The Way It Was
As someone with their own page in most of my friends' telephone books, coming back to the Jersey Shore in the summer has always represented an anchor in an otherwise transient existence. No matter where I live, I manage to return to the shore at least once each summer to experience sensations familiar to me since the days before my active memory kicked in. But several years ago, I realized the shore had changed. Or so I thought.
I still remember the excitement I felt as a child as I rode with my parents from Philadelphia to "the shore" -- a feeling I hadn't lost by the time I could drive my first car across New Jersey. Yet somehow or other by the time I reached what I will discreetly call my maturity, I no longer experienced the exhilaration of that inevitable moment when someone in the car punctuated the following statement with a deep breath: "We're almost there. Can't you smell it?"
Was I too sophisticated to feel that kind of joy? Was I too jaded to revel in proximity to the beach? Or, was I too old to smell the traces of salt the air? The fault, I realized, lay not in myself, but in my car, that it was air-conditioned.
Missing that sensation made me recognize that life's changes intrude even on what we consider institutions. When it comes to visiting the shore, it isn't just the means of transportation that has changed over the years. So for the benefit of those of you who might wonder what a summer vacation at the Jersey Shore used to be like, I thought I'd record a few memories culled from my recollections of the last five decades. First a warning to those of you never knew a world without personal computers, microwaves, and cell phones. When I was born there was no air-conditioning let alone VCRs or PDAs. Yeah, I know. Sometimes, I forget that too.
When I was a kid, going to the shore meant more than an opportunity for vacation activities, it also meant an escape from hot inland homes. Even after our houses were air-conditioned, most summer rentals weren't. We relied on cool ocean breezes to provide a respite from summer's heat.
During the day we vacationers would flock to the beaches that lined New Jersey's Atlantic shore. At least one night each vacation we would cover our sunburn with sweatshirts and visit the Boardwalk's arcades, amusements and refreshment stands offering foods long since deemed inappropriate for human consumption by the medical community. But most evenings we would sit in our cottages (and in those days summer cottages were actually cottages not six bedroom/five and a half bath monoliths). The luckiest vacationers would sit on screened-in porches and listen with equanimity to the buzzing of the mosquitoes that the authorities attacked periodically with foul smelling sprays whose chemical composition I do not know nor want to. We would sit, scratch and amuse ourselves by . . . get this . . . conversation, card playing, and board games. With the exception of conversation which I will engage in with any stranger anytime, anywhere these pastimes are irrevocably linked to my early visits to the shore. I haven't played canasta in years and never outside the state of New Jersey. Does anyone?
When gin rummy, Monopoly and Checkers grew old, we would rock -- and listen to the creaking of the floorboards, the crickets in the bushes, and the waves. Why could we hear the waves? Because not only were there were no TV's in the houses we rented, there were no TVs in the houses anyone rented. Even after the average American home had multiple TVs, most rental houses at the shore did not have one. Eventually when portable televisions were introduced (and we could argue the application of the term portable to these early appliances) we would lug a portable TV to the shore. After much manipulation of the rabbit ears, we watched traces of the only available channel (which appeared to change daily) underneath a heavy layer of snow. Finally, the more enlightened lessees (as the rental contract would call them) began putting cable outlets into their properties so that the cable man could make a housecall to plug the television you dragged with you into the wall. Don't make any mistake, however, about what was available on cable in those days. There was no HBO. No MTV. No ESPN. Think we could get around that by renting a movie? In those days if you wanted to rent a movie you not only had to rent the film, you had to rent the theatre and the projectionist as well. It happened occasionally. I read about it in the newspaper.
Worried that without all the amusements that life in the twenty-first century has to offer we had time on our hands? Not so. We had other traditional shore activities. The laundramat for example. You know that washer/dryer combo you expect to find in your rental. For years, that was only a dream. Laundry went to the laundramat and someone had to go with it. With any luck, a rainy day would coincide with laundry day. But keep in mind, everyone saw it that way. If there's anything worse than lugging a week's laundry to a laundramat, it's lugging a week's laundry to an overcrowded laundramat and fighting for a dryer guaranteed to take years off the life of your wardrobe.
No washer/dryer meant that wet bathing suits went on the clothesline where they often stayed for several days until all our bathing suits were hanging there. We'd have to declare one dry and slip into it dry although slip might not be exactly the right word for climbing into a wet bathing suit.
Laundry wasn't the only timekiller. When I was a child, cooking took up more than its fair share of time not mine of course. But it kept my mother pretty busy. Meals were rudimentary. Rental kitchens rarely included the complete array of culinary aids that they do today. And, don't suggest take-out. There was great seafood takeout that we looked forward to as a weekend treat. The American psyche hadn't yet developed to the point where every meal served could be cooked elsewhere. (By the time I was renting with my college friends, I realized that one could survive for months on subs, pizza and burgers. At that point, although I didn't much care what they put in the kitchen except for a dishwasher for all those dirty glasses we accumulated. But when I was in college, houses with dishwashers were well beyond my crowd's budget.)
Luckily we could devote a minimum of time to food shopping -- for two reasons. One, we would stop at the farmstands and cram as much produce as we could into the already packed car. (For some reason, when I was a kid once you were on a barrier island you no more thought about leaving it over a causeway than you would have considered hopping a ferry for a two-hour ride to the mainland.) Two, before we left home we packed everything we could possibly need into the car and this was before the era of the mini-van. Comfort was not a keynote of the drive to the shore. All a kid could hope for was to get packed between the linens and not the aluminum beach chairs. (This was one part of the vacation I never understood. People lived at the shore. Didn't they go to the drug store? The hardware store? The grocery store? Did we believe local residents were paying $5 for a loaf of bread? Whatever the thinking, no one was going to catch us unawares. We packed it all. The only thing I can compare our provisions to is the motherlode of supplies I packed for a trip to post-coup Russia. That I understood. Russia's economic system was failing. I still don't understand what we thought was going on at the shore.)
Speaking of knowing what was going on, there was a lot we didn't know. Rental homes did not have phones. And remember there were no cell phones, pagers or e-mail. In those days only NASA was online. Unless you made the effort to track down a newspaper, a vacation at the shore was gloriously free of any awareness of the outside world. Eventually, we had transistor radios but that didn't mean we always have clear reception to hear about world events. Looking back, it seems like such a luxury not to know.
But don't feel sorry about what we didn't have on our summer vacations. What's important is not what we didn't have but what we did have: true escape to a life that in no way resembled the one we'd left behind. That's the way it was. Or at least that's how I choose to remember it.
