The Wildwoods has always been an easy kind of place to figure out. If you don’t live here all year long, you save up your money and struggle through the ice and snow of winter seemingly forever until schools are out and you can finally head to the shore for that desperately needed vacation.
Ah, the shore. Warm gentle breezes laced with the arid scent of salt. Walking – or trudging, actually – over the course white sand and down to the sea until you can finally dip your sore, tired, feet in the cool waves.
And if you’re the owner of a Wildwoods business, you spend the entire spring painting and chipping, gathering your stock until school is out and the crowds come flocking back – after Memorial Day.
Lately, however, it seems like the world has turned completely upside down. Most of the time, there isn’t any ice or snow any longer. The big crowds wait until the high schools get out in June to come down. But, hey, it’s already warm down here (up until recently, that is).
The anticipation and thrill of shivering through the long winter until you can jump into the family car and finally get out of town is gone. Unless you live in Los Angeles or Miami. Because until recently, our winter season had swapped places with those other distant cities.
Through January, it felt like early June. Respectable sized crowds were roaming the beach and boardwalk, and some businesses were beginning to pop their hatches like groundhogs coming out to check out the sun. Yet, it was only January.
As Chill Wills’ character asked in Blazing Saddles, “What in the wide, wide, world of sports is a goin’ on here?”
Former Vice President Al Gore has been winning an Academy Award, and tirelessly trekking around the world for some time now, trying like Chicken Little to convince us that we humans are in great danger – we are reaching the “point of no return – and if we don’t change our environmently destructive ways, life itself is going to be a lot different for us. Winter will turn to summer; the ice caps will melt and polar bears will drown; the ocean will rise; and the Wildwoods will become prime ocean property – IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN!
Maybe he’s right. Wake up people!
– Thom F. (The Wildwoods).
