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Are We There Yet?

How do you know you’ve reached the beach? When you can smell the salt air.

Karen McGrath left the big city for the beauty, sense of
community—and the salt air—found in the First State's Quiet Resorts.
Photograph by Rob Nicholson, www.humbledeyesphotograph.com.

I grew up and lived in brick and cement neighborhoods in Philly, places where you’re smacked with bus fumes, funky garbage, baking bread and your neighbor’s simmering gravy all in a single block. Perhaps the constant cacophony of city smells is partly why, for me, the beach is first and foremost about the scent.

My father loved the beach. He was born on the way down the shore (Jersey, that is) when my grandparents tried to squeeze in one more beach day before the new baby. My siblings and I inherited this draw to the ocean, and it’s always been the smell that reached us first.

We made the trip to Wildwood what seemed like a hundred times, but never enough. About halfway between our row house in Philly and the rental motel-apartment in Wildwood, we would cross the bridge at Egg Harbor. “Roll down the windows,” my dad would order. “You can smell the ocean now.”

My brothers and I would excitedly crank down the windows to suck deep breaths through our noses, letting the briny sea smell wash the city soot from our heads. As a kid, and as a grownup, the beach has begun when I could smell it.

I eventually discovered the Quiet Resorts and fell in love with the beauty and the sense of community. In 1999 I traded sidewalks for sand, and haven’t looked back.

Today I get to smell the ocean every day, and every day I’m thankful. Our office squats right on the dune of the incredibly beautiful Fenwick Island beach, and I’m surrounded by that clean and cleansing scent. Windows open and the smell washes through the building.

And sometimes, when the wind blows right, I can smell the ocean at my home in Ocean View. I’ll go outside and call to my kids, “Come out here, you can smell the ocean.”

Former Philly girl Karen McGrath is executive director of the Bethany-Fenwick Area Chamber of Commerce.