My Week Out East
I spent the week before Labor Day on the East coast, flying into Philadelphia with my mom, who went directly to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, while I headed for Princeton, New Jersey. My friend Luke is beginning his third year at Princeton Theological Seminary, and I wanted to see him in his element. As I suspected, he is the big man on campus. During the mid-morning break from Hebrew class I watched him throw a football around the quad with his classmates, who kept saying things like “I’m not used to tight spirals!” and “That had some heat!” I also learned that mumbling equals meditating –at least in Hebrew– which Luke demonstrated as he studied the book of Ruth in the evenings. 
I wandered around the lovely Princeton University campus. Designed in the spirit of Oxford and Cambridge, it made me think more of Hogwarts. You know you’re at an Ivy League school when even the gym is built from gray stone and athletic gargoyles project over the entrance. I also learned why Moses is sometimes depicted with horns, as he is on facade of the Princeton auditorium. The Vulgate was the first direct translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Latin; previous translations relied on the Greek Septuagint. The Hebrew words for “shining” and “horns” are very similar, and horns were a symbol of power to the Jews. The Septuagint translates it as shining, as the translator (Jerome) surely knew. Even though it seems like a mistake, it was apparently intentional. Details here if you’re interested. We also visited the grave of Jonathan Edwards in the Princeton Cemetery. I’m happy to say his vault was not one of the several unquiet-looking ones we saw. 
He was president of the university for about a month until he died in 1758, which is getting to be quite a while ago. The area is historically Presbyterian, and we saw the seminary’s collection of Calvinist manuscripts, including a first edition of The Institutes and a few unauthorized biographies of Calvin. There was also a Reformed catechism book. Preserved in a convent, the cover was helpfully labeled “heretique” by the nuns.
That Saturday I began a long, circuitous journey southward to Cape May, where I crossed the Delaware Bay on the ferry to Lewes. I missed my 8:55 am bus in Princeton. I crossed the campus and stopped by the first bus I saw, which turned out to be headed to New York, and by the that time the one to Trenton had left. Since I didn’t know when the next one would come, I sat at the bus stop for over an hour. After visiting one of the nicest parts of New Jersey, I saw some of the not-so-nice parts. The light rail system between Trenton and Camden was nice and reminded me of Europe. Regarding the buses, I have a question: who decided bus seat upholstery must have such hideous patterns? Why are they always black with neon blobs or streaks? Can’t we just have gray? The towns along the Jersey shore showed me how much I took for granted in Rehoboth Beach. Except for Cape May, they all had a seedy quality to them. Atlantic City had a plastic and cardboard feel to it– the Las Vegas of the east. The ferry ride was pleasant, “a break from the ordinary,” as the ferry company would say. There was a wedding on the boat, which seemed like a neat idea.
The last time I was in Rehoboth Beach was four years ago, after my grandfather’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery (he was a Lt. Colonel in the Air Force). At that time, the city was completing renovations to Rehoboth Avenue, the main street. After a few bad storms the boardwalk was redone for the umpteenth time, but this time they left dunes between the boardwalk and beach, with dune grass planted to prevent erosion.
AH at the beach
The last storm swept away half of the dunes anyway, and the beach was uneven. The beach wants to erode and drift northward as it has further north along Cape Henlopen. The cape is growing and pointing into the Delaware Bay with sand from the eastern shore. The old Cape Henlopen lighthouse, built in 1767, ended up far south of the tip of the cape and collapsed in 1926 after a storm eroded the last grains of sand holding it up. I visited the maritime museum in Lewes, which had bits and pieces of it. Remember the gospel warning about building on sand? Well, everything around Rehoboth is built on sand! Despite the the erosion, Rehoboth still is a pleasant town, due to thoughtful ordinances and zoning in recent times. It was founded as a Methodist seaside camp, and while it quickly became a resort town, that conservative Christian foundation influenced its development, and is probably why it’s not like the Jersey shore towns I saw. There’s some sprawl along Highway 1, but the ocean thankfully limits development options. My Aunt Helen lives in a modest beach house in the old part of town. She has window air conditioners in the bedrooms, but doesn’t use it herself. She washes her dishes by hand and dries her laundry on a clothes line. The house is decorated with family heirlooms and hand-me-downs, and the phone for the land line is even a rotary! This has always been the case, ever since they bought the place in the mid 90′s. Aunt Helen was vintage before it was hip. One of her neighbors was an old man who’d been a longtime resident of the town, and had been a lifeguard on the beach in his youth. After he died at the age of 104, a gay couple bought the place (a small Sears house) and enlarged it. The house on the other side is rented but owned by two lesbians, so we joke that Aunt Helen lives in the “gayborhood”– the upper-class yuppie liberal neighborhood, at least. It seems like most of the houses have been extensively renovated, and there’s usually a German-make car in the drive. Whatever happens to rest of the neighborhood, within Aunt Helen’s house the times are not a-changin’.
My Uncle Michael and Aunt Connie came down for an afternoon with my cousin Michael Chad, his wife Amy, and their two boys, Michael and Zachary (ages 5 and 3). We went to a playground a few blocks away, and while I was with Zachary another boy came up and began telling me about his sunglasses, which he alternately described as X-ray glasses and 2-D glasses. He could see bones like they were on paper! I guess he thought I was the playground monitor. After lunch we walked to Funland, the boardwalk amusement park. It’s hardly changed in twenty years. Most of the rides are the same, and the smell of greased metal and buttered popcorn is ubiquitous. It’s amazing to think that twenty years ago my brother and I were riding those same rides, the cars and motorcycles with the honking horns, the little airships with buzzing guns. Before long they’ll move on to the teacups (my favorite) and then the haunted house and the Spinning Barf Spaceship. My camera battery was low and I’m annoyed I didn’t take any pictures then. I later got it charged at the camera shop, but by then the boys had gone home. I did get some good night shots later. 
Another highlight was the Discoversea Shipwreck Museum in Fenwick Island. For a $3 donation you can see a wide variety of goods recovered from shipwrecks along the Delaware coast, and some famous Florida wrecks like Atocha, all collected by the owner, Dale Clifton Jr., and most personally collected from the ocean floor. He even has a treasure chest he found near Cape Henlopen using a map and encoded book he happened to discover in an antique bookstore in Lewes. It seems hard to believe, but it looked convincing. Apparently the map indicated several other chests, but they were described as “next to the old oak tree” or other features that don’t exist now. Definitely worth a visit.
The morning before we left, I biked down to the beach to see the sun rise. I’m usually not a big fan of sunrise-over-the-ocean photos, but the woman in the foreground made these more interesting.
