Sunsets, ghost crabs, and dolphins
The water is still above 70 degrees, the jellyfish are (mostly) gone, and the beach is wide open.
Dogs are welcome again, the ghost crabs rule the beaches, tossing sand around as they dig their holes, and the sun sets almost due east now.
It’s a good year for beach plums if you know where to find them, but leave some for the wildlife.
It’s locals’ summer, for may of us the best time of the year.
Earlier, when the tide was a few feet higher, I had brushed against a jellyfish and got lucky. The tentacles were drifting away from me.
Getting stung by jellyfish is a July ritual for folks who enjoy bouncing in the bay. Not fun, but not terrible, either, so long as its one of our more common critters.
This particular jelly, unlikely the one I encountered earlier, got too close to the edge, and now it sits under the dying light of last night’s sunset.
As different as we are, we share many of the same proteins, the same DNA code, the same need for sunlight to keep us alive.
Our bay is home to sand tiger sharks–like much of Philly, they love to spend their summers lolling about in the Delaware Bay.
They are not particularly aggressive, and if you pay attention at dusk, you might see a fin slicing through the water. While most fins we see belong to dolphins, sand tigers can occasionally be seen traveling through shallow waters near the beach. They gulp air and hang at the surface, like our Philly friends roasting on floats.
As much as I like spending time under the bay’s surface, I avoid swimming at night.
Here’s why:
Not very aggressive doesn’t mean never aggressive–there have been 36 unprovoked sand tiger attacks, maybe not a whole lot considering how close we swim to them.
But for 36 humans, it was aggressive enough. And in every incident, the human survived.
I think the date says November 30, 1985, almost 4 decades ago,
The tide has risen, the tied has ebbed over 25,000 times since then.
The love lock rests on a sign post facing the bay, a bit rusty, but still holding. A couple likely placed this there themselves, many years ago. (It might have been there for decades, though. The bay is unforgiving.
Where are they now?
Kale has kept the Irish (and other northern folk) alive for over a millennia, even before cabbage (at least according to Donnchadh Ó Corráin while he still breathed), but here in the States it’s often used as an an ornamental, and eating it became a fad
Using kale as an ornamental is like using a Maserati to commute in Manhattan. I mean, yeah, but why would you?
I suspect part of the problem is not knowing when to eat kale–late summer kale can be as tough and bitter as a sea salt’s boots. Best time to eat it is after a hard frost, and it only gets better as the winter melts into spring.
You can use it in colcannon (an Irish dish with its own song), but I love it in a very local clam dish.
Prep the clams:
Everything else:
Put it together:
Serve with bread and Guinness.
The tide was ebbing. The seahorse lay on the beach, just beyond the reach of the receding waves. I assumed it was dead–until I saw the tiniest movement of its tail.
I picked it up and let a few waves wash over my hand. Its head flicked a couple of times, spasmodically, without intention.
Then I felt its tail wrap around my finger.
I do not presume that this seahorse had any awareness of me. It was in trouble, and may not have survived the day, but that’s not why I am telling the story.
I am sharing the story because I felt its tail wrap around my finger with surprising strength, with an unexpected vitality.
I do not believe that the seahorse was in any sense communicating with me–dying critters do not waste energy talking to alien beings. I had nothing to say to my seahorse, and the seahorse had even less to say to me.
The tail of this seahorse had wrapped on hundreds, maybe thousands, of things before me. It clung to eelgrass, to its lover, and if a male, grappled with other males who dare to separate him from his partner.
If this was the seahorse’s last few living moments, the last thing it held was my finger.
***
Seahorses do not share language with humans, but if they did, their tales would be shared through their tails. If this particular seahorse felt any sense of vitality from the palm of my hand, the only way it could share this would be through doing just what it did–hugging my finger.
This is not why it did, of course, and that is not the point. But if the only way for a creature to share its world with us is a way that we dismiss as reflex, then we will forever see a mechanistic universe, and we will remain the lonely species we are.
***
We need evidence! Proof! Substantiation! Concrete facts!
Today much of the world rejoices over an event pieced together with the slimmest of evidence–the oldest of the Gospels, written more than a half century after the death of Jesus, ends with frightened women fleeing from an empty tomb (Mark 16:8). The rest is appended history.
I am not going to equate the curling of a dying critter’s tail with the scantest of evidence that (in a perverse form) drove much of European history. Both evidence and faith have their place.
Still, if we cannot allow for the possibility that perhaps even a seahorse has a story to tell, then the slight tug of a seahorse’s tail, a twitch of life on an early spring beach, means nothing, and everything is just noisy chaos.
(Seahorses, it turns out, are monogamous.)
They come every summer, these magnificent fliers, chomping up flies and mosquitoes as they pass through.
Yesterday hundreds were flying north along the edge of the Delaware Bay, the wings glinting in the late afternoon sun, moving like they had a train to catch in the upper bay.
I reported it to The Dragonfly Swarm Project, and here, mostly as a reminder to myself.
In two days of just sitting on the beach I’ve seen dolphins, pelicans, and dragonflies, and interacted with stinging nettles twice.
If you hang around North Cape May, you know the first ferry leaves at 7 AM, because it tells you.
The first short toot comes almost always on the dot, as the captain lets the crew know it’s time to go. Shortly afterwards, there’s a long blast followed by three short (more or less, depending on the captain), as the ferry backs out into the canal, getting ready to head over to Delaware.
When there’s a south breeze, the sound is crisp, even loud. The day is going to be seasonably warm in February as the south wind carries some ocean warmth our way. On days when we hear nothing, the breeze is likely from the northeast, foreboding, dark.
In late spring we sometimes hear a long blast every minute or so as the ferry slips through the foggy mist. We’re about a half mile from the beach, often bathed in morning sunlight, when we hear this.
Occasionally, usually in summer when some smaller craft are piloted by folks with more beer than brains in their skulls, five short blasts remind folks that colliding with a ferry is not in anyone’s best interests.
There’s free miniature golf at the ferry terminal. It has has everything you need if you want a fairly challenging but spartan nine hole course. No flags, but the sound of the ball rattling in the cup is as satisfying here as anywhere else.
Except for one hole . The Abyss.
The second to last hole, perpetually damp sitting under the pedestrian bridge, is deep. Very, very deep. Deep enough that it swallows light. Go ahead, try to see the bottom. Disturbing.
Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the echoing voices.
Go ahead–stand a foot or two away from the hole and shout something. (Maybe not Beelzebub, why take chances.)
Most folks will look at you as though you’ve lost your mind, and maybe you have. Better to lose your mind than to lose your soul.
I would drive a long way to taste a damn good brew, but fortunately I do not have to,
We have the best beer in the state right here in North Cape May. Cape May Brewery is really, really good. Gusto Brewing Company is even better.
Our merrie crew hunkered down on Sunday, and despite the delightfully cool and dry climate inside the brewery, opted to drink outside in the garden. (OK, don’t get overly romantic here, you want lush surrounding and Adirondack chairs around a fire pit, go to Cold Spring Brewery, but know you’re going for the scenery.)
I brew beer, My son and his girlfriend brew beer. My daughter and my son-in-law brew beer. We used to brew because we wanted exactly what we wanted. Gusto makes a good case for letting someone else do the work.
We tried several brews, all of them excellent, but two stood out, one for its cleverness, the other for its skill.
The Inside Joke: Tangerine+Peach Créme is a fruited sour with a creamy, rich mouthfeel and a complex (in a good way) estery swirl of flavors, but to describe it that way makes it sound too serious. It’s fookin’ good without being cloying.
The Real Fake Doors is a better bitter, done exactly right. The Fuggle hops were spot on, balanced perfectly by the crystal malt. I felt like I was back in London, experiencing the sounds and aromas near the Thames. It is not hard to make an ESB, but it’s difficult to make it just right. This was a fookin’ home run.
We also had the Slam Poet, a classic IPA that shows off by not showing off, and the Little Spoon oatmeal stout, also good stuff.
The menu varies, as it should, and the staff has always been nothing but friendly. Our first visit was four years ago, when the tour consisted of a card and a formal signing in a composition notebook acknowledging you took the tour, but now a quick glance at the wall (and the merch) suffices.
But don’t tell anybody, The Atlantic City Press damn near ruined our beach a few years ago, and things got pretty crowded for a bit. The beer here is as good as beer gets. My fear is Gusto gets too successful. Until then, we’ll keep sharing our oasis with folks who stumble down the shore, as long as they keep it semi-secret.
If the place is too hoppin’ (it is summertime, no?) grab a 25 oz crowler of a 64 oz growler. They also carry 4-packs.