Imagine Media LLC

#

Subtle Splendor

I did most of my growing up just after midnight on summer weekends. I spent six years’ worth of Saturday nights standing next to a boardwalk pizza mafioso named Freddie, serving cheese steaks by screaming “Yo, Joey, you’re up!” and hollering for a cop named Squid when the drunks arrived at my counter naked and hungry after a pre-dawn dip in the Atlantic. My sun-bleached bangs were sprayed high, my denim mini-skirt was acid washed, and my mantra was proudly emblazoned across my too-tight red T-shirt: “We Give A Little More on the Jersey Shore.”

Summer after summer, my friend Rosie and I slept on the sand all day, took cash tips from the tourists all night, and fancied ourselves the inspiration for more than one Bon Jovi video (when we weren’t pretending to be Madonna). We referred to the masses who provided our disposable income as “benny’s,” which stood for Bergen County, Essex County, Newark and New York—hordes that crawled hundreds of miles south in bumper-to-bumper Cameros just to get a slice of our heaven on a shtick at Exit 98.

All the customers’ faces have blended together for me now, except one. He showed up just after my shift started around 6 p.m. He had curly blond hair and a freckled, peeling nose. His biceps were as thick and tanned as the local lifeguards’, but his posture was much more Tobey Maguire than The Rock. In retrospect, I’d bet his name was Chad, or Nate, or Quinn.

The yachtie asked me what town he was in, a question I’d never heard slip from a pair of sober lips. He’d just sailed in with his family from a place about 30 miles south, a place I’d never been, called Long Beach Island. “It’s really pretty there,” he said. “It’s a whole other world. You should go visit sometime.”

I ended up visiting every single weekday the very next summer, during a reporting internship with the Asbury Park Press. My job was to drive along Long Beach Boulevard, the main drag that stretches the length of the island, canvassing for police blotter tidbits from the northern tip of Barnegat all the way south to Beach Haven. There was no boardwalk on Long Beach Island, and families far outnumbered college couples jammed six to a room in rented houses. The peacefulness, the slow pace, the piping plovers nesting along the dunes—it was misery for an eager young Jersey girl like me. The only crime reports I ever found involved lost bicycles, and the only scoops I ever brought back to the newspaper’s office were chocolate chip mint.

Luckily, as I’ve aged, Long Beach Island has stayed much the same. Some of the classic older houses have been torn down to make way for new-money monstrosities, and the price of ice cream cones has gone up about a quarter and two nickels, but for the most part, the 18-mile-long barrier island remains one of the nicest family-friendly destinations along New Jersey’s Atlantic coastline. No neon blares amid the hand-painted shop signs; no drunks stagger home as joggers take to the streets come sunrise. The streetlights all still change in unison the entire length of Long Beach Boulevard, and the open-topped Jeeps and convertibles still respect the 35 mph speed limit. The island is simply in no rush to get going.

This summer, when I returned for a leisurely day’s cruise aboard Capt. Bob Brazill’s 25-foot charter Kencraft, Miss Kathleen, I saw the same things most cruisers do: a lot of private docks, a lot of private decks, and beaches that seem to stretch even farther to the east than the marshes do out to the west. It was a whole lot of nothing, I would have thought a dozen years ago. But now, with older eyes, I could finally see what that young yachtie had been trying to tell me.

It is really pretty here.

 

 

“So this sea gull has the crab in its clutches, right? It drops it on the dock and looks at it, and the crab goes into this martial-arts stance, to defend itself, you see? And then the gull just pokes its beak right through the crab—bam!—so hard that it left a dent in the dock. An actual dent in the dock! You don’t see that just anywhere, any day.”

We are sitting in Miss Kathleen’s cabin, cruising slowly to keep her flat bottom from pounding, and Capt. Brazill is relating the amazing but true story of one of the most exciting things he’s seen happen on Long Beach Island in about the past 25 years. He’s lived on LBI all his life, all year round, in a house his father built as a summer retreat for their family. Capt. Brazill and his wife, Mary, are raising their two boys there. They like that they don’t have to lock their door at night, that their boys would have to go looking pretty darn hard to find any trouble.

To understand how precious this is, you have to understand what LBI sits in the middle of. Atlantic City is to the south, its towering casinos beckoning through the horizon’s haze by day, its skyline blaring like a beacon for the weak-willed all night. To LBI’s north is Seaside, a dizzying swirl of junk food, games of chance, and scantily clad teenagers with belly and nose rings who hope their thick mascara and muscle T-shirts will help them get lucky in the dunes under the boardwalk. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of lights. People tend to miss the trash cans when tossing their sticky soda cups and stinky cigarette butts.

LBI is the place folks go to escape the carnival. Many of the houses have been owned by the same families for decades, and though they could get top rental dollars for the houses each summer, most of those families still choose to use them themselves. As we cruised past Beach Haven, a town toward the south end of the island, I could see parents along the shoreline with their sons and daughters in tow. They looked just like a family I know that has kept a summer home in that town for more than ten years. I’ll bet they enjoy the same games we used to when I visited, like the clam shell toss on the beach. I’ll bet those kids also get homemade waffles on Sunday mornings, and I’ll bet they also play cards instead of watching TV at night. When the kids get older, they’ll probably head toward the middle of LBI, to congregate with the college-age masses at Joe Pop’s Shore Bar on summer Saturday nights. How horrified they’d be if they knew the bands they’ll grow to love are the same ones we went to see when we were their age. Those guys have been playing the same cover tunes—like “Radar Love” and “Disco Inferno”—since well before vinyl became extinct.

Fishing is the biggest draw nowadays on LBI, Capt. Brazill says. Most of the calls he gets for charter business are from families who want to head offshore in search of tuna, shark and marlin, or stay closer to land and chase blackfish, bluefish and fluke. On the weekends in June, July and August, it’s tough to find a quiet spot on the water, but on weekdays and during the shoulder seasons, it’s near perfection.

“The fishing has been very good the past few years,” he says as we inch up the ICW along the island’s middle. “Conservation efforts have definitely paid off. I go out, and every trip we’re catching fish.”

Most of Capt. Brazill’s other calls come from visiting boaters who need a local skipper to help guide them through Long Beach Island’s tricky waters. The toughest cruising is in Barnegat Bay, which has converging currents on LBI’s northern tip—and converging commercial fishboats and recreational craft on Saturday mornings. (Barnegat Bay is at its worst with an outgoing tide and a west wind, Brazill says.) Even the Intracoastal route leading to LBI’s middle is full of shallow spots that can be disastrous during a blowout tide. “If you don’t pay attention, if you don’t have local knowledge, there’s a good chance you’re gonna get stuck,” he says.

That’s not to say that boaters should pass LBI by. “You’ve got to be careful,” Brazill says. “Use the charts, the GPS, the plotter, and don’t go fast. You’ll be okay.”

Once you’re in the Intracoastal, you can navigate by sight, keeping one eye on the depth sounder and the other on your approach to one of the handful of marinas that have transient slips (see sidebar). If you cruise with kids, LBI is a terrific stop-off point between Manhattan and Atlantic City. You can feed ’em cheap, rent ’em bikes or kayaks all day, and tire ’em out before setting off again for adult, nighttime fun at the clubs or craps tables.

On the other hand, you might drop the hook in Myers Hole near the Barnegat Lighthouse and State Park, which is a terrific place for couples and families alike to indulge in a bit of boating history. The park is one of the sights on the New Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail, and the lighthouse served for many years as the mark captains sought to prevent running aground in the offshore shoals and ever-moving sandbars. The original lighthouse began operating in 1835, and the one that stands today (affectionately known as “Old Barney”) went into service in 1859.

Alas, Old Barney couldn’t save every ship that passed by, but those that sank are now frequented by scuba divers from all over the New York and Philadelphia areas.

                

 

As our day aboard Miss Kathleen began slipping away with the sun, the winds kicked up to about 15 or 20 knots. The waves weren’t so much big as they were biting, just snippy enough to be a constant nuisance, like a pack of hungry Chihuahuas. We were tasting a bit of the conditions so many of those old skippers must have known as they looked to Old Barney for guidance, and I finally understood what the captain had been explaining to me all afternoon: Long Beach Island is definitely navigable, but it sure can keep you on the tips of your toenails.

We were coming out of Barnegat Inlet after a fuel stop near Myers Hole, and spray from the chop splattered the windshield like Jackson Pollack’s paint. It was coming up on suppertime, and our minds were not on the course that lay ahead, but on the warm clam chowder awaiting us at its final waypoint. We were in Double Creek, beating our way back toward the island’s middle, when Capt. Brazill rose from his chair, pulled back on the throttle and stood at the helm for the first time that day.

“Do you see the next channel marker?” he asked me with that kind of serious calm that pricks all your nerves.

I squinted through the drops on the windshield. I saw gray sky, gray water, and nothing in between.

“See, I know this place like the back of my hand,” he said, “and it can still be tough to see.”

I feel the same way about Long Beach Island itself. I’ve been coming here for years, and only now am I beginning to appreciate all it has to offer. I don’t have kids, but if I did, I can’t think of a place between Newport and Annapolis that I’d rather cruise with them for a visit. LBI is like a snow globe full of summertime, long ago placed on New Jersey’s continental shelf and shaken up ever so rarely as the years go by. It may be forgotten from time to time as newer, shinier destinations command attention the way LBI’s modern mansions dominate parts of its shoreline, but the island will always be there, ready to delight anyone looking for some good old-fashioned fun.

“This place has always had a working-class root,” Brazill says as we cruise toward home. “It’s changing, and there’s more money coming in here. New Jersey is changing. Our society is changing.”

I suppose Long Beach Island isn’t immune, but I’m glad it’s changing slowly.

So slowly, in fact, that it’s a pleasure not to notice.  ♦

New Jersey’s Long Beach Island may look like just another quiet little string of towns. Thank goodness that’s exactly what it is.