Ken McAlpine - Off-Season: Discovering America on Winters Shore  

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FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA
No Barnacles in Heaven

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THE LAST OF HUCK FINNS FLORIDA

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OH BLACK WATER

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VALONA, GEORGIA
A Shrimpers Last Cast

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ROOT OF GOOD, ROOT OF EVIL

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MURRELLS INLET
The Last Little Piece of Heaven

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NAKED NATURE

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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO OCOCKERS

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THE OUTER BANKS
Blackbeard Lives

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VIRGINIAS EASTERN SHORE
The Curious Case of George Avery Melvin

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TANGIERS SOLITARY WATERMAN

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RETREAT AND REVIVAL ON THE JERSEY SHORE

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LONG ISLAND
Santas Helpers

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CONNECTICUT
One If By Kayak, Two If By Ski

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RHODE ISLAND
Peter Pan Lives

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CAPE COD
Ghost Ships and Shores

17 MAINE
Arriving at an Answer

No ONE CAN SAY , with absolute truth, what effect the oceans shore has on the human soul. Too many souls are involved. But it has an effect, no doubt, and though I should be old enough to know better, I am certain it is a magical one. Others feel it. Our bodies, like our planet, are 71 percent salt water; our blood is precisely as salty as the sea. Take from that what you wish.

I have spent my own life at the oceans edge. I was nearly born in the ocean, my mother, with the superb instincts of her sex, at the last minute reluctantly bypassing a beach outing for the hospital instead. My father instilled in me his own love of the ocean and taught me to bodysurf. I returned the favor by putting a good scare in him, working as an ocean lifeguardin New Jersey and Floridauntil I was nearly thirty. I fell in love with the woman of my dreams beside the ocean, asking for a first kiss on a moon-spackled jetty in Ocean City, New Jersey. Our two sons were born in a hospital that catches the Pacific Ocean breeze. We live two miles from the ocean now, farther than Id like but as close as we can get, given the price of coastal real estate in California, or anywhere else for that matter. If a price tag can be affixed to magic, it has more zeros than reason can fathom. It doesnt matter. The ocean is free, and I still come to it several times a week, often just after dawn when no one is there, slipping into the cool Pacific to surf or kayak. For a few moments I slip away to a place beyond care or time. When the time comes, I want my two sons to scatter me across the water, beyond care and time forever.

The world, of course, is neither idyllic nor beyond care. At forty-three, I found my own outlook increasingly tainted. I woke, like the rest of the world, to days that couldnt be scrubbed clean. The world seemed to be sliding with exponential speed into a cesspool of trouble and inhumanity: terrorism, murder, corporate fraud, addict mothers, absent fathers, feral children with no ties and even less conscience. The woeful list is long and familiar to anyone who reads todays news.

I still believe most of the world isnt like this, only that the clamor and flash of mayhem and mistrust have drowned out the better behavior of the world at large. It is simplistic, but I believe it to be true. Harbors of upstanding conscience and intent still exist, vast anchorages actually, where people and communities are as good and right as people and communities can be, given our imperfections.

I wanted to see these places and meet these people, see the proof that the world still rested on a quiet foundation of hope and community. Led by my own bias, I went to the oceans edge to look.

I went in winter, taking an off-season journey along the East Coasts beaches; over the course of five months, I drove hundreds of meandering miles from Key West, Florida, to Lubec, Maine. I chose winter for a reason. By traveling in the off-season, through hamlets like Ormond Beach, Florida, and Strathmere, New Jersey, I believed I would find people and their towns in their true form and best season, when life slows, and community and humanity reassert themselves. I hopedno, I fervently believedthat Id find a salty, small-town America, a place of substance with a unique stamp beyond the faceless suburbs and strip malls that are consuming this country, a place where people have time for themselves and their neighbors and possibly even a stranger.

Tourists know these beach towns in summer. Often loud, garish, and overrun, these swirls of boardwalk, sand, and coconut-scented skin are spread beneath a happy dome of sunshine. Its a season of gentle, frothy waves, when hooting kids bounce to shore, when fumbling teens find first love in dark dunes, when sunburned families play Crazy Eights around the dining room table at night and old couples sit on porches, picking through their memories on the sea breeze.

Its magic, certainly. But when the summer crowds leave and the last Indian summer withers, the tone changes, and the magic begins its real reign. Those who live beside the Atlantic Ocean in its off-seasonthe term, of cours, is all wrongknow this. It was their story I wanted. Shrimpers, crabbers, drunks, and university zoologists, newspaper editors, bartenders, painters, poets, and postal clerks, social misfits and social pillars, I wanted a glimpse of their livesfunny, sad, selfless, petty, insular, enlightenedwarts and all.

In setting out on this adventure, I believed I would discover a common thread, a human bond, and quite possibly a reassuring lesson in these trying times. I am not so nave as to believe we can all get alonghuman beings are destined to clash. But for many the ocean is a link, and lives and people that at first glance seem impossibly distantwhat could you have in common with a Chesapeake Bay crabber?are really not so far apart after all. The ocean connects. Anyone who loves the water will recognize, in this journey and unspooling cast of characters, a piece of themselves.