Letter from America
‘It looks like a bomb has hit the place’. That was the opening text last Tuesday week from my friend Ross Fales on the New Jersey Shore. Superstorm Sandy had spent its terrible wrath on New York and New Jersey’s coast line from mid-afternoon on Monday right through the night. Ross lives in Avon on Sea a town over from Belmar, the town I called home for 3 years. I asked Ross what he knew about the damage in Belmar. What Ross knew was not good news.
Text messaging was the easiest and most effective way of keeping touch with my friends in New Jersey as the scale of hurricane Sandy became clear in the hours before and after the storm made landfall. With phone lines and WIFI services soon to be knocked out the written word of the text message was my connection with what was unfolding in my home away from home. The words of destruction, damage and panic were so alien to me it was easy to slip away in my minds eye and think of ravaged countries like Haiti or sub-Saharan Africa. There was a disconnect between what I was being told via text and the images of the places I had left just weeks before. Even the picture Ross sent of the sea literally taking to the streets and cascading down the road had a surreal, unbelievable quality. Tuesday brought pictures of a town called Belmar in ruins. Piles of sand encroaching on the streets. Flood waters engulfing the buildings and timber strewn around like in the aftermath of an explosion. It was hard to see where the land began and the sea ended. I have always said that there is much more to New Jersey than meets the eye but what has met the eye in the days after Hurricane Sandy is a New Jersey Shore that is now hardly recognizable from the place I left in mid August.
The Jersey Shore is iconic. I have been lucky enough to spend much of the last few years in its environs and ‘summers spent on the Shore’ are the treasured memories of New Jerseyeans and New Yorkers who vacation there and, in some cases eventually retire there. It is 217 miles of small beach towns and boardwalks and beautiful seafront. This summer I spent time in Belmar, Avon on Sea and further south in Cape May. Idyllic is a word that gets used all too often but there isn’t a better one to describe this place. Now, large parts of the Jersey Shore’s trademark boardwalks, towns, homes, businesses and beaches have been completely destroyed. The tranquility of Shore life has been attacked in a brutal fashion. Locals have spent the last few days rallying together to help the worst afflicted but the magnitude of the rebuilding ahead is often overwhelming. In the space of a few short days the landscape of the Shore region has been utterly transformed. In large areas an affluent, picturesque symbol of the American dream has been destroyed. My friend Ross Fales, assistant vice principal at the Christian Brothers Academy high school in Lincroft, New Jersey has spent the last few days volunteering to help those in plight in Belmar. ‘I’m clearing out people’s entire lives because the water was higher than the first floor of most people’s homes’. Even in the midst of this devastation Ross recognizes how personally it could have been much worse. ‘Im just trying to help out but believe me its only a little in the grand scheme of things. I feel almost guilty that I made it out okay, I just lost power. Some people have lost their homes’.
This part of NJ has known tragedy before. Monmouth and Ocean counties encompass many of the Shore towns I’ve mentioned and lost many residents in the terror attacks of 9-11 with Monmouth alone losing 147 citizens on that day. The loss of life in NJ has been much less in this current disaster and the strength to rebuild the Shore is strong. Having heard the stories of resolve these people have shown in this trying week I am sure they will rebuild the region again.
Almost as soon as I left the Shore for home a few months back I began to think about the next time I would see the place again and, for a few horrible days last week, I almost thought I never would.
