Cape May Diaries
7 - Inn at the end of the road
We arrived in Cape May for the first time on a dark night in October 1990, greeted by the glow of the harbor as we rolled over the bridge into the quiet streets beyond. The scent of the seat flowed through the open car windows recalling past days in my grandfather’s company when I helped him in his boat-making. We could even hear the creak of boats rubbing against their moorings.
I did not know as we passed the boats that Cape May's whalers had lost their home as well, how erosion had stolen the whole southern tip where their original town lay. Yet I could feel their ghosts hovering above us in the dark, I could hear their voices in the wind, mingling with the desperate cry of the sea gulls.
Many of the men who had come here to whale had grown rich, even as they exploited the resource to the point of extinction, taking in some much for so long that Delaware became depleted of stock. Their greed, of course, blinded them to the ill‑effect of their acts, so that like the clammers and oyster collectors of later generations, they fished until they found the whales were all gone.
Unlike their whaling cousins to the north, these fisherman did not rig large ships or sale them to remote locations. The whales came to them, sailing near enough to shore that whales could set out in small boats ‑‑ and though as risky as other forms of whaling ‑‑ strike the beasts until weak enough to drag to shore for gutting.
After the whalers killed off most of the cow whales and ended the whaling industry in Cape May, fishing didn't end: other forms of fishing took its place. As far inland as Mays Landing and Tuckahoe, boats were built on tidal streams for services in the sea and ocean.
The driving instructions directed us over the bridge on what turned out to be Lafayette Street where all we had to do was hold onto until we reached the first traffic light, make a left and drive straight to the beach.
Following the directions the innkeeper had given us, we drove to Madison Avenue and made a left for the short ride to the beach. The streets along one side of Madison Avenue reflected one-time developers to imitate Atlantic City's success, one street after another named after states in the Union. They were part of a later developer’s vision to build a new residential neighborhood around what was then called the Hotel Cape May, the largest hotel in the world. These streets differed sharply from the more confusing streets that made up the more historic part of the town, cris-crossed like a map of central Manhattan.
Although beautiful in their own right, many of the houses in that section (East Cape May) tended to be less historic than those at the heart of the town, built and painted to resemble Victorian architecture rather than restorations of the authentic originals. One of the handful of glaring exceptions was the Physick Estate, which we would visit in later years. We would learn from that visit how the acres around that house had once been bog, considered of little worth -- much the people had looked upon the Meadowlands in the north -- and that between it and the ocean was a sea of dunes and swamp, much like the vast expanse we had witnessed in-between the Parkway and the distant glow of Atlantic City, a place more suited to egrets than sunbathers. In filling in this land as part of their vast money-making scheme, the developers made one of the greatest environmental intrusions of the early 19th Century, and one for which modern residents still suffered the consequences.
Our motel was the second hotel from the corner, a pink painted L-shaped building constructed to roughly resemble the Victorian cottages we would later see. Wild flowers sprouted up in front of the office door, surrounding a small bubbling fountain in which we would later discover fish. Everything except for the green glow from the motel’s two swimming pools in the court yard was dark, and as the clerk had said, we found the key to our room under the office doormat.
In the AAA guide that led us to pick this motel, management had boasted of seaside views. This proved a bit disingenuous. When we woke in our room the next morning and stepped out onto our balcony to take in the morning air, we discovered we needed binoculars to actually view the sea. The motel office and the apartment above it – which fronted the motel – had the best view of water and beach. We had to squint and for the most part saw only the joggers and bicyclists on the promenade, and, of course, the swirling, always hungry sea gulls squawking overhead. But even in the dark when we first eased into the room from the road and threw open the balcony door, we could hear the sea, that ever present whispering of waves that seduced us into sleep.
The unnaturally warm weather that week in October 1990 provided us with a small, but plentiful stained glass wedding present as hundreds of monarch butterflies drifted through the air like falling tree leaves. Had we read more of the Joel Lewis poem that had brought us here, we might have expected the gift and anticipated their orange glow as we later did over the next decade and a half visiting this place at this time of year. At the end of autumn, these flocks stopped here on their slow migration south to Mexico. When the temperature dropped, the monarchs moved on – except on this particular year the temperature remained fixed in excess of 90 degrees. In subsequent years, the numbers of monarchs diminished with each sinking degree. But as with many things we encountered in Cape May, the appearance of the monarchs became an omen of fortunes over the next year. We needed to see them as part of our own renewal process. On that morning, we found the sky filled with them even as we stood and looked out from our balcony, their number coloring the golden rod into new shades of orange, rising and falling from the landscape like delicate clouds.
They were the first, but hardly the last signs of magic we would find in Cape May over the years, but they remain the brightest in our memory.