Shore Thing
Springing into the off-season
Greetings from Ocean Grove, New Jersey, where my wife and I made a late-breaking decision to take a quick trip to the Jersey Shore during an otherwise duty-bound Spring Break. We typically head north to New England when taking short vacations, but she has never spent any time on the Garden State coastline. As a child, my family took a trip to Wildwood, a working-class vacation stronghold in decades of yore. (I understand it now has something of a retro-chic.) The Sand Dollar Motel, where we stayed—I almost inadvertently drowned my sister and me in its pool before being rescued by a lifeguard—is now on a street dominated by condominiums.
Ocean Grove, by contrast, has much more respectable roots as a Methodist summer retreat, where camp revivals are still held. They established Asbury Park next door—I’ll get to that in a minute—but it quickly got overrun by the Wrong Sort (you know: immigrants, African Americans, criminals). Ocean Grove, by contrast, has maintained its Victorian character, particularly now, in the depths of the off-season. The hotel in which we’re staying, which sits on a street that ends at the boardwalk, charged me $130/night for a room that fetches $580/night in the heart of summer.
The sleepiness suits us just fine. I spent a chunk of time yesterday at the Odyssey Coffee Shop on Main Ave, which featured framed pages from Homer and copies of books like John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government on its shelves. (Yep. My kinda place. Bought my wife a pair of earrings there that feature images of Frida Kahlo inserted into the back of bottlecaps—proletarian chic.)
I did have a bit of an ulterior motive in steering us here, as I’ve been writing a fair amount about New Jersey lately, and our late afternoon constitutional on the boardwalk led us north into Asbury Park, which is, of course, the heart of Springsteenland. I don’t know it well, having only been there a few times. My current project on the wider world in which he came of age will focus a lot on the suburbs, though any reckoning with New Jersey must reckon with its cities (Frank Sinatra’s Hoboken; Philip Roth’s Newark; I might work in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson), and its long Atlantic coastline (I’m bracing myself to take on Snooki of Jersey Shore). There’s a lot to be figured out with this project. Which is part of its appeal.
For now, though, I’m happy to keep my attention focused on a new history of the Hundred Years War, which has been sitting in the stack on my living room side table for four months. I’ll replace it with the new Robert Harris novel, set on the eve of World War I, that I picked up on a bookstore foray on our way here. It will bring back pleasant memories of this little spring vacation when I read it this summer. Time travel is the best part of vacations.