By Joseph O’Sullivan, Photographs by Michael McCarthy

OCTOBER 26, 2025 – I’m staring at Barnegat Lighthouse from a new angle, and I’m seeing ghosts. Jagged ribbons of blue sky punctuate the dark smear of clouds above the 166-year-old tower. Another day in Old Barney’s knife fight with the atmosphere, with time.

This colossus of antiquity, day-marked in red-over-white, anchors Long Beach Island’s northern terminus. It anchors my psyche. I’ve come here, I’ve been brought, longer than I can remember. Its presence in my life predates memory.

Lt. Gen. George Meade built this tower in 1859, a few years before he commanded the Union forces to victory at Gettysburg over the Confederate traitors. Meade’s construction may outlive the republic he saved. One thing’s sure: I’ll never live to see anything of this durability built in my America. The masters of our universe have built nothing more than a shareholders’ casino in need of tearing-down. No glory till we scrape the rot.

Usually I’m standing beneath the lighthouse, about to make the ritual climb of 217 steps. Other times, I see the upper half – the red half – from a block away at a bar called Daymark. In my drinking years, it was the dive known as Rick’s American Cafe. A perfect name for a dingy pub beneath the beacon in tucked-away Barnegat Light, where the fishing fleet ports. The bar’s a classier version of itself – known as daymark, the definition of a lighthouse’s paint scheme – and with Nichole back in town, I’ve been hanging here with her. Other times, I see the lighthouse from middle distance, walking the concrete jetty along the inlet, looking across to Island Beach State Park.

Island Beach State Park. Photo by Michael McCarthy.

Not this time. This time, Michael and I stand at the southern tip of Island Beach State Park itself.

We’ve trucked up the Garden State Parkway and through Toms River to hit one of the last pristine stretches of mid-Atlantic coast. Ten miles of dunes and barrier beach that “remain almost untouched since Henry Hudson first described New Jersey’s coast from the ship, the Half Moon, in 1609,” per the state Department of Environmental Protection. That’s a diplomatic way of saying we soiled everything else, or gave it to the New Yorkers.

Our boots may tread on virginal land, but it’s still Jersey, and we’re far from alone. A line of hopefuls has driven their trucks and RVs to the end of the park, the lip of the inlet. They sit facing the lighthouse while casting rods from the boulders. The fishers have called out to us, asking how we got here. They’re impressed that we walked the last mile or so by beach.

The afternoon light is everywhere but where Michael needs it. It peeks beneath the rifts of aggressively dark clouds, bursts all around and nowhere. We promised Beach Badge publisher W.P. Tandy an Island Beach State Park profile. Maybe the lighthouse under the clouds, maybe an incoming sailboat, maybe a flock of gulls on the beach, maybe someone casting a rod? Nothing is working, nothing looks right.

Island Beach State Park. Photo by Michael McCarthy.

At least Michael is working: crouching, climbing, shooting, searching for anything to communicate into your heart this dune-ensconced bastion of wilderness. Scrying via viewfinder.

Not this secondhand seer: my own notebook is blank, the pen immobile. Sentence fragments stagger across my mind before turning back or pitching over and giving up. In July, I buried my mother after 20 months wheeling and lifting her through hard and unsuccessful cancer treatment and a month of hospice to die at home, within sight of the birds, roses and lagoon that kept her company for nearly five decades. (For more on my return to the shore, see “We Envy Your Journey and Wish You Every Success” in Beach Badge No. 5.)

Back in Manahawkin, I’m knee-deep in the forbidding journey of indexing and emptying 47 years of the family home, readying it for the painter, readying it for sale.

Last week, I found three cremated cats up in a closet along with my father’s funeral registry. Even my extensive training as citizen nurse, undertaker, and executor has not prepared me for this fresh round of WTFs. I call up Aunt Kath, who has the wisdom to suggest burials at sea. To the lagoon our kitties return. I’ve hauled 35 carloads out to thrift stores, gave a dresser to Enrique the painter and a rusting metal garden bench to one of my mother’s nurses. Unbeknownst to me, I’m only halfway done.

And the month earlier, the president of the United States succeeded in destroying my newsroom, Cascade PBS, where I worked as a statehouse reporter. The dunes here are steeper than my haunts in Ship Bottom and Surf City, the beach in places narrower. The waves crash harder. I watch them and can’t decide if I’m more pissed at the president or the people of Seattle – from our overpaid PBS executives down through the layers of upper- and middle-class citizens who proclaim themselves readers and participants in democracy. None of them did a good goddamn thing to stop the desecration. I’m distracted – I struggle to cohere.

But what can I say – I’ve been a sucker for bearing a little witness. As Michael shoots, I force myself into observation.

It’s nearly 60 degrees, a persistent wind dragging it down to a 50-feel. Along the beach, vessels congregate, drawn by the inlet. I clock the distant silhouettes and check the marine traffic map: a tugboat named Nanook puts along at six knots, as does another named Uncle Bill. There’s a fishing vessel named Manhasset Bay and a sailboat called Eclipse. Michael and I are here with the good ship Beach Badge, safe from trackers of any kind.

Island Beach State Park. Photo by Michael McCarthy.

We’ve missed Island Beach’s big highlights for the year. In late-July, a waterspout blew around offshore. The news reports show a gaggle of park visitors eyeing a dark tendril snaking from the sea to pasture of angry storm clouds above. Later that month, a sailboat sunk in the shallows near the official summer mansion of the New Jersey governor, a cedar-shingled mansion that crouches in the park behind a gate. A motor boat later struck the derelict, causing thousands of dollars in damage, according to Jersey Shore Online.

Coming over the causeway on the drive toward the park, Michael saw a stranded boat in the bay. Heading home, we motored the side roads and found it near the edge of the causeway. A sailboat, slumped toward shore in a nook of shallows, its tack bundled tightly. It looks exactly like a picture of the July wreck, just drifted toward shore. Michael gets good shots: he’s redeemed our day. We load into the car and stop at a Wawa on Route 37 for dinner. When in Jersey…

September 11, 2025 – It’s near twilight at the Island Beach park entrance. The sky is a blot of insects so dark they splash the windshield like rain. It’s only my second time here.

A surly gate attendant takes our money and tells us we have 20 minutes before close. She makes it clear she doesn’t care what side of the gates we’re on. Michael and I drive alone on the two-lane road, past the state patrol outpost, past the governor’s mansion. One building big, the other small, they hunker down dark and abandoned against the dusk. We follow the yellow striped line down a road shrouded in shadows of pitch pine. We’re in the nation’s most densely-populated state, the go-to spot for its biggest metropolitan area. And we’re utterly alone.

Island Beach State Park. Photo by Michael McCarthy.

Michael’s been here more than me and he remembers a bird blind on the bay side, near the southern tip. We roll south and check it out.

Earlier this year, Michael and I documented our hometown haunt in Manahawkin for Beach Badge’s inaugural photo essay about the Jersey Shore’s roads to nowhere. (See “Nowhere, Squared” in Beach Badge No. 7.) Back then, without thinking and near instantaneously, I pitched Mr. Tandy to reserve Island Beach State Park for me to write about for a later issue.

Why did I pitch this? I ask myself. Why am I here? I try to push my blank mind into reportage, into criticism, into any kind of pronouncement by which writers live and die. But push against emptiness and all you do is tip and fall over.

We decamp from the car and enter the Spizzle Creek Trail, slip into beach forest. We’re surrounded by sand, pitch pines, beach plums, highbush blueberries, American holly, beach heather. The Pacific Northwest has an emeraldness to its flora. When I dream of my hometown forest, I dream of pitch pine and American holly.

We reach the marshes. The trail converts to wooden planks. Up ahead, a cedar-shingled cabin roosts in estuary sunset. The planks lead to its door: it’s the bird blind. Above us, a twin-engine prop plane buzzes – a WWII-era Beechcraft. I wonder if we’ve teleported.

We huddle inside the blind. The sunset presses into the skeletal trees at the marsh’s edge, sprinkling its glow across the bay. There is peace within this cradle.

Island Beach State Park. Photo by Michael McCarthy.

May 2006 – My first time at the park. I’m wandering a dirt trail, the ocean’s a distant din. I don’t remember seeing it. For sure I never made the southern tip, never saw the lighthouse from across the inlet.

The week before, during a 72-hour period, I managed to both discover Buddhism and drive home on three-quarters of a bottle of rum from Doc and Crick’s place over on the Mill Creek lagoons. I passed two police – the shore is famous for no crime and too many cops – who didn’t pull out behind me.

They say the average drunk makes about 150 trips before getting pulled over, and I would have been at around that threshold on that, my last day in the bottle. I’d spent two-and-a-half years trying to quit. On the trail, I’m reading historical signs that point out the foundations of an old building reclaimed by the beach forest. I trace faint stone outlines through thicket. I wonder if sobriety will take root. I’ve lapsed by now before.

In this era of reinvention, I’ve resolved to do something new every day. Island Beach is today’s something. I left the east coast the year before, drove my ’68 Dart with my then-girlfriend to Minnesota, and took a job as a body man for a political candidate. He dropped out of the governor’s race. Here I am: 25, back at the family home, unemployed, a college dropout. Uncharted, untrajectoried.

Another day this month, I made my first three-mile hike, in Brendan Byrne (née Lebanon) State Forest, one of the last core tracts of preserved Pine Barrens. These two trips sparked a compulsion toward deep nature that would fling me onward to the Badlands of South Dakota, to the shadow beneath Wyoming’s Casper Mountain, and to the doorstep of the Olympic Peninsula. Witnessed, felt. Charted, trajectoried.

December 30, 2025 – Downtown Olympia, Washington. Writing while watching the Island Beach State Park live cam (https://friendsofibsp.org/live-cams/oba1-beach-cam/). The cam is sponsored by the Friends of Island Beach State Park. The page’s motto: Don’t miss a single crashing wave.

I look out the cafe window and wonder about the crashed waves I’ve missed. I watch a pigeon cross Fourth Avenue. It’s all legit, waddling the white-striped pedestrian crossing as the flashing red hand blinks down, five, four, three…

It’s been six weeks since I’ve fed Bubba – the seagull who came to our family home in Manahawkin near-daily for eight years, along with the mallards, pigeons, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays and those little brown birds of whom no one knows their given name. (See “Lagoon Life” in Beach Badge No. 6.) My mother is gone, the house is sold, three generations of O’Sullivans at the shore have reached their terminus. Bennies rarely feed the bids – our monied visitors can be shockingly poor in crucial ways. The guiltiest feeling about leaving is not getting my friends their food.

There’s a postcard of Barnegat Lighthouse on my apartment fridge, affixed by a Barnegat Lighthouse magnet. I couldn’t get my mother to the lighthouse during her cancer treatment, but we strolled that jetty in autumn of ’23, a month before her diagnosis.

I hope I die before it falls into the sea. If I could give the beach back to the Lenape, I would. If I could build a lighthouse from the bones of the billionaires, I would. If I could tell why you should go to Island Beach, I would.

Island Beach State Park. Photo by Michael McCarthy.

I’ll return to the park in 20 years, in another hour of turmoil, and gaze into its innateness. To remind myself that to live is to see what was. Even if the ocean is boiling and the clouds spit acid, I’ll see you there. Even if the foxes and beach heather have been deported, I’ll see you there. Even if the gate lady beats me with a broom on the way in, I’ll see you there, you can tend to my bruises.

In the meantime, I hope you get there. Don’t miss a single crashing wave.