The Jersey Devil and I are just good friends.  Honest.  But we have history.  In fact, our relationship goes back quite a few years. 

A friend of mine read a lot of James Fenimore Cooper as a child, and it had affected his mind.  He was forever planning camping trips and dragging a whole bunch of us with him.  I hated everything, the bugs, the dirt.  Did I mention the bugs?  But we all had that kind of deeply binding spiritual connection that results from having consumed a lot of beer together in high school, so I always tagged along, complaining with every step.  We did the Appalachian Trail and the Delaware Water Gap, Walden Pond and Lake Champlain.  (I told you about the bugs, right?)  Then came that fateful summer.  Knowing I was a sucker for spooky places, my friend kept hinting about ghost towns and other eerie ruins in the New Jersey pine barrens.  Secretly intrigued, though with my usual vast show of reluctance, I agreed to yet another expedition.

Four of us ventured out, our backpacks crammed into a little Datsun.  On the highway, I remember someone saying, “It’s like I’ve been looking at these trees all my life – must’ve been down this road about a million times.  You know?  On the way to the shore and stuff?  Guess I always figured, a few yards in, there had to be another road or some houses.  Something.  But it’s … just … woods.”

Once off the highway, we got lost.  I imagine that’s pretty much the first thing most people do in the pines.  The road twisted and split into sand trails, and almost on cue, the sky darkened.  (“Oh, swell,” I’m thinking, “Special effects.”)  Suddenly, pine trees lashed in a thunderstorm, as line squalls swept the woods.  The car shuddered and splashed.

A sudden lake drowned the woods, and we were in the middle of it.  In.  The middle.  Water sheeted up on either side of us, and everyone screamed.  (Okay, so maybe it was just me.)  An instant later, the storm slaked to a drizzle.  But the car remained thoroughly bogged.

After much discussion, someone suggested we hike back to that old, deserted-looking farmhouse we’d passed about a mile or so down the road.

“Are you all nuts?” I inquired politely.  “What, like none of you has ever seen a horror movie?”

However, since my friends were accustomed to ignoring my complaints, and since other options did not present themselves, we all started out for the farmhouse.  I took maybe three steps before my foot sank in swampy muck, and something clicked agonizingly in my ankle.  I screamed. 

“What now?” my friends asked patiently.

I tried to walk and screamed some more. 

“You wait with the car,” one of my friends advised.  “We’ll go for help.”

Now if you saw this in a horror movie, you’d think, “What kind of a moron would wait with the car?”  I mean, you know he’s going to be the first one the zombies get.  Right?

By now the drizzle had become a steady, saturating mist.  Windows rolled up, doors locked, I watched my friends go splashing off through the woods … and tried to persuade myself that what I heard was only the wind.  I hate that sound.  My shoulder pressed uncomfortably up against the door, so I shifted position, but a moment later was pressing against the door again.

The car had developed a definite list to starboard.  And my feet were getting wet.  I checked the back seat: several inches of water, rising as I watched.  “That’s it.”  As I climbed out the window onto the roof, the car lurched to the other side and sank about a foot.

I didn’t know about the aquifer at the time.  All that rain water, filtering down, created this percolating effect.  Instant quicksand.  Huddled there on the roof of the sinking car, I listened to the wind raise a wet keening through the branches of those dwarfish, misshapen trees.  And it got dark quickly.  Very quickly.  I started to shiver.

Things I hadn’t thought about in years began to drift through my mind, campfire stories about the weird, inbred people who were supposed to live out here – pineys their called – and tales of the demon who haunted these woods.  Much later (after months of serious research) I would discover that the legend of the Leeds Devil was the oldest and most consistent oral myth tradition in America.  But even then I could sense an aura.  A presence.  I understood why the myth had been born … why people had always felt there to be something ungodly here.     

Something thrashed through the brush.  Behind me, a jolting roar – I whirled around to confront two blazing orbs.  Pines toppled, and I fell off the car.  Choking on two feet of water, I struggled to rise as a tractor mowed effortlessly through the trees, its headlights scything the woods.  I vividly recall the “Piney Power” bumper sticker.

My friends were back.  It seems the deserted-looking farmhouse had indeed been abandoned.  After wandering a bit, they’d found a shack where the owner held a shotgun on them and laughed while they ran.  Eventually, they’d found a farm and somebody who knew somebody who had a friend who had a tractor and could give us a tow.  They’d met some good people, several of whom expressed concern because the back road where they’d left me was notorious for its use by a vicious gang of car thieves.

On the damp ride to the medical center to get my ankle looked at, we all kept our eyes fixed on the trees.  They didn’t seem familiar or ordinary anymore. 

They never would again.

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