By Joseph O’Sullivan

FIRST THING MANY mornings I trudge across the house and step onto our back deck to toss birdseed to the gathering ducks, pigeons, and small brown birds. I advance slowly across the old cedar planks, which have been peeling rusted-red paint for years, to a storage container where I keep the feed. One of the planks in the path of my flip-flops has occasionally shown some give. One post near the house is pulling away slightly, and the deck’s wide steps down to the dirt strip are sturdy but sagging. But it’s the inevitable stray nail lifting off the planks that demand a certain gingerness. A nasty stubbed toe they’ll give you.

Lately, when I appear, the mallards bob out in the lagoon, about 10 feet beyond our deck, waiting and then quacking softly but rapidly. A quick, low-power flight lifts them the few feet from the water and over the bulkhead onto our dirt backyard. It is this strip, about 10 feet wide that runs the length of the property between the deck and the bulkhead, where they and the pigeons breakfast. I’ll also lean over the deck railing to fill a feeder for the small brown birds and the occasional cardinal.

As furniture goes, the deck is a rare piece. A pre-Y2K wooden structure, it lives on in a neighborhood almost exclusively given over to the soulless efficiency of white plastic decks and patio sets. Many are attached to the McMansions that have sprung up the past decade. The plastic makes sense: our climate is reliably unforgiving, with the lagoon’s brackish mix of salt and fresh water. A punishing dew point often soaks the deck from early morn till the sun pulls up around 11:00 a.m. and finally starts cooking it off.

The ocean is not distant, and thunderstorms roll through the estuary adjacent to our neighborhood. We have nasty storms we call nor’easters, and there are hurricanes, as this deck knows. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy pushed two feet of water over it and into our home, displacing my mother for nine months. It was one of 346,000 houses damaged that October.

When I tell people I live on a lagoon, I don’t know if they know what I mean. I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t grown up here. I’d think of Creature from the Black Lagoon, a 1954 horror film that I have never seen. Or Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, a place I did not see when I visited there a few years ago. Or a lagoon in Palmyra Atoll linked to murders as told in the true crime volume And the Sea Will Tell, written by Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter. I will never see those, either.

Our waterway is 100 feet wide, the water murky but generally clean. Wooden and metal bulkheads contain the waterway and also hold docks for boats in the summer. The water is brackish, a mix of salt water from the bay and freshwater from Mill Creek, which empties into a main waterway near the end of my block. That waterway opens onto a channel that takes you out to Manahawkin Bay, and from there, the Atlantic Ocean.

Our lots are small and our backyards open not only to the water, but to our neighbors’ backyards across the way. Most of these are summer homes for North Jerseyans, New Yorkers, and Pennsylvanians. During the season, they barbecue, lay out, fish off the dock, or swim in their in-ground pools, another recent trend. Kayakers occasionally float by, jet skis blaring country or rap have become more common, and pleasure boats still amble through.

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Back home after 20 years gone, I needed a project, so I took up the deck. It hasn’t hosted a group in 15 years, though my mother has used part of it to garden in pots. During college summers, I came home, and sometimes worked for my friend’s dad, who was a painter. So I return to painting. I was never brilliant at it and it turns out I still get paint on my shorts.

I start with our deck furniture – a picnic table and two benches, made locally with cedar, which withstands water well. Worse off is a gliding rocking chair from Pennsylvania Amish country, a gift to my mother some years ago from her older sister. Not only is the paint peeling, but the wood is rotting on the edges.

I fetch a hand scraper to get off the old paint. The problem with scraping is you think you’re done and you never are. I’m always finding more little lips, bulges, and shavings of red that need to go. I scraped and sanded and painted throughout the spring, as the neighbors showed up, readying their furniture and boats and pools. The deck is even worse, trying to clean dozens of spindles along the railing.

For the furniture, two coats of oil, in a deep emerald the paint chip calls “Equilibrium”. For the deck, I’ll go with red, in honor of the original color of both home and deck. But deeper, a ruby right on the edge of purple: “Divine Wine”. The combination of colors and dirt back yard gives us the feel of a vaguely redneck Christmas tree farm in a neighborhood full of Bayliners and BMWs.

I’m here caring for my mother through cancer and congestive heart failure, a months-long trudge of near-daily medical odysseys: chemo and side effects, blood tests, transfusions, and ER visits, a stroke, vascular surgery, upper respiratory infection.

It gives the days and weeks a casino-like endlessness. One day, I was out scraping and sanding and stomping around with a quart of primer and brush while every yard around us hosted a barbecue or pool party. Turns out it was the Fourth of July, and here I was banging away on my shitty deck on our dirt lot with no pool. After that, I kept painting to weekdays until the off-season.

One day, a young woman in a string bikini glides, back and forth, on a paddleboard as I scrape the chair, looking at me to make sure I’m looking at her. One day, the swans parade down the lagoon, strikingly large, every other bird a little toy. One day, as I finish painting a bench, clouds appear and explode in booming lightning and rain. One day, the sky is a deep rumble as F-35s out of Atlantic City twist in the distance.

One evening, I get an extra treat: Jersey Girl, the toast of the lagoon, slips her berth. The only sailboat on the row right now, it’s a stately, 20-some-foot ocean-worthy vessel and, just as rare these days, it gets regular use. On another night, some years ago, my mother glanced out the window toward the lagoon and saw an eerie light gliding through the sky. She thought it might be an alien. But it was only the light atop the mast of Jersey Girl, gliding through.

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I’m writing this at the picnic table – now fully painted – beneath a cheap beach umbrella I bought at the grocer, and a dozen feet from a seagull roosting on the railing. It has come here near-daily for two years, and my mom feeds it peanuts and named it Bubba. Bubba wears a pathetic look, guilting me. My mom would blow it off occasionally, lamenting that it needed to go out and do the seagull things. I’m worse, rarely blowing Bubba off.

The other day I looked out to the dirt strip to see Bubba eating a crab alive. Its claws flail as Bubba’s slender beak grips and crunches down the creature’s middle like a pincer, the same way you or I would hold the crab, between thumb and pointer, coming from behind so the angry claws face forward. Except the crab is upside down. Walking through the yard to bring my drop cloth back to the shed, I find a trio of crab husks. Bubba hasn’t told anyone about eating well.

We used to crab here, my mother and father and me. We’d throw a couple of those big boxy wire traps full of bait – bunker or chicken – and the crabs would crawl through two openings that narrowed as they entered the trap, essentially allowing them to move in only one direction. My mother would boil them and make crab royale.

When our family friends came down to stay, we’d crab with lines, tying at the end a sinker and a bit of bait. You hold the line and feel for the twitch and pull of a nibble, and when you’ve got it, you pull up, slowly. Gradually, a clutching creature would appear in the shallows, gripping and grappling. With a free hand, you’d take a net and try to get it under the crab before they figured out the trap. Sometimes you got them.

I close my eyes and see my father on the deck, smoking cigars like cigarettes. My aunt, my grandmother, our family friends, my parents, drinking Rolling Rock as the grill goes, lighting sparklers. In college, my friends and I sat out at this table and drank beer while my father died of cancer inside. In high school, my girlfriend and I had sex just back in that corner, where it meets the house; she sat on the rail and I came up, like we were hugging. Those were desolate off-seasons, the town still rural, summer folks gone after Labor Day, the waterway abandoned to ducks, swans, gulls, egrets.

I painted that particular railing first, mostly to get around the young pine tree that’s coming up between two boards of the deck in that corner. It’s already reached the height of the railing and I don’t know how I’m going to paint the planks or inside of the railing or what I should do about the tree. All I know is that it stays for now.

It’s not till September that the first coat of Divine Wine spreads across the deck railing, its dozens of spindles, and those long, sagging stairs. I painted the stairs on September 11, a few hours before I drove to New York City to see Pia Fraus in a basement club on the Lower East Side. Not unlike those college summers after work.

If we sell this house, they’ll demolish the deck. They might well demolish it all – old homes disappear quickly around here. Put up something tall, maybe a pool instead of the deck, maybe a boat. Looking out the window in the morning, I spot the fresh paint: Half the deck is tight and dry, slathered in dew as the old parts drearily soak. There’s more scraping and painting ahead. But I’m already thinking about a third coat for everything, maybe a fourth. Make it indestructible.

JOSEPH O’SULLIVAN is a writer and journalist who was born and raised in Manahawkin, NJ. He graduated Southern Regional High School in 1999 and is back in town after 20 years living west of the Mississippi. Find him on socials: @Olympiajoe.