She was seventy-one years old and stood less than five feet tall, and she liked to keep a clean kitchen. It was the brightest room in her beachfront bungalow, the place where she sipped her morning coffee and watched the sun rise over the surf as she paged through the morning’s Ocean County Observer. And now hippies were there—and on her front lawn, too. Their sleeping bags were crowding her perennials. It was her own fault. She had invited them, sort of. It had started with an article Donato noticed in the Observer three months earlier, in April of 1984. She read newspaper stories all the way through if they were about environmental topics, and this particular one hit close to home. The article, by Don Bennett, described a rupture in a pipeline that carried wastewater from the big chemical plant in Toms River, which was ten miles inland, to a discharge zone a half-mile offshore from Ortley Beach—a location well within view from Rose Donato’s kitchen, since Lavallette was just north of Ortley Beach.
