A Good Ride Spoiled

The highlight of most of my days is my bike ride to a pagoda-roofed pavilion

at the end of a blacktop road that juts out into the lush green wetlands. The only sounds there are the gull cries, the lapping of water, and the cries of the delighted children playing on the fishing pier there while their parents fish and crab. 

 

The road is about a quarter mile long, and is surrounded by high marshland, which gradually thins and reveals the green and blue domed magnificence of these precious wetlands. It gets me every time.

 

What doesn't get me are the signs that have popped up like poisonous mushrooms on my final turn onto the pagoda road, as I call it: “Cape May County Is Trump Country” they pronounce, like that is some kind of unique and hallowed sobriquet.

 

First there was a single lawn sign, but now there are five, close together, three on one side, two on the other. The houses whose lawns they profane are what I call “pop-up” houses. There are empty lots and then a couple days later these houses appear full-blown – no hammering and sawing and actual building, but rather these houses are plunked down fully formed, what were once called “prefab” but now are doubtless called “modular.” They are cheesy, fake, Trumpian.

 

The people who live in them are younger, probably professional. I saw an unmasked gathering at one over Labor Day, young couples and dogs and new SUVs. They must feel covid-proof in their Trumpism. 

 

They are worrisome, sure, but then something occurred to me: part of my ride is past a golf course, and in 2016, several of the “real” houses that border the golf course had Trump signs. There are none now – so far. Is it because the older people who can afford that real estate have had enough of Trump? I hope so. That could mitigate the pop-ups.

 

Yes, Cape May County is Trump Country. It has the highest proportion of retired people in the state of New Jersey, people who liked things the way they were and see in Trump a savior of that way, for all its uncaring racism and casual cruelty.  

 

There are a lot of retired Philly cops and firefighters down here, and what gets me is that even though they served with many black people, who literally had their backs in life and death situations, I have never heard one who doesn't use the term “nigger” without the slightest awareness or embarrassment. 

 

The younger people in the pop-ups are their spiritual and political progeny.

 

Worrisome, yes. But not insurmountable. These younger, settled pop-up families are a given, but they are one decade older than the truly young people who are taking to the streets and registering voters and using social media to make their demands for a better, truer America heard. They are rising up in numbers that haven't been seen since Vietnam and the end of Nixon. They can be the difference. They and their America can and will prevail.

 

And the poison mushrooms will be gone from the pop-up lawns.