The Last Swim

The beach towns of the American coast have long run on a calendar that does not match the ocean itself, clearing out by Labor Day because the children go back to school and the hotels drop their rates and convention says the season is over, while the water, indifferent to all of that, holds its warmth well into September and sometimes beyond. The regulars have always known this and stayed, or come back, slipping into the long slow weeks when the umbrellas disappear and the towns remember what they were before the summer families arrived. This issue is written for that particular kind of person, the one who has learned that the shoulder season at the coast is not a consolation but the point.

Everything that follows operates on the same assumption, which is that the water is warmest in the weeks after the crowd has decided it is cold, and that the towns surrounding it are at their most themselves in exactly that window. The morning beach walk is quieter, the restaurant reservation easier, the view from the pier unobstructed, and the light in September has a quality that July cannot produce, lower and longer and serious in a way that suits both the swimmer and the person watching the swimmer from a porch. The Lowcountry barrier islands, the Gulf Coast stretches, the last of the mid-Atlantic strands, Midcoast Maine before the first real frost, all of them have been receiving this particular visitor since before most of their hotels were built, and they are set up for it in ways they cannot be set up for summer.

The pieces in this issue do not argue for the shoulder season so much as assume it, the way any regular would, and they are concerned above all with how to make the most of it, which weeks to go, what the towns look like without the summer layer, what the water asks of you in return for the extra warmth. Come with a sweater you will not need until evening. Book the last week of September if you can manage it. Stay in the water longer than feels reasonable.