Blind Faith Read online

  As Chris got out of the station wagon, he saw his brother Roby hurrying toward him. Then they were hugging and then, literally, crying on each other’s shoulder. This caused Chris to feel closer to Roby than he ever had before, and then he thought how happy that would make his mother, and with that he began to cry so hard that his knees buckled and Roby had to help him into the house.

  3

  The way you can tell when you’ve reached Toms River is that all the FM stations you set in the city suddenly fade from your car radio.

  It doesn’t matter which way you come—sixty miles down the Garden State Parkway from New York or fifty miles east from Philadelphia, along old two-lane Route 70, past the fruit stands and cornfields and the billboards for the retirement communities—when the music stops is when you’re there.

  There really isn’t any other way to tell. It’s on the New Jersey road map, near the shore, about halfway down, between Asbury Park and Atlantic City, but no sign says “Entering Toms River” when you get there and there’s no Toms River Police Department or Toms River City Hall.

  What there is, officially, is Dover Township, which is sort of the same as Toms River, but not quite. The Toms River School District, for instance, includes areas which are not part of Dover Township, and sections of the township, such as Ortley Beach, certainly would not be considered Toms River.

  What it really comes down to, as much as anything, is that Toms River is an attitude, a state of mind, and the longer you’ve lived there the smaller you’re inclined to think it is.

  Some people who have lived there all their lives still insist that it’s only the village downtown, and maybe a mile up Main Street to the Office Lounge, and maybe a mile out Washington Street to the country club. Newcomers, on the other hand, consider Toms River to extend to at least wherever it is that they live, no matter how far west of the parkway or north of Route 37 it happens to be. This is because to the newcomers, the name Toms River suggests prestige.

  Its history and geography are very simple: there was no Tom and there isn’t any river. Actually, there were a couple of Toms, one of them an Indian who spied for the British during the Revolutionary War, but who would also spy against them if the price was right (thereby establishing the profit motive as the governing principle of Toms River society), but the town was named after a British Army officer named William Toms, which is why there’s no apostrophe.

  As for the river, it’s really just an estuary, extending four miles inland from Barnegat Bay.

  The first settlers were pirates, the banished sons of wealthy Monmouth County families to the north. They would lie in wait behind a thin strip of sand that separated the bay from the Atlantic Ocean, and when they saw a passing merchant ship they would sail out through an inlet and attack. The goods thus acquired were then auctioned off in the center of town. By the early 1800s, Toms River was notorious for its illicit commercial activity.

  In 1812, however, a storm closed the inlet, putting the pirates out of business and creating an unbroken barrier between ocean and bay that stretched forty miles down the New Jersey coast, with the village of Toms River stuck in the middle.

  For the next hundred years, Toms River existed as a sleepy little trading post at the edge of the Pine Barrens, notable mostly for humidity and mosquitoes and populated almost exclusively by those whose chief characteristic was that they lacked the energy or imagination to leave.

  Even as late as 1920, land in the area was so cheap and plentiful that it was given away with newspaper subscriptions. “Subscribe to the New York Tribune,” said one ad, “and secure a lot at beautiful Beachwood.” People wrote in, asking if they could have the newspaper without being obligated to take the land.

  But then came the automobile and, with it, tourists. Those bound from New York to Atlantic City had to drive straight down the main street of Toms River. Many turned left instead, and traveled five miles along tree-shaded Locust Street and crossed the wooden bridge over Barnegat Bay to the thin strip of sand that separated the bay from the ocean. There, they vacationed at temperance resorts in such communities as Seaside Heights and Seaside Park, which were described in brochures of the era as being “free from the blighting influence of immorality, drunkenness, and Sabbath desecration.”

  Enough chose to stay in Toms River itself that, for a time, the village became a thriving resort, “sought each year,” said one tourists’ guidebook, “by throngs of visitors, principally of a well-to-do class, who seek health and quiet recreation rather than to engage in the more exacting social life of the fashionable watering places.”

  From Memorial Day to Labor Day, tranquil visitors rocked slowly back and forth on the long wooden porches of grand old hotels like the Riverview and the Ocean House and the Marian Inn. In September they departed, and Toms River went back to being a lazy little Jersey shore town that wasn’t even quite on the shore.

  It stayed that way right through the thirties and forties. There were only two movie theaters and one of them closed for the winter. Of the town’s three policemen, one still wore his World War II Army uniform, dyed blue. The only new arrivals were a few Jewish poultry farmers who settled on the scrubby, sandy land to the north and west of the village and who had the good sense to keep to themselves.

  Every store on Main Street was run by a graduate of Toms River High. Your school classmates would surround you all your life. If you were born in Toms River, chances were you would die there. If you were born anyplace else, chances were you’d never even know the place existed.

  In 1950, Toms River had a population of just over seven thousand, not counting the chickens. True, it was the county seat of Ocean County, but that was not much to brag about, since Ocean County was the most sparsely populated and second poorest county in New Jersey.

  Things began to change in 1952 when the Cincinnati Chemical Company came to town, looking for an inconspicuous body of moving water—preferably close to an ocean.

  There had apparently been some difficulties with the authorities regarding the peculiar color of the Ohio River in the vicinity of the chemical company’s plant. So the company set up shop on several hundred acres west of town, behind high metal fences, with very tight security around the plant, and changed its name to the Toms River Chemical Company.

  Soon the Toms River turned the color of blood. It began to give off an odor. Fish died. A foul-smelling foam covered its surface. The chemical company said not to worry, the river was going to be fine.

  The company’s executives, of course, needed a nice neighborhood in which to live. Not finding any in Toms River, they made their own. Twenty-eight of them purchased fifty-five acres north of Locust Street in an undistinguished and previously uninhabited area known as Long Swamp. They subdivided the land into seventy-eight lots and took the best ones for themselves. Then they built the sort of ranch houses that everybody was building in the fifties.

  It occurred to the executives that people so highly stationed in life ought not to live in an area called Long Swamp, so they changed the name of Long Swamp to Brookside. Immediately, their property values increased by fifty percent. Townspeople began to snap up the leftover lots. Nobody in Toms River had ever considered building a house in Long Swamp before, but Brookside, with all those vice presidents, soon became the town’s first ritzy neighborhood.

  Next, the executives decided that they needed a country club. They acquired a nine-hole golf course on Washington Street and named it the Toms River Country Club. For a stiff initiation fee, townspeople were permitted to join.

  All at once, dozens of Toms River natives discovered how deprived they’d always been. The country club: why, one simply had to join the country club. This was especially true if you had just built a new home in Brookside. After all, if you didn’t join the club it might look like you couldn’t afford to.

  In 1955, the Garden State Parkway opened and made Toms River suddenly accessible to the rest of New Jersey. The parkway stretched 172 miles, from the state’s north
ern edge to its southern tip at Cape May. From Asbury Park south it ran parallel to the coast and only ten miles inland. For the first time, everybody in North Jersey could get to the shore without spending half the day in the car. And everybody did.

  They poured into Toms River by the thousands, turning off the parkway at Exit 82, hitting the first stoplight on Locust Street and clamoring for directions to the beach. The traffic got so bad on weekends that high school girls in bathing suits stood in front of gas stations, selling for a dollar hand-drawn maps that showed the back roads to the bridge.

  Each year, a few more of the tourists did not go home. Now that it was so easy to get to, Toms River began to seem like the sort of place where a person might actually want to live. By 1960, the population had grown to seventeen thousand, the color of the river notwithstanding.

  In 1967, a Toms River poultry farm was turned into a sort of ghetto for old people called a “retirement community.” That first one was given the name Holiday City. It consisted of 1,600 nearly identical houses on fifty-by-hundred-foot lots. In less than a mile of driving down freshly paved streets with names like St. Moritz Place, Parisian Drive, Yellowstone Road and Kilimanjaro Lane, one passed 150 such houses, each with a plot of gravel in front of it instead of grass. The only way to tell them apart was that some had ceramic deer on the gravel while others had pink flamingos or smiling ceramic rabbits pushing wheelbarrows.

  And Holiday City was only the start. Almost overnight, it seemed, where only chicken coop or pine barren had stood before (on the largest tracts of the cheapest land, so far from the ocean that you might as well have been in Kansas), there came Leisure Village, Silver Ridge Park, Crestwood Village, Holiday City South, Leisure Village East, Silver Ridge Park West, Cedar Glen Lakes, Cedar Glen West, Pine Ridge at Crestwood and on and on, until there were more old people in Ocean County than chickens. It was as if everybody’s grandparents had come for a visit and decided to stay.

  In 1967, there also occurred an event which, in the history of modern Toms River, is the equivalent of the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. This was the rioting of black people in Newark.

  Even before the tear-gas fumes had dissipated, the whites of North Jersey by the thousands had jumped in their cars and sped down the parkway until they found an exit where they didn’t see any black faces. Then they looked around for a house. Sociologists came to call this white flight. In Toms River they called it a boom.

  These new immigrants—actually, they were more like refugees—were almost exclusively blue-collar apartment dwellers from cities like Newark, Jersey City, Union City and Elizabeth—places where the old neighborhoods were collapsing. The ones with money moved to the established suburban communities of northern New Jersey. The ones without it rushed south.

  Housing was cheap because land was cheap, and land was cheap because Ocean County was in the middle of nowhere. But the apartment dwellers from the north didn’t care how far away it was. They were willing to commute fifty miles up the parkway to work every day, as long as they did not see any black faces at night.

  The population of Toms River had jumped to 43,000 by 1970. The county around it was growing just as fast. In 1950, there had been only about 50,000 people in Ocean County. By 1970, there were more than 200,000 and they were streaming down the parkway so fast that increases were measured in arrivals per minute. In the 1950s, one person had moved into Ocean County every ten minutes. In the 1960s, the rate jumped to one every five.

  Traffic congestion was no longer just a summer phenomenon. Suddenly, there seemed to be nothing but strangers on the streets, and lines at the supermarket checkout counters when a few years before there hadn’t even been supermarkets. But nobody in Toms River was complaining. This was progress, after all. The people of Toms River had heard a lot about progress, but except for the arrival of the chemical company, they had not experienced much of it before.

  In 1971, when Locust Street was widened from two lanes to six—which meant the end of locust trees on Locust Street—nobody complained. It was progress. Likewise, when overcrowding forced the Toms River schools to go on double session, it was deemed a sign of progress and became an immediate source of civic pride.

  The chemical company was making progress, too. By now, it was polluting the Atlantic Ocean, pumping four million gallons of waste every day through a pipeline that ran under the streets of Toms River and emptied into the ocean half a mile offshore at Ortley Beach.

  In 1972, the chemical company was actually indicted, which didn’t happen often in New Jersey. A 206-count federal indictment charged the company with polluting both the river and the ocean with toxic substances believed to cause cancer and genetic mutations.

  But that was not the big news of 1972. The big news was the opening of the mall. Suddenly, right out there on Hooper Avenue, just a mile and a half from downtown, there was a real live fully enclosed shopping mall, with Bamberger’s, Sears, J. C. Penney and more than forty other stores—just like they had in the suburbs.

  A suburb, in fact, was what Toms River was becoming. The only peculiar thing was that there wasn’t any “urb.” Toms River was sixty miles from anywhere, not part of the social or cultural or economic orbit of either New York or Philadelphia. It was a town with no connection to anyplace else; the sort of place that one always had to apologize for being from.

  But now, with the mall, all that was different. Toms River had arrived. Toms River was big league. At long last, the people of Toms River could shop at stores that issued credit cards.

  The boom continued throughout the 1970s. All over Toms River and around it, bulldozers advanced like battalions of tanks, uprooting anything green. Swampy meadows were drained faster than bathtubs and sold as “lagoon property.” It was the alchemy of Long Swamp to Brookside repeating itself on the grandest scale Toms River had ever seen.

  During the 1970s, the county population increased at a rate of one person every four minutes. In the entire United States, only Orange County, California, grew as fast.

  Such growth, of course, had its cost. The Marian Inn became a parking lot, the Riverview gave way to a Travelodge, and the Ocean House, which once had graced the town’s main intersection, was replaced by the largest 7-Eleven in Ocean County.

  Out on Route 37, which nobody called Locust Street anymore, the growth of fast-food outlets, car dealerships and discount department stores was as dense as a tropical rain forest. K mart, Caldor, Zayre’s, 7-Eleven, Cumberland Farms, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Burger King, Howard Johnson’s, Holiday Inn, Lum’s, Taco Bell, a new one, it seemed, every week: if it was franchised, Toms River had it. Even the chemical company became part of the multinational Ciba-Geigy corporation, with headquarters in Basel, Switzerland (where the river that got polluted was the Rhine).

  By 1980 there were more than 65,000 people in Toms River, 99.6 percent of them white. Ocean County’s population had jumped from 200,000 in 1970 to 350,000 ten years later, with more than twice as many residents over sixty-five as in their forties and almost as many chiropractors as blacks.

  These new arrivals were no more affluent, individually, than had been their predecessors in the sixties, but there were so many of them that, for the first time, there seemed to be a lot of money in Toms River. Enough, anyway, so that the First National Bank of Toms River replaced the chemical company as the county’s leading private employer, and shopping—especially at the Ocean County Mall—became the area’s most popular recreational activity.

  Each weekday morning the shuttle buses from the various retirement communities would file slowly into the mall’s vast parking lot to discharge their cargo of the stooped and frail, come to wander, dazed, among the altars of consumerism. I shop, therefore I am.

  Younger residents would arrive by private car (more than 55 percent of Ocean County households possessed two or more automobiles and, in Toms River, more traffic accidents occurred in the parking lots of shopping centers than on the roads). They would come on Friday night, al
l day Saturday, all day Sunday. It was the primary source of diversion for teenagers and housewives as well as for the elderly.

  So normal had shopping as a form of recreation come to seem that when the newspapers wrote their summer holiday roundup stories (“The beaches were crowded, boat traffic on the bay was lighter than expected, state parks reported heavy turnout”), they would include activity at the major shopping centers (“The Ocean County mall was filled to capacity this holiday weekend as avid buyers with no better way to occupy their spare time once again made thousands of unnecessary purchases”).

  There seemed to be an emptiness at the core of their lives—these tens of thousands of new arrivals who found themselves stranded in a land without character or style, trapped in a vacuum that only possessions could fill.

  There was nothing unique about that. Hollowness at the core of American middle-class life has engaged the attention of social commentators for a quarter century or more. It’s just that in Toms River you got a highly concentrated dose.

  Part of the problem was that, in the Toms River of the 1980s, almost everyone had come from someplace else. Nobody knew who anybody was anymore. And because you didn’t know who they were or where they had come from or what sort of lives they were living, it was hard to know how to feel about them.

  Thus, the acquisition of objects that would make it appear that their owner was affluent, and therefore successful and desirable, became an important task. Shopping was much more than the town’s number-one recreation: it was the only means available for Toms River’s upper middle class to make a statement about who they thought they were and what they wanted to be.

  In Toms River you were what you drove, you were what you wore, you were where you lived—no matter how heavily mortgaged it was.