The Cold Indifference of the Winter Sea

My local beach in winter is a different beast altogether—stripped down, raw, and merciless. Gone are the bloated tourists staggering through the sand like sedated cattle, replaced by an eerie emptiness, a howling wind off the Pacific that cuts straight through bone. Gone, too, are the Bluetooth speakers vomiting Top 40 atrocities into the salt-heavy air, their owners now tucked away in suburban cul-de-sacs, where the only waves they contend with are HOA regulations and the crushing monotony of existence. This is the real beach, the one the brochures don’t bother mentioning. The season of wreckage, when the waves crash harder, the sky hangs lower, and the sun drags itself toward the horizon like a wounded animal.

I swing my car into the nearly deserted lot and fish inside the center console for my annual parking pass, a golden ticket that lets me haunt California’s beaches without feeding the state’s insatiable appetite for parking fees. I drape it from my rearview mirror with the same casual reverence as a gambler tossing his last chip onto the table. Not that it matters today. There’s no traffic enforcement goon lurking behind the dunes, no clipboard-wielding zealot ready to ticket my windshield. This is a dead zone, a place where rules are suggestions and the only real authority is the tide.

As I step out onto the sand, I plug in my AirPods and Alcest swells in my consciousness—Les Voyages de l'Âme, the perfect soundtrack for a place like this. The opening notes of "Autre Temps" drift through the salt air, shimmering and spectral, setting the tone for the long walk ahead. This album belongs to winter. It belongs to cold shorelines and the ghosts that linger there.

The wind is feral, shredding across the beach with a personal vendetta. The waves roll in thick and heavy, sucking at the shoreline with relentless hunger. A lone surfer floats out beyond the break, hooded and motionless, looking less like a wave hunter and more like a wraith waiting for a summons from the deep—just another shadow moving against the backdrop of slate-gray water, caught between the world of man and whatever abyss waits beyond the horizon.

Best of all—not a single Arizona plate in sight. Those sun-blasted lunatics who migrate here every summer, clogging our streets and defiling our fish taco establishments with their putrid palettes. They drive with the erratic grace of people who have never encountered a roundabout, barreling through red lights like they’re fleeing some unspeakable desert curse. But not today. No, today, they remain huddled in their air-conditioned bunkers, plotting their inevitable return. Let them stay there. Let them fear the cold.

The beach itself is unnervingly clean. No sun-bleached beer cans, no forgotten sandals, no careless human wreckage littering the sand. From the naked eye, anyway. Undoubtedly, beneath our feet, buried in the shifting grains, lies the detritus of summers past—shattered sunglasses, bottle caps, lost earrings, the secret leavings of people who came here to forget something or be forgotten themselves. The sand is firm and damp, scattered with ghostly footprints that tell fragmented stories of those who came before me.

Up the coast, a chunky concrete restaurant hunches against the elements, looking less like an upscale eatery and more like an outpost at the edge of the known world. The bawdy, margarita-chugging revelers of July 4th weekend are gone; today, the balcony hosts only a few die-hards clutching their coffees like relics from a more civilized time.

I push south toward the tide pools, where the ocean has peeled back its surface to reveal a hidden kingdom—tiny craters filled with seawater, hermit crabs skittering through their doomed little lives, slick rocks covered in ancient algae. The smell is thick and unfiltered, a briny slap of salt and decay, a scent that carries the weight of something older than civilization itself.

Above me, seagulls circle like impatient executioners, their sharp cries ripping through the wind. They, too, are waiting—waiting for the return of the easy pickings, the careless snack-wielding hordes who make life so effortless. But today, they are forced to fend for themselves, scavenging among the scant offerings of an empty shoreline.

Further down the beach, "Là Où Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles" kicks in—a slow build of shimmering chords and distant, half-whispered vocals. The kind of song that doesn’t so much play as it seeps into the environment, spreading through the wind and dissolving into the crash of the waves. It is a hymn for the winter sea, a reminder that even in its coldest, loneliest state, there is still music in the waves, still life in the silence.

The sun is sinking, bleeding its last light into the ocean, and the beach is turning to shadow. This is not a place for those who need warmth or comfort. It is a place for the ones who understand that nature is neither kind nor cruel, but simply indifferent. And sometimes, that is exactly what we need.