The Mast in the Sand, Barnegat Light, LBI

I had it in my head like a record refrain, some odd memory of my father a few years ago telling me about this wrecked boat in the sand somewhere on Long Beach Island, all the way out on the end by the Barnegat Lighthouse. His face was buried in the cheap newsprint of The Tin Can Sailor, a press for old Navy veterans. He showed me the picture. “Don’t you remember when I took you to see it when you were a kid?” I didn’t. We weren’t really Long Beach Island people and I wondered if my dad was mixing it up with some other sea curiosity. “I love it when things end up where they don’t belong,” mused my father, in his way, pensive and thoughtful in the way of an old salt, forced to live on the land and work for a utility company.

This past summer, I spent two weeks at a writing program in Boulder, Colorado trying to write this story about two kids who fell in love in Seaside Heights. The boy, Jason, is a baseball player and in one scene he takes her to this masthead, which sticks out a good fifteen feet into the air, the rest buried by sand. He has grandiose plans to dig up the boat moored underneath, to restore it, and take his female counterpart sailing around the world. I wanted this to be a romantic and significant moment in their relationship. Two kids driven by imagination finding themselves in a mystery. Perfect! I’m ready for my Pulitzer.

Jogging as if I was underwater through the high-altitude muck of Boulder, the image of that masthead kept presenting itself to me in an almost Jungian way. I decided to visit it as soon as I got home. After fourteen days of Buddhist education and half-assed meditation (since it turns out I can’t sit still to actually meditate, but I love the adoration of ringing bells), it seemed an almost cosmic invitation.

On my thirty-third birthday I took the trip down to South Jersey. I was meeting friends in Atlantic City to celebrate my birthday and my husband was in Chicago on business. It was a perfect opportunity to disappear for a few days and do what I liked. The summer still stretched charmingly before me and I was free to wander around the beach in my hat and sundress just like a character from a novel, or better: I will write my own novel, and this is research. An hour in the library before I left confirmed a few facts; the boat is the Sea King, foundered in 1963, and depending on the wind and erosion and other technical variables, locals have been measuring time by the boat’s position in the sand. People my mother’s age can remember playing on the boat as kids; these days, the mast is the only thing you can see, tipping to the sky like a reedy grandfather clock.

My friend Tim met me in Barnegat Light and escorted me to the right place: the 10th street beach where a few sun worshippers lounged, oily and brown and sleepy. It was swelteringly hot as we made our way down the path where the dunes were waist-high. The bright umbrellas dotting the shoreline were wavy and blurry, almost a mirage. Every step I took burned the soles of my feet so I carefully placed each one in the tiny strip of shadow against the wire and wood barrier fence.

About a hundred or so feet from the shoreline the mast stood like a huge crucifix in the heat, casting an impressive shadow. A sort of watchtower, slightly bent forward, cradling a few birds. The wood was baked and splintered and unforgivingly hot to the touch.
I tried to imagine my characters, the ones engendered in my brain, standing there. What would they say? How can this story take shape? Is there even a story?

As I looked and looked, my head felt empty save for the immediacy of the sun pelting my shoulders and back and my burning feet.

I didn’t bring my camera or a notebook anyway, so after a brief moment of looking, I made my way back to the car and drove to Atlantic City.

Driving down the parkway with the air conditioning on full blast, I thought about my dad’s delight in the idea that things sometimes end up where they aren’t supposed to be. Shoes on the side of the road or thrown up around telephone wires, for example. Or shopping lists that end up blowing around the edges of the supermarket parking lot. Or the slightly magnificent creepiness of a children’s toy, left behind in the road.

Of course, the person (mostly me) is standing there in the summer heat, gazing up at the mast in the sand, waiting for that moment, that moment that says, you haven’t been wasting your time. This will be a story. You aren’t being weird. This means something.

That person isn’t quite like the masthead, staring down the water for forty years, fixed and unfixed, depending on the whim of the wind. The person is not the thing in the wrong place.

I hope.