Credit Andrew Moore for The New York Times The sands found Destin first. They started off eons ago, from the Appalachian Mountains, washing their way down the rivers that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Winnowed to pure, hardy quartz, the sediment moved with the gulf’s currents and gathered into the necklace of narrow barrier islands that buffer ’s Panhandle. Time and tides refined the sand into a soft, sun-bleached powder. By the 1830s, when a Yankee sea captain named Leonard Destin sailed down to the wilderness of the Florida Territory, he discovered as dazzling and white as a fresh blanket of snow. The sight evidently impressed the captain, for his reaction — like that of so many migrants who followed — was to claim a piece of the shore.

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Destin landed, built a Colonial-style house and started a fishing business, becoming the first recorded white settler in the beach town that now bears his name. For a long time after that, very little changed in the community of Destin. Well into the 1970s, the town still had fewer than 2,000 full-time residents and was traversed by just one east-west thoroughfare, a two-lane highway with shoulders made of crushed seashells. But then word got out about its emerald green water, its mountainous dunes and, most of all, that sugary sand. Beachgoers arrived, followed by developers, who swiftly set about bulldozing Destin’s pine barrens to build condominiums, amusement parks, resorts and luxury outlet malls, swelling the property-tax base to $4.5 billion. Flush with new tourism revenues, the town fathers adopted a sanguine civic motto: Destin was, they declared, “the world’s luckiest fishing village.” Among Destin’s many blessings was a gift of coastal dynamics.

There’s an old saying that buying property is wise, because God isn’t making any more of it. But that didn’t seem to hold true in Destin. Because of the complexities of currents and bathymetry, the gulf kept bringing its beaches more sand. In the early 1980s, there was a major brouhaha over what to do with 60-some acres that had accreted to a peninsular spit called Holiday Isle, newfound land that was claimed by developers, and though that was an extreme case, all along the coast beaches were growing wider and more alluring.

The Panhandle is conservative country, closer to Alabama than, and the desires of property owners were seldom contravened. As speculators strung the coastline with hulking condo construction, only a few longtime residents remained wary of the folly of staking out shifting sands.

One winter evening, I met a gray-bearded former fisherman named Dewey Destin — Leonard’s great-great-grandson and an elected councilman in his namesake town — at a seafood restaurant he operates on one of the family’s old pieces of waterfront. Gesturing out across a harbor toward Holiday Isle, he told me that before the development boom, “people didn’t build over there, because only a fool would live over there, because would wash whatever you built away.” When he was in high school, in the late 1960s, kids threw campfire parties out on the deserted peninsula.

“You look at it now,” Destin said. “You can see all the high-rises.” And sure enough, a few of the developments over there were in danger of falling into the ocean, as waves encroached on their foundations. The town’s luck had suffered a reversal: the sand nature had given, it was taking away. Nexus 2 refx.