Pineys

I was doing my monthly shopping at the book store and a title caught my eye. “The Pines.” We’re all products of our experiences and perceive things through that prism. I was transported to my youth by the expression.

It was not a positive term. It was a euphemism for the benches you sat on, in the context that you were not on the starting team. It was a stigma to be “riding the pines.” It was also a motivator to go full out in practice.

I picked up the book and read the jacket copy. An even more poignant memory. It wasn’t about athletics. It was a horror story set in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

There are over a million acres of swampy cedar forest in South Jersey, straddling the roads we took from Philly to the shore. The waters are tea colored, due to high iron ore content in the sandy soil. It was never a hospitable place to inhabit.

Therefore, it harbored the dregs of society. The Pineys. Many of the impressions you may hold of deepest Appalachia apply here.

“It is a region aboriginal in savagery.” – “Atlantic Magazine,” 1858

“I have been shocked by the conditions I have found. Evidently these people are a serious menace to the state of New Jersey (that’s saying something). They have inbred till they have become a race of imbeciles, criminals and defectives.” – James Fielder, Governor of New Jersey (1914-17)

The seed of fact spawned legend. The lore spread about teenagers getting flat tires in the barrens and disappearing. The Greenies got them. This was a variation on the Piney theme. Denizens had turned green from eating pine needles. And teenagers, apparently. The area was also supposed to be a favorite haunt of the Jersey Devil.

So, we grew up terrified of the area. Returning from a weekend at the shore with their parents, kids would pray for an uneventful passage through the long tunnels that threaded the closely set trees. The setting sun would play tricks with your eyes and the shadows appeared to leap toward you.

This mindset changed as puberty set in. An area where you could completely disappear a hundred yards down a dirt road. Where most feared to tread. That spelled party to us. We could roister there with virtual impunity.

But, what about the Pineys, Greenies and Devil? Bring ‘em on! We’re young, tough and indestructible. We’ve kicked butt all the way across South Philly and back. You want to talk about savages? That’s us.

Apparently, the Pineys agreed. We never saw a one.