Travels in Philadelphia/The Shore in September
THE SHORE IN SEPTEMBER
The sands are lonely in the fall. On those broad New Jersey beaches, where the rollers sprawl inward in ridges of crumbling snow, the ocean looks almost wistfully for its former playmates. The children are gone, the small brown legs, the toy shovels and the red tin pails. The familiar figures of the summer season have vanished: the stout ladies who sat in awninged chairs and wrestled desperately to unfurl their newspapers in the wind; the handsome mahogany-tanned lifesavers, the vamperinoes incessantly drying their tawny hair, the corpulent males of dark complexion wearing ladies' bathing caps, the young men playing a degenerate baseball with a rubber sphere and a bit of shingle. All that life and excitement, fed upon hot dogs and vanilla cones, anointed with cold cream and citronella, has vanished for another year.
But how pleasant it is to see the town (it is Fierceforest we have in mind) taking its own vacation, after laboring to amuse its visitors all summer long. Here and there in the surf you will see a familiar figure. That plump lady, lathered by sluicing combers as she welters and wambles upon Neptune's bosom, is good Frau Weintraub of the delicatessen, who has been frying fish and chowdering clams over a hot stove most of July and August, and now takes her earned repose. Yonder is the imposing bulge of the real estate agent, who has been too busy selling lots and dreaming hotel sites to visit the surf hitherto. Farther up the shore is the garage man, doing a little quiet fishing from the taffrail of a deserted pier. The engineer of the "roller coaster" smokes a cigar along the deserted boardwalk and discusses the league of nations with the gondolier-in-chief of the canals of Ye Olde Mill. The hot-dog expert, whose merry shout, "Here they are, all red hot and fried in butter!" was wont to echo along the crowded arcade, has boarded up his stand and departed none knows where.
There is a tincture of grief in the survey of all this liveliness coffined and nailed down. Even the gambols of Fierceforest's citizens, taking their ease at last in the warm September surf, cannot wholly dispel the mournfulness of the observer. There is something dreadfully glum in the merry-go-round seen through its locked glass doors. All those gayly caparisoned horses, with their bright Arabian housings, their flowing manes and tossing heads and scarlet-painted nostrils, stand stilled in the very gesture of glorious rotation. One remembers what a jolly sight that carrousel was on a warm evening, the groaning pipes of the steam-organ chanting an adorable ditty (we don't know what it is, but it's the tune they always play at the movies when our favorite Dorothy Gish comes on the screen), children laughing and holding tight to the wooden manes of the horses, and flappers with their pink dresses swirling, clutching for the brass ring that means a free ride. All this is frozen into silence and sleep, like a scene in a fairy tale. It is very sad, and we dare not contemplate the poor little silent horses too long.
Bitterly does one lament the closing of the Boardwalk auction rooms, which were a perpetual free show to those who could not find a seat in the movies. There was one auctioneer who looked so like Mr. Wilson that when we saw his earnest gestures we always expected that the league of nations would be the subject of his harangue. But on entering and taking a seat (endeavoring to avoid his eye when he became too persuasive, for fear some involuntary gesture or the contortions of an approaching sneeze would be construed as a bid for a Chinese umbrella stand) we always found that it was a little black box full of teacups that was under discussion. He would hold one up against an electric bulb to show its transparency. When he found his audience unresponsive he would always say, "You know I don't have to do this for a living. If you people don't appreciate goods that have quality, I'm going to pack up and go to Ocean City." But he never went. Almost every evening, chagrined by some one's failure to bid properly for a cut-glass lady-finger container or a porcelain toothbrush-rack, he would ask the attendant to set it aside. "I'll buy it myself," he would cry, and as he kept on buying these curious tidbits for himself throughout the summer, we used to wonder what his wife would say when they all arrived.
Along the quiet Boardwalk we saunter, as the crisp breeze comes off the wide ocean spaces. Bang! bang! bang! sound the hammers, as the shutters go up on the beauty parlor, the toy shop, the shop where sweet-grass baskets were woven, and the stall where the little smiling doll known as Helene, the Endearing Beach Vamp, was to be won by knocking down two tenpins with a swinging pendulum. How easy it was to cozen the public with that! A bright red star was painted at the back of the pendulum's swing, and the natural assumption of the simple competitor was that by aiming at that star he would win the smiling Helene. Of course, as long as one aimed at the star success was impossible. The Japanese dealers, with the pertinacity of their race, are almost the last to linger. Their innocent little gaming boards, their fishponds where one angles for counterfeit fish and draws an eggcup or a china cat, according to the number inscribed on the catch, their roulette wheels ("Ten Cents a Chance—No Blanks")—all are still in operation, but one of the shrewd orientals is packing up some china at the back of the shop. He knows that trade is pretty well done for this season. We wondered whether he would go down to the beach for a swim before he left. He has stuck so close to business all summer that perhaps he does not know the ocean is there. There is another thrifty merchant, too, whose strategy comes to our attention. This is the rolling-chair baron, who has closed his little kiosque, but has taken care to paint out the prices per hour of his vehicles, and has not marked any new rates. Cautious man, he is waiting until next summer to see what the trend of prices will be then.
Across the fields toward the inlet, where the grasses have turned rusty bronze and pink, where goldenrod is minting its butter-yellow sprays and riotous magenta portulaccas seed themselves over the sandy patches, the rowboats are being dragged out of the canal and laid up for the winter. The sunburned sailorman who rents them says he has had a good season—and he "can't complain." He comes chugging in with his tiny motorboat, towing a string of tender-feet who have been out tossing on the crabbing grounds for a couple of hours, patiently lowering the fishheads tied on a cord and weighted with rusty bolts. His patient and energetic wife who runs the little candy and sarsaparilla counter on the dock has ended her labors. She is glad to get back to her kitchen: during the long, busy summer days she did her family cooking on an oil stove behind the counter. The captain, as he likes to be called, is about to make his annual change from mariner to roofer, the latter being his winter trade. "It's blowing up for rain," he says, looking over his shoulder at the eastern sky. "I guess the season's pretty near over. I'll get up the rest of them boats next week."
In September the bathing is at its best. Particularly at sunset, when every one is at supper. To cross those wide fields of wiry grass that stretch down to the sand, is an amazement to the eye. Ahead of you the sea gleams purple as an Easter violet. The fields are a kind of rich palette on which every tint of pink, russet and bronze are laid in glowing variation. The softly wavering breeze, moving among the coarse stalks, gives the view a ripple and shimmer of color like shot silk. A naturalist could find hundreds of species of flowers and grasses on those sandy meadows. There are great clumps of some bushy herb that has already turned a vivid copper color, and catches the declining sunlight like burnished metal. There are flecks of yellow, pink and lavender. A cool, strong odor rises from the harsh, knife-edged grasses—a curiously dry, brittle scent, familiar to all who have poked about sand dunes.The beach itself, colored in the last flush of the level sun, is still faintly warm to the naked foot, after the long shining of the day; but it cools rapidly. The tide is coming in, with long, seething ridges of foam, each flake and clot of crumbled water tinged with a rose-petal pink by the red sunset. All this glory of color, of movement, of unspeakable exhilaration and serenity, is utterly lonely. The long curve of the beach stretches away northward, where a solitary orange-colored dory is lying on the sand. The air is full of a plaintive piping of sea-birds. A gull flashes along the beach, with a pink glow on its snowy under-plumage.
At that hour the water is likely to be warmer than the air. It may be only the curiously magical effect of the horizontal light, but it seems more foamy, more full of suds, than earlier in the day. Over the green top of the waves, laced and marbled with froth, slides a layer of iridescent bubble-wash that seems quite a different substance from the water itself—like the meringue on top of a lemon pie. One can scoop it up and see it winking in points of sparkling light.
The waves come marching in. It is a calm sea, one would have said looking down from the dunes, but to the swimmer, elbowing his way under their leaning hollows, their stature seems tremendous. The sunlight strikes into the hills of moving water, filling them with a bluish spangle and tremor of brightness. It is worth while to duck underneath and look up at the sun from under the surface, to see how the light seems to spread and clot and split in the water like sour cream poured into a cup of tea. The sun, which is so ruddy in the evening air, is a pale milky white when seen from under water.
A kind of madness of pleasure fills the heart of the solitary sunset swimmer. To splash and riot in that miraculous color and tumult of breaking water seems an effective answer to all the grievances of earth. To float, feeling the poise and encircling support of those lapsing pillows of liquid, is mirth beyond words. To swim just beyond the line of the big breakers, dropping a foot now and then to feel that bottom is not too far away—to sprawl inward with a swashing comber while the froth boils about his shoulders—to watch the light and color prismed in the curl and slant of every wave, and the quick vanishing of brightness and glory once the sun is off the sea—all this is the matter of poems that no one can write.
The sun drops over the flat glitter of the inland lagoons; the violet and silver and rose-flushed foam are gone from the ocean; the sand is gray and damp and chilly. Down the line of the shore comes an airplane roaring through the upper regions of dazzling sunlight, with brightness on its varnished wings. The lighthouse at the Inlet has begun to twinkle its golden flash, and supper will soon be on the table. The solitary swimmer takes one last regretful plunge through a sluicing hill of green, and hunts out his pipe. He had left it, as the true smoker does, carefully filled, with a match-box beside it, in a dry hollow on the sand. Trailing a thread of blue reek, he plods cheerfully across the fields, taking care not to tread upon the small hoptoads that have come out to hail the evening. Behind him the swelling moon floats like a dim white lantern, penciling the darkening water with faint scribbles of light.
But there are still a few oldtimers in Fierceforest, cottagers who cling on until the first of October, and whose fraternal password (one may hear them saying it every time they meet) is "Sure! Best time of the year!" Through the pink flush of sunrise you may see the husbands moving soberly toward the early commuters' train, the 6:55, which is no longer crowded. (A month ago one had to reach it half an hour early in order to get a seat in the smoker.) Each one transports his satchel, and also curious bundles, for at this time of year it is the custom to make the husband carry home each week an instalment of the family baggage, to save excess when moving day comes. One totes an oilstove; another, a scales for weighing the baby. They trudge somewhat grimly through the thin morning twilight, going back for another week at office and empty house or apartment. Leaving behind them the warm bed, the little cottage full of life and affection, they taste for a moment the nostalgic pang that sailors know so well when the ship's bow cuts the vacant horizon. Over the purple rim of sea the sun juts its scarlet disk. You may see these solitary husbands halt a moment to scan the beauty of the scene. They stand there thoughtful in the immortal loneliness of dawn. Then they climb the smoker and pinochle has its sway.