Kingwood Thanksgiving

 

Kingwood Forest, not quite primeval but pretty ancient

We managed to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday in a way that accommodated the reality of Joan’s current residence in assisting living facilities at Stonebridge in Montgomery township with a major feast at Richard’s beautiful old colonial mansion in Kingwood township in Hunterdon County.  This beautiful property is far from what you are likely to think of if your concept of the state is constructed around turnpike exit numbers. The surprising truth is that New Jersey, though it ranks at the top of the list of states for population density, has an extensive amount of sparsely populated rural land and even some heavily wooded forest land.  It is of personal interest to me that the county seat of Hunterdon County, Flemington, was founded by an early settler, Samuel Fleming (mid-eighteenth century) whose surname I share.  I think of Samuel as a rather old-fashioned name; certainly my own long deceased grandfather Samuel Fleming now seems to me to have been from another world rather than merely from another generation.  One of the oldest buildings in Flemington still exalts in the rather pretentious name of “Fleming’s Castle,” though it is hardly more than a rather modest frame house that in its present configuration may disguise even more humble origins. 

 

Flemington, N. J., did have one moment of national, perhaps even international fame.  It came in 1935, when its courthouse was the venue for “the trial of the century”.  True enough, in our country trials of the century usually come around at least once a decade, but this one was special because it addressed the “crime of the century”.  A German immigrant carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was convicted of having kidnapped and then murdered the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh.  Lindbergh was perhaps the most universally admired hero in America.  In May of 1927 he had performed the astonishing feat of having made the first ever solo flight across the Atlantic, leaving from Long Island in New York and arriving in Paris about thirty-five hours later.   Lindbergh was handsome, courageous, articulate, and highly photogenic.  There was in historical retrospect a downside: he was a voluble philo-germanic antisemite at the time Hitler appeared on the international scene.  Hauptmann’s trial, which was held in the courthouse in Flemington, focused international attention on the place for more than a month.  

 

One of the automobile routes from Princeton to Kingwood takes you through the small village of Rosemont.  Only somewhat confusingly, there is also a place of that name nearer to Princeton, and for all I know there could be a dozen other New Jersey Rosemonts and half a hundred in the country.  Rosemont today seems to consist of perhaps a dozen houses spread out along the right angle of a turn in the inland road between Stockton and Frenchtown.  I say “today” because stretched along the margin of that road is a quite extensive cemetery, fenced in with well laid stone and carefully tended, that testifies to what must have been a much more substantial local population in years gone by.  But of course like destination weddings, destination interments are not uncommon.  The considerable extent of still cleared fields in this part of Hunterdon County suggests that the whole area has long been under cultivation.  So although New Jersey is our most densely populated state, parts of it are considerably less populated now than in previous decades.  Even between the large cities of New York and Philadelphia there are stretches of countryside that suggest in the comparative sparseness of their rural contours the “wide open spaces” usually thought of in relation to the West.  It took me many years of residence in the state to discover and enjoy this pleasing feature.

 

There are two Katies in our immediate family, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  They are textually distinguished by a small difference in orthography, but orthography doesn’t help with oral homophones, and so for clarity we refer to the daughter-in-law, Richard’s wife, by her fuller name, Katie Dixon.  This is the same means  used in the old ballad to distinguish among an abundance of ladies named Mary: There was Mary Seaton and Mary Beaton, and Mary Carmichael and me.  In any event Katie Dixon, among her other virtues and talents, which are many, has become the historian of her Kingwood property, tracing its ownership at least as far back as the Revolutionary period, when one of its occupants was a proto-American French Huguenot named Lequere.  And if George Washington didn’t sleep in her house, it can only have been due to insomnia.  That’s the vibe the place gives off.  Furthermore, I have a couple of times seen actual native wild turkeys around those parts.  So, a Thanksgiving feast in Kingwood seems about as “historical” as it can get.

 

The name “Kingwood” itself incidentally reveals a typical colonial attitude.  I recently viewed the latest Ken Burns documentary series, “The American Revolution.”  It reminded me of the extent to which colonial populations have been doggedly loyal to the mother country up to the point that they abruptly cease to be.  Many of the place names in the original American colonies are homages to British royalty.  The town in which I have now spent most of my life, Princeton, is one of a chain of villages which included a Queenston and a Kingston.

 

Though timber is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the American East Coast today, its forests were formidable.  There is still much evidence on both sides of the Delaware River of what must have seemed in colonial times the utter vastness of its forested lands.  Though Pennsylvania (literally William “Penn’s forest’) now refers to lands west of the river, the man at one point owned thousands of square miles of what is now New Jersey, including the spot on which I am writing this essay.  Hardly a mile east of my house, where US 1 meets one of the three east-west arteries into our town, and now buried in the mess that Route 1 has becomes, lie the scattered remnants of the one-time village of Penn’s Neck.  An old Baptist church now overwhelmed by the super-highway still boldly evangelizes via billboard.  One recent and memorable message: “Despite Inflation, Death Still Wages of Sin”.  Some verities are indeed eternal.  An old cemetery, walled in probably sometime in the nineteenth century but almost certainly of earlier founding date, is now just an extension of  Princeton’s sport fields.  But William Penn once owned it all!

 

Tree Planting

 

 

            Over the past weekend we spent an exhilarating (and for me enervating) day up at our son’s fabulous rural retreat at Kingwood in Hunterdon County.  As the place name suggest, this stretch of land on the east bank of the Delaware River was once a royal forest and its first growth timber must have been magnificent.  Rich and Katie, in addition to being generous and imaginative hosts, are serious environmentalists, dealing heroically with a large wooded property, the forestry aspects of which had been long neglected when they acquired the property.  They are trying slowly to clear out some of the more troublesome invasive wood and also (unfortunately) the hulks of dead ash trees, formerly prolific but now pretty well annihilated by the recent blight of the emerald ash borer.  Like Covid itself, the ash borer is another probable but unmentionable import from China.

cleared of invaders; ready to plant

 

The first photograph, which shows a finished piece of my handiwork along with the shadow of a friend, is hardly self-explanatory; but it is very meaningful to me and may be at least a little to you as well when I explain it.  One of the easiest and most effective ways of conservative forest management is the thoughtful and well prepared planting of select native seedlings in the early spring.  One of our great national public benefactors, the National Arbor Foundation, fosters this practice by each year distributing at nominal charge, hundreds of thousands of seedlings, indeed probably millions, of desirable species.  Numerous other organizations also distribute seedlings.  Rich tried to give me a simple task that I could probably accomplish even from a sedentary posture.  It was one at which I was reasonably practiced after the experience of previous years: the construction of protective sturdy wire cages for the vulnerable seedlings.  The statistical chances of any particular seedling growing to mature plant on the forest floor are very slight.  A hungry deer could, and if given the opportunity would more or less effortlessly, suck up in five minutes as many as a man could plant in a day.  Nature has a few strategies, the most obvious of which is a vast overproduction of seeds.  Search around the base of a big walnut tree in the woods.  You can easily find a thousand walnut carcasses, and encounter some happy squirrels, but only most rarely will you see a thriving young walnut sprout.   I can remember seeing only one.  The sometimes horrifying cruelty of nature captured in the words of Darwin and Tennyson (“survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw”) are realities.  The survival rate even of seedlings protected by my stout wire cages would be considered disastrous in our human population.  But the human populations determine to a very large extent the forest ecology.

 

 

            The top photograph is of a planted pine sapling defended in its wire cage.   The circular cage is is four feet tall and about a yard in diameter.  The name on the red tape is that of my mother, Rich’s paternal grandmother, Janet (Davidson) Fleming, who was born in Salida, Colorado in 1909, and died in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1979.  She spent most of her life in rural western and southern places, and she had what most people might regard as a pretty hard life.  She was a complicated lady who raised three very different sons under often difficult circumstances.  It has taken many years of mature reflection on my part to realize in full the nobility of her character.   The tree planted, a cadet member of an ever-changing natural forest, will be an arboreal memorial to her.  I shall hope to supply a slightly more durable memorial—her name shallowly etched on a piece of soft native slate found on the forest floor--at a later date.  We also planted trees that will memorialize my father and our dear English friend, so recently departed, Andrew Seth.  This seems to me a beautiful initiative: living memorials in a living forest binding the living with the dead.

 

            I am especially pleased that it is a pine sapling.  I don’t expect anybody to read any particular blog post, let alone remember what they might have found there.  But last Christmas I published a family story about my mother and a small pine tree (“Father, Son, and Uncle,” December 20, 2023).  So this post is as it were the second panel of a fortuitous diptych.

 

            A very great deal of what happens in our vegetative world begins with human beings.  The development of agriculture is universally recognized as a definitive one in the history of the human species.  The word agriculture literally means the artisanal management of natural topography and botanical states for the production of foodstuffs for human and animal consumption.  So what we now often call “natural” or more absurdly “organic,” actually refers to the conscious human direction or management of botanical growth.

 

            The human management of the vegetable world has by now a very long and fascinating history, and a controversial one.  The wisdom of, indeed the necessity for what we now generally call “conservation” has been recognized if too often ignored throughout recorded human history.  The human struggle for dominance over field and forest is ancient and continuing.  In many places in Europe the battle for human cultivation and nature’s resistance to it is everywhere painted on the landscape.  Aerial photographs of what at ground level appears to be virgin meadowland often reveal patterns of a nearly invisible tillage of several centuries past.  Even in our own comparatively shiny new country, in which serious population centers date from no more than two hundred and fifty years ago one often encounters signs of dramatic population shifts.  It seems to me pretty clear that my own native haunts in the rural Ozarks had a considerable population in the year 1900 that had almost wholly vanished by the time I came around.  I spent many summers teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English, under the auspices of Middlebury College.  More than once I found cutting through what seemed to be dense forests long, straight stone walls set up as property markers and made from hundreds of tons of fieldstone removed by hand or horse-drawn sled from once cleared and cultivated land.  One wall I came upon somewhere near Ripton, invisible until I came right upon it, had been elegantly constructed with the care one might expect from a mason in Tuscany.

 

            I described the task I was assigned as “simple,” but that does not mean that the work involved was easy for me.  It doesn’t take much to tire me these days, and wrestling with heavy gauge wire fencing was rather exhausting.   These days it’s hard for me to be sure whether it is the amyloid or the anni domini that is the bigger foe, but working in tandem as they do they can exhaust me pretty quickly.  I have to pace myself.  Joan drove us home in the late afternoon.  I fell into bed around 7:30. Five hours of sleep a night I regard as the basic minimum.  Six hours is adequate.  Seven in usually my maximum.  That night I slept, with but a single necessary but barely sentient trip to the bathroom, until 7am!

Family Easter

 

There is a certain kind of holiday letter that might better be called the Annual Family Report.  Its purpose is to bring the reader up to date on the most recent doings and achievements of the various members of the family being reported upon.   The posterity of our friends all appear to be prolific, very active, and fertile.  If one’s contemporaries tend to be grandparents with a scattering of even great-grandparents, the dramatis personae of the annual Christmas reports can easily grow to Shakespearian proportions.  It soon enough can become impossible to keep your Gloucesters differentiated from your Leicesters, or be certain that your Imogens, Violas, Rosalinds and Beatrices are accurately distributed among the bourgeoning households of the second and third generations.  One reads on in admiration but sometimes only with modified comprehension.

 

In attempting to convey some sense of the highly satisfactory family Easter we just observed, I am doubtful that I can entirely avoid something of the vibe of the annual report.  But given the facts that the numbers involved were relatively limited, and that the events of the day can plausibly be carved into manageable and discreet episodes, it may prove possible.

 

Late on Good Friday, our younger son Luke, his wife Melanie, and their two children—John Henry (11) and Hazel (9) arrived by car from Montreal.  They had not been able to leave all that early, and there had been a long line at the border crossing, and there was not a lot of Friday still left.  There was of course enough time for us to ooh and aah about the kids’ notable increment in size since last sighting, but the serious visit began on Saturday.  At what age do Easter eggs, especially their decoration, and the disputes attendant upon their decoration, cease to command passionate family engagement?  I cannot yet answer that question, but it is obviously well over eighty.  Nonetheless a multi-generational corps of decorators did at last succeed in producing a small but elegant collection of eggs approaching Romanov standards.  From the point of view of weather Saturday was as at best mediocre, with prognostications for Sunday at first being not all that much better.  

John Henry, Hazel, & eggs 

 

The miracle of Easter is of course an improbable and unexpected corporal resurrection.  So was its secular echo on Hartley Avenue.  All the Montrealers, in addition to the two permanent residents, were up and about by about 4:15 a.m. to prepare to attend the Easter Vigil eucharist in the Princeton University Chapel.  This chapel, which cost more than a million dollars in the 1920s (when it was affectionately known as “Princeton’s million-dollar answer to materialism”), is a mini-Amiens of great beauty.  The lengthy Easter service is of exceptional beauty.  Save for a few rare occasions when I was temporarily resident in Europe, I have not missed one in more than thirty years.  The congregation gathers in darkness outside the cathedral-like west door for the lighting of the “new fire", then solemnly processes, in the dark and  in two parallel single lines, the whole length of the huge nave before mounting the chancel stairs to take up places in facing banks of  unlit choirstalls of the slightly elevated chancel.  More miraculous activity: here the Hartley Avenue group was joined by granddaughter Cora Louise, currently a sophomore living on campus.  The service is long, solemn, and impressive, and more than an hour of it elapsed before the light appeared, but faintly at first, in the huge east window.  Soon the sun would be fully risen in a cloudless sky.  But by then you already knew that Easter had really arrived.  We certainly knew it when we got home and rustled up the rare treat of a pancake breakfast—festively eaten, though in moderation, as we knew the real feast that awaited us in the afternoon.

 

At about ten-thirty we all piled into the monster Dodge van from Montreal and headed north toward Kingwood Township.  We took the route along the Delaware River from Trenton, which goes through several little waterfront villages, including two sizeable ones, Lambertville and Frenchtown, though we turn east before reaching the latter.  Most of the way is through beautiful Hunterdon County, still amazingly rural, the seat of which, Flemington, was presumably founded by one of my very distant relatives.  It is barely more than thirty miles from our house to the Fleming-Dixon property, but it takes about an hour to get there.  The word “property” is definitely a faute-de-mieux.  Farm, estate, mansion, and empire—though not without accuracy—don’t capture the down-home vibe.  Obviously some money exchanged hands in its acquisition; but the real enabler was imagination.  The house is a genuine colonial mansion (ca. 1790), and if Washington didn't sleep there I want to know the reason why!

Kingwood House
 

By the time we got there, the major New York delegation had already arrived: our daughter Katy and son-in-law Zvi (daughter Katy fortunately being orthographically distinguishable from our daughter-in-law Katie), who arrived with their eldest daughter Sophia (whose husband Raymond was unfortunately sidelined at home in Brooklyn with a cold).  So with the thus far unmentioned but indispensable granddaughter Ruby (daughter of the Kingwood hosts) the dinner party of eleven was now complete.  That is also the end of the incomprehensible family catalogue

 

Son Richard is a super chef and also a small-d democrat who imaginatively catered to the majoritarian vegetarianism of his guests.  Carnivores like me simply had to suck it up, which is not hard to do if what is on the table is the festival of vegetables we found before us.  These were such delicacies as galette of caramelized onion, imperial lentils, and a half dozen other succulent dishes previously known to me only from the Le Guide culinaire of Escoffier (from which my favorite untried recipe, for bear’s paw, begins thus: ‘Wrap the paw in clean mud…’).  

Rich's vegetarian feast

 

The young kids, in the nine to eleven range, still love an egg hunt, and there was one, using the rather superior eggs we had painted on Saturday.  There was also a limited bit of walking about the open woods, still leafless, but just on the verge of verdure, so to speak.  There was a marvelous show of daffodils.  The kids are fascinated by the huge old barn, and even more by its contents, including Richard’s burgeoning shop.  But mainly it was a gab-fest sitting around on a side patio with its view down to the pond.   Zvi, always interesting,  was recently returned from China.  The conversation was wide-ranging and mellow.

 

The Montrealers regaled us with tales of the life and hard times of Justin Trudeau, and the two K’s, Katy F. and Katie D., offered occasional expert opinions about the larger arts scene.  I have probably said enough in earlier posts about our daughter, who is the President and CEO of the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, one division of which is the fabulous Getty Museum.  Let me now say a few words about the somewhat less well-known museum of which our esteemed daughter-in-law Katie Dixon is the current interim director.  That is the Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens, on the East River front just below the Astoria Ferry and just above the Noguchi Museum.  It is one of many little-known cultural institutions that make their contributions in establishing New York City as the inexhaustible cultural resource it continues to be through thick and thin.  As its name and location might suggest, the origins of the Socrates Sculpture Park are to be found among philanthropists in the large Greek-American community in Astoria.  It is among several New York cultural institutions that I myself, alas, have never visited; but it is claiming an eminent place among the growing number of sculpture gardens and parks displaying monumental works of material and size more appropriate to open spaces than enclosed salons.  There was a lot to hear about.  By the late afternoon of this perfect day the incoming light clouds were beginning to contest the day’s sunshine, and the party broke up, replete with good food and family fellowship.  Cora decided to go to the city with her parents and her elder sister, but we were still six driving back to Princeton, replete with good food and good talk and that relatively uncommon feeling of celebration rightly demanded and achieved.