By Taylor Catalana

Townsend’s Inlet, Sea Isle City: An ideal spot to find a shard in the shallows, hefty, jagged, gray, but smoothed by the cradling of water and sand, its curving surface rippled with a copper coating that, with just the glance of your fingertips, makes you think you’ve just lucked your way into archaeology. Confirms for you what you’ve always felt when you step out into the sea surrounding this island: that the world is so vast, and time stretches back so unthinkably far like a horizon line thinning out of sight, but this place – this place – it has been here always, has been a conduit, a secret keeper. You cherish that indistinct shard of something, anything (perhaps, really, everything), and are fueled in your continued dreams of lost, ocean-bottomed continents sending out signs, just for you. Whispering, We are not lost. You are not lost. Not here.

Sacred Heart Grammar School, Vineland: Good in that it contains a bathroom window ledge wide enough for a couple young girls to occupy, stockings stretched over crossed legs, a classroom down the hall escaped. Before you: a view of a town you can’t wait to leave. Sea Isle, you dream aloud to one another, no matter how near or far you are from summer’s freedom; all that matters in your conjuring is that you’re bored of school, of being told where to be, what to care for. We already know, you declare with confidence of those who have fallen in love, imagining the sleepy town shuttered for the season and longing for it all the more. You know the secret: that it’s even better like that, the way the barren barrier island transforms into a protective barrier against the pressures and performances of growing up a girl in this world; what you don’t know yet is that this will remain true into your teenage years, into adulthood, and that you’ll keep finding kindred spirits in this feeling like perfect seashells unearthed from the sand while aimlessly walking. You’re dreaming of a place that wraps you up in safety like a loving parent with a sun-warmed beach towel. No stale suburban boredom here. A little place where little lives play out under massive skies, swallowed up by hungry waves, where every other constraining thing about New Jersey – including the very land itself – can be left behind. Where you can taste all that bigness and all its treasure-chest promises in every single breath.

The Stone Pony, Asbury Park: A devotional hub encrusted with thousands upon thousands of mystical musical experiences. A stale, dark room you’ll enter, wide-eyed, for the first time during your nascent years of Springsteen worship – when you realize that a pilgrimage is only a tank of gas and a print-out courtesy of MapQuest away – coming into the emptiness, the soundlessness, from the blazing daylight outside like entering a cathedral midweek. Just you looking around to see if you, fan that you are, can inherently detect what of this Jersey Shore bar is different, more magical, than those more familiar down the Parkway – well, you and Ethan Hawke, appearing out of nowhere to buy a shirt from a bartender who has popped up like an animatronic from a roadside Old West attraction. The very same Ethan Hawke whose photo you just glimpsed in the temporary New Jersey Hall of Fame up on the nearly empty boardwalk. New Jerseyans, Shore babies – we never get shaken loose, do we, even when we’ve set out and conquered; this is perhaps the most important revelation Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen will ever bestow upon you. You’ll behold the Stone Pony bar stage in its most natural state as 2016 folds down, exhaustedly, into 2017, with the wind icing over the dark Atlantic on the other side of those white brick walls. Wondering, is this the year the world burns down, or will it feel more like all these bodies dancing together, in from the cold, finding the joy, mining the hope? Throwing a fucking party anyway, because life goes on. The band plays on, just like E Street did the year you and your fellow pilgrims (in your red car worthy of a Springsteen verse) stopped and enacted your spontaneous plan: leaving, offerings for the recently passed-on Big Man Clarence Clemons, by way of those instantly recognizable Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. postcards, stuck to the exterior with wads of gum, personal messages of thanks pressed directly onto the hallowed halls that make New Jersey more important than Nashville, more sacred than the Vatican.

Play by the Bay, Sea Isle City: A series of castle towers not made by scoopfuls of dry sand nor drizzles of wet sand, but by wood that seemed like it could defend you from any foe but could not, ultimately, save itself from an eventual replacement. But before those towers came down, they rang with the victorious sound of small sneakers fervently pounding across wood mulch, rubber, metal. The sizzling smell of sun on asphalt. And away from the lines for the slide and those monkey bars your palms could never quite manage, and the swings that allowed you a seagull-like view of the eponymous bay: a solitary tower, big enough only for one at a time. A fairytale tower. As an adult you’ll earn art history degrees, thinking back fondly on the works that molded your child-mind, but you’ll forget to credit the painting at the top of the tower steps. An abstract. Artist: Unknown Child. You visited it the way you’ll later always seek out your favorites in the Met, to see how they hit you on approach this time. Paying homage in the wooden dimness, in that space-built-for-one, the sounds of playing streaming in through the slats with the sunlight, you don’t even know yet what it means to be lonely, only the thrill of coming across a place, a moment, and thinking, Look at what I have here. These islands, they’re meant for discovery.

Whale’s Tale, Cape May: A Cape Cod-style shop in the middle of a town of Victorian dollhouses, a town you’d come to know very well, but for many impressionable years was visited only on one special day. Extended Thanksgiving holidays spent in Sea Isle included driving south to Cold Spring and then excitedly boarding a train that guaranteed, before it pulled into the station in Cape May, you’d get face time with Santa Claus. A visitation you took very seriously, yes, but that paled in comparison to finally making it all the way down to the far end of Washington Street Mall. To Whale’s Tale. Seemingly just a gift store like any of the others flanking that charming brick lane, except that you knew that Whale’s Tale contained a magic portal in plain sight. Right there, built into the archway between the front and middle rooms, stood a shelf devoted entirely to mermaids. You could reliably prostrate yourself before it every year on that Saturday after Thanksgiving and leave with a new tome, a new trinket, something to hug to your chest and make believe that out there, somewhere, girls just like you never, ever had to get out of the water when the day was done and their parents called them in. Better than believing in Santa. A shelf you’ll still gaze on with wistful adult eyes decades after it has been remerchandised back into just a stocked shelf, like a flat, still sea, unbroken by the tantalizing flash of a fin.

Scoop Daddy’s, Sea Isle City: Formerly the northernmost business in town (once proudly forming a little corner triumvirate with the late Fun City and the thriving Pirate Island Golf). An establishment to gleefully patronize for years and then saddle up to as a high-school student hoping for her first real job. A bubblegum-pink building perfect for spending three summers with dairy products splotched plague-like up your scooping, strengthening arm. Perfect for learning what you don’t like: repeated plays of “Tears of a Clown” while wrangling chairs and tossing bucketfuls of water over the perennially stained deck like a sailor in an oversized t-shirt; people giving you a different amount of money than what you’ve already entered into the register, forcing you to (fail at) doing fast math on the spot; sweeping; feeling insecure about not being a kid anymore but not yet being old enough to join those phantom figures you can see ambling in the dark past this family-friendly intersection, lured by the siren songs of the bars, and not even knowing what you would do, how you would be, if you could (after all, you were assumed to be a cool stoner when you were hired, but no, you were just some shy girl in a Bob Dylan shirt); and – making you perhaps the only person in South Jersey for whom this is true – the DJ stylings of one Jerry Blavat. May he rest in peace, but no, thank you. A perfect place to work and then walk home from to find a porch populated with waiting friends, fresh from the beach, or a grandmother who will go on to recall these summers together when she can’t recall much else. The best damn name an ice cream shop ever had.

31st Street, Sea Isle City: A street running from bay to ocean, where turtles cross treacherous roads to lay eggs and egrets stand still in the marsh like white beams of alien light, like streetlamps, like angels. A street where the sky is permanently fringed by cattails, reaching up towards the stars, towards the corner of your house, there on the edge of the universe. The scene of the crime of one million heartbroken Sundays. A place you think about constantly when you are away from it; an exercise in pondering absence, elusiveness, impermanence. What does that stretch of beach look like on most of the days of the unsummered year? A wave on an untrod beach is not like a tree falling in a forest with no one around. And that house, empty, waiting, like all those other houses keeping watch on that island. A world you know is destined to be taken back by the sea, Atlantis all over again. The bitter inseparable from the sweet, a custard swirl, melting down your fumbling hand – another weekend, another summer, gone. Love spent deliriously, all at once, like arcade tokens.

Aspiring novelist TAYLOR CATALANA has spent the last decade-and-a-half describing where she grew up to befuddled New Yorkers as not, in fact, just outside the city, but “between Philly and Atlantic City.” When not working at her museum job, she loves scouring the Jersey Shore for antiques and writing historical fiction. To learn more about Taylor and her work, visit www.taylorcatalana.com.