Did you catch that remark about how “landscape seems to stop”??? Did the “author” run into a brick wall or does he believe that the world ends at the horizon?
The author is saying in an oh-so-clever way that HIS world ends somewhere in central NJ, probably just south of Princeton, a remote outpost of what the Manhattan liberal defines as civilization. Beyond that, all he knows is that there are sand dunes, scrub pines, and trashy shore towns. And strange uncultured people whose ways are foreign to his refined sensibilities.