The Devil’s Woods 

Reaching the trailhead is usually part of the romance of backcountry travel: rattleboard roads, a van with a trailer and rafts on the back, a rooster tail kicking up for miles. Not this time. Our ride was a blue-gray late-model Sentra in central New Jersey, nervously piloted by a bookish, middle-aged driver with a spotty beard. We lurched past White Castles and box stores in a halting, jarring manner, rapidly slowing and accelerating as if a lifetime of dense, urban traffic makes a commitment to a particular speed too much to ask. Which is to say, I didn’t know a lot about the driver. He’d offered us a place to stay the night before and a ride to the edge of the Pine Barrens, saving us the $200 cab fare. It occurred to me more than once that he could be the last to see us alive, and it didn’t help when he turned to us—me in the passenger seat and my buddy Angus in the back—and joked about a notorious episode of “The Sopranos,” as the million acres of dense pines and cedar bogs that make up the Pine Barrens are known as a dumping ground for bodies.