A Trip to the Pine Barrens

Of Devils, Mobsters, Aviators, Authors and the Lindy-Carranza Pousse Cafe.

I first became aware of the Pine Barrens the same way most Americans who live outside New Jersey did, through the season 3 episode of “The Sopranos” named for that ancient Garden State woodland.

I didn’t watch that episode; I didn’t watch any of “The Sopranos” when it first aired from 1999 to 2007. (I don’t love Mob-oriented entertainment.) I just heard and read about “Pine Barrens” countless times as fans and critics hailed it as the series’ greatest moment. I remember being struck by the peculiar bleak poetry of the name, which is used to identify the 150,000-acre swath of protected mid-Jersey nature, an area nearly as large as Yosemite. Pine Barrens. Edgar Allen Poe couldn’t have come up with anything more eerily evocative.

I didn’t lay eyes of the actual Pine Barrens until nearly a decade after “The Sopranos” concluded its run. It was during one of the first of what would be many trips I took from Brooklyn to Long Beach Island, the long barrier island that lies parallel to the Pine Barrens. As you drive south on the New Jersey Parkway, there’s a point after you pass Tom’s River—around Exit 77, if you want to talk Jerseyese—where the factories and malls and urban sprawl fall away and nature reclaims its dominance.

This is where the Pine Barrens begins. For miles, there is nothing but wilderness on either side of the road. The scenery came as a surprise to someone like me who, like most Americans, thinks of New Jersey as densely populated from border to border.