Deep in South Jersey, cars stream in and out of a Wawa. They're laden with bikes and beach gear. They're trailering boats. They're on the way to somewhere else.
Pete Dunne stops there, too. He fuels up and gets a cup of coffee. But he's headed just over the way, to see some birds. And as one in particular, a blackpoll warbler, calls see-see-see from the nearby bushes, he can't help but marvel at how much the other travelers are missing.
Forget the far West. Dunne claims that Cumberland County and its environs is one of the last great, undiscovered wild places in the nation. It's within a tank of gas for 60 million people, but largely hidden from their view.
Because they won't look.
So in "Bayshore Summer," Dunne takes us there.
The slim, joyous book — lavishly illustrated with photographs by his wife, Linda — is his love story to the place, his ode to its shorebirds, crabs, wetlands, and tomatoes. Its farmers who follow the tradition of salt hay, its watermen who joust with the fates and, all too often, lose.
The Bayshore's beauty isn't in dramatic vistas that make people gasp and reach for their cameras. This is a subtler realm. One has to get to know it first, and that is what Dunne has achieved.
Those passers-through are missing an ageless place drenched in constancy, where the graveyard tombstones and roadside mailboxes often bear the same names.
They're missing rich tidal wetlands that, twice a day, switch their allegiance — land to water, water to land.
Dunne grew up in North Jersey, but as an adult he moved to tiny Millville, on the banks of the Maurice River. He has spent the last few decades as director of New Jersey Audubon's Cape May Bird Observatory.
The book is the result of a summer he spent re-exploring all the things that, for him, define life in the place he cherishes.
He begins with one of the migratory spectacles of the planet. Each spring, Arctic-bound shorebirds alight on the Delaware Bay beaches, emaciated and in need of quick refueling.
At precisely the same moment, horseshoe crabs have roused from a winter in the bay mud and are headed toward shore to lay their lipid-rich eggs.
To Dunne, the story is simple sex and gluttony.
Dunne was there in the 1970s to see red knots, in particular, more than 100,000 strong, converging on the best banquet around. All shorebirds have since declined, the red knot most precipitously, and biologists blame a spike in crab harvesting to meet an Asian demand.
Dunne joins a crew to pick Jersey tomatoes — a signature food item for the region, "their sweet and acid taste making your taste buds flip-flop like poll-driven politicians in a tight race."
(Yes, the trademark Dunne sass is there, too.)
He goes out with a crabber and marvels at their pride and frustration. "Every time a crabber goes out, he throws dice with the universe," Dunne writes. "It is at once commercial fishing's greatest risk and greatest attraction. And nobody plays this game who is not optimistic and who doesn't like to play hard."
He spends a day with farmers and tosses a few bales of salt hay, Spartina patens. It's hardy stuff that actually takes nutrients from seawater and, when harvested and used as a mulch in gardens, gives them back to the earth.
He even takes readers along for a predawn stargazing session, where he gawks at meteors and laments the intrusion of light pollution.
One of the offenders, it turns out, is the local prison. "The greatest blemish of light on the horizon is the one built to hold criminals, while its poorly directed light robs the heavens blind."
(So, yes, the poetic Dunne is here, too.)
There could be a good reason more people don't flock to the Bayshore: Its biting insects, including 25 species of mosquito, clouds of no-see-ums, and chiggers that Dunne says "undermine the whole concept of a benign God."
He describes almost with relish the pain that the strawberry fly inflicts with its "scissorlike mandibles." But that's nothing compared to the greenhead.
"When strawberry flies bite, you say 'ow,'" Dunne writes. "When greenheads bite, you use expletives."
"Bayshore Summer" is as profound as it is lovely. In essence, it is a call not just to discover that region, but to take a closer look wherever you are.
If life beyond the Route 49 Wawa is that good, what about elsewhere? Can you see-see-see the treasures that nature holds?
"Bayshore Summer" is the second of a four-season series. It began last year with "Prairie Spring: A Journey Into the Heart of a Season," Dunne's account of a two-month trek he and Linda took across America's grasslands to immerse themselves in sodbusters and bison, prairie chickens and mountain plovers.
I can't wait to see what Dunne comes up with for autumn.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.