Sunday morning, driving on I-95 somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, I passed an exit sign that indicated “Shore Points” and I was immediately struck with the powerful urge to take that exit, to head down the shore and spend the rest of my day at the beach or on the boardwalk, somewhere sun-soaked and crowded. Best I can figure, it was a perfect confluence of sense-memories; the wide blue sky through the windshield, the hum of the road under the car wheels, the green-and-white highway signs, the sun warming my arm through the driver’s side window. I could almost smell sunscreen in the car, and it felt like being in high school again, senior year and the summer after, when we’d all pile into cars and head down to spend the weekend in Point Pleasant. Eric’s mother had some investment properties down there, and kept a tiny apartment for herself, just two blocks from the beach, to stay at when she had to manage the rentals. We would fit seven, eight, maybe nine people into that one-bedroom apartment.
Driving part of that same route now is different than it was at seventeen, of course. I’m no longer terrified of the trucks on the parkway, I now drive a car that can accelerate even when the air conditioning is on. The biggest difference was the quiet–on Sunday, it was just me and the highway hum, plus a little bit of singing along with the radio. (”We play the songs you grew up with” might be my new favorite radio slogan.) In high school, the drive always involved too many people in not enough space, Jean and Devon bickering over control of the radio, and god help you all if Dennis got bored. Dennis was a professionally-trained singer, and when he got bored in the car he liked to play what he called “The Dennis Gets Louder and Louder Game,” which consisted mainly of using that professionally-trained voice of his as a vicious weapon.
Memory is tricky, especially at a distance of fifteen years or so. I remember the shore trips most clearly through the driving–I think I drove a lot of the time, because I had a regular-sized car (unlike Eric’s pickup truck, which could only take one-and-a-half passengers, really) and because, while I probably wasn’t a great driver, I wasn’t a -bad- driver (unlike, say, Dave, best known for coming to a -dead stop- on the freaking -Parkway- because he thought he’d missed an exit). I remember the long mornings, sitting around in the wee living room in the apartment, all of us listlessly flipping through fashion magazines while we waited for the morning shower rotation to work its way to the end. I remember waking up before everyone else one morning, having instant coffee and cinnamon red-hots for breakfast and watching my friends sleep. And I remember all the sunscreen-and-salt-water smells, but somehow I don’t actually remember ever being at the beach, or even the boardwalk, although I do think I remember Eric almost getting into a fight out at Seaside one night because he was a little too loud making fun of some over-hairsprayed girl near the haunted house.
You can’t ever go back again, right? It’s all Heraclitus, that it’s never the same river (and never the same you). I haven’t seen some of those friends in over ten years, and the ones I’m still in touch with are scattered all over the country. And anyway, I’m years past being satisfied with sleeping six-to-a-floor just to be close to the beach, and years past the age where Seaside Heights still has any real charm. (Sorry, Seaside.) But just for that one moment, it was all a gorgeous sunshiny haze.
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In any event: if not heading for the shore on that lovely Sunday morning, what purpose in the drive? I was on my way to Maryland, where I’ll be for the whole week, attending a Gilder Lehrman Institute seminar on the history of slavery in North America. Full title of said seminar being “North American Slavery in a Comparative Perspective”, which makes this useful material for all three of the classes I’ll be teaching next year. How did slavery in the New World compare to slavery in the Old World; how did Anglo American slavery compare to Iberian American; how did slavery in New England compare to that in the Chesapeake, or lowland South Carolina, or the Mississippi Delta; how did North American slavery change (or not change) from 1620 to 1860; and so forth.
I’ve been telling people that it’s like going back to grad school for a week, and in many ways that’s true–we have assigned reading, and homework to complete by Thursday evening, and a lot of intense (and occasionaly tense!) seminar discussions. But wait, there’s more! Tomorrow we’re going on a trip to Mount Vernon, to see how George Washington’s slaves lived and worked, and later in the week we’re taking a day trip out to the Eastern Shore to visit the plantation where Frederick Douglass spent his early years. I’ll try to remember to post some pictures for y’all.
Posted Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 5:41 pm. Filed under: academic > personal.
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