Chapter 49:- Vacating to Barnegate Light
I had never been to the ocean and never seen a really large body of water. I heard the gigantic Barnegate Lighthouse had been built to keep ships from stranding on Long Beach Island. This I wanted to see, as well as the Atlantic Ocean.

I left Germantown with my friend, George Ricks, a local business man, who, also, had never seen the ocean. We decided to vacate from Germantown and the Philadelphia area for a while, not a hard thing to want to do. We rented horses and rode south toward the ocean. We carried food and a small tent against bad weather. It would only be a three day ride there, or four at the most. As we rode east through New Jersey, we found it to be a cultivated state, relatively flat, covered by large farms and vegetable gardens. Half way across, we came to forests, but they were nothing like home. They had no mountains and not much wildness left in their woods. They partially took away the wildlife, the wild plants by over harvesting and anything that could not be cultivated. With all the wildness gone, how could an honest, self-respecting wolf, bear or mountain lion live here? If they could take away the wildness and the animals, what would go next? The right to keep and bear arms? That thought was too silly to even consider.

The closer we came to the ocean, the more I could smell it. It was not a totally disagreeable smell, but neither was it pleasant, like mountain pine on a warm day. There was something of salt and rotting fish in it. When we got to the shore, we saw the dead and rotting fish! We heard the eerie cries of the seagulls as we approached the beach. The ocean looked gray, as did the sky and it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. This was truly amazing to me.
The white sand beach was littered with seaweed and other trash. Sometimes, old bottles or fancy seashells could be found, and even boards from wrecked ships. I picked up some clear and multicolored pebbles, along with some fancy seashells and even got sand in my brogans. I found a round flat white pebble the size of a quarter and put it in my pocket to remind me of the ocean.
When I first heard it, the wind across the ocean made a low, ominous moan along with the splashing sounds of the waves, a matter of continuous sound. During the day the wind came from the sea with a sighing sound and at night died away leaving us to the mercy of the humming insects. The mosquitoes were fierce. A smudge fire would have helped but, we hadn’t made one.

We hired a small boat to ferry us to the lighthouse and the village around it. It was a pleasant, little village with long boats in the inlet and back yards of houses. Large fishnets were hung up to dry everywhere. Men worked on the overturned boats in their yards, trying to get them ready for the next day’s fishing.

We approached the lighthouse, and a tall structure it was, too. I had never seen anything so tall and grand. The top three quarters of the lighthouse were painted red, the lower quarter was white.
While we were staring at its height, a man came running up the beach, yelling,” Leviathan, leviathan, leviathan!” We asked him what he meant and he said, “A leviathan had washed up on the beach and we should come and see it. Never having seen one, we ran down the beach about one half mile to see this wonder, and a wonder it was. It was gray, covered with skin, not scales, and about twenty feet long. There were large tears in the skin and pieces of flesh were missing. The man told us that sharks had done the damage and maybe drove it ashore. We were amazed because we had never seen anything that big that had once been alive.

That night we slept in the sand near the ocean and in the morning our feet were wet since we were too close to the ocean and the tide had come in while we slept. The leviathan had been washed out to sea. We went home, but I will always remember the lighthouse, the leviathan and the sea, the continuous rolling sea.