MY KID TRIPS TO THE SEASHORE

When I was a kid my family spent two weeks of every year at the seaside resorts in New Jersey. My parents always favored Atlantic City but through constant pleading and promises to ace my homework, I was frequently able to steer them to the more kid-friendly Wildwood.

The trip from Philadelphia to Wildwood was made on a train pulled by a real, smoke-belching steam locomotive. All the cars had sliding windows and, when we kids weren't busy chasing each other we'd be hanging out the window, trying to grab leaves from nearby trees. After a few hours of farms and forest, the ground turned sandy and marshy, indicating that we were entering the coastal zone. There a curtain of solemnity fell on the train as the locomotive pulled us slowly over wooden trestles crossing desolate plains of quicksand. Every kid believed there were hundreds of bodies just below the surface.

Finally the train pulled into Wildwood Station and we located our hotel and got checked in. I remember how the linen on the beds always smelled like sea salt and how sand got into everything despite the best efforts of the staff.

I was always chomping at the bit to run up to the boardwalk and get my first glimpse of the ocean, but the adults seemed to get a fiendish pleasure out of delaying that, so for hours I'd have to be satisfied with fleeting glimpses. From a block away the boardwalk struck me as a boundary demarcating the end of the world. I half expected that just beyond the point that I could see was a giant waterfall where the Earth's water tumbled into outer space.

When I finally got to go to the boardwalk I'd run to the rail, and what I saw did not disappoint: a wide-screen, panoramic vista of the awesome Atlantic Ocean and the vast, blue sky above it. I'd squint to see if I could see the curvature of the Earth. I couldn't but I was still vividly reminded that I was standing on the surface of a small planet making its way around a star.

The boardwalk could look kind of tacky at first glance, and my parents were always appalled the first time they saw it. No doubt they wished they'd gone to Atlantic City instead. If you want to see why, take a look at the 15 second video above.



In an effort to delay my immersion into Wildwood culture, my parents always dragged me to their favorite fishing pier first. It was okay, but I couldn't see the point of a pier without a roller coaster on it. It was fun to watch the fishermen, though. The ocean there contained a lot more sea life in those days and lots of fisherman had sizable fish swimming in buckets beside them.

Since we're on the subject of fishing piers I'll digress for a moment to vilify the stupid yuppies who build shaded concrete piers. This is a grievous violation of pier tradition. It's true that wood is hopelessly fragile when exposed to the elements, but that vulnerability is what makes it special. When you walk on it you can't help but meditate on the impermanence of things and the grandeur of nature. How do you get that from concrete?

Anyway, I'd finally get free of my parents, and undertake to see if there was anything new on the pier since I saw it last (that's not anyone I know above, it's just some guy). I'd walk the length of the long boardwalk from end to end, making note of where the special places were...special as in stores that sold rubber shrunken heads and magic tricks.

Here's (above) the way the boardwalk looked when I was a kid: lots of shooting galleries, pizza and clams, big gambling wheels, novelty stores, Big Daddy Roth shirts, buckets and shovels, rubber chickens, sunglasses, ship captain caps, stuffed alligator babies playing ukuleles, and the like.

My favorite place was a dark, cavernous arcade with a canvas roof which contained some really old-fashioned carnival attractions. In one you threw balls at a target, and if you hit it a little pig was released from a cage, slid down a ramp, then ran backstage. In another the same thing happened only instead of a pig, it was an evil clown who insulted passers-by. In yet another one you gave a crow (above) a quarter and he took it in his beak, climbed some stairs to a Japanese pagoda, grabbed a fortune from a satchel, then climbed down the steps and handed it to you.

There were always alligator wrestlers, too. The barker and the hand-painted posters all around made the alligators look huge and ferocious (above) , but in real life they were tiny and I wondered how they could stand having fat Seminole indians sit on them. There were horse shows, beauty contests (I wasn't allowed in there) and...Oh, did I mention caricaturists? I spent a LOT of time watching them.

I later heard that this arcade was a gift to my generation from an elderly businessman who undertook to preserve the feel of the older amusement parks, even at the expense of big profits. Boy, we Wildwood kids owe him a lot. We were changed by him.

By far the most common stores then and now were these shops where you could buy sunglasses and day glow "I'm Standing Next to Stupid" shirts. When I was a kid I used to wonder how the proprietors could be so dumb as to stock the same merchandise that everybody else was selling.

On the other hand, I thought that even these debased people possessed some mystical knowledge that only beach people knew. I imagined that they had short-wave sets which informed them of ship disasters, piracy and sea monsters. I'd root around these stores looking for something different like old cutlasses or the eggs of sea dinosaurs.

The beaches were really crowded, and littered with seaweed and crab skeletons. Each new wave brought a kazillion burrowing clams onto the beach, and when I waded into the water I would sometime see tiny eels swimming around me, snapping at the strings on my bathing suit. Once I saw a shark next to my leg which was only about a foot long and appeared to be scared of people.

Like every other kid I frequently stayed out in the sun too long and had many painful bouts with sunburn. On those days I was grounded and had to stay at the hotel for most of the day. We stayed at small hotels that were more like houses than hotels, and all these places had white porches with rocking chairs. I'd sit there and read comics and Mad magazine and listen to screams from the roller coasters.

Occasionally I'd awkwardly talk to girls who were also staying at the hotel, surely one of the thrills of my little kid life, just talking to them...but I digress again.

Some of the best piers were disorganized, sloppy mutts with rides and popcorn stands in no special order, just wherever they were able to squeeze something else in.

This reminds me that seashore piers before my time (above) used to be elaborate affairs with ornate buildings and labyrinths of weird auction rooms and cigar shops. Unfortunately I missed most of that. Atlantic City's Steel Pier was somewhat like that, but that pier was always burning down, and was eventually simplified beyond recognition.

There were lots of dark rides. I hung around these constantly, believing that there was some mysterious lesson to be derived from them.





When I was a kid I thought there was no better job on Earth than designing dark rides. Using ordinary materials, somehow designers could cause a rent in the fabric of the universe that would connect the ride with the spirit world or with weird creatures on Mars who were plotting to invade the Earth. Ordinary people thought the rides were just for entertainment, but the designers knew better.

Every summer I renewed my resolve to one day live in a house that was designed like a fun house. Thinking about this now fills me with remorse. Today I live in a house that's pretty typical and not at all up to the high standards of weirdness of my childhood.


I'm getting tired of writing, so I'll end with the observation that what made the seashore special was that all the shooting galleries and pizza parlors were right next door to the mysterious and menacing Atlantic Ocean. Lots of restaurants displayed giant whale bones. I never saw a whale at Wildwood, but my father saw one from a fishing boat. I'm envious.