‘Part dystopian, part delightful.’ Why winter is the new beach season.

A beach in high summer is predictable: hot sun, murmuring surf, a bright expanse of sand filled with people, towels, beach chairs, and the scent of sunscreen. But an offseason beach often holds surprises – even treasure. Sometimes a lot of it.

My wife and I live in a northern latitude that would seem to limit what TV meteorologists deem “beach days,” but we have humbler criteria. A good beach day is sunny, without too much wind or too many people. New Year’s Day, for example, is now a tradition for us – and for others, too, judging from the clumps of ski-parkaed and woolly-capped beachgoers we encounter.

Have you ever seen it snow at the beach? Snowflakes sift onto the wave tops and disappear. The onshore breeze keeps snow from accumulating much. Instead, it forms long thin lines on the sand, too sparse and dry to make a decent snowball. The whoosh of breaking waves sounds the same in midwinter as it does in midsummer. It’s part dystopian, part delightful.

Add to that the occasional cinematic thrill of horses splashing through the surf. Dogs are also welcome offseason, and they are mostly ecstatic and a blur. Owners of long-haired breeds seem wistful, if not a bit morose, as they lead their happily drenched and sand-coated charges back to the parking lot. That will be a smelly ride home. 

Spring provides the most surprises at the beach. Winter storms may have profoundly altered the shoreline, erasing a sandbar here, adding a new one there, or sculpting a long sand cliff along the high-tide line. The ribs of a 19th-century shipwreck dramatically appear and disappear from season to season. 

You can pretend that the weather is warmer than it truly is and shed your shoes and socks at the base of the boardwalk steps. The sand is damp and not unpleasantly cool, but it’s best to walk into the wind going out so that it’s at your back when you turn for home. 

Harsh wind and high tides also bring summer detritus to the surface. I take a bag with me whenever I go to the beach. Trash bugs me, and I can do something about it. 

I had a bag handy one sunny March day during the pandemic, when my wife and I decided to visit the beach. The winter had been long and gray. 

It wasn’t long before we started spotting them: brightly colored sand toys, newly revealed. We found little shovels, a pail, a plastic sieve. There were metal toy vehicles, too, that their young owners had surely been warned not to bring to the beach. And sand molds, lots of them: blue fish, red lobsters, yellow turtles, even a small crenellated mold with which a determined child might fashion a wall for a doomed sandcastle. Soon, my shopping bag was filled to bursting. Oh, there was trash, too. But mostly it was toys. We’d never seen this happen before.

There’s an ancient limestone formation in Wyoming, the Green River Formation, that is world famous for the Eocene-era fossils it contains in abundance – fish, turtles, and alligators, as well as insects, birds, and leaves. 

We seemed to have stumbled upon a similar sedimentary layer of beach toys. They were everywhere, often in groups. 

Now it was time to go home, and we scuffled back to the boardwalk. But what about the toys? They would have been a bonanza for our kids, years ago, but we had no use for them now. “Let’s line them up on the sand for kids to help themselves,” I proposed. That felt right in our hearts, but not in our heads. It was March, after all. We went with our hearts.

We were still clapping sand off our treasures and setting them in a long line when a young woman came down the steps leading two young boys. 

“Would you like some beach toys?” we said. We hadn’t even emptied the bag yet.    

She was as grateful as her charges. She’d left the house so quickly, she said, that she’d forgotten to bring things for the boys to play with. She thanked us. We put on our shoes and left, pleased that our treasure was falling into the right hands. 

I suspect that the entire cache migrated back onto the beach that day, and that not all of it returned home with its new owners. Some of it was lost, abandoned, and reburied, to emerge later and begin the cycle again. A few might even become bewildering fossils someday. 

My wife and I took an early-morning beach walk the other day, before many others had arrived. I saw something in the sand at my feet and bent down to pick it up, ready with my trash bag. It was a small sand mold, a bright yellow turtle.

It looked familiar. This time, I took it home.