Local walks: Ralston District
October 1, 2005 • (0) Comments
In good weather, we enlarge ourselves in perambulation. Walking is healthful, slow, determined, invigorating and instructive. When we walk vigorously, we recharge our circulatory faculties and enjoy a lively pulse. At slower paces, it is our minds that race ahead, taking in the countryside in ways that are impossible from a moving car. I have found that walking with a cigar can be particularly salubrious.
It was in just such a mood that I recently set out from Gladstone to walk to Union Schoolhouse in Mendham’s Ralston District. Savoring a bright afternoon, it seemed reasonable to meet the Raritan River at Union Schoolhouse, then follow it up to where it emerges from the Roxiticus Valley beneath Schiff Preserve. From there, it seemed an easy circuit home along Roxiticus Road where the valley views open up below Chester’s hills and Peapack Brook winds gently down into Gladstone.
In a car, this is beautiful country, diminished now and again by mistaken grandiloquence in recent construction. Like nearly everywhere else lately, McMansions sit awkwardly upon their subdivisions, but at a walker’s pace natural elegance still reveals itself, shown in occasional farmhouses that seem ideally situated in their sites. The best of these combine a palette of neat fences, fields, graveled lanes, trim hedgerows, orchards, barns, paddocks, ample shade-trees and so much arcane apparatus of barnyard husbandry that a visitor could easily mistake these places for authentic farm country. Done right, they array themselves in a harmonious accommodation with the surrounding hills.
Mosle Road climbs through thickly wooded country where, except for dump trucks and the errands of workmen racing to fill this green landscape with McMansions, it is a quiet place to gather one’s thoughts.
Wild raspberries are in season and their ruby clusters beckon sweetly from thorny places along my route.
At the Raritan, I stood above the North Branch for a good many minutes, peering into the bridge footings on the lookout for somnolent trout avoiding the midday sun. None were apparent, but the clear burbling of flowing water made me thirsty and I emptied the first of two water bottles in my knapsack before an approaching truck chased me from the single-lane span. Walk here much and you’ll agree with me that country bridges are among the best reasons men have devised for instituting governments; it discomfits me not at all to share them.
On the left side of the road, the Raritan flowed easily through a series of rills and riffles, interrupted at intervals by calmer pools of deeper water and shady stretches. It is easy to imagine this scene little-changed from how it might have appeared a century ago, except that every 50 feet or so, another No Trespass sign glares from a tree. “You are under constant observation,” the signs warn.
Schoolhouse Road is level in this stretch and parallels the river for a half-mile, bordered on the right by a steep bank of heavily timbered hills that rise into Schiff Preserve. Up and down their flanks, frost-heaves have displaced loose boulders and broken rock, mostly adorned now in a somber palette of dried lichens; tall stands of Norway and sugar maples tower above the road. In the river, closer observers will discern the shadowy figures of small trout or an occasional glint of silvery creek chub. Overhead, turkey buzzards often glide in circular orbits that pass in and out of the tableau. On my recent walk, coming into a curve I startled a large blue heron that climbed wings-akimbo, nearly-pterodactyl in its haste to achieve flight.
Coming into the last bend, I crossed another bridge, a twin of the first, and spied a site on my right that had eluded me in faster conveyances.
Spanning the river was a concrete and fieldstone weir, festooned with admonishments to “keep off” and to desist from parking. A profusion of barberry threatened to consume the landward end and my immediate thought was that its broad catwalk made an ideal platform for sunning snakes. But in the solitary beauty of this place and drawn by the lazy course of the Raritan through it, who could obey? With a feckless glance in both directions, I stepped up onto the structure. Happily, there were no snakes.
On its upriver side, a deep pool gleamed crystal clear in the midday sun. To my surprise, three dozens or more of large trout—which I made to be rainbows and brownies—skulked in cooler water near the bottom, occasionally turning in a flash of vermillion and olive. On a day when the rainy spring seemed a distant memory, nothing save their reluctance to leave the cold bottom kept these fish from spilling over the weir. Standing on the sturdy catwalk above, I marveled that a bayman’s cast-net could take the lot in a single throw but a dry-fly fisherman might go all season without ever observing this many fish. For a moment, I murmured a silent prayer of thanks for those “keep off” signs.
Below the weir, the river cascaded abruptly into a roiling cauldron of aerated water, possibly the last until the spillway at Ravine Lake dam. Happier fish must thrive on the downstream side of the weir, but other than an occasional glint of silvery flanks, I did not see them.
With any luck, I’d be rewarded by a view of an enormous sow and her piglets that I’ve admired from my car so many times driving through the area.
A pair of farmers baling fresh-mown hay hove into view. One man drove a standard farm tractor with a baler while the other stood in a wagon being towed along behind. Two or three times a minute, a bale of hay shot up the conveyor, flying head-high into the high-sided wagon. Like a wild balletic “catcher in the rye,” he neatly snatched most of these airborne bales from their trajectories and muscled them into stacks around its sides. Others, he simply shouldered aside to be stacked at leisure. If there was rhyme or any particular rhythm to his choices, I couldn’t tell. It was curious work and after a few minutes, the man driving the tractor observed me observing him and awarded me a crooked grin, as if to say “It’s daft, I know.”