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.

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?

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.

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. 

A month from now we’ll know if there will be a course correction politically, as many hope, though how many will back up that hope by voting — presumably for a more evenhanded, more thoughtful, less lacerating society — remains to be seen. I hope there’ll be a record midterm turnout.

In an age when it is abundantly obvious that people must act more in concert with one another than against one another, the earth’s health and the health of the people who live on it being paramount, nationalism, born of fear, is raising its hateful head again.

“Don’t talk to me about the environment,” my late stepfather once said, drawing the word out at length, especially the second syllable, and eliding it with the third. 

But it occurs to me what else other than our surroundings — surroundings of which we are, while we’re here, a part — is there to talk about? It’s all about the environment, in fact, and our environment, the state of nature, the state of the world, seems to be suffering, even while agreeing that it is our lot, much more than it should.

If language is humankind’s best gift, then we ought to treat it better, rather than debase it so as many do now, “social media” being one of the prime offenders in that regard, or if not an offender in and of itself, a preferred channel, then, for offenders who are committing lingual assault in the first degree. 

We talk of values and the need to defend them, but you wonder every now and then what it is we’re defending. The right to proclaim our pre-eminence in the world? The right to threaten others (when they’re downwind of us) with thermonuclear annihilation? The right to belittle, to demean, to foam at the mouth, to preen, to prate — as in “Make America Prate Again” — to debase public discourse?

I see few examples of the evenhandedness, reason, and well-considered actions that so interested this society’s founders, our birthright, really, values which deserve allegiance and which deserve defending. Let’s revive them again.

I am an admitted clotheshorse. I remember what I was wearing for most of the momentous and semi-momentous occasions in my life. I have already written about my two wedding dresses (for one wedding), but I also remember exactly the bridesmaid dress I wore to my friend Jane’s wedding when I was 17 and home from college for the occasion. 

Am I a rarity? A frippery? A flibbertigibbet? An airhead? In the shallow end of the gene pool? Maybe, but I sure have some fun stuff to think about as I peruse the closets of my past.

I remember what I wore to my first day of high school (black sweater set borrowed from my mother, slate blue straight skirt, Capezio black suede skimmer flats, pointy toes), important because for eight years I had been in a school uniform (navy blue, white shirt, navy blue knee socks). 

I remember what I wore at sleepaway camp. My first shorts were red, navy, and turquoise and I had white T-shirts and white sneakers. I remember what my eighth-grade graduation dress looked like (white piqué with narrow lace insert at the waist, semi-full skirt), what I wore when I graduated from high school in 1962 (beige linen sheath, front pleats, buttoned up the back, sleeveless), and what I wore to my graduation party that night (an Indian-print sleeveless shift, very bohemian, and thong sandals, ditto). 

I remember what I wore on my first date with the man who eventually broke my heart (purple camp shirt, olive green vintage Bermudas; we were taking a drive) and the first date with my future husband, who, by the way, did not ever break my heart (pale yellow cotton sweater, Yves Saint Laurent pleated-front pale yellow gabardine trousers, no bra; it was 1981).

I remember what my college graduation dress looked like (white shift dress from DiPinna, sleeveless, white sling-back Pappagallo shoes), and I remember the first little black dress I ever owned, where I went in it, and with whom I went (10th grade, school play at Collegiate School, Loel Morwood).

I remember almost my complete wardrobe from a three-month car trip around Europe with my first very serious boyfriend, Ralph Bogertman, in the late ’60s, when trousers were frowned upon for traveling young women. I took five little dresses and washed them in the sink and dried them on the back seat of the car. One was navy blue with white dots, one was vermillion, with cut-in armholes and a great A-line swing, one was a subdued tan poplin shift. Do I need to continue? This was 1966 and very swinging London. 

I remember every vintage fur coat I bought at the Ridge Trading Company on Great Jones Street, back in the day before that area was cool. I remember every Marimekko dress I ever owned and the ones that got away. 

I know what I was wearing in Pompeii when my late husband and I traveled from Rome with a car and driver. I remember what I wore in Venice and what I wore climbing the Duomo in Florence. I remember the bathing suits I wore on my scuba trips and what my custom-made quarter-inch wetsuit looked like (red and black, with a stenciled initial on the chest). I remember a Norma Kamali bathing suit that was red and white striped and was truly amazing. 

Some memories are jogged by photographs seen in albums, of course: the cocktail hat I wore for my entire fifth year of life in Peter Cooper Village.

I remember what I wore the first day I started working at Glamour magazine (long-sleeve navy blue silk shirt-dress, tied at the waist, with camel Pappagallo heels with navy blue toe) and what I wore my last day at that job 32 years later (tan Donna Karan pantsuit, white T-shirt, gold-ish Yves Saint Laurent sandals). 

I remember the first day I turned up the collar of a white shirt, and I have done it with every shirt since. It was the mid-’70s at Glamour magazine; Anne Shakeshaft did it and it looked great and I copied her.

To this day I could draw most of the clothes I have ever owned, and many of the shoes and boots and bowler hats and Annie Hall looks, and prairie skirts, and Victorian whites. I loved “le smoking” and I still embrace the look, though it doesn’t work so well outside of a city. 

I remember wearing tweed and lace to the first party I went to solo after my heart was broken, and what I wore to an infamous “red party” when I had recovered from that broken heart. 

I have dressed to please a boss (I got fired anyway) and to please a fella (he broke my heart anyway), so I gave that all up and I dress for me.

I have had fashion mistakes, and I remember them in detail, too. A hot pink wool coat was a fabulous success, à la Jackie Kennedy, but a pink strapless dress worn with turquoise satin heels was a total failure, as was a vintage purple Joan Crawford-type evening dress, which never played well with the chartreuse elbow-length gloves I decided to wear with it. I still cringe in afterthought.

I remember when I saw my first Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat (lipstick red) and I remember that I bought my first one the same day.

I can also draw, pretty accurately, the floor plans of every place I have ever lived. You might call me a visual rememberer. 

Why would that red prom dress I wore to a dance at Yale with George Frazier IV burn itself into the retina of my mind? And the pale turquoise chiffon semi-formal I wore to the sixth-form weekend at St. Mark’s School is as easy to conjure up as the boy, Ramsay Wood. I could draw that dress today, I remember it in such detail.

These outfits represent where I hung my hat, where I worked and lived, and with whom and without whom. The thread, the ribbon that ties it all together is what I wore, and why I wore it when I wore it.

And by the way, I still have that Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat, and almost 50 years later, it has never broken my heart.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star, the shopping guru behind its “Gimme” columns, and usually the most fashionable person in the room.

“Welcome to ‘Friday Night Lights,’ Dad,” our daughter Emily said as we walked — she with easy confidence, and I with mouth agape, stunned at the sight of so many, thousands upon thousands — toward Perrysburg High School’s football field, where the Yellowjackets (“Once a Jacket, Always a Jacket”) were playing the Panthers of Toledo’s Whitmer High School, whose quarterback was said to be Ben Roethlisberger’s nephew, a sophomore already being courted, so I was also told, by the University of Michigan.

Before we entered that stadium in northwestern Ohio, a stadium flanked by towering bleachers bursting at the seams with screaming fans and with even taller light towers transforming night into day, Emily made sure I shelled out for some proper Yellowjacket gear, a frenzied buying spree capped by a fistful of 50-50 raffle tickets. 

I almost got a nosebleed walking up to the top of the bleachers, which, when finally there, afforded a panoramic view not only of the field and of the scores of children (two of them Emily and Anderson’s) darting about in the shadows of the goalposts, but of the village of Perrysburg and the Maumee River that courses by it as well. My guesstimate is that there were 5,000 or so there that night, maybe more, which is to say about 20 percent of Perrysburg’s population. I had, as I said, never seen so many. And this didn’t include the bands, the cheerleaders, the dancers, and twirlers.

“It’s like the Roman legions,” I said as they marched onto the field at halftime. I half expected to see acrobats vaulting over the horns of bulls. In the headiness of it all, any caveat having to do with concussions fled from my temporal lobes.

And it wasn’t just football. The next day, in a small college town an hour of soybean farms away, junior high and high school boys and girls from 60 schools in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana swept wave upon wave out onto the green Tiffin Cross-Country Carnival’s courses as their parents, coaches, relatives, and friends full-throatedly urged them on.

The sense of fellowship — at the football game (the Yellowjackets lost, lopsidedly, but their twirler was fantastic) and at the cross-country races — was palpable, uplifting, an innocent joy you never wanted to end.

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.

If you are looking for a break from the bustle of the film festival this weekend, one of the more untrammeled options is the modest farm museum on North Main Street in East Hampton.

The museum is in an old farmhouse and focuses on ordinary life from the 1880s to the 1930s, a period of peace, war, growth, and rapid change. The last quarter of the 19th century brought artists to East Hampton; Winslow Homer made a pioneering visit in 1874. The rakish members of the Tile Club arrived in the summer of 1878, among them William Merritt Chase, Homer, John Twachtman, Stanford White, Alden Weir, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The East Hampton Star printed its first edition in December 1885. Train travel from New York City to East Hampton began 10 years later, in part to serve a burgeoning summer colony up by the beach.

But the farm museum is less concerned with these milestones than in the anonymous lives of the town’s ordinary residents. It was with pleasure that I accepted an open-ended offer from its organizers to speak on Sunday during a community turkey dinner. 

My thought was to speak about the value of history and to say that the past is not only important on its own but for what it says about the present. East Hampton has long been going around in what I think of as a history cul-de-sac, obsessing over the leading families, the ones that got here in the 17th century. But that leaves out a lot.

Three hundred and seventy years ago, when the first English colonists came across the Sound from Connecticut to establish this beachhead, the last names were nine in all: Barnes, Bond, Hand, Howe, Mulford, Rose, Stratton, Talmadge, and Thomson. 

Recollections of a number of their descendants have faded. But some have not, and for those of us who have ties to the old families, things get complicated pretty quick trying to figure out the genealogies. When I was at East Hampton High School the joke was that those of us who went way back would call each other “Cuz,” as in cousin — and we probably were if you looked back far enough. In middle school and later, I went out on dates with a distant relative. It was no big deal, even if the kids from away gave us grief about it.

Of course, those early colonists worked hard and were part of the foundation of the American experiment, but they were just part of the story. The muscle and sweat that built East Hampton and the New England colonies, what would one day be the United States, was not just this handful of “upstreet” folks. There were native people, people of African descent, and scores of families that moved here for one reason or another. 

The last names were Bennett and Lester, Halsey, Dominy, Field, Filer,  Gann, Hicks, King, Loper, Payne, Schellinger. There were Sherrills, Strongs, Tillinghasts, Vails, and Van Scoys. There were the Pharaohs, Cuffees, Fowlers, and Lynches, Cards, Iaconos, DiGates, Bistrians, Motts, Andersons, Schencks, Bahnses, Pittses, Eckers, Duryeas, Joneses, Hayeses, and Carters, and on and on.

History is a lot more than just stories about the leading men. And that is what I think the farm museum is so good at — pointing out that everyone in his or her own way contributed to what East Hampton is today. And that this is a story that keeps writing itself.

“Only two more weeks,” I said to the young woman at the liquor store, who, I thought, did not entirely comprehend. 

Scott Rubenstein wanted to know exactly what I meant when I’d said there was no summer here. “No summer as it is traditonally known,” I said. “You know, when you’re lying dreamily in the hayloft on a late summer afternoon and the air is redolent with the effluvium of cow manure.” Ou sont les étés d’antan?

Speaking of which, we — well, most of us — got it wrong in last week’s column when, owing to a last-minute editorial snafu, it came out that the fellow perched on a tree in Fellini’s “Amarcord,” had cried out, “Voglio una donne!”

“No,” Aldo, with whom I was playing tennis a few days later, said. “It’s ‘voglio una donna.’ ” 

I had initially written “dona,” and that’s where the trouble began. The plural of “donna” was “donne,” Aldo said, and, clearly, Mariolater that I am, I hadn’t meant to say, in Italian, or in any other language for that matter, “I want women!”

Mary is quite enough, all I’ve ever wished for, the paradigm of her gender, beautiful for one, I never tire of looking at her, a boon companion for another, I never tire of talking with her — it used to be thought almost obscene by other family members.  

She is, in brief, true blue, and we are most times wonderfully linked, but she sometimes is baffled by my waspy indirection — as am I — and by its tendency to set us apart, as if at times I were creating a gated community of one.

Ah, but once I’ve thought about things and have acknowledged that my habitual reaction is to scuttle sideways whenever called to account — Mr. Mercer didn’t call me “Mr. Responsibility” in high school for nothing — there is, I’m happy to say, reconciliation — what, in fact, we all want. 

Steve Sigler spoke to me about this years ago, in the last interview I had with him. Mozart, whose music gave him joy, was all about reconciliation, he said. No wonder, he said, that Mozart had died so young. 

Reconciliation: That is all ye need to know.