Jonesin' For The Ocean

I’m not a fan of Billy Joel’s music, but I’ve seen “The Piano Man” interviewed a couple of times and he’s a damned good ranconteur. We’re both born and bred Long Islanders and he sums up the class difference between our two shores with the following clever assessment:

“If you wanted to date a rich girl, you went to the North Shore; if you wanted to date a cool girl, you went to the South Shore.”

I’m not wealthy by any stretch of the purse strings, so you can guess which side of our LI Mason-Dixon line I inhabit. There’s another great distinction between the shores besides what’s in (or not in) our wallets and it can be boiled down to the word “beach.”

If a resident of the North Shore tells you they live by “the beach,” don’t believe it for a second. What the Northies live on, or near, is the Long Island Sound. This notoriously polluted body of water washes up on rock-strewn spits of land that make even the thought of a barefoot stroll an exercise in pain. And you can forget about spreading a towel to catch some rays, unless stretching out on a bed of nails is your thing.

For the real white sand deal, you need to pack up your sunscreen, sunglasses and suds and point your ride south until you hit the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve done my fair share of traveling and can honestly say that the beaches on LI’s South Shore are some of the most beautiful in the world. I’ve parked my bikini-clad butt on many of them – Long Beach, Atlantic Beach, Point Lookout, Gilgo, Tobay, Overlook, Cedar, Smith’s Point, Hot Dog, Robert Moses – but none beats the crown jewel, Jones Beach State Park.

I couldn’t have been more than four or five when my Dad took a passel of us Brady kids and cousins for a dip at Jones’ Zach’s Bay. Dubbed “Diaper Beach” because of its toddler-friendly nature (shallow, no waves), it’s where many an Islander got their first dose of salt water up the nose and serious sunburn on the shoulders. By the time I was in high school, hitching down Wantagh Parkway to reach the teenage wasteland of Field 4 with its blasting radios and bodies baking like human Tater Tots was a regular summer activity. And it goes without saying that my first summer job was at Jones during my college years. If I had a dime for every cocktail I downed in the Field 2 lifeguard shack, I could have been a North Shore girl.

But the paramount reason I love Jones is, perversely, the crowds. With an average of six million people sprawling across it sands during a typical summer season, any idea of spending a peaceful idyll lulled by the soft sound of ocean waves is crushed by a tsunami of humanity, and that’s just the way I like it. If all the world’s a stage, then Jones is a non-stop theater of comedy, drama and farce, with the players parading around half-naked, which adds to the absurdity.

It’s not until I open my ears, though, that this native realizes Jones isn’t a Long Island or even a New York playground but a world-wide tourist attraction. It’s not unusual to hear Japanese being spoken to my left, Spanish to my right, Swedish to my fore and some strain of Slavic to my aft. Master builder Robert Moses got it right when he modeled the Jones Beach Water Tower after St. Mark’s Campanile. Like that Venetian landmark, it still knocks me out that that the beach I consider just another part of my ‘hood is on some foreign traveler’s itinerary.

Let the North Shore keep their riches and their Sound. For my two cents, it’s all about keeping up with the Joneses.