Ten True Summers
The physics of being "down the shore"
This past holiday weekend I experienced joy equal to discovering I qualify for reducing fares on NJ transit: senior citizen season beach badges for Asbury Park. This is the first downward shift in my summer economic calculus in the fifty years since I began paying for my own records and books.
There is a certain sense of well-being that comes from commutating the short summer work week for an extended weekend “down the shore” — never at the shore, never to the beach, strictly “down the shore” with its own set of cardinal directions (measured with respect to the ocean and ocean parallel boulevards). A friend’s father used to say that cresting the Route 72 causeway onto Long Beach Island split the world into halves.
Here are some observations on six full decades spent down the shore, with family, friends, my own family, and more friends.
Beach badges are the silver dollars of our generation. They mark time and place; duration (day, week, season) and are the sole fiat currency that gets you access to the beach. You see that wavy pin pattern in the off season and are willing to trade the holes it put in your favorite concert tee for the smile.
When you unroll a piece of salt water taffy with your teeth to avoid getting every finger sticky, you end eating a minuscule square of wax paper. It doesn’t matter if the taffy is hot, cold, freshly rolled or remaindered in the bottom of your beach bag. Despite a decade working in the pharmaceutical business, I have no idea what the medicinal chemistry properties of taffy wrappers might include, but they are vital.
Boardwalk pizza takes on ethereal qualities. It’s not the artisan thin crust or curated toppings of your home pizza place; it’s salt spray and humidity being heated just above air temperature that make it taste differently. The oversized slices require folding skills that can only be mastered via a graduate Springer-Verlag topology text book. But we all know them, innately, once we’re old enough to command our own slices.
You will find sand stuck to a body part at bedtime. Independent of showers on the beach steps, or an outside house sand shower, or a high pressure hotel rinse off, sand sticks to skin with something between the strong nuclear force and Gorilla Glue. You could get washed down by a fire truck and there will be grit. That feeling of sand between your toes is invariant from the surf line to the shower pan.
Soft serve ice cream has its own physics that has never properly been studied, because doing so would take away the magic of Jersey Freeze or the Margate Dairy Bar (do not comment, those are the only two serious options).
There is a band playing a pop song in a bar that you will remember for the next decade. For me it’s cover band Sringfield playing “Rosalita” at Joe Pops in 1981. James Campion’s “Deep Tank Jersey” (now in its 30th year) captures every sight, smell and sound of one of those summers with the band Dog Voice in ekphrastic beauty.
Long before MTV and TikTok we had soundtracks to our summer. “Born to Run” and the “Jaws” theme at the denouement of 1975, Pilot’s “Magic,” the Commodores “Easy (Like Sunday Morning)” as well as having to explain the Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” to our parents. The barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain has turned 50 plus a teenager, and we have never stopped singing about her.