Day 2

When we stay in a small AirBNB, we usually have a debate about whether we should message the host regarding storage for the bikes (and risk them rejecting us for being a pain in the ass or being a damage risk), or just keep our mouths shut and figure out what to do with the bikes on our own when we get there (and risk ending up in a place with no good secure storage). More often than not I can analyze the photos well enough that we feel comfortable taking the latter approach, which is what we did here, even though we knew it would be a pretty tight squeeze.

So then it was a surprise (a pleasant one!) when our host messaged us with photos of where we could store our bikes outside, along with a brand-new tarp and bungee cords to secure them. “Oh, so you did end up messaging our host about the bikes?” I asked Rett. No, he had proactively checked out our profile, saw and admired our method of travel, and went out of his way to ask his neighbor if we could store our bikes under his stairs. How thoughtful! Later he offered to drive us somewhere in town for dinner if we wanted. And on top of that specific thoughtfulness, the cute, cleverly designed space had three types of coffeemakers!

So yeah, our second day was our stay-in day.

Day 3

When we decided to embark on this extended travel, disposing of any form of permanent housing was actually a pretty easy decision. It would just be silly for us to maintain ownership of a house we wouldn’t use. Even sillier to us is the notion of establishing a permanent, underground “storage unit” for our bodies when we die, also property we wouldn’t “use”.

But today we were incredibly grateful that other people didn’t find these concepts silly for themselves.

During our time off in New Haven last month, I had somehow gotten off on a genealogy tangent, and found that Rett’s maternal grandmother was buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Cape May. That also led to Rett fondly remembering family visits to Cape May and spending time with Uncle Larry, Aunt Deb, and cousin Christy.

So today we rode 10 miles south, west, and inland towards the center of the Cape May peninsula (across more of those minor-road toll bridges, and yes, bikes are free). The address the data brokers displayed for us wasn’t too far from the cemetery, so I convinced Rett to stop there first. The mailbox had the family name on it, and the house set back far from the road (with a second house sharing the property) felt familiar to her, so she turned up the long drive, and every turn of the wheels began filling in fuzzy forgotten memories with photorealistic reality. There was a car in front of the house, so Rett then tried a risky maneuver rarely attempted in the 21st century: she rang the doorbell.

It took only moments for a kind-faced, bald man to open the door. Rett began blurting a quick explanation of who she was and why this man might remember her, but it didn’t take long to see that both of them were quickly going through the same process of morphing fuzzy memories into the detailed reality of facing someone 30 years older than those last memories.

Any nervousness quickly vanished, as it was clear that he was thrilled to see a long-lost relation; his instantly-recalled memories and complete lack of disorientation revealed that Rett and her family had always remained in his “working memory”, rather than being shipped off to deep cold storage.

For me it felt almost magical to hear this guy I’ve never met relating memories of people I know very well (“Sophie, is she still a reader?” “Ken, is he still playing guitar?” “Pat and Jon”?) I think it must be the fact that our knowledge of these people has zero overlap in time, so it’s not even completely valid to say that we know “the same people”, but his memories of the earlier versions of those people were independent confirmation that their cores have persisted across the years.

We learned from Larry that he has suffered loss beyond what 30 years of time’s passage should fairly extract, and he learned from Rett that the years have not spared her from loss either. Thus it was heartwarming to see from their mutual excitement that this small reconnection was a welcome reversal of the tides of entropy that flow against all human lives.

And this reconnection was all possible because Larry still lived in the same house that Rett had visited all those years ago. The land and buildings have been in the family for generations, and while of course an online search could have been used to connect at any time over the last couple decades, it was the fact that Uncle Larry’s home occupies a static point in physical space that caused this reconnection to actually happen. As the flashing dot that indicates our constantly-moving home swung through space, it was the immobile presence of his permanent home that provided a place to rendezvous.

Rett’s grandmother died in 1972, six years before Rett was born. From Scotland, Harriet met Charles during the war, and soon emigrated to marry into an extended Italian family in Albion, New York. With their two children (including Rett’s mom, Sue), they moved to Cape May, and this is where she is buried (Larry’s mother Muriel, a Cape May native, then married Rett’s grandfather, so Muriel is the “grandma” that Rett knew).

In some ways, that makes Harriet more of a “nomad” than even we are. She moved across an ocean for love, into a culturally-unfamiliar family, then moved to another state, and finally rests in a quiet cemetery with zero blood relations orbiting anywhere near her physical home. Conventionally, there ought to be a sadness in that isolation (even the grave slots on either side of her remain empty), but as nomads who also live relatively-isolated lives, I ought to concede that maybe her final resting place is a fitting tribute to her personality?

We knew from FindAGrave.com that her headstone was in St. Mary’s, but the cemetery manager was on an extended leave, so we were forced to do a manual search through physical space to find her. But on this crisp autumn day, a walk through the peaceful grounds felt appropriate. We found her much more quickly than I thought we would, and Rett got a chance to speak to the grandmother she never knew. Again it’s a conversation that never would have happened without Harriet occupying this physical space in the universe. They of course talked mostly about Sue, the mother and daughter who connects most-tightly to these two women. And Sue explicitly had connected the two women by naming her daughter after her mother (“Retta” was apparently a nickname for Harriet). It felt good and useful to spend half of an hour tending her gravesite, where Rett left a couple of cherished tokens behind, and we left sure that she was as pleasantly surprised by our visit as Uncle Larry was. I know for Rett that making a physical connection to this place is a valuable step along the neverending stairway rising from Sue’s death.

We’d had no idea if we’d find anyone at these two physical homes, so after going 2-for-2, it felt like an incredibly successful and satisfying morning. We returned over the bridges to Wildwood for a brewpub lunch at Mudhen, and one more exploration of boardwalk, where now the only activity was a few workers scrubbing down equipment before packing it away for the winter, waiting for the return of the vacationers to this physical place next summer.

After dinner Rett coaxed me out to see the latest celestial event, this one comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, a traveler with nomad-credentials far beyond our own. It may never return to our physical home here near the sun, but the ongoing or reconnected relationships aren’t the only ones that give us value on the road. The ephemeral, one-and-done meetings we frequently have can bring their own joy and excitement, just as T-A did when I saw it streaking downward with a tail five times longer than my brain had been expecting.