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A story of life, love, and a journey of a thousand years…

It was Monday, May 19th, 1975. I’ll never forget that day. The Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon that April, and the world was mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment in the United States was nearly nine percent, inflation even higher, and leadership lacking. The Watergate scandal had cast a smear across American politics, resulting in Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, and his successor’s immediately pardoning him to close the book on an unhappy chapter in U.S. history.

It was not a good time for anyone and a particularly hard time for the old Victorian town of Cape May. The crown jewel of the New Jersey shore had fallen into neglect and disrepair and was dying a slow death. Once the elegant summer home to presidents and kings, it had become the last refuge of the deposed.

That’s where I met Tom Ryan. Tom was a king, or so he would have you believe, but unlike Richard Nixon, when Tom was dethroned, he wasn’t sent home with a slap on the wrist. He was sent to prison. He was a convicted draft dodger, but one of the lucky ones released early by President Ford as part of his mass clemency after Nixon’s pardon. The problem was, Tom had nowhere to go when he got out, so he took the money his dad mailed to him and spent it on a bus ticket to get as far away as possible to a place where nobody cared who he was or what he had done, a place where nobody cared about anything. That place was Cape May.

As hard a time as it was for everyone, it was harder for me because that was the day I met Tom Ryan. I should have turned and walked away. I knew it when he first looked at me, but I didn’t, not my first mistake, but one that would make Monday, May 19th, 1975 the hardest day of my life. 

This is the story of how Tom Ryan and I met and how things never quite work out the way you think. You might find a love story in here somewhere. You might not. You might find a message hidden in one of the nickel pop bottles collected by the beachcombers from some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. You might even find a little mystery, but life is a mystery, isn’t it?

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A Cape May Diamond - the Nor'easter of 1962

2013 Winner Independent Publisher Book Awards (bronze medal) for best eBook fiction. 

One of the tragic bits of historical information in A Cape May Diamond, is reference to a massive storm that devastated the town of Cape May in 1962 (13 years before the story takes place). They called that storm the High-Five. Here is an excerpt from A Cape May Diamond about that storm with photos of the devastation.

"They all remembered it. How could they forget the Ash Wednesday nor'easter of 1962, one of the worst storms of the century? They described it to Tom as the storm where the ocean met the bay. It was that bad." 

Where the Ocean met the bay

"The forecasters hadn’t thought it would amount to much when it first appeared on the radar. They said it would blow through with minimal impact, but they were wrong. An unusual combination of weather patterns coinciding with the Spring equinox caused it to stall in the mid-Atlantic for almost three days where it pounded coastal areas with continuous rain, high winds, and tidal surges, and dumped large quantities of snow inland for several hundred miles. Cape May went through five record high tides during that storm, and so it came to be called the High-Five."

Aerial photo of one of the five record high tides

"The seawall that ran the length of Beach Avenue had been a boardwalk back then, dating back to the late 1800s, but the High-Five lifted it off its moorings like so much kindling and tossed it into the center of town, damaging everything in its path."

The boardwalk

"Beach Avenue collapsed when the storm pulled the sand out from under it, leaving behind craters filled with abandoned cars and chunks of concrete that the angry unrelenting sea picked up and hurled into the buildings along the strip. Very few escaped nature’s fury in that High-Five of 1962 when the ocean met the bay."

Beach Ave

"Many saw the High-Five as the beginning of the end. Some money trickled in afterwards. The roads were repaired with federal disaster relief money. They built the seawall. The salvageable buildings were shored up and the ones destroyed were bulldozed, but the town was never the same after that. The High-Five had washed away the quaintness from Cape May, and people just gave up. Many left for good, boarding up and abandoning their homes. Insurance companies pulled out, leaving the Dew and everyone else along Beach Avenue at the mercy of the sea."

Ocean Avenue

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A Cape May Diamond

Genre: Literary Fiction/Mystery

Published: September, 2012

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