A Site for Shore Eyes

Some of us have silly dreams, but they’re only silly to others. Like most people, I had lots of dreams, but most of them were nothing more than things that I thought would be nice if they happened to me. I don’t know when it actually occurred to me that most dreams don’t just happen to people without some form of purposeful pursuit, but I guess I finally figured it out.

Many would probably laugh at what eventually became one of my most important goals, namely, to move back to the barrier island where I grew up. Back in high school, many of my classmates wanted to get out of this place once and for all. They considered it the end of the world, tucked away at the bottom of New Jersey, where nothing happened except during the three months of summer.

I never wanted to leave, but my career as a structural engineer demanded my resources in just about everyplace but the Jersey Shore.

Nor was I truly certain that I wanted to return, although infrequent trips home to visit relatives started my nostalgic juices flowing, if only for a brief time. I lived in the south, mostly Georgia, for about 20 years. My family loved it there, and lost any desire they ever may have had for returning to the northeast.

When the job market bottomed out in the south, I took a job in Maryland near the end of 2002, thinking of it as a temporary thing. A month after I arrived, I noticed that my wife of over 32 years had sought a divorce attorney, and we ended our marriage two weeks before our 33^rd anniversary. The winter snows suddenly became much more appealing to me.

I met Jacalyn in 2005, and eventually moved to Woodstown, New Jersey, about 65 miles from where I started out. My sister and younger brother, as well as many of my other relatives, still resided in the area, and my older brother moved back to the area from Indiana, after retiring.

Jackie wanted to live in the mountains, but started considering modifying her dream to coincide more closely with mine. I would have done the same, but admit that I’m glad I never had to make that choice.

We made a list of the many reasons we would never consider moving to the Jersey Shore, and started looking at potential places in other states, especially North Carolina. South Jersey real estate prices, especially near the shore areas, went out of sight, and way beyond what we considered fair market value.

Funny things happen, though, and the inflated real estate prices caused a building boom, and we realized it would be only a matter of time before the hucksters killed the goose that laid the golden egg. We started looking closer to home, waiting for the craziness to subside. Neither of us really wanted to move away from our closest relatives.

It’s not really a long story, but I’ll make it short anyway. We recently bought a place in North Wildwood, where I was born, but now with a better view.

The island is still the same, only much different. Many of the older homes and motels disappeared, replaced by condos and townhomes. The business section along Pacific Avenue in Wildwood has reinvented itself several times, looking for a new identity, and it certainly hasn’t found one yet. And the beaches in Wildwood and Wildwood Crest keep getting wider. The elected officials in the Crest fight over whether to preserve a fishing pier rendered worthless by the absence of ocean beneath it. They continue fishing, but only for answers.

But it’s still pretty much the end of the world, especially during the winter months. The addition of some major retailers in Rio Grande makes real shopping much closer to reality now, saving a few trips to more populated areas for big ticket items. Internet shopping also helps considerably.

I definitely don’t recommend moving here. Things go way too slow during the winter, and way too fast during the summer. You’ll go from feeling lonely and abandoned during the winters, to smothered and crushed during the summers. You won’t like it, trust me, and progress is our least important product here.

Most of my dreams fell by the wayside. I no longer care about being rich and I never wanted to be famous. But now I’m famously rich with Jackie and our home by the backwaters, and I just don’t care much about money or anything else.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 6:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.