Bucket List Goal #4: Be part of a cranberry harvest.
On my second Thanksgiving in New York, which was actually celebrated in Pennsylvania, I discovered whole berry cranberry sauce. It rocked my world. I’d previously abstained from the tart treat, because people in the South - and sadly, most of the country - think it suffices to serve the canned kind. It doesn’t. Trust me.
So first I fell in love with cranberries, whether in a sauce or muffin or supplement, and then I saw Ocean Spray commercials like this:
Well, loan me some waders and call me Bob! I wanna do what these guys are pretending to do.
This was my dream deferred, and while drying up like a raisin - nay, a cranberry - in the sun sounds pretty good, I decided this should be the year. TBID enjoys exploring and missions. Plus, he always up for singing TV show theme songs with me in the car. There’s no better road trip partner.
Apparently, the place to go for a cranberry harvest is Nantucket, but the big cranberry shenanigans had already petered out. I settled on Whitesbog, New Jersey, a town that’s made cranberries and blueberries its claim to fame.
One another thing that’s special about Whitesbog: It’s pretty obscure. I couldn’t find very much information about it online. Where are the user-generated reviews by cranberry enthusiasts? I hoped the town wasn’t part of some fan fiction ring.
Whitesbog is part of the Pine Barrens, which I thought was pretty impressive until I found out that they’re really extensive and rife with pines no taller than the average high school basketball player. I told my friend Mike about my plans.
“Damn,” he said. “What are you trying to do - dispose of a body?”
That’s when I learned that talking about the glory of the Pine Barrens to some people from the Northeast is a little like gushing, “I found this amazing boutique with the chicest clothes. It’s called Old Navy!”
I printed out what information I could find about Whitesbog, including the contact information for some alpaca farm and a canoe rental place. Never mind maps! I have information concerning the whereabouts of some woolly mammals we’ll never be able to find anyway!
The weather forecast predicted a 99.3% chance of rainlikewhoa (official meteorological term). I assumed it would change. It always changes, right? Especially when you’ve already packed a backpack and rented a car?
No.
When TBID and I left early Saturday morning, everything was clear. We had a quick and dirty McDonald’s breakfast and stopped at a gas station. Things were looking gray. Hours later, we were surrounded by pine trees and not much else. Pulling off the main road, we decided to drive our rugged Volkswagen sedan down the long sand trails through the short evergreen thicket.
No corpses to be found. We parked and started walking down some foot trails that wound around infinitely linked, like those US Weekly diagrams of which celebrities have been romantically involved.
“If you run off to try to scare me,” I warned TBID. “We have a long ride back home. It’s a loooong time to give you the cold shoulder. But I will do it.”
We walked around five minutes and it started to rain. This is where things started to fall apart. There’s this well-known farm I wanted to stop by, but TBID turned onto a road marked “Authorized Personnel Only” and ended up on Fort Dix.
Surrounded by Hummers and signs about firearms, I started feeling a little conspicuous. TBID, the anti-war, left-leaning New York Jew, played it cool.
“Should I wave?” he asked. A camouflage wearing, gun-toting posse scowled at us from bivouac #75.
We eventually got out of army territory and found Joseph J. White Farm. I thought there’d be a bog tour or some guys wading through cranberries, but alas. They don’t do that in rain apparently. Stealthily, TBID and I drove up to the bogs and took pictures. We found a frog in one of them. If you look carefully at the close-up berry picture, you can see him. I wonder how many amphibians end up in cranberry juice.
The berries came in reds, purples, and yellows and really stood out against the dense gray clouds. I can’t think of a fruit that grows more beautifully.
Post-bog, TBID and I were starving and cranky. Excluding the possibilities of breaking into a mess hall or someone’s house, we weren’t sure where we’d find lunch nearby. So we decided, “Why not just go to another state for lunch?” As a native Texan, that idea is always so weird to me. We settled on Pennsylvania. TBID hadn’t pulled any Blair Witch crap out in the boonies. He’d earned himself a cheesesteak.
It rained. It stopped. It rained some more. We had mediocre lunch at two separate places. Then we drove around West Philadelphia and talked about whether The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme playground scene was filmed on a real Philly basketball court or on an urban set in Hollywood.
It rained until we got back to New York, so we couldn’t really walk around much. Nonetheless, I considered it just a drop in the bucket list.
I love that you want to do something so you do it. So many people just talk about doing things and it makes me want to punch them in the kidneys. Also, having been raised here in the Dirtee Jerzee, school trips to cranberry bogs happened a lot. The best part? Whipping hard cranberries at boys you liked, cutting their forehead open and not being allowed on the next trip to the cranberry bog. I may or may not know that from personal experience.
Hahaha. I have to try that sometime…