Cape May Diaries
21- Through the dark wilds of Cape May
The dark swallowed us like a beached whale might. Our car headlights barely illuminated the curving black top roadway ahead of us as we steered out of the cluttered historic Cape May proper, back over the bridge and passed the harbor to the unknown wilds of Cape May County.
This was 1992, and though this was our third trip to Cape May, we still knew nothing about the landscape, seeing the familiar twinkle of the only area we knew as populated shrinking in our rear view mirror.
We were hungry, but had made the mistake of waiting too long to seek out food, learning that Cape May tended to close down after dark in those days. This has since changed as the resort became a more popular destination for off-season travelers.
We also being city dwellers presumed the worst about rural areas, assuming arrogantly that places like Cape May and other places remote from the city simply rolled up their sidewalks at night.
So we set forth over the bridge into what we thought were the wilds of southern New Jersey, hoping we might stumble upon something other than the 7-11 convenience store with his microwave diet. We wanted real food, and failing to find that, some form of fast food diet.
We had no idea that this would later become one of our yearly rituals. We simply thought we were getting lost
Our lives had already revolved around cycles, good and bad times, startling episodes followed by dull routines, meaningful moments shifting into empty habits. Each trip to Cape May served us as the beginning of a new cycle, a kind of New Years a few months early during which time we made resolutions for the upcoming year and hoped our time wandering through this world would help us restart the cycle of our lives on a high note.
We became more than a little superstitious in this regard – making certain we went to certain places and did certain things as if these rituals would guarantee us a positive new year. While we didn’t always do the same routines, we set aside special events we considered worthy of repetition, adding a new feature with each trip, balancing the old with the new to see which was most relevant for that year.
The classic movie theater on Beach Drive became one aspect of these since it generally held over films we meant to see up north but had missed. We always spent one night out having dinner. We always took a night time stroll along the dark beach to see stars city lights had always denied us. We always searched for Cape May diamonds, always went to see the birds, and always strolled through the Victorian Cottages.
So that night in 1992, while seeking food, we found ourselves adding yet one more yearly ritual to our diet. Conventional wisdom should have sent us back up the Garden State Parkway to a rest area where we might purchase fast food at a price equivalent to fine dinning anywhere else.
Instead, we turned down a dark and narrow road signs claimed would bring us to either the Cape May Ferry or as place named Rio Grande. This was still a few years before real estate developers discovered that part of the world when farm land, horse ranches and trailer parks still decorated the road sides, and old fashioned motels still posted their vacancy signs in a flash back to those days when my grandfather drove us along Route 35 further north. All that was lacking was the fruit and vegetable laden stand with handwritten signs advertising “real Jersey Tomatoes.”
We would live to see all this change despite claims from Gov. Jim McGreevey that farm lands would be protected under something called “Smart Growth,” and that new development would be slated for where old industry used to stand. Each mile we drove into darkness that night would become enriched with lights and housing as developers – restricted by strict regulations inside historic Cape May built around the boundaries, shedding the state of that last aspect of “garden” for which it was nick named.
Of course, even in 1992, this concept of rural as our “citified” minds painted it no longer existed – although as we drove and the darkness increased our city sensibility and fear of being lost forever in “the boondocks” grew. For a city person lack of electrical lights was unnatural. If every block didn’t have lamps to illuminate the street and if neon or some equivalent didn’t blink in our eyes we felt hopelessly isolated. And here we traveled with street lights as infrequent as mile posts and only a sprinkling of lights glowing in distant farm houses as we passed.
For the most part, our headlights bore a tunnel through the darkness that allowed us to pass, and my chore was to keep site of the broken white line at the center of the road without which we would be hopelessly lost. And then, he grew even darker so that we began to believe the dark would never end. Every so often, one or the other of us would ask if perhaps we should turn back and seek out civilization again. But some force kept us from doing it, some part of our brains that found this intriguing. In some strange and perverted way, we liked the idea of “getting lost,” as if we had traveled back in time to as 1930s New Jersey when getting lost was actually possible.
We thought then about what might happen if we ran out of gas. Would we have to walk the whole way back with a gas can in our hand to the Parkway where we might find traffic and lights? Every sort of wilderness danger popped into our heads.
Did they have bears or mountain lions in this part of the state, my wife asked?
Mountain lions didn’t sound logical since Cape May lacked mountains, I said.
But other, darker more fearful horrors that we had no name for grew on us as I stared down at gradually lowering gas gauge. Then, just as we made up our minds to turn back we rolled around a curve – blinded by the parade of highway lights, fast food restaurants, gas stations, motels and strip malls that made up the heart of Rio Grande.