“Experience keeps a dear [i.e. expensive] school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.” — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

As Hurricane Sandy bore down on the East Coast, I confess feeling an odd sense of excited foreboding. As a New Jersey expatriate — I followed an Arkansas girl home from school and never looked back — I haven’t lived there since college, but haven’t entirely lost my feeling for the state, either. The place where you spent your first 20 years leaves an indelible mark.

Having spent parts of every summer of my childhood on the beaches and boardwalk at Seaside Heights, I also had vivid memories of a charismatic Rutgers professor warning a lecture hall filled with Jersey boys that allowing urban development on the state’s Atlantic Ocean front was dangerously short-sighted, and that a day of reckoning would surely come.