Frogs Don't Ocean

Rainbow Lake, Parvin State Park, Rosenhayn, NJ

17 October 2020

In the before times, we'd have carpooled, meeting at Tom's house, three bikes in the bed of his truck, me getting motion sickness in his passenger seat because I'm so rarely not the driver. Now we were driving down to Bridgeton by ourselves. 

Bridgeton doesn't set a high bar for itself. Their diner is called the Golden Pigeon. In the before times perhaps we'd have stopped there for  lunch after the ride, just so we could say we'd been there. Now we'd packed our lunches to eat them in our cars on the way home.

The reason we were driving an hour and a half, or more, was to get a change of scenery and visit the Cohanzick Zoo, a little outdoor place, free, part of the Bridgeton City Park, that some of us had seen on Tom's Cumberland County High Point ride back in 2015.

It was going to be a Kermit sort of ride, long, flat, and windy, so it was Kermit I put in the car.

This being southern South Jersey, there wasn't much in the way of hills. Tom found as many inclines as he could, though, facing us into a stiff wind for nearly the entire trip, because the wind shifted mid-day.

I did pull over for a few pictures along the way. Eatmore Supermarket, shuttered, stood in for much of what we'd seen in the area.

That and Trump campaign signs. We were in fascist country. I didn't feel safe.

At about eight and a half miles in, we crossed Rainbow Lake in Parvin State Park.

The little town of Centerton had what appeared to be an abandoned inn. I'd have taken more pictures, but the light turned green.

The Cumberland County high point, a treacherous 138 feet above sea level, came soon after. We needed to stop for pictures to prove we'd climbed to the top.

This is looking downhill, in case you can't tell:

Our rest stop was at a convenience store in Alloway, between two abandoned buildings, across from a dilapidated warehouse sporting a fascist campaign banner. I chose not to spend money in the deli and to photograph the abandoned buildings instead.

Somewhere farther along there were white geese. Again, the light turned green before I could get a decent picture.

We pedaled into Canton and came across a road sign I had to stop for.  Jim agreed.

"Frogs don't ---" I said.

"Frogs don't ocean!" Jim replied.

We crossed Stow Creek, the Salem-Cumberland County border, to spend a few miles in Salem County with a tailwind.

I was getting tired. I hadn't eaten enough at the rest stop. Mentally prepared to hammer for another five miles, I was relieved when we came in at 49 miles rather than the 50 I had in my head.

In the zoo parking lot we were greeted by a peacock.

The zoo, an outdoor affair, had some of the paths closed off to maintain social distancing. A few odd ducks wandered about.

I don't even remember what animal we were looking at when I found the grass spider. 

She boogied back into her retreat.

Around the corner, the guys were looking at a ring-tailed lemur. This is where my camera began to fail me because it always wanted to focus on the fence in front of the animal. I tricked it for a couple of shots.

To get the animal in focus, I couldn't zoom in. This is a gibbon.

The star of the show was the Bengal tiger, who was acting like a domesticated cat half-woken from a mid-day nap.

Never mind the stripes. Look at those ears!

I spent so much time with the tiger that I missed the mountain lion completely. The Asiatic bear was asleep in her hammock.

So I amused myself with some fallen leaves on the pavement instead.

The sun was low enough in the sky to make getting pictures of the pacing serval cats particularly difficult.

The leopard was loafed in the shade.

The red river hog had a face that I'm sure somebody out there could love.

We were through in about twenty minutes. It occurred to me that this was only the second non-biking social event I'd been to since the pandemic began. The other, comet-watching, was the first, with the same people. The Hill Slugs/Insane Bike Posse have become my pandemic pod*. We stay in touch during the week, Zoom on Friday nights, and ride together on the weekends. If Tom were to plan a group trip to Cape Cod, as he's been wanting to do, I'd feel comfortable going.

We can't, of course, because a bunch of covidiots outside of central New Jersey have gotten the whole state banned from Massachusetts. Day trips to outdoor zoos will have to do for now.

(*I'm not the only one of the seven of us who has been tested, but I am the only one who is required by my employer to spit into a tube every week. No test, no access to campus. In my office I have a pile of printouts of my negative test results. I don't know why, but it seems as if I should keep them.)