Here’s something from the archives — an end of summer piece I submitted to The New Yorker back in the early 1980s. Just a few summers earlier (1976 to be exact) I was a college student working behind the bar and in the kitchen of a restaurant in Cape May making Oceanburgers and the like. This proposed (and rejected) cover is a blend of two very different Jersey shore towns. Cape May is represented by the beach tents, the bird watcher, and the lifeboat (its CMBP refers to Cape May Beach Patrol). I never saw a horse on Cape May’s beaches, but I liked to think a horse would be allowed on the beach the day after the last big weekend of the season. The boardwalk pier came out of my even earlier summers in Wildwood, just north of Cape May. The thing with the devils on it is based on a ride called The Hell Hole. Most definitely considered tame now, back then it seemed the scariest thing on the boardwalk. Inside the structure was a giant barrel that revolved at a terrific speed keeping the paying customers flattened to its wall. The floor dropped out at some point. Horrifying. I never went into the pirate ship — I’d heard it was filled with dancing skeletons.
