Off-Season: Discovering America On Winter's Shore [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Ken McAlpine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2005

Just after Labor Day, Ken McAlpine said goodbye to his family and began a drive up the East Coast, from Florida to Maine, on a one-man quest to capture the elusive "forgotten season" of beach towns shuttered until the return of warm weather. Off-Season brings to life the magic of the sea and shore in winter, the charm of beach towns emptied of summer crowds, and the warmth and eccentricities of year-round coastal residents.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"For those who want to read about the unfamiliar in familiar places, this book will have appeal."
-- Booklist (Booklist )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 495 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press; 1 edition (January 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786271949
• ISBN-13: 978-0786271948
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,322,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Deftly Written and Engaging Memoir, July 4, 2004

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Off-Season: Discovering America on Winter's Shore (Paperback)

Consider the sad fate that has overtaken the word "tourist" in recent years.

It started out meaning simply someone who travels somewhere to see the local sights. But over time it has taken on a strong odor of disapproval. "Tourists" arrive in huge crowds, create congestion, behave rudely, drink too much, speak in weird accents, leave trails of litter behind them and condescend to the locals. Economically they are a necessary evil in the eyes of residents (I once heard a board member of Colonial Williamsburg complaining about the damage inflicted there by tourists: "Couldn't they just stay home and send the money?").

Ken McAlpine, however, is a different kind of tourist. Unhappy with the stress and bustle of American life in general, he set out --- alone --- in his van to find places where what he considers the true spirit of "real" America survives. His hunting ground was the East Coast, from the Florida Keys to Lubec, Maine. And just to show that he was no typical tourist, he traveled in midwinter, largely avoiding the better-known tourist roosting places in favor of out-of-the-way areas, like the spot on the New Jersey shore where one resident told him, "We don't want people to know where Strathmere is." No Sanibel, Hilton Head, Cape May or Hamptons for Ken McAlpine.

McAlpine has chronicled this offbeat odyssey in a deftly written memoir. He is an experienced travel writer with a nice gift for simile and metaphor and a gift for seeking out crusty local characters who seem wedded to the places they inhabit. OFF SEASON is enjoyable reading, but it also has a subtle undercurrent of concern for an imperiled American lifestyle that McAlpine treasures. He deplores the creeping advance of urban sprawl toward the unspoiled places he finds, and he sides unashamedly with the small-town heroes who are fighting against it.

The major East Coast cities --- Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston --- are either skirted entirely or summarily dismissed as obstacles to be got through as quickly as possible en route to more interesting places like the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Tangier Island, VA, or Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island.

McAlpine has a thing for "the loveliness of islands." Fishermen, beaches and water bulk large in his narrative. He went to the trouble of packing a kayak into his van so he could periodically go off by himself and paddle around looking for exotica, human, vegetable and animal. And the casual reader will painlessly learn a fair amount about fish and fishing. Several of the places he visits can be reached only by boat. There are no maps in OFF SEASON, so it is a good idea to have an atlas handy as you read.

Summer weather was still around in the Florida Keys when he started out in October, but as he gets farther north winter is an increasingly bold presence, culminating in a harrowing night spent in a ditch when his van slid off an isolated rural road in Maine. He finds his interest shifting from meeting colorful people to spending time alone, tramping beaches or exploring inlets to drink in a sense of inner peace.

The spirit of this engaging book is well captured by the picture on its cover. A group of empty canvas beach chairs stand, backs to the viewer, looking out over a flat expanse of water. A thin line on the horizon suggests, rather than depicts, a far shore. A lone gull inspects the scene. Not a "tourist" in sight.

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare treat, an emotional winter jaunt, November 20, 2004

By 

Alexander M. Moir "Lt. Moir" (Huntington, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Off-Season: Discovering America on Winter's Shore (Paperback)

Journalist Ken McAlpine's decision to travel slowly from Florida to Maine in the dead of winter could not have been more appropriate. Familiar miasmic tourist locations like Key West, the Outer Banks, the Jersey Shore, Long Island's East End, coastal Connecticut, Rhode Island and the Cape all take on new sheen and character under McAlpine's pen. I couldn't help but be jealous for all the solitude and friendship he found on his frigid but warm winter trips. Anyone who has appreciated a quiet, special location when the tourists were all gone will doubtless appreciate the dialog, the characters and the voyage itself. As several reviewers have already noted, McAlpine's fresh travel log achieves and instills an admiration, respect and vigorous hope for an America in which there is still so much originality, warmth and community. Thanks to McAlpine, we can recognize that hope. I loved this book.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ever want to get away from it all?, July 17, 2004

By 

Amy G. Dennis (Ojai, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Off-Season: Discovering America on Winter's Shore (Paperback)

Do you ever feel like getting away for awhile, leaving family and friends for a brief vacation - but can't? Pick up a copy of this book to have on hand when the mood hits. Like the armchair athlete, you will have a vicarious experience, but you won't find a more enjoyable or relaxing way to "go".

Author Ken McAlpine left on this trip initially because "the world seemed to be sliding with exponential speed into a cesspool of trouble ...terrorism, murder, corporate fraud...the woeful list...familiar to anyone who reads today's news".

McAlpine believes (and seeks to confirm) that "most of the world isn't like this...that the clamor and flash of mayhem and mistrust have drowned out the better behavior of the world at large". His trip is a test of sorts: does he find the "proof that the world still rests on a quiet foundation of hope and community"?

He decides to visit oceanside communities in winter, exploring the reality that exists when they are uncluttered by tourists and the usual summer distractions. McAlpine is a travel writer, so he beautifully describes the locales he visits up and down the eastern seaboard. But he is also an astute observer of human behavior and has a degree in environmental science, so his perceptions are interesting and informative as he shares stories and chats with the locals about their way of life. I found myself happy to be "traveling" with Ken because his wonderful, dry sense of humor puts much of what he finds into a warm, compassionate and often hilarious perspective.

Does he find what he's looking for?

Pick up a copy and put it on your nightstand. Keep it for when you aren't sure if you can watch yet another evening newscast, or read another depressing headline. Then savor McAlpine's take on our modern world.