Editor’s Note: Everyone who lives or works on Long Beach Island has come to expect the unexpected – and intensely annoying – during the seemingly endless construction on the incoming and outgoing Causeway in Ship Bottom. We’re flexible. But the detours, especially in the dark, are poorly marked and poorly lit, as was the case at Barnegat and Shore avenues on Tuesday night.

This is addressed to someone with whom I crossed paths, extremely briefly, last Tuesday evening in Ship Bottom. So briefly, in fact, I don’t know if it was a man or a woman. Maybe he or she lives on Long Beach Island, or was just visiting, or was on an errand to the North End that dark and rainy night.

However, this I do know: He or she probably came very close to not surviving our sudden encounter. I feel certain I would not have survived – except for the grace of God, which in that instant most certainly saved me from mortal peril.

Only 10 minutes earlier, I was finishing my usual Tuesday editing at The SandPaper office in Surf City. The cover page headlines were written and approved, the contents page numbers were complete, and I was more than ready to get home. I had arrived 12 hours earlier, successfully ahead of most of the Causeway morning traffic through the Ship Bottom construction zone. Shortly after 8 p.m., I said goodbye to my colleagues and prepared to head out.

“Drive home safe tonight!” I remarked, typical of my Tuesday farewell to the staff. “Don’t worry about the deer; they hate the rain,” I added on this occasion.

“And watch for the detour at Eighth Street,” warned one of my coworkers.

“You’ll have to take it all the way (west) to Hochstrasser’s (marina), and come out to the Causeway from there,” elaborated another coworker. They knew about this because the detour using West Seventh Street existed on Monday. I didn’t because I had not been on the Island since Tuesday, March 26, when that night I just followed the Boulevard around the Oskar Huber furniture store onto Eighth Street, heading west toward the bridges. I thanked them for the advisory.

On the Boulevard at Seventh Street, the detour was obvious, including a lighted message board. The way was, of course, familiar to me; the same detour had existed some years prior, during the N.J. Department of Transportation’s Causeway bridges project that began way back in 2013. I slowed my turn, traveled the first block of West Seventh, and paused at the stop sign for Central Avenue (one way heading south). On my left, the intersection was blocked by orange barrels; over on Eighth Street were plenty of the harshly brilliant construction site lights now commonly used. My rain-splattered driver’s side window impaired my vision only slightly. I was glad the door’s power window had been fixed, and gone were the plastic and tape that a week earlier had bandaged the partially open left window and seriously compromised my peripheral vision while driving until March 29.

Next was the Barnegat Avenue two-way cross street, north and south. Undistracted – not listening to music or the radio, not on a cellphone, not pondering whether my two pizza slices at 5 p.m. were enough dinner or whether I should fetch more on the way home – I slowed down for the Barnegat Avenue stop sign to peer intently at the orange barrels and west-pointing arrow sign set up in the middle of Barnegat Avenue to block southbound traffic.

What I could not perceive, through my rain-splattered side window dazzled by those oft-blinding construction lights from a block away on Eighth Street, was that the Barnegat Avenue northbound lane was unblocked!

Making a fatal presumption, I did not stop at the stop sign.

A sharp blare of a vehicle horn suddenly struck my mind with horror as a northbound vehicle, whose approaching headlights I had failed to discern, slammed on its brakes as the driver side of my compact wagon sedan passed straight in its path! Without the other driver’s instant reaction, the other car would have stove my car door into me with, I believe, enough crushing force to kill me instantly.

I kept driving, yet now raging aloud at the detour, at the harsh lights and rain, and at myself for presuming the roadblock I passed at Central Avenue was replicated at the Barnegat Avenue intersection. I was dead wrong. Thanks be to God, it was not fatal – not even a rattling of metal. But, oh God, was I ever rattled!

Reaching Manahawkin, I stopped for an extended, calm-down sandwich break and to place a call to  The SandPaper office, with a clumsy warning of the peril I had escaped – and to inform my mainland-bound colleagues of how close I came to never seeing any of them again.

* * *

It was only gently raining an hour later when I wearily arrived at my front door in Lanoka Harbor. My wife, Diane, and son, Brian, both engaged at their own computers in the living room, rendered a routine greeting.

“I live to see another day,” I softly sighed, in a reverent voice.

We occasionally use that expression in our family – me, for example, lately in an Easter Sunday card game as a glib reference to merely getting another turn before someone else wins the game. Neither Diane nor Brian had an inkling of the literal intent of my remark this time; it drew no response, as they returned their attention to whatever it was my entrance had briefly interrupted.

So it is for them, also, and to all whom I love, that I write this testimony: The grace of God’s providence, once again, returned me home on April 2, 2024. Safe.