From the journal

All stories

Hilton Head Island

Hilton Head Island

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glowing seahorse and sea turtle lanterns at night during Hilton Head’s 2024 Lantern Parade

Ritual

The 5 a.m. walk

Hilton Head Island

The poles are in the sand before breakfast. The walk that put them there is not yours.

Place

The town they built

Hilton Head Island

The Union Army drew the streets. Formerly enslaved people built the houses, elected councilmen and made civic life inside them. Mitchelville’s achievement—and its limits—began in that division.

Place

The name on the chart

Hilton Head Island

On an eighteenth-century sea chart, Hilton Head marks only a point. Trench’s Island fills the land behind it. The two names shared the page across editions—and their strange coexistence reveals what maps remember, what they discard and how a headland name came to cover an island.
Hilton Head Rear Range Lighthouse, a white cast-iron skeleton tower rising through trees at Leamington

Place

The lighthouse in the fairway

Hilton Head Island

Hilton Head’s famous red-and-white tower was built to give a new resort a face.
Still water on the Palmetto Dunes lagoon, with pines, docks, and a bridge in the distance

Place

The 11-mile lagoon

Hilton Head Island

At Palmetto Dunes, engineers excavated one landscape to save another. Half a century later, the quiet water behind the dunes is still working.
Junior player on the 18th at Harbour Town Golf Links, looking through a rangefinder toward the green, with Daufuskie Island beyond

Ritual

How the Heritage took the island

Hilton Head Island

In 1969, Charles Fraser staged a golf tournament beside an unfinished lighthouse. Arnold Palmer gave it a headline. Hilton Head gave it permanence.

Siesta Key

Siesta Key

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Nature

The mountains under your feet

Siesta Key

Siesta Beach’s powder began as Appalachian rock. That geology is why the sand stays cool, why it squeaks, and why the rankings keep coming back.

Waikīkī

Waikīkī

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People

The stones Waikīkī walked on

Waikīkī

Four pōhaku at Kūhiō Beach hold a healer story the English signs flattened — until the City finally said māhū.

Tybee Island

Tybee Island

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Oddities

The Tybee Bomb

Tybee Island

On Tybee the object in Wassaw Sound is theirs. A Mark 15 went into the water in 1958 and never came back up.

Place

Santa Monica–Venice

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Place

The postcard is not the swim

Santa Monica–Venice

Above the water, Santa Monica built an icon. Beneath it, a century of engineering has yet to solve a persistent bacterial mystery.

Place

Los Cabos

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Place

Two shores, two answers

Los Cabos

At Land’s End, a short walk separates a generally sheltered swimming beach from the open Pacific. Cabo’s clearest coastal lesson is written in the angle of the sand—and revised by every swell.

Outer Cape

Outer Cape

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Nature

The lot the storm took

Outer Cape

You come to the Outer Cape for this beach. What you find is a decision the storm already made — the lot gone, Beston’s house gone, and a shuttle in their place.

Gulf Shores / Orange Beach

Gulf Shores / Orange Beach

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Place

The hinge

Gulf Shores / Orange Beach

You pick Gulf Shores or Orange Beach as if those were two beaches. What you hit is the park between them, older than both cities, and a pier that is not a swim.