Displaced from Seaside, now in four Wildwood hotels

WILDWOOD, N.J. - The last time that Shaun Murray, now 31, was in Wildwood was after his Toms River High School North senior prom, when he and Elise Giordano spent the night in some motel on the boardwalk.

That time, unlike last week, he did not cry on the ride down.

Flooded out of his home in Seaside Park, his job as a hairstylist literally washed away, dressed in a donated Phillies sweatshirt and Phillies flip-flops, Murray stood among the frondless plastic palm trees at the offseason Blue Palms motel Friday, smoked a cigarette, and tried to make the best of it.

Room 125 was not so bad, a block from the boardwalk, in the shadow of Splash Zone. Not that he or any of the 150 other refugees from Seaside were in the mood to see the ocean or anyone else's boardwalk, theirs having been famously ripped to pieces by Sandy.

"It's great, we are all together," he said.

He was referring to the gang at the Blue Palms, whom he had met only last week at his Ocean County alma mater, which had been transformed into an emergency evacuation shelter for those displaced by Sandy.

"I don't even know where I am," Murray said.

Improbably, incongruously, four motels in relatively unscathed Wildwood - the Blue Palms, StarLux, Esplanade Suites, and Days Inn - have received FEMA-registered evacuees into their doo-wop-decorated quarters, their aqua mid-20th-century couches providing a haven until Wednesday and possibly a lot longer. Seaside, 90 miles north, is off-limits for at least six months.

Those who landed in the Wildwood motels, most from the Toms River and Seaside Heights areas, bedded down in Toms River high schools until those buildings needed to reopen to students. A few were flooded out of homes closer by, including Egg Harbor City, Egg Harbor Township, and Ocean City.

One who sought shelter was Evan Davey, 51, a retired military man who is actually from Wildwood.

"You'll always see me smiling," Davey said. "But looking at gutted walls, all my belongings outside, I just stop and say, 'Damn.' This is traumatic."

At the Blue Palms - which, like the Jetsons-ish StarLux, is owned by the Morey family of Wildwood water park and amusement fame - manager Gordon Clark had just closed for the season the Sunday before Sandy arrived, his last guests cutting short their stays due to the mandatory evacuation.

Last week, he dragged out the plastic deck chairs, uncovered gas grills, and started receiving Red Cross supplies, mounds of donations from North Wildwood, and guests including week-old Nicholas Barnes, who arrived with his father, mother, 21/2-year-old sister, a pit bull, and three cats.

Clark became part social worker, part motel operator, organizing rides to Seaside, where police were allowing residents in for brief shifts to gather belongings.

The North Wildwood Fire Department mobilized a donation center, and the women were cooking, donating, and delivering. Postmaster Bernadette Puodziunas came by the Blue Palms with mail-forwarding forms.

Like Denise Palek - manager of the Esplanade, owned by Beach Tree Resorts, based in Maryland - Clark was arranging transportation to doctors, registration in local schools, and FEMA help.

FEMA will reimburse the motels for most of the guests' stays, but Clark said the Moreys planned to donate 25 percent of that to charity.

Palek hosted a barbecue Friday night for all of the evacuees and had "ambushed" one eight-months-pregnant woman from Seaside with a baby shower of donated gifts.

The guests at the motels Friday represented the range of victims affected by the storm. There was a teacher from Atlantic County who has driven every day to her job, and not a few who already were living in government-paid motels in Seaside. Some evacuated as ordered, while others held out until the National Guard or police ordered them out on threat of arrest.

Some were content to stay in their temporary quarters and noted that others wound up at the more spartan Monmouth Park racetrack. There were those trying to get closer to home, to jobs, and doctors' appointments.

There were the Barneses, with the newborn, who started in Room 218 but soon were moved - with all their donated baby supplies, food, pet food, and clothing - to adjoining Rooms 219 and 220, helped by two women from Lancaster.

"We joke about how no matter where we go, we always wind up near the beach," said Kelly Barnes, 24, whose baby, Nicholas, was born eight hours after she left the Toms River school shelter for a nearby hospital. It was Barnes' first trip to Wildwood since she came as part of the Manasquan High marching band's color guard.

Her husband, Nicholas, 26, said the family would survive this latest ordeal, no matter how surreal. They hoped to get to family in Maine.

"We're used to it," he said. "We know how to take the hardship."

There was Laura Englebrook, 46, whose last brush with Seaside fame came when she called Snooki, of Jersey Shore, a bad role model on the boardwalk and was fined $233 for being a public nuisance.

For now, she was trying to find an apartment. Despite FEMA approval for monthly rent of up to $1,170 for a year and a half, landlords were turning her down due to bad credit.

Her children were proving resilient up in Room 306, with its view of the back of Splash Zone, a "Wildwood" script wall hanging over the bed, and a 1950s bathing-beauty poster.

As was Englebrook, no stranger to dislocation, having walked out of a marriage with nothing to show for it, working her way back by cleaning houses. Her clients' big homes are ruined.

"It's harder on the people who had everything," she said.

She looked at the motel's winterized plastic palms, now headless trunks.

"I bet you they're blue," she mused of the missing tops. "They put everything out for us like it's a summer resort. I find that amazing. My father was like, 'Where the hell are you? That's a beach resort. Find yourself a job.' "

Englebrook's son Chance, 15, was simply hoping to get a power cord for his Xbox, which he managed to save when he evacuated, the water rising around them.

His 17-year-old-sister, Jessica, was hoping for a few makeup products and hair straightener. Jaimie Gallo, one of the North Wildwood women, went to find some.

Chance called Wildwood "Seaside 2.0" and said there had been kinship between the two honky-tonk boardwalk towns for years. It seemed like a bad joke that a storm named Sandy had picked him up from one and landed him in the other.

Another few days and he'd be enrolling in Wildwood High, home of the Warriors. For now, he was feeling like a warrior himself.

"Everybody in Seaside wants to go to Wildwood, everybody in Wildwood wants to go to Seaside," he said. "It looks like Seaside won."

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