I spent last week on the beach in Wildwood, NJ, a place I’ve gone for vacation since before I can remember. Even more than the beauty and fun of a week at the beach, I enjoyed the break from life’s routine. Such experiences can’t help but readjust a person’s focus, and the endless horizon of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching toward the “old world” of my ancestors can’t help but provide perspective.
Lying on the sand, staring up at the sky and clouds, I found my thoughts drifting to the extremes of joy and agony I’ve experienced at the place where the water meets the land: playing pinball in a boardwalk arcade; returning from the beach in the afternoon to shower and make love before heading out for dinner and drinks; watching the sun rise out of the ocean and set into the bay. When I was small, my brother, my cousin, and I were pulled away from the beach by a riptide and had to be rescued by lifeguards in a boat. In one of the most intensely painful incidents in my life, a wave lifted me up and pounded me headfirst into the sand, compressing a vertebrae. As I age and my bones stiffen, I think that particular one will give me more trouble than any other.
Still, there’s something about the seashore that is hypnotic and seductive. There are the scores of healthy young bodies, proudly on display; the gentle hush of the endless waves; and the eternal, unblinking force of nature pounding rock into sand. I hear the fudge is good too.
In 2009, my first novel, The Zoo, was published. It contains this passage in which the protagonist visits a special beach with the planet’s oldest being, a fish named Ella:
“How old is that?”
Words & Music by Mike Power 