the rix mix

I was brought to the Ocean City boardwalk before I was one year old. This is how the minds of generations of children are imprinted with the sights, sound & fragrances of boardwalks, so we return to them year after year like shad up the Delaware. One of my earliest memories is of waking up as my mother carried me out to our woody station wagon just after sunrise for the long drive south on Route 9 before the Parkway existed. For ten years, Ocean City was the only boardwalk I knew. With two exceptions: My grandmother took me to Asbury Park for a weekend. I only recall that there were a lot of flowers & I rode on a kiddy boat in Wesley Lake. Nana also took me to Allantic City - my mind plays tricks & recalls it as a trolley trip, but the line shut down the year I was born. although they were stillin running in Atlantic City.

Ocean City was a sedate place, then as now an alternative to the raucus beach towns. Point Pleasant, Seaside Heights & Wildwood were only signs on the highway. I first visited Seaside when I was 17; by then I was thoroughly familiar with Atlantic City in & out of season & took an "Is this all there is to it?" attitude toward Seaside. But I loved it. Atlantic City was far away & dying. I didn't get a good look at Wildwood until I was nearly 40. In the 80s, the road into North Wildwood was still an unimproved two-laner lined with shacks, the island loaded with cool motels, the boardwalk a multi-media extravaganza that went on & on. It won me over instantly. I also ventured into Cape May City, which had many charms to be sure, even a club with a drag show to go with the Victorian "cottages." I visited the first classic lighthouse I'd ever seen close up, & took the ferry over to Lewes & back. They all knocked me out.

I was in Ocean City the summer Hatari played there, 

"Outside there were birds perching on the clothesline, & dew on the grass, & a cool, cloudless morning sky stretching away to an island over the marshes & bay."

Angels At the Jersey Shore

I keep a special feeling for both Ocean City & Somers Point, although I haven't visited since the previous millennium. Somers Point is almost unrecognizable, there's been so much development since the casinos arrived. My godmother still lives there with her husband, it makes me sad that I haven't seen them in two decades. Ocean City is very much a year-round residential town, a true city. Because it had run out of space by 1970, it's losing old houses to the "tear down" disease. The amusement areas are larger, there's tall condos & traffic jams, expensive espresso drinks & pastries; the expressions of affluence & price-tagged taste more overt, the leisurely ambience unconvincing. Yet the boardwalk looked & felt like the boardwalk as I knew it long ago. The Music Pier, Flanders Hotel, & stucco stores remain. It just wasn't my boardwalk anymore. I understood how the love given a child becomes the love a child feels for a place.

Labels: boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, Ocean City NJ, postcard