Cape May Diaries
24- The mystery of the gun emplacement
During our earliest visits to Cape May we frequently walked to the end of West Beach Drive and paused at the wooden barrier that separated the originally settled Cape May from the one which is currently considered historic. From this point, we could watch one of the more amazing and least advertised attractions of Cape May: sunset. On days with a mostly clear sky, the sun evolved into a huge red ball sinking slowly into the horizon well beyond the light house and the distant Delaware shore line.
For the first few times, we arrived at the barrier at high tide so that we were unaware of the fact that people frequently slipped down the slippery stones to what was considered the original Cape May beach. Then, at some point between high tide and low we saw people strung out along that section of beach and realized we were missing out on some secret treasure. So we slipped over the edge, too, skirting the still relatively high water for a walk towards what we considered a forbidden world.
The region between the end of West Beach Drive and the property containing the light house was not technically considered part of Cape May Point State Park, but it had the same remote feel with the water gurgling up along one side and the tuffs of yellow and green sea grass on the other.
We did not then know of how much Cape May’s long history rested under our feet and under the waves, how Henry Ford and Louis Chevrolet had raced early models of their cars on the flat hard sand in an effort to demonstrate their power and worth. We could almost trace the imprint of the early New England Pilgrims who had relocated to this place in order to take advantage of the whale hunting at the mouth of the Delaware River. We even imagined we might find signs of Cape May’s original tourists, those Native American Lenape Indians who fished, trapped and hunted her, though lived elsewhere along the river’s wide shores.
Later, when delving into the picture books, we understood the horror of change residents faced here after the shore line began to vanish, and we saw the historic pictures of houses being transported up this beach for relocation on the more solid ground of what we now call Cape May – a flight of panic so startling it seemed like the end of the world.
Squinting, we could make out tips of houses further on beyond the light house and believed we could reach them more easily than we actually did. We being city brats we constantly miscalculated distances here. As we walked small sand-colored shapes fled ahead of us that a closer study showed as sand crabs, each leaping into holes in what appeared to be a breathless panic. We found the remains of more clearly recognizable crabs strewn across the sand in a mix of shells that looked as if the entire Atlantic Ocean’s population had decided to crawl out of the water and die here.
We knew nothing then of the bird sanctuary that lay just to the other side of the dunes or how at low tide the beach we so carefully navigated expanded into a vast almost dessert-like plain where pools of salty sea water provided sea gulls with easy prey. Yet the sense of wilderness flowed over us as the sun beat down on our heads and the stiff wind from the sea stirred our hair. Sand constantly got into our hair, eyes and clothing, and we felt painfully pleased with the fact that we had someone found something authentic at last.
Eventually, we began to make out an odd and dark shape along the beach, something closer to us than the light house was, yet sitting on the very edge of the water. As we grew closer, the green shape looked more and more like a turtle and we imagined we could make out eyes and some sort of hooked beak – but if a turtle it was one the size of a warehouse. Therefore, we knew it could not be a turtle. So even as weary as we rapidly became, we knew we could not abandon this beach until we had solved the mystery of what we saw and thus kept going.
Yet each yard closer did nothing to resolve the shape’s identity – except to show just how large an object it was. Gradually, we realized the green color was a deception created by the moss that grew over its sides and the stalks of grass that grew from its top, birds circling and landing on the top as if they owned it.
We soon saw small shapes of people at the base of the thing, gawking at it the way we must have gawked, shaking their heads wearing the same puzzled expressions that we wore. Many snapped off photographs though we knew and they knew no photo could quite capture the feeling the object gave off.
Finally, we were close enough to hear some of the local fishermen explaining to other tourists like us the history of the object, dating not back to the whalers or the Victorians, but to World War II when the huge concrete shape had housed huge cannons with which to guard the harbor against German submarines.
Cape May, one gentleman informed us, had taken center stage during the conflict. The U.S. Navy had constructed Cape May canal – over which we had driven on our way in without knowing it. German U-Boats hugged the coast seeking to sink any ship that dared sail out of the canal and spied on the community through periscopes. One German U-Boat captain was so captivated by what he saw that he returned to Cape May County after the water and purchased a hotel here.
That mystery solved, we made the long hike back to our hotel and the more civilized portion of Cape May, where we collapsed in our beds – feeling the strain on our muscles from our walk for a week after our vacation ended. But we never forgot the gun emplacement and looked to the sea half expecting to see the glint of a periscope staring back at us.