Jonathan Oldham is the mayor of Harvey Cedars, a small town on the Jersey Shore. He grew up there, on Long Beach Island, where his father, a Presbyterian minister, ran the well-known Bible Conference. He is just old enough to remember the Ash Wednesday Storm, the March, 1962, nor’easter that was, until recently, the worst storm in living memory to strike the Shore. Because it lingered for five high tides, it was also known as the Five High Storm. Jonathan, his parents, and fifty of the town’s residents found shelter at the Bible Conference complex, which was on higher ground. From there, they watched the destruction of Harvey Cedars.
In the town’s Borough Hall, where I spoke with Oldham recently, there are several dozen black-and-white pictures of the devastation the storm left behind, uniformly framed and spaced along all four walls, a grim Presbyterian reminder of the doom that awaits us all. In the photographs, the tops of three-story houses can be seen bobbing like corks in the waves.
“My mother took that shot right there,” Oldham said, pointing to a photo taken from the Bible Conference. The ocean has cut a wide channel straight through the narrow barrier island to Barnegat Bay. “So, you see, for those of us who have been here for a long time, this is the demon that we’ve lived with, and it was never a matter of if a storm of great magnitude would come, it was always a matter of when.” . . .
