Most of my travel on my Sabbath Leave was front-loaded for the month of August so that I’d be around for all the big events at the start of Sara’s senior year – field hockey games, homecoming float-building, college apps, and the like. But I’ve still managed to squeeze in some local photography and one and two day excursions to a handful of selected spots. Earlier this week I got to travel back to the Jersey Shore – not the one of the current TV reality show but the one of my childhood. For twenty years, I vacationed with my family in North Wildwood and it still holds a ton of wonderful family memories. Nearby is Ocean City, NJ, not far from where I was born (Somers Point) so an overnight trip to these two personally significant beach towns seemed in order.
The North Wildwood of my youth was a magical place. We rented the upstairs of a modest house at 315 E. 12th Street whose amenities included a large deck, a refreshing outdoor shower, and proximity to the Catholic school right across the street. After playing all day long on the spacious beach which was literally a block long from the bulkhead to the ocean – pinky, whiffle ball, horseshoes, body-surfing, soccer – my brother and I would head over to school before and after dinner to continue our never-ending games on the basketball court and baseball field. Every morning meant glazed donuts from the Terminal Bakery at 17th & Central (to this day it is THE bakery that I measure all others against) and evenings included miniature golf at Diehl’s or trips to the boardwalk to blow the quarters and dimes we had been saving all year long for this family pilgrimage.
Sunday afternoon was truly a step back into my past. As I expected, a lot had changed in the intervening years: “our” house had been razed and replaced by a beautiful new dwelling twice as large; gone was the Dolphin restaurant, our annual first-day-of-vacation dinner choice; the amusements and shops had morphed along the boardwalk, too, though enough was the same to make it feel familiar – Douglass Fudge, Sportland Pier, and Mack & Manco’s Pizza had all survived the decades. The beach was still huge and it was fun to be back getting that sand between my toes. I headed down to Cape May for some sunset pictures, fully intending to spend the night back in Wildwood, but more and more I felt drawn to visit the other beach I wanted - no needed – to see. So I booked a room at an Econo Lodge a little farther north up Route 9 and got up early the next morning to watch the sunrise on the 9th Street beach in Ocean City.This stretch of sand was chosen quite intentionally, too, but for very different reasons. It was here in the summer of 1994 that my father had drowned while successfully rescuing two young girls from the water after the lifeguards had gone off duty. I had come to pay tribute to his life and to remember his sacrifice. It was, as you might imagine, a bittersweet time, but not as full of the sadness and tears that I had anticipated. Instead, I found myself just simply lingering on that beach all day long, moving from boardwalk to water’s edge to my (reclaimed from someone’s trash pile) beach chair and back again. I took pictures of the rock jetty over which they had pulled my father's body in their efforts to revive him, the signs which warned of dangerous rip currents in the area, the hotel a block away where my parents had come to stay on that fateful mini-vacation.
In a deeply reflective and life-giving way, I spent the day with my dad on that beach, the man who had coached me in little league, worked his whole professional life for one company, come to all my games in high school, taught Sunday School at our church, modeled respect and openness to everyone, got down on the floor to play with his grandkids, the man who loved and helped us to love the beach, too. The gift of warm memory and mystical presence was way better than the cotton candy or pizza I ate or the book I was reading or the pictures I took. I miss you, dad.
