There is something timeless — and therefore reassuring — with a Vineyard beach on a sunny October day. No matter how many times you have made the short journey to Lambert’s Cove Beach, it is a visceral moment when you arrive at the top of the dunes. Feet sink into flour-like sand while you take in the spectrum of the view: rustling beach grasses, Paul’s Point, James Pond, and a few boulders.

 “I just loved sitting still,” the narrator of Barbara Kingsolver’s book, The Bean Tree, says at one point; and that’s the way it is at the beach. In the off-season, the beach is a powerful restorative; one leaves regretfully, but renewed.