MEMORIES OF MANASQUAN AN OFTEN-OVERLOOKED STRETCH OF THE JERSEY SHORE BECKONS SUMMER VISITORS.(TRAVEL)

Byline: LINDA TRISCHITTA Staff writer

MANASQUAN, N.J. -- Pale jade walls of water pummel and toss my body into the foam, wrenching away heat and reality as only the sea can. Black-headed terns nose-dive for bait, benign white jellyfish carcasses float past and I ride and dive over and under the waves that deliver me to shore again and again.

The water distorts sunlight into a kaleidoscopic pattern on the sandy ocean bed, where tangerine toenail polish, shells and seaweed are visible from above. Salt-cured skin is pumiced smooth by nature's tumbler, and a briny taste lingers at the back of my throat. Dragonflies skim the surface. Puffy white clouds decorate the blue sky. It is July, the tide is high at Manasquan, and I am home.

Manasquan is a 1.25-square-mile town at the center of the Jersey shore, a lead-footed three-hour, 225-mile drive from Albany. The boro does not boast gated estates and manicured lawns like neighbors Sea Girt or Spring Lake, but its casual comfort accommodates college students, single professionals and generations of families, and has welcomed guests for more than a century.

The mile-long beach is about 300 feet wide (after a federal reconstruction project last summer), with a 700-yard inlet at its southern end where boaters head to the Atlantic Ocean or the Intercoastal Waterway to points south.

The rental district is filled with cottages fancy, plain or dumpy, available weekly or for the season. Somehow this dusty beach town, snug in the Jersey shore that is romanticized by patron saint and Rumson resident Bruce Springsteen, caters to its varied summer visitors.

Incorporated in 1887, Manasquan means ``stream of the island of squaws'' in the language of the original Lenni Lenapi Native-American residents.

The red brick high school, my alma mater, also graduated Apollo IX astronaut Russell Schweickart, Class of '52, and actor Jack Nicholson, Class of '54. New York Jets football coach Bill Parcells resides in Sea Girt; ``Today Show'' host Jack Ford lives in Spring Lake.

Moving in

My family eventually moved to the shore, but in the mid-'60s we vacationed at Manasquan, where we created some of our favorite childhood memories. The two-week respites would begin with a road trip from our …