January 25, 2021 — Water is everywhere in Cape May County, and land is borrowed space the loan sharks of the Delaware Bay and Atlantic Ocean periodically reclaim without eviction notice. People who make their livings here—lighthouse historians, funnel cake artists, surf instructors, hotel housekeepers, Coast Guard officers, mackerel processors, marine biologists, barbacks, and shot girls—do so because of and in spite of the water, and the tourism water brings every summer, reliable as the tides that flood and drain the saltwater marshes that stitch together ocean and bay.
Twenty-four-year-old Sara Bright is one of these people. She sells seafood by the seashore, in Wildwood more specifically, a town famous for its rambunctious boardwalk, wide white beaches, and midcentury neon. She lives with her parents in nearby Cape May Courthouse on a seagrass-fringed pond her commercial fisherman father, Bill, dug before she was born. If you told Sara a year ago that she’d be among the 52% of pandemic refugees under 30 that moved back home in 2020, and that she’d be working with her family in the seafood industry, “I would have laughed and said no way, my life is in Colorado.”
Sara and her three siblings—Tess, 26, Sam, 23, and Will, 20—grew up on the Cape’s man-made and moon-made waterways, digging littlenecks, catching crabs, going on fishing trips with Bill, and helping him and their mom, Michelle, run Hooked Up Seafood, the family’s acclaimed dockside food truck. But the mountains and the snow pulled each Bright kid West. After college and a year in New York, Tess moved to Denver for a marketing job with a 48-brand software portfolio. Sara followed her, committed to Colorado but leery of the corporate world. “A lot of my friends were getting jobs but weren’t happy, and I started to panic,” Sara says. “Growing up we were taught to chase adventure, and that life should be anything but boring.”