North Cape May is, according to the USGS, is fill. Just north and west of us are nice, loamy soils. Strawberry festivals, lima bean festivals, even barley festivals (if beer counts)
But fill that’s mostly sand makes for good potato gardens–some compost, some nice seed potatoes from Pinetree, a tiny bit of sulfur, a little bit of hilling, and then a ridiculous amount of fun while on all fours digging up potatoes with your grandbabies.
Yes, it’s early–they haven’t even flowered yet–but the kids are here this week, and we needed blue potatoes for a patriotic potato salad.
Every year thousands creep their way to the edge of their world and celebrate the long June days as only a critter around for hundreds of millions of years can.
They came before the dinosaurs.
The only other humans on this half-mile patch of beach were a few kids flipping exuberant males back on their many feet, their parents drinking at the local watering hole across the street.
A few moments earlier, only a few of the critters were visible, but cued by voices humans cannot hear, they rose from the waters, seemingly in unison, to creep to the top of the tide line.
An hour later, most will be gone. A few will not return to the water, their gills a treat for the gulls.
In a couple of weeks, the high tide will help release the few of the millions of new critters that survive through June.
Most will fall prey to the ghost crabs, the gulls, the grackles, the killies and kingfish. The Audubon Society folk will praise the eggs as fodder for the red knots, perhaps easier on human eyes but certainly not nearly as interesting as these creatures from the depths of the bay.
Decades ago I stumbled on thousands of horseshoe crab babies, moments before they emerged from their now transparent shells, spinning and spinning as if anticipating their release.
Every year around this time of year we have a local triathlon, Escape the Cape. People pay good money to jump off the ferry, push their bodies to exhaustion, and buy a few beers.
I don’t do that, but I do grow garlic. (OK, garlic mostly grows by itself–some of my plants literally grew from cloves too small to bother to peel–I just toss them towards the garden.)
So when we hear the noise from the terminal starting at 5:15 AM on an otherwise lovely early summer Sunday, it reminds me to go cut the scapes.
And in just a few short weeks after the scapes, we’ll get the bulbs.
Ghost crabs spend their winters right here in North Cape May, snuggled a few feet under the beach in their burrows, waiting for spring.
You get through winter several feet under the sand. You greet living again after a long months in your dark wintry tomb. And then you keel over at your doorstep as the sun sets, again, on your patch of Earth. There’s a lesson here.
If the beach is not crowded and you sit real still (their eyeballs work real well), you can see them going ghost crabby things during the day.
Enjoy their company and try not to step on their doorways. They’re locals, after all.
Bottled last summer’s beach plum wine, fruity, a tad astringent, but hey, practically free, as a private jet flew overhead. The beach plums come from two bushes in the backyard.
Made some bread from home ground wheat, cheap and good.
Eating kale from the garden tonight, as cheap as cheap gets. Kale grows like a weed in North Cape May, and requires little more effort than stooping to drop the seeds in the ground.
The mayor has taken “capture everything” to heart, and plans to use the drone to patrol the bay looking for “people who allow their dogs to off leash” in an effort to save our officers time.
Maybe Mayor Sippel should ask us which we prefer–putting up with the occasional ( and usually well-trained) off leash doggie or some five-figure eye-in-the-sky buzzing away as we (attempt to) enjoy serenity along the bay’s edge.
A drone-free evening on the edge of the Delaware Bay.
Having an officer stroll along the beach without the high tech would better serve all of us, a gentle reminder that there’s a human under that uniform.
And for those who occasionally nurse an ale or two, be forewarned. First they came after the dogs, then they came after the Dogfish. Heads.
