Poking into a sand dune last week, looking for shells, my niece uncovered a shark’s tooth.
“Watch for pieces of eight and gold doubloons,” I told her, repeating something my mom, a tireless beachcomber, would say while we ambled along the Jersey shore, scouring the surf’s edge.
My niece and I were at Ocean City, N.J., one of the dozen or so beach towns that fill up each summer with Philadelphians. My parents took us there when we were children.
For young families, a giant sandbox next to a natural swimming pool remains the perfect vacation spot. Aside from rents, it’s cheap and it’s easy. Moms and dads stretch out under beach umbrellas and tykes wander almost anywhere they want. It’s reassuring to go back after 50 years to find that the place and the formula still work.
In this region, Jersey shore vacations are so sacred that families buy plaques on boardwalk park benches to memorialize them. Inscribed with the names of relatives who were along for those trips, the plaques testify to the mighty spell spun by the sand, sun, breeze and boardwalk, a value that has withstood ocean pollution, crowds and extra fees for parking and beach tags.
Biologist Wallace Nichols recently authored “Blue Mind,” on the therapeutic power of water, including its ability to provide feelings of “calm and well-being.” The book’s premise is that living near water can boost mental health and happiness, that even just gazing into an aquarium can improve one’s attitude.
I don’t doubt Nichols’s thesis, but I’d venture there’s something more at work on us at seaside besides warm sand and the metronomic lullaby of rolling surf: It’s the wide blue horizon, a view of infinity, a landscape that sets loose the imagination.
When we’d ask mom what was on the other side of the ocean, she’d say, “England. France. Europe.”
She may as well have said the moon. With the exception of my grandfather’s all-expense-paid-trip to fight the Kaiser on the Western Front, no one in my immediate family had been to Europe. It existed only in books or TV, but it was right there, on the other side of the water.
How far could it be? If you looked really hard and long, could you see Europe on the opposite shore?
The ocean was literally the biggest thing we’d ever seen, consuming our view. Our lives at home were full of roads and houses and sidewalks and parks, objects that could be measured or at least viewed from front and back. But the ocean, seen from the shore, was half as big as the world.
It magically churned an endless supply of waves, day and night, that inched up the beach then crawled back into the ocean. It gargled up strange critters like horseshoe crabs and jellyfish, even sharks – small toothless ones that occasionally lurked into the shallows where we were swimming, and bigger, scary ones whose sightings caused lifeguards to whistle bathers out of the water.
Albert Einstein reportedly said that imagination is more important than knowledge. I’m sure Einstein wasn’t diminishing the importance of knowledge so much as making a point that there is so much more to know than is known, and that our ability to know the unknown is limited only by our power to imagine what those things might be.
Knowledge is a statement, bounded by facts. Imagination is a question, bounded only by our curiosity. At the Jersey shore, the ocean was our great question. Where did it come from? What did it contain? How far was it across? What was on its bottom? Pieces of eight and gold doubloons cast from shipwrecks? Might they wash up on the beach?
Maybe.
A child quickly learns the meanings of “yes” and “no.” The ocean served up our first deep experience of “maybe,” an idea as delicious as any of the treats sold in shops along the boardwalk.
I suspect it’s still the Jersey shore’s biggest draw.