Three Rivers Press, 2004
When people tend to their daily lives
The term is all wrong, the author says. Off-season is when what makes a community is most visible. When those who inhabit the Atlantic coast, either lured by the sea or there as a birthright, go on making a living, attending church, raising families, and tend to their daily lives alone and together, against the odds of bad weather and lousy economies. McAlpine writes, “It was their story I wanted. Shrimpers, crabbers, drunks, and university zoologists, newspaper editors, bartenders, painters, poets, and postal clerks, social misfits, and social pillars. I wanted a glimpse of their lives, warts and all.” The author explores the coast from Key West to Maine, dipping into communities well trodden by summer crowds, as well as hidden pockets of villages on muddy marshes that no tourist seeks.
Off Season is an easy-going ride up the coast with the privilege of getting to know some characters well — that is, as well as any writer can who is passing through, and a Californian at that. McAlpine has a gifted way of peeling back the layers of people like the marine policeman on the Chesapeake’s Tangier Island (who’s often forced to arrest his own fishing relatives), letting the person share his everyday life through some dialogue and nimble observances. When the author asked a man in Brewster, Massachusetts, if he was looking forward to summer, he snarled, “Only the candyasses come here in the summer.” The more I read, the more I respected the author’s gentle and humorous way with words and people. One can’t wait to move on to the next chapter to meet more locals. And best of all, he doesn’t romanticize lives pinned to the water’s edge.
While Off Season has people at its core, McAlpine shifts some chapters to his own relationship with the landscape, a modern-day Thoreau with occasional solitude, such as the unplanned night the author spends stuck in his van, sans AAA, in the ice-glazed parking lot of Maine’s Barred Island Preserve. His writing shines in descriptions of the sea’s frozen edges and of stars that pop from a frigid sky.
Ocracoke Island, part of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, grabs hold of the author through its potluck and talent show, plus a trombone-practicing resident who rides the ferry. “Which is real life?” the author muses, “Life on an isolated winter island or life in the hubbub of a city center? CNN had called Ocracoke’s residents `refugees from reality.’ [A resident] who had heard countless vacationers bemoan their inevitable end-of-summer return to the real world believed the tourists had it backward: the unassuming lifestyle of Ocracoke was reality, and the world of high heels, neckties and Palm Pilots was fiction.”
Focusing on “people who didn’t particularly want to be found,” Off Season spends time on, in, or near the water with a professional lifeguard who removes barnacles from hulls, a shrimp factory worker, a descendant of Blackbeard, a pro surfer who loves winter surf in Rhode Island, a black water recovery diver and a well-informed postmistress, all of whom cling to their beloved shorelines. The author’s premise for his travels was “that there are people and communities along the shore that have yet to be swallowed up by the bland homogeneity that has overcome much of America.”
Off Season ends in Lubec, Maine. En route, McAlpine observes, “Maine’s coast juts, pokes, folds, turns, twists, and backtracks, sculpted apparently by someone who attached a cookie cutter to the end of a jackhammer.” A fine book to read in any season, but perfectly suited to months when rain, snow, and sleet tap one’s windows.
A resident of Torrington, CT., when she isn’t in Maine, Linda Beyus is a frequent contributor to Working Waterfront.