We hit up Long Beach Island yesterday, one of my family's favorite vacation towns from years ago. Everything I loved about LBI was still intact. From the weird antique stores to the Tiki-themed custard shops, it was the same town I'd spent ten consecutive summers swimming, playing, watching and wasting at. The only difference was an increase in traffic lights.
LBI isn't as glitzy as most of the other Jersey shore vacation spots, if we can define "glitzy" as a series of blinking, neon signs directing your attention towards the nearest funnel cake. There's no giant boardwalk and there are no big roller coasters. It's more quaint and subdued, and nothing better evidences that fact than one of Long Beach's biggest entertainment venues -- a strip mall.
It's called "Bay Village," home to countless tiny shops selling everything from ice cream to sand sculptures. I loved this place as a kid. With money to burn and a passing interest in everything, I don't doubt that I've purchased at least one thing from every single store in Bay Village at some point in my life. Even at the ones that only sold women's clothes, I managed. My favorite store was always this little shithole called "Shell Shanty," and I was elated to find it still running strong.
What can one buy at the Shell Shanty? Well, shells, for the most part. But there's more than that -- everything from shark-themed shot glasses to dead-and-now-decorative shellacked blowfish. There's enough awesome sea-themed crap in there to get anyone to rethink their living room's motif. It's the kind of place that has just the right amount of homegrown charm to persuade even the coldest browser to buy a $300 statue of a lighthouse.
And since it's been there forever, it's one of those stores that has 2,000 times more inventory on display than it can really support. Most stores have walking room; at Shell Shanty, you kind of have to just hop around on one foot. This is part of its charm. You'll find everything from twenty-year-old squeak frogs to two-year-old Pirates of the Caribbean knockoff toys. If only they sold tacos and bottled water, I'd never have to buy anything from anyplace else, ever. It'd be like Wal-Mart, only with an aisle full of plastic lobsters instead of Dyson vacuums. I'd rather do little lobster puppet shows than vacuum cat hair, anyway.
The entire store is lined with a buffet of shells and dead, dried sea creatures. I loved those bins so much as a child. I wouldn't say that I was an avid shell collector, but when you're a kid vacationing in a beach town for a week, you tend to pick up the local hobbies.
Then again, it's possible that kids are just born with a desire to own shells. When we went there yesterday, I was among six of my nieces and nephews, each more obsessed with picking "the right shell" than the last. I strongly feel that you can't truly grasp human nature until you see a five-year-old boy in tears because he can't decide between the fifty cent cone shell or the seventy-nine cent dead baby starfish. Trivial pursuits are the ones that stick with you.
Around a quarter of the store's space is devoted to hermit crabs. Small hermit crabs, medium hermit crabs, large hermit crabs and jumbo hermit crabs. ("Jumbo" crabs, being the largest and most expensive, put to rest the eternal debate over which is truly bigger: Jumbo, or Large?) They sell plastic tanks, wire cages, water sponges, food, endless tank decorations and a hundred other things related to hermit crab care. Every kid who enters the store refuses to leave without a new hermit crab, so it's smart of the Shell Shanty folks to take advantage. After all, Shell Shanties can't support themselves on the sale of Long Beach Island mermaid-themed sweatshirts alone.
Running with recent trends, they also sell "designer" crab shells which force the poor hermit crabs to troll around town wearing bad paintings of Mickey Mouse and Dora the Explorer over their asses. It's the hermit crab equivalent of dyeing a poodle pink, only nobody gets to have their photos purchased by pet salons in need of new material for their print advertisements.
I wanted to leave with something, for old time's sake, and I have to admit that the dried up baby seahorses were tempting. Had Shell Shanty offered them in protective boxes, I might've taken 'em up on it. As things stood, there was no way that thing would've made it all the way home intact. I have little use for dead seahorse crumbs.
I know that killing seahorses for profit is a pretty big taboo nowadays, but as someone who is eternally fascinated by the window displays of Chinatown medicine shops, I can't help myself. Promise you this: For every dead seahorse I buy, I'll plant a flower.
I'm the type of person who views life as a fragile chain of events, and within that, there isn't much room for regret. Shit causes goodness, however indirect, and vice versa. But now I'm a crossroads. Ever since I left the Shell Shanty without the kickass octopus light seen above, I've felt regret. Strong regret. Strong, piercing, I-can't-believe-I-didn't-buy-that-awesome-piece-of-shit regret. That octopus light is the kind of thing you can come home to after three car accidents and a funeral and still be cheered up by. "Life never sucks when you get to come home to a light-up octopus." I put it in quotations because, really, it deserves to be on a t-shirt.
With time running short and a wallet blown to pieces from our visit to Atlantic City earlier in the weekend, I opted for a cheap little bag of prehistoric shark teeth -- complete with "shark teeth facts" on the back of the package! Yes, that's how the facts were presented. A bullet list, under a header reading "Shark Teeth Facts." How could I pass that up?
My visit to the Shell Shanty isn't exactly an epic tale. I realize this.
Posted by Matt on 06/26/2007. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
Some of the hermit crabs we sell at my work have painted shells. There’s a bunch with American flags and cartoon characters and stuff…and then there’s one with VIETNAM and the Vietnamese flag on it. Needless to say, that one’s my favorite.