Chances are you’ve known a few beach towns in your day. There is all manner of human-habitation-by-the-sea the world over, cities and ports and fishing villages among them, but beach towns those are not. Beach towns are about fun and “getting away.” Beach towns are all about the the ocean’s beauty and appeal, and of course, the beach. Beyond that, things get a bit murky.
There are funky beach towns and tony ones and everything in between. A beach town can be just a collection of trailers and shacks, and maybe a few surf and dive shops, and that’s it. These places are heaven for some folks, totally unappealing to others. One might take the family there for a vacation but that family would have to be pretty unusual.
At the other extreme are places like Malibu and the entire island of Nantucket, famous for good reason and not exactly family destinations, either, unless the family is one whose name gets in the news sometimes. Cannes and St. Tropez might also be beach towns of this sort, whereas Marseille is definitely not. Miami might fit in this category, as well, though that’s pushing the envelope to the point of ripping it open. Key West is essentially a beach town, or was once until it became almost a caricature of one, with way too many bars. On the other hand, being drunk on the beach, especially at sunset, is a hallowed beach town tradition, but does one bring the children along?
A big question on our trip was how Cape May, a beach town in New Jersey, measured up against Cape Cod, our local seaside collection of beach towns of all sorts. There are many Bostonians whose only getaway place, ever, has been somewhere on “the Cape,” as it is known, with families having vacationed at the same locales for generations. The more prosperous have obtained cherished second homes down there, with one-time “summer places” (i.e., shacks) getting winterized and now inhabited year round. This gives Cape Cod a very suburban feel, a far cry from the “quaint little villages here and there” as described in the song, Old Cape Cod, written so long ago.
It should come as no surprise that many permanent residents are retirees, for what better place to spend the last of one’s days than someplace one has vacationed for so many years? Cape Cod’s popularity has made it a much busier place and not quite the getaway it once was; in summer all the roadways are jammed and the lines at the supermarket are very long. And of course, the winters can get a bit dreary and long. The place is not quite a retirement mecca like Florida or Arizona, but on the other hand the health facilities in nearby Boston are world class, and as one ages that’s no small thing.
Cape Cod also has kind of an island ambience, as it’s cut off from the mainland by a canal and one can only access it by a couple of bridges. Backups heading onto and off of the Cape are legendary, and slow traffic all the way to and/or from Boston, depending on the timing, is part of the Cape experience. But hey, once you cross that bridge, you’ve entered another world, if only in your romantic and/or nostalgic imagination, and does anything besides that really matter?
Though many natural areas on Cape Cod have diminished or disappeared due to development, pockets of untouched habitat remain here and there, including the vast National Seashore on the Atlantic side and Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge on the southeast corner, much of it an island closed to the public. Monomoy hosts vast numbers of birds in the summer, breeders and migrants alike, but to see them you’ll need a boat. Cape Cod has had a very active birding community for a long time, so the record of what has shown up there is impressively long, with few species of note escaping scrutiny. The Boston Globe runs a weekly bird report from the Cape each week, lending it a mystique beyond the fried clams and the white shark sightings and knowing which Kennedys are at the family compound in Hyannisport.
Cape May, New Jersey, presents a similar gestalt, where the town boasts numerous well-maintained Victorian dwellings and likely a good number of retirees, along with tasteful tourist accommodations and only two liquor stores. It’s a quiet place, with no ferris wheels or roller coasters, no water parks or eight mile boardwalk with shopping and arcades.
For these, one must travel up the Jersey shore to Ocean City, a truly classic family fun destination in the grand tradition. It is likely generations of New Yorkers and Philadelphians have cherished childhood memories of the place and similar ones nearby, things like eating too much cotton candy and getting sick on the roller coaster, frolicking in the surf with hundreds of other kids, scoring big at games in the arcade, getting a terrible sunburn.
Our travel companions on this excursion were not exactly family, but as a group we were congenial. At one point we did stop by the Ocean City Visitor Center, which stands on an island in the middle of the highway bridge that leads into town. This was only because down below was a very active and lovely heron rookery, seemingly an ill chosen location but if all the breeding birds down there could talk they might’ve explained why, with safety from predators near the top of the list, more than likely. The rookery fit our agenda, whereas everything else at Ocean City did not, and we moved on.
The same kind of odd contrast presented itself a bit father up the Jersey shore, where the Forsyth National Wildlife Refuge, a vast and beautiful marsh area, sits incongruously adjacent to Atlantic City. Perhaps you’ve seen the movie and already know something about Atlantic City, a family fun destination that hit upon hard times about 50 years ago. Their formula for economic revival was to create a kind of Las Vegas by-the-sea, a colorful story of casinos and mobsters and lounge acts and families heading elsewhere for family fun.
It is a fact that casino trips are a staple of those bus trips favored by seniors for day outings, up there with live theater matinees and all-you-can-eat restaurants. The entire group on our multiple-day outing turned out to be impressively old, some of us in our seventies and a number in their eighties, and included four couples who had shared lives together for a long, long time. Nobody suggested leaving the glories of Forsyth for a few hours of slots over across the way, for we were seniors on a different mission.
Any veteran of nature outings, local or distant, brief or extended, will soon notice how celebrations of this kind seem to draw a preponderance of elderly of a certain mindset. There is the obvious appeal of the beauty and wonder of it all, as well as the love some of us have for just being outside. Being on this trip, with this group, raised thoughts about what else might be at work, here. It is a truism that getting old is about losses, both of physical capacity and the passing of more and more people you’ve known, along with a growing realization that sooner or later this will include you.
Two of the women traveling alone with our group felt comfortable enough at some point to mention how they’d recently lost spouses, and how they missed them. It was sad and poignant and certainly sobering, but also led this writer to wonder about the nature of nature, so to speak. What better way to acknowledge and accept mortality – and maybe ease the pain of loss, if only a bit – than to seek out those parts of the world teeming with aliveness, the world which in all its glory will carry on when we’re not around?
One of the two, a particularly outspoken woman in her mid-80s, mentioned how living partnerless the past few years was something she’d never get used to. So would you believe she had plans to get back to Africa for the eighth or ninth time after this trip? Something about how she could never have her fill of all that African wildness, so different from other parts of the world. She lamented the situation of her poor younger sister, who had no interest in joining her and who apparently “just keeps to the house while feeling her age,” or something to the effect. “I guess I just have a higher tolerance for pain, and a need to keep going” was her assessment. Maybe it’s really as simple as that.
To compare the wilder places on the continent of Africa with those found on greater Cape May seems a bit ludicrous, though for some nature seekers both are clearly worthy of a visit. Cape Cod, on the other hand, offers an interesting and more subtle comparison, and after a second visit to its counterpart on the Jersey shore, distinct differences were apparent.
Cape Cod has an intimate, almost claustrophobic feel; you’re never far from people there, and you know it. Cape May, in comparison, is far more spacious, with marshes that stretch to the horizon and thick deciduous forests where getting lost is a distinct possibility. Get away from the beaches in southern New Jersey and much is farmland. Agriculture is big in rural parts of the Garden State, greater Cape May among these. Blueberries are the state’s most lucrative crop, but garden vegetables are right up there, and in Massachusetts grocery stores it’s a big deal when the “Jersey corn” arrives.
As for birding, Cape Cod’s odd geography – a long extended L-shaped peninsula – seems to attract any number of bird species moving up and down the coast, some of them unusual and even rare for the American northeast, painted buntings and swallow-tailed kites and even a vermilion flycatcher in 2022. Cape May offers similar action at times, but is more famous for hawk migration and those beaches with the horseshoe crabs and the birds that show up for that. With so much more inviting habitat available, Cape May gets greater numbers of whatever suits the season, both migrants and breeders.
So what else to compare? Cape Cod has 48 Dunkin’ Donuts franchises, greater Cape May has 40 Wawas or thereabouts. One serves mostly coffee and breakfast-style edibles, the other offers every kind of foodstuff imaginable, plus gasoline. Dunkin’ (recently the name got shortened, God knows why) opens early and closes in the evening, while many Wawas are open 24 hours, which for birders headed out before dawn is a Godsend.
How did this trip compare to the others we’ve done over the years? It was New Jersey and not Costa Rica or Finland or even Texas, so the birds and habitat were less exotic but it was right up there in terms of beauty and spectacle, because nature trips are like that. The group with whom we’d shared it was especially memorable, for the reasons mentioned. We were all pretty old and instead of sitting around talking about our health issues and our many medical operations, as the stereotype goes, we had joined up for a good time and we bonded in a thoughtful way, thank goodness.
On the other hand, intimations of mortality were definitely a feature, for all the reasons mentioned here as well as a few others noted in Part 1. The most personal of those was how we’d left behind an old cat who’d been fading away, Felice, at one of those boarding places, and the fact is she’d died the day before we returned home. What is remarkable, in a striking or troubling or at least thought provoking way, is that this is a duplicate scenario from thirty years before, when we’d left another feeble old cat, Slim, at the vet’s when we’d gone to visit family. Thoughts of history repeating itself weighed on our minds in New Jersey, though not heavily. Que sera sera, as Doris Day sang it.
One can speculate on how those poor creatures met an earlier end out of loneliness for us, or because they’d felt abandoned, and anyone prone to feeling guilty would grab the opportunity, but it seems more likely that humans have thoughts like those and other species simply don’t. There is speculation nowadays that whales and elephants (or all sentient creatures – what do we know?) feel the pain of grief and loss, but that’s nothing like our species’ need to contemplate our end, and to even fear it. Animals simply express their will to live until they are no more, with no thought process involved. Call that speculation or belief, but it’s an understanding as good as any.
Slim’s passing was one loss among many, and one interesting thing about loss is that you never get used to it. The latest one generates as much pain and reflection as that first one, whenever it was, and so has every one in between. The hardest part is being home with the occasional thoughts about how something’s now missing, and how when you remember what it is, the moment is somehow joyous and sad at the same time. Such moments might become less frequent, but at some level they persist forever, which may be true for humans and whales and elephants alike, and who’s to say who else?
