You're never really alone

Song of the winter beach

One of my more specific memories of growing up in the Nineties is watching a lot of music videos in which the lead singer is skulking around on an empty beach. I’m not sure how or why this became a video motif, but an empty beach—especially in winter—is such an effortlessly atmospheric and moody place that I can understand why the directors decided to shoot all of these bands on the sand. To this day, whenever I end up listening to Coldplay (which happens maybe twice per year) it’s impossible for me not to think of Chris Martin in a raincoat walking past the surf, crooning “And it was aaawwwlll yellow.”

New England is full of beaches that are lonely and mercurial during the majority of the year, when the summer crowds are sequestered inland. And I’ve found it surprising that we just abandon the coast like this, as soon as it becomes just a little more cumbersome to be outside. Being in an austere environment has a special, more esoteric beauty of its own, and it imbues any subsequent cozy activities with an extra slab of deliciousness. But as I was driving home from a work trip to New York the other weekend, along the Connecticut stretch of I-95, it occurred to me that we only have a few more months left before the crowds descend upon New England’s beaches. In other words, your window for having a brooding, bundled-up day at the beach has begun to close!

So I decided to take advantage of the time and place, by paying a pre-sundown visit to one of the Nutmeg State’s most bounteous beaches—a destination where people compete for parking spots and campsites from June through September, but where you can just waltz in (for free!) during the chillier months; with full access to the woods and waters that abut the sandy beach.