The Jersey Shore. For most people it means fun and sun, sand and surf, and hours spent sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the Garden State Parkway.
      For most people, The Shore is a summer place, opening on Memorial Day, closing after Labor Day, boarded up against the cold and damp months of the New Jersey fall, winter and spring.
For me, the shore is where my mother's family has lived for more than a century, first brought to Spring Lake in the early 1890s by her great uncle Ralph Caggiano of Potenza, Italy. Through a relative in Hoboken, 17-year-old Ralph Caggiano got word there was work to be had on the Jersey Central Railroad, which was extending train service in the shore area. He jumped the train south and found the work as advertised, laying and maintaining tracks. He then called for his younger brothers, Rocky and Joseph, who came separately within six years. For extra money, the brothers took the job of lighting the kerosene street lamps around town in the evening, and extinguishing them at dawn. The also worked as laborers on St. Catherine's Church, the elegant cathedral by the town lake.
      More relatives followed (my grandparents Paul and Angelina Tricarico arrived in 1921) and the big immigrant family bought land, built houses and farmed in the western part of the town, all within two blocks of the train tracks that today forms the border between Spring Lake and Spring Lake Heights.
      Sixty years and three generations later, I was born in Spring Lake under the most un-summerlike conditions. The day was December 22, 1956, the Winter Solstice that year and the first full day of winter. A dense, gloomy fog locked over the area, making the darkest day of the year even darker. Perhaps that is why my favorite time to walk the boardwalk is at dusk, particularly on a misty day.
      My father and mother moved us away from the shore the following year, inland and north to Summit, N.J., but close enough to return at least once a month. Growing up, I did not see the shore as a vacation place, but a place where our grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins lived, worked and went to school. It was a place where we spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and winter vacations, as well as summer.
I learned to love the winter desolation at the shore. The words "quiet'' and "empty'' took on amplified dimensions.
      Spring Lake's grand hotels--the Monmouth, the Essex & Sussex, and Warren--would be boarded up, dark and silent. On summer evenings the sounds of piano music, laughter and pleasant conversation would float down from their front porches. From the great dining rooms would come the sounds of dinner being served; glasses clinking, the clatter of silverware on fine china. These were the sounds of the affluent living the good life. From the boardwalk, especially on hazy nights, the hotels looked like giant luxury ocean liners, cutting through the darkness, all lit up and festive.
      But in winter, the only sound coming from the grand hotels, would be the rattling of the plywood on the facades facing the ocean. Against the falling light of winter evenings, their enormous empty hulks would black out huge portions of the gray and orange western sky. In those moments, they looked like ghost ships ... the landlocked cousins of Titanic, Lusitania, or Morro Castle, which burned within view of the balconies.
      In winter, when the boardwalk and beach are deserted, thoughts can expand to fill the empty spaces. With the curtain of summer humidity lifted, the horizon is extended. Ships, balanced on the distant line where sea meets sky, go about their business silently, their movement indiscernible to the eye. The only sounds you hear are truly the sounds of nature; the crash of the waves, the squawk of the gulls, the wind combing the dune grass. It is a beautiful season at the beach, if you're sturdy enough to weather it. In winter, the sea can be rougher, the winds more fierce. A simple walk along the water's edge can be a naked challenge of the elements. Need some invigoration? Try a mid-February jaunt down the boardwalk.
      Of course, appreciating the merits of peace and quiet is unique to adults.
When I was a kid, nothing beat summer in Spring Lake. We played baseball at the grammar school field, fished in the lake and played in my grandmother's backyard, dodging her fruit and fig trees and grapevine trellis. The flat, wide streets were perfect for bicycle riding and the lake, with two wooden foot bridges that span its narrow points, a playground and tennis courts, was the perfect destination. For one thing, it always seemed 10 degrees cooler there than at the beach, and there was a heck of a lot more shade. Also, hanging around the lake put you in striking distance of downtown and the classic 5 & 10 where even the most meager allowance could be stretched to cover a variety of cheap toys and gadgets. There was a little luncheonette called Jerry's, where candy, ice cream and soda were sold and where the owner remembered my mother, who worked there as a girl.
      Going to the beach was always an option, but rarely the top priority. While most of my girl cousins stayed on the beach from sun up to sun down, my boy cousins could have cared less. My cousin Joe Tricarico, spent a couple of college summers working as an auxiliary policeman on the boardwalk. That was the closest he got to the ocean throughout his teen years and into his 30s. Now he goes reluctantly, only to take his baby girl. His brothers, Jerry and Steven, were also beach-haters, opting for lake-fishing and baseball as summer activities. Their father, my uncle Jerry Tricarico, may hold some kind of record for beach avoidance. While he has spent his entire life living five blocks from the ocean, he hasn't been to the beach to swim or sunbathe in over 60 years! Like almost everyone else in town, he ran down to the beach in the early morning hours of September 8, 1934, as the luxury liner Morro Castle was burning offshore.
      In recalling the disaster ... how the fiery ship set the storm-darkened skies aglow off the coast ... how its passengers staggered out the surf after swimming ashore ... how neighbors like the teen-aged Stanley Truax, waded into the wicked surf to pull in exhausted survivors ... how volunteers went door-to-door searching for every available blanket ... my uncle thought for a moment and said, "I think that was the last time I was at the beach!''
With year round access to Spring Lake, I grew up not seeing the shore as a 127-mile long summer place, but as a series of little homey towns. To me, these towns were not resort towns to be used for three months and forgotten for nine. They were places with year-long--make that lifelong--continuity. They were great small towns, intimate and warm and friendly. They were places with a history and, in many cases, a maritime legacy. They were places where people put down roots against the ever shifting sands.
      Long before the amusement piers, the miniature golf, junk food concession stands and blocks of motels, the shore towns were places where people went to relax and meditate; places of peace were one's problems seemed insignificant in the face of the most powerful natural force on earth, a sea that could be violent and dangerous, or calm and comforting, depending on its mood.
      There is, in all of us, a natural, almost gravitational pull to go there; to feel small against the wide, unobstructed horizon. We look over the ocean and think about the relentless swells, mysterious depths, the creatures below and the men who challenged them all. The never-ending sky holds the same mysteries and challenges. Air, land and sea. Galileo and Columbus. It is a magical juncture; the first frontier of man's inherent desire for knowledge, a fertile ground for his unlimited imagination.
      This gravitational pull works on me constantly. I am writing this book from my home on the eastern face of a mountain in Boonton called Sheep Hill. When there are no leaves on the trees, I can see the tops of the World Trade Center from my desk on the second floor of my home. From my kitchen window, I can watch the sun rise over the Watchung Mountains to the east, firing up the sky for the day's work. If I walk one block to the top of the hill, I get a 240-degree unobstructed view of everything northeast to west ... I can see the tops of the tallest buildings of the New York City skyline (Empire, Chrysler, Twin Towers), the highest bridges (Verrazano and Goethals) the church steeples, water towers, apartment high-rises, and office complexes of the Essex and Morris suburbs, the reservoir with its lone island at the foot of my town, the highways that cross Morris county and the development along them, the tops of the other high peaks to the southwest and west (distant Watchung, neighboring Tourne). We are elevated enough here to be above much of the ground light; I have seen the Milky Way twice in my life, once from water's edge on a black, September night in Lake Placid, the other from my front yard in Boonton.
      There is beauty here. History, too. The iron ore in these hills played an important role in the history (and wars) of this country. George Washington rode along these ridges. The Morris Canal went through here.
      There is enough here to make it an adequate adopted home. But my real home, the place that lives inside me, is Spring Lake. I know it is just a matter of time until I return.

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