Margaret Montet

My Precious Cape May Point

 

 

Not much happens in Cape May Point unless you know where to watch. From the breezy top of the lighthouse to the wooded nature trails to the desert landscape around the World War II Lookout Tower, life happens. Birds, bees, dolphins, and people put on a show every day for the attentive observer. Gulls steal sandwiches. I struggle to identify the birds who have been part of this environment for centuries.

 

My parents landed in Cape May in the late 1940s because my dad was stationed at the U.S. Coast Guard base there. By the time I came along, this former Louisiana Bayou and then Chicago boy had learned about the sea life and the flora at the Delaware Bay Beach near our house. He taught me about oysters, horseshoe crabs, and razor clams on our many walks. He taught me how to fly fish, a skill I’ve never used in adult life, and he tried to teach me about shorebirds. I regret most profoundly my lack of interest in learning about birds from him then because I struggle with bird identification now. I wish I had learned about birds from Dad. Through self-study, I can now distinguish a Herring Gull from a Laughing Gull, and I can pick out an American Oystercatcher because of its long orange beak. I can point out terns in Cape May Point State Park only because I know where they perch on that old wooden structure with the “No Trespassing” signs on it. The only bird I remember from Dad is the distinctive white Great Egret, because he told me he remembered them from his childhood in Louisiana.

 

While thinking about what to tell you about Cape May Point, I made a point to sit on the beach at Cape May Point State Park. It’s an unguarded beach where swimming is not allowed, but it is my favorite spot for thinking and writing. This is where that Laughing Gull with the black head landed on my head and stole the pulled pork sandwich out of my hand and then had the audacity to eat it in front of me. There’s the sand-colored lighthouse behind my spot, the moss-covered ruins of a World War II bunker to my left, and, if I’m lucky, a pod of dolphins swimming in front of me. Boat and Sea-Doo motors compete with the sound of the crashing waves. The Park Ranger in his noisy John Deere 4x4 patrols with his eye out for scofflaws—mostly beachgoers going into the water past their knees. (No swimming!) His 4x4 adds an aroma of gasoline to the scene. Small airplanes fly overhead with block-lettered advertisements trailing behind, and no matter what book is open on my lap, I have to look up to read those messages. Best of all is the steady sea breeze on a hot day. Owing to my position at the southern end of the peninsula of New Jersey, I enjoy the benefits of sea breezes from the east, south, and west. They flip the pages of my book but I don’t care. This is my bliss.

 

I don’t feel like I’ve been to Cape May Point unless I’ve been to the lighthouse. Last year, there was a full moon on what would have been my father’s 100th birthday, and Cape May Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts and Humanities (“MAC”), the organization which takes care of the lighthouse, hosted one of those Full-Moon Climbs. I’ve been to these before, but last year’s was particularly popular making it necessary for me to wait in line with the heat, humidity, and mosquitos. Eventually, I had my chance to climb the 199 wrought-iron steps to the top where there are fewer mosquitos, refreshing breezes, and magnificent views.

 

From the top of the lighthouse at night the sky seems to melt into the Atlantic Ocean to the south and east, and the Delaware Bay to the west. It’s difficult to spot where the sky ends and the water begins. Twinkling lights from ships at sea dot the water like those tiny colorful balls on a nonpareil candy. Stars in the sky do likewise. Near where the horizon should be, I can’t tell which are which. The moon’s reflection on the water  looks like a sparkling path to the horizon. There’s an exotic Swedish word for this, mångata. On this evening the moon is positioned just east creating a striking mångata. In the distance, I can see the illuminated amusement rides and neon signs of honky tonk Wildwood, our neighbor to the northeast where the young go to find good times and good pizza. Closer to the lighthouse, I see the warm yellow window-glow of the quiet homes in Cape May Point, North Cape May (to the north where my family house is), and Cape May City (to the east). It’s breezy up there, and remarkably cool after a hot summer day.

 

My dad would have liked the Full-Moon Lighthouse Climb. He didn’t go in for touristy things, but this combines a natural event, the full moon, with a Cape May landmark, the lighthouse. For most of the time he lived in North Cape May full-time (the 1950s and 1960s) the light was less of a tourist attraction and more of a navigational aid for sailors like him. He never got to climb it: the lighthouse was restored and opened to the public in the 1980s but this was after his debilitating stroke. For me, the climb is a little piece of Cape May authenticity and he would have approved.

 

After our moonlit lighthouse descent, more calf-painful than the ascent, Rich the Lighthouse Keeper told our group to look up. There was the rotating beam of light shooting out from the gigantic lens at the top of the tower. It appeared light blue against the dark blue night sky from the ground, but I know the sailors out there see a white beam. (I know because I’ve seen it from the ferry.) It’s extraordinary to see the blue beam from this perspective, and so far I have not been able to capture the magical sight with my camera.

 

Rich the Lighthouse Keeper is not really a lighthouse keeper (the light is automated and tended by the U.S. Coast Guard), but he plays one for tourists. Besides shepherding people up and down the tower and answering hundreds of questions, he gives talks about the lighthouse on summer Sunday mornings. Rich works with Cape May’s Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts and Humanities (“MAC”) and as part of that job he also ushers visitors at the nearby World War II Observation Tower and gives talks about the music of World War II. He’s not a birder. I sat down with him one day to find out what it was like to be a kid in Cape May Point back in the 1950s and 1960s. During his childhood, he was there every summer with a whole lot of cousins getting into mischief and cooking hotdogs on beach bonfires. “We’d run around barefoot all summer,” he told me, “and by August we wouldn’t even notice when we stepped on the yellow-flowered wild cactus native to Cape May Point.” The Cape May Point Rich remembers from his childhood was a scruffier, less-developed place, but he wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

 

The lighthouse wasn’t a tourist destination during Rich’s childhood. In fact, it was off-limits to civilians. Kids are kids though, so he and his cousins used to go exploring on the lighthouse grounds as much as possible. Imagine the thrill for them when the lighthouse opened for visitors in the 1980s and Rich eventually became one of our esteemed “lighthouse keepers.”

 

On one beach day last year, I noticed the dolphins as I submerged my feet in the cool water. They were more active than usual, about fifty yards away from me. One small dolphin jumped and dove athletically enough to show anyone interested his tail flukes. Usually we beach observers just see their curved backs and dorsal fins above the water as they swim by. I was admiring Flipper’s spirit when my attention was shifted to a greyish-white bird in the water who seemed to be having difficulty. One wing was extended awkwardly and small waves were washing over her head. A couple of girls walking the strand stopped to try to figure out what might be wrong. A fisherman came running over with a knife, suspecting his daughter’s fishing line had tagged the bird’s wing. He cut some lines leading to the bird but it still seemed to be in trouble. A small crowd had formed around me to watch the proceedings, and from this crowd my hero emerged. That guy with the white shirt and black shorts walked behind the bird, and in spite of the bird’s squawking protests, he calmly grabbed both wings so that the fisherman with the knife could cut more fishing line off the bird. She was finally set down onto the shallow water, and after a few false starts, flew away, thus relieving the acute helpless anxiety I felt during the ordeal. I was so focused on the bird’s terrified face that I failed to note her identifying characteristics so that I could consult my bird books later. In retrospect, I remember her coloring, her pointy wings, her long yellow beak, and her approximate wingspan when the guy in the white shirt bravely held her wings wide open. (He kind of reminded me of Dad. Dad would have done that.)

 

My official amateur opinion is that this bird was a Northern Gannet, not terribly unusual around here, but up to now, not a bird I recognize. According to my Kaufman bird guide, it probably wasn’t. According to my Peterson’s bird guide, it probably was. I’m still trying to figure out where the fishing line came from. It wasn’t the little girl’s because as all this was happening, she hooked a tiny sand shark. No one noticed that event besides her father and me.

 

Before my parents bought our house nearby, and before Rich was running around “The Point” with cousins, this region was active in World War II homeland security. My parents never talked about this, so I started my research from scratch. There were German submarines (U-boats!) in the ocean just beyond my beach. They torpedoed a U.S. ship in the beginning of the war. (No one but history buffs talked about this for years.) There was a military base at Cape May then and another at Cape Henlopen, Delaware, across the bay to guard the Delaware Bay and River. Ports to the north shipped war supplies, so the river had to be secured. The sites on this tour are remnants from those tense days and two are especially important to Cape May Point.

 

That enormous concrete structure on the beach at Cape May Point was a bunker during the 1940s, working in tandem with a couple of others at Cape Henlopen in Delaware. Today this structure sits on the sand with moss growing on it and ‘Keep Out’ signs posted all around. The salt air has not been kind to the concrete through the decades, and it has been deemed too far gone to restore. Forster’sTerns seem to like the area around the bunker—whole flocks of them stand around it on hot summer beach days. (They might be Common Terns, but I’d have to spend more time with them to really know.) It took me a while to notice the terns since they have the same coloring as herring gulls and mingle with them.

 

The World War II Lookout Tower (technically in Lower Township but geographically closer to the center of Cape May Point) was restored in 2009. I was thrilled then to finally learn what this tall, austere concrete cylinder was and to climb the stairs to the top. We visitors get to climb convenient stairs today, but World War II military personnel had to use ladders. This cylinder, about three stories tall, stood next to the road to Sunset Beach for all of my life and a couple of decades before. It used to be called the Fire Control Tower, and briefly during the war soldiers would watch from here for enemy vessels in the ocean and bay. Through triangulation, personnel in another tower in Cape May City and soldiers here would be able to get a fix on the enemy and inform shooters in the concrete beach bunker. Their communication technology was primitive (telephone wires, for example), so this strategy was soon abandoned.

 

The tower stands near an abandoned magnesite plant. My mother told me that this plant was built in World War II to manufacture magnesite from salt water and limestone. (Bricks of magnesite were needed to line factory furnaces and were especially precious during the war.) The factory closed in 1983, and has since been demolished. What remains is a curious desert-like area resulting from the magnesite plant’s noxious fumes. These killed vegetation all around including on the grounds of the Lookout Tower. Adding to the tower’s mystique, it seems to be standing in a New Jersey desert with yellow-flowered wild Cape May Point cacti scattered about. Due to the lack of vegetation here, it is not a birding hotspot, but there are few trees and a clear view of the sky. I was standing near the tower last year when there was some commotion about something flying overhead. I asked the two otherwise taciturn guys standing near me about the creature causing the stir. “Oh, that was an immature bald eagle. There’s a nest near here.” Immature bald eagles are brown and don’t have the distinctive white head. I wouldn’t have identified this eagle unless he was wearing a sign.

 

Cape May Point is the accomplished birder’s utopia. Besides its distinction as America’s Oldest Seashore Resort, Cape May is home to some of the best birding in the world. If I could live anywhere, I’d choose this 0.3 square-mile seaside borough at the southern tip of New Jersey with the circular park in the middle, its own lighthouse and spring-fed lake, World War II artifacts, and the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay for neighbors. Cape May Point is surrounded on three sides by water, and naturally, the water helps draw me and all those yet-to-be-identified birds to this place. There’s the ocean, there’s the bay, there’s the bird hangout Bunker Pond in Cape May Point State Park, and there in the middle of town is charming Lake Lily, a spring-fed lake with its own island. Lily is a popular birding spot and it is catnip for photographers, too. You would think that with an ocean and bay to look at, a small lake would be an afterthought, but no, it is just too darn charming.

 

Personally, I am not a skilled birder, but I put forth an effort. My method of birding looks like this: I take photographs of interesting birds, enlarge them on my laptop, and then compare my photos with pictures in books. It’s a slow process and means that when I pack my car for a weekend at the shore, I nerdishly include a bag of bird identification books: Sibley’s, Peterson’s, Kaufman’s, and Dunne’s, at least. My complete birding reference collection is no less than ten volumes, and sometimes I consult all of them trying to make an ID. Except for a few distinct varieties, I don’t make identifications in the field. I’m just not good at this. I’ve decided the time has come to be proactive about this birding thing, so I’ll be studying those birding books, hiking the nature trails, and attending workshops and guided walks particularly in Cape May Point. I have to learn to recognize the birds.

 

Hanging around birders is fascinating. One sultry summer day, I was standing on the Cape May Point State Park’s Hawk Watching Platform near the lighthouse shooting some landscapes featuring the bird-filled Bunker Pond. The man standing next to me was looking through his tripodded Swarovski viewing scope. “Did you see the Glossy Ibis through your camera?” “Uh, no.” “Look through my scope: over there to the left, on that little island next to the Great Egret.” Thanks to Dad, Great Egrets are a variety I can identify, so I had no difficulty locating the dark Glossy Ibis with the rosy sheen through the man’s advanced optics. “I drove all the way from North Carolina to see that,” he said. I wonder if he has a bag of bird identification books in the trunk of his car.

 

Non-birders visiting Cape May Point State Park can also enjoy the place. I recommend a walk through the marsh mallows. Also called rose mallows, they are a type of wild hibiscus that thrives in the marsh. The park is filled with these soft-colored flowers, and its nature trails take hikers through fields of them. They are as tall as me, and feature white or pink petals with dark pink middles and yellow stamens. Marshmallows, the candy, were originally made from the gooey nectar of these flowers.

 

The flowers don’t have much of a scent but they are a visual delight. The boardwalk or wooden trail through the biggest flowery field is a joy to walk through, snapping photos of the blooms from far away (a field of thousands) or super close-up. My photographs of these fields of flowers resemble Impressionist paintings. Butterflies and dragonflies flourish here. July and August are the best months to visit the rose mallows and be surrounded by their wild pastel beauty.

 

See those bees buzzing around my ankles? Don’t be alarmed. They are harmless. They buzz over to the rose mallow flowers to extract the nectar and then burrow into holes in the packed-sand path. They won’t bite, but it is unnerving to have bees buzzing around your legs as you walk. By the way, they take their name from the flower: rose mallow bees. I learned what I know about these bees from the park’s faded informational signs.

 

Whenever I mention to people that I am originally from Cape May, I can count on getting this question: “Oh, the Sunken Ship! Is that still there?” It is. The S.S. Atlantus was one of four experimental World War I concrete ships. As you might predict, concrete did not make for an effective ship material, and the Atlantus was retired and towed to Cape May to be used for a ferry dock. It broke loose during preparations and ran aground off Sunset Beach in 1926. It was left there off Sunset Beach on the bay side of Cape May Point and became an unexpected tourist attraction. Today it no longer looks like a ship but rather concrete slabs with rusty rebar sticking out. That’s at low tide. At high tide you can barely see any of it anymore.

 

For decades now, the sunken ship has directed pebbles to the beach at the end of their journey down the Delaware River and Bay from the Delaware Water Gap. The pebbles’ rough edges are smoothed as they tumble on their trip down the river, past towns like Easton, New Hope, Trenton, Bristol, Salem, Sea Breeze, East Point, and finally Cape May. Some of these tumbling pebbles are made of quartz. When they wash up on the beach, eagle-eyed beachcombers will snatch them up and have them polished and cut--with facets--as a diamond would be. Known as Cape May Diamonds, they make impressive, inexpensive, sparkling-clear jewelry. People mistake mine for real diamonds all the time, but no, the set cost me less than fifty bucks.

 

I don’t have any bird stories from Sunset Beach, but while walking along the bay with my Shetland Sheepdog, Gladys, about a mile further north, I saw an enormous brown bird perched on the sand ahead of us. I had never seen such a large bird, and I was beginning to be concerned for my chubby little Sheltie. The bird took flight and I took many photos of it as it flew over us like a runaway kite. When we got to the place where it was perched, I saw the large footprint in the sand, almost as big as my own. Later I blew up the photos I took of the big brown bird. Sure it could have been a very large hawk, or a turkey vulture, but from the shape of the beak, and the markings of the wings I’m pretty sure what we saw was another immature bald eagle.

(Turkey vultures have a distinctive ugly red head which this bird did not have.) That was exhilarating.

 

A few local history books share space in my bag with the birding books. I don’t just carry them around; I sometimes consult them. How many of those birders and photographers are aware that during the War of 1812, British sailors came ashore here to fill up their water jugs with Lake Lily water? Local residents outsmarted the British by digging a trench to connect Lake Lily with the Delaware Bay. This made the water salty and undrinkable for both the British and the American patriots, but it was worth the price. After the British left the area, the Americans filled in the trench and eventually Lake Lily’s fresh water was restored.

 

This summer, remembering my vow to take definitive steps to learn how to bird, I signed up for a workshop at the Cape May Bird Observatory (CMBO), in the woods across the street from Lake Lily. The workshop would be led by esteemed birder and writer, Pete Dunne. Staring at the cover of his book that morning, I thought, “I should read some of this before the workshop so it’s not all brand-new.” I was reminded of a favorite music professor who chided us thus: “You don’t soak up any knowledge by owning fabulous books. You have to read them.”

 

I sat with Pete Dunne’s book for an hour or so and immediately learned a few things:

 

• In order to make any progress with birding, I would have to acquire birding binoculars.

• I was wearing the exact wrong colors for birding: the white shorts and a bright orange T-shirt I was wearing would not only alert birds to my presence, but probably make them nervous, too. The last thing I wanted to encounter was a nervous bird.

• The robin is the first bird up in the morning.

 

Re-clad in tan, I set out for the CMBO. I have to admit I was nervous about meeting this respected expert.

 

I was the first to arrive (a symptom of nerd travel) and I met Pete. We talked about binoculars and his books. Once everyone else showed up, he began the workshop with this advice, also in the book: “Buy the best binoculars you can afford, and buy them as soon as you can.” He covered everything I wanted to know: the best places to bird in Cape May Point, birding books (his own and others) to add to my birding reference collection, and recordings of bird song. This last is of particular interest because I often hear birdsong outside when I am inside, without a visual. Pete was very patient with our binocular questions and let us try a few of his favorite entry-level “bins.” I took his advice and I now have optics: I bought a pair made by Zeiss. We learned an insider trick from Pete: if the lenses or eyepieces get grungy from birding in the salt air and you are without proper lens cleaning supplies, lick the glass! It sounds disgusting, but that tip might come in handy one day.

 

Our workshop group of ten went outside in the stifling July heat for a brief sample of bird finding. In that fifteen minutes we saw and/or heard a robin, a cardinal, a blue jay, a purple martin, a mourning dove, and a chimney swift. Pete Dunne was expert at identifying the birds’ songs, so we didn’t have to see them to identify them. I don’t know if I will remember the songs of the blue jay, cardinal, and robin, but they were clearly identified that afternoon. I bought a compact disc collection of birdsong to get my ears involved in the bird identification effort.

 

I excavated Mom and Dad’s old photo albums to look for a photograph he might have taken of birds. He brought his camera with him when he was stationed on the western Pacific islands of Palau, Guam, and Saipan, and brought his film home to Cape May to develop in the basement. I thought this collection would be the best bet for bird pictures. I found a crab close-up, a big lizard portrait, lots of palm trees, one-story concrete barracks from many angles, and one of Dad in his sailor suit holding his accordion-bellows camera. There were no pictures of birds to wrap up my story. It occurred to me, though, that Dad must have learned a lot about the flora and fauna of these tropical islands during the 1940s and 1950s and he brought that knowledge back to Cape May. Cape May is not tropical, but its climate is a lot milder than Brooklyn’s and Chicago’s. All of this happened during an anxious time that was of great consequence to him, well before I was born. By the time I knew him, he was just Dad, who really liked birds.

 

 

 

Margaret Montet trades in travel narratives with memoir, culture, research, and conversations braided in. By day she is a college librarian who teaches wickedly sophisticated Music History courses to older adults. Her work has been published in Library Journal, Solo Travel Network, Mature Years, America in WWII, Edible Jersey, and now DM. Bienvenue au Danse, Margaret.