exposed quartzite is arrayed in long, wavery bands that lie at such an improbably canted
angle--about 45 degrees--as to suggest to even the dullest imagination that something
very big, geologically speaking, happened here.
It is a very fine view. A century or so ago people compared it to the Rhine and even (a
little ambitiously, I'm bound to say) the Alps. The artist George Innes came and made a
famous painting called "Delaware Water Gap." It shows the river rolling lazily between
meadowy fields dotted with trees and farms, against a distant backdrop of sere hills,
notched with a V where the river passes through. It looks like a piece of Yorkshire or
Cumbria transplanted to the American continent. In the 1850s, a plush 250-room hotel
called Kittatinny House rose on the banks of the river and was such a success that others
soon followed. For a generation after the Civil War, the Delaware Water Gap was the
place to be in summer. Then, as is always the way with these things, the White Mountains
came into fashion, then Niagara Falls, then the Cats-kills, then the Disneys. Now almost
no one comes to the Water Gap to stay. People still pass through in large numbers, but
they park in a turnout, have a brief appreciative gaze, then get back in their cars and
drive off.
Today, alas, you have to squint, and pretty hard at that, to get any notion of the
tranquil beauty that attracted Innes. The Water Gap is not only the nearest thing to
spectacle in eastern Pennsylvania but also the only usable breach in the Appalachians in
the area of the Poconos. In consequence, its narrow shelf of land is packed with state and
local roads, a railway line, and an interstate highway with a long, unimaginative concrete
bridge carrying streams of humming trucks and cars between Pennsylvania and New
Jersey--the whole suggesting, as McPhee neatly put it in In Suspect Terrain, "a
convergence of tubes leading to a patient in intensive care."
Still, Kittatinny Mountain, towering above the river on the New Jersey side, is a
compelling sight, and you can't look at it (at least I couldn't, at least not this day) without
wanting to walk up it and see what is there. I parked at an information center at its base
and set off into the welcoming green woods. It was a gorgeous morning--dewy and cool
but with the kind of sunshine and sluggish air that promises a lot of heat later on--and I
was early enough that I could get almost a full day's walk in. I had to get the car home to
New Hampshire by the following day, but I. was determined to get at least one decent
walk in, to salvage something from the catastrophe that was this trip, and luckily I
seemed to have chosen well. I was in the midst of several thousand acres of exquisitely
pretty woodlands shared jointly by Worthington State Forest and the Delaware Water Gap
National Recreation Area. The path was well maintained and just steep enough to feel like
healthful exercise rather than some kind of obsessive torture.
And here was a final, joyful bonus: I had excellent maps. I was now in the
cartographically thoughtful hands of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, whose
maps are richly printed in four colors, with green for woodland, blue for water, red for
trails, and black for lettering. They are clearly and generously labeled and sensibly scaled
(1:36,000), and they include in full all connecting roads and side trails. It is as if they
want you to know where you are and to take pleasure in knowing it.
I can't tell you what a satisfaction it is to be able to say, "Ah! Dunnfield Creek, I see,"
and, "So that must be Shawnee Island down there." If all the AT maps were anything as
good as this, I would have enjoyed the experience appreciably more--say, 25 percent
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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