Perfect Moments: Stone Harbor; Late ’70s; Night

A series of professional and personal disappointments. A young man on the brink of his 30s. No idea where his life is bound — forward, over the precipice? or backward, over that one? — or what he’ll find once he gets there. A motorcycle.

The details of the disappointments aren’t important. (Once you reach a certain age, they never do — and not just because the memory isn’t as reliable as it once was.) Suffice it to say, I really had no freaking idea what was going to become of me. It wasn’t quite despair, this feeling — not the stereotypical “my life is in the toilet,” you know. More like fear, maybe: was my life in the toilet?

Nothing seemed to be working out quite as I’d imagined it would, and a large part of that failure translated to: I myself wasn’t working out quite as I’d imagined.

Nothing doing on the writing front. Interesting but crapola jobs, plus an interesting but decidedly not crapola job that I’d still managed to fail at. Friends and classmates settling in to comfortable niches. One marriage flushed away after just a couple years. Nothing like a satisfying relationship within the horizons I could see. I had the bike, yeah, but I’d already taken the “finding-myself” tour on the road with it, camping around New England. Found some great photographs on that trip, and then of course I’d found New England itself (which I still love). But myself…?

Somewhere in there, I remembered a favorite college professor, Mrs. R as I still thought of her (although we’d long since lost touch and although she was no longer Mrs. R).

For some reason, particularly what I remembered was her rapturous description of her favorite day trip: hopping in the car and driving to Stone Harbor, a town at the Jersey Shore, and stopping for (I think) raspberry sherbet at a roadside stand on the way. (Details of disappointments often cease to matter; details of moments of epiphany often matter very much.)

I’d lived in New Jersey my whole life (save for a year in college when I’d been in North Carolina). I’d been down the Shore (as New Jerseyans say) dozens of times. But never had I visited Stone Harbor. I had no idea where it was. No idea what it would be like when I got there.

I went to the bookshelf. Out came the road atlas.

Mrs. R had specified nothing of the route she liked to take, except the vague phrase “back roads.” This was not North Jersey but South — big sprawling farms, cranberry bogs, the Pines — but even so it was, after all, Jersey. Which meant that a road trip of any length at all couldn’t take place entirely on back roads: you’d have to be on a highway or two, somewhere… I could see the highways she’d probably taken. The back roads I’d have to guess at, but sure, I could see the possibilities…

****

I couldn’t believe it: What the hell was I — timid I — doing on a motorcycle, at 10pm on a weeknight, riding through unfamiliar South Jersey countryside along unfamiliar routes, to a destination I knew absolutely nothing about — except that it had once meant something to a college professor to whom I hadn’t spoken in years?

No, I couldn’t believe it. And I knew my family wouldn’t believe it, either. I could almost hear my mother’s voice: What if you’d run out of gas? (“Mom, Mom, come on, give me some credit, I gassed up just after I left the apartment for cripe’s sake!”) I could hear my dad’s voice, too, in a dad-modified version of my own thoughts: What the hell are you trying to prove, anyhow? (I couldn’t imagine how I’d reply to that question, other than to shrug, nervously.) My sisters and brother might be more cautiously skeptical, maybe just sort of cocking an eyebrow apiece and looking across the table at one another…

The handlegrips throbbed under my hands, the pedals beneath my feet. The wind blew past my helmet. My ears were filled with roadnoise. The moon hung in the sky. I turned off the last highway onto the first of the true back roads I envisioned on the map in my head, and said goodbye to traffic for another hour.

As had happened on the New England trip, the first few bars of John Denver’s “Sweet Surrender” played in my head:

Lost and alone on some forgotten highway
Traveled by many, remembered by few
Lookin’ for something I can believe in
Lookin’ for something I’d like to do…
…with my life.

Some of the towns I rode through, I’d heard of before. Millville, sure. I nicked the corner of Vineland and of course I knew of Vineland, designated a “city” instead of town, and the largest city in the state in terms of land area — but I could see nothing as I streaked through the dark but fields to the left and right and, way off in the distance, the lights of a farm here and there, the blinking red lights atop a water tower. But I’d never heard of most of the towns down here. I’d seen the names on the road atlas, I guess, but didn’t recognize the names until blowing past the Now Entering signs: Brotmanville, Norma, Port Elizabeth, North and South Dennis and Dennisville itself…

Among the myriad other things I didn’t know when I set out was what to expect from Stone Harbor itself. Was it one of those cheap gaudily-lit Shore towns, with a main drag flanked by a dozen T-shirt shops and tourist traps selling clocks and doll furniture made of seashells? (Swainton, Avalon…) As I drew nearer, I could see bright lights on the south horizon and at first my heart sank. But then I realized the lights were too far off — they were Wildwood. So then Stone Harbor had to be that dark stretch directly ahead… Relief. A few stores, sure. 7-11s and Cumberland Farms convenience stores; a couple of largely vacant motels; a bakery, a supermarket, a post office. But nothing, apparently, open this late at night in the middle of the week.

Which meant I could probably get pretty close to the ocean without having to negotiate a lot of cars and human bodies.

Now, in some New Jersey Shore areas, actually getting to the waterfront can be complicated. You have to walk on only the prescribed footpaths, for instance, and once you get to the beach you need to watch out for signs warning of private property.

It didn’t look like I’d have that problem in Stone Harbor, as I approached the beach. To my right was a bird sanctuary and a rocky jetty, I could see.

I pulled the bike into a parking space, removed the helmet and strapped it to the chrome bar behind the seat. Yes. The bird sanctuary. The jetty. I could see the tall grasses of the one and the dark knuckles of the other in the moonlight, all right. But where was the ocean?

I walked off the asphalt onto the loose sand, and headed in what had to be the right direction. Mounted a drift…

There. That white line way the hell out there: that was the surf. That was the ocean.

The beach at Stone Harbor, as it happens, is very broad and very shallow. When the ocean retreats at low tide, it really retreats. That white line, it seemed to me that night, was a quarter-mile distant.

I sat down in the sand, lit a cigarette. I didn’t need to get close to the ocean, just wanted — although I’m not a “beach person” by nature — to see it, for some reason. I could see it fine from here and that was all I needed.

And I could hear it, too, far-off like the thin white line. Deep, a coarse rhythmic whisper, repeating and repeating the same syllable, pronounced slightly differently each time as though playing with it: Shhhh… sssssshh… shush… shhhhhhhhsshhh… Like a jillion other people, I know, but this was a first for me: I thought of all those waves traveling across the ocean, non-stop, weirdly traveling in all directions at once so waves lapped up on every coastline. I thought of how long they’d been doing that. I thought of how long I’d been doing whatever it was I’d been doing. Ssssssshhhh… shissssssssh… shushshush…

****

Another cigarette, and then (I think) a third, extinguishing them by stubbing them out in the sand. For probably another half-hour I sat there, a perfect half-hour compressed in my mind into a perfect moment of sitting there and not really thinking of anything of consequence to my everyday life. Not a single other soul disturbed my solitude. No dogs came padding along the sand. No birds squawked. An airplane or two crossed the sky, too far-off to be heard; the bright lights of Wildwood flickered to the south like a fluorescent tube going bad.

But really, it was just me, the quarter-mile-broad empty beach, the distant ocean, the sibilant tide…

Finally I got to my feet. I plucked the cigarette butts from the sand to dispose of them when I got back to the parking area, or at home if there was no trash barrel handy here.

Back on the bike again, reversing the route. Avalon. Swainton. The Dennises… Miles of dark open road. A starlit sky. Throttle and brake and engine purring. Wind rushing around the helmet and into my ears. And in my mind, again, “Sweet Surrender”…

There’s nothin’ behind me and nothin’ to tie me
To something that might have been true yesterday
Tomorrow is open — right now it seems to be more
Than enough to just be here today…

_______________________________________

[A search of YouTube yielded no videos of John Denver himself performing “Sweet Surrender,” just a couple of those nostalgic-photographic slideshows with the song playing in the background. However, I did find the live performance, below, by a Dutch singer, Leon van der Meer. I think JD would have been pleased with this rendition. Also note that there are at least a half-dozen completely different songs by the same name, by Sarah Maclachlan, Tim Buckley, Wet Wet Wet… So for those of you who know and treasure the other songs: Sorry, this is the only “Sweet Surrender” I’m familiar with. And even if I’d known of the others, this one would probably the only one running through my mind in this context.]