A shark, a whale, and men who chase them via “dead reckoning.”

BY LESLIE DOYLE

IT’S A SUMMER highlight—we join the crowds hauling beach chairs and blankets to find a place to view the large inflatable movie screen, temporarily set up on the sand between the back of the Cape May Convention Hall and the Atlantic Ocean, perpendicular to the latter to allow room for the hundreds of people—many vacationers, some locals—who have arrived for a viewing of “Jaws on the Beach.” It’s the summer of 2016. Exactly one hundred years since the original, tragic iteration of this story, the inspiration for Peter Benchley’s novel: a great white shark killing several people a hundred miles up the Jersey shore.

The movie starts: familiar scenes of panic and attack, heroism and frustration, hubris and obtuseness. The fleet of would-be shark-hunters careen inanely around the harbor, the throngs of vacationers stream off the ferry, the shark-hunters compete in a humorous one-upping scar comparison. Applause breaks out for “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Quint icily recounts the gruesome fate of the sailors of the USS Indianapolis who went into the water—hundreds killed by sharks during the days and nights after the ship was sunk in World War II. The finale: shark mass blown up in a haze of red.

And two maybe not-so-iconic moments: Mayor Larry Vaughn sneering at the idea of putting safety over commerce when he refuses to close the beaches, and Quint smashing the radio with a baseball bat when Brody tries to call for help. As I watch the film, my mind goes back to an earlier obsession-based quest: Moby Dick’s Ahab pursuing the whale despite the risks to his ship and crew. The comparisons between this tale and Jaws have been made many times; in our present times, they continue to ring true.

“But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him?” This is what Starbuck, the cautious first mate, asks himself in the last quarter of Moby Dick. Ahab has just risked his sailors’ lives as they navigate through a typhoon, keeping the sails up to catch all the power of the threatening wind and refusing to drop the lightning rod chains, so that he can instead stage a pyrotechnic spectacle, electricity like enormous torches: Ahab in charge of the elements. The spectacle overwhelms the crew’s sense of self-preservation, and they commit to his doomed course, rather than to Starbuck’s logic and fact-based reasoning to lower the sails in the storm, drop the lightning rod chains, and give up the chase for the one particular whale, the imaginary enemy—to admit that the whale is just a whale, going about its whale business. But Ahab’s diatribe wins easily. It is always easy to target, so easy to rally opposition against the “other.”

Melville’s Captain Ahab is more Quint than Vaughn, though ultimately it’s hard to know which is more dangerous: the man with a quest for revenge, or the man with a quest for money.

*Rockwell Kent’s illustration of Ahab in “Moby Dick.”*

IT’S TEN years ago. My husband and I are kayaking up a tidal creek in North Jersey that snakes through quiet wetlands, mostly the silky hay of spartina, sometimes the tall brown tufted phragmytes. After a good long stretch of paddling, we slide quietly under the Garden State Parkway—the Main Street of the Jersey Shore. The Parkway stretches from one end of New Jersey to the other, from the urban north to the tip of Cape May at its southernmost point.

Emerging on the other side, I realize it’s unlikely anyone in the passing cars above sees us. This waterway is barely visible from the road. There are signs for the drivers to read, exits coming up. It might be rush hour, or maybe the start of vacation. Everyone is heading somewhere. This creek, narrowing now, no longer in wetlands, lined with grassy banks on one side, trees on the other, passes onward, away from the coast, away from the ocean, unheeded, as are we.

A hundred years ago, those roadways did not exist.

A hundred years ago, a Great White Shark swam silently, unseen, up this creek, Matawan Creek, through the brackish, tidal water. On that day, three people were attacked, two died. These were the latest victims of a series of shark attacks that began farther down the coast, at Beach Haven and then at Spring Lake. The shark moved up the Jersey shore, killing and moving on, till it got to the northern tip. Swimming farther north would have brought it into New York Harbor. Instead, it turned west, past the end of Sandy Hook, then along the Monmouth County Bayshore, and up Matawan Creek, through the serene, tree-lined water we float on this afternoon.

The town of Matawan has never known what to make of it—there’s no memorial, no sign. In recent years, they have wrestled with acknowledging the town’s history. The community held a “Sharkfest” for a few years but a lot of folks felt uncomfortable about it. Probably rightly so. After all, what was being celebrated was a series of gruesome deaths.

We can’t kayak all the way to town; the creek is blocked by roads as it extends inland. There’s no way to know where the attacks happened, and to be honest, ten years ago, I wasn’t thinking about them. It was just a really great paddle, in the corner of New Jersey where I grew up, where few people ever heard about these attacks, at least not in my neighboring town. Not prior to the movie, and mostly not even after its debut. Even now, though well-regarded books have been written about the New Jersey attacks, they’re not what most people think of when they hear the words “Jersey Shore.” The more popular associations fade away as we glide from bay to harbor to backwaters.

But the attacks happened. And Peter Benchley wrote a book, apparently inspired by them. And Steven Spielberg made a movie. Both debuted while I was in high school. Here I am thirty years later, kayaking up that creek. Ten years later, on the beach, next to the ocean, applauding when Chief Brody says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

The creek has no shape. It meanders until it doesn’t anymore. There is no reason that this is where a shark wreaked havoc. It was a tragedy, and people want to label tragedy, assign a motive to someone else, and paint a target on their back.

MELVILLE WRITES about motive, how aggrievement and anger are channeled into vengeance. He says of Ahab: “He piled on the white whale’s hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” If Quint from Jaws is overtly Ahabian in his quest for retribution, what to make of Mayor Larry Vaughn, who also strives to bend reality to the shape of his desire? In his case, it is not for vengeance, but commerce—to bring in tourists and, in so doing, votes. Vaughn says, long before the eponymous “Jaws” of the title is destroyed: “I’m pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have, in fact, caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But, as you see, it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and people are having a wonderful time.”

*Robert Shaw between shots of the scene in which Quint is eaten by the shark in “Jaws.”*

THERE ARE READERS and critics who applaud Ahab as the embodiment of man against dumb fate. I’m not one of them. I despise Ahab for putting his grand thirst for revenge ahead of the lives of his crew. He claims, “Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!” And, “Truth hath no confines.” Think on that. It’s rhetoric we’re hearing a lot lately. As they get near the whaling ground, Ahab throws away his quadrant, crying “Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy!” He will steer by “dead reckoning” from there on in. His own, of course.

Quint is no Ahab, but his smashing of the radio is in a similar vein, again choosing to endanger others in his quest for his personal vendetta. Contempt comes across clearly in this exchange:

QUINT: You have city hands, Mr. Hooper. You been countin’ money all your life.

HOOPER: All right, all right. Hey, I don’t need this... I don’t need this working-class-hero crap.

There is no indication that Hooper has been “countin’ money,” but that’s the narrative Quint needs. It justifies his contempt. He goes on to mock Hooper’s education and the shark-cage which ultimately saves Hooper’s life (just barely). To both Ahab and Quint, science is suspect. Both insist on what they call instinct, without questioning its motives or veracity.

Ultimately, it is not Ahab, or Quint, but rather Mayor Vaughn who most exemplifies the politics ruling our country today. Vaughn who says, “August? Heh, for Christ’s sake, tomorrow is the Fourth of July! And we will be open for business. It’s gonna be one of the best summers we ever had! Now if you fellas are concerned about the beaches, you do whatever you have to, to make them safe. But those beaches will be open for this weekend!”

Because in the end, the most powerful motivation in this country, more than vengeance, more than anger, is money. And that is where these two stories and their monomaniacal characters lead me. To our present day reality. To our country’s Ahab, Quint, Mayor Vaughn.

Like Vaughn, President Trump uses—subverts—working-class rhetoric and religious pieties to gain the same ends, and each bill or executive order that rips apart our safety net—whether undermining environmental protections, rejecting climate pacts, tearing up the Affordable Care Act, decimating food security, selling off national parks, building walls, or whipping up animosity towards migrants and minorities—is really in the service of someone getting paid.

Boris Johnson, architect of Brexit and Trump doppelganger (the pale orange hair, the gummy lips, the disregard for facts), was quoted in 2007 in the Telegraph:

“The real hero of Jaws is the mayor,” Mr. Johnson said last year in a speech at Lloyd’s of London. “A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. OK, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor—we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer.”

And yeah, ultimately, Mayor Vaughn was wrong. A boy died who would not have, had the beaches been closed. Vaughn cries crocodile tears: “Martin, Martin. My kids were on that beach, too!” At least he can see that his kids and the boy who died belong to a shared humanity; I am not sure that our present day Mayor Vaughns understand this.

I LIVE half a mile inland from the Delaware Bay, just north of where it meets the ocean at the tip of New Jersey, a few miles from the beach where we watch the movie. Exit 0. The road I live on is Leaming Avenue. That always sounds like it should be a chapter from Moby Dick, maybe because of the one called “Loomings.” Maybe it just sounds like a job a sailor would do on a whaling ship—today it’s time for leaming. Or, we hoisted out the leamings. In fact, the road is one of several in the area named for the Leaming family, who were part of the first settlers of Cape May County, back when it was a North American center of whaling in the 17th and 18th centuries, long before the voyage of the Pequod. These whalers did not venture out on the years-long voyages around the globe most people think of when they think of whaling history, but they did their own sort of damage. Launching from shore in small boats when whales were sighted in the Bay, these men managed to wipe out the local population of whales within a few decades. The town they founded, the original Town Bank, was abandoned and eventually washed into the bay.

Our state, New Jersey, is a coastal state, and coasts shift. And now, they shift faster. Hurricane Sandy scoured the beaches and demolished houses, businesses, and lives up and down the Jersey Shore. Sandbar islands were split by new inlets, uprooted houses floated down the Intracoastal Waterway. Weirdly enough, though Donald Trump didn’t win in New Jersey, he and his climate change denial entourage got the majority of the votes in the coastal counties: the places which will be, are being, most affected by climate change. That’s New Jersey for you.

In my neighborhood, climate denial is widespread. We’re up on higher ground than the sandbar islands that line the Atlantic Coast across the Cape from here, so we can, if we choose, pretend that sea levels are not rising, that erosion is not nibbling at the Delaware Bay beach. Along the beach road here, small, shoebox cottages are replaced every year by three-story, many-balcony-ed edifices. The east-west streets nearest the Bay take their names from oceans and seas: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Caspian. The complicated relationship to the natural world here is palpable. The local July Fourth celebration takes place along the Bay, crowds eating funnel cakes and ice cream, waiting on line for portable rides trucked in and set up on residential streets, local bands playing covers of mainstream country and seventies rock. The houses along the Bay are festooned with red, white, and blue—flags, hangings, blow-up Uncle Sams, patriotically garlanded Statues of Liberty. One house is notable for the giant flag banner that takes up the whole west slope of the roof. I can see it from my kayak, far out on the bay.

Except: this past summer, as we do every year, my husband and I ride our bikes to the Bay to walk along the street scene for a while before heading down to the beach to find a good spot on the sand for fireworks watching. The display is always a fine one, and fireworks over the water are my favorite. This year, we walk by the flag house and see there’s a major party going on. Everyone’s in red/white/blue; everyone’s got a beer; the front windows have a new message, carefully painted on: “Make America Great Again.”

Walking back to our bikes after the display, we pass a house neighboring the MAGA one—also festooned with patriotic excess. In the driveway off to one side, a portable playpen has been set up. A small child sits on the pavement, leaning toward the bars closest to the partiers, holding onto the rails. The group is about twenty feet from him on the raised deck in front of the house, looking away towards where the fireworks had been exploding moments before. The boy is barely visible in the dark, intently watching the adults. They’re close by, but he looks abandoned in his enclosure. We watch him for a long enough while to be concerned. I take a picture, because it’s hard to imagine that I’ll remember what this looks like. Eventually, a woman comes over to pick him up. He turns his head away from her.

This is my adopted town; I live near these waters, half a mile inland from these partiers. My children and grandchild visit here and I have good friends nearby, but in the past three years, my home feels less like home.

*Trash left after a Donald Trump rally in Wildwood, New Jersey. (Image via @theother98 on Facebook.)*

It’s January 2020, and Trump comes to town.

He holds a re-election rally at Wildwood, a nearby seaside town, just a few miles up the beach from where we watched Jaws. Thousands of people, locals and not so local, converge on this tiny peninsula to attend. A smaller group gathers to protest. The protestors are assigned a parking lot down the beach from the hall where Trump is speaking, up against, but below, the raised boardwalk that separates town from beach. The MAGA fans who can’t get into the rally spend the day and the evening hanging off the side of the boardwalk rail, hectoring, spitting at, and threatening the protestors below. This behavior might happen anywhere; it’s the nature of protests and counter-protests. What makes it wrenching for some of the folk in the parking lot is seeing their fellow townspeople, their doctors, the gardener who shares seedlings with his neighbors, the guy next door, lean over the rail and shout curses and threats at them, ask the women how many abortions they’ve had, tell the men to “get jobs.”

Videos record the vitriol; photographs share the miles of garbage left behind where the rally-goers had waited in line. It’s an insular community, surrounded as it is with water on three sides, and close ties run from home to home, business to business, street to street. The width of the divide, the depth of the contempt, shocks the protestors. Melville again: “Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels.” The crowd on the boardwalk feels, feels, feels, and it wants to let the opposition know everything it feels.

EACH YEAR, the movie ends. This shark is blown up successfully, and everyone applauds.

We collect our beach chairs and blankets, our bottles and our food wrappers. The public announcements thank us for being there. They jocularly urge us to “enjoy the ocean tomorrow—it’s going to be a beautiful day.” We all laugh nervously, on cue. It’s 2016 and we don’t know what’s coming.

The projector switches off, the screen now dark, dim in the dusk, another blank expanse on which we project our desires and our fears.

*Michael Schleisser with the shark he caught in Raritan Bay, New Jersey, in 1916.*

A LOCAL JOURNAL, Weird New Jersey, retells what happened after the shark really did swim up a creek, a hundred years ago: “Now the town of Matawan, stunned by the gruesome and unlikely attacks, was out for revenge. A reward was offered for the shark, and the people of Matawan became obsessed with vengeance against this evil creature. Some of the townspeople industriously filled the creek with dynamite, hoping to blast the shark into oblivion. The dramatic effort proved unsuccessful.”

And who could blame them? A boy had died horribly, and so had the man who dove in to save him. Another young man lost his leg the next day, though he survived. The idea that a quiet country stream meandering through fields to a town eleven miles from the ocean could harbor such a threat, that in itself was monstrous. That threat mandated action, even if action was blowing up a river. And of course, unlike Moby Dick, this creature had ventured into their world. They hadn’t gone looking for it. This was not so much vengeance, though certainly in the aftermath of those attacks, vengeance was part of it. But moreso, it was an attempt—albeit probably not the best choice—at self-defense. The danger was clear and present.

And meanwhile, factories sprouted along that river, and all the rivers across the country and the globe, the inexorable stealth of industrialism a harbinger of the bigger danger, the one gliding unseen into the atmosphere, the one whose existence our present administration denies.

We want to end a threat. We want revenge.

We label the whale, the shark, the other. We call it the enemy.

The ground shifts under our feet, and the waters rise, just slightly, so imperceptibly we hardly notice. We put up flags and shoot off fireworks. We hang over the rail and tell our neighbors to go back to where they came from. We want control. We want prosperity. We want the illusion of safety. But just like Mayor Vaughn’s boys, our boys, and our girls, and ourselves, are all on that beach, too.

And the water is rising.

LESLIE DOYLE’S essays and fiction have appeared in The Fourth River, Fiction Southeast, The Forge, Gigantic Sequins, Electric Literature, Tupelo Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey and teaches writing at Montclair State University. She does her best thinking on her kayak.