Cape May Diaries
9- First Impressions
Although management boasted of an ocean view when we arrived in 1990, this was only technically true.
The cottage as well as the apartment above the office faced the Ocean, giving those exclusive residents a clear view of the water. The rest of us had little more than a slice of sky with its associated layer of water and sand -- stuck between the opening over the fountain between cottage and office. While we could see a bit of water creeping into the shore, we saw joggers on the walkway and cars with greater ease.
At night, we saw little but a curtain of black made worse by the bright lights a five storied motel next door with a light outside every room, casting a glow that could have been seen twenty miles out to sea, yet made any visible object beyond the boardwalk invisible.
Each motel room came equipped with a balcony, all of which overlooked the central court, or in the case of the first floor apartments, the doors led out to the lawn itself, putting them on eye level with the parade of lawn chairs on the pool side. Later we experimented with one of the kitchenette supplied facility to disastrous results.
All the rooms -- with or without the microwave had dresser, beds, closets, toilet and shower, as well as a small refrigerator -- into which we stuffed a variety of non-cook foods purchased at the local Acme, reducing the overall cost of our trip since it saved us from having to eat out. Some years later, the refrigerators mysteriously vanished, as if inn owners and restaurant owners had conspired against our cost-cutting measure.
We had mistakenly presumed that our proximity to the ocean would allow us to hear it. What we heard instead night and day was the hum of the central air conditioner, struggling to contain the late season heat wave that kept us sweltering for the week. This sound filled our dreams the way the sea should have, jolting us awake each time the mechanism clicked off.
The unexpectedly high temperatures, however, provided us with another small wedding gift we would find nearly the moment we woke the next morning. Once we jerked back the drape and looked out into sunny Cape May, we found it nearly filled with Monarch butterflies. Had we read ahead, we might have been better prepared for this eventuality, and known about the migration of the butterflies that gave Cape May some added color after Labor Day each year. Even then, we would have learned that their number decreases steadily with the dropping temperature. But since the temperature did not drop, neither did the butterfly population
Everywhere we looked we found these gentle orange and black-winged insects, floating in the air or perched on golden rod along the beach. While we would later find such creatures there every year but one over the next decade, we would never see as many as we did in 1990, as if God or fade had issued us one more wedding present that year. Indeed, one year towards the end of the decade, Sharon and I would stumble into a wedding on the Washington Street Mall in which the guests released butterflies instead of throwing rice. We would also see other less lucky wedding parties pursued by bees near the promenades, bride and her train of attendants tossing away bouquets in order to distract the stinging insects.
Sadder, however, was the environmental disaster which struck the Monarch butterfly in 2000, a disease against which they had no immunity, wiped out large portion of their populations, and depleted their number when we arrived in Cape May that year.
Even Joel Lewis' poem about Cape May hardly prepared us for our first walk down the promenade. Perhaps pre‑1962 Cape May might have fit our preconceptions better, an echo of the dying resorts we had encountered further north such as in Asbury Park, where the hulks of previous era stood along the beach front with a ghost town effect.
In coming south, I had developed vague misconceptions of what Cape May's historic preservation meant, expecting to find at the center of the Cape May promenade a similar concrete wreck as stood in the center of Asbury Park's, filled with the same empty echo of joggers sneakers and bicycle bells and the voices of vendors from the flea market that had rented space for their tables.
While Cape May had developed a handful of these relics during its brief effort to imitate more northerly sea side cities, its remoteness and the general economic incompetence by the speculators allowed the city to escape largely unscathed. What relics might have remained vanished during mid‑century storms. The few hulks that had survived up until World War II were taken over by the military and eventually faded away.
The beach side promenade that greeted us was also remarkably free of the more traditional seaside gambling that had been legal in resorts like Point Pleasant long before the 1980 legislation allowed Atlantic City to sell its soul. Because of the remote location, investors did not see the influx of huge crowds necessary to make the construction of gaming establishment and piers full of rides profitable. For that, most people down here seemed to go to Wildwood.
Except for a cluster of buildings between Howard Street and Ocean Street, the beach front was remarkably bare, and during our walk from the Periwinkle Inn toward what we thought then as the center of town, we encountered joggers and cyclists and elderly people walking, all seemingly in no hurry to go anywhere or see anything other than the water, sand and sky. Around us, butterflies floated, seagulls cried, and the soft wind blew at our faces. While we were told later that the town took on a more hectic air during the season, this time of the year, most people just came here to relax.
Just as we planned to do.