Cape May Diaries
4- Taking the Turnpike south
By the time we set out for Cape May for the first time in October 1990, Mike Gonnelli a firefighter from Secaucus had already made his trips a ritual there. We later learned that had made the trip there that same year but a few months after us during the annual firefighters’ convention in Wildwood.
He and his wife usually slipped away from the rowdy celebrations for quiet time together along Cape May’s promenade and the Washington Street Mall.
That year, Mike had a lot to think about. He still had singed fingers from two fire rescues he had made, the first in which he had to yank open the door of a burning car after a crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, the second when he recovered the child from a burning building in which the mother had been murdered.
What did it all mean?
His recent decision to remarry only complicated matters, adding love into the mix of pride and confusion.
A master gardener who had once run several green houses raising flowers, Gonnelli had a gentle disposition people frequently mistook as mild mannered. Newspapers called him a hero
Linda, a municipal worker at the time, had fallen for Gonnelli’s gentle nature, basking in his soft spoken manner while at the same time she admired the great courage she knew hid behind his baby-face.
That year they settled into a quiet conversation over dinner in one of the numerous quality eateries. They let the luxurious colors of the cottages wash over them. They took deep breaths of the sea winds blowing in from off shore, cleansing them of the year’s troubles, so they could wander back to their ordinary and extraordinary lives.
“We call it getting some quiet time,” Mike told me. “It’s become a ritual. It’s just something we have to do.”
For most people, finding Cape May from North Eastern New Jersey was not a difficult issue. All you have to do is get on the Garden State Parkway south and keep going until you hit water. Living at the time in East Rutherford, we actually found it easier to take the New Jersey Turnpike, a bit of a trickier proposition since it required us to make one additional turn.
Historically, Cape May’s remote location at the southern most tip of New Jersey made land travel next to impossible. Cape Isle, as it was sometimes called, was most easily accessed by water, not by roads. Some accounts claim the trip from Philadelphia took days, over muddy and rutted roads. Trains improved the trip when finally a spur was connected to the Cape, though most traveling south or west stopped at Atlantic City instead. Early on, many of the earlier visitors to the Cape came from the deeper south, a southern resort in New Jersey that was oddly enough, still below the Mason-Dixon Line. But for a long time, Cape May was known as the resort for Philadelphia’s high society – of which, of course, we were not.
Many people dislike the Turnpike. For me the stretch between Giants Stadium in East Rutherford and the Parkway turnoff near Edison was familiar stomping ground I had traveled for decades coming and going from family homes in Tom’s River.
I knew its idiosyncrasies, odd turns or shifts in lane. I could anticipate the change of air as we passed through the oil refineries and shipyards of Linden and Elizabeth. I loved the flocks of geese honked their way over the Meadowlands and let my imagination wandered through the Stephen Spielberg-like industrial light shows the refineries provided at night – flames huffing and puffing out of high towers as the machinery below processed credo oil. Even the container ports seemed like an alien invasion, so loaded with lights they seemed ready for a close encounter each time I passed at night.
There was something more legitimate about the Turnpike than the Parkway, as if this stretch better reflected the nature of contemporary New Jersey than the garden-like illusion the lawn-like sides of the Parkway provided. The Garden State had not been a garden since my grandfather’s time, when he traveled south as I did to build and launch boats -- neither Turnpike nor Parkway available to him until near the time of his death.
Both roads had served North Jersey as a conduit for migration, masses of city dwellers – including members of my family – descending upon the rural parts of inland and the sea side resorts where many had fond memories of going during vacations as kids, populating the corridor as adults in a fit of nostalgia. The move largely ruined the landscape in what was later dubbed suburban sprawl.
The landscape surrounding the Turnpike was also more honest, as bleak in sections as the worst industrial zones on the planet. For years, the stretch below Route 3 testified to humanity's bleak habits since the end of World War Two, spreading mounds of trash out over the meadows -- a condition that had one time drew flocks of sea gulls so think I often mistook them for clouds or smoke. On some trips, I found myself studying their efforts to draw substance from the waste. Over the years, I also watched that landscape change, as political bodies such as the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission and private entities such as the Hackensack Riverkeeper struggled to return the place to a more natural state.
Further south where the highway passed through Elizabeth, the air changed, and stench of oil refineries and other chemical institutions sobered even the most inattentive driver. So potent was that smell at times that it worked through closed windows even in winter, making some travelers holds their breaths for miles until they passed through the vapors.
On this hot October evening in 1990, all these things came together at once, as if the route helped us celebrate our wedding: the sun setting over the meadows in Secaucus, the unabated flight of airplanes, and finally the fire and lights of Elizabeth, and we drove through it all like children visiting Disneyland for the first time, each marvel more spectacular than the last, whetting our appetite for that final marvel we were to visit: Cape May.