the rix mix

The first time I went to Wildwood overnight was in late October in the 80s. We drove down on a Friday evening in a furious rainstorm, trusting the excellent forecast for Saturday & Sunday. The road acroass the marsh into North Wildwood (Anglesea) was unimproved, a two lane road lined with shack cottages on silted canals, an old drawbridge at the island end. We stayed at a bed & breakfast in North Wildwood. The innkeepers weren't there when we arrived - they were at a high school reunion, & a designated neighbor checked us in. Saturday morning was clear blue sky, & cool, & I realized I wasn't a B&B type. I don't want to have to get up at certain time & immediately sit down to breakfast, no matter how tasty, with strangers. I just want a good cup of coffee. & even it's not that good it's still better than nothin'. Anyway, after breakfast we had a look at the boardwalk. This was at the tail end of Wildwood's post-season, & the immensity of the sparsely populated boardwalk stretching out before me was a beautiful thing; I resolved then & there to return the following August. That weekend also included my first stroll around Cape May City & first visit to the classic Cape May lighthouse & the Victorian light in North Wildwood. Following that weekend, I made the final revisions to my long poem "Boardwalk," originally published about five years earlier under a different title. Which was one reason I made an offseason trek to Wildwood. I needed to find out if my poem felt big enough to encompass a place like Wildwood. It did.

The following early Spring we stayed for a night in a standard motel with a cute name. I recall little of that visit, we had gone on a whim. In August we took an inexpensive room for three nights in an older wood frame hotel in the center of Wildwood. It seemed like a good idea at the time, trying an "Old Wildwood" experience, but I wasn't going to do that again either, sharing a bath. Also discovered how wide the beach is when all you want to do is get to the edge of the water & plant a beach chair. But the boardwalk was fabulous. So was a maiden voyage on the ferry across Delaware Bay to Lewes. I brought a small tape recorder along & captured several great barkers & lot of ambient boardwalk sound.

Downtown Wildwood in the late 80s was a failed pedestrian mall; the city had fallen for the Urban Renewal scam, lost the core of its pre World war II history & had nothing else to replace it. Wildwood is still throwing itself away. Not having gone there as a child or adolescent, the town fortunately was incapable of breaking my heart. Visits to Atlantic City & Asbury Park are tough enough. I knew there were plans on the drafting table to widen the two lane causeway into North Wildwood & replace the drawbridge, getting rid of all the shacks. There was creeping condo development at both ends of 7 Mile island. The 50s & 60s motels had been publicized & praised in a study from the Yale Architectural School. But that wouldn't be enough to save them. Most of the smaller motels were family-owned, & those not located on a beach block were obviously struggling. The city's "Doo Wop" promotional campaigns were just that. No serious effort was being made at developing & codifying anything that would constitute a real attempt at preservation of buildings or even style. It was mostly, in a word, jiveass. Wildwood real estate would soon enough be as ripe for the picking as a Matawan cornfield. Unlike Cape May City or Ocean Grove, the buyers don't buy to live there.

These initial Wildwood experiences happened in the declining years of a lengthy relationship . I might have gotten more out of them if I'd been alone. She liked boardwalks but had no childhood memories or family connections to the shore. I appreciate that she had the patience to let me explore mine. Our fathers had died a few years before & she understood this was a large part of how I was coming to terms.

(8/06)

Labels: boardwalks, jersey shore, motel hotel, postcard, Wildwoods NJ