AT the end of Pompano Avenue in Manasquan, one of the
Jersey Shore towns scoured and tumbled by the storm, is a small patch of
beachfront property that seems as if it has been in my family for several
generations now.
We hold no title to it, other than whatever property
rights might accrue from the thousands of summer days we have spent there at the
ocean’s edge. It is 17 miles from the inland town where I grew up and still
live, a rectangle of sand just wide enough for a couple of towels and long
enough for a few chairs. It is where my mother and father took my siblings and
me when we were children, and it is where my wife and I took our own children. A
wooden jetty once stood beside it, but a beach replenishment project covered
that up years ago.
A lot of people in New Jersey hold similar unofficial
title to similar patches of the Shore, which is why the losses from this storm,
large as they already are, seem even larger. The Shore is our summer home, and
it now lies in ruins, wrecked by a storm that shares a name — in a cruel
coincidence — with the most elegiac song ever written about it by our poet
laureate, Bruce Springsteen. “Our carnival life on the water,” he sang in “4th
of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” but in Seaside Heights and Belmar and Point
Pleasant and too many other beach towns, our carnival life is now in the
water.
New Jersey, the most densely populated of all states, has
127 miles of oceanfront, almost all of which has been built upon, foolishly
perhaps in some spots, but always hopefully, by people heeding a primal urge to
be near the sea. Damp, rickety fishermen’s shacks; boxy, game-board bungalows;
sprawling marble-clad palaces — all are trying to do the same thing: capture and
hold with some measure of permanence that most sublime and evanescent of all
moments, the perfect summer day.
There are parts of the Jersey Shore that, in high summer,
are almost indistinguishable from California or Florida or some other sun-washed
paradise. The difference here is that summer dies each year. It is briefer, and
thus more precious, and Labor Day is the saddest day of all. That’s why we grasp
the Shore so hard, why we hang on to it so fiercely. How much can we squeeze
from this wave, from this romance, from this fishing trip, from this bar band,
from this sun? How much more before it all chills and fades and we have to wait
nine more months to try again?
My own town, Freehold, N.J., took some big hits in the
storm — trees crushing houses, power dead and no sign of when it might return.
But I’ve found my attention turning more toward the wildly, almost
eccentrically, diverse string of towns along the Shore, where so many other New
Jerseyans, from the poorest to the richest, have staked their own claims,
however tenuous. I’ve been thinking about how unnaturally warm the water was
this summer, and wondering whether the storm was the price we paid for that, and
then wondering, too, how much of what I remember, what I love, will be there
next summer.
Habits die hard, and it’s painful to imagine not going
back to Manasquan next summer, no matter how much of it may be gone. It’s not
the closest beach to my hometown, but it’s the one where everyone has always
gone — a migratory pattern rooted deep in history, by a weekend excursion train
along a potato-train line that hasn’t run in almost a century. No other town, no
other beach within Manasquan even, would feel right.
My sister loved Manasquan so much that she moved there
when she got married and is raising her own family there. She lives far enough
from the beach that her home survived Hurricane Sandy unscathed. Her friends, as
well as a couple of our cousins who live closer, were not so lucky. Exactly how
unlucky, they don’t know yet. The beachfront section of town is still sealed
shut, guarded by the police, nobody — not even homeowners — allowed in
yet.
All anyone has so far are the photos the town has posted
on its Facebook page. People have been scrutinizing them for signs of damage. Is
that house still on its foundation? How high is the sand piled on this one?
Where is the waterline on this one?
I was scrolling through the photos with my brother-in-law
the other day, and we found one of “our” property: the beach at the end of
Pompano Avenue. The asphalt beachwalk — no boardwalk here — was buckled as if by
an earthquake. The remaining beach was a narrow strand, the sand pushed off it
back onto the streets behind. But looking to the north, we saw something we
hadn’t seen in years: the wooden jetty that had long been buried, the one that
loomed in my favorite photograph of my father as a young man, watching his son
toddling toward the water. It stood there again in this new photograph, like a
guidepost, marking the way back.
Kevin
Coyne, a journalist who teaches at Columbia, is the author, most recently,
of “Marching Home: To War and Back With the Men of One American
Town.”
