OCEAN CITY — There is a particular quiet that settles over a Jersey Shore town in the last week of October, and if you’ve only ever come down in July, you’ve never heard it. The funnel-cake stands are shuttered. The parking meters don’t bark at you. The ocean, gray and businesslike now, has the beach mostly to itself. And the people walking the boardwalk aren’t tourists checking a box. They’re locals, and they’ve got their dogs with them.
This weekend, Ocean City leans all the way into that. Saturday and Sunday are “Dog Days,” the stretch of the year when the town officially hands the boardwalk back to the four-legged residents who’ve been waiting since Memorial Day for permission to trot its boards. On Saturday at 3 p.m. there’s the “Howl-O-Ween” parade on the boardwalk, a benefit for the Humane Society of Ocean City, which is exactly what it sounds like — dogs in costume, owners pretending the costume was the dog’s idea — and a Halloween Costume Skate at the skate park at Fifth Street and Asbury Avenue. Down on the sand that same morning, volunteers will fan out for a Clean Ocean Action beach sweep, the unglamorous, necessary work of picking up after a summer that’s long gone home.
Put those things next to each other and you’ve got the whole character of the off-season shore in one Saturday: a little bit of silliness, a little bit of stewardship, and almost nobody from out of town around to see it.
When a shore town stops performing
I love this time of year down here, and I’ll tell you why. In the summer, a shore town performs. It puts on the lights and the music and the fried everything, and it does it beautifully, and it does it for millions of people who will be gone by Labor Day. But in late October, a shore town stops performing and just gets to be itself — a real place where real people live year-round, run the hardware store, coach the rec team, and walk the same stretch of boards every morning whether or not anyone’s watching. The costumes on the dogs this weekend are the only thing anybody’s putting on.
The costumes on the dogs this weekend are the only thing anybody’s putting on.Max Cedar
You see it in the small stuff. The bench regulars who nod at you like you’ve known each other for years, which down here you sort of have. The surfers out past the jetty in full wetsuits, because the water’s cold but the waves in fall are the best-kept secret on the East Coast. The way a Howl-O-Ween parade can shut down a block and feel like the biggest event in the world, because this week, for this town, it is.
The thin months
There’s a melancholy to it too, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Every closed-up storefront is somebody’s livelihood on pause until spring, and the shore’s year-round economy has always run thinner than the summer crowds would ever guess. The same towns that can’t find a parking spot in August spend the winter counting carefully. That’s worth remembering the next time somebody treats these places like they only exist between June and September.
But this weekend isn’t about the counting. It’s about a costume parade for dogs, a beach that needs picking up, and a few thousand people who never left reclaiming the boardwalk that’s theirs the other nine months of the year.
If you’ve got a dog and a free Saturday, point the car south. Bring a bag for the beach sweep. Let the dog be ridiculous. The shore in late October doesn’t ask much of you — just that you show up and notice it’s still here, being exactly what it is.
Based on reporting from Patch (Ocean City), the City of Ocean City, Clean Ocean Action and local event listings.