A handful of parents, a batch of schoolchildren, and a pair of grandparents, including me, went to East Hampton High School on Sunday to see “In the Heights,” this year’s musical, and to say we were glad we had done so would be an understatement; we were blown away.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Hamilton,” composed the music and lyrics for “In the Heights” back in 1999, as a student at Wesleyan University. After making it to Broadway, the musical won four Tony awards before touring companies took it across the country and abroad. It tells a story, in song, of three days on a single block in Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. The coffee from the bodega is light and sweet, and the mostly Latino residents, who come from different national backgrounds, are facing the future, which is changing.

The two leading roles were played by freshmen, Alfredo Chavez as Usnavi De La Vega, who owns the bodega and really can rap, and Talia Albukrek, as Nina Rosario, who has a sweet and very expressive soprano. People tend to gush a bit too much about student performances, even those that in truth aren’t that remarkable, but it would be hard to overstate the excellence of this cast. Talent after talent shone across the footlights. 

Even those in character roles drew smiles of admiration and — no kidding — not a few tears of emotion from the audience. The director, Laura Sisco, integrated each in a way that not only recognized differences among the male and female ensemble dancers and chorus but highlighted them. Inventive and lively choreography let them whoop it up, especially in a nightclub salsa scene. 

While specific to a time and place, the plot resonates here, where many families are immigrants concerned about increased scrutiny and where the schools are learning how best to educate a diverse student population. Everyone present at the Sunday matinee, whether onstage or in the school auditorium, surely felt the emotional reverberations of telling this story of community and diversity in these times.

 We were touched even while laughing as we learned, toward the end of the play, that Usnavi’s late parents, who were from the Dominican Republic, named him for painted words on the ship bringing them to America: U.S. Navy.  

At the conclusion, Usnavi — who has come into some unexpected money and seems to be winning the heart of the girl of his dreams (played by the charming Ciara Bowe) — decides to stay in his home, the Heights. He sings:

Yeah, I’m a streetlight!

Chillin’ in the heat!

I illuminate the stories of people in the street

Some have happy endings

Some are bittersweet. . . .

Ms. Sisco, who runs the Creative Edge, a dance studio in Montauk and Amagansett, had directed her first musical at the high school, “Rent,” last year. Her skillful execution was enhanced by the efforts of Karen Peele Hochstedler, the music director, Brian Niggles, the set and lighting supervisor, a few other professionals, and many students who helped construct the realistic and ingenious set (“Wow!” people around us said as the lights went up) or joined the pit band.

Counteracting any impression that the show — with its unusual polished and knockout set — had cost the school district a hefty sum, Ms. Sisco said the budget was just slightly higher than in previous years and that many things were “repurposed, recycled, borrowed, and created.”  

The fact that it had such a strong impact, she said, was probably because of the unusual length of time devoted to character development. “As a team,” she said of the kids, “they did research and shared experiences.”

Ms. Sisco said she and the other adults involved were “really trying to elevate it to the next level.” And, oh, how they definitely did.

The train was like the Hogwarts Express, but only for women. An insider’s knowledge was needed to locate its whereabouts. Even the stationmaster, who sat under a twirling fan in his office of cockeyed grandeur, could only waggle his head and say, “No idea,” when I asked what time the next Ladies Special train would leave Bandra — a neighborhood of Mumbai — for Borivali, at the northwestern end of the city.

Riding a commuter train during rush hour in Bombay (sorry, only CNN weather reporters call it Mumbai; no one in Bombay does) is not for the timid. I hadn’t been on one since I was 12 and lived in Bandra. Today, despite Bombay’s eye-popping new wealth, commuter trains remain as bloated as ever, with an average of nine train-related deaths every day. 

My childhood friend, Rita, has been commuting to work by train for more than 25 years. She used to have to fight her way on board twice a day amid lots of jostling. And pinching, and often groping. Or, as it’s euphemistically called here, “Eve-teasing.” The problems of harassment on trains were so persistent that in 1992 the government decided to simply remove men altogether, and Bombay introduced the world’s first women-only train. Today, Ladies Specials run eight times a day during peak hours in Bombay.

At 6 p.m. on International Women’s Day, I stand at Bandra station trying to figure out where to catch the Ladies Special to meet Rita, as agreed, at the end of her workday.

Railway stations in India are special places. Once, they were monumental tokens of British supremacy, and one of the benefits the empire brought to its subjects. They remain to this day a marvelous memorial of the Raj. The engines rumble now, rather than hiss — no streaming smoke plumes trail — but still, beneath the echoing vaults of Bandra station, the timeless thousands swarm, the hawkers cry, the whistles sound, and the stationmaster reigns imperious.

I spot a group of brightly clothed women and ask about the Ladies Special. “Yes, here. This platform,” one answers.

There’s no indication of a platform number anywhere. Perhaps this is Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. 

With an announcement over the P.A. system wishing women “a special and happy day,” the Ladies Special arrives. It is pink (where were the pink trains to Washington, D.C., in January?) and, like all commuter trains, doorless. 

Women stream aboard like ribbons of color, happily chatting and smiling with their friends. Men stand back and sigh. They have to wait even longer in the stifling heat for the Testosterone Express.

Inside the train women continue to enjoy themselves, speaking an intoxicating mix of English and Hindi. I join a cluster of women in their 20s. One shows off her shopping, another tears opens a packet of crispy bits and passes it around. Another woman shares a Facebook post on her iPhone and they all giggle into their hands. The absence of men appears to be quite liberating for the young women.

A conductor in a flowing blue sari walks through our compartment, inspecting tickets. “Happy Women’s Day,” she wishes me and smiles.

I know my feminist friends in the West will be furious about the need for female-only spaces. Oh, the pitfalls of a gender-segregated world, they will say; women should feel safe wherever they go. There are larger societal issues, they will caution, that no pink carriage can fix.

Unarguable stuff. 

But what they don’t see — can’t see from a first-world vantage — is something I glimpse that day as the train glides into Borivali station, where I am to meet Rita. 

Male commuters line the platform, a forlorn bunch. They have been cast out, and their faces register resignation with a touch of defeat, like remorseful schoolboys. They look wistfully into the superior and joyful Ladies Special as if to say, “Maybe if we can learn to behave ourselves and not be brutes toward women, we might be allowed to ride this nice train home.” For now, the men are patient, even respectful. Not one tries to jump on.

Besides, they know that if anyone does, he’ll be instantly turned into a eunuch.

Judy D’Mello is a reporter at The Star. 

I can’t wait to try out my new Signum Pro Tornado strings in a stroke-of-the-week clinic tomorrow. The website says you will “wreak havoc” with them. 

The prospect of wreaking havoc, nay, of wreaking anything — aside, of course, from simply reeking — at my age is beguiling. I may not be very intelligent, but I know what kicking butt is. The secret, of course, lies in the way you do it, as in “it’s not so much what you say, but the way you say it.”

In this regard, I could take a cue from Confucius, of whom I wrote last week, who said nations decay when their manners do. I have been, I confess, churlish in victory and surly in defeat on the tennis court, raging, raging against the loss of a set — not a good role model for our polity at all. I must reform, I can’t reform. No matter, fail better at reforming. After all, it is time, now that I have nine — count ’em, nine — grandchildren, to grow up.

“You are a horrible human being,” Mary concluded the other night, with a certain frightening finality, as I argued (with her having already been backgammoned) that since one of the double 6s I’d rolled was only slightly canted, I shouldn’t have to roll again. “We talked about this yesterday. When a die doesn’t lie flat, the roller has to roll again.” 

She’s hawkeyed when it comes to my moves, constantly double-checking me.

“It’s honest cheating,” I said in my defense during a telephone conversation the other night with our daughter Johnna, and, bless her, she understood. And laughed too. She knows I’m a horrible human being, but that that’s . . . okay.

No, it’s not okay, and I do mean to do something about it. Yes, I will wreak havoc with my Signum Pro Tornado strings, but with grace, modesty, and fellow feeling. You’re going to love it.

March storms are hard on the ocean beach. The month was also hard on ships in the long age of sail, many of which ran aground on the shore here on their way to and from the Port of New York.

The Mars was among them. Part of its heavy timber frame was exposed to view this week at Georgica if you happened to look during low tide. Dark ribs like jagged tea-stained teeth showed as the waves receded, then disappeared as they surged again.

In all my years walking this beach I have only seen the Mars a handful of times. The most recent until this week, if I recall, was five years ago almost to the day, when enough of the ship was laid bare to make out the rough shape of its hull. That it has survived hurricanes and sea worms for nearly 200 years is something of a miracle.

In her book “Ship Ashore,” my grandmother Jeannette Edwards Rattray recounted that the Mars had run aground at night in 1828, been declared a total loss, and sold to two men, a Sherrill and an Osborn, who set about removing all its furnishings, trim, spars, and copper sheathing.

Midway through their work, a storm blew up and covered the ship with sand. The Mars was not reported to have been seen again until 1931, after another March storm. It was front-page news in The Star on March 13, 1931. A brief account noted that the seas and tide that had ripped under the summer houses of Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice had dislodged thousands of yards of sand so that the vessel stood out clearly. The Mars was seen again in 1956, 1958, 1961, and 1965, The Star reported.

I had not thought about the Mars recently until I noticed a familiar bit of wood in a photograph that a friend posted on Instagram. 

Shipwrecks have always interested East Hampton people, and I am no exception. In the old days, a shipwreck might represent a sudden windfall, as in the case of the Sherrill and Osborn men. Today, such remains are objects of wonder and reverie. Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center is said to be working on an operatic staging of the Circassian disaster of 1876 at Mecox.

Why the Mars met its end off East Hampton was something of a mystery. In a contemporary account by Henry Parsons Hedges, the suggestion was made that its captain, a man named Ring, might not have taken depth readings frequently enough. The captain responded testily to a question from locals on the beach the morning after the grounding, according to Hedges, who recounted that Capt. Jonathan Osborn of Wainscott led the questioning, inquiring about the wind and weather and if Captain Ring had taken soundings and how often. 

“Old fellow, what do you know about a ship? If I should tell you, do you think you would know any more than you do now?” Captain Ring is reported to have said.

Let it never be said that Wainscott folks were a retiring lot. Captain Osborn looked Captain Ring in the eye and replied, “I have commanded a ship, larger than your brig, and never ran her ashore, either.”

If the tides are low and you have a moment in the next week or so, I suggest you go have a look at the Mars and think for a moment about times gone by.

On August 1981, Judge Shepard Frood married Christa and me under the big oak tree in front of East Hampton’s Town Hall. We moved to Los Angeles two months later to break into the movie business. 

Sometimes in life you take a wrong turn, but it usually feels right at the time. It started in 1978 with Frank Andrews, known in New York City as the “psychic to the stars.” Christa gave me a session with him for my birthday, and I sailed out of his SoHo brownstone on his premonition of me as a future movie mogul. 

At that time I hadn’t thought of a career change. I was working at the Whitney Museum and Christa was a video artist. We had never discussed making movies, but a few months after that session we gave up our careers in the art world to make an independent film in New York. We read Syd Field, wrote the script, but didn’t know the first thing about raising even a modest amount of money. So we flew to L.A. with a dozen copies of our screenplay. Four days later, we returned empty-handed — except for the scripts.

We wrote another and again flew to L.A. to peddle it. That did not go any better. Perhaps because they were recommended by a successful screenwriter friend of ours, the agents tried to let us down easy. For a while we called it the land of encouragement. After two years it became the land of disappointment, and eventually the slough of despair.

Our third script drew a call from an agent at William Morris, who said she loved it. I told her we wrote it with Goldie Hawn in mind. She chortled at my naiveté and explained it wouldn’t fly as a feature, but maybe as a TV movie, and she promised to route it to one of the TV agents. 

Fired by a jolt of optimism, we headed west in my yellow Toyota Tercel with two bicycles on the bike rack, a trampoline on the roof, and the rest of our belongings jammed into whatever space there was inside the car. We rented a typical Hollywood bungalow with a lemon tree in the backyard, a block south of Sunset Boulevard near Fairfax. We liked the weather, we liked the palm trees, we liked the beach. We never heard from the TV agent.

Soon after we arrived, I contacted a cousin. It had been 10 or 12 years since I had last seen him, but we had been friends. When I called him, he didn’t know who I was. When I explained, he reluctantly agreed to come for dinner.

Now, this cousin had already produced one movie and was to go on to be a partner in Castle Rock and a big-time producer. He told us how it happened. While he had a law degree, the only place he practiced was as a pro on the tennis court, where he volleyed with people like Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks, and Charlton Heston. 

The evening was excruciating. It was clear from the beginning that he didn’t want to be there and was obviously dreading that we would make a pitch — which we did over dessert. He looked as if we had poisoned him and made for the door.

I had one more contact — another cousin who was a top executive at 20th Century Fox. When we finally reached the inner sanctum, after waiting for an hour, she dismissed our screenplays and suggested we read “Butch Cassidy” and “Chinatown” to learn how it’s done. Strike two!

The rest of our time there had a clear arc, even if our screenplays didn’t. Things slowly improved until one script had a producer and director committed and another was optioned by a production company. That was the closest we got. 

The production company folded, the other script withered on the vine of almost-but-not-quite projects, and we gradually slid down the other side of that parabola. We had written 11 scripts in four years and had nothing to show for it, not even an agent. 

I was finished, demoralized, but Christa wasn’t ready to call it quits. She had a screenplay she had written about a green card marriage that was still in circulation, and she wanted to give it a fair chance. 

What finally brought her around was literally a near-death experience. She had a little problem with food. Once at a Studio City sushi bar with an all-you-can-eat special, the chef kicked her out because he caught her dumping the rice into her napkin and eating only the slivers of fish. By then, she was so thin you could almost see through her. 

In the summer of 1985, she developed a pain in her abdomen. Our doctor diagnosed a pelvic abscess and immediately checked her into Century City hospital, where she was put on intravenous antibiotics and nutrients. After a couple of days he told us she was too thin to survive surgery; our only hope was that the antibiotics would be effective. It was a long two weeks at that hospital.

Since you know we made it back to East Hampton, you know she survived. We were relieved to be back on the East Coast but unsure what was next. I was halfway through a novel but had no idea what I would do with it when it was finished except undertake the sure-to-be-futile search for an agent. Christa was still recovering, mentally and physically. We were in a kind of limbo: too long away from New York and the art world, but with nothing concrete on the horizon. 

Then one day soon after we returned, we drove by Town Hall and saw the oak tree was gone. So was Los Angeles. We were home.

Mark Segal is an arts writer for The Star. 

If digitization makes keeping track of everyone and everything easy, what do those of us with old, pre-computer address books do with them? I don’t remember how I managed to get all the information from my Rolodex transferred to my computer; perhaps I spent long nights keyboarding (or maybe I hired someone)?

For those of you born after, say, 1990, a Rolodex used to be indispensable in almost any office. It is a rotating spindle on a metal stand with removable address cards arranged alphabetically. When people left a job, they sometimes made a big show of taking theirs with them, if they didn’t want anyone in their old office to access their data. I, of course, have not left my job in lo! these many decades, and I still have a huge Rolodex on a low office shelf. The Rolodex company seems to have gone digital, but I have found a couple used and old-stock units available on eBay, starting at $7.50. Each of the listings reads “Only one left.”

By now, however, the data in the folder on my desktop labeled “Old Rolodex” is historic. It contains names, addresses, and phone numbers of people and businesses I don’t remember, as well as (I must confess) many who are no longer alive. It would seem disrespectful to pluck them out.  

Although my digital address book has grown huge on my email accounts, I do frequently look up the entries in the “Old Rolodex” file. I had occasion to do that the other day, but had a strange guilty feeling as I clicked through. Guilty for not keeping up with various old friends who live on, on my Rolodex cards. Guilty for not staying in touch with a relative. Guilty for having entirely forgotten the existence of an old acquaintance. Guilty about those whose information is still listed with a now-divorced spouse. 

Sociologists — someone writing a dissertation, for instance — might be able to mine old Filofaxes (remember those?) and Rolodexes (remember when the letter “X” seemed to signify modernity?) to learn about the time and place when the data were entered. But as my file cards were done without dates of entry, perhaps not. Indeed, I have to admit that I sometimes still add people to my Rolodex. I wonder how many people still do that? All too often, I surprise myself by finding they are already accounted for. Well, forgetfulness: I guess that’s why they invented Rolodexes in the first place.

Jeannette Edwards Rattray, the late publisher of this paper and my mother-in-law, died at the age of 80 in 1974. I am uncertain why it fell to me to care for her red, leather-bound “address and telephone” book. Perhaps it was just left in the desk. She filled its narrow lines with a remarkably fine hand, and a postcard with an 8-cent Dwight Eisenhower stamp on it fell out when I picked it up this week. It gave me a turn to discover that postcards were 8 cents in the year she died. 

Mrs. Rattray traveled quite a bit, so it was not surprising to find addresses of people living in far-flung places, from Cuba to Holland, France, and Yugoslavia. She even saved the name and contact information for the maitre d’hotel of the S.S. France in 1973. 

My own Rolodex is equally revealing of the times in which I have lived and worked. Yesterday, I noticed the name of Carrie Moritz under letter “M.” I remember Carrie quite well. My mother feared I would grow up with a Brooklyn accent, even though we lived in New Jersey, so she sent me to Mrs. Moritz for elocution lessons. Thank you, Mrs. Moritz!

Unfortunately, I also remember a poem Mrs. Moritz had me memorize and recite in what was supposed to be an Italian accent. “Giuseppi da barber, ees greata for ‘mash,’/ He gotta da bigga, da blacka mustache.” I can’t imagine what good she thought it would do me or my elocution.

The name Dita Von Teese meant nothing to me, so I thought of nothing as M. and I neared the marquee at the Gramercy Theatre, where the burlesque dancer would soon take the stage and command the gathered crowd. 

M. had an altogether different take, emitting a piercing “Ahh!” upon seeing the name, shock given way to ecstasy. Unwittingly, I had earned many additional merit points. 

Two weeks prior, we had attended Le Scandal, which stakes the claim to “New York City’s longest running variety burlesque show,” and had a splendid time, so, when I happened upon what looked to be similar entertainment, I secured tickets for Friday, the third of four sold-out performances. 

“She is so beautiful,” M. observed of Ms. Von Teese. Among other attributes, “she has such beautiful skin,” according to M., who is from Tokyo. And indeed, she does. The pearly-white-skinned performer led a troupe of the bold, the beautiful, and the bizarre at the Gramercy, which was packed as though hosting the rock ’n’ roll concert we’d attended there last month. 

The winters in East Hampton, they get me down, and I go to New York more than I used to, and think about the old sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg and sometimes wish I had moved back, and tell myself that maybe I’ll finally do it in the fall. Or maybe I’m just full of hot air, as usual. 

But I’m free again, and I’m bored. Or I was, until M. and I found each other on a bleak December afternoon, day-tripping, once-and-maybe-future New Yorkers escaping our present, and most weekends since then have been devoted to thrilling, blissful rendezvous there. 

The city always takes me back, circling back to the beginning, everything old new again. On the abnormally balmy Saturday, we awoke near Times Square and found a Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner, and I savored the sweet jolt of an extra-large coffee like the ones I bought daily for years on my way to the office at 53rd and Seventh, or Ninth and Broadway, or 31st and Park Avenue South. Later, we circled Gramercy Park, the scene of so many early-childhood memories, and rode a subway uptown to stroll Central Park to the carousel, the setting of so many others. 

The night before, we had reprised an earlier adventure: sushi at Yama, downstairs at 49 Irving Place, the onetime home — at least, according to local legend — of Washington Irving, followed by an evening at the Gramercy. 

On that night last month, the theater hosted the Magpie Salute, an offshoot of the Black Crowes, a great band I saw more than a dozen times in the Nineties and Aughts. The Magpie Salute played many numbers from the Crowes’ catalog, each drawing myriad memories of late nights at the Beacon and Irving Plaza and CBGB and that private party on Spring Street in April of ’01, where guests including Mick Jagger and Howard Stern and Don Was and Oasis, and a couple of us from Billboard marveled at that defiantly live and loud rock ’n’ roll powerhouse. 

On that first night at the Gramercy, M. and I partied like it was 1999, dancing like Elton John and Mary J. Blige had done before us as we all listened to the playback of “Deep Inside” (her take on “Bennie and the Jets”) at Quad Studios in Times Square in, yes, 1999, and then drank our way to the Lower East Side and stayed up until 3 and slept late and spent a small fortune on brunch but God it beat waking up alone in East Hampton in January. 

“Who can tell, when he sets forth to wander, whither he may be driven by the uncertain currents of existence,” Irving asked, “or when he may return, or whether it may ever be his lot to revisit the scenes of his childhood?” I, for one, often revisit the old neighborhood, still trying, I guess, to get back to where I once belonged. 

M. cheered wildly for Ms. Von Teese and the others. Seeing her so happy made me so very happy too, and loosened the sorrow and regret to which I tend to cling. “How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him,” Irving wrote, “and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

David Brooks lamented the other day that Americans are tending to stay put, while in the past they moved about quite a bit, were more adventurous. The short answer to that, I think, is health care’s exigencies.

When you had Blue Cross-Blue Shield, it didn’t cost much, and you could change jobs and locales without worrying about that coverage lapsing. My father did many things, quitting and moving on, he told me, whenever he got bored, which he often did. I think health insurance was not the issue for him, or for his generation, that it is for us.

In fact, I’m not sure health itself was the issue in my parents’ day that it is for us. You took what came and didn’t expect that much. Life spans were shorter, but now, especially given all the improvements in medical science, we’re clinging more to life. (I’m always reminded in this regard of what the French woman said: “Do you Americans want to die of good health?”)

Also, I don’t think people, people in general, were aware in the past of the seemingly endless list of diseases, physical and mental, that can attack you. Every parent knows of them now, and they’re rendered all the more fearful and timid because of this knowledge.

So you stay put, and ante up, and hope that the antibiotics will work. Before we went to Mexico, I was almost put on them, having had a tenacious cold, which would have been a cruel irony inasmuch as, when on them, as you know, you have to stay out of the sun and cannot drink. In the end, I found the margaritas salvific.

Though while the climate there is far more, I think, to Mary’s liking, she’s always talking of moving to Canada, while I, who wilt in the heat, keep saying we should move to Mexico. She’s worried we might run afoul of the cartels, but I think frostbite would be worse.

Of course, we’ll stay put (this place being among the nicest places to stay put in), and ante up, and hope that the antibiotics work.

Asked by a colleague, with whom I share a birthday, how I’d spent mine, I said, “On the tarmac, in Houston — they couldn’t get us to a gate for the better part of an hour and kept thanking us for our patience.”

A few hours of fitful sleep at a far-flung Hyatt down a road clogged even worse than the Expressway on its worst day, and we were back at the airport, at 5 a.m. 

When, on nearing La Guardia, the pilot said we’d be circling for a while given the godawful weather, I clasped Mary’s hand (not the one with the heavily bandaged forefinger, which earned us preboarding status when she said if it were banged she’d probably bleed all over everyone) and asked if we had gotten around to updating our wills. When, every now and then, I see our lawyer at the dump, I say we’ll be in soon. I’ve been doing this now for about 10 years. 

Oh, and when I say “we,” it is really she who sees to much of the dreck of our lives. And thus I wrote to her last night on her Valentine card: “Roses are red / violets are blue / I’m so exhausted / I bet you are too.”

It’s a long way to Zihuatanejo, it’s a long way to go, but it’s worth it. We love the Las Brisas hotel there, and the people. And though its structure, a sort of half-pyramid set into a high seaside cliff, may remind one of ancient sacrificial rites while ascending the steep stone stairs, it also is a paradise — a conflation that the crepes flambées we had at the Coconuts restaurant in town illumined. 

“The sun, the sea, and thee,” I would say to Mary, looking up from yet another transcendental margarita. “Rather than shut up and listen,” as Sean Spicer has said, “we should shut up and look. If everyone did, what a wonderful world this might be.”

We had never, in all the years we’ve been going there, seen the baby turtles released. That usually happens around Christmas. This time, we saw the baby black leatherbacks make their unsteady but inexorable way into the vast, vast ocean twice, swept away at last by the ebbing surf. It was a wonder, yes, even more so than the Super Bowl, though on a par with the birth that day of our ninth grandchild. May her life be blessed as ours have been.

Late on Sunday afternoon, only a few people were left on the trail down to Amsterdam Beach. 

It had been unusually warm on the East End, with the air temperature getting close to 60, even near the water. I had a photograph to take for the news section, and, as the shadows of the day got long, I pulled into the parking lot off Montauk Highway.

The trail was well traveled. Footprints through the muddy places suggested that a score or two of people had been through earlier. Where there was no mud, the ground was slick and hard from innumerable boot soles. 

Even on a winter day the way though this Montauk preserve was tunnel-like. At one point the trail fell from a low hill through a Sistine Chapel of green-leafed hollies. Fallen shadbush trunks lay here and there. High-bush blueberries posed ready for warmer days ahead.

Walks like this often leave me with a sense of melancholy. Amid the trees or dunes it is easy to forget the present, then, rounding a bend, a too-big house comes into view, and I remember. I think about the native people who came here first, then about what Montauk must have been like 100, or even 50 years ago. It is hard not to be a little sad. The people who came before us must have always known the raw, open experiences I can recall dimly from childhood, but that now are only to be found in small moments in the parks and preserved spaces. We are lucky to have them, but still.

Turning to the left and onto a trail that wound down to the beach, I came upon three young men in shorts, sunglasses, and T-shirts. One carried a football. Talking among themselves, none replied when I said hello.

I walked to the east a bit to take a photograph of the old Warhol place, where a new owner has asked the town for permission to build a swimming pool. It had been awhile since I had been out that way, and it seemed tidier than I remembered. I stood on a tall rock out front of the main house and looked at the ocean.

On the way back up to the road, I took a left fork, the second part of a loop trail that I had not been on before. Judging from the lack of footprints, far fewer people had taken this route that day, and I wondered if they had just been more comfortable going back the way they had come. And I thought about making my own way through the woods.