If you walk down to the very edge of Sunset Beach in Cape May, New Jersey, right where

the Delaware Bay swallows the land, he'll find yourself looking at something that doesn't

belong.

It's evening.

The sky is bruised with shades of deep plum and burnt orange, and the breeze off the water carries

that sharp, salty

sting of decaying seaweed in old wood.

But if you will look about 150 feet off of the shoreline rising out of the surf like a jagged

spine of a buried leviathan, there is a massive gray shape.

Now at first you might think it's a natural rock formation carved by centuries of brutal tides,

but as the water retreats, you see the hard, straight lines.

You see the hollow, cavernous space where rooms once were, and then you see the rust.

Thick, bleeding veins of orange oxidizing and eating away at the exposed

matrix of steel reinforced bars. It's a shipwreck. But it's not made of wood and it's not made

of iron. It's made of concrete. Solid, heavy liquid stone. Many people who stumble upon it today asks themselves the same question, who in their right

mind builds a ship out of concrete.

Stones do not float.

It's the universal metaphor for sinking, toss a pebble into the pond and it goes straight

to the bottom, so why would anyone build a 3,000-ton ocean-going vessel out of the same material we used to build highway overpasses

and subdivision driveways? The answer is a cocktail of wartime depression, engineering madness,

and a heavy dose of good old-fashioned American eubris. But if you ask the locals or the old-timers who have

spent their lives watching this gray corpse slowly sink into the New Jersey sand, they'll tell

...