I'm a Jersey guy, through and through.
  When I joined the Navy to see the world, I instead got stationed in Philadelphia and ended up living here. I went to college here, married two Jersey girls, raised my family here. I work here, too, for The Star-Ledger, the state's biggest and best newspaper.
  So far I've lived in 15 different towns and six different counties in New Jersey, from the family homestead in Spring Lake (born) to the parkside Normandy Tudor in Summit (raised) to a boarding house in Woodbury and an apartment in West Deptford (Navy days) to a dorm room in New  Brunswick (college) to a first-married apartment in Bloomfield to a first-home wreck of a handyman's special in Morris Township, to a co-op efficiency in East Orange (after the wreck of the first marriage) to a co-owned mini-manse Victorian in Maplewood (with two fireplaces in the  living room) to a couple of rooming houses in Madison and Chatham Township, to an apartment in Denville, then one in Boonton, to a rented house with my new wife in Boonton Township, to our first home, a cozy post-war Cape in Boonton, then a cozy post-war Cape in Mountain Lakes and, maybe, finally, mercifully, to the 1949 split level which is walking distance to all schools  and big enough to accommodate all the kids.
And that's just my personal life.
My professional life moved me around the state, too. I started in  the newspaper business right out of the service as a $17-a-night stringer,  then $90-a-week part-time sportswriter, for the Daily Record of Morristown,  spending most evenings and Saturday nights in either town council chambers  or high school gyms throughout Morris and Sussex Counties. Then I did two  years in the Jersey Rust Belt as an editor at The (now-dead) News Tribune.  (Does anybody else miss the paper's art deco cartoon newsboy that overlooked  the Woodbridge turnpike exchange?) After a five-year stint as a nearly  well-known sports columnist in New York, I returned to Jersey, to The  Star-Ledger, the paper I'd grown up with.
  For the most part, my early job at the Ledger was to go out and  write about things that were interesting. Simple enough. I not only knew the  state from my many moves, but had toured it as a kid with my father, a  teacher with great geographic, historical and social curiosity and the  restlessness to explore it.
  My father was born in 1923, a member of the Great American Middle  Class that would elevate car culture in America. His generation was the  first to truly experience the wholesale freedom of the automobile ... his  generation was the first to enjoy the automobile's mass-production  affordability, emerging reliablity and the burgeoning network of good roads. 
  They could, anytime they wanted, "go for a ride." They could  explore. They could drive beyond the cities and transportation hubs, deep  into the countryside and find quiet, hidden places. After World War II,  these people moved away from cities simply because they knew they could.
  During the war, my father traveled extensively through Europe and  the Mideast, South America and the South Pacific, and visited nearly every  port in the United States. He had lived in Italy part-time as a boy and in  Mexico as a G.I. Bill student, so he was fluent in English and Italian, and  conversant in Spanish and French. He wanted to be a language teacher, but in  the full rut of the baby boom, found it easier to get work as an elementary  school teacher.
  With his growing family in the 1950s and 60s and 70s, he became a  weekend wanderer, and I discovered much of New Jersey leaning up against the  front bench seat of whatever station wagon we had, looking over his  shoulder, watching the road go by, learning. He seemed to know a little bit  about everything, everywhere - The Shore, the Pine Barrens, the cities, the  mountains and farmlands. We climbed the Statue of Liberty, the High Point  Monument and the lighthouses at Barnegat and Cape May. We discovered the  deserted villages at Allaire and Batsto, swam at Hopatcong and Spruce Run,  walked the streets of country towns like Clinton, Flemington and  Lambertville. We saw the grand mansions of Short Hills and Cape May,  witnessed the elegant decay of High Street in Newark and the downtowns that  became ghost towns in Asbury Park, Paterson and Plainfield. We saw where  Edison, Einstein and Whitman worked, where Washington's legend was made,  where Hamilton's illustrious life ended. We heard the thunder of the Great  Falls, and the wind rush though the dune grass at Island Beach in dead  winter. We saw hawks circling and deer bolting.
  I got my driver's license in 1974 and quickly found I had inherited  my father's restlessness. First in his Chevelle, then in my Honda Civic, I  explored the backroads, covering great distances, plunging the depths of the  state. I climbed the winding ridges in the Highlands, kicked up dirt on the  sandy roads of the Pinelands, found the dead-ends down to the Delaware River  and through the grasslands to the Delaware Bay, traversed the Great Swamp  with lights out in the dark, trespassed on the private roads of the Somerset  Hills, felt the car shudder on Ocean Avenue during winter Nor'easters.
  The goal was always the same: to travel unobstructed. To escape the  suburbs, and their downtowns and their traffic lights and their school zones  and their local cops and their station wagons doing 35 in a 40. To find the  flat country roads, or those that wound and climbed and dropped through the  hills of the countryside. To find the roads that made you want a two-seat  British roadster, or a full-dresser Harley.
  To get lost - and lost in daydreams. To be the stranger in the  diner, the traveling loner.
  To be alone together, to smoke cigarettes and think, or smoke  cigarettes and talk - to ride in silence in the company of someone happy to  be there, her head on your shoulder. To find the private hillside or curve  by the river, to be the one who found those places, to be the one who made  those memories.
  To see great estates with their mansions hidden by mature trees at  the end of long driveways and wonder, who lives there? and dream about  possibilities and futures. To the see abandoned farms with their sagging  Victorian houses and collapsed barns, and worry about how broken life could  become.
  To see animals: thoroughbreds and draft horses, the regal llamas and  common sheep, the dignified but doomed Black Angus and the dumb,  prehistoric-looking Jersey milkers.
  These rides, always endless, always too short, helped me discover  lots of things - about myself, about girls, and about our compact little  state. I learned New Jersey was a place of enormous geologic, geographic and  cultural scope, a place worthy of scientific and social study, a place where  a writer could work.
  The great outcrops of rock in the north and the flatlands of the  south tell the story of prehistoric New Jersey, an abridged version of Earth  history. Likewise, the story of man in New Jersey is a microcosm of American  history.
  Let's start at the beginning.
  The Precambrian granite and crystalline rock formations of the  Highlands are among the earliest on Earth, dating back four and a half  billion years. The Kittatinny Ridge and Valley in the extreme northwest  corner of the state began forming in the Paleozoic Era, about five hundred  and seventy million years ago, when ocean life first appeared, until the  final folding of the Appalachians in the Permian Period, when insects and  reptiles roamed the earth.
  The sedimentary rock of the Piedmont, the area between the Highlands  and the Coastal Plains, was formed during the Triassic and Jurassic Periods  of the Mesozoic Era, beginning two hundred and twenty-five million years ago  when birds and early dinosaurs made their entrance. The Inner Coastal Plain,  stretching from the Raritan Bay down to Gloucester County at a forty-five  degree angle, was formed during the Cretaceous Period, when dinosaur life  reached full bloom. Finally, the Outer Coastal Plain formed mostly in  Tertiary Period of the Cenazoic Era, beginning sixty-five million years ago,  as primitive mammals developed. Some of the fringes of the Outer Coastal  Plain developed during the relatively recent Quaternary Period, the time  during which humankind evolved and dominated the earth.
  And this is why you find unique, hard flourescent minerals in  Franklin, utilitarian traprock in the quarries of the Watchungs, and the  permeable, loose sedimentary rock in the water-rich Pinelands.
  And this is why New Jersey's surface geography - from the dizzying  cliffs of the Palisades, to the blunted peaks of the Highlands and  Kittatinny Ridges, to the rolling swells of the Morris, Hunterdon and  Somerset Hills, to the soil-wealthy agricultural belts through Monmouth and  the deep south counties, to the flat, sandy beaches of the 127-mile "Jersey  Shore" beginning at Sandy Hook and ending at Cape May, to the still-desolate  marshlands of the Delaware Bay - is a landscape artist's dream.
  These drastic natural differences, along with natural resources that  shaped industry, have fed cultural diversity, too. Diversity was a buzzword  in Clinton-era America trumpeting the nation's growing racial, religious and  ethnic mix. The U.S. Census 2000 data on New Jersey shows as many Hispanics  as African-Americans, and triple digit rise in Asians - especially in parts  of Bergen and Middlesex counties.
  But the state has always been ethnically and culturally diverse:  When the first federal census was taken in 1790, New Jerseyans of English  descent were already in the minority (forty-seven percent). Sixteen percent  were Dutch, nine percent German, eight percent Scots and eight percent  African American. Only Pennsylvania, among the 13 colonies, had more kinds  of people living there. (By today's standards, this is hardly a beautiful  mosaic, but that doesn't mean all was well in Colonial America: The Dutch  and Swedes battled for control of South Jersey in the early 1600s,  Presbyterians and Episcopalians burned each other's churches down during the  American Revolution, and the ethnic-clustering that later would be  associated with blue-collar neighborhoods in industrial cities first took  hold in the early American farmlands).
  Likewise, New Jersey's early cultural diversity among white people  was a byproduct of the landscape ... the whalers, fishermen and other  sea-goers of the shore region, the miners of the Highlands, the dairy  farmers of rock-strewn Warren and Sussex, the vegetable of Central and South  Jersey, the muskrat trappers and oystermen of the Delaware Bay, all created  cultures inherent to their regions. The later cultural diversity driven by  new flavors of immigrants only added to the mix.
  All of this, the dramatic difference in landscape, the regional  differences of its people, is the New Jersey I know.
  It is a place of infinite natural beauty, a place of intricate human  patterns. A place where you can see a lot in a little time. This is, so  simply put, the over-riding theme of this book.
  There is no shortage of ways to get around New Jersey by car.
  Two Interstates (78 and 80) begin their cross-country treks here,  linking the New York area with points west. The Turnpike is the overland  route between New York and Philadelphia, a modern road that has superceded  many historic routes. The Parkway runs the state north to south, delivering  the tourism economy to the shore.
  The circuitous Interstate 287 loops the metropolitan area,  connecting Highlands to Somerset Hills to the Middlesex chemical belt.  Interstate 195 bee-lines from Trenton to the shore, like a belt through the  state waist. The Atlantic City Expressway can move you from the Philadelphia  suburbs gameland in just about an hour.
  Then there are the U.S. Highways - 1, 9, 22, 30, 40, 130, 202 and  206 - and 2,267 miles of State Highways marked by their circular shields.
  All these roads make up the state's primary network of roads.
  But they won't take you into every corner of the state, to out-  of-the-way places like Plumbsock or Myrtle Grove in Sussex County, or  Cedarville and Dividing Creek in Cumberland, or Rosemont in lower Hunterdon,  or Pipers Corner in the heart of the Pinelands.
  They won't take you deep into the Stokes, Wharton or Belleplain  state forests. They won't take you along the stagnant waters of the old  Delaware and Raritan Canals in Griggstown, or the trout-rich white waters of  the South Branch of the Raritan, or the deep, mountain lakes of the  Kittatinny chain. They won't take you over the one of the earliest roads on  the continent, the Old Mine Road in Sussex County, or to Sergeantsville, the  home of the state's last covered bridge.
  They won't take you to the place where George Washington wrote his  farewell orders at Rocky Hill, or the tavern at Centerton where Lafayette  may have helped plot Revolution strategy or the town of Swartswood, where a  British Colonial officer named Anthony Swartwout and most of his family were  massacred by Indians.
  To truly explore New Jersey, you have to take the secondary roads.  Backroads, New Jersey.
  The secondary roads - also known as the inter-county roads or 500  series, are a 6,788-mile network of mostly one-lane highways. These roads,  marked by blue and yellow five-sided shields bearing county names make up  over 20 percent of New Jersey's 33,741 miles of public roads.
  The odd-numbered 500 roads run north-south, the evens go east-west. 
  Route 501 - the first secondary - runs from the upper northeast  corner of the state at Rockleigh in Bergen County, down along the Hudson  River through Hoboken and Jersey City and ends at the Bayonne Bridge. Route  502, the first east-west road, goes from Alpine, overlooking the Hudson, and  heads uphill to Oakland some 20 miles away.
  The highest-numbered secondary road is 585, that skirts Abesecon and  Lukes bays in Atlantic County, then reappears as a four-mile spur connecting  Burleigh to State Highway 47 halfway down the Cape May peninsula.
  The longest - and perhaps most beautiful - is Route 519, which  clocks in at about 87 miles from Rosemont in lower Hunterdon County to Mount  Salem in Sussex, just south of High Point. The next longest, at 84 miles is  527, which runs from Singac at the Essex-Passaic County border to just  outside Toms River in Ocean County.
  The "500 roads" were set up as a network by the state Legislature  just before the federal Interstate Highway Act of 1956. The purpose was to  set up a secondary road network to complement the state highway system,  which was formed in 1912, and to make the inter-county roads eligible for  federal funds.
  What the secondary road system provides is a well-maintained network  of "backroads." The "500 roads" good roads - smoothly paved and clearly  marked as they wind through the countryside, connecting New Jersey's small  towns and main streets.
  These roads give you a chance to see first-hand New Jersey's  geologic diversity. The 63-mile drive from Hightstown to Tuckerton on Route  539 begins in the soil-rich open farmlands of Central Jersey. Before long,  the soil turns sandy and the stubby pines crop up, as the road cuts south  through the Pinelands. Soon enough, the pines all but disappear, the sandy  soil becomes all sand and the road ends on the coast.
  The 54-mile drive on Route 553 gives a similar view of changing  geography and its effect on local economies. Down in Port Norris, on the  Maurice River a mile from the Delaware Bay, the road goes past the remnants  of New Jersey's oystering industry, the hamlets of Bivalve and Shellpile.  This area is one of meandering streams traveling to the bay over marshy  lowlands, where the only thing that grows is swamp grass. Farther up 553  into Cumberland, Salem and Gloucester counties, the road cuts through one of  the richest agricultural areas on the east coast. The highly-mechanized  industrial farmers there produce millions of bushels of produce a year, and  it is not unusual to see migrant workers harvesting crops on smaller farms. 
  These "500 roads" are where you meet New Jersey history.
  Many of the secondary roads have their roots in Colonial times and  some go back to Native Americans. Route 511, which begins near Morristown  and ends at Greenwood Lake, follows a trail used by the Munci (a sub-tribe  of the Lenni Lenape Indians) through the Highlands. The trail area, which  followed the Wanaque River Valley out of Greenwood Lake down into the  Pompton area, was a fertile hunting and fishing corridor. Colonial Americans  found it useful, too. The water power of the mountain rivers and abundance  of iron ore in the region made it ideal for a string of foundries. The old  Indian trail became a much-traveled Colonial road, connecting the Morristown  area with the iron works at Hanover, Boonton and Ringwood, and serving as a  supply line for the Continental Army.
  These roads are where you understand New Jersey sociology.
  Route 510 in Newark begins its 31-mile crawl west as Market Street  in downtown Newark and tells the story of population migration in Twentieth  Century New Jersey. The road captures so much of what is New Jersey today:  the energy of the city and the placidity of the country, urban decay and  suburban sprawl, urban renewal and rural decay, the undeniable segregation  of races, the death of manufacturing and the rise of the service economy,  the historical and ever-present shift of affluence west.
  These roads are never the fastest or most direct way to get  anywhere. They meander. They go through residential areas and school zones.  They bog down as they become Main Street in many towns. But when you break  out of the towns and hit the country, they are a pleasure to drive.
  Let the people in a hurry take the Interstates, let the shoppers and  errand runners take the State Highways. Leave the secondary roads to the  explorers, and the restless, and the wanderers. And therein lies the true  beauty of the secondary roads - there is so much to see, and so few to see  it.
 

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