Delaware Water Gap

So last weekend Mrs Walles and I went to New York (the state, not the city...well, actually we did pass through the city...it's complicated and I'll get to that another day).  Our favourite spot to stop on the way is just on the other side of the border with New Jersey, at the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, or the DWG as we usually call it.

The Delaware river is an important landmark in the northeast US. It marks the borders of several states, including the one that shares its name.  It is a very old river, pre-dating the already old geological ructions that produced the stubby mountains known as the Appalachians (I'm happy to describe them as stubby, since they are compared to, say, the Rockies or the Southern Alps, but it's all relative - they wouldn't look so stubby if I had to walk up one).

Anyway, because the river is older than the mountains it cuts through them as it pleases, its channel having carved out a place for itself as the mountains rose around it.  This creates what is called a water gap in this part of the world, which is basically a river gorge cutting through a mountain range.  It's lucky for us, too, because it provides a convenient breach in the mountains which the interstate highway takes advantage of, along with the railroad.

Apart from the convenience the DWG is spectacularly beautiful, and I highly recommend a visit.  Although the Delaware is an important river it is still relatively small at this point (and relative to other American rivers it is also small, similar in flow to the Waikato River).

At the DWG the river cuts through a ridge, called Blue Mountain on the Pennsylvania side and Kittatinny Mountain on the New Jersey side, and the walls are almost vertical, yet still heavily wooded, like the whole region.  Here's Kittatinny, seen from Turtle Beach, a little sandy spot beside the river.

The river bends to the right once it reaches Kittatinny, so that's the side of Blue Mountain to the right of the frame, with an equally spectacular vertical wall facing Kittatinny across the river.  I only managed to get a snap of the face of Blue Mountain from the road a couple of days later, on the way back towards Pennsylvania.

Incidentally, since the river forms the border, all of these photos show two states, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

My favourite of the photos we took (which required a return visit to the car to swap cameras after mine ran down - but it was worth it) is of Kittatinny framed by the lush vegetation at the side of the river.

Doesn't it make you want to go there?  It makes me want to go back.

Penn's Woods

Before I left New Zealand my impending departure would often become a talking point, even with people I had only slight contact with.  Reactions were mixed.  Many people weren't sure where Pennsylvania was, and said as much; far more amusing - or perhaps worrying - were the people (more than one) who were excited that I was going where the vampires come from.

I assume (unless there's something they haven't told me here...maybe that's the reason we keep so much garlic in the house) that they were getting confused with Transylvania, the region of Romania where Bram Stoker set Dracula.  I laughed to myself but the joke was eventually on me because when I finally got here the extent of my own ignorance became clear.

It wasn't only ignorance.  There were plenty of things that I didn't know about the US and life here (there still are, and they pop up every so often to confound me), but there were also things that in a way I did know but nevertheless didn't expect.

Take that confusion between Pennsylvania and Transylvania, for instance.  They both end in -sylvania, Latin for "woods".  Transylvania is "on the other side of the woods" and Pennsylvania is the name Charles II gave to the vast region of woods that he granted to William Penn - "Penn's woods".  That should have tipped me off that there would be some trees here.  I'd also read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, recording his hiking of the Appalachian Trail through several eastern states, including Pennsylvania.  Again, just the title should have been a sufficient hint.

And yet it came as a great surprise to find that vast tracts of Pennsylvania are covered in trees instead of, oh I don't know, rolling hills or something.  Maybe this comes partly from growing up in Central Otago, where forests are something you visit in the car.  New Zealand, too, was once largely covered in trees until farmers turned up.  Here, though, even after the farmers took their share the trees are everywhere.  There is a stand of them in the back yard and visible beyond the next row of houses are woods which stretch on and on out of sight.

These aren't evergreen forests as you find in New Zealand, either, but largely full of deciduous maples, oaks, hickories and dozens of others. I'm used to these trees as interesting ornamental plantings in parks and gardens, and I think that the very idea of millions of them growing in the wild didn't quite register before I came here.

It's not just Pennsylvania, by the way, but most of the eastern part of the US that's this way.  Outside the towns the trees generally rule unless beaten back by humans.

That's one of the reasons I'm writing this blog - to draw attention to the unexpected things about America.  Some are like the woods: the evidence was all there but I never joined the dots.  Mostly, though, it's things that Americans only rarely refer to in books, movies and TV, presumably because they are considered too mundane to mention. They can't be blamed for that: when you're so close to the action it's easy not to see the wood for the trees.