In Defense of New Jersey and its People
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Yesterday my friend and I took a walk with her dog in the quiet residential neighborhood where we both live, just outside of Morristown, NJ. It was a brisk evening, just before dinner, and passing by a white cedar bush next to the sidewalk, I got the idea to take a few sprigs to make cedar tea when I eventually made my way back home, as I had done many times in growing up in my home state of Vermont. My friend made a funny face and nervously looked over her shoulder to see if anyone else had seen me.
“We don’t do that here,” She said. “This is New Jersey. They probably sprayed this with something.”
I work part-time for an enormous garden center in a neighboring town, comparable to a Lowe’s or Home Depot if they had a large nursery where trees and perennials are sold. I’m not sure what our neighbors could have possibly sprayed, but I am familiar with this region's zealousness to spray their yard with all kinds of things.
I want to preface this piece by repeating myself — I am an outsider. I didn’t grow up in New Jersey. I have no ulterior motive that requires defense of this state. I didn’t grow up on Taylor Ham (or pork roll, depending on which part of New Jersey you hail from). None of my childhood friends grew up to be police officers. I can’t remember what exit to take to get to the house I grew up in. But irregardless, I love New Jersey.
My love affair with New Jersey started a near-decade ago, a few years after Hurricane Sandy hit, a monumentally horrific event that many other people living in this state use as a guide to measuring the timelines of their lives; before and after the storm. I was a 20-year-old traveler kid hitching up the coast to visit my best friend, Juice in his hometown of Cranford on my way to Vermont, and eventually Alaska to work on a fishing boat for the summer. I started in North Carolina, eventually getting dropped off in Lambertville where I spent the night smoking grass and listening to records with some other friends I had met along the way. I woke up hungover and slightly panicked about the trip ahead.
“You want to hitchhike in New Jersey?” My friend had bewilderedly said to me the night before. “Good luck with that!”
For most of my life, I had been told stories about the type of people who lived here. Unfriendly. Loud. Trashy. If you’ve heard of New Jersey, you’ve probably heard these same stereotypes. My theory had long been that they originated with the introduction of the 2009 reality TV show Jersey Shore, but I’ve since seen media that suggests the “trashy New Jersey” stereotype has been around much longer. Maybe it first arrived with the reputation of the Mafia’s business operations here. Or the massive industrialization that exists in factories all over Trenton, Cambden, and Newark. Wherever it came from, it stuck. And New Jersey’s trashy, unfriendly reputation poked at my anxiety as I stood at the side of Route 29 with my thumb nervously pointing to Frenchtown.
I was picked up in less than five minutes.
The driver was a 50-something stalky man with a kind smile, a bald head, and glasses. “I can’t take you all the way to Cranford he said, but let me buy you a coffee here in Frenchtown.” I was taken aback. Surely this was a fluke and he was just going to buy the coffee so he can spit on it and hand it back to me. We walked into a local espresso joint where I was greeted by a sweet, middle-aged, olive-skinned, woman, lovingly capping my macchiato with foam.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked her.
“No problem, honey.” I dialed the number of an old flame I knew was living in Frenchtown for the summer. I was on a mission to reach my friend in Cranford, but maybe it was worth paying her a visit before heading back down the road.
“I’m working all day today!” She said disappointingly. “But I just texted a few friends, they’ll meet up with you and show you a good time.” I stepped outside the coffee joint to roll a cigarette. Part of me was anxious to get back on the road while there was still daylight. But the other part of my 20-year-old self couldn't resist a good time. I looked around the town and my senses were delighted. There were old men embracing each other, and speaking in Italian, brick buildings that held local artist galleries, and a river that babbled through town and under old bridges built with raw iron and weathered wood. Shaking the stars from my eyes, I was approached by three young men, all wearing sunglasses and bleach-white t-shirts. One carried an electric guitar and wore a red bandana as a sweatband, and another had greasy slicked-back black hair.
“You Gene?” He asked.
“Yep.” I smiled and shook their hands.
“I’m Rick. Shannon sent us. We’re all headed to play some music, you wanna come along?”
We walked along the river on a trail that was surrounded on both sides by poison ivy and sycamore trees, to a storage facility where the sound of distorted electric guitar rang out over the hot, sun-beaten blacktop of the parking lot. A young man with a blonde pompadour waved and motioned us into one of the units that was equipped with a couch, a drum kit, two guitars, amps, and recording equipment. Posters of Bruce Springsteen and Green Day were hung proudly on the wall.
“The owner knows we crash here sometimes. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it. We mostly use it as a recording studio.” The other boys smiled cheekily over their prized clubhouse.
As the evening began to set in, we moved toward the hills where some other local kids were starting a bonfire. On the way, we stopped at a convenience store (not a gas station) where the blonde boy bought some beer with a fake ID. The other boys pooled their money together and raised enough for a 30-rack. I didn’t have any money to my name, and I embarrassedly told them so.
“I’ll back him up,” Rick said, smiling at me through his sunglasses. He handed an extra five-dollar bill to the blonde boy. In the eyes of a 20-year-old traveler kid, this was the purest expression of love.
In the dirt lot that lead to the bonfire, the four of us sat in the car waiting for the girls to show up; Shannon and her friend, Erin were meeting us there. The guy sitting next to me looked me up and down, slurping a Miller Highlife. “How much for the shirt?” He asked. It was the first thing he said to me all afternoon. I started to laugh at the absurdness of the question, and he followed, his beer gut shaking up and down.
The girls pulled into the lot and we all got out together. Shannon flashed me a toothy smile and walked over to me. Her green eyes looked like limes in the full moonlight. I swooned at the dream girl in dream-town and I reached for her hand, but she politely pulled it away and placed it on her backpack strap.
The six of us walked together in the dark, up a steep, narrow path that lead to an overlook. My nose was pierced by the smell of hotdogs roasting over burning pallets, and my eyes met about fifty locals around our age. They were loud. They were crass. But they weren't unkind. Rick patted my back and handed me a beer.
At some point in the night, I got separated from my new friends. I circled around the fire looking for Shannon and bumped into a guy shouting “PAPERS? WHO’S GOT FUCKING PAPERS?”
“Rolling papers? Here — ” I took a rolling paper out of my pocket and handed it to him. He smiled a desperate smile.
“Yo, thank you, can you believe this shit? Fucking New Jersey. Nobody has shit to spare. Makes me sick.” He rolled a joint, lit it, and handed it to me. I could have corrected him and told him he was wrong; that I was having a wonderful time, and that people in New Jersey were more giving and kind than I could have ever imagined, but then I would be proving his point. The only person there with a paper to spare was an outsider.
The joint (or maybe it was the fumes from flaming pressurized lumber) started to hit me and I decided to sit down and look at the full moon reflecting over the river hundreds of feet below where I sat. I thought of the people I met, and the people that lived in the tiny houses below my feet, what their lives must be like, and what their dreams were made of. Shannon found me there and sat next to me, and we quietly looked together for a few minutes.
“How do you know these guys?” I asked her. “I’m having so much fun with them.”
“They're losers” She laughed. “I used to date Rick.”
“Really? He must not know about me and you then, huh?”
“No, he does. He’s just a nice guy.” I looked over my shoulder and saw him walking towards us. He smiled the biggest grin I had seen him smile all day. It was late (or early), and I started to wonder where I was going to sleep that night. My question was answered when Rick said, “We’re about to head out. My mom’s got a cot rolled out for you. I think there’s leftover pizza too if you’re interested.”
“Interested? Does the pope shit in his hat?” Shannon laughed.
In the morning, Rick and I sat at his mother’s kitchen table, drank coffee, and played cards, while his mother cooked breakfast for us, chatting away with stories of Rick’s childhood. The kitchen had 70s orange and white linoleum tile and fake wood-paneled walls that extended to the adjacent living room.
“He was a real terror.” She said with a thick Jersey accent. Her hair was cut in a bob, and dyed red; her liver-spotted hands grasped a fork that she used to flip the bacon frying in her cast iron pan. “Every morning, just as much energy as a bull. One day, I had enough and I screamed ‘SIT DOWN! EAT YOUR BREAKFAST!’ and somthin’ must have clicked!” She laughed. “Look how quiet he is now!” I looked at Rick, and he cracked a loving smile at his mom. I laughed and took a sip of coffee.
After a late morning of drinking coffee and watching cartoons, Rick made plans to drive to Somerville to a skate shop and offered to give me a ride. It would put me a lot closer to Cranford to meet my friend so I happily agreed to go along. He let me out at the Somerville Shopping Center.
“It’s been real,” I said to Rick, gathering my things from his car. “Thank you for everything.”
“Don’t mention it.” He said. And he meant it.
I think the saddest thing about the “rude and dirty” New Jersey stereotype is that it seems to be repeated more by people from New Jersey than outsiders like myself, whether it’s done so ironically or not. My friend showed concern for me when I tried, maybe naively, to harvest cedar in our neighborhood. The rolling paper guy at the bonfire expressed frustration at his fellow statesmen when no one had a spare rolling paper. In Lambertville, my friend laughed at me when I said that I would hitchhike to Cranford in one day, which I failed to accomplish not because people were unfriendly, but because they were too friendly. And in fact, it was for the same reason I never made it to my fishing boat job in Alaska.
When I made it to Cranford, days turned into weeks quicker than I could keep track of. I spent the dog days of summer laughing with my friends until my face felt like it would burst, cooking beans over an open fire, learning to surf on the expansive Jersey coastline, and playing music on rooftops of houses built hundreds of years before I was born and eating the sassafras leaves that shaded us while we sang our songs for the neighborhood. In the weeks that I lived in Cranford, I never needed anything. I never went hungry, and I always had a place to lay my head. You can say that maybe I got lucky, and just had really good friends. But now that I’ve spent two summers here, in a completely different part of the state and with different friends, I feel like I might be safe in saying that the misconception of this state and the people living here is wrong.
I’ve lived in many states including Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota, Montana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Illinois, and I love them all for their own reasons, but the people I’ve met here have genuine love in them. And if you don’t believe me, come see it for yourself. You’ll have people you just met inviting you to come to the city with them for a night on the town. You’ll have old men pulling out their bill-folds to pay you for helping them cross the street. You’ll also experience the natural beauty that I haven’t even begun to describe in this piece including the beautiful isolation of the Pine Barrens, historic hikes through Jockey Hollow where George Washington wintered his troops, and 130 beautiful miles of coastline, proving that this state is much more than the snarky claim that it’s “the armpit of America”.
And if you do make your way out here, send me a line — I’d love to show you around.
