, and we only had access to the walkway. On the bank below us was a man fishing and a couple with kids. The family all sat down on the rocks and grass that made up the beach watching us with confused looks, unspeaking. I stayed towards the middle of the overlook, my fear of heights taking over. I know it's irrational, but I couldn't help but imagine myself falling over the bars on the side and tumbling into the water where I would surely hit those subsurface rocks.

I took a few pictures of the view and the overlook, and then we walked back onto the path. We continued up it for a few minutes when we came across a bunch of old cars in the woods. I've seen this a couple of times before, old cars in the middle of the woods. I can't help but wonder--why would you leave your car in the woods? Is it really that hard to take it to a junk yard? And in this case, why would you leave three cars in the woods?

Two were painted--one with actual paint, and one with grafitti. The other one was extremely rusty and didn't really have all that much coating left on it. From head on, the old designs and paint made them look like the ruins of the cars in that animated movie, Cars. They looked like what happened to the characters' faces once they got old. When cars get older, their faces change just like people's.

"I wonder if I can take one of these steering wheels," Sharon asked, and pulled at one, but without any luck of being able to get it loose.

We got back up on the path, wondering if we had stepped in a bunch of a poison ivy on our detour to the cars. Eventually, we came to some rocks, and another fence that enclosed a huge quarry. I knew this quarry was either the Bridgewater or Warren quarry, or perhaps the two towns shared it, since it's located in both places.

The quarry juts up from the ground with its huge red stones, like a mediocre, miniscule version of the Grand Canyon--the Jersey version. Sharon said it looked like Jurassic Park. I took a bunch of pictures, and then when Sharon decided to hop onto one of the closest rocks, I followed.

I looked down at the stone and suddenly realized that I had once kissed an ex-boyfriend on that rock. It was a weird thought, and when I told Sharon, I felt a little uneasy.

We got back on the trail and I said, "I wish I didn't remember things from past relationships. It always feels weird. I guess I always feel like the other person wouldn't remember, and then I do." That thought hits me a lot, and it makes me feel embarrassed, and I can't quite put my finger on why.

Sharon nodded, "I was talking about this yesterday--I feel like I have a really great long term memory, and you might be like that too. I remember a lot of little, insignificant things from the past. I was reading this blog and the girl writing it was talking about how she remembers every little, nice thing people do for her, and that they usually forget doing it, and so she always ends up loving them more than they love her."

We were silent for a moment, going over that concept in our minds. Then the conversation that I'm sure happens between many other college sophomores began, the one about relationships and dating and hooking up. We told our stories, even though we both knew each other's stories already, and then we told our friends' stories, and our families' stories.

The rest of the trail was pretty uneventful, and we walked back down and to my car. We got ice cream at Gabriel's Fountain, a cute little place in Bridgewater that has delicious food, ran into some friends from high school, and then drove around for a while, listening to bands from New Jersey.

"Do you think people from other states just drive around like this?" Sharon asked.

"I'm not sure. I feel like they must. But I think there's just something about Jersey. Everyone always ends up 'going for a drive' in Jersey. 'Cause it's just a state of endless suburbs."

And with that we continued into the night, driving past the same sights we had driven past a hundred times, with the windows down and the music blasting.

Long Hill Township: The Adventure Begins at Home

Long Hill Township in central New Jersey is made up of three small towns--Gillette, Stirling, and Millington. Although, Gillette has a small section of the town, Meyersville, that people often consider to be the forth town in the township. Long Hill has no movie theater or bowling alley. Yet, it has over twenty restaurants and a few sections of town for businesses--local and corporate. Long Hill shares an exit on Route 78 with two other towns, and on the whole, is relatively unimpressive with its 12.13 miles of land.

But it's where I grew up, so its simplicity is often something I long for when I'm in other places. My grandparents built their own house in Gillette, and eventually my dad moved onto the street I live on now. Except he lived in a different house. When he married my mom, they settled in across the street from the house he once shared with several roommates. Until I went to college, I had never lived anywhere else. I didn't even go to camp when I was little, so all of my time had been spent bumming around Long Hill and the neighboring towns.

And today started off like many other days in my past. I met my friend, Sharon, for lunch at a local Panera. Sharon and I have been to Panera so many times in the past seven years of friendship, that I've probably spent enough money there to cover my first year of college loans.

I told her that I wanted to start blogging, and that I needed a project. "I don't want to just complain about my life over the Internet. It makes me uncomfortable," I said to her, eating my typical salad with balsamic vinaigrette. "I'm thinking of going to places in New Jersey and writing about them."

She smiled, "I like that idea."

And so it began. We decided to start at home, even though Long Hill was far less exciting than neighboring towns. Our first stop was the Elm Street School in Stirling. There are three schools in Long Hill--Gillette, Millington, and Central. Elm Street School has gone down in local history as the creepy, old abandoned school of the past. My dad went there, back when it was up and running, except he wasn't supposed to. On his first day of kindergarten he got on the wrong bus along with a few other kids from his street and they ended up there, crying, dressed in typical 1950's first day of school attire.

Elm Street School in 2009, however, appeared to be less than exciting. According to some signs we saw laying around, the building is now an office for a surveying company. The only creepy part was the spider web that lined one of the stoops.

We decided to visit a few other spots in Long Hill. We wandered around the back of a restaurant/bar, the Stirling Hotel. It used to actually be a hotel, but now it's a place where locals go for burgers and beer. Many generations of men in my family have gotten drunk in there, and one time, when I was little, a few other younger kids and I found a tree house in the back part of the property. I guess its been taken down since 2002, though, cause Sharon and I had no luck finding it.

We road up Main Street a little further to where Long Hill's old library used to be (it's now relocated to Gillette), in hopes that we could find some old grave stones of ex-Long Hillians that used to be burried and marked by grave stones at the side of the building. But they were gone as well, so we walked into the woods where we used to hang out in middle school.

"One time, in sixth grade, I was walking in these woods," Sharon began. "And these eighth grade boys stopped me and asked me what I was doing. They told me that I wasn't allowed to come back into the woods again, or something stupid like that. And now we're sophomores in college, and eighth grade boys would either ignore or us... or maybe try to hit on us."

"I feel like you know you're an adult when eighth grade boys just completely ignore your existence and don't try to give you a hard time. 'Cause at that point, you're just too old to be bothered with," I said, as we crossed a little bridge over the stream, wandering around and reliving the time when we were twelve.

We still hadn't found anything particularly weird or exciting, so in a last final attempt, we road to the ruins of Archie's house. Archie was this man in Meyersville who sold ice skates and dolls and other miscellaneous items out of partially dillapidated buildings in his back yard until he died. He also had pet deer. There was a car on his property, so I made Sharon take a picture from the passenger's side window, and then we headed back onto the main road to avoid pissing off whoever was in the house.

The first exploration of the Summer of Jersey had been pretty much unsuccessful. I wasn't really expecting much, though. Long Hill will always be my roots and my home, and I will always love it for being simple, but I will always become bored with it for those reasons. That's why I started exploring different towns, and eventually consciously chose to go to college out of state to get away, and see what else is out there.

It's weird to have to admit to myself that I'm slowly outgrowing my hometown and to realize that, perhaps, it's outgrowing me at the same time. The mysteries of the past are gone-- Elm Street School is an office building, the tree house and tombstones are gone, and Archie's dead and there are no more pet deer--and there may be new mysteries someday, but right now the town has purged itself of what I used to love. It's becoming a suburb with no stories, and I want it to be a suburb with a history. I can't even remember which one of us started to change first.

~Sarah

PS- I appologize for the amatuer photography!

Summer of the Old and the New Jersey

I have a love-hate relationship with New Jersey. I guess it’s mostly a love relationship, but sometimes my small town and small state just seem like ground I’ve already covered so many times that there can’t possibly be anything left there for me. I’ve been to all of the restaurants in my town, and most of the ones in the neighboring towns. I’ve watched movies in all of the theaters within thirty minutes of my house. I’ve bowled in the two bowling alleys close to me. I’ve enjoyed the Jersey Shore countless times.

This year, I lived in a state that wasn’t New Jersey for the first time when I left my home to go to college in New York. Being away was exciting. There were new places to go and new people to meet every day. When the school year ended, I was worried about returning to New Jersey. I felt like I was going to have to put the adventure of living somewhere new and enjoying this new life I had begun on hold for four months until the fall semester started.

But sometimes you can start small. If everyday can’t be an adventure, you can have an adventure here and there.

If you're from New Jersey, you probably know what "Weird New Jersey" is--the magazine (also, book and website) that tracks unusual places around the state, from the pine barrens, to the suburbs, to the shore. I've been to a handful of the places mentioned by the writers, and I want to go to more. I also know (and know of) some unusual sights and places close to my home that haven't made their way into the public eye yet.

This summer is going to be a revival of the old secret spots my friends and I explored when we were younger, as well as a discovery of the new places in Jersey I've never seen. My summers have always been summers spent in Jersey. But this year, it's going to be the summer of Jersey.

~Sarah