Cape May Diaries
2- Making preparations
In 1990, our landladies boasted of Cape May's bed and breakfast establishments, but we were a little wary of those kinds of places. Many, we met later, found attractive what Joel Lewis called "communal living and formal conversation." We did not. The whole idea that we should feel as if we were staying at someone else's house appalled us, giving us the dreadful sense that we would be imposing.
For some people -- like us -- travel needs the edge of the remote, that cold sense of strange places where we can maintain our distance from other people, picking and choosing those moments when we wish to engage others in conversation. What we wanted was a place that would provide us with access to the local scene without intimate contact with strangers.
This became a problem for us at a distance. While the Bed and Breakfast places in Cape May had a fine reputation -- as we learned later -- many of the ordinary establishment had renamed themselves in a fashion to fit the Victorian nature of the place. During this pre-internet era, we had to either call around to ask or rely on our intuition to steer clear of the more intimate places. In this case, AAA of Northern New Jersey came in handy.
For several years I had paid dues to AAA as a kind of insurance policy against roadside breakdowns. Several such disasters had made me wary of extended travel, even as far as my best friend's house near Mt. Arlington in northwestern, New Jersey. But only as we began to plan our trip south did it occur to me that we might make use of AAA's other field of expertise, taking advantage of its book laden with recommended food and lodging establishments.
We knew from a guidebook on shore resorts which honeyed atmospheric establishments to avoid such as the bed and breakfast places like "The Abbey" or "The Brass Bed," AAA gave us a list against which to compare. Once we had cut the choices down to a manageable number, we could call and inquire about the details.
Although we did not know it at the time, the roots of the Bed and Breakfast tradition seemed to go back to when then Cape Isle began as a summer resort. People fresh off the schooners from Philadelphia found only a handful of taverns to accommodate them, the earliest of these was a tavern owned by Ellis Hughes that later evolved into the Atlantic Hotel, who competed against Ephrim and Mary Mill, who ran an establishment called "The Mills." These -- in contrast to the brightly painted Victorian cottages that you might find there sixty years later -- were largely unpainted wooden structures whose wood had turned gray from constant contact with salt air.
At best, these two places put up three dozen people at a time, leaving others to make their own arrangements in private homes. Although eager for money, early Cape Isle homeowners seemed relieved when the summer season ended and the flocks of tourists migrated back to their winter residences. Many locals took on a kind of clannishness, a mentality that lingers there even today, when after the three million summer time visitors vanish and the small community of 5,000 returns to normal.
The character of the tourist, of course, differed from those who seem to seek the sea today. With Cape May at the height of fashion, many of the most spoiled people came to the Cape to summer, carrying on in a manner many locals found outrageous, the symbolic characters that would later mark young professionals of "the roaring twenties" and the even more outrageous 1980s. For all its fashionable attraction, Cape May seemed endowed with practical values that had arrived with the Quakers and Whalers who first set up residence there, men and women -- some of whom were the direct relations to those arriving in America on the Mayflower -- endowed with a sense of survival that put up with, but did not totally accept the frivolous attitudes of their visitors.
A sense of other-worldliness seemed to hover over the heads of those who lived full time in Cape May, the way such a sense does over most people who spend their lives in little towns. In some ways, Cape May struggles with its sense of identity as it becomes more and more popular, dealing with little town concerns and its sense of community, both of which come under siege each summer when more than three million tourists arrive. In the decade of our traveling south, we routinely encountered in these residents a wary friendliness, as if those who rented us our room or made our beds or issued us our breakfast expected the worst in us to emerge at any moment.
We called one of the places based vaguely on a map and the name. Calculating the off-season, holiday weekend cost of our room was chore. The inn keeper was never rude or deliberately condescending. Hers' was the same impatience of tone I had come across with various tradesmen over the years, which did not view their craft as complicated or mysterious, and failed to perceive why other people did.
With that settled, I offered to pay the bill in full over the phone by credit card.
"We don't take credit cards," she said.
"You mean over the telephone?"
"Not at all."
Although this changed over the next decade, the initial restriction haunted me, echoing that small town distrust for the city slicker. Or perhaps, the restriction reflected some of the more basic human stock upon which Cape May was built, Quakers and Puritans, struggling against the tides and circumstance to build a community on a land mass that was mostly water, learning to fill in swamp to provide more ground upon which to till or raise cattle, learning to ignore the thousand and one schemers that continually washed up on their shores with plans to make money.
"What about a check?" I asked, wondering whether I would have to wire cash. Or did they not believe in the telegraph down there?
A check would be fine, she said, as long as it cleared her bank well before we arrived. Although the phone conversation did make us wonder what it was we might expect when we finally reached Cape May’s shores.