The princess was feeling quite a bit better when I went out to check the cage this morning. We tried to give her a restful night, but of course the girls and I couldn’t help peeking in from time to time. When I went up about 2 AM she was standing in the corner with her head tucked under her wing. A blanket covered the cage to darken it. When I lifted the blanket first thing this morning she was standing there looking at me, beak half open. She didn’t touch any of the chicken the kids provided for her, and I don’t know if she drank any of the water, but she did crap in the cage, as well as outside of it (thus settling the age-old debate about whether bird poop just drops out or has actual velocity), so at least that end of her is working. If you don’t know to whom I refer here, check out the post immediately below this one.

I ran out and picked up a pair of thick work gloves, and about 10:30 AM we transferred her from the wire cage to a cardboard box that would be safer for travelling. She didn’t appreciate the effort we were going to on her behalf, and just about put her talons through the gloves. About 11:15 AM we arrived at The Raptor Trust in Millington, New Jersey, on the edge of the Great Swamp wildlife refuge. The Trust just celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary, and they have quite a compound there. After a young lady took the box from us we walked around and viewed the collection of raptors. Among the permanent residents are Great Snowy Owls, Golden Eagles, Bald Eagles, Vultures, Peregrine Falcons, and three or four kinds of hawks. It’s really quite a place.

Eventually we want back to the office to collect our box and towel. The volunteer who accepted the hawk from us told us she was a Broadwing, not a Red-tailed. She said that after the bird had calmed down they would be giving her a complete medical examination including x-rays, after which they would know what actions to take. If possible she will be returned to the wild. We’d like to think that’s what will happen. I feel pretty good about her chances after having her talons wrapped around my gloved fingers this morning. The staff at the Trust think she was probably hit by a car and stunned, and if she can’t fly it might indicate a broken shoulder bone. I’ll try to find out what happens to her and post an update down the road.

I see hawks in flight all the time over Northwestern New Jersey, and down in the pinelands to the south as well. But I had never seen one standing by the side of the road. I taught the kids over the years that any time they see an animal that doesn’t run away, they should fear it. Flight is more or less the normal behavior for almost any creature we’re likely to encounter in the U.S., except under certain circumstances. That bird should not have been there, and my immediate fear was that it would be hit. That part of Flocktown is very dark, and the bridge is somewhat narrower than the main roadway.

I wheeled the truck around and came back by it. It didn’t move one inch from where it was seemingly rooted. I went up and turned around again, and came back down and pulled off near the creek, popping the blinkers. With the FJ in the way, the bird was as safe from cars as it was going to get without flying. I grabbed the camera and slowly approached the bird. It still didn’t move, though it opened its beak and lifted its wings, in a clear warning that it was obviously too weak to make good on. I worked my way up slowly and got quite close, snapping the picture you see above. I was afraid of scaring the bird out into the road, but if it had taken flight that would have been fine with me.

She didn’t. I think of her as “she” because hawks seem female to me, though I couldn’t tell you from any anatomical clue whether she is. If an egg popped out, then I would know. I stopped about five feet away and crouched as I looked her over. Cars passed, slowed, nobody curious enough to stop. She was fully fledged, and definitely looked to be a red-tail, but quite young. There was no evident injury. Her claws and legs looked good. She partially stretched her wings and I didn’t see any damage to either. She stood straight and with her head up, eyes alert. And yet she was in evident distress, and I had no idea what to do.

I placed a cel call to the Washington Township police, but they had to put me on hold and I lost the call. I had planned to ask if they knew of a rescue organization or state agency that would come get her. After all, hawks are a protected species, and this one needed protecting. I called home and my daughter Emily looked up a state agency online for me, and I called them. The young man at the action line said that there was nothing the state would do, but that he needed to take a report from me anyway. Mercifully, I lost the call.

A car came by about this time and she flapped about two feet off into the brush, out of immediate danger, and sat there. Yes, I admit, as she lay there in her misery I took her picture. I’m not proud of it, but there you are. I got back in the truck and went home. She was off the road, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could immediately do to help. She’s a small bird, but you ought to see those talons. I didn’t intend to just wade in and grab her. Too much chance of injury to one or the other party. Back at the house my daughter Olivia looked at the pictures and demanded that we save the hawk. I searched a bit and found a story of a guy who had rescued one by taking it up gently with a towel. We grabbed an old hand towel and climbed back in the truck.

Back out on Flocktown Road by the bridge, we shined a flashlight into the brush, but the hawk was gone. I was certain she had not flown off (otherwise she certainly would have done so back when some goon was leaning over taking her picture). The road drops off into a gully that contains the creek at that point, and I hoped she had not flapped her way down in there. The ticks are ferocious this year. I moved the light around, and suddenly there she was, stuck about two feet up in a shrub, kind of wedged in like she had attempted to fly, and hadn’t been able to do it.

I have never captured a wild hawk before, of any size, so I have no idea whether what I did was right or wrong. I basically walked up and wrapped the towel gently around her wings, and took ahold of her legs, equally gently. She flapped, but made no sound and really was not able to resist much. We got her home and made a place for her in our dog’s cage, which is quite large, and for the moment she seems content. I called The Raptor Trust in Millington, NJ, and they called me back at 10:20 PM. We’re scheduled to speak again in the morning, and then either we will transport the princess to Millington, or they will have a volunteer come get her. If it weren’t for the folks at the trust I’m not sure what we would have done with her.

I still don’t know what’s wrong with her; only that something is. Hopefully some people who know what they’re doing will be able to sort her out. I’d like to think she’ll survive, but honestly I’d be more hopeful if I could see some injury that I know will heal. I’ll try to follow-up and post an update on her condition as things progress.

I walked up the forest trail, leaving the Old Mine Road behind. It’s called a trail now on all the Park Service maps, but like so many of the trails in these parts it was once a road. The trail has a name, and the data buried in modern GPS devices gives it that name and calls it a road, but when it was really a road, in the days before Tocks Island, it had another name altogether. It begins not far from an old town with a biblical moniker that disappeared fifty years ago, and ends by the banks of the Delaware River, in as scenic a spot as I have been privileged to visit. Along the way it passes the remains of farmers, and their farms.

I kept an eye to the south as I walked, and soon spied what I was after: a break in the wall of brush lining the path, and an old, faded blue sign telling the occasional traveller that somewhere beyond was the burying ground of the Depue’s, one of the oldest families in New Jersey. According to a variety of sources they are the descendants of one Nicholas De Pui, a French Huguenot and minor noble in the court of Louis XIV. He fled France for Holland after Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and subsequently took ship for America aboard the “Pumerland Church,” settling in Esopus-on-Hudson, one of the string of fortified towns the Dutch built during their brief tenure as masters of the American Northeast.

The link with the Pahaquarry region north of the Delaware Water Gap comes in the form of the Old Mine Road itself, which was built by Dutchmen to connect their strongholds on the Hudson with the fertile Upper Delaware Valley. It has long been said that the road was built to reach the metal mines of the Kittattiny, though some modern historians feel this could not have been the case. In any event, the road was in use as early as 1650, and a number of communities were established by settlers on both sides of the river, from Port Jervis all the way to Easton. The Depues, or Depews, or Depuys of Pahaquarry were either descended from Nicholas Depuy, or Samuel Depuy, depending on which source you choose to believe. The records are vague, partly because these settlements were soon orphaned. When the English wrested control of America from Holland in 1664 (nearly bloodlessly), the villages on the Delaware were cut off. In the 1730’s, when the Governor of Pennsylvania heard rumours of them and sent surveyor Nicholas Scull, he spent some pleasant hours in the home of Samuel Depuy and reported back that the settlers were shocked to learn of the colonies to the south, and had known nothing of the river’s name or destination, or that the English were there at all.

They lie all about this shaded forest grove, some beneath plain stones so worn they can no longer be read, others with still-ornate monuments to memorialize them. And there are no doubt many more around this place for whom there is no longer any stone. There always are. The farms they built are still here as well, and like this once-hallowed ground under the trees they are crumbling away. Leaving the graveyard I continued up the forest road. Somewhere ahead the old topographical maps and aerial surveys said a substantial farm had once existed. Google Earth said parts of it might still be there. Soon I came to a wooden utility pole, standing alone by the side of the road. Coiled at its base were loops of long-dead phone cable leading up to the insulators on the crosstree, and thence back into the woods along the way I had come. The connection to civilization had been cut. Just a little farther and I spied a gabled roof poking up above the riotous undergrowth. Eyeless windows peered out across a seemingly unbroken mass of green. I turned and looked to my right and saw another, directly across what had been the road, front door standing open. Further on there were the remains of barns and silos, and some rusty old vehicles.

This is what it looks like when the people leave. I’m familiar with ruins, but this is something different: a ruin in the making. In fact it is a ruin now, for all practical purposes. None of these houses are inhabitable. Very few are even salvageable. And there is a great tragedy in that: a sad song of good intentions and lost legacies. It was the plan of the Federal Government to dam the Delaware at Tocks Island, and it was for that plan that the people of the river towns were separated from their homes. The dam was never built, but the people were never invited back, and now you can see, from the Water Gap to Wallpack, historic old structures falling slowly into rubble. The National Park Service is responsible for this land and these structures now, and I sympathize with their plight. There is never enough money to preserve all of history, and the decision has been made: this land is now a park, and is to be allowed to revert to its natural state. Still, when one views hand-hewn beams that are two centuries old and fastened with hammered wooden pegs, and sees structures built in that way left open to the weather and decay, it is hard not to feel a twinge of anger. Surely, if the Park Service does not care to preserve these structures, there is some better use for them than to slowly become mounds?

I continue to return to this region often with my camera, because the past here is decaying quickly. There are currently two galleries with images of the abandoned farms and houses in the Pahaquarry region of Warren and Sussex counties in New Jersey:

The Depue and Kinney Farms

Calno to Wallpack Center

If you manage to get to these places on your own, please leave them as you found them, and I urge you to be very careful about entering any abandoned structure in the park. Some are posted against trespassing, and I do not enter those. Of those that aren’t posted, the vast majority are unsafe to enter. Ignore this and you may get to see the basement of one sooner than expected.

It strikes me often that we don’t think in geographical terms anymore. I don’t mean that sort of abstract geographical knowledge that tells us the names of the seven hills of Rome, unless of course you’re a Roman. If you are a Roman, then the names of those hills are part of the lore of the land around you, that along with the rivers, valleys, meadows, and forests gave shape and nomenclature to everything that sprang up upon it. There was a time when we thought and spoke about the land and our relationship to it in the terms of these natural features. You lived on a certain ridge, or in a certain valley, and the road ran down along the valley to the ford, and from the ford on to the big meadow with the two oaks, and eventually intersected with a larger road that was named for the villages it connected.

If you wanted to travel you thought in terms of how many ridges you had to cross, whether there was water and a way to get across it, how steep the road was, or how muddy. And this of course was because you likely had to walk it, or sit atop some beast that was walking it. We were intimately connected to the land then, I think because we travelled slowly and personally. We felt the land, and absorbed its character at every plodding step. Today we are much more likely to think in terms of roads, and where they go. Intersections are the points of reference, and addresses the language of the machines that remember how to get somewhere when we don’t want to. On-ramps and off-ramps mark the little villages along the way between the centers of commerce. One of the most fascinating things for me is that you can look at Google Maps and zoom right in and see them there still: all the little trails that connected outposts of civilization, and took their names two centuries ago. Transpose an historical map and all the noise of our building disappears and the old roads are left there like the veins on a leaf.

We live up on Schooleys Mountain, which isn’t a mountain at all, but a great long hump of rock running eighty miles from southeastern New York to the Delaware Water Gap in western New Jersey. Near us Schooley’s Mountain Road runs down the north side to Hackettstown. Some of the old timers may remember this as the Washington Turnpike, and it was the first road west from Morristown to Easton, back in the 1730’s or so. Off to the east Drakestown Road used to connect Drakestown with Flanders, but Drakestown doesn’t exist anymore. Naughright road ran down the south side to Naughright, but there is no Naughright now. Bartley Road ran from Bartley to German Valley, and nope, there isn’t a Bartley anymore, either. But there is a German Valley, whose residents changed the name to Long Valley back in 1914, when it was considered more advantageous to be long, as opposed to German. If you keep going south you run up Fox Hill, which forms the south side of the long valley. The south branch of the Raritan flows down the valley and makes a great improbable arc to tidewater at Raritan Bay, carving out and outlining a great swath of some of the most beautiful and fertile rural land in America.

I admit it’s not easy to see it anymore. It goes by too quickly. I’m interested in it at a conscious level, and I still have to repeatedly stop and refer to maps and devices and remind myself how things are arranged. I routinely have minor epiphanies where, after traveling a road for four years, I suddenly realize that it runs more north than west! I think many of us may have lost something, in all our mobility, or at least I think I have; something that farmers likely remember. If we hiked more, or were able or required to walk the places we need to go, I suspect we’d get some of it back. It’s an intimate familiarity with the way the land is shaped, and where the roads go, and if oil prices keep on going the way they are, who knows? We may all become more tied to the land in the way that our ancestors were. If it is not as easy to just pick up and go somewhere else, then the quality of where you are now is that much more important.

The sandy loams of the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey are a porous filter for the water that trickles through purifying layers to feed one of the largest aquifers on the East Coast. Hours after the rain has fallen the ground is for the most part dry again, and undisturbed. Into this same ground has been poured, over the centuries, the hopes and dreams of generations of entrepreneurs. The woodcutters, colliers, iron and paper mongers, would-be glass barons, and land speculators have all thrown their best shots at these seemingly endless miles of forest, meadow, river, spung, and swamp, with as little effect. To decamp in the middle of these woods today, in Lacey Township, or perhaps old Shamong, is to find yourself set back 200 years to the turn of the eighteenth century. Before and behind you are the miles of rutted sand roads. Around you the wind moans in the cedars and oaks. There seems to be no sign of the place this once was, and yet, something gleams dully from under a thick carpet of spring greenery.

What comes up in your hands after you push aside the brush is a chunk of clay pipe, thick and cold even in the spring warmth, with a rich brown glaze and crackling that has here and there marred the surface. Henry Beck visited this spot once, following a map old Buzby had given him, and mentioned similar shards. Once clay was the latest in a long list of natural resources that would at last bring riches to the captains of Pine Barrens industry. Not far up the road the Adams Mining Co. dug the pits at Old Halfway and hauled the clay in narrow gauge cars to the rail line at Woodmansie. Northeast of there, and south of Whitings, the Hydraulic Press Brick Co. operated clay pits for many years. The clay all around these parts is of the Cohansey formation; good for terra cotta and pipe. Under this spot where the shards litter the ground a yellow-white variation of it lies in ten foot-thick layers. In 1858, according to state geologist George Cook in his 1868 report to the New Jersey legislature, the Union Clay Works was established in this place to work that yellow-white clay.

First they attempted to make brick. Many of these can still be seen on the site, bearing partial imprints. I haven’t found a whole one with a good imprint, but I have been told by people who should know that they typically read “Ocean Co. N.J.” and sometimes had the date “1850″ below that. You can see pieces of this inscription in some of the pictures of brick fragments in the gallery. According to “The Clays and Clay Industry of New Jersey” (Ries, Kummel, and Knapp, 1904) they also tried common pottery, but for whatever reason these products were not successful. Perhaps there was too much competition in the brick business from the Sayre works in Sayreville. You certainly find many of their bricks in the pines. In any event, by 1866 the plant had shifted over to making terra cotta sewer piping in a wide variety of sizes, styles, and configurations. It is this product which is found at the site in quantity today. Again the product was not successful over the long term. Ries, et al speculate that the distance from the railroad and the soft, sandy wagon tracks had something to do with it, but those seem small hurdles for the kind of people that persistently attempted to make enterprise work in the pines.

Whatever the reason, while other clay pits and works continued, Union Clay was abandoned in the late 1870’s. All of the pipe and brick you see in the images accompanying this article was manufactured before that time. Later, around the 1930s, the property was sold to a rod and gun club that maintained a hunting lodge here for several years, some remains of which can still be seen. Today the site is thickly overgrown forest, with few landmarks, waste-high brush, and an abundance of ticks and chiggers. I had visited it once before, nearly a year ago, but failed to muster the gumption to wade deeply into the woods. On a recent return I came more prepared, and spent nearly two hours searching for what I was sure I must have missed last time. The southern portion of the area, where I had been previously, has scattered pipe shards and the occasional brick. As I worked my way northward these dwindled, until in the center of the site I was seeing no remains at all.

I had almost convinced myself that there was nothing more to see when I came upon a pit full of foul, stagnant water. There was no reason for there to be a pit full of water here, unless some human had dug it out and left it to fill. I worked my way around the north side of it and began to see more shards, including one smooth chunk that had become embedded in the roots of a tree. Ahead of me a mound of earth obscured the ground beyond, and since mounds are always of interest in the Pines I headed toward it. On my right were what seemed to be piles of brick, whole and in fragments. On the other side of the mound I stumbled into a large dump pile of broken sewer pipe fragments. In “Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey” Henry Beck mentions finding a pile of pipe “draped around what might have been a kiln.” It’s possible that this pile I had located was the same one, or some other. How it got there is anyone’s guess. Very likely the workers at the plant dumped rejected product here, but it is also possible that the pipe was pushed here when the site was tidied up at some point in the past.

I had to move carefully as I photographed the pile, to avoid breaking anything underfoot. When I left I followed an old fire cut southward, as it was an easier trail than the one I had made for myself coming in. More bricks and shards were in evidence all through this area, and at one point I spied a series of six large iron bolts protruding from the ground. According to one historian I know the management at Union Clay once bought a steam engine and had it mounted at the works to provide power. It’s possible these bolts are part of the footings for that engine. There is more to see at Union Clay. There is a very old cemetery out there that was mentioned by Beck, and I think I know where to look for it now. There are supposed to be some cellar holes as well. And although I brought back my usual collection of tick and chigger bites as a reward for traipsing through their domain, I am looking forward to going back and giving them a third crack at me.

Note: updated on 6/14/08 with some corrections, with thanks to my friend Jerseyman, who knows more about this stuff than most people.

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What causes slow boots in a Windows machine? In fairly rare circumstances it can be problems with the registry, page file, disk, or a device. Typically, though, it’s software that has to be loaded at startup. When software is set to run from the Startup folder or the registry it is essentially added to the work that the operating system must do before handing control over to the user, because by definition “startup software” must be running before the system can be considered to be fully up and functional. Of course, a large chunk of the software that we find running at boot is nothing like essential to the function of the system. Thus the term “craplets.”

So which were the culprits in the case of Mom’s new luggable? The usual suspects: update notifiers, system tray monitors, context menu handlers, etc. There was Java’s update checker, and Adobe’s update checker, and HP’s update checker, and Quicken’s update checker. I was glad to see the first two of these on the recent ZD.Net UK list of the most annoying software. Update notifiers are among the worst offenders in my book, simply because there’s no good reason for them at all. Yes, people have a vested interest in knowing when new versions of important software are available, which is why Windows Update is a good, if imperfect, mechanism. But the criticality of the need tracks the criticality of the software, and outside of the operating system most of it just doesn’t qualify.

Do I need a separate process running just to check and make sure that there isn’t a new version of Java available? Or the Adobe PDF reader? Of course not. What’s wrong with checking every so often when the software is run? Many applications do just that (Google Earth, for one example), and the system works great. I can’t help but think that many of the software OEMs that dump these craplets onto new machines are in pursuit of some vaguely positive branded relationship with users, but it’s a misguided pursuit. Users have good branding experiences with software when it helps them get something done, not when it interrupts what they are trying to do with useless information.

How much is a proprietary business advantage worth? In 1907 Milton Hershey began selling ‘Kisses’, the now-familiar teardrop-shaped milk chocolate confection. His new treat would become a world-wide phenomenon that continues to generate increasing sales today more than one hundred years after the product launch. The initial introduction of Hershey’s Kisses required the development of specialized machinery that could extrude a very accurate amount of molten chocolate onto a moving steel belt and then cool the resulting shape before gravity caused it to deform. This machinery, created under Hershey’s own hands and direction, enabled the production of the candies, but it wasn’t enough to secure the market.

Kisses were wrapped in a simple square of tin foil. A candy-buying consumer couldn’t tell the difference between a genuine Hershey’s Kiss and any other teardrop-shaped chocolate confection wrapped in foil. Imitations soon began to appear, and Hershey responded by beginning work on yet another new piece of candy manufacturing technology: an automatic foil wrapper that inserted a paper strip that extended out of the wrapping through the top, like the stem of a cherry. On the little strip of paper the words “Hershey’s Kiss” were printed. The company secured a trademark on this label, and imitators began to fall by the wayside.

Although it isn’t often cited as an example of the advantages of investment in proprietary technology, the food business is one of the best illustrations. Food is messy. It comes in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and textures, and a changing market constantly demands additions to this variety. Many of the best-known and most durable brands required the development of proprietary technology to get off the ground. If you decide to produce Twinkies, you can’t just go out and buy a twinky-stuffing machine to get the cream inside, because they don’t exist. If the machine were available off the shelf everyone would be making Twinkies. The same can be said for cream-filled cupcakes, frozen appetizers, fresh-brewed ice teas, and any number of other things we now take for granted.

Not that the food business has a corner on the market for innovation. Many companies small and large have, over time, developed proprietary advantages in their markets by inventing new production technology. I once worked at a small manufacturer of urethane roller skate wheels, and recall the owner-engineer working in a little shop late at night, trying to perfect a home-brewed machine that inserted the steel hubs accurately onto a little stand in the center of a mold. There was a time when the average U.S. business person was like that guy, I think; or at least a time when there were more like him. Now we’ve become a nation of managers, and at least in the case of software, the business of virtual machinery in which I work, we generally think just about any effort is too much to bear.

“This project is too expensive” are words I hear often. Well, then don’t build it. Maybe one of your competitors will. Or perhaps you don’t need it at all. Not every business requires new custom machinery, of the soft or hard varieties, in order to prosper. But if you think you do, i.e. you have identified an advantage that will add market share or some other value to your business, then suck it up. New one-of-a-kind machinery is expensive. Its design, development, and production time lines are uncertain. You’re going to have to take some risks, like Mr. Hershey. He could very well have stuck to the caramel business, which was doing fine before he sold it and built his factory for kisses. Fortunately for generations of kids and chocolate lovers, he didn’t.

According to Wikipedia “junta” is a Spanish word meaning “committee.” That makes me feel pretty good about the way I view most committees, and the people who seem to form them almost spontaneously upon awaking in the morning. Reading further I learned that “junta” may refer to: government by a committee of military leaders; an album by Phish; a board game; an administrative body of the Spanish Hapsburgs; several local administrations in the Napoleonic era; or a Marvel Comics character.

In 1810 after the May Revolution the first government of Argentina was known as the Primera Junta. It created an executive branch called the Junta Grande. Alex Haily later stole this phrase and corrupted it into Kunta Kinte, the lead character of his hugely popular novel “Roots.” In any case, it seems clear that a “junta” is a military dictatorship that rules over any particularly hot and sweaty country, where the humidity plays some role in the formation of committees.

The NX list of permitted host keys is stored in /usr/NX/home/nx/.ssh/known_hosts (at least it is on debian). You should see two identical entries, one for localhost and one for 127.0.0.1. If your NX Server install is more complicated than mine your mileage may vary. Your shiny new RSA host key is located in /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub. Replace the key value in known_hosts with the new key value for both entries, and you should be all set.

Note that running /usr/NX/bin/nxserver –update might also fix it, or one of the other commands might. I didn’t experiment beyond trying nxserver –history clear, which did not do it for me.