Almost everything written about Myrtle Beach is about ten blocks of oceanfront, and almost nobody who lives here spends their week there. The year-round city sits inland of the Boulevard and it is ordinary in the best way: Socastee and Forestbrook (29588) with their carports and their boats on trailers, the older streets off Kings Highway, Carolina Forest (29579) full of school-run traffic on a Wednesday morning, Market Common (29577) where people walk dogs around Valor Park on the footprint of a closed air force base, Surfside Beach (29575) which calls itself the family beach and mostly means it, and Conway twelve miles up US-501, a river town with a courthouse and old oaks that predates the resort by a century and a half. Up the coast, Atlantic Beach in 29582 is its own incorporated town — one of very few beach communities in the South owned and governed by African Americans, wedged between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach and fiercely separate from both. This is the Myrtle Beach a just-because delivery actually goes to. It is also a city where a very large share of residents arrived recently and know almost nobody: Horry County has been among the fastest-growing counties in the United States for two decades straight, and a no-reason bouquet does a disproportionate amount of work on a street where half the households moved in during the last five years.
The occasions that are not occasions have a particular local flavour here, and three of them are worth naming. First, the hurricane-season thank-you. Evacuation is a real part of life on this coast — Horry County runs lettered evacuation zones, and the state has reversed the lanes of US-501 to push traffic inland out of Myrtle Beach when a serious storm has come at the Strand. What follows a storm is a long list of quiet favours: the neighbour who moved your patio furniture, the one who stayed behind and sent you a photograph of your own roof, the friend in Conway who took your dog for nine days. In 2018, when the Waccamaw River rose after Hurricane Florence and cut the US-501 corridor between Conway and Myrtle Beach, those favours went on for weeks. Flowers afterwards say the thing a text does not. Second, the snowbird goodbye in April. Thousands of people from Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan spend the cold months here, and the friendships formed over five winters in the same condo building get a farewell every spring when the caravan heads north — an arrangement to a departing neighbour a day before they load the car is a very Grand Strand order. Third, the parent who retired here alone. This coast is full of people in their seventies who moved south for the weather and buried a spouse afterwards, whose children are in another state. Flowers on a random Thursday are the version of a phone call that stays in the room for a week.