Greetings From Asbury Park, New Jersey

By now, everyone has seen what might have been just another postcard from a fading beach resort

had it not graced the cover of a certain singer/songwriter's first album.

By now, everyone has heard of Bruce Springsteen and someone's claim of having seen him for $1 before he was famous. I swear, it's true!  

One of the great things about getting to be, ahem, a certain age is that the statute of limitations runs out.  You see, when I saw the then-obscure Bruce, the legal drinking age was 18.  Still, I was a few years shy of that.  So were a couple of the youngsters who accompanied me, and their siblings who were just on the other side of that age.

In those days, the Stone Pony was a "dive bar" in what was then a dying town.  If you were in Atlantic City before the casinos opened--or have ventured more than a couple of blocks away from its "strip"--you have an idea of what Asbury Park was like in those days.

It had become so unfashionable, in fact, that this was nearly demolished:

I used to ride through it and, as often as not, have no company besides a pigeon or seagull or two.  Now it houses a bar and a few stores--and you can't ride through it.  Cycling isn't allowed through the promenade, but even if you've spent your life riding criteriums and downhill slaloms, you couldn't have ridden through the crowd I encountered there the other day.

I'm not complaining.  I had a great ride down there, from my place in New York, and back up to Long Branch.  I reckon I did about 120 kilometers in total before taking the train back.

Though it was warmer--about 14C--the air felt almost as chilly as it did during my Connecticut ride on Thanksgiving day, when I started in OC conditions and the temperature didn't get much above 5C.  I wasn't complaining, though:  My seashore ride had the sun and clear skies I saw during my ride to the Nutmeg state.

No, I didn't see Bruce, or stop at the Stone Pony. I did go by it, though. Not surprisingly, it's become a tourist attraction:  While some parts of the city are still worn around the edges and suffer from unemployment and poverty, the beachfront and downtown areas draw strollers, shoppers and others from around the area.

By the way:  Contrary to what some have mis-reported, Bruce was not born in Asbury Park.  He did, however, spend his formative years--at least, musically--in the city.  

On the other hand,"Bud" Abbott of the Abbott and Costello comedy team was born in AP.  So were Danny DeVito and Leon Hess.  And, as much as it pains me to mention her name, Wendy Williams.  

Oh--a fellow named Arthur Augustus Zimmerman also first came into this world in Asbury Park.  In 1893, he won the first World Championship of cycling.  

Finally--You might say that Asbury Park is where the "joy buzzer" went to die.  At least, that's where its inventor--Soren Adam Sorensen--drew his last breath!

Without the Need to Escape

I rode to Point Lookout, again.  At approximately 65 miles round-trip, it's tied with the longest trip I've taken this year, and since my surgery.  


On a day like today, when the sea seems to be the shadow of a preternaturally clear sky--or when the sky is light refracted through a cobalt stained-glass reflection of the sea--it seems as if the water is a sort of light, and that light flows and ripples and undulates like the waves of water.  

And the ripples of water and waves of light become each other's reflections:

Just before I crossed the bridge from which I shot the above photo, I saw one of those things that could you forget that you're in Queens:

The dunes are in Arverne, which is just to the east of Rockaway Beach.   The streets leading to the Arverne stretch of the beach and boardwalk were, not too long ago, filled with bungalows and cottages that served as summer homes for some New Yorkers and permanent residences for some cops and firefighters.  Then most of them were abandoned when housing projects were built in Far Rockaway, the next neighborhood to the east and the last before the Nassau County line.  


I was pedalling into a fairly stiff breeze as I rode past those dunes toward Nassau County and Point Lookout.  That meant, of course, that my ride back was actually easier: enough so that I found myself thinking of a poem by Pablo Neruda:


EL viento es un caballo:
óyelo cómo corre
por el mar, por el cielo.

Quiere llevarme: escucha 
cómo recorre el mundo 
para llevarme lejos.

Actually, those are just the first two stanzas of  a poem from "Los Versos del Capitan."  The selection above translates into something like this:

The wind is a horse:

Hear how it runs

through the sea,

through the sky.

He want to take me away:

Hear how he roams 

through the world

To take me far away.

Please forgive my poor translation:  It's really much better in Spanish.  

Here is my "horse" :

And here is how someone is "riding" Neruda's "horse":

Yes, that white object is a board of some kind.  A man is riding it and the wind is pulling his kite.

Somehow these rides that are directed by the wind and follow the sea are even more innocent--almost to the point of being naive and romantic, as Neruda's poem is--than the ones I took as a teenager and in my early adulthood.  Those now-long-ago rides kept me sane, at least to the degree that I was. 

 On summer days, I would ride down to Long Branch, Asbury Park or beyond.  I learned that around 2:00 every afternoon, the wind would shift along the coast, so the wind I fought on the way down would blow me back up to Sandy Hook, the northernmost part of the Jersey shore.

I remember that long, straight flat stretch of Route 36 along the beaches in Long Branch and Sea Bright.  Some days I would just let the wind do my work, while on others I would spin as fast as I could.  It was my release and escape; now that I no longer am trapped by what I was trying to escape, there is just the ride along the sea.