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.

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.

Leo the pig does not do much in the winter. Actually, Leo, a house pet of unusual size, never does much at all. It’s just that on these early mornings, when I sit at the kitchen table thinking about what to write as he stands idly by, his easy ways are more obvious.

If I can generalize about pigdom from having watched Leo going on five years now, their dominant motivation is in their stomachs. Sun up or not, as soon as Leo hears me stirring, he scrambles out of his bed near the fireplace and with a string of loud grunts and whines demands to be fed. If one of the dogs gets near he gets downright operatic. “Shut up already,” I think, “or it’s the knacker for you.”

Leo is not dumb, as basic as his needs may be. He knows how to push open the front door to let the dogs in or out, and has my predawn moves around the kitchen memorized. If I veer away from what Leo believes is the plan, howls ensue; oink has very little to do with it. I feed him first lest he turn up the decibel level, and then get around to what I need to do. The dogs, polite, wait by their bowls. But Leo has a thing for dog food, too, and expects me to scatter some kibble on the kitchen floor for him to find. It’s like an Easter egg hunt, I suppose, the highlight of his day. The wet nose marks on the tile dry up soon enough.

Beyond food, Leo’s interests run to pushing the furniture around to get my attention when it is time for a scratch or for sleep, in that order. In his middle age, Leo chews on the woodwork less frequently than when he was young. However, anything new that we place in the house where he can get to it gets a good working over. 

As I type this morning, Leo has knocked down a mop and is appraisingly pushing it around the kitchen floor. Next, it’s over to the bathroom to see if anything interesting has been left in the wastebasket and to pull down the towels. This will have taken a great deal out of him, and he will head back to bed shortly. By the time the kids are up and getting ready for school, he is back in his bed, eyes closed as if he had not already made my morning a living hell. “He’s not so bad!” they will declare when I complain later on.

At a time when Americans are lining up on opposite sides of what seems to be an increasingly wide divide, it was heartening that the film “Moonlight” won the best picture Oscar on Sunday night. The story of “Moonlight” follows the physical and emotional trials besetting a boy growing to manhood in one of Miami’s poorest black neighborhoods, Liberty City. I had seen it in the fall when it was featured at the Hamptons International Film Festival. On Saturday, I was fascinated by the man who adapted the “Moonlight” script from his play “In Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue,” Tarell Alvin McCraney. Forget Horatio Alger, Mr. McCraney’s magnificent trajectory may prove that this country still is a land of possibility after all.

Mr. McCraney was destined for the creative life from the time he was in high school, at Miami’s New World School of the Arts. Like Chiron, the protagonist of “Moonlight,” he was tormented as a child for being gay. Mr. McCraney’s mother, like Chiron’s, battled drugs. Unlike Chiron, however, Mr. McCraney was a surrogate parent for three younger siblings. He nevertheless got a B.F.A. in acting from DePaul University in Chicago in 2003, and then became a graduate student at Yale, where he studied playwriting. Acclaim first came while he was at Yale for a trilogy of plays set in Louisiana among the Yoruba: “In the Red and Brown Water,” “The Brothers Size,” and “Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet.” Skip ahead some 13 years, and he is now to become the head of Yale’s School of Drama, in July.

At the Academy Awards on Sunday, Mr. McCraney took the stage with Barry Jenkins, who directed “Moonlight,” after the award for best adapted screenplay was announced. Mr. Jenkins also grew up in Liberty City, and although they did not know each other there, he understood the autobiographical aspects of the story. Accepting the screenplay award, Mr. McCraney said they had had less than a month to shoot the film. Speaking of Mr. Jenkins, he said, “This man did it in 25 days with a cast and crew that was in and out in Miami in the dreaded heat. But we did that with love and compassion and fullness.” Because of the unheard-of mix-up in announcing the best picture, the “Moonlight” principals did not get to the stage to speak again. Earlier, however, McCraney had said, “This goes out to all those black and brown boys and girls and non-gender conforming, who don’t see themselves. We’re trying to show you you and us. So thank you, thank you. This is for you.” 

Along the way, Mr. McCraney has written six other plays and worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, for which he has directed a pared-down “Hamlet” and adapted “Antony and Cleopatra.” And, since 2013, he has been able to devote himself to his work as the recipient of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

The director Joseph Adler, who met Mr. McCraney when he was a high school student in Miami, speaks of him this way: “Even though he’s gone on to international acclaim, the fact that he wants to come back makes him unusual. And he hasn’t changed a bit. His humility, compassion, and genuine concern for people are remarkable. . . . By that I mean profound, lasting, meaningful works along with what is as, or perhaps more, important: the ability to touch, inspire, and give back to those in the here and now. He is a gift-giver.”

Last week was the first birthday of the rest of my life. 

Well it’s not like I just got over a disease and I now have a new lease on life. Nothing like that. This was the first “celebrated” birthday in my life that I had not been with one or both parents, or, as an adult, in the company of an important boyfriend, significant other, or spouse, a first celebration solo. 

Those of you freshly called “widows” and “widowers” know that the first birthday after the loved one is gone is a weird one. That first solo birthday is not actually an event you embrace or enjoy. Mostly you want it just gone (like the first Christmas: too many changes, too much missing). In my personal memory that first year was a blur, not fast, just blurry.

But, having passed all the firsts in the year after the death of my husband, I am now on to the next chapter. I find I am no longer thinking in the plurals of “ours” and “we.” This new chapter is called “My, Me, Mine.”

My birthday, thanks to an invitation from a wonderful pal, was spent in the Virgin Islands. (The irony of a widow in the Virgin Islands was not lost on me, by the way.) I was invited to hang out for a long weekend with her and mutual friends at her fabulous house on St Thomas. Or, was it a coincidence that it was my birthday. How lucky am I? 

The house is at the far east end of the island, overlooking the St. Thomas yacht club across the small and oddly named Cowpet Bay. Palm trees, turquoise water, and good buddies. What a treat to leave the East End winter for that east end.

I slept listening to the tropical tides lapping at the iron shore below the infinity pool, which was 10 steps away from my sliding door. I watched a rainbow during one of those crazy tropical storms that last minutes. I put on a mask and snorkeled and paddled off the beach at Magens Bay and watched two sea turtles having a lunch of seaweed about 10 feet under my tummy. I slathered on sunblock (near the Equator, you know) and stayed hydrated (ditto). And the clouds, well, the clouds are fantastic, and the sun kind of does go down like thunder, though there is a bit of dusk after it is gone, contrary to Kipling. 

Being a loosely knit group of three dames and sometimes four, and two guys but sometimes three, some of us did one thing, some did other things, all did some, and at times I was solo beside the pool, which, can I mention again, overlooked totally turquoise water, clear as a bell and dotted with boats I could wave to if I felt like it. 

My room faced the sunset, which bounced off that bay and off the infinity pool and gave me no end of pleasure as I took pictures of reflections. One afternoon, in the pool, I looked over the edge and down in the vegetation and palm trunks and there were iguanas in courting mode, bobbing heads and looking like Jurassic Park. My imagination was, at times, in overdrive. Where was my camera when I needed it?

St. Thomas is one hour earlier, so my island time was different from their island time, and while I was in a place where I could sleep as late as I wanted to, I was awake before dawn. Who knows why. 

I was aware of the moment when the night peepers outside my window shut up in favor of the early morning birds doing their vocal exercises. (Discretion being the better part of living another day, for the peepers.) I heard the tiny sounds of birds landing on a sugar-water feeder. Sneaking outside I tried to get a good picture of the many hummingbirds that were having their breakfasts. All this surrounded by flowers in colors that are so glorious they have no name and a tiny little lizard on the screen. 

My birthday dinner, surprise, was at a long table, beside the marina near the ferry to St. John. A band and a bunch of new friends and funny cards and gifts totally topped my special day. The singer with the band tried really hard to get my name right when she sang (to my total embarrassment) “Happy Birthday” to me, so I can say that a Doral, Duvall, Donnell, and Doowall was/were all serenaded along with me. My birthday cake was a slice of local pie with a candle. What could be better than this?

About 20 minutes from the house, in downtown Charlotte Amalie, there are nifty old warehouse buildings with wonderfully painted arched doors housing all the local color and duty-free stuff your heart could desire. The harbor is bustling. Gigantic cruise ships come in and disgorge countless thousands of sea-legged folks who want to spend their retirement savings on gemstones and designer luggage. The cruise ships look like the mother ship from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” when they cruise out, lights ablaze, much like a slice of pie with 72 candles, all lit up. What a sight — bedazzling and keeping the economy going, but also clogging the streets and venues so the locals stay home, if they can, on the days the ships come in. (We did that.) 

Two local friends drove us around, thus we were able to get to a beach that was too far to walk to (Magens Bay) before church let out, so as to get a good parking place. We got dropped off at the ferry to St. John without having to figure out where we were going to park, and we always took the scenic routes so I could take pictures. 

Now, pretty much everything is scenic in its own way, and while I would have walked around on my own, the roads terrified me. They drive on the wrong side of the road and they do it really fast. There are no shoulders along these narrow lanes, just bushes, views, oncoming cars, free-walking chickens, and, yes, East Enders; there are deer on this island, too, and there isn’t much room for one car much less one coming the wrong way around a bend. 

I was astounded that anyone could or would do this driving, but they do and they can, and that was also a birthday present: that I didn’t have to drive, anywhere. For that I am really, really thankful.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

By the time Bernie Sanders swept the New Hampshire Democratic primary and urged voters to go to Bernie Sanders.com to make online contributions to his campaign, Barack Obama had long since revolutionized presidential fund-raising by using the internet in the 2008 race to seek donations and to gather information and organize the ranks. (Time and Twitter moved on.)

It will come as no surprise if I say I admire Mr. Obama. These last few weeks of his tenure, and his eloquent farewell address — in particular, his willingness to address the topic of race head-on — have secured his place in my mind as an exemplary president and a fine human being.

So it was a bit annoying on Tuesday to receive an email, purportedly from him, asking for $1. Anyone who has gone to a political website in the last few years is likely to be familiar with the experience of inadvertently signing up for innumerate emails from candidates running for national office and, naturally, asking for signatures on petitions as well as, of course, money. 

As Trump supporters are wont to say: Isn’t it time to move on?

The small print at the bottom of the Obama email noted that it wasn’t actually anything to do with a presidential campaign, or really much to do with Mr. Obama, but was from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, although that wasn’t spelled out in the body of the text. The name of the organization is in any event somewhat misleading because it assists only those in or seeking to be in the House of Representatives.

The subject heading of the email — “unfortunately,” with a lower case “u” — drew me in. In part, it read: “Helen, I’ll make this quick — I’m emailing for $1.” It went on in what were supposedly Barack Obama’s words: “As my time in office comes to a close . . .” and so on.

What I find annoying about these emails, in addition to the $1 thing they always try, is that I don’t remember ever having given money to the D.C.C.C. before; in fact, I’m quite sure I never have. As a rule, and as a journalist, I have never registered in any political party. Nevertheless, it seems I must have made some sort of donation in the past that flagged me as someone who could profitably be entered into the email pipeline, forever to be tapped on the shoulder and asked. 

Whatever side of the political fence you fall on, it is likely that you, like me, have received many insincerely personalized messages in the last year, with pleas from candidates whose names you barely recognize, from all over the country.

But really, do any email recipients in 2017 still believe patently silly statements like this one in Tuesday’s email? “We still need 35 more Democrats from 11937 to step up before Friday.” Still need 35 for what? I get the Zip code, but why Friday?

I know the word “algorithm,” and can throw it around, but I don’t have a clue about algorithmic procedures. Which brings me back to the internet. If an email from an organization with which I have no quarrel and which is signed by someone I admire contains information that is less than 100-percent factual and reliable, how am I supposed to believe information that comes from it at more important moments? And what am I supposed to make of the email promises of those whose points of view I do not even share?

Sprinting down the asphalt path at Lowenstein Court in Montauk late Monday afternoon to get a look at the ocean before the light faded, I had a passing thought about how excited many of us who live on the East End get about a good northeaster. I was clearly guilty of that as I ran from the car to take a few photographs, then back to the car to check them, then back to the shuddering wood walkway to take some more.

At lunch earlier that day at John Papas in East Hampton, I got talking about the weather with an acquaintance from high school whose name I had forgotten. In my defense, he had forgotten my first name, referring to me only as Rattray, and asking how my brother was doing as if to fish for a clue about which of us I was. I left before I could ask a waitress, who seemed to know him, who he was.

At any rate, he told me that he had been up to the beach that day to look at the ocean as the surf came up and that until recently he had been taking a 92-year-old woman there from time to time as well. “She just liked to look at the water,” my old friend said.

Jean Stafford, the great novelist who lived on Fireplace Road in Springs for many years, wrote an introduction to a picture book about the sea that made note of the local habit of driving to the beach just to see if it was still there. If I recall, she was both amused and a little perplexed. 

The storm wind that wrapped East Hampton in its fists on Monday was blowing hard as I stood on the walkway. Salt spray pelted my coat as the whitewater rushed forward. Grinning and giddy, I turned to protect my camera. A quarter mile to the west two men and two dogs stood on a low dune, watching as successive surges grabbed at the s­and.

It is easy to get swept up, in the figurative sense, by the sight of a riled up ocean. The roar of waves breaking to the horizon goes straight through your coat and into your chest. What the agitated sea represents, whether death, mystery, or power, is hard to say, but we watch, and it is difficult to turn away and head back to the car and shut the door. 

I want to begin by thanking our granddaughter Ella, who’s 8, for having turned my wife’s Ping-Pong game around, for having raised her Ping-Pong self-esteem (the fiery competitive spirit she’s always had) so that Mary and I are now on an even keel Ping-Pong-wise.

This is very important to me because she usually creams me in backgammon and, whenever we can find the rules, in gin. I have no card sense, none, though I will play these games to humor her. But it’s batting balls back and forth that I really love, and Ella, bless you for having said to Mimi, as you call her, that getting a Ping-Pong table was the best thing we ever did.

It’s a state-of-the-art royal blue Kettler that Geary Gubbins somehow put together in the fall after we’d had the basement brightened, neatened (the 10-year statute of limitations having run out on her brother’s tools), and dried out a bit. 

I had envisioned unending games, and had bought a space heater toward that end, but until Ella entered the equation, the handsome table wasn’t used all that much because Mary — despite the fact that our games were always close — thought she wasn’t up to my speed.

Ella proposed a freer format. One could serve twice, as in tennis, and serves were alternated point after point. Games were to be to 10, not to 21, and if you could fetch back onto your opponent’s side of the net a ball that had hit the floor, whether simply by way of a lifted shot or by caroming the ball off a wall, as in squash, that would count.

Thus less constricted, Mary, with whom I’ve always batted ideas back and forth in somewhat similar fashion, began to play with more verve, and the other night, after she’d creamed me 10-3, and as I was muttering to myself, she went upstairs to give Ella the news. 

I won one that night, she won two, whereupon she said it was over, which was fine. I was delighted. Whatever rules she wants to play by. Perhaps more will be added as we go along. That’s what kids do, make them up as they go, and that’s what makes it fun.

This week’s snow notwithstanding, this winter has been a letdown, at least as far as ice goes. For skating the only option has been to pay for time on one of the local rinks. Likewise, the chance that there will be iceboating this year declines every day that we get closer to March.

In the mid-1970s, when my father was given our first iceboat by George Fish, a doctor and family friend with a house overlooking Three Mile Harbor, it seemed that every winter would dependably produce enough ice to sail upon. Mecox Bay was the center of a considerable flotilla of boats, some large two-seaters, most, like our second boat, DNs, so called after the Detroit News, in whose shop the first of the relatively inexpensive, light and nimble craft were built. 

Many of the freshwater ponds were good. Memorably, one glorious season, homeowners in the Georgica Association let us use a landing on Georgica’s west side to get to its beautiful glassy surface. Three Mile Harbor froze as well one year or two. We sailed from Hand’s Creek across to the main navigation channel and back again, passing baymen spearing eels through holes they had cut in the ice. We sailed on Montauk’s Fresh Pond and on Poxabogue, anywhere that had a big enough slab. We don’t get ice like that much anymore.

The iceboat that came from Dr. Fish’s garage was a Mead Glider, a two-seater probably built in the 1930s and repaired and altered over the years. We called it the Bat, for its batwing sail, which had a single batten that ran from the mast out to the leech, or loose, edge. Its hard ware was largely cobbled up from toolbox assortments and not necessarily up to the stresses of sailing over a hard surface. 

One winter day at Fresh Pond, in about 1978, the Bat struck a pressure ridge in the ice, and the mast came down on top of my father and my friend Mike, who, as he tended to do, and still does from time to time, howled in protest.

It was last year or the year before, on a Monday in early March, that we last sailed in the Bat. I had left it at Mecox after the weekend, and my friend Jamey and I met there to take it out for a ride as a light snow began to fall. 

By the time we lifted the sail, the snow was falling in heavier clumps; sailing through it was marvelous, we could not see the edge of the horizon nor tell the difference between ice and sky. More snow came down, and as we rumbled along, we had the sensation of flying through space and that the clumps of icy flakes were stars.

The bat and the DN are stored in the barn behind my mother’s house. As I said, it would surprise me if we sailed this year, but the boats are ready, and so am I.