Among the pleasures of a late summer day here is being at the beach and watching small shorebirds race to pick food from the wet sand as each wave recedes. As the next wave advances, they dance up the beach, returning in a seeming instant to probe again with their beaks.

Plovers and sandpipers live at top speed, as befits birds that follow migration routes twice a year that can reach many thousands of miles. In miniature, their bursts of flight from one place to the next along the water line, like confetti shot from a cannon, give a hint of their lives on a hemispheric and global scale.

World Shorebirds Day, as declared by a group of British birders, is today, with bird counts by individuals and organizations accepted through Tuesday. Here, Frank Quevedo, the director of the South Fork Natural History Museum, is leading a count beginning this morning, the third SoFo has done.

The idea is that annual tallies by volunteers and professionals around the world can provide details about the birds’ distribution and population trends, and pinpoint species in need of greater conservation effort. As this is a digital age, checklists can be submitted by a smartphone app, ebird, available for IOS and Android.

On a still, muggy morning this week, I was disappointed not to see a single shorebird on the Gardiner’s Bay beach. Five or six cormorants lingered on the wooden swim raft floating out front; maybe 25 more had staked out the nearby pound trap and were arrayed at wings’ length along the lines and stakes. On the beach itself, immature gulls of differing size stood impassively.

On most September days there are at least a few sandpipers around. That morning, with only the high-pitched love songs of insects on the air, nothing seemed to move, not even the water. Given the threats to shorebirds from all sides — habitat loss, climate change, competition from other species — it is difficult not to worry when none cuts through the stillness with a shrill call or the soft beat of its wings.

For reasons that I think require explanation, I have never registered as a member of a political party. To put it simply, I was the editor of this paper for more than 20 years and thought it quite enough to have an opportunity to express opinions large and small in print, including who should be elected or re-elected to local or national office. 

Not being on a political roster also was an attempt to appear nonpartisan, to set The Star apart as well as keep it away from the internecine warfare that sometimes occurs within majority parties. Over the years, however, I have been criticized for obfuscation: The Star’s reputation has almost always been described as liberal, so who did I think I was fooling?

David Rattray, The Star’s editor for the last 15 years, writes its editorials, and has honored me by giving me a look before they are published. We’ve a collegial relationship; I respect what he has to say, and if there is an occasion when I disagree strongly with his point of view, we talk it out. 

This sounds enlightened, I suppose, but when heated controversies come along, I often wish I had a direct voice. Let’s face it; it has been a long time since the East Hampton Town Board was politically divided. If the heart of the debate is taking place within a majority party, it’s pulling punches to stay out of the ring, right?

It turns out that a number of friends who used to vote in New York City have taken my advice (and my husband’s) and registered to vote here. It was easy to convince them their votes would count more here than in thoroughly Democratic Manhattan. I also would argue that if they were aghast that the Trumpist Lee Zeldin was entrenched as the First Congressional District’s representative, voting here was imperative.

There also are two strong factions among Democrats vying for control of East Hampton Town government facing off in a Democratic primary next week. David Gruber, a longtime mover and shaker here, is considered the Reform Democrats candidate, while David Lys, who is new to political candidacy, is pegged as the Establishment Democrat. 

The Star’s letters to the editor prove this is a hot-button issue. There were 14 letters about Gruber and Lys among the 37 in the Aug. 30 edition, with another 28 among the 52 (yes, 52) letters this week. My guess is that more will come in even though there will be no opportunity for them to be published before the primary, Sept. 13. 

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, recently explained political philosophy this way: When a group used to controversy has sole control it invariably finds an adversary.

Perhaps it is just as well that I remain unregistered.

On Tuesday morning, I took a shower with a clam rake; it made sense at the time. I had just come up from the bay after a swim and needed to rinse off the salt. So, too, did the rake.

Old-time lore is that you should not eat oysters during months without an “R” in them, that is, May through August. Modern refrigeration and health departments have undercut that advice, but as far as personal shellfish digging, as opposed to commercial, there is something questionable about picking oysters, clams, and such from tepid, olive-brown water.

The East Hampton Town Trustees recently closed Georgica Pond after a toxic algae bloom was noticed there. Most of the time, the pond is open to crabbing, despite pretty regular indications of perhaps more disturbing bacterial contamination. This never stops the crabbers, however. 

Out in the boat the other day, my son, Ellis, who is 8, asked me if there were crabs that could swim. Yes, there are, I told him.

The blue-clawed ones we catch at the dock can do so. Most of the rest of the crabs he knows, especially the monstrous spider crabs feasted upon by black-back gulls on the beach in front of our house, do not swim.

Ellis’s question got me thinking about going crabbing — then not going crabbing until the water cools next month. The problem is that by late September, all the obvious spots are crabbed out. Ellis and I went last year at about that time and all we caught on our submerged chicken necks was a single, enormously fat eel, which quickly wriggled out of the net, accompanied by our shouts. 

I saw a photograph the other day of a massive blue claw whose pincers would span a garbage can lid. Apparently, Callinectes sapidus, or beautiful swimmers, do just fine amid the toilet flushings of the super-rich. As for me, I tend to hold off until September at the earliest: You know, a month with “R” in it.

Labor Day weekend is going to hit me like a ton of bricks. I can’t help feeling I let summer go by without taking enough advantage of its possibilities. Did I get to the ocean when it was calm enough for the likes of me? Did I meet up with the best of friends who are rarely here in fall or winter? Did I attend some humdinger social or political offerings? It would have been an absolutely crazy summer if I had tried to get out and about to every enticing event; the Guild Hall calendar alone was mind-boggling.

When I ran into Andrea Grover, Guild Hall’s executive director, in the lobby one evening in August, she suggested with a laugh that it might be time to put a cot in the basement for me because I was there so often. That seemed close to true at the time, although to be fair I live only a hop away across Main Street, and, furthermore, a quick glance at Guild Hall’s stuffed summer 2018 book gives proof that my forays were quite humble.

Nevertheless, it’s true that I was at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater on July 29, Aug. 4, Aug. 5, and Aug. 8. The program on July 29 brought together Neil deGrasse Tyson, the well-known astrophysicist and writer, and Questlove, an instrumentalist, D.J., journalist, record producer, and actor, for a rapid back and forth about creativity. Whoever made this match, whether Andrea or another, struck gold.

On Aug. 4, I was pleased to be there when Andrew W. Kahrl, an assistant professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, spoke at a gathering planned by the Eastville Community Historical Society about summer communities founded by American blacks, like the three long-standing communities of Azurest, Ninevah, and Sag Harbor Hills. Residents of these communities filled the hall, enjoying not only what Mr. Kahrl had to say but a 40th-anniversary video.

The next night was a concert by Bela Fleck, who apparently is the most revered banjo instrumentalist ever, and on Aug. 8 The Star’s East magazine took over for “Vengeance,” a program about mass incarceration and the criminal justice system. Whew.

Without these opportunities, the summer might, I am sorry to say, have had a lugubrious effect. The problem is that my husband and I are aging, and so are many of our friends. The good news is that despite a series of physical setbacks, one friend had enough stick-to-it-iveness and stamina to overcome them and is avidly playing chess again. Another, I learned just this morning, is out of the hospital, to which he had been sent after a fall, and “doing quite well.”

There’s only one thing to say: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

So you think your operation was bizarre? Let me tell you about mine.

In the middle of an otherwise uneventful yearly checkup, with that little hammer thingy in his hand that doctors use to test your knee-jerk reflexes, mine frowned. “I’m going to push down on your thigh,” he said. “Try to push it up against me.”

I couldn’t. Half an inch, maybe. 

“Have you felt tired lately? Fatigued?” 

Well, I said, it was taking a lot longer to climb up the two steps onto the bus, but I’d just turned 50, so that was to be expected. Wasn’t it?

It turned out that I had Graves disease — hyperthyroidism, an overactive thyroid gland. It isn’t fatal — Barbara Bush, wife of George, mother of George W., was diagnosed with it in 1989 and died five months ago at 92 — but it’s certainly not one of life’s pleasures. 

Swallowing radioactive iodine is the most common treatment, but for more people who go that route than not, the pendulum will swing 180 degrees and they’ll become hypothyroid and have to keep taking pills for the rest of their lives to stave off lethargy, weight gain, mood swings, exhaustion, and more. Or, there are two kinds of pills you can take. “Side effects of both include rash, joint pain, liver failure, or a decrease in disease-fighting white blood cells,” says the Mayo Clinic website. No thank you.

The doctor advised surgery. I agreed. It seemed to have the least scary after effects. 

The hospital where the operation was performed was under renovation at the time, and some of the operating rooms had been moved temporarily to the basement. After a very long ride on a gurney, down one elevator, through murky passages where dementors could have been right at home, down another elevator, we emerged into a very long, very cold, subterranean room where all of the hospital’s infrastructure appeared to be housed. The ceiling of this cavern was lined with water pipes, which kept up a steady drip as we passed beneath. The sheet covering me got wet; so did my face.

They’d given me something upstairs that was making me drowsy, but what with the cold and the damp, I was still half-conscious when we stopped, which, as you shall see, was providential. 

People were talking above me but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Eventually the gurney started moving again, and as it did somebody in one of those shower caps they wear in operating rooms leaned over and said, quite clearly, “Welcome, Mrs. Barnett. Everything is going to be just fine.”

I could feel myself about to give in to whatever I’d been given and slip under, like an exhausted swimmer who’s fought a riptide for too long, but somehow I found my voice. Well, my mumble.

“Not — not — Barnett.”   

A different voice: “What’d she say?”

“Not sure. Now don’t you worry, Mrs. Barnett, everything is fine.”

“Not — Barnett.” The gurney was still moving. Inspiration, born of desperation, struck. I eased my left wrist, with the hospital bracelet on it, out of the sheet and flapped it at them weakly. Somebody took hold of my hand. The gurney stopped.

People began talking in hushed voices on both sides of the stretcher. Now I really was losing consciousness, but I felt it being turned around and then starting to roll again. The last thing I heard as I drifted away was, “You’re very lucky, Mrs., uh, Silverman. This is neurosurgery.”

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

Digging opened Saturday for the East Hampton Town Trustees 2018 Largest Clam Contest. I should say officially opened, since it is my well-nursed suspicion that somecompetitors prospect for potential prizewinners all summer long, reserving the heftiest quahogs in deep hidey-holes for a shot at September glory.

The winning clams are big all right, as big as your head almost. I’ve never seen the like, and I’ve been clamming on and off for over about 50 years. Damned if I know where the really huge ones are found — other than Napeague, from where, without fail, comes the crowning bivalve.

Other than glory and bragging rights, there is no big money or valuable prize. Still, the story goes that one year when someone entered a Napeague clam claiming it was from one of the lesser harbor categories, the sharp-eyed judges were able to pick out the fraud. I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t there.

On Sunday, the day after digging officially opened, as I said, Ellis and I and my oldest friend, Mike Light, headed out in the boat to a favorite flat with our rakes. The clamming was slow at first as it often is. Mike pulled up a few near where we had anchored. But the action wasn’t active enough for me, so I went prospecting. Closer to shore, I felt the bottom change — softer, with a layer of fine gravel on top. I jammed the rake down. One, then two, then three. “Hey guys,” I shouted, “I’ve hit the mother lode!”

There is an odd thing about clamming. Once you hit a good vein, it is near impossible to force yourself to stop. As our baskets filled, I went to the boat to grab an official trustees clam bag, into which I transferred them by the dozen. Still we could not pull back.

“I am going to put my rake in the boat,” I promised, pausing three times to scratch up a few more. Mike begged me to take the rake out of his hands. Ellis could not be stopped. With sunburned backs, even after we had stowed the gear aboard, we kept at it, probing in the sand with our fingers and toes, cramming clams into our swim shorts pockets.

We won’t know until the contest Sunday whether the fat, nearly pure white clam that Mike found or a thick, mean-looking number of Ellis’s will be in contention. They are safely in one of those hidey-holes keeping hydrated until we enter them in advance of the deciding weigh-in.

The rest of our 50-pound haul has various obligations to look forward to in the kitchen: clams casino, clam chowder, clam fritters. That is, other than the two dozen we had for lunch over linguine an hour after getting home from the boat; they are already gone. Ah, September. 

They say “The Bookshop” is boring, which, of course, quickened my pulse. I have loved boring movies for years, and, in fact, once suggested that a new studio, M.B.M. (More Boring Movies), be formed to market them. 

Americans as a rule love action, blood, explosions, guts, glory, though it’s not particularly my cup of tea, “Godless,” whose women really could shoot straight, being an exception. 

In other respects, though, I’m typically American, a lover of sport first and foremost as the surest way to salvation. 

“Ah, you ran the 800!” I’ll say to a mother of two whom I wrote about in her high school days. 

“I remember you at the age of 6 crying when your pom-pom got rolled up in the mat at a gymnastics class,” I’ll say to another, now the stepmother of a terrific high school long-distance runner. 

“Mr. Graves,” still another will say, on running into me on the street 20 or so years after having graduated, “you misspelled my name throughout my high school career.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “I’ll run a correction this week.” 

(Indeed, it would probably take an entire issue to run corrections of all the errors I’ve made over the course of a 50-plus-year career — an interesting idea when you come to think of it, and that I have come to think of it on Yom Kippur seems to me especially serendipitous. I must atone, I must atone. . . .)

Anyway, it’s by their sports that I know the younger generation — younger generations, I should say. It’s how I stay connected.

I remain connected to my for-the-most-part boyhood home through the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, though, as we’ve been reminded lately when it comes to the Steelers, it’s not so much “the Steel Curtain” as it is the Steel Sieve, and the extracurricular carrying-on among some of the players has risen to the level of low farce. “The centre cannot hold,” I sighed, as Russell Bennett commiserated, “especially when it comes to kicking field goals and points-after.”

However, locally it is wonderful to consider the season that is upon us. I don’t think I ever remember a fall when so many of the high school’s teams were so compelling. As I’ve said, you don’t have to win all the time to catch my attention, just make it interesting. And this from one who loves boring movies. Go figure.

The busy season was over, or so we thought, when two events proved otherwise. One was a screening of “Jane Fonda in Five Acts,” a documentary that jammed Guild Hall on Saturday night even though it was soon to be available on HBO. The other was a very well-attended talk by Sebastian Junger, a writer and filmmaker of international renown, at a private gathering in East Hampton Village.

Ms. Fonda was not here for the screening, but the audience was clearly happy to be able to hear a lively Q. and A. with Susan Lacy, who directed and produced the film, and Alec Baldwin. 

Mr. Junger, who has traveled over and over to places of conflict and lived to tell about them, came to support the South Bronx Documentary Center, a relatively new organization that trains young people, teenagers in particular, in writing and photojournalism. Mr. Junger grew up in the Bronx, and said the time had come for him to step away from the wars he has witnessed and to foster storytelling by young people as necessary tools of change. 

Mr. Junger’s most well-known book is probably “The Perfect Storm,” which was made into a film. It is about a 1991 storm along the East Coast that resulted in physical damages estimated at $200 million, the loss of power to an estimated 38,000 households, and 13 deaths, including six aboard the Andrea Gail, a fishing vessel that left Gloucester, Mass., and sank off the Grand Banks. 

Among his films is “Restrepo,” a full-length documentary made with a partner, the photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed in pursuit of a story in Afghanistan.  

For Mr. Junger, the human search for meaning in life is not about belonging or loyalty. He has been quoted saying, “It’s about why — for many people — war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Humans don’t mind duress, in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary.”

And then it was time to grab tickets to the Hamptons International Film Festival, which runs from Oct. 4 to 8. The festival’s program guide — which The Star publishes and distributes every year — contains information on the 68 films that will be screened this year, and it was no mean feat to try to digest enough details on each to make an informed decision on which we would like best to see. I think next year we will get organized with a flow chart and online calendar! Although tickets for HIFF are sold online, by Monday morning a long line stretched down Main Street as wannabe filmgoers waited for the box office at Obligato boutique to open its doors at noon.

Tumbleweed Tuesday has come and gone. HIFF ends on Columbus Day, but it is likely that many part-timers will stretch their stays into that shortened workweek. Pumpkin Town in Water Mill will soon swell with crowds. I’m not sure when the peace and quiet of autumn will return to the South Fork, but perhaps calm will reign by November?

A dead whale washed up at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett on Monday. Another hit the beach east of the Maidstone Club yesterday. Predictably much of the response was downcast. “Sad,” some said, implying that human activity in the sea was to blame. 

Maybe it was the hand of man that killed this particular whale, a minke, or maybe it was not. The cause could be determined conclusively after a study of its carcass and tissues by biologists. Like all living creatures, though, death must come, and a hard east wind like the one we have been having on and off for the past week will drive some of them ashore.

Time was that drift whales, as they were called, were of tremendous importance here. In the early days of the East Hampton plantation, there were few laws, but a good number of them, as well as agreements with the native inhabitants, concerned whales found along the beach.

 The 1648 deed for East Hampton executed with the local sachems reserved for them the “fynns and tails of allsuch whales as shall be cast upp.” Moreover, the colonists agreed to pay 5 shillings to any Indian who found a whale. Unequal treatment was true from the beginning, though; a white “man of ye Towne” would be entitled to a piece of the valuable blubber three feet wide.

At the Town Meeting of November the 6, 1651, John Mulford was ordered to “call ont ye towne by succession to loke out for whale.” Two months later it took a Town Meeting to resolve a dispute over how a whale would be divided among residents. 

Wyandanch, the sachem of Long Island, put his mark on a deal by which Thomas James, the town minister, would get “one halfe of all the whales or other great fish shall at any tyme bee cast up uppon the Beach from Napeake Eastward to the end of the Lland. . . .” Lion Gardiner, of the island that bears his name, would get the other half. What, if anything, Wyandanch got was not described. 

James and Gardiner, perhaps the leading citizens of the time, were exempt from the communal dirty business of cutting up whales. Instead, they were to “give A quart of licker a peece to the cutters. . . .”

Whales were valuable enough at the time that debts could be settled with their oil or bone, the baleen. And they were valuable enough that the Town Court was called to settle several disagreements in the early days, including one in 1674 when James Loper sought redress after John Combes stole a portion of a whale from Loper’s cart. Combes countersued, claiming that Loper had snatched up bone and whale that belonged to him. 

Town Meeting in about that time established a law dealing with whales found floating dead without visible marks of a wound from a harpoon. By then the men were busy with the chase during whale season from small boats, and under the sharp eye of the watch, dead whales could be claimed well before they ever hit the shore.

These days, after the biologists’ work is done, whales are loaded onto a truck and taken off for incineration. As far as I know, none of the Montauketts living in this area has asked for their promised fins and tails for hundreds of years.

Ellis came home with ticks the other day. He had been on a nature walk with his thirdgrade science class when someone bolted from the path into the leaf litter to inspect something interesting. Accounts vary about who led the charge, but several reliable sources pointed to my son.

Word came around dinnertime from Ellis’s teacher, Julie Browning, that a parent had discovered the tiny menaces on her child. Ellis submitted more or less willingly to a full-body check, with me peering through a magnifying glass.

Tick larvae at this stage of development are small, but not all that difficult to find. Though I cannot see them even with my reading glasses on, they generally can be found sitting atop a red, raised bump, like a lone, proud mountain goat on a crag. 

My approach, with the magnifier in my left hand and fine tweezers in my right, is to pull the things free then wipe the tick from the tweezers’ tip onto a piece of duct tape where they can be counted. This time, Ellis served up five from below the belt. 

One of the odd things about these diminutive attackers is that unconscious scratching can work them loose, and they will often creep away in search of a more private place to have their supper. This I believe is why many people around here are convinced that chiggers or something else is hatching in their skin — multiple itchy bites give rise to all sorts of assumptions.

My hypothesis about the things’ movable feasting came late this spring, when, going to bed, I noticed the telltale welts. Then, alone, I spent the next hour or more clamping a cellphone for its flashlight between my teeth, while trying to get the magnifier and tweezers into position. 

We can laugh about ticks. Certainly they have provided endless inspiration for Peter Spacek’s weekly cartoons in The Star. But they are no laughing matter. I have had the lone star tick-caused meat allergy since the 1990s. Innumerable people here have been laid low by Lyme disease. The Vineyard Gazette reported last week that a seasonal resident died in August of tularemia, possibly contracted from a tick bite he sustained while cutting brush in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.

At this point, I tend to view ticks as a fact of life — and try to remember to check the kids for them whenever they slow down enough for a thorough inspection.