Updated 2 years ago
After driving an hour through the dark highways and dead ghost towns of South Jersey, avoiding any gas stations so as to evade detection, we made the designated turnoff onto a dirt road. It was around midnight and everything was pitch black. Fort Dix was nearby, an occasional black helicopter buzzed overhead, and we passed a road that said BOMBING RANGE ROAD. After a few minutes, we ended up in a dead-end.
Pulled out my cell. No signal.
“Shit! The directions were shit! FUUUUUCCCCKKK!!!”
We turned off the engine and listened.
We could hear ghostly trance music of the outlaw party we were trying to reach, off in the distance.
One mile? Three? So close yet so far.
So began our quest.
Back in the early 2000s, some hippies from New Jersey that never had a name or flyers or anything but today I call the New Jersey Forest People – Jowe & Adam and Ian & Kalypso – wonderful people, really, with kids and dogs, that introduced many people to their first health food – threw psytrance parties out in the middle of nowhere in a big L-shaped (L for LSD) field in the middle of the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey.
Although it had just rained, the Pine Barrens were normally very dry, with red sand, and (obviously) lots of pine trees. Completely desolate. Much of the area has overgrown roads that go back to the Native Americans, and the occasional ruins of an old house. Spooky even during the day. Where people go to get disappeared. One time out there I whole pile of trash, notable that a lot of it wasn’t trash, but letters and toys.
Different groups, such as PSI, 28th Day and DMT also did events, at several locations around there. I had never been to one of their parties, or at least this new location, and I figured the directions were legit. My friend Mark Lorenz, who had come from an interesting family, was driving in his van, with me riding shotgun.
So there we were, stuck in BumFuck, driving around in circles, looking for a ghostly party, triangulating and circumnavigating towards the bass of the distant music. The directions may have very well been correct, but they had so many rights and lefts, and there were so many roads and clearings that could barely qualify as a cowpath, with many gradients in between, all in the dark, so who knows.
This went on for at least an hour, and pretty soon, one by one, we were joined by more and more lost cars. I knew almost everyone, as I ran the email lists. I wore what little authority I had in life with pride and purpose.
We ended up in a long caravan at least ten cars thick, like pioneers making it through the Donner Pass.
Every so often, we would stop the wagon train, get out, ask everyone to turn off their engines and listen.
Bass.
“That way,” someone said, licking their finger and sticking it in the wind. Okay, they didn’t really do that, but that was where we were. I wasn’t even sure it was “that way” because the bass seemed to come from all directions. Someone suggested we send out scouts and I was like What the fuck is this, the Oregon Trail!?
So we got back in and kept driving towards what most people said was the direction of the sound.
We started to hit a lot of puddles, and they increased in frequency. “We must be entering the Lower Moors,” I hazarded, grinning at Mark. Ever since Lori and Boris threw the Lord of the Rings party, we had been fantasizing about dressing up as Orcs, drinking mead, and playing heavy metal. We were in our element. I popped my first tab of acid. Home Free!
Then we hit The Water.
Mark and I, as the lead car, saw it first. It was a long-as-we-could-see patch of deep-looking puddles covering the entire red dirt road. We stopped the caravan. We got out and put a stick in one of the puddles and figured it was about six inches deep.
All the other cars, responsibly, didn’t honk, because that would have attracted attention to our illegal caravan, but all these people, many loud New Yorkers, were all hanging out their windows going WTF! Keep it going!
“Pull back some”, we yelled at the car behind us.
So we got back in, strapped ourselves in, pulled back a bit, and revved the engine. Mark turned to me and said, “The only way is forward, ” and blasted it.
Adrenaline rush and blurry branches hitting our windshield like we were in a carwash made by druids on PCP. Water blasted up up to eye level. It was a crazy ten seconds, and midway through, we lost traction, hydroplaned, and pummeled through on sheer inertia.
We made it to the end.
We stopped.
“Whew! WE DID IT!” High five!
Right then, almost imperceptibly at first, the water in the road, which had been pushed back by the van, got some liquid courage and flowed right back into the puddles. Where we had stopped. Enveloping us. The back of the van was in a foot of water.
Fucked.
We tried all sorts of shit. Putting branches and sticks under the wheels. Whatever we could find. Nothing. And all the other cars were now trapped on the other side of the puddles.
“Well, Mark, this is it, man. No way out. It was nice knowing you!!!”
Yeah.
At least we had beer and weed.
Much time passed. The booming of the music in the distance taunted us like lonely wooly mammoths going slowly extinct.
Eventually a beat-up old shitkicker pickup drove up, driven by a local country boy with a ball cap, pale translucent skin, and ice blue eyes.
He got out, looked at the whole mess, and all the other cars stranded, and was like what you guys doin out here??
We explained. We were out there for a party, motioning vaguely towards the pumping bass. His eyes lit up. He said that he was in a band, the Blue Eyed Devils, named after the local urban legend, the red-eyed Jersey Devil, that they had just done a show at (maybe) the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, and that he was just taking a chillin’ night drive out in the woods.
Yeah right, on a Friday Night, I thought, probably burying bodies, or other such redneck activities. We had found occasional weird dumps of personal items and kid’s toys, memories of lives trying to be forgotten.
We are so fucked.
Then he quickly pulled out a chain from his truck bed. He hooked it up loud clanging noises that sounded like it was connecting with my spinal cord, ready to suck my soul into the Matrix.
My acid was starting to kick in.
He then pulled us out.
Like pulling a splinter out, it was the best rush ever to get that van out of the mud. I popped another tab. Home free, I thought to myself.
“But listen,” he said, sternly. “No way, I’m pullin’ all those other people out,” pointing back at our caravan of the damned. My mouth dropped.
Then he noticed us drinking beer. “You guys got any more beer? Crank?”
In the next half hour, over a case of beer, a quarter of weed, several ecstacies later and probably some acid and God knows what else, but no crank, everyone was safely pulled out of the River Styx. I barely noticed, but he was getting more and more strangely agitated each time he pulled someone out.
He was the hero. Our savior. Our Moses. And as each car was rescued, his pile of goodies got bigger.
As the last car was pulled out, he got his last portion of party supplies. Got back in his truck.
“Wait wait dude – the party! Yer gonna miss the party! PSYTRANCE!! Call your buds!! We got DJs!!
He floored it, spun out, and sped off down the dark road, and we never heard from him again. We figured that he was eager to impress his other band members with his newfound party war chest.
Everyone made it to the party afterward, but that journey was the highlight of the evening. What a story! Mission Accomplished! I said GW Bush-style, and we popped open cold ones.
Home free!
Or so I thought.
Part 2: The Mother of all Plot Twists.
After I sat on this story for years, and finally wrote this article, I was ready to press Publish, and call it a day. Then I decided “Hey, why not google “Blue Eyed Devils.”
Doh.
It turns out the Blue-Eyed Devils are an unfamous white power band, and a decade later one of its members famously murdered six in cold blood at a Sikh gurdwara (temple) in Wisconsin in 2012, before turning the gun on himself.
Tragically, Sikhs are a peaceful religion and are a truly wonderful people. Part of their religion is wearing turbans, which really confuses rednecks.
I was friends with one, who called himself Bob, at the University of Texas who wore a “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” T-shirt, with his turban. You don’t get more punk rock than that.
Here is a video fo the band:
I guess all those hippy drugs didn’t help the Devils. I recognize him in band photos on the web, and I still haven’t pinpointed from photos if he was the shooter, nor do I really want to.
Glad we didn’t know any of this at the time. Maybe he was weirded out by the Benetton Ad of races that were in all the cars, and didn’t want to be in some dark creepy woods with the lot of them. But in a real way, he and his friends could have very easily massacred us in the dead of night from the treeline. Miles from earshot, police, cell phones, or civilization.
Somewhere right now, The New Jersey Forest People are like, “this is why you don’t stop at nearby gas stations.
The Jersey Parkway is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to pick up!”
An alt-right reading this will be like, “See! All those dirty ethnics saved by The White Man! Those candy ass city slickers can’t even drive through the mud without calling on the help of the Nordic Race!”
And if you are reading this, Herr Blue-Eyed Devil, thank you bro, for saving our night. It was an even trade. We are even steven. So peace and I hope those party supplies lifted your mood. And I hope you weren’t the shooter, which you can’t be, because the shooter is dead.
Update 4/29/21 – Part 3 – Yet Another Twist
In 1987 I was associated with Dallas skinheads, and the Sikh shooter was part of the affiliated Hammerskins, who were formed in Dallas in 1988.
That’s it, I can’t even anymore.
* * *
Out of all the adventures I had had in the Pines over the years, all the tripping, dancing, and girl drama, those sober hours were the ones that were burnt into my memory, ones that I will reminisce as an elderly man if I make it that far.
But now that I am halfway there, I see who our savior was and wonder, wow. Sometimes we just don’t understand how close to the edge we get.
Ultimately, you remember the danger, the adventure of making your own path through the woods, and coming out alive.
And you find that you’ve been home all along.
– – –
Part 3: Wow.
There is another twist.
A few years later, Akshaya Kubiak would also end up making his way to this very same spot, out in the middle of nowhere. He would also go on to kill a Sikh, Herleen Dulai.
Yeah.
If you live long enough, and are paying attention at all, enough coincidences start to pile up and really start to affect you.
Respect to the gone, but never forgotten.
But anyway, on with the videos and photos of happier times:
Click images to view captions
