As we awoke to Donald J. Trump as president-elect of the United States yesterday morning, my best hope was that we would be able to count on his penchant for changing his mind. He is nothing if not fickle.

I find it hard to believe that so many Americans voted for him because they actually want, or actually expect, him to follow through on his endless incantation of wanton threats. The list is appalling: to see Hillary Clinton indicted and imprisoned, Muslims banned from immigrating here, “deportation forces” in our streets, punishments for women who have abortions, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the defunding of public schools, health insurance denied to 16.4 million people, nuclear weapons spread around to more countries. . . . If these things are really what half of America supports, we may be forced to recognize that our belief in ourselves as compassionate, idealistic people has been a giant mistake. 

What is clear is that the electorate no longer holds the leaders of this nation to standards of exemplary behavior, that it doesn’t care that the next president of the United States doesn’t pay income taxes, stiffs creditors, laughs at bankrupting small businesses, mocks the obese and the disabled, and dupes would-be university students. 

Many of us woke up yesterday feeling like outsiders. Call me a bleeding-heart liberal if you like, but “where have all the flowers gone?” 

It has been said that Americans no longer pay attention to both sides of national debates, but instead “curate” the news by choosing only those sources with which they agree, that they no longer bother to educate themselves about the facts and science behind issues, much less about what dissenting voices might have to say. After all, a demogogue has no need of a government-controlled media — a Pravda — when we the people are only too happy to censor our own news intake, when we no longer seem capable of distinguishing between reported news and mere opinion.

Here at home, I am proud that through its letters pages The East Hampton Star continues to be a vibrant public forum.

I am someone who waivers between optimism and denial when faced with adversity. This is probably the greatest adversity we have faced. Given the Republican sweep of both Houses of Congress, I fear for what lies ahead.

One of the puzzles about clamming is how slowly it goes at the start. It happens almost every time: No matter when or where I go, after I step into the water and drop my rake I find nothing for several long minutes. Then, there is a familiar clunk as the tines of the rake strike the first clam, and then another, and it is on. This may reflect some kind of truth about nature and humankind, but I’m not sure what that may be.

On Monday, my friend Jameson Ellis stopped by the office so we could go to the harbor to dig clams. He and his wife, Jill, were planning an election-watching party the following night and wanted to make a red and a white chowder. To a fault, I am always up for any excuse to leave the office on a spectacular fall day, and off we went in my truck.

That the truck was running that morning was in itself a bit of good fortune. Its battery had given up the week before, and I had just picked up a replacement at Bridgehampton Kmart when it opened at 8 a.m. Low tide was around 9:30, so I rushed to the Napa Auto Parts store for a new pair of lug connectors, then back to the office parking lot to install everything, check the morning email, and get ready to go.

Nobody was around when we got where we were going, and a beautiful scrim of orange and red leaves ringed the harbor. Up a creek tucked away from the northwest wind, we waded in our wetsuits. True to pattern, as we began I worried that we might have previously clammed the location out, or that the tide was wrong, or that the bottom had shifted. Then, whunk. A clam. And another and another. 

At the end of the morning, as my floating basket neared full, and I worried that it might tip and I would lose an hour’s digging, I wondered how I could have thought it so hopeless at the beginning.

I took a dozen cherrystones home; Jameson dragged the rest off to Sag Harbor in a five-gallon bucket. Destination: Election Day dinner.

I’ve just reread some of my columns and I am struck by how relentlessly optimistic, how cheery I am, as — if you’ve read me for any length of time, for half a century, say — you will probably agree.

“I’ve been reading you,” a fellow I once met at a Canio’s book reading said, adding, with a sigh — yes, yes, it was a sigh, though not an unamiable one, I thought, one of a fellow sufferer rather — “for weeks . . . and weeks . . . and weeks. . . .”

Maybe it’s the nature of the beast. As Robert Gottlieb has said to the writers he’s edited, or at least to some of them, “Don’t write, type.” 

Ev Rattray once said to me, when I asked him how long I should go on, that a page and a half would do, which is to say about 450 words. It got so that on a typewriter I could almost hit the mark blindfolded. When my synapses began to cease firing, I would take the blindfold off and marvel at how close I’d come.

Norton Mockridge told me when I first began here that I tended to overwrite, and after a while I figured out what he meant. Nothing too much. Get in and get out. Verbose ist verboten. 

Though when computers came along, you could no longer see the page unrolling from the carriage, nor could you anymore delight in exxxing out whole paragraphs, or in ripping pages out, scrunching them up and hurling them toward a wastebasket, invariably wide of the mark. 

With computers, you were less argumentative, you just went along, the screen was clean, there were no smudges, the process was mesmerizing, and if you wanted to know if you were done, you went up to “tools” and asked for the word count, to keep yourself in check, no longer being availed of the  proverbial page and a half. 

And maybe, in some insidious way, computers, as opposed to typewriters, lend themselves to optimism — how depressing — though I tend to think whether you’re an optimist or not dates to infancy. It’s all there, your character is pretty much obvious from the beginning. 

So, how many words is this? Ah, 380. I’ve fallen short of the mark. I must think of something else to say, something significant, well, if not significant, something. . . . Ah, have you noticed all these words that all of a sudden you see everywhere. Words like “buffeted” and “twee” and “roiled” and “reaching out” and “upcoming” and “ongoing.” I fear I’ve been ongoing too long. Ah, 450, on the button!

I’m a sucker for aesthetics. I’m the kind of guy who would live in a modernist glass cube because it looks cool, no matter how inconvenient. I judge books by their covers and products by their packing and I would rather have a mediocre dinner at a chic restaurant than good food from a dive.

East Hampton is a great place for the aesthetically motivated. It’s beautiful almost everywhere you go. And for a weekender, it looks like utopia. I would think that the people on the local boards and improvement societies are as aesthetically motivated as I am because they are doing a great job making the town look good. But after living here full time for eight months, I’ve started to see that aesthetics can be deceiving. 

The Village of East Hampton is made to look old. That’s because many of the buildings in town are old. And the rest of them are designed to carefully match the village’s charming aesthetic. The signage is restrained, the store windows are tasteful, and the sidewalks can make you feel like you are strolling through a town of yesteryear. This is all by design; the design review board regulates almost every aesthetic detail of what a storefront can and cannot look like. But what it doesn’t regulate are the kinds of companies that fill its highly manicured village. Inside a building that was designed to house, say, a cobbler’s shop or a mom-and-pop toy store is an international corporation with headquarters far from our quaint little village. Behind the perfectly vintage facades are companies that use our town for P.R. and close their doors once the New York folk leave for the season. 

If the local boards spent as much time thinking about how the village could work for the community as they do thinking about how it looks, I think East Hampton could be as successful as it is beautiful. 

Levi Shaw-Faber is an associate editor for The Star’s East magazine.

Leo the pig has put on quite a few pounds since the last time I wrote about him. As pigs do, he grew fat this spring and summer, grazing on the lawn, then munched with pleasure on the black cherries, acorns, and beach plums that reached the ground in the fall.

The last time I was able to get a scale under him, he weighed about 110 pounds. Now, in his fifth year of life, I estimate he might be closer to 180. Where this ends I don’t know.

I had been way off guessing how big he would get back when he arrived at our house, shipped from a backyard breeder in Texas via air freight. He would grow to be as big as our black Lab mix, only with shorter legs, I declared. I was wrong by half.

Next time we want to weigh him, it will have to be on the scale at the town waste center.

Pigs can live up to 18 years, I read somewhere. That means that Leo may well have plenty more growth ahead of him. The biggest pig I ever saw was a massive mountain of flesh and bristles lying under a tree near a ferry dock in the Caribbean that did not flinch as four small children climbed onto its spacious flank for a photograph. Given Leo’s good and easy life, maybe that is ahead.

It was not supposed to be this way, of course. The breeder had made assurances that her pigs never got bigger than 10 pounds. When Leo arrived, in a plastic crate about the size and shape of a soda bottle, one might have been deluded into believing that. There was even supposed to be a money-back guarantee — you can guess how that worked out. I was told “she sounded so nice on the phone!”

Sure, information to the contrary abounded. One story I enjoyed involved a supposed “tea cup” pig that grew to 200 pounds and took a dislike to a grandmother, particularly when she tried to sit on a sofa that the pig considered its own. The web is filled with tales of pigs eating woodwork, destroying furniture, rooting up lawns, harassing other pets, and so on. I protested that getting a pig was a very, very bad idea; it made no difference.

I think of Leo’s trajectory as a cautionary tale about the dangers of the online world in general. People on the internet will tell you anything — and some will always believe.

Mary said they’d discontinued her makeup, and I said the things we liked seemed always to be discontinued, like the fleecy warm-up pants I just had had sewn, and which I’ll wear every day now until the end of eternity.

And, yes, not to sound too morose a note, our lives will be discontinued as well, and to prepare I’ve begun hauling my regrets to the dump to be deposited in the far corner with corrosive things unfit for recycling. 

Montaigne said that if you’d lived a while by the time death came you were pretty much dead anyway, so there really wasn’t much to it. Meanwhile he continued planting his cabbages, as I do too in a way if you consider what a wonderful compost heap could be made of my outpourings. 

Speaking of compost, we had to get rid of ours — just as was the case with my regrets — because rats, we thought, were delighting in it, as they evidently also were with the birdseed on the ground. I caught onetwothreejustlikethat in a Havahart trap, and felt very proud of myself, much as O’en does when he’s strutting ahead of me with a stick between his teeth.

Discontinuing the bird feeding has deprived us of colorful and compelling company, though I guess it had to be done, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, divested of regrets for the time being, I can, perhaps like the rats in the compost, spend more time delighting in transitory things, in the woodsmoke scent of Mary’s hair, in her warmth and laughter, and in the golden light at the end of summer days, in the memory of the proud tilt of a little wren’s head, and in O’en’s black eyes.

For, in the end, that’s it! That’s all there is, folks.

Summer ended late this year — a whole month late, this week’s high temperatures notwithstanding. It wasn’t until October 21 that the summer sun delivered its last, loving rays as we unloaded a good few thousand lobsters and crabs from the Kim & Jake. 

The phone had chimed its text-message chime a few minutes before 7 a.m.: The Kim & Jake would tie up at 8. With a meeting in East Hampton at 11, I could work two hours at most, but there was enough time to stop for coffee on the way, and that was reason enough to head east, into the rising sun. 

I gulped the last, sugary gulp on the dock a few minutes before 8, and it was on with the boots, the apron, the gloves. The sun resplendent, I glanced north-northeast and wondered if that was Watch Hill across the gentle Sound, the breeze light and soothing — sensual like Blossom Dearie hitting the highest notes in a bouncy ragtime workout. “And you, you come from Rhode Island, and little old Rhode Island is famous for you.” 

Sometimes I am on the dock, a long steel hook in hand, and as the crew fill plastic crates with their catch and heave them from the boat, I drag them inside, one after another, where they are hoisted onto the culling table. Other times I am inside, where the lobsters, sorted by weight into larger crates, are carried to a scale and then to one of many tanks where they await the end. Here’s hoping for an auspicious rebirth, I think, as crate after tightly packed crate is dropped into the cold, cold water. 

The last couple of times, I’ve taken a turn on the boat’s deck and, once, climbed into the hold, crouching and surrounded by innumerable sullen and forlorn Jonah crabs, many hundreds of dagger eyes on me as I toss them into a tall bucket that, when filled, is lifted to the deck and poured into a crate. 

If there is one thing I know almost nothing about, it is fishing. But a few minutes of this and I do know one thing: I am not cut out for this work. Shouldn’t I be lying on an ocean beach, blissfully absorbing the last rays of summer? Yes, but no: The winter is long and I must earn what I can while the summer lasts. 

My short unhappy career concluded, I return to the deck and the captain takes a turn below as the crew work another hold. I raise the bucket, dump it into the crate, and turn the crabs upright. A claw closed on a finger will make a man cry, I’m told. For now, I must take their word for it. Fortunately, the beasts move slowly. 

Back on the dock, I gaze eastward toward Shagwong Point, site of so much, so-long-ago sunshine and merriment, and beyond. Summer. Endless Summer. The Endless Summer, like that old surf movie, or that Beach Boys compilation, multipart harmonies pouring forth like the midmorning sun on the last day of summer. 

The love of my life

She left me one day

I cried when she said

I don’t feel the same way

Still I have the warmth of the sun

Summer ended in the afternoon. Famished and unable to wait for a promised clam pie, I sipped lukewarm soup in the car, the rain starting quickly and then pouring down, the cover haphazardly thrown across the broken, leaking convertible top, me inside, drenched and in near darkness as an old man shouted angrily on the radio. Time to kill and nowhere to go. 

Go east, not-so-young man, go east, a voice whispered. Toward the rising sun. 

Or south, maybe. To the endless summer. 

But just go. 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

Let’s not blame the election but bad international news coverage for not knowing about the Peace Boat. You may not have heard about it, and I would not have if I had not been paying attention to what Judy Lerner, a part-time East Hampton resident and a nonagenarian, has been up to lately.

Peace Boat’s mission is to promote a nuclear-free world and the 17 “sustainable development goals” of the United Nations. It left Japan on Aug. 18, headed for 21 countries in 104 days. It docked at Pier 90 in Manhattan last month, with five atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki aboard, here to offer testimony at the U.N., and it sponsored a “Floating Festival for Sustainability” onboard on Oct. 20. Judy Lerner was there.

Ms. Lerner was honored with the William Sloane Coffin Jr. Peacemaker Award in early October by the Peace Action Fund of New York State. A longtime special-education teacher and former teachers union president who raised three children in Harrison, N.Y., and Greenwich, Conn., she has been a peace activist since at least 1971, when she was among the founders of Women Strike for Peace, which fought nuclear testing. She has been all over the world, fact-gathering and attending forums, including Cuba (when it was off-limits), Vietnam (with the antiwar movement ), Japan, China, Kenya, and Denmark. 

  Ms. Lerner was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for 20 years. Now the director of the executive committee of the 1,000-member Non-Governmental Organization Department of Public Information, she spends three or four days a week at the U.N., where she works to engage others, particularly the young, in its activities.

Cora Weiss, a part-time East Hamptoner who was profiled in The Star in August, gave a few words of introduction to Ms. Lerner at the dinner at which the Peacemaker award was presented. Speaking of Mr. Coffin, she said he could gather people of different persuasions together. “And you,” Ms. Weiss said, referring to Ms. Lerner, “persuade people also: to campaign against nuclear weapons, to call for no more war, to work together with other peace groups, to learn about the United Nations, and to call for education for peace in our schools.”

Noting that she was almost 95 years old, Ms. Lerner also spoke. “I only hope that I reach 100 years and can look back at all of my work and struggle for a world without war. . . . Together we will not only ensure peace and equality, but we will do something else significant. We will disrupt aging!” 

East Hampton is often thought of as a place where celebrities roam, and that is not incorrect. But among our celebrities are people who would never think of themselves in that way, but whose life work may help make this a better world.

The whole social-media dance has gone on for a long time now but, given its growth and its impact on the world in which we live, it seems well past time for me to get with the program. I use a Mac for work and read and write emails all day, every day, but beyond that I really have not participated in the revolution in how people communicate with each other.

When my eldest granddaughter, who at that time already had an iPhone, started using Instagram at the age of about 12 or 13, I wondered what the world was coming to: Wasn’t she too young? When some years later my youngest granddaughter, barely 9 years old this summer, tried to set me up on Instagram, I smiled benignly but ignored the whole thing. By then, my daughter-in-law had started posting stories from The East Hampton Star on Facebook, and although I clicked occasionally to find out which stories were attracting notice, I didn’t pay much attention.

I do have a Facebook account, but I rarely look at it and have no idea how many Facebook “friends” I may have. I do know, however, that my husband has many more. He has always been gregarious, and seems to have “friended” all of my friends online, as well as his own. Without trying to, he has become my social-media social secretary. When I forget someone’s birthday, his Facebook alert, promptly relayed, allows me to remain in good stead. 

I can remember when the activists at Tiananmen Square got news from the outside world via fax. More recently, the Arab Spring, another kind of revolution, was sparked by activism on social media. ISIS uses Facebook and other platforms (hey, at least I know some of the lingo) to spread hatred and recruit young men and women from the West. You can’t pick up a copy of The New York Times without finding articles about hacking and cyber war that often go right over my head and, I assume, many people of my generation. 

And then, of course, we have Donald Trump, with his addled talk of “the cyber.” I have read that, incredibly, he is even more behind the times than I am when it comes to computer literacy. Reportedly, he didn’t own a computer until about 2007, and his real estate business still uses a Windows operating system from 2003. But isn’t it fitting that he has embraced Twitter as his own favorite means of mass-communication, given his accusation that traditional media are part of a giant, secret conspiracy against him? (A news-media conspiracy that, by the way, the Illuminati or the “international bankers” or whoever else it is who is supposed to be running it have completely forgotten to tell me about.)

Not wanting to get left behind by history, I spent some time this morning trying to get up to speed on some relatively more up-to-date forms of social media. I came away with a list of the 12 most popular platforms in this country: In order, according to one source, they are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Tumblr, Vine, WhatsApp, Reddit, Flicker, and Pinterest. 

That’s too many for me to digest. Maybe one of our schools or libraries will take up the social media challenge by offering adult-ed courses for people like me. I would be the first to sign up.

In the meantime, I noticed an interesting headline on Google News this afternoon, from The Independent: “We Probably Just Heard a Message From Aliens, Scientists Say.” Apparently, extremely odd and inexplicable noises and modulations are emanating from a set of stars in deep space. 

I wonder if anyone will be offering a course in interplanetary communications one day soon? We’ve seen a lot of wonders in our lifetimes. If it all comes to pass, and our civilizations do make contact, I really have my fingers crossed that the first human being the aliens speak with at that intergalactic-introductions ceremony isn’t President Trump.

News that the Maidstone Club, having just gotten a new irrigation system in place for its golf course, now wants to build a new bridge over an upper reach of Hook Pond reminded me of my childhood in East Hampton Village. In those days, the mid-1970s, we could roam a lot more freely than kids can today. 

From about seventh grade on, my friends and I spent a lot of time poking around Hook Pond and the Nature Trail dreen. From my family’s house behind the library, we could walk with our fishing poles and a bucket of worms across to Jeffery’s Lane, past the club tennis house, and onto the course’s longer bridge.

Other times we could push a little farther, crossing the bottom of a field that was still farmed to get to a shorter, falling down span known as Joiner’s Bridge. That bridge, which also reaches the golf course, was recently rebuilt by the new property owner on the private side of the pond. It still appears as if it is decaying into the pond, but this time on purpose.

In retrospect, I suppose we were trespassing when we cast for bass and perch from the pond’s bridges, but no one ever objected. In fact, golfers often would stop to ask how the fishing was going. Nowadays, the feeling is different; I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone fishing from either of these bridges, let alone the Dunemere Lane vehicle bridge, and there are signs reminding would-be visitors that the course itself is private property. May­­be there are fewer fish. 

My son, Ellis, and I got it into our minds to see what was what from the Main Beach side of the pond the other day. And, while we saw signs of fish splashing on the surface, we could get nothing to rise to our hooks.

For my dollar, I would prefer not to see another bridge over the pond, which belongs to the town trustees, but if the club insists that it has to have one, perhaps it might be willing sweeten the pot by allowing the public to fish from its crossings again.