I did some wild stuff in those weeks. I literally infiltrated the New Jersey Animal Health Diagnostic Lab and got a source to tell me a bunch of stuff about dolphins. How? I mean, it sounds cooler than it is. I just pretended I was researching a book. It turns out that dolphin autopsies aren’t actually super confidential, and the people who do them don’t get a ton of opportunity to talk about their work.
But the only pertinent information I actually got from those conversations was that they had no idea why a bunch of dolphins swam up the Delaware River and died. They all starved, like maybe they were afraid to go back downstream.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the Delaware River, it forms the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey and then the border between Delaware and New Jersey before dumping into Delaware Bay. My theory was that something had happened in the bay or the river that forced the dolphins north and either prevented them from traveling south or convinced them that it was better to starve than face it again.
And if there was something downstream that they were afraid of, well, I wanted to find it. And, by chance or not, downstream of Trenton, where the dolphins had died, was a little town called Wolton. A town where the internet had stopped.
Oh, Wolton. Going to Trenton I could get my mind around, but I am a rich girl from the Upper East Side and I was not accustomed to small-town life. I’d gotten an Airbnb on short notice, which I considered a blessing both because there weren’t many and because I wouldn’t have been shocked to get profiled out. The cabin fronted a winding little road, and across that street was a tangle of trees and bushes and vines. That same tangle was out back and on either side of the house. New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the US, and still, the first week I was there, I walked into the woods just to see what it was like, and within twenty minutes I was panicking that I wouldn’t be able to find my way out.
Wolton was a ten-minute drive from the cabin, but there wasn’t much to see there unless you were into quilts or antiques or golf. I was following a lead that seemed increasingly flimsy. The internet in South Jersey was spotty. Some days customers’ internet would be unusably slow, other days it would be back to normal, and the next day there would be no connection at all. This had been going on long enough that it was news, and that news had been picked up by the Som as another example of something weird going on near Philly.
—
I arrived in town before my Airbnb check-in, so my first stop was the Dream Bean. It was a very normal coffee shop except that, on every flat surface, there was ancient-Egypt kitsch. There was even an area in the corner that sold . . . antiques? They were antiques from a time when America was super into King Tut and the Sphinx. They weren’t from Egypt; they were some designed-in-Jersey, made-in-Ohio anglicized approximations of the ancient-Egypt aesthetic.
It wasn’t like the chairs were painted with Cleopatra and mummies. The coffee shop just looked like a coffee shop with lots of Egypt-inspired knickknacks.
Ultimately, I wanted two things out of this visit: intel on the internet outages and coffee. I was greeted by a sleepy-looking thirty-something guy who was about a month overdue for a haircut. His smile shone through his grogginess as he asked how I was doing.
“Good. How’s business?” It didn’t look great, but there were a couple customers sipping lattes with plates that had once sported bagels or croissants but now sported crumbs. I couldn’t imagine rent in the tiny building was that much.
“What’s life without coffee?” he asked in response.
“I hear that.” And then I spotted a spinning stand of reading glasses on the counter. “Oh, and can I also get . . . reading glasses? At a coffee shop?”
I tried not to sound too judgmental, but I don’t think I succeeded.
He sighed. “My mother-in-law. She adds little sparkles and rhinestones to reading glasses she buys in bulk. She has a stand down at Cowtown, but she asked if she could display some here, and she’s taking care of my two-year-old son right now, so there’s really no saying ‘no.’”
I laughed. “Is she also responsible for . . .” I gestured at all the ancient Egypt, and then felt a little self-conscious—maybe this guy was just super into Egypt.
He smiled a big smile. “No, that’s just Wolton!” He did not explain further before saying, “I’m Derek.”
“Uh, I’m Maya,” I said, a little unnerved by his enthusiasm. “Is there a Wi-Fi password?”
The enthusiasm vanished. “It’s ‘cleopatra,’ lowercase c. But it’s not good. We’ve been having weird outages for over a month now.”
“I think I read about that!”
“Honestly, you don’t want to get me started. Carson has given me a refund, but people expect coffee shops to have internet. This isn’t 2007. I’m really sorry.”
“Do they know what’s causing it?”
“Aside from incompetence?” His voice rose a little. “I’m sorry, I’m just frustrated. No, they say they’ve hired somebody who knows these systems from the top all the way down, but apparently even they’re stumped. I’m looking into getting satellite internet, but it’s more expensive and slower. I understand it’s complicated, but they’ve figured out how to do it everywhere else, I don’t get why it’s not working here.”
“Well, I guess I’ll get my latte to go then!” I said. He looked despondent, so I continued, “You’re the only shop in town, so as long as I’m here, caffeine is more important than internet.”
I left the coffee shop with my
