Our special guest blogger is award-winning author Thad Ziolkowski. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure and Interview Magazine. He has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the Associate Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
In surfing, the drop is the initial, thrilling descent down the face of a wave, like the perilous slide into addiction. But in surfing, the way down can be the way up. This paradoxical liminal state is what Thad explores in his original exploration of the connection between waves, addiction, and recovery. THE DROP: How The Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery (Released July 6, 2021) investigates the many ways in which surfing can teach us about the undertow of addictive behaviors and how to swim free of them.
Casino Pier
Thad Ziolkowski
There is no pier at Casino Pier. It was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy almost a decade ago. I knew this before I recently visited for the first time, but a chasm separates what we know as information and what we experience directly, by immersion in a place.
Sitting astraddle my board waiting for waves—I was there to surf—I found it a little eerie to be where the pier had stood before it collapsed, where the spidery loops of the classic rollercoaster teetered half-submerged by foamy storm surge in the iconic aerial photo taken in the aftermath of the storm.
This was on a Sunday in May, my visit, too early in the season for the amusement rides on the boardwalk, including a new, smaller rollercoaster, to be in operation. Viewed from the surf zone, especially on a day of good waves, everything on shore has a slightly unreal, mirage-like cast, and this effect intensified the liminality of the empty, immobile rides.
But I kept returning to the pier, or rather to its ghost. Casino Pier was a formidable structure, extending three hundred feet into the ocean and looming overhead of anyone in the water. It served as a platform for the famous classic rollercoaster and arcades and concessions—an entire summer world, almost painfully lyrical in its sea-swept innocence, the instant and reliable production of a kind of home-movie nostalgia.
Down below was another world, whose season was not summer but autumn into winter, when swell-giving hurricanes came grinding up the coast from the Caribbean, followed by Nor’Easters. The sand that built up at the base of the pylons made Casino Pier one of the best surf spots on the East Coast. In that era, when the waves were good enough to inspire territorialism and outsiders were made to feel unwelcome, I would have hesitated to paddle out here. But without the pier to the provide a foothold and bastion for the shifting sand, the spot has undergone a loss of status along with the loss of its essential component. It’s merely another beach break now—good one season and poor the next, depending on currents and storms. Thus no one seemed to notice or care that I was a stranger. There’s no longer anything of unique value to guard and mete out to those who have established themselves by dint of residency, respect for hierarchy and dedication—the values of the surf local.
Toponym is the term for names that refer to an essential or characteristic feature of a place. When the feature referred to ceases to exist, a void or wound opens for the people who remember it. The local surfers who knew Casino Pier as whole and intact, as continuous with its name, who were imprinted by the pier’s mass and seasonal moods, must experience the place now as broken open and exposed, glaringly bright.
We name things and the things change and die and disappear, as if in defiance of our impulse to reflect and also fix them in place with our naming. But everything flows. Passed from generation to generation, even names change and become misshapen, lose their referential clarity. For names are things in the world too.
The pier was conceived like a child in the mind of a builder or developer, it was built, it lived for a certain number of years then died in a storm tied to global warming, with the ominous and guilt-laden tenor of that association. But it was never going to last forever, whatever its cause of death.
What remains is space, like the ocean following a burial at sea.
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