May Belongs to Chincoteague

Chincoteague has been famous for one week of the year since the pony swim entered the national imagination, and the island has been quietly better the other fifty-one ever since. The regulars concede the swim to the crowds without argument. What they keep for themselves is May, when the marshes green up, the beach at Assateague runs empty for miles, and the town is fully awake but not yet performing.

The arrangement of the place explains the appeal. Chincoteague is the working town, a low island of docks and neighborhoods where people still make a living on the water, and Assateague is the wild barrier island across the channel, all beach and marsh and loblolly pine, protected end to end. You sleep and eat on one and spend your days on the other, crossing the causeway each morning past the lighthouse, and the crossing itself becomes part of the rhythm within a day.

May is when that rhythm pays best. The spring bird migration moves up the Atlantic flyway through the refuge in waves, and even a visitor who cannot tell one shorebird from another will understand that something large is passing through. The ponies are there too, grazing the marsh edges in small bands, seen properly across a stretch of water rather than through a festival crowd. The water is still too cold for swimming, which the regulars count as a feature, since it keeps the beach to the walkers and the fishermen.

The town holds up its end. The oyster and clam beds around the island have fed it for generations, and in May the kitchens are cooking for neighbors as much as for visitors, which is the condition under which island kitchens do their best work. Evenings run short and unambitious, a walk to the water, an early dinner, the light going long over the channel, and this is not a deficiency but the design.

Come before Memorial Day and book a place in town rather than on the highway. Rise early once, cross the causeway before seven, and walk the beach north until the last footprints run out. Then turn around and walk back for breakfast. That is the whole itinerary, and it has been enough to bring people back every May for decades.