The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to a Day at the Beach

“Did you feed the dog the cheese sandwich?” This was the response to my query to Eric some 36 years ago. I don’t remember Eric’s last name, but he was the only person I knew on campus who had won the adventure game “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The quizzical look on my face clearly said I hadn’t fed the dog the cheese sandwich. “If you didn’t give the dog the cheese sandwich at the very beginning of the game, you can never win.”

For my younger friends who have over-developed thumb muscles from playing modern, action-packed video games, Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a text-based computer adventure game based on the book of the same name. Before we had today’s powerful, video-rendering computers we played games that gave you a verbal scenario and you had to respond with choices for what to do next. We had to read the text. There was no Siri. As an example, the game starts something like this:

You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can’t. It is pitch black.

-Hitch Hiker’s Guide

As the player, you have to guess what is in the room, what you are wearing, etc. Game play goes from there depending on you decisions. The entire outcome of the game depends on those decisions. Make the wrong one? Game over even though you could play for hours or even days but can never win.

So what does all this have to do with a trip to the beach? Bear with me. We’ll get there.

For a bit of background, I grew up in southern New Jersey and spent summers at the Jersey Shore. Not the one from the dumb TV show. There wasn’t any of that nonsense in Cape May and other southern shore points. We had normal people. From the time I was very small, we had some sort of accommodations in or near Cape May. Both my brother David and I worked summer jobs there back when American kids did that.

The most memorable summer job for me was at Cape May Point State Park. I began working maintenance there in the summer of 1985 after my freshman year of college. It was hard, sweaty, rewarding work and my workplace was, quite literally, at the beach. I became an adult that summer learning to manage my own money, and living basically independently. I also found love for the first time in my life.

The last part was kind of a surprise to me. All through adolescence, grade school, and high school, I was pretty much deathly afraid of girls. As my fear subsided, I viewed girls mostly as really attractive friends, unattainable to me in any sort of romantic sense. Sure, there were boys with girlfriends all over school but I never viewed myself as someone any girl would be especially interested in so when I suddenly found myself very much in love, it was a delightful and wonderful surprise.

The summer of 1985 was spent working at the park, fishing, and spending every spare moment I could with the person that made my heart flutter. Summer seemed to last forever. Summer also whisked by in a heartbeat. One of the worst days of my life was packing up the car and driving north to return to college in the fall. The empty feeling in my stomach was awful but I pressed forward. College was important. The prescribed life plan was to get educated, get a job, work as a loyal employee for some company that would take care of me and my family, retire, and die. Happiness would have to wait.

I’d like to say that sweet, first romance lasted. I’d like to say I recaptured those happy, youthful days and lived a life forged from my South Jersey experiences. I’d like to say I spend my summers where I am the most happy . . . at the beach listening to the sounds of the surf and laughing gulls, sharing those days with someone that feels the same. But life takes funny pathways when you fail to feed the dog the cheese sandwich.

Earlier this week, I took a couple days off and headed south and east to Cape May. I needed to hear the surf, feel my toes in the sand, and listen to the laughing gulls and other shorebirds. Sure we have laughing gulls here. You see them by the dozens in shopping center parking lots. But they don’t laugh or call. My Mom used to point out that gulls never seem to call when they aren’t near the ocean and I completely get that. Being away from the ocean makes me sad too.

Early on Thursday, I hurriedly packed a bag, a beach chair and umbrella and left. By noon, I was on the beach in Cape May Point. The hatred and stress of my mundane computer job drifted away with the outgoing tide. I pondered my life as dolphins swam by.

Over the last few years, as the corporate winds have shifted, I have watched good, hard-working friends laid off in exchange for cheaper labor elsewhere. I have seen people I’ve known for a long time, retire one day and die or suffer catastrophic health events a week later and never get a chance to spend a dime of the money they saved for retirement. Much closer to home, I’ve pondered retirement and what it will look like. Right now it is not a pretty sight. In my parent’s day, employees spent a career working hard for a company and the employees and company grew together. Corporations took care of their employees. The employees truly were their most important assets. With a life of hard work, employees could create a nest egg and live happily ever after with a pension and pension-funded health plan. Married couples left on their own adventures after a life of hard work.

I spend way too much time some days living vicariously through others via YouTube and the Internet of things. I follow several channels of young people without “real” jobs, traveling the world, by boat, RV, or even on foot. They make their living by reaching out to Patreons and sponsors in exchange for the content they provide. Once upon a time, I was indignant and mad at these “kids”. Why should I give you my hard-earned money? I’ve slaved at a job I hate for 30 years so I have savings, healthcare, and a future! You aren’t doing anything to deserve any of that!

When I left Cape May with that pit in my stomach in 1985, there was no way of knowing that that model was dying. Corporate greed, a global economy, and greedy stockholders were the way of the future. Add to that, onerous governments with high taxes and a highest costs of living in US history, and the American Dream begins to crumble. There was also no way of predicting the outcomes of the choices I would make in the forks in the road of life.

Now when I watch a young couple eeking out a living from YouTube sponsors while sailing across oceans I do so with a bit of envy. They are truly happy together and continue to pursue happiness instead of following some flawed blueprint of life. They fed the dog the cheese sandwich and at least have a chance at success. I watch their videos and I cheer for them! I hope they win the game.

Friday morning, I had planned to go fishing. When I stepped out of my motel room, an ominous dark cloud hovered just to the west over the Delaware Bay. A streak of lightning rent the darkness. Maybe fishing wasn’t a good plan. Pancakes it is then! I spent the next hour nibbling pecan pancakes and sipping coffee at Uncle Bill’s Pancake House right by the ocean in Cape May. The black cloud moved across the sky bringing a half-hour or hard wind and rain. Runners along the promenade took it in stride. Walkers out for morning coffee hunkered under awnings or simply got soaked. I stared out the window people watching and deciding what to do next.

Due to some real-life circumstances at home, I could not stay the entire day as planned. Sometimes adulting stinks. As I sipped the last of my coffee, the rain moved east and some blue sky began to appear. I paid my bill, hopped in the truck and pointed the hood toward Sunset Drive and Cape May Point State Park. My vehicle followed the familiar route I’d travelled dozens and dozens of times on my way to work. When I arrived, it was quiet and empty and mine was almost the only car there.

I’ve rarely returned to the park since my summers working there. Only on occasion have I visited. I parked the truck, and wandered up on the picnic pavilion that overlooks the dunes and beach. I looked back at the park buildings. In my mind, I saw the shadows of my co-workers here and there as if it were yesterday. I remembered the details of all the buildings. I looked around at the remnants of many of the projects I worked on that were still in place.

I made my way down the ramp to the beach which has changed tremendously. What was a sliver of beach at high tide now stretches for a couple hundred yards beyond the dunes.

Beach replenishment has, for now, saved the state park and other areas around Cape May Point. The bunker, an old military gun emplacement, now stands high and dry hundreds of feet from the ocean. Once upon a time, it was excellent fishing with weakfish and bluefish hanging out around the outboard gun stations and sheepshead and tog amidst the pilings below. You used to be able to walk up on the bunker. My first summer at the park, we built an access ramp opening it to the public. The bunker now stands forlorn and decaying far from the water. A relic of the days of war.

As I stand on the beach listening to the surf and remembering things as simple as collecting trash from the beach, or digging a post hole for a sign, tears well and blur my vision. I should be happy here. I drove a long way to be here. I am happy. But also tremendously sad.

I kicked off my shoes and walked toward the water. A remnant of rain sprinkled a bit. I didn’t care. Turning north, I walked in the edge of the ocean toward the bunker. The occasional wave broke on the beach soaking my shorts. After the storm, the ocean was so calm one could have taken a canoe to the offshore reefs to fish for flounder. I circled the bunker, seeing it from a perspective I never had before.

As the waves washed over my feet and the cheerful Least Terns chattered and “ka-cheeted” overhead, I pondered my life path. I was never a huge video gamer, but I considered how when one messes up in a game, they can reset and start over. It is unfair that there really aren’t do-overs in life. On at least one occasion, I was given a second chance to give the dog the cheese sandwich but but obstinately I blew it. That moment is seared in my memory and I groan when I remember it.

Like others, I’ve spent a lifetime chasing things I think will make me happy and living with decisions of the past. We can’t undo history. We can’t go back and feed the dog the cheese sandwich so we press onward and do the best we can. If you’ve followed these pages, you know I’ve been blessed to do some pretty awesome things and the reader might think “there is a happy, satisfied guy with a fulfilling life”. Well, I do consider myself fortunate overall, but if offered the chance to go back and take a different pathway I believe I would, for better or worse.

I’ve seen the meme about playing with your friends for the last time and it creates a melancholy feeling. I thought of this while standing on the beach and it dawned on me that I was the happiest I’d ever be in my life here in Cape May Point, and I just didn’t know it. When you find your happiness, grab on to it and hold on for dear life no matter what that means!