The Beach at Night

Undertow

Chapter 9: The Beach at Night

The beach at night was a different country. The beach at night was the country that existed after the flags came down and the stands emptied and the last swimmer walked up the sand and the last towel was shaken and folded and carried across the boardwalk to the car, the country that began at dusk and ended at dawn and that was governed not by the patrol but by the ocean, the ocean that had been watched all day and that was now unwatched, unscanned, unsupervised, the ocean that did not need supervision because the people had left and the people were the danger, not the ocean, the ocean was never the danger, the ocean was the condition, the permanent condition, and the danger was the people in the condition, and at night the people were gone and the condition was the condition without the danger and the condition without the danger was the ocean at its most honest, its most unperformed, its most itself.

James came to the beach at night perhaps once a week during the season. Not on duty. Not in his red suit. He came in his off-hours clothes -- khaki shorts, a gray T-shirt, the flip-flops that he wore between the truck and the sand and that he left at the base of the boardwalk ramp when he stepped onto the beach because the sand was the sand and the sand was walked barefoot, day or night, on duty or off, the bare feet being the connection, the physical contact between the body and the medium that was the beach's medium the way the water was the ocean's medium, the sand that he had walked ten thousand times and that he walked now in the dark with the familiarity of a person walking through his own house, the muscle memory of the terrain that did not require sight because the feet knew the ground.

He came alone. He came because the beach at night was the thing the beach during the day was not, which was quiet, which was still, which was the beach without the mission, the beach without the scanning, the beach that he could occupy as a person rather than as a guard, the beach that did not require his vigilance but only his presence, the presence that was the being-there that was not the being-on-duty, the being-there that was voluntary, recreational, personal, the visit rather than the shift.

The boardwalk at night was lit by the strings of lights that the Asbury Park Development Corporation had hung between the lampposts in 2019, the warm-white LEDs that gave the boards a glow that was not the harsh municipal illumination of the old sodium lights but the softer, more deliberate illumination of a boardwalk that had been remade, reimagined, reconceived as a destination rather than a relic, a place people came to rather than a place people drove past with the particular New Jersey sadness of a shore town that had seen better days and that was trying, with the lights and the restaurants and the vintage stores and the craft cocktail bars, to see better days again.

Asbury Park had been trying to see better days for forty years. James knew the history because the history was the boardwalk and the boardwalk was the beach and the beach was his jurisdiction and his jurisdiction had a past that was not the ocean's past but the city's past, the human past, the story of a place that had risen and fallen and was rising again with the uncertain tentative optimism of a place that had been burned and that knew it could burn again.

The city had been founded in 1871 by James A. Bradley, a New York brush manufacturer who saw in the Jersey Shore the opportunity to build a resort, a summer community, a destination for the genteel classes of the metropolitan area who wanted the ocean and the air and the boardwalk and the not-being-in-the-city that the shore provided. Bradley built the boardwalk. Bradley built the pavilions. Bradley built the rules -- no drinking, no gambling, no dancing on Sundays, the Victorian strictures that governed the pleasure and that made the pleasure respectable and the respectable pleasure was the product, was the thing the city sold, was the reason the trains brought the people from New York and Philadelphia and Newark to the shore.

The city grew. The city built the Convention Hall in 1930, the grand beaux-arts auditorium on the boardwalk where Springsteen would play before he was Springsteen, where the Miss America pageant would be staged, where the architecture announced the city's ambition to be more than a summer town, to be a destination, a cultural venue, a place where the boardwalk was not just the boardwalk but the stage, the platform, the structure on which the city performed its identity for the audience that arrived by train and later by car and later by bus and that expected the performance, expected the show, expected the boardwalk to be the thing the boardwalk had always been, which was the promenade, the gathering, the place where the people walked and the walking was the pleasure and the pleasure was the product.

Then the burning. James did not talk about the burning but he knew the burning because the boardwalk knew the burning, because the boards he walked on at night were the replacement boards, the boards that had been laid after the fire and after the other fires, after the riots of 1970 that destroyed the commercial district on Springwood Avenue, the district that had been the heart of the city's Black community, the West Side, the neighborhood where the music was and the clubs were and the Turf Club hosted Count Basie and the Orchid Lounge hosted the acts that played the Chitlin' Circuit, the parallel entertainment infrastructure that existed because the main boardwalk's hotels and clubs were not open to Black visitors, not open to the people who lived on the West Side, not open to the community that was part of the city but not part of the city's advertised identity, the identity that was the boardwalk and the beach and the Convention Hall and the not-Black, the deliberately not-Black, the exclusion that was not posted but was practiced and that the practice enforced as effectively as a sign.

The riots burned Springwood Avenue. The riots did not burn the boardwalk but the riots burned the city's economy and the economy's burning was the boardwalk's decay, the slow deterioration that followed the departure of the businesses and the visitors and the money that the businesses and the visitors represented. The boardwalk decayed through the 1970s and the 1980s and into the 1990s, the boards rotting, the pavilions collapsing, the Convention Hall's grand facade crumbling with the specific visual pathos of a beautiful building being abandoned, the architectural equivalent of a person who had been handsome and who was now gaunt, the structure that announced its former glory by the degree of its current ruin.

James had seen photographs of the decay. The photographs were in the Asbury Park Historical Society's collection, in the display case at the library on First Avenue, the black-and-white and early-color images of a boardwalk that looked like a war zone, the missing boards and the standing water and the graffiti and the abandoned structures that lined the boards like the ruins of a civilization that had existed here and that had departed, leaving only the shells, the husks, the empty buildings that the ocean wind blew through with the sound of a place that was no longer a place but a memory of a place.

His father had driven past Asbury Park in the 1980s, had driven past it on Ocean Avenue on the way to somewhere else, and had not stopped, because the not-stopping was the relationship, the relationship between Neptune Township and Asbury Park being the relationship between the residential and the commercial, between the place where people lived and the place where people had once gone for pleasure and where the pleasure had stopped and the stopping was the decay and the decay was the boards he drove past and did not walk on because the walking was not safe, the boards were not safe, the city was not safe, and the not-safe was the condition, the condition that lasted for thirty years before the condition changed.

The condition changed in the 2000s. The condition changed because the money came, because the developers came, because the artists came before the developers and the developers followed the artists and the artists were priced out by the developers and the pricing-out was the cycle, the specific American cycle of urban renewal that began with the cheap rent and the galleries and the musicians and the queer community that had found in Asbury Park's decay a freedom, a space, a place where the decay was the permission, the permission to be the thing the non-decayed places did not permit, and the permission attracted the people and the people attracted the restaurants and the restaurants attracted the money and the money attracted the developers and the developers built the condos and the condos changed the boardwalk and the boardwalk that James walked at night was the changed boardwalk, the rebuilt boardwalk, the boardwalk that was neither the original Bradley boardwalk nor the decayed boardwalk nor the ruined boardwalk but the third boardwalk, the boardwalk of the renewal, the boardwalk that carried within its new boards the memory of the old boards and within the memory the history and within the history the burning and within the burning the West Side and within the West Side the people who had been excluded from the original boardwalk and who had built their own boardwalk, their own music, their own culture, on Springwood Avenue, and whose boardwalk had burned, and whose burning was the city's wound, and whose wound was the thing the new boardwalk was built over, the way the new boards were laid over the old joists, the surface concealing the structure, the present concealing the past.

James walked the boardwalk at night and the walking was the traversal of the history and the traversal of the present and the two existed simultaneously, the way the ocean existed simultaneously as the thing it was now and the thing it had been yesterday, the tides having rearranged the sandbars overnight, the new morning's ocean being the same ocean and a different ocean, the continuity and the change coexisting in the medium the way the history and the present coexisted in the boards.

He walked past the Paramount Theatre, the 1927 movie palace that had been restored, the terra-cotta facade lit from below by the uplights that the restoration had installed, the lights that made the building glow against the night sky with the warm amber luminance of a thing that had been brought back from the edge, that had been almost lost and was now found, the found that was the restoration, the restoration that was the city's project, the city's ongoing project of finding itself after the losing.

He walked past the Stone Pony, the bar on Ocean Avenue that was not on the boardwalk but that was the boardwalk's annex, the satellite, the venue that had given the city its musical identity, the identity that was Springsteen and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and the specific sound that the city had produced in the 1970s, the sound that had survived the decay and the burning and the thirty years of ruin, the sound that was the thing that lasted, the cultural artifact that outlived the physical infrastructure, the music that continued to play in a city that had stopped playing everything else.

He left the boardwalk. He walked down the main ramp to the sand. The sand at night was cool, the day's heat having dissipated into the atmosphere through the process of radiation that the physics textbook described and that the feet experienced as a temperature, a specific temperature, the temperature of sand at ten o'clock on a July night in New Jersey, which was seventy-two degrees, which was the temperature of comfort, of the body's ease, the temperature at which the feet did not recoil from the hot and did not clench against the cold but simply walked, simply touched the ground, simply made the contact that was the contact, the feet on the sand, the person on the beach.

He walked to the waterline. The waterline at night was the same waterline as the day, the same boundary, the same interface, the same place where the land ended and the water began, but the boundary at night was audible rather than visible, was heard before it was seen, the sound of the waves reaching the ears before the waves reached the eyes, the hissing and the booming and the particular sonic signature of the Atlantic Ocean arriving at the New Jersey shore that James could hear from a hundred yards and that resolved, as he approached, into the specific components of the sound -- the hiss of the foam on the sand, the thud of the breaking wave, the sucking of the water retreating over the shells, the whole orchestra of the shore break performing its composition in the dark for an audience of one.

The ocean at night was dark. The ocean at night was the same ocean that had been green and gray and blue during the day, the same water, the same volume, the same currents, the same rips, the same sandbars, the same everything, but the everything was now invisible, was hidden by the dark, was the ocean without its visual information, the ocean stripped of the surface text that the guard read during the day, the color changes and the foam patterns and the wave behavior that told the guard what the water was doing, all of it gone, erased by the absence of light, replaced by the sound and the feel and the smell that were the ocean's nighttime language, the language of the senses that were not the eyes.

James stood at the waterline and he listened. He listened the way he scanned -- with the total attention, the professional attention, the attention that was not casual but practiced, not voluntary but compulsory, the attention of a person whose life's work was the reading of this water and who could not stop reading it, not even at night, not even off duty, not even standing on the sand in khaki shorts and a gray T-shirt with the flip-flops left at the ramp. The listening was the reading, the auditory version of the visual sweep, the ears doing what the eyes did during the day, receiving the ocean's information and processing it into knowledge, the knowledge that said: the swell is two feet, I can hear it in the interval between the breaks. The tide is incoming, I can hear it in the rising pitch of the foam. The wind is offshore, I can hear it in the smoothness of the wave face, the absence of the chop's staccato. The ocean is calm. The ocean is doing its work. The ocean is being the ocean.

He could hear the things the day obscured. The day's noise -- the crowds, the radios, the whistles, the gulls, the children, the whole auditory congestion of a public beach in summer -- masked the ocean's subtler sounds, the sounds that emerged at night when the human noise was gone and the ocean had the frequency spectrum to itself. He could hear the sand moving. The literal sound of the grains being transported by the water, the soft granular hissing that was the longshore drift's acoustic signature, the sound of the beach being rearranged by the water, grain by grain, the slow patient labor of the current moving the sand from north to south, from south to north, the bidirectional transport that the tides and the waves and the currents performed continuously, day and night, the geological work that built and destroyed the sandbars and that shaped and reshaped the beach, the work that the guards saw the results of each morning when the morning assessment found the sandbars in new positions and the rip channels at new locations and the whole near-shore architecture rearranged by the night's work, the work that James was now hearing, the sound of the beach being rebuilt while the city slept.

He could smell the ocean at night. The daytime smell was sunscreen and hot sand and the fried food from the boardwalk vendors and the human smell, the collective olfactory output of a thousand bodies in the sun. The nighttime smell was the ocean's own smell, the salt and the iodine and the organic compounds that the water released as the temperature differential between the air and the water produced the offshore breeze, the land-to-sea wind that carried the ocean's scent inland and that the person at the waterline received as the pure unfiltered aroma of the Atlantic, the smell that was the oldest smell, the smell that the first thing that crawled from the water onto the land must have carried with it, the ancestral smell, the smell of the medium from which all terrestrial life had emerged and to which the lifeguard returned every morning and from which the lifeguard departed every evening and which the lifeguard now stood beside in the dark, smelling the thing that was the source, the origin, the beginning.

The moon was up. The moon was three-quarters full, hanging in the southeast sky, the pale disc that controlled the tides from a distance of 238,900 miles, the gravitational influence that reached across the void and pulled the water toward itself with the gentle persistent force that raised the ocean's surface by three feet twice a day, the cosmic engine of the tides that the guard factored into every morning assessment, every stand assignment, every flag decision, the moon that was the silent partner in the patrol's work, the celestial body that shaped the conditions the patrol managed and that the patrol did not acknowledge, did not thank, did not look at during the day because the day's attention was on the water and the water was the moon's product but the moon was above the water and the above was not the guard's jurisdiction.

But at night James looked at the moon. At night he could look up, could look above the waterline, could direct his attention to the sky that he did not scan during the day because the sky did not contain swimmers, did not contain the drowning, did not contain the thing the guard was on the stand to find. The sky at night contained the moon and the moon was beautiful and the beauty was the thing the day did not allow, the aesthetic appreciation that the duty prevented, because the duty was not appreciation but assessment and the assessment was not beauty but danger and the danger was the job and the job did not include looking at the moon.

He looked at the moon and the moon's light was on the water and the water's surface held the light in a long trembling column that extended from the horizon to the shore, the moonpath, the luminous road that the light painted on the ocean's surface and that moved as the water moved, the road that was not a road but a reflection, not a surface but a shimmer, the light arriving at the water after traveling 238,900 miles through vacuum and one mile through atmosphere and being scattered and reflected and broken by the water's surface into a thousand fragments of light that the eye assembled into the column, the coherent image of the light that the eye created from the incoherent reality of the light, the seeing that was the making, the perception that was the creation, the eye constructing the beauty from the raw material of the photons and the water.

The boardwalk behind him was quiet. The restaurants had closed -- the last seatings were at ten, the kitchens shut down by ten-thirty, the staff emerging from the back doors to smoke and check their phones and stand in the salt air for a moment before driving to the apartments in Neptune or Bradley Beach or wherever the restaurant workers lived, the workers who served the renewal, who staffed the new boardwalk, who made the destination function as a destination. The bars were still open -- the Stone Pony and the Wonder Bar and the Asbury Lanes and the newer places, the cocktail bars and the wine bars and the speakeasies that the renewal had produced, the nightlife that existed alongside the beach life the way the night existed alongside the day, the same boardwalk serving two different populations, the daytime population that came for the sun and the water and the sand and the nighttime population that came for the music and the drinks and the particular energy of a shore town at night, the energy that was different from the daytime energy, the energy that was not recreational but social, not family but adult, not the wholesome energy of children in the surf but the complicated energy of people in bars, the energy that the patrol did not manage because the patrol's jurisdiction ended at the waterline and the bars were on the other side of the boardwalk.

James did not go to the bars. James came to the beach. The beach at night was his bar, his restaurant, his entertainment, the place he came to when the day was done and the patrol was done and the house on Tenth Avenue was too quiet and the quiet of the house was not the right quiet, was not the quiet he wanted, and the quiet he wanted was this quiet, the quiet of the ocean at night, the quiet that was not quiet but that was the ocean's sound without the human sound, the subtraction that was the addition, the taking-away of the people that was the giving-back of the water, the water's own voice, the voice that the day's noise masked and that the night's silence revealed.

He sat on the sand. He sat at the point where the dry sand met the wet, the line that was the line, the line that moved with the tide, the line that was the boundary between the land the water had touched and the land the water had not yet touched, the same line he stood on during the day, the same interface, the same boundary, but the sitting was different from the standing, the sitting was the being-here without the being-on-duty, the being-present without the being-responsible, the presence that was not professional but personal, not the guard's presence but the man's presence, the man who was also the guard but who was, at this moment, in this dark, on this sand, only the man, only James, only the person who had sat on this beach since he was a boy and who would sit on this beach after he was no longer a guard and who sat on this beach now in the space between the being and the not-being, the last season, the last summer, the last series of nights on this sand before the nights became the nights of a person who did not guard this beach, who did not own this water, who did not sit on this sand as the person between but simply as the person, the person on the beach at night, the person listening to the ocean in the dark.

The ocean did not know he was there. The ocean did not adjust its behavior for the audience of one. The waves arrived at the shore with the same force and the same rhythm and the same indifference they would have arrived with if the beach had been empty, if no human had been present, if the entire species had never evolved and the beach had been the beach for its own sake, for no sake, for the purposeless purposefulness of a system that operated because the physics that governed it required the operation, the waves arriving because the wind and the swell and the tide and the geometry of the continental shelf required the waves to arrive, the requirement that was not a choice but a law, the law that James sat in the presence of, the law that he listened to, the law that was the ocean's only law and that the guard's law existed to mediate between and the people, the people who came to the beach during the day and who were gone now, and the going was the relief, and the relief was the night, and the night was the ocean without the mediation, the ocean without the guard, the ocean being the ocean, and James sitting beside it, listening, not guarding but attending, not scanning but hearing, not the captain of the Asbury Park Beach Patrol but a man on the sand, a man who loved the water, a man who was spending his last season listening to the thing he loved in the dark.