The Town That Exists Mostly in the Off-Season
I arrived on a Tuesday in early October. The parking lot at the beach was empty except for a pickup truck with a surfboard in the back and a dog sleeping in the cab. The ice cream shop was closed. The souvenir store had a handwritten sign: "Back in May." The coffee place was open, barely, with one person working and no line.
This is the version of the town I'd been trying to find for two years. The summer version — the one with the traffic and the wait times and the families with matching beach chairs — is a different place entirely. The October version is the real one.
What Leaves With the Tourists
The obvious things leave: the crowds, the noise, the sense that you're competing for space. But other things leave too. The performance of the town leaves. In summer, every business is performing its version of what a beach town business should be. The ice cream shop is performing ice cream shop. The souvenir store is performing souvenir store. In October, nobody's performing anything. The coffee place is just a coffee place, making coffee for the people who live here.
The people who live here are different from the people who visit. They know each other. They talk to each other in the coffee place in a way that assumes shared context — references to things that happened last winter, to people who aren't here anymore, to the storm that took out the pier in 2019. The town has a history that the summer version doesn't show you.
The have a field trip archive has a lot of writing about this — the difference between the tourist version of a place and the resident version. October is when you get to see the resident version.
The Specific Details
The hardware store was doing good business. The grocery store had a full parking lot. The bar that's impossible to get into in July had three people in it at 4pm, and the bartender was watching a game and willing to talk. He'd been here for twenty-two years. He'd seen the town change and not change. He had opinions about both.
The beach itself was different. The sand was the same sand, but without the umbrellas and the towels and the children, it looked larger. The waves were the same waves, but without the swimmers, they sounded louder. A pelican landed about ten feet from me and stayed there for a while, which would never happen in July.
The josephcalitoy.com essays have a line about this — the way a place reveals itself when you stop competing with it for space. October is when you stop competing.
The Argument for Off-Season Travel
I'm not going to make the obvious argument about cheaper prices and shorter lines, though both are true. The real argument is about access. In season, you're seeing the performance. Off-season, you're seeing the place.
The brushed past has written about this from a painter's perspective — the way a landscape changes when the light changes, when the season changes, when the tourists leave. The same place is multiple places depending on when you're there.
I stayed three days. I talked to the bartender twice more. I found a restaurant that was open four days a week and had twelve tables and no menu — just whatever they'd made that day. I walked the beach every morning without seeing another person. I left with a clearer picture of the place than I'd gotten from two previous summer visits combined.
Go in October. Go in February. Go when the parking lot is empty. The town is there. It's just waiting for you to show up when it can actually be itself. And if you want more of this kind of travel writing — the slow, specific kind — girl next up has been doing some interesting work on solo travel that gets at the same thing from a different angle.