Last weekend I went camping with my girlfriend, whom we'll just call Emy for now. We camped last year for her birthday but that turned out to be only for one night. I originally planned to surprise her by having us camp on an island in the Delaware River that the Internet said could be reached by shallow waters. I wanted to surprise her and be like, "We may not get our own private island but this is as close as we can get!"
Well, that ended up being BS when we got there. So we wandered around and ended up staying for one night in this cheesy family campground, which was pretty funny. That's one of the best things I love about her - when our plans fall through we just continue having fun improvising.
So this time for her birthday we planned ahead and we camped in the same area - the Delaware Water Gap.
First of all, man, if you haven't done camping you need to camp at least for a couple nights before you die. It feels great. I heard that it resets your biological clock. I don't know how much of that is true but I can tell you that after the weekend ended, I felt FANTATSIC. This entire week I've been on this energetic high. Not like a sugar high or cocaine high or anything like that. I feel awake and free and calm. I also find myself making decisions in a fingersnap. Work usually bogged me down by the time I went home and I just milled around thinking "I don't know what I want to do." But now I'm suddenly like "OKAY. Let me watch a movie I've never seen before! Yeah! That one! Go! Let me finish a game I haven't finished before! Yeah! That one!" Like even if you don't have the money to spend going to a campground, just camp in your backyard and pretend like you can only live off of what you bring for a couple nights and don't go inside your house.
BUT SO anyway.
CROSSING THE DELAWARE RIVER
Across the Delaware River on the PA side was this beach - Milford Beach. We decided to go and we went in the water, yada, yada, yada.
I looked at the other side of the river and I yearned it. You know? I can't just be on one side of a river and not know what it feels like to be on the other side. I always need to explore as much as I can.
So I said to her that I wanted to swim to the other side, but she said no. She said the river could have water snakes. She was also generally afraid of swimming across a large body of water. I put on my goggles and looked underwater. Suddenly, I too started to feel afraid because this primal fear of the murky depths emerged. My visibility underwater was maybe limited to five inches. Having written stories of fantasy adventure, my imagination got to the better of me and I thought about giant sea serpents suddenly popping in front of my face with their jaws wide open and their eyes milky white.
"Yeah. . .I guess it's too dangerous," I said.
Of course, I didn't let it go. Even though I didn't say anything further, Emy saw that I kept looking at the other side of the river.
She sighed and said, "Okay. We can go. But promise you won't swim ahead of me."
I made sure she really wanted to do this and wasn't feeling forced.
So we swam, and by the time we reached the center I realized "Oh, crap, heh, this is longer than I thought." And meanwhile Emy started panicking. I told her we could go back but she said she still wanted to do it, but she was moaning and freaking out. So I felt super guilty and tried my best to calm her down. I said things like, "We can do it. I'm right here. Look. I'm not going anywhere. I'm swimming with you. Look, I'll even keep my head down to watch for any water snakes."
I was doing breaststroke the entire time, which is my favorite, and kept my head down in the water like I said to watch for anything. I looked down and imagined how deep the river could be. Maybe it wasn't that deep but the murkiness of the water makes you want to believe it's bottomless.
I got this sudden high. This incredible high that I've never felt before in my life. I suddenly got really excited to get to the other side, and I kept encouraging Emy to swim with me. I don't know what got into me. Maybe it was James Horner's heroic score to Willow, which was a movie soundtrack I was obsessing over. I suddenly felt like I could take on anything, like I could punch out Cthulhu in the face. Like even if some cryptid sea monster popped out underneath us I would have tried my best to wrangle it with my bare hands.
So we finally reached the other side and sat there on the rocks. We took our breather, and then hugged and kissed and enjoyed the view. I suddely felt like the meaning to life opened up then, and it was simply to explore - to just go out and wander around for the sake of wandering around. It scares me that so many die not leaving their country or never knowing certain places. We swam back without incident. Emy said she felt much about her fear of water snakes and drowning, and also another young couple and an old man had seen us and decided to swim across the river too.
Before this becomes tl;dr, let me move onto my next story of the weekend that affected me.
NEWTON CEMETERY
On Sunday we were on our way back to Emy's place, but I wanted to surprise her with someone else. We have a list of things we want to do and one of them is to visit a location listed in Weird NJ Magazine. Weird NJ Magazine is pretty much a magazine dedicated to creepy, unexplained, or just weird stuff in NJ. PA has one too, I believe, and other states across the nation.
I realized that we passed through the town of Newton in NJ on our way to the campground. Newton Cemetery was said to have this special grave for three children from a family name Lewis. They all died in 1909. The youngest daughter, Margaret, found a cave on the outskirts of the cemetery and got lost. Her two brothers went in after her but also never returned. The urban legend is that the cave itself was sealed off with a plaque commemorating them.
Newton Cemetery is weird. I can't explain how exactly, but it's quirky. It's a pretty big cemetery but it's not nicely spread out on flat land. It's squished within these cliffs and woods. It's like a microcosm of some strange fantasy land in the middle of a modern town.
Finding the Lewis grave wasn't obvious. We wandered around for a bit and the picture from the magazine showed that the plaque was on the face of a cliff. Well, we found nothing on the cliffs.
However, we passed by a gate with a fence that read "NO TRESSPASSING." Once I saw that I thought to myself, "Watch. . .the plaque is definitely behind the one place we can't legally enter."
Welp - I was right.
Emy found a way to walk around the gate so that nobody could see us tresspassing. We did some impromtu rock climbing and descending. Finally, we were on the other side of the gate, and there was even weirder stuff to take note of. There were graves there too. . .but they weren't aligned like they were in a cemetery. They were just strewn here and there and placed in such an awkward position. There weren't many graves, only like maybe five other ones. But I gotta tell you - it just felt weird. Something about it was unsettling.
I really wanted to find this plaque but was starting to believe that maybe we should give up. But then I turned around to a cliff face and shouted, "THERE IT IS!"
Emy freaked at first at my outburst.
I rushed up to the plaque - and here it is:
Then below the plaque on the ground is another grave which wasn't written about in Weird NJ. It must be new, but it's small and almost unnoticeable unless you're actively scanning the ground.
Someone's dog?
I asked Emy to take a picture of me with the plaque and she refused, saying how that would be really inconsiderate and cause bad luck. I wasn't planning on smiling or making a goofy face - I had just imagined a simple picture as proof that we were there. But she was right. These were real people who died. I wouldn't have wanted to put them up like some carnival attraction. I mean, maybe the reason why they fenced off this part was because stupid adventurers like me wanted to see it. The magazine never said anything about requiring to tresspass in order to see it.
So we prayed (she's a bit more religious than I am, but I prayed too) for them. As we prayed I got this weird feeling again. I mean, this was where three kids died. You know? It's different from the rest of the cemetery becuase everyone else's place of death was somewhere else. But somewhere below us their remains still lingered, untouched since 1909. I also realized that DAMN - that cave must have been huge for search parties to fail. A part of me wished I could open up the cave, venture into it, find the remains and just sprinkle holy water or something on them. I know it sounds weird but I wanted to be the one person to find them and say to their remains, "It's okay. You're not forgotten."
There's a sh*t ton of other cool stuff that weekend that I could write pages about. Literally, pages. On our last anniversary I bought ourselves a red leather book to write down our adventures. Every time we go out together we write our experiences and thoughts. This weekend was undoubtedly the longest entry so far. I could ask for no better companion than Emy.
