Stone Harbor Point

                                             Stone Harbor Point

               Barrier Islands, what a stodgy, heavy-footed name for those slim strips of sand that almost dance along the gentle inward curve of the south New Jersey mainland. Nomads all, they love a home place but resist an anchor that tries to tie them only here!  Centuries, millennia perhaps they have wandered closer to the staid and stable shore running from hurricane winds but moving back and out into the waves again under summer skies. Seeds flown from otherewheres take hold growing into scruffy, rugged plants, even trees in quiet times. Shallow rooted they travel easily in the restless sands  back and forth along the coast. Until Man, loving these islands, doing what greedy Man seems to always do built roads that stapled the dancing place and push-pin houses that said “You’re not going anywhere!” Anchored, held tight, unable to move, the beaches are cliff-cut by winter storms, bay waters flood, sometimes splitting the fragile land forms into two.

Just two islands north of the open sea Seven Mile Beach has a small treasure. The southern end, beyond houses and streets, is a half a mile or more of unanchored sand and green shrubbed soil floating, almost primordial, back and forth.  Stapling roads,  push pin houses holding all in place are not allowed.  The lovely shoreline free, spreads itself one year way out into the sea, flat with small streams meandering filled with tiny shiny fishlets swimming. Another year the beach, higher, drier hugs the dunes but still fosters inlets for the sea water to meet and explore the land.  I love this place.  For fifty-eight years I have felt the cooling sweep of ocean wash my feet as I walk, entranced, the summer shore.  Even in winter, almost my favorite time, my feet are bare.  How else can I discover and pick up the beautiful whelk shells burrowing into small sand cliffs just beneath the waves.  One spring when the beach was wide and shallow I saw two skates swimming inland in waterways at least ten yards from the open sea! A million tiny, soft baby clams crunch beneath my toes washing back and forth within a coming tide. And birds, dippy terns, sanderlings, thrown like bits of confetti to race, manic along the shore,  plovers, laying their fragile eggs just above the tideline, trusting God and their acting skills to keep danger away, self-important black winged gulls, even the screechy laughing ones welcome me each year as I climb over the last jetty into this  special place drifting on the ocean floor.