A Return Ticket to New Jersey’s Cape May

I first arrived in Cape May, New Jersey in the early summer of 1966. I had driven from Detroit, Michigan, reaching the Garden State Parkway as a revelation — so lush with greenery and glimpses of marshes and a coast that sparkled for an 18-year-old used to densely packed urban expressways and weekend outings to lakes. As I approached Cape May in the early evening a mist had settled around everything in a vapory otherworldly nimbus that made me feel I was entering what had been advertised as the nation’s oldest seashore resort. I had been accepted as an apprentice at the Cape May Playhouse, then home of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival (a money loser) that barely paid its way in the community by putting on “Oklahoma” and other musical comedies, the staples of summer stock, in the weeks that were not devoted to plays like “Macbeth,” in which I had a non-speaking role. I stood upon a platform stage mainly to be jumped on by the play’s star, Peter MacLean, in a fight scene staged by director Paul Barry to make “Macbeth” as much of an action drama as possible.The Queen Victoria guest house at Cape May, New Jersey. Carl RollysonIn 1966, there was no mall on Washington Street, West Cape May was still a black enclave, and a beach for black people remained a vestige of the Jim Crow era. The concept of a bed and breakfast had yet to be broached in a town with some rundown boarding houses and a conservative community that looked upon actors with considerable skepticism, if not outright contempt. Regular passenger rail service to Cape May ended in the 1980s just as bed and breakfasts began to proliferate — like the Queen Victoria, where I stayed weekends after going to work in New York City. I remember crossing abandoned railroad tracks called “ghost tracks,” the vestiges of another time when you could travel right down to the beach by train, and about a South Cape May, swept out to sea by a fierce storm in 1950.The 19th-century track at Cape May, New Jersey. Carl RollysonI returned to Cape May in early October to take a four-mile round-trip ride down a railway route that dated back to 1863. You can pedal back into the past that is now the future, cycling beside salt marshes and ending up at the Cape May Canal built in 1942 and 1943 for a wartime purpose, a 3.3 mile stretch connecting Cape May Harbor to Delaware Bay. It was designed to provide protection from the German U-Boats sighted off of Cape May Point. You can still visit one of the Lookout Towers (built in 1942) on Sunset Boulevard on the way to Cape May Point. The German invasion never came, but Cape May was prepared.A seashore train line went over a swing bridge that is now stuck in place — an apt symbol of the gap between past and present — as pleasure boats now go back and forth unconnected to the past.The Swing Bridge at Cape May, New Jersey. Carl RollysonPropelling myself down the four-mile 19th century track, I thought of a sentence in a New Yorker article published many years ago about a murder scandal in Cape May Court House, not far from where I now live. The writer identified the area as on the “road to nowhere but the beach.” At one time, Cape May did indeed seem stodgy, out of place and out of time as other resorts thrived, and its playhouse struggled to survive.It all looks quite different now, with so many fine restaurants, and old edifices like the New Jersey Trust & Safe Deposit Co. becoming a popular emporium. In my heyday—that is in that era of the mid-1960s—Barbra Streisand was indeed the funny girl that us summer stock hopefuls latched onto even as we watched a great actor, Christopher Lloyd, just starting out, play the porter in “Macbeth.”The author riding the Revolution Rail at Cape May. Carl RollysonRevolution Rail, which runs the four-mile journey I pedaled, cautions that seats sell out fast, and I can see why. Couples ride in tandem at their own speed, with time for a stop at The Nature Conservancy’s Garrett Family Preserve at Cape Island Creek. A break in the rail trip includes a brief lecture about the monarch butterflies who thrive in Cape May on their way to Mexico. You can even have your picture taken at the “Dream Machine Monarch” created by Brazilian artist Rubem Robierb.Just off to the side, though, I spotted monarch caterpillar murals painted by artist Alex Lebron on transformed historic train cars by. Everyone on the Revolution Rail expedition passed by the murals that can only be spotted through dense vegetation. Instead, they were content with what used to be called a Kodak moment, when a tourist has a photograph taken to put a stamp, so to speak, on a touristy adventure. The Nature Conservancy’s Garrett Family Preserve at Cape May, New Jersey. Carl RollysonReturn after your revolutionary rail experience to enjoy the native wildflower meadows, and walking trails, an insect hotel, and a poetry path. Lamenting the loss of so much in the vertiginous changes overtaking his native South, William Faulkner had one of his characters declare: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It is a declaration that in fact is meant to bridge the gap between now and then that can appear and disappear as a mist in the penumbra of time.

A Return Ticket to New Jersey’s Cape May

A Return Ticket to New Jersey’s Cape May

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