Among the mountain of depressing news surrounding President Trump’s decision to end the program that protected from deportation some 800,000 young people brought illegally as children to this country was the observation in The New York Times that when Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals began, some immigrant advocates and lawyers warned against participation.

Registration was key to DACA. Applicants had to provide details about who they were, when they arrived in the United States, and where they lived in order to sign up. They were told their information would be secure and never used to start deportation proceedings. That was not good enough for some advocates, who cautioned that the government could not be trusted to honor that pledge. 

According to estimates from immigration policy groups, Suffolk County had about 7,000 DACA-eligible residents, the majority from Mexico, but also large numbers from China, Guatemala, Ecuador, and the Caribbean. In East Hampton, where the resort and second-home economy squarely rests on the shoulders of immigrants, the implication of the president’s crackdown, if allowed to take place in the absence of new and rational congressional action, is alarming. What would happen in an already difficult employment picture if this young, smart, and ambitious portion of the population disappeared is terrible to contemplate.

There is a ray of hope in the response by New York State officials, among others, who have vowed to sue to block the federal government from using the information provided by DACA applicants against them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not said what it will do if and when the president’s six-month deadline passes without action from Congress, but the risk that it might tap people’s private data and use it against them remains a terrifying, un-American possibility.

Reading about the lawsuit former East Hampton Village Police Chief Jerry Larsen has brought against Mayor Paul Rickenbach, a village force retiree, and Richard Lawler, a village board member, I kept saying to myself, “Wait a minute — none of these guys ought to have been doing these things to begin with.”

You want to bang nails, mow lawns, shovel driveways, clean chimneys, or take care of pools, fine, but policemen (or elected officials) providing security, parking cars (or booting them), and roping off sections of the public beach so that well-heeled riparian owners and their guests won’t be discomfited by strollers along the public strand, that’s another.

Why, I wondered, did I think this way? The answer, which resulted from a minimal amount of digging through our hoary files downstairs, was close at hand.

In November 1967, following a grand jury investigation into the removal of Montauk Manor furniture — the then-forlorn building being watched at the time by an off-duty town police officer — to a fishing lodge in North Carolina, we wrote that the town board had adopted a set of moonlighting rules for the East Hampton Town Police Department.

Those rules said in part: “Off-duty jobs are restricted to work which is NOT [emphasis mine] related to Police Work and does not impair the reputation of the Department. . . . No Police Officer can use any police equipment on outside jobs. . . .”

“All off-duty men who have outside employment must have a work permit issued by the Chief on the recommendation of the Board’s Police Committee. The request for a permit must be in writing and state the employers’ name, type and place of business.”

I know that was a long time ago, and I know that the village is different from the town, and I know not if those moonlighting rules I’ve referred to remain in effect to this day, though they always seemed to make sense to me. 

Not to say that such transactions are corrupt per se, but you can’t help but wonder about the possible attendant ramifications, which is why the moonlighting rules were adopted in the first place.

From The East Hampton Star, September 7, 1967

The two-month-long grand jury investigation into the alleged looting of the Montauk Manor by one or more East Hampton Town policemen ended last Thursday morning. The grand jury returned a secret indictment, and a lengthy report, also secret, which reportedly makes several strong recommendations about the East Hampton Town Police Department. 

District Attorney George J. Aspland confirmed that the indictment names one defendant, but refused to comment on the grand jury report. 

Lots of people went to Southampton over Labor Day weekend to do lots of things, but I went to cross over from “the Hamptons” into the Shinnecock Nation, which was hosting peoples of many tribes, and all kinds of visitors, for its annual powwow. 

It smelled of woodsmoke and sage. Walking slowly around the grounds, the sound of anklebone jingle bells swelled and faded as dancers behind me approached and passed. The vendors sold Shinnecock clams, Wampanoan frybread, Aztec tacos, and Mexican-style corn, mixing and matching cultures.

My heart set to the drumbeats, as it always does, the moment I arrived. 

Preteen friends in powwow garb hurried through the gates into the dancers’ area behind the stage. Their footsteps, without effort, fell onto the soft ground in that circular, staccato native dance, in sync with the drums. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know just what I mean; it’s a step at once grounded and skittery, like the way some small animals move through the woods, a connection and light touch upon the earth, the push and pull of a magnet.

On stage the M.C. welcomed dancers and drummers representing different tribes, moving through their traditions, enacting stories, marking the wheel of life, honoring the Great Spirit.

A seagull flew diagonally across the field of clouds overhead as Arvel Bird, a composer and performer, stood front and center with flutes and electric violin. The wind, rising, rustled branches of the tall trees, livening the background of green. “The wind spirits are waking,” he said. Before playing a song from his “Animal Totems” CD he talked about the message a young hawk trying to fly has for us in its example of determination and fortitude.

I left before the Grand Entry lineup of all the dancers dressed in colorful ceremonial clothes, but stopped to buy an Arvel Bird CD. I was looking forward to putting it on at home whenever I need a breath of life, an elevation of spirit.

In the parking lot, the hatchback of his minivan raised open, the man who had earlier sat eating barbecue fresh from the fire was adjusting his full regalia, a spread of long dappled feathers blossoming from his back like the mouth of an anemone. 

The moon was up, almost full; enough light lingered for me to see the shine of the blue bay at the end of the lane. I turned right, toward the highway, and back into the fray.

When I got home the tree frogs and cicadas were making their own music, the steady rolling chirrupy voice of one chorus overlaid with the 1-2-3 rhythmic saw-buzz of the other. 

From across the street and through the woods came the sharp sounds of an edgy band, one of five playing at a party at the cold glass-and-iron trophy house built by the Euro-rich neighbor of a friend. 

The night before, drawn by the sounds of a party, the young people at her house went over to the neighbors’ to see what was going on. There were colored lights shining into the woods, music, fabulous guests.

One of the visitors remarked upon the neighbor’s house, and on the scene. A native Spanish speaker, the wealthy owner waved his hand. “All this,” he said, “I don’t know why.” 

Neither do I. But for it, the East End has been transformed, a heavy imprint on the quiet interconnected waterways, woods, fields, and skyways that the powwow dancing celebrates.

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.

The job of editing letters to the editor landed in my lap a few years ago and has remained there ever since. I don’t know whether I was given this difficult task because the editor or managing editor decided it would be a suitable slot for an old hand like me or because they thought it would keep me out of harm’s way (or prevent me from doing harm as I “age in place,” as the saying goes).

Readers know that The Star publishes every letter it receives provided it is exclusive, neither libelous nor obscene, and the writer is identified. Of course, the letter also has to arrive before our deadline of 5 p.m. on Monday. Recently, the East Hampton Star motto “Shines for All” could well have been changed to “Letters for All”: We ended up publishing 35 letters in each of the last two editions. We are proud of this service, an open forum — one of our previous editors called the pages “Freedom Hall” — that we believe is healthy for the community and that has for many decades now been a medium through which important issues and ideas have been raised leading to important progress in government, in our local organizations, and in our school districts.

In order to keep the letters pages from becoming an incoherent hodgepodge, each missive is edited to conform to our standards of grammar and punctuation (but otherwise, in general, left as written). Because we are a newspaper of record for local municipalities, it is incumbent on us to check the accuracy of the titles of the various entities mentioned: Is it Workmen’s or Workers’ Compensation, for example? We give each letter a headline taken from words or phrases within it, and then we put them in what seems to be a common-sense order, grouping those on the same topic.

That sounds easy, right? But there’s more: the human element. We typically have to engage with the letter writers, devoting many hours to checking that names are real and not pseudonyms, checking addresses, deciphering bad handwriting, transcribing, and fielding angry phone calls from cranks and from those who don’t agree with an opinion someone has expressed in one of the letters.

In the past, if there happened to be, say, 20 or more letters in a given week, we would find the  time to engage their writers, by phone or, later, by email, in a more or less pleasant give and take about anything confusing. Even recently, with so many letters, the majority of writers make it easy. Those who write regularly are usually savvy enough to make sure they aren’t just composing the same letter each week, and they become familiar with the process.

It may not be surprising, however, that there also are a few letter writers who try our patience. Some have an urge to submit a flow of letters that are very long and/or technically obscure and therefore difficult to proofread. Some refuse to understand that we cannot print letters that have been sent, en masse, to a score of other publications. Last week, one writer wanted to know why he couldn’t have two published in the same week, and then, when we agreed, kept changing his mind about which of the two should be published first. We let him know our decision was to use the first first, but he wasn’t satisfied. Now imagine engaging in this way with 35 writers. It adds to my gray hair each week, and holds up the whole process of going to press.

Not that I’m complaining. I believe The Star’s role in publishing letters, which began as a promise to readers, has become a civic institution; it is a responsibility that none of the other local publications can match. Week after week, the letters provide readers with information and opinions on issues of myriad concern and offer reflections on ideas both simple and profound (and sometimes silly). To be sure, it is sometimes a heavy duty task, but the letters to the editor can also be a laugh. I hope you agree.

For whatever reason, I did not get the old Sunfish rigged and onto the beach ready to sail until about halfway through August. Summer is like that, I told myself: Something always comes up.

One of the kids finally got me around to it. Evvy had taken sailing lessons in Sag Harbor and wanted some of her friends to come over to try our boat in the bay. The Sunfish, unnamed as most are, was given to me long ago by a friend who had won it at some corporate event. Initially, its sail carried a large Pepsi logo; I swapped it for a nondescript used one found on the internet.

Simple as Sunfishes are, I miss some of the boats I grew up with. My father was a big fan of catboats, and we had a series of them, mostly old and made of wood, in my youth. The last to go was a Beetle cat, a small version without seats, in which we sailed toward the end of his life. He was 47 when he died, and he had made it plain that he wanted me to learn as much as I could about the water, sailing, and the old ways as he had from his great-grandfather on the same waters when he was a boy.

The various catboats eventually went to new owners, one after the other. We donated the Beetle to a wooden boatbuilding school after its planks got too loose for me to deal with. On its last voyage, with my hand on the tiller, I had to take it into Hog Creek and tie up at a private dock as the water came in at a rate I could not keep up with using a clanking bilge pump. 

Fiberglass-hulled Sunfishes don’t usually have such problems. With age, though, even the industrial pop-outs begin to weather. Last weekend, sailing in the bay with two of the kids, the mainsheet block came loose. A rivet had worked through the thin-walled aluminum boom, leaving a U-shape bracket dangling. We were able to get back to the beach, though, and after looking around at the lumberyard, I found the needed parts.

Time, though, is another thing. The rivets are on a shelf. The rivet gun was on the floor of the passenger side of my truck last I saw it. I have other things to do, like mow the lawn and take the recyclables to the dump. It could be the middle of September before I get the boat back in the water. As I said, something always comes up.

“You’re good to go,” my dentist, Perry Silver, said after cleaning my teeth.

“That’s what I said yesterday to Mary after we had the cesspool pumped,” I said. 

I don’t know, there’s something about the way you feel after you’ve had your cesspool pumped — cleansed, ready to begin anew. 

I’ve been reading Jung lately, about the unconscious and its repressed contents that we ought to face if we really want to know ourselves, and there before me, once the cover had been pried off and we were peering down, was the unconscious metaphorically speaking. 

“Not bad,” the pumper said. I gloried in his words. “Not bad, that’s good,” I said. 

My daughter was coming, that was one thing that prompted me — an avoider as well as a voider — to take action. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened just prior to a festive dinner out there in Ohio, a root-caused massive cloacal contraction that cast us to the winds — Emily, Anderson, and the kids going to his parents’ house for the night, and Mary and I to his brother’s down the street, which was unoccupied that weekend.

Mary loved it that Todd’s house was so neat, so uncluttered. “Is he an architect? An engineer?” I asked. At any rate, its sleekness was the polar opposite of ours, whose dark living room with its raggedy books, sideboard, knife boxes (so the servants couldn’t steal the knives), velvet love seat, and dining room table that can be folded up against the wall when you’re having guests over for champagne, gavottes, and quadrilles is more 18th century than 21st.

Emily wants us to open and brighten it up, to consciously face our collective mess by ridding ourselves of the ratty oriental rug, by painting the classic burgundy window trim white (maybe Anderson will get to that when he visits next week), by replacing the three-cushion Jennifer convertible couches with one or ones more conducive to conversation, and by putting the plasma TV up over the fireplace, which we won’t do because that’s where Billy Hofmann’s beautiful painting “Louse Point,” with its moody allusion to the collective unconscious, is. We never tire of it. I’m glad I told him so once at One-Stop.

A founder of the Maidstoners softball team, the other being Dan Christensen, Billy, who could also pivot neatly in turning a double play, used to say he presumed Thoreau was my guide, and that if he wasn’t, he should be. This morning, in a review of a new biography of him by Laura Dassow Walls, I read that he once said, “Surely joy is the condition of life!”

He’s batting 1.000 in my book then.

But back to the unconscious, I dreamed the other night that my late stepfather was maniacally at the wheel of a car in which I and my mother were captive passengers. He was careening down the street toward a bank — we couldn’t stop him — and, as we feared, smashed the car right into it. A shot rang out.

I’ll admit it was puzzling, until I remembered that my basketball-playing grandchildren were on their way here and that they had great bank shots. Voila. Don’t talk to me about the unexamined life. 

To the dismay of many, Labor Day weekend has arrived, and for Hamptoners it officially marks the end of summer. White, beachy apparel, nautical stripes, and floral bohemian dresses will be stored away for next-summer use, or likely for the holiday season when St. Barth’s, the Bahamas, and Palm Beach seem better suited for weekend tans and holiday getaways than the windy, white winters on the East End. 

For locals, on the other hand, Labor Day weekend marks the finale of a long-awaited three months of pop-up shops, celebrity sightings, summer concerts at the Surf Lodge, hours of traffic, and the inability to get a reservation at just about any and every restaurant.  

While locals will revel in the tranquillity, and travelers will anxiously wait for next year’s Memorial Day weekend to mark a new beginning to summer, ambivalence is undeniable when you’re in not one, but both of these groups. 

Having left home at 15 years old for boarding school, I grew up yearning for summers in the Hamptons, and so did all of the friends I made. Maybe they’d heard about it from their parents, listened to librettos from a multitude of music artists, watched “White Chicks,” or wanted to experience a real-life “Gossip Girl” episode (all of these have ways of infiltrating conversation when you say you’re from Southampton).

Though I suppose the South Fork can be all of those things, the reality of hectic summer months — no beach parking spots, bustling Main Streets, lack of dining availability, and heavy traffic — while far from the glamour “the Hamptons” exudes, had an air of excitement . . . maybe because I, to a degree, was a vacationer . . . a faux local. 

Memorial Day marked my arrival and Labor Day my sendoff to Sheffield, Mass., and eventually Winston-Salem, N.C., but now my days in academia are over. This year I will outlive the expiration date on my summer beach parking sticker and end the seven-year streak of spending September elsewhere, and while it’s a bit unsettling, I’m equally thrilled. The weather (insert emoji with heart eyes)!

For the record, all those episodes and songs . . . they’re misleading. Sure, summer is great, but oh, the fall. . . . The air is crisp, the fields are voluminous, the ocean is warm, the leaves transform into every shade from fiery red to canary yellow, the roads are open, light beams glisten and bounce off everything in their direct line, and the sunsets. . . . Civility takes the wheel and ruckus patiently sits in the passenger seat for a ride through the fall, winter, and spring seasons. 

Maybe it’s the frenzied summers that make falls on the East End so glorious. Maybe it’s just as beautiful, only now we have time to digest it. 

Jackie Pape is a reporter for The Star, and about to spend her first fall on the South Fork.

As host of the third panel on timely, serious issues under the umbrella of Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute on Monday, Alec Baldwin wore a number of his many hats comfortably. The topic, “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” was explored by Mr. Baldwin and a prestigious panel: Nicholas Lehmann, former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a frequent essayist for The New Yorker, Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!,” the long­time muckraking radio program, and Bob Garfield, the author of five books and a podcast on journalism and advertising and a co-host of the radio and online program “On the Media.”

Mr. Baldwin said he has been a news junky since he was 10, something we know here at The Star from the letters to the editor he has submitted over the years. As president of Guild Hall’s board of trustees, he helped plan the panels and took this one to heart, asking tough questions and eliciting generally jaundiced views of the corporate media and TV pundits from the panelists. He even found an occasion to bring down the house with his comical and by now familiar Donald Trump impersonation.

Acknowledging that the panelists could all be considered liberals, he said Guild Hall had tried but failed to get an avowed conservatives like Tucker Carlson to take part. And he drew out an apparent lofty consensus: Despite apocalyptic change in how and where people get news, and the many questionable sources, intellectual honesty continues to be the reporter’s credo.

As someone who has dedicated more than the last 50 years to newspapering, it was an evening well spent. The conversation was informative, sometimes provocative, and helped put “fake news” in perspective. Besides, Nicholas Lehmann had quite a few things to say about today’s Columbia School of Journalism, where the late Everett Rattray, who edited this paper from 1958 to 1980, and I met and sealed our fates.

The panelists bemoaned the lack of press coverage of local and state government across the country, saying it resulted in the loss of an informed citizenry, and Mr. Baldwin cited the Los Angeles Times as a major newspaper that managed to do it all. I couldn’t help think he could have applauded The East Hampton Star for being a community forum, where issues are brought to light and opinions of all stripes are published week after week in our expansive (and sometimes exhaustive) letters pages. Turn this page and take a look. There are 40 letters this week.

Would she want to learn how to make beach plum jelly, I asked my eldest child one morning this week. We were in the truck, driving to a college prep class, and she was going on only a few hours’ sleep.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like the taste.”

“But maybe it would be good if you learned so if you wanted to make jelly some day, you would know how,” I said.

“That’s what the internet’s for,” she answered.

She had a point, but it was one that made me instantly melancholy. I had picked up jelly making in our kitchen as a child. My father, who had learned how to do it from his grandparents, if I recall, passed on a skill that connected me to them, and through them to a long line of Huntings and Edwardses and so on, back to the 17th century.

I think about the people who lived here long ago just about every time I go onto the dunes when the beach plums are ripe. I think about the Native Americans who arrived millennia before the Europeans and how they must have exalted as the days of summer drew shorter and the sweet and tangy purple fruit began to swell. 

Early European visitors observed that the native people cooked meat with the fruit that grew wild on these shores. They also saw them preparing dried sheets of the pulp to save for the cold, barren months.

I could tell from the broken pottery and fragment of fire remains that used to spill from a dune across the road from my house that native people indeed had been here at some point in the past. A new summer palace for a part-timer rises about where as a child I used to find dozens of quartz flakes, evidence that someone long ago had made stone tools there.

It is perhaps sentimental for me to feel a connection through beach plums to the European ancestors and the people whom they deliberately displaced with a thicket of legal restrictions. Early East Hampton Town records are filled with laws restricting native people’s access to guns and powder and penalizing them sharply for the most incidental transgressions. 

I think about all this each year in the beach plum patch, which no one, even the most determined 16-year-old, is going to find on the internet.

Sitting in the lotus position, inhaling the Universe — and nothing else, mind — I marvel at the profane, embattled creature I was the other day on the tennis court.

A spectator said steps should be taken, that a letter to the editor of The East Hampton Star should be written, citing in detail how unsportsmanlike its sports editor was, and added that he knew they wouldn’t print it. My wife, Mary, who was sitting nearby, said, “Yes, they will.”

“No, they won’t,” he said.

“It’s The Star’s policy,” she said, “to print every letter it receives exclusively, except those judged to be an invasion of privacy, libelous, or obscene.”

“I would deserve it,” I told her later. “I’m a wretch, normally well-spoken on the outside, but with an unconscious that is a cess­pool of demons on the inside.”

“Do you feel that way all the time?” 

“No, no. It’s just that I can’t put a lid on the id when I’m playing tennis. . . . Did you see when I got stuck in the fence?”

“No, I missed that.”

“I’d gone back for a lob and got it back, but in doing so my right foot became wedged between the base of the fence and the cement edge of the court. I was desperate. The Monty Python knight would have cut the foot off and rejoined the battle. In extremis, I would butt the ball with my head.”

Mary agreed that Tom, Leif Hope’s friend, was right when he recommended that I clear my mind during the changeovers, that I take full advantage of the allotted 90 seconds, visualizing a geode, a halved amethyst with glowing crystals in side, for the first 30, concentrating on my breathing for the next 30, and focusing on my game plan for the remaining 30.”

“And did it work? Did you clear your mind?”

“So well that I forgot what my game plan was, other than to get the ball back. I drank the electrolytic elixir too, but it didn’t save me in the end.”

“Well, you and Gary played hard. So did they. You all gave it your best — it was a good match, it wasn’t boring.”

“I fear the total solar eclipse may top it. Meanwhile, where can I buy a geode?”