From the turn off the highway at the red and gold liquor store sign, it’s three miles, winding along a curved macadam road through square, flat fields, to Bowers Beach. You pass a few large farmhouses framed by trees and clusters of aging mobile homes, their battered metal glinting impudently in the sun, stealing the light from the darkened, fading farmhouses. The fields of the last farm at the edge of town are narrowed and sliced by marsh grasses and stream branches. The road ends in a flat parking lot. It’s often flooded during nor’easters when the moon is full.
The old houses wear their decay right out on the street; their foundations crumbling and their porches sagging from repeated floods. It’s just a few steps from the parking lot to the ramshackle docks. Although they extend less than a quarter mile, there is an unexpected gap between two sections of boardwalk, having to do with ownership boundaries. I remember my father lifting me over the gap and setting me down on the other side when I was little. Clueless strangers seldom stroll along these docks at night. Somebody might break a leg if they didn’t fall in and drown. The docks smell of oily fish and diesel oil. Watermen in wading boots and suspenders pass local family groups on weekend afternoons, the women in polyester coordinated casual wear. Basic burgers and fries and fresh fish sandwiches are available at a dockside restaurant. The ceiling is low; it’s dingy and dim as a city tavern, but from the window booths you can look out on the sloshing bay water as you eat.
Bowers Beach has a reputation. Drunken fights were common in the Heartbreak Hotel bar before it was demolished, after looking like it would tumble down on its own any day for as long as anyone could remember. My mother’s brother was one of the toughest characters in the village, and my mother was afraid of him. We lived twelve miles away near the town of Dover. We visited my grandparents regularly on holidays, but Mom kept us away from the more colorful life of the village.
I have mixed feelings about that, though. I know from talking to family members I have reconnected with lately that there were good families in Bowers that my mother shunned, too. Or they shunned her. My mother was infected with her family’s argumentative temperament. Although we visited her parents regularly, at least once every couple of years a visit ended abruptly with cursing and slamming doors. One of my mother’s next-door neighbors summed up what he had heard about the Hall family reputation for violent outbursts after she had brandished her fists and cursed at him. “Once in a while,” he intoned, “when the moon is full . . . “
The Bowers community consisted of disparate elements that ground together like badly meshed gears and sometimes sparked trouble. My father’s family lived in a decaying Georgian, dating from before the Civil War, sitting atop a rise at the three-mile turn to Bowers Beach. When my father was just coming of age, his father lost his whole dairy herd and had to sell some of his land because he refused to get his cows vaccinated against anthrax. But it was a family line of more genteel landowners before that. Grandfather Pardee was involved in local Republican politics and served a term as District Representative. My mother’s family was composed of farmers and wharf gleaners, and my father’s family looked down on her. Plus, she earned their distrust with her outbursts: “Once in a while when the moon was full . . . “
A few decades before I was born, Bowers entertained an even more disparate mix of volatile elements in its heyday as a tourist destination. There were two elegant hotels, a saltwater pool, a dance hall, and a “casino” room. Visitors came by ferry from Philadelphia and New Jersey. The ferry connected them with the more affluent South Bowers community across the mouth of the Murderkill River then, too. During prohibition, liquor was freely smuggled. My maternal grandmother Mary was a fearless character who bobbed her hair and wore flapper dresses. She could swim across the treacherous channel to the South Bowers side. She bore a child before she married my grandfather. I carried an image of her for years as a naïve, adventurous local girl seduced by some rich party boy out for a good time. But I heard later that her seducer was just a married neighbor.
As for the glamorous past of Bowers Beach, by the time I came along there was nothing left of it but the sloping wreck of the Heartbreak Hotel. There was another wreck, too, a good-sized fishing boat snagged on an easily accessible spit of land jutting into the water. After my own boys were born, we used to take them out there for pirate play among the rotting timbers. Back then, we were astonished by the easy access to an Atlantic coast inlet where sandy, waterfront property lay open to the sky, hidden by marsh grass at the end of a dirt road.
By now, the modern world has found it: there is a row of modest beach houses along the sand, despite the summer mosquitoes that were so thick, my father said, that “you had to knock them out of the way with a stick to spit.” In the 1940s, when my maternal grandfather bought his 600 acres consisting mostly of marshland, real estate was considerably cheaper than elsewhere in the area because of the mosquitoes. Thus, my Grandfather Hall, the laborer and sharecropper who married my wild and wayward Grandmother Mary, was able to buy 600 acres, which he haunted with his volatile temper when the moon was full.
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