Off-Season: Discovering America on Winter's Shore

McAlpine, a freelancer for Sports Illustrated and Outside, decided he needed to "see the proof that the world still rested on a quiet foundation of hope and community." But was it possible to find a town in America where people weren't preoccupied with corporate fraud or terrorism? As a lifelong ocean lover, McAlpine's answer came easy. He'd pack up a van and spend the winter driving along the Atlantic Coast, visiting with locals. "I was interested in people who didn't particularly want to be found"—not hermits, he explained, just people happy enough with their own lives that they didn't need an audience. In this pleasant travelogue, McAlpine tells how he started in Fort Lauderdale and dipped south to Key West, before turning back north for the islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. He continued up the coasts of Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey, stopping on Long Island and Cape Cod, before freezing his way through Maine. Along the way he talked with a variety of working people. By journey's end, McAlpine did find the purity he was craving—only it wasn't from the folks he chatted up or in the slower cadences of off-season village life. Rather, it was when he was surfing the empty, icy waters off Rhode Island, or walking in the snow on a sandy beach, or sitting alone on a boardwalk over a Cape Cod marsh, just studying the gray skies. It was in his time alone with his ocean that McAlpine found his peace.

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