Surf Journalist caught in torrid love affair with Bruce Springsteen’s hometown

"The heart has reasons that reason cannot know."

Yesterday, the sun popped out, in New York City, and I went to Penn Station to ride the train to Asbury Park, New Jersey. I fell hard in love with Bruce Springsteen’s hometown almost a decade ago when, alongside the filmmaker Jack Boston, we were there to shoot the young local legend Tommy Ihnken for BeachGrit’s New Jersey Wetsuit Fairytale. It featured covers of the aforementioned Springsteen sung by Vaughn Dead and Pauly B and stands, to this day, as a critical work of 2018 surf art.

As it turns, a wiser Tommy Ihnken would be picking me up from the train station in Long Branch and we were going to discuss his, and partner Florian Meyer’s, new dumbphone version of surf forecasting on the weekly recording of The Grit! podcast. You can and should read about it here.

Driving back into Asbury my heart fluttered uncontrollably. Ihnken spoke about how the town had changed, a bit, money had come in and gussied up the blue collar charm, a bit, but all I saw was pure, undiluted raw as hell sexy. We stopped in for a coffee by a tattoo parlor. There were three very cool Jersey men sitting on a bench out front each with tattoos. We went into Glide, a very cool surf shop, to record. We drove to the beach and paddled out into fun 2-3 windswell. A summer surf school, run by other cool Jersey men, was in the water but it didn’t matter. We had a snack at a cool harbor-adjacent seafood diner before I caught the ferry back to the City.

A wild squall broke through the sky right as I boarded and as I sat, gazing out at the gray, I touched my cheek and couldn’t tell if the liquid, there, was rain or tears.

What is it about Asbury Park that whispers so tenderly to me? That makes me recklessly cheat on Cardiff-by-the-Sea? I can’t exactly say. The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.

Maybe its the sausage rolls.

Yum.