A group of us were on the beach Sunday night watching the sunset over the hills across the bay as a sound like thunder rolled across the water. Because it was not quite dark, our assumption was that it could not be fireworks, and no distant sparks could be seen on the horizon, and some among our group of picnickers assumed the end was nigh.

I am only half-kidding. Though I declared that it was likely the rumbling had come from a festival finale in Greenport, someone pulled out a cellphone to check if the North Koreans had attacked Connecticut.

It has been a long time since fear of potential devastation swept the country, and I am not sure that the current foolishness between President Trump and Kim Jong-un really counts. Still, the thought did collectively cross our minds, as we sat and watched the sky change, that missiles could be flying.

In 1991, as the United States military and its allies began retaking Kuwait with a barrage of missiles and bombs, a single thunderclap rang out over East Hampton Village. Watching the news on television in the apartment I lived in at the time near Hook Mill, I felt my heart drop.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans were sure that terrorists were about to attack everywhere and anywhere. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited a close friend here because someone had heard him talking about a visit to Iran. During the anthrax mail scare the same year, some people opened their letters outdoors wearing protective clothing and respirators. There was a run on pharmacies for Cipro, an antibiotic that could fight the toxin.

It was with a familiar, if long sleeping, sense of dread that our sunset dinner suddenly turned ominous. Intellectually, we knew that North Korea’s long-range arsenal, if it works at all, could reach only into the far Pacific, not halfway around the globe, and was not able to target anything we might notice from Amagansett.

During the Cold War, as we did our duck and cover drills at East Hampton Middle School, we thought the submarine base across the Sound at Groton might be something that the Soviet Union would want to destroy in an all-out nuclear exchange. Still, huddling in the basement, in my memory, we were hardly scared at all.

Now, as adults, perhaps the world seems more frightening. More than 20 years of violent surprises, culminating when terrorists flew jet aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, leaves us perpetually on edge. It is strange, yet perhaps not surprising, that some noises off the north at dusk can make us worry for a moment that some new war has begun, as far fetched as that may be.

“Don’t play it again, ’Nam,” I said to Mary as we agreed we weren’t up to watching what I’m sure is a very well done, years in the making Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

The lessons should have long ago been learned, though, admittedly, they probably need learning again, the most important being not to act rashly lest you (and many others) get burned. 

Our extraordinary military might ought to have made us humble, and yet it seems the opposite has occurred, as in “My stockpile’s bigger than your stockpile, my stockpile’s bigger than yours. . . .” Oppenheimer tried to nip a nuclear arms race in the bud, but Truman was deaf to his entreaties, writing the father of the A-bomb off as a wimp. We were the sole nuclear power for a few minutes, then the genie was out of the bottle and we were off to the races.

Will brains or brawn win out, Buckminster Fuller wondered. We’re still wondering . . . well, maybe we’re not.

The obituary of a Soviet officer whose gut instinct (and distrust of a hastily put together early warning computer system) prevented what could well have been a nuclear war in 1983 was in the paper the other day. It was, he said in later years, at best a 50-50 guess. Should the U.S.S.R. counter what appeared to be five Minuteman missiles heading its way? Given just a few minutes to decide, he concluded that if the U.S. were really serious it would have launched many more than five, and so, bless him, he guessed right — the satellite had misread the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds as a launch! We should remember this close brush with Armageddon, and we should remember his name: Stanislav Petrov. Maybe we should put up a monument to him at the U.N. “To Stanislav Petrov, whose cool-headedness in the Cold War prevented World War Three.” Will cool heads or hotheads win out? That is the question, now more than ever. We know nothing of great importance apparently of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, except that he is pretty ruthless, as dictators are wont to be, and is an avid basketball fan. Dennis Rodman might be of value in that regard — a mutual exchange of touring N.B.A. and tae kwon do teams trumping an exchange of missiles in most people’s minds, I would guess. By contrast, we know quite a bit about our leader, and are about equally as dismayed. 

Most people, the everyday, average, normal sort, would rather there were no nukes, I imagine, but, given their prevalence, and the distrust that exists among nations, nuclear disarmament is wishful thinking, I’m afraid. (And, yes, I am afraid.)

It’s not wishful thinking, however, to ask that the world’s chiefs of state think, that they not think the unthinkable, and that they remember Stanislav Petrov.

Because Helen Harrison is an expert on 20th-century Ame­rican art and has written about it, her latest book should not have come as a surprise. On the other hand, what would your reaction have been upon first encountering her first work of fiction, a paperback novel called “An Exquisite Corpse,” with a cover drawing of a figure wearing a dark mask with a chicken foot on one leg, a boot on one hand, and an umbrella in the other? Surprise! 

 Ms. Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, where Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, lived and worked, has just published an engaging and hilarious whodunit peopled with characterizations of well-known Surrealists and familiar members of the art world, their lovers, and a good number of cops and robbers.

“An Exquisite Corpse” is based on a parlor game that the Surrealists are said to have played. The game involves passing a piece of paper on which you write some words or do a drawing and then fold so what you have done cannot be seen by the next person to get it. Ms. Harrison provided her exquisite corpse with just such an inexplicable outfit (and must have had fun doing so).

Andre Breton, a Surrealist who wrote its “manifesto,” has said the game, like the artwork itself, was “designed to provide the most paradoxical confrontation possible” between elements. It is he who sets the story in motion, finding a fellow artist, the Cuban Wilfredo Lam, sprawled dead wearing a bizarre costume that might have been drawn in such a game.

The book is self-published, which has limited the critical attention it has received, and that’s too bad, especially among those interested in the Surrealists and Greenwich Village of the 1920s, who recognize such artists’ hangouts as the Cedar Tavern, and who are familiar with art world figures such as, for example, Roberto Matta, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Harold Rosenberg. They all play a part. 

Ms. Harrison’s characters speak and behave personally in ways that seem thoroughly appropriate, given what is known of their real lives. She also manages to give them secretive, fictionalized roles in a smuggling operation, on which the story spins. Anne Matta, one of the artist’s real-life wives, is the key to the mystery. In the fiction, she absolves the artists of murder, while at the same time keeping their involvement in drug smuggling undiscovered. She even undoes the misimpression that a murder was committed.

Even though I spent a good part of the 20th century here and knew some of the figures in this book, I didn’t remember the work of Wilfredo Lam, although he was a prominent Surrealist whose idiosyncratic Afro-Cuban images were highly praised. The real Lam, whose background explains the mask that the fictional Lam was wearing when found dead, was a good target for fiction, although he did not die until 1982. 

Ms. Harrison, whose best known book until now is “Hamptons Bohemia,” reads a lot of mysteries and uses credible police lingo. She told me she often found what happens in the books she reads implausible, so she decided to write one herself. She’s working now on a sequel, although this time it’s a love story. 

I hope you are intrigued. “An Exquisite Corpse” is available at Amazon and BookHampton.

A week ago Sunday at Accabonac Harbor for a picnic, I announced to a friend that I was going to set off to search the shoreline for Native American stone tools. I had gotten excited about the prospect looking at images from the Montauk Indian Museum of arrowheads and other things picked up on the beach here and there. “I’ll be back shortly,” I said.

Seven minutes later, by my friend’s estimation, I was back, a white-quartz triangular tool about the size of a half-dollar in hand. I was pleased, but puzzled. It was an astonishingly beautiful thing, but was it legal for me to have picked it up?

New York law prohibits the collection of archaeological artifacts from state land without a permit. Where I was, inside Accabonac Harbor with my feet in the water, is East Hampton Town Trustee property, but as far as I can tell from a cursory look, trustee regulations and town law have nothing to say on the matter. If the trustees want to claim the stone point for their collection or want me to put it back where I found it, I will comply.

Meanwhile, I have the tool in my office, where I pick it up from time to time and wonder about its intended use. Two of its three corners are gone, though I can see from the fine and symmetrical edges that it was crafted with exceptional care. Holding it, I think about the person who made it and who might have used it and then discarded or lost it while hunting along the shore.

For thousands of years, native people lived and thrived and dreamed and died here, leaving behind indelible, if often overlooked, signs of their presence like the probable spear point now on my desk. To think that someone I will never know chipped this perfect thing out of a featureless stone and held it in hand so long ago simply fills me with awe.

So there we were in Pittsburgh, my eldest daughter and I, and she said why not go by the old house I had told her my mother and I had lived in, when I was 10 and she was 34, beginning again after a painfully sad divorce.

Three families lived in that house, at 5649 Northumberland, in 1950, the Bonavoglios upstairs, the Busicks downstairs — I think he was the super — and my mother and I in the middle, at the head of an impressive staircase, my bedroom on the landing side of some Japanese screens behind which my mother took refuge. 

Those were parlous, betwixt and between, times for her, literally, though that never dawned on me until I was much older, until Mary enlightened me. She had no skills to speak of, and had to make her own way, taking typing and stenography courses, the child support being meager, though I, oblivious, as usual, and preternaturally happy, perhaps obscenely so, have always thought of those days fondly when I had her all to myself. 

I looked across the street at the broad dark brick house with its high-set gray front porch, and said to Emily, yes, that was it. Rather than go up to the front door, however, we went down South Negley a ways and came at it through the alley (Pittsburgh has many of them), to three people working away in the back, a couple and an older man, who were instantly welcoming when I said I’d lived there some 70 years ago.

Come on in, she, Lauren Grim, said, and so with no further ado we did. All the partitions on the bottom floor were gone, it was opened up, though the stairs with the landing were as I remembered them. What had been the door to my bedroom was walled over, the bedroom in which I had imagined a dark figure standing in the corner all one long night, the kitchen in the corner was gone. . . . The configuration of the rooms wasn’t entirely as I’d remembered. 

“I think that was the living room there,” I said, pointing toward the left streetside corner where there was no longer one. “That’s where the Chinese-red American Flyer bicycle was on Christmas morning.”

Lauren and Will Oberman, who had bought the house two years ago, just before it was to be condemned, and who are well on the way toward giving it new life, had us go through some old black-and-white photos from the period, photos they’d found in a cranny, hoping that I might find that they were of my mother and me, or of people we might have known, but they were of another family, no one I knew.

We weren’t there long: My mother and I moved a lot in those days, beginning on Howe Street, with my aunt’s parents, then to Linden, then to Northumberland, then back to Howe Street, 5712 — where Robert Gwathmey told me he too had once lived when he taught at Carnegie Mellon.

I felt blessed then. I still do. 

East Hamptoners, both full and part time, are in a heightened political frame of mind these days, which doesn’t seem to be quite so true in Southampton. This may be due to the Democratic primary that took place on Tuesday, while there was none next door. 

Evidence of passionate political concern can be found in the marches held here in protest of  various actions of the Trump administration. It also can be found among the rank-and-file Democrats in a group known as East Hampton Resist and Replace. 

Similar groups sprang up from coast to coast after the inauguration, spurred in part by the wallop Democrats took in the election and in part by many Americans’ growing sense of horror that the institutions of our democracy — from the independent judiciary to the free press — were under attack. It wasn’t just Facebook memes that helped spread what might be considered a movement, it was the rise of energized political action commitees (like PAC for a Change, whose logo is a pair of boxing gloves) and “resistance” groups of all stripes. Here on the East End, there are now quite a few resistance organizations, both new and simply newly focused, including Indivisible Riverhead (now Indivisible East End), the loose coalition of folks based around a Facebook page called Let’s Visit Lee Zeldin, and Progressive East End Reformers, a.k.a. PEER/NYPAN.

East Hampton Resist and Replace was brought together by David Posnett, a retired physician who lives in Springs. The group has grown rapidly and is currently working to get second-home owners to register to vote here. The idea, which grew on social media over the last year, is that if enough new voters are Democrats, they could outnumber the First District’s Republican majority. That would be an extraordinary feat, given the district’s demographics and given that Mr. Zeldin won election by more than 58 percent of the vote. But these activists do not seem deterred.

Further evidence of the populace’s mood was on display at Guild Hall this summer with full houses at its Hamptons Institute programs on “The Trump Presidency and the Constitution” and “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” as well as one on climate change. Applause and questions expressed the boisterous audiences’ opinions.

And then came a reading at the John Drew Theater of Guild Hall on Saturday night of excerpts from the transcripts of hearings in the 1940s and ’50s by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The program, titled “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?” was sold out more than a week in advance, which has to tell you something. 

The well-heeled audience, and by that I mean fashionably dressed, may have been drawn to the event because James Earl Jones, Matthew Broderick, and other well-known actors were among the some 25 members of the cast doing the readings, but their interest in today’s politics came over loud and clear.

Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of the John Drew who worked with the actor Harris Yulin to bring the production here, was also in the cast, having some pertinent lines from the director Elia Kazan’s testimony before the committee. Mr. Kazan had appeared once, refusing to answer questions, but changed his mind and asked to appear again. This time, he explained, as Josh read, “I want to tell you everything.” Kazan was widely condemned for naming eight men and women as having been members, as he had, of a Communist wing of the Group Theatre, which the committee had targeted. Regardless of what evidence may or many not have been presented, many of those named lost their livelihoods, reputations, and, in some cases, even their lives.

Kazan, however, avoided being blacklisted and went on to direct some of Hollywood’s most enduring films. Condemnation followed him throughout his life, as the anti-Communist madness subsided, even reaching Main Street, East Hampton, when a longtime activist stood outside Guild Hall with a placard protesting Mr. Kazan’s appearance there years later.

We are, as the proverb would have it, definitely living in interesting times. I don’t know which way the wind will blow, but it is obvious that the nation and the world are at a historic turning point. Some days, when I hear of the ways in which new media can connect us and can provide a bulwark against oppression, I think that’s a blessing. But most days, when some fresh horror — whether brutal evidence of climate change or unabashed acts of hatred against minorities — is in the headlines, I feel these Interesting Times are indeed a curse.

That’s just what it costs, or so I was told when I got through venting to someone on the Star staff this week about a plumber’s bill that I thought was highway robbery. I’d identify the plumber, but, if what the office wisdom says is true is, in fact, true, everyone is doing it.

People complain a lot about the price of gas on the South Fork. State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. even sends out reports on a regular at-the-pump survey, which indeed indicate folks here are paying a Hamptons premium. By the numbers, however, the real banditry, at least in percentage terms, lies elsewhere.

Take deli sandwiches, for example. A turkey with mayo and lettuce or a roll might punch a $9.50 hole in your wallet in Amagansett but only set you back $6 in Riverhead. Plumbing? Forget about it. The invoice for getting The Star’s upstairs toilet and small basin reinstalled to existing pipes after the floor was replaced came in at $600 for labor.

Naive, I thought the plumber had accidentally added a zero to the invoice. When I asked, however, he knocked $150 off the labor portion of the bill. Lawyers and shrinks charge hundreds an hour, but the real money seems to be getting on one’s knees with wrenches.

Not expecting honest answers from people in the trades, it is hard to figure out what is going on. The “Car Talk” guys who gave automotive advice on National Public Radio for decades used to make cracks about boat expenses and mechanics’ need to keep up with them. Chances are 50-50 it’s the same with plumbers. 

Or it could be that the labor shortage here means that firms have to pay more to keep their people from defecting to the competition. On the other hand, maybe they can just get away with it. Who knows?

Ever since Bucket’s on Newtown Lane closed some years ago, I more or less stopped going out to buy lunch. Instead, I try to stop at the North Main Street I.G.A. at least once a week for some cold cuts, lettuce, bread, and mayonnaise and mentally pocket the savings. Deli sandwiches, plumbing — who knew that they were luxury items? Then again, maybe I just need to get with the times.

“What is truth,” Lisa’s father asked me at East magazine’s party at the Golden Eagle the other day.

“Beauty,” I said.

“And?”

“Ugliness too. Truth’s beauty and ugliness, I’m afraid.”

“And what is the ugliest thing that you can think of?”

“At this moment? Trump?”

“That’s it!”

I had passed the test. We spoke after that of our fathers and lamented wars and tyranny and dark, ego-enslaved psyches from which, it appears, little in the way of enlightenment can come.

I might have gone so far as to liken our new regime to an eclipse, but was happy I hadn’t, for the eclipse a few days on was to prove to be quite the opposite — a phenomenon through which people were united rather than divided, blown away, as it were, by such a rare and wonderful natural occurrence, rather than blown apart by benighted fanatics.

Earlier in the day, I joked that if no one were willing to share eclipse glasses — the library’s supply having been doled out by the time I arrived at its front desk — I would chide them for denying me the chance to realize how insignificant I was in the grand scheme of things. 

But people were quite willing to share. 

“It looks like a croissant,” I said of that part of the sun that was over the moon. 

We were all over the moon in fact. Paul held a colander through whose celestial holes the sun’s light shone onto a slab of white cardboard. We passed the pair of special glasses among us and thought how we might have thought thousands of years ago that two wolves were chasing the sun and the moon.

“If celestial bodies can align, why can’t humans?” Mary asked. 

Maybe it was a good omen. I saw the president look. Did all of the other world leaders? Did they feel like nobody too? I pray they did.

We all have those special places. Places we go for respite or rejuvenation, where we relax and unwind. Places where we seek refuge from a storm. St. Thomas is that for me, but last week a storm found the island and wreaked havoc. 

Hurricane Irma unleashed its wrath on several islands in the Caribbean. While it did not level St. Thomas as badly as St. Martin/St. Maarten, Barbuda, or perhaps even St. John, it is in shambles.

The American news media was slow to report how widespread the damage was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, perhaps forgetting it is a U.S. territory whose residents pay taxes and deserve federal aid. The Weather Channel played the same clip on rotation of palm trees bending in 185-mile-per-hour winds. 

On social media, I was able to find some real-time information by searching by location to see strangers riding out the storm in some of my favorite spots. But with the strong winds and loss of power so went the cellphone service and the updates. Local news sites were down. 

I found a group on Facebook called “What’s Going on St. Thomas?” where news slowly started to seep in. Lives were lost, the airport was flooded, the hospital roof flew off, buildings were destroyed, and roads were impassable. 

Lyn Shoemaker, who owns land where the Golden Age Ranch was founded in 2011 as a horse sanctuary, was out of town in Massachusetts when she posted ahead of the storm that Jerry, who runs the ranch, had made a trial run, putting all 27 horses in the barn — three in each stall and three on cross ties in the aisle. 

The last she heard from him during the storm was at 11 a.m. and the horses — and Jerry — were riding it out in the barn. “Close quarters but all behaving,” she wrote. “Jerry sounded confident and upbeat. Need to calm frightened horses.” 

By Friday afternoon she got miraculous news. Jerry, the horses, and even the barn, which he had built himself, and the shelter in the paddock had made it. A friend had even sent a photo to prove what otherwise might not have been believable. 

The destruction and cleanup are all horrible, of course, but it is the long-term impacts that make me frightened for all the good people of St. Thomas. They survive on tourism.

The horses, too, depend on the tourist economy. Once abandoned or unwanted, many from the local racetrack, the folks at the Golden Age Ranch support them financially by leading trail rides down to the nearby Lindquist Beach. Tourists, mainly, pay good money to take the ride down the rocky terrain to a wooded trail to the sandy white beach. 

The horses, with names like Captain Morgan and Bushwacker (a signature drink on the island that we know here as B.B.C.s), go right into the turquoise blue water. I’ve ridden in some pretty fancy riding facilities in my day, but nothing compares to riding with your feet in the water under the Caribbean sun. Knowing my mount, Budweiser, was saved from the glue factory and being treated kindly and supported by the trail ride fee makes it that much sweeter a ride.

Now the trails are impassable. Lindquist Beach — where my husband and I were married two years ago — is bare, from what I hear. Not to mention, the tourists won’t be coming if the rest of the island’s infrastructure cannot support the tourism. 

The news caught up early this week once major organizations like CNN were able to get to the island. The National Guard arrived on St. John. President Trump will visit the U.S. Virgin Islands later this week.

Tim Duncan, the retired N.B.A. champion, quickly donated $250,000 and pledged to match $1 million raised to help the islands. A native of St. Croix, which was devastated by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, he knows firsthand how long it can take for an island to recover. Then a swimmer, when the Olympic-size pool was destroyed on St. Croix he turned to basketball. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade.

There is so much to be done in the weeks, months, perhaps even years ahead to fix what recent hurricanes have undone. Let’s not forget about the islands we run off to to get away from harsh winters and our everyday lives. Let’s not forget about our favorite places or our friends — two or four-legged.

Taylor K. Vecsey is The Star’s digital media editor.

It’s the day after Labor Day, perfect for tallying up what was best and what will be most missed about summer. That’s certainly true for me, because I went around saying this summer wasn’t anything much, at least for me. But the night of Labor Day changed all that. This was the summer of grandchildren — and that’s where happiness lies.

It’s fair to say, without remorse, that three of my grandchildren have more or less aged out of everyday activities with grandma. But I was lucky enough to spend goodly lengths of happy times with four of them, who were often at my house this summer, and that deserves a big hooray. It wasn’t any particular thing we did together that brought the smiles but simply watching and listening.  

They did many of the conventional things kids do. They went to day camps and had play dates. They tossed balls around and flew small plastic planes. They hit softballs and kicked soccer balls on the front lawn. They did a jigsaw puzzle or two. Two of the four fulfilled a characterization bestowed by my husband as the running Rattrays, which means they ran throughout the house, back and forth, for no reason we could ascertain except they prefer to run. 

They played hide and seek. (I laughed out loud when one or another tried to squeeze into closets that had no standing room.) They did artwork. They took pictures with new cameras. They used iPads to play video games. One also had fun photographing another and then changing the result by imposing different eyes, lips, and hair.  

They played pencil-and-paper games of some mysterious sort. There were board games, too, but more often the games were, you might say, home-brewed. Word games, for example. We all indulged in a game called What. All you do is hang out with everyone and try not to use the word “what.” You’re out if you do, and it isn’t as easy as you might think. They picked beach plums, and I helped stem them.

One of these four spent the better part of an afternoon baking and icing a birthday cake, which was wonderful to both watch and enjoy. One of the grandchildren even sat down to watch the “PBS NewsHour” with my husband and me, sharing concern about the people in Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey. 

It’s often said that if you are lucky, like I am, you have little responsibility for bringing up your grandchildren but can instead offer some of the most important things in life: caring attention and love. You can also help them understand their heritage.

On the night of Labor Day, four of the grandchildren took over the playroom in my house, which goes back to the 1930s. It has a tiny stage, curtains and all, but it had been quite a while since the kids had the time or inclination to put on a show.

This night, they went full out. They found and got dressed in old costumes that had been put away in dresser drawers or closets and forgotten. They made tickets and numbered the seats. And then they opened the curtains on a variety show. The eldest was a riotous M.C. while the others presented individual and joint acts that were loud, rowdy (spilling off the stage at times), and hilariously appropriate to their personalities and talents. It was a great way to end what was a good summer, after all.