A biblical-grade plague descended on Montauk in recent days, according to residents and visitors. And what has people talking is not the oversupply of bros and hipsters. 

Swarming black flies have suddenly appeared at Montauk Point and on north-facing beaches in stunning numbers. As far as I know, these are not the same dreaded black flies of New Hampshire and Maine — those things leave swelling welts; the Montauk menaces just hurt like hell.

I first met up with the flies with my son, Ellis, at Hither Hills, where we had gone to snorkel and look at fish on Saturday. Going into the water, there was no sign of what was to come, but when we emerged it was as if we had stumbled into a nest of hornets. 

Slapping at our legs and arms, Ellis and I ran to my truck, jumped inside, and started to go. The problem was that a good three dozen of the flies had followed us into the cab. It was difficult to fend them off my exposed ankles and drive at the same time, let me tell you.

Monday night, getting out of the water after surfing near Montauk Point, it was even worse. Hundreds of them, drawn, it was clear, by the moisture on my skin and surfboard, rushed in. Cursing and stumbling, I made my way as quickly as possible back up the trail. The bug spray that I had stashed with my flip-flops did nothing at all, diluted, I assumed, by the saltwater still on my skin.

It is kind of a fitting thing, I suppose, right when the waves are getting good, thanks to Hurricane Gaston far out in the ocean to the east and surfers have a little more time to get in the water, that a new challenge, like the flies, arises. There’s a bit of poetry in that, cussing like a sailor nothwithstanding. 

I remember Arthur Roth likened dying to getting on a train. Here comes the train, he said, soon before he did. I’ve got to get on.

I, on the other hand, am thinking of jumping out of a plane. I did that as a youth, for a brief period, and, as I said to Rob Balnis, my personal trainer, the other day, it was at the same time scary and fun.

Whenever Mary and I go by Spadaro Airport, I say, “Why don’t we jump out of a plane,” but she will have none of it. I won’t either, not after having seen a friend of mine’s cheeks flap like a Bassett’s ears in the wind in the video of his 75th birthday’s descent.  I just say it to get a rise out of her. 

I didn’t puff myself up too much in telling jump stories at East End Physical Therapy. I just did it in training, I told them, never in combat. And there was no free-falling to speak of, only for the first couple of seconds before your chute, attached to a communal clothesline of sorts, popped open.

At jump school, we leaped from a 34-foot tower, 34 feet apparently being the height at which you either would or wouldn’t. And if you froze, they sometimes gave you a little nudge. There was no standing on ceremony. One guy prodded thus, did a 180 and grabbed the tower floor with both hands and dangled there. “He was the most athletic of us all,” I said. 

We were attached to a line there too, one that slanted down toward a berm. “Like a zip line?” said Rob. “Yes, like that.”

“Me and Jerry Hey used to take paperbacks with us when we jumped — there was this wonderful bookstore where we went all the time, Tuttle’s, of Okinawa and Rutland, Vermont, who would ever have thought of that? I used to read James Agee’s ‘A Death in the Family’ as we circled the drop zone. Hey would be reading Henry V’s ‘Once more unto the breach . . . stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. . . .’ ”

We were paper tigers, not King Henry’s kind. There was no noble lustre in our eyes. I wound up clerking for the chaplain and did time teaching tennis in satisfaction of a minor offense before I was discharged, having never left the island except to visit Yap and Babelthuap.

“At any rate,” I said to Rob. “I’ve come to the conclusion that jumping out of a plane serves well as a metaphor for birth and death. And I wish I could tell you, when it comes to the latter, whether my chute opens.”

They never should have done it. They never should have released the news that coffee wasn’t bad for you, was in fact good for you, so you might as well drink till your chromosomes start crackling. Because I have, will, and continue to. 

It was yet one more of those reversals of conventional wisdom that turn back the clock to a time when you could more or less wing it with health concerns — knock back that red wine or beer, even the smallest and weakest of chest-centered organs will pump with newfound vigor. While you’re at it, go ahead, stuff nuts in your mouth, squirrel-like, they’ll do nothing more than help blow that built-up plaque out of your arterial pipes like oil-mist from a Harley’s exhaust system. 

Salt? Never mind the coy thumb and forefinger pinch, break out the ladle — turns out too little will lay you low with a stroke. And why not lard up with proteins to stoke your body’s fires? Don’t worry about that panniculus of jiggling flesh at midriff, carry it proudly as a signifier of your wise all-things-in-moderation judgment.

All things considered, though, coffee is the best, as articulated seemingly semimonthly in the pages of what is surely the nation’s most informative, even indispensable, periodical, Bottom Line. Unfailingly devoid of advertising, each issue comes chockablock with fascinating factoids (“Did you know that medical error is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S.?”), mother-knows-best tips (“Nail polish stops window-screen tears”), and occasionally hair-raising reportage (“Can Your Cell Phone Cause Cancer? The Answer Just Changed From ‘Possibly’ to ‘Probably’”), all courtesy of a dozen or sometimes upward of a score of contributors and clearly laid out across 16 succinct pages. 

“Liver Disease Is Rampant” declares one recent headline, but turn the page and you have your near-cure under a one-word subheading: coffee. It’s good for reducing inflammation — cancer, too — and not only that, two extra cups of joe a day will cut the risk of cirrhosis by almost half (for you two-fisted drinkers out there). Worried about Parkinson’s? A family history of Alzheimer’s? Spark up the percolator.

But I could’ve told you this, or something like it, more than two decades ago, when I was still new to the pleasures of the beverage and a friend showed me a yellowing used bookstore find detailing how some sultan of yore once tested the physiological consequences of coffee by confining two sad-sack prisoners to a tower to drink nothing but cup after cup of the strong Turkish stuff. The ill effects were none, however; the captives simply sat around, talked, and drank in peace.

In my case, I must say it’s become a crutch. Got a writing assignment? As a matter of fact I do, and it’s now 11:15 at night as I type these words into a Google Doc, my left leg still hammering like a woodpecker’s beak from the Starbucks venti I drained hours ago. 

Most runners know of the benefits of drinking a cup of coffee before pounding the pavement — the blood flow, the alertness, the, uh, placebo effect. On my way to engage in my midlife crisis regimen of postwork 5K-ish runs, as I pass Sag Harbor’s most relentlessly frequented business, I think, “Boy, I should stop in for a quick cup of 7-Eleven coffee; I’ll sip it as I drive.” 

Hey, I’ve been reading on a computer screen all day while failing to keep up with the usual leaking-faucet drip of emails, what could be the harm?

Then in the mail the other day came a Bottom Line with this teaser on the cover: “Hot drinks linked to cancer; page 10.”

Just keep it under 149 degrees. You might be okay.

Baylis Greene is an associate editor at The Star.

Who would have thought an audience at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater listening to a panel discussion on “Presidential Politics” would take to booing and hissing? But, yes, that’s what happened on Aug. 15. Even Ken Auletta, the eminent writer, appeared nonplused in his role as moderator. 

It became apparent early on that Democrats were in the majority in the packed house when Gov. Howard Dean stated that “Hillary is truthful,” and the audience broke into applause. The laughter and booing ensued when John Jay LaValle, an attorney and former supervisor of Brookhaven Town who was a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention, called his nominee “blatantly honest.” Some also booed when he that said Mr. Trump was a private person who just wasn’t used to using “politically correct” language. But Mr. LaValle was applauded when he said policy issues should be the focus of the campaign.

It was a rowdy evening. John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of  The Nation, got into a few brief shouting matches, beginning with one over their opinions of Bernie Sanders. Mr. Podhoretz was “extremely distressed” by the support Senator Sanders had received in the Democratic primaries, and he called socialism “a horror.” Ms. vanden Heuvel not only said she had supported the senator but that he “did a great service for the country.” Mr. Auletta asked them to cool it.

There also were shouts when Mr. Podhoretz said he would not vote for either presidential candidate and when Ms. vanden Heuvel said Jimmy Carter had been the best president. All this passion made for a lively evening, although Mr. Podhoretz’s insistence on continuing to speak when it was someone else’s turn put his arguments at something of a disadvantage. 

There were some things all the panelists agreed on: that many Americans feel disenfranchised and that the economy should be made to work for everybody; also, that even if Mr. Trump lost the election “Trumpism” would continue in our popular culture. Each of the pundits damned the media, agreeing it was “corporatized,” while Governor Dean expanded on that subject, saying short-term profit-making goals had warped dependable reporting. Mr. Auletta remarked that people today often pay attention only to those mediums that reinforce their pre-existing opinions.

Mr. Dean had the last word.

Noting that war after war had plagued Europe over the centuries, and mentioning our own war of 1776, he said a democratic political system was a step ahead for humanity because it was a substitute for war. The audience voiced its approval loudly again when he said, “Hillary will be a great president.”

While shouting isn’t what you expect when you go out for a panel discussion, it seemed to demonstrate how the toxic tenor of this year’s presidential campaign has seeped under the skin of even the most staid Hamptonites. (You can check out what went down by going to Guild Hall’s YouTube channel, but take note that while the panelists can be heard clearly, the commotion in the audience is muted.) The second of three programs sponsored by Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute, this one on the Supreme Court, took place Monday and was live-streamed. A third, on Aug. 29, will be on the topic of President Obama’s legacy. Tickets are hard to come by. Prepare for Round Three.

A Trump voter told me a joke the other night about how Jesus was in the back office at the Pearly Gates using Hillary Clinton’s “lie clock” as a ceiling fan. It was amusing when he told it, though thinking about it later I figured it would not win any comedy awards.

In this man’s view, what he called Mrs. Clinton’s mendacity was the reason he didn’t like her; he did not care for Donald Trump much either, and said that if there were a viable alternative candidate on the right, he would consider voting for him or her. Then he said some things about Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s email server, and I changed the subject.

Politics are in the air even here on the South Fork this August (as the “Connections” column above attests). Mr. Trump was at Woody Johnson’s house on Highway Behind the Pond in the village the other day for a fund-raiser. Mrs. Clinton will be around this weekend for her own round of events. As they say in Manhattan when a dignitary is in town, expect delays.

Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul stopped by the Star office late on Wednesday last week. She was here for an overnight in the area in advance of a clean-energy announcement in Montauk the next day. As I gave her a brief tour of the building, the subject of the election came up. 

She said she had known Mrs. Clinton since she was in Congress some years back, and had been struck by the same quality I had noted the one brief time I saw her speak: how authentic she seemed. Bernie Sanders people, as well as the Trump voter with the joke will differ with that observation, but Ms. Hochul’s take mirrored my own, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Mrs. Clinton comes across as someone who knows what she is talking about when one hears her speak. And it seems to come from the heart.

 Mr. Trump also seems to believe strongly in what he says, even though only a fraction of it is true, or could even be considered rational. It was odd, listening to the Trump guy after having read in The Times just that morning that Mr. Trump claims his golf courses are valued at more than $50 million each on disclosure forms and in public boasts, but he says they are worth far less in property tax filings. Whose lies one tolerates depends on one’s point of view, that much is clear.

I had given one of my best sermons ever, though the phone, I discovered, had gone dead.

Well, I had heard it anyway, and what a stirring sermon it was, all about persistence and grit and the fruits thereof. Before I’d ascended my pulpit, she’d said she had reconnected with God, which I thought was good, for recently she’d said she no longer talked to Him, which had struck me as — especially in her case — sad. 

She said she was also connecting now with people too. To know that she was reconnecting spiritually — however that connection may be characterized — and socially may have boosted my spirits as much as hers were depressed when, a week ago, and physically compromised as well, she’d checked herself into the hospital.

It is good every now and then to readjust the carburetor, as it were — which is what I think she was trying to do here — trying to achieve a more perfect mixture.

Was she happy to go home? Yes. 

Did she think it was a good thing she had done, a good decision that she had made? Oh, yes, it had been a good thing.

I said she sounded 100 percent better. She said she felt much better, though it had been, she said, a rough few days.

She was unsure about driving a car. One step at a time, I said. 

The goal was to be happy, was it not, to feel physically and mentally and spiritually in tune insofar as that was possible. 

(It’s a deeper goal, I think, than is often assumed.)

One step I hope she’ll take once she gets home — requiring some courage on her part — will be the one over the threshold and into the air . . . into life.

Some months ago, I wrote an essay, here in The Star, titled “The Last California Christmas.” It was about the last Christmas my family spent at my parents’ house on the West Coast. 

Dear reader: I may have misled you, albeit unknowingly. 

About a year ago, my parents, both newly retired, abandoned their life in Southern California to join us here, on eastern Long Island. 

Now 67 and 69, it took them a solid year (and that’s being generous) to adjust to their new surroundings. They first braved the humidity and later learned to shovel snow, discovering that weather patterns here change by the minute — the skies routinely unleashing more rain in a few hours than falls on parts of Southern California some years.

Once the temperature approached freezing, Father went online, dutifully purchasing down coats of various weights and lengths, waterproof boots, and flannel-lined jeans in hopes of surviving his first New York winter. 

My parents also got to know their two grandchildren, Theo, 4, and Violet, 1. For years, our relationship consisted of cross-country plane rides and occasional visits. Intimacy became sandwiched into long weekends. A week if we were lucky.

Now, their grandmother makes several appearances throughout the week, sharing in the burden of child care and cooking — also, the joy of spontaneous trips to Serene Green for fresh fish and Long Beach for a quick swim before dinner. 

Eighteen years ago this fall, I moved “back East” for college. I never really moved back to California, apart from a few summers here and there. Though Los Angeles runs through both sides of my bloodline, the East Coast and its people felt instantly familiar. New York is where I started my life as a writer and met my husband and gave birth to our two children.

A few weeks ago, my husband was working in the city and my mother and I were standing in our front yard in Sag Harbor, the children taking turns running through the sprinklers on a hot July afternoon. It occurred to me that being close to people requires vulnerability and that it hasn’t always been my strength, learning to rely on others. 

I looked over at my mother and realized how much I’ve come to rely on her over the past year. And how living across the country from each other seems inconceivable now. Also, should either of my children ever decide to similarly relocate, I will immediately move to wherever they are and find an apartment nearby.  

But I digress. Earlier this month, my husband accepted a job in Silicon Valley. It’s a monumental shift for him professionally and obviously for our family, but he’s more excited than I’ve seen him in a long time. I’m a big believer that when the lights come back on again, excitement overtaking inertia, it’s generally a good idea to follow such impulses. 

Over the past year, Sag Harbor has become our home — its thriving year-round community and wonderful friends alongside whom we planned on raising our children. Last week, we went looking for a new place to live, hoping to replicate much of the magic we’ve found here. In Northern California, standing beneath the eucalyptus and redwood trees, I felt a bit like a transplanted New Yorker visiting a foreign land, albeit one with familiar five-lane freeways and suburban cul-de-sacs stretching as far as the eye can see (see also: earthquakes, wildfires, and droughts). 

I first arrived at The Star in the summer of 2012. My son was only a few months old at the time and I somewhat hastily emailed David, eager to start working and writing again. I did little things at first, attending a school board meeting after Theo had gone to bed, before later diving into more complicated stories of all shapes and sizes. 

This newspaper was a huge part of our decision to move here full time — a yearlong experiment we started in January 2013. Since then, we never moved back to the city, eventually abandoning our two-bedroom apartment, which came to feel like visiting a former life. 

Before coming to The Star, I had never worked at a small-town newspaper. I first got to know this community through its schools. It proved an invaluable lesson to cover a school board meeting, get something wrong, and have to interact with those same people week after week. 

Four years went by in the blink of an eye. 

I guess one of the lessons here is that love makes you consider otherwise crazy things. For my parents, it will be their second cross-country move in two years. And for us, we will again go in search of a place to raise our family. (By the way, if you hear of any progressive, family-owned newspapers doing great journalism, you know where to find me.)

My latest plan is that we will again become summer people. I’m already on the lookout for a rental house. 

August is a magical time. I wait all year for the water to turn this warm. From now until we go, I’m vowing to take a swim in the ocean every day. The majestic beauty of the freezing cold Pacific awaits. But first, a few more swims at Egypt Beach before I go. 

Amanda M. Fairbanks has written for The Star since 2012, and she will be missed. 

An old friend, whose high-winged plane has been tied down from time to time this summer at the Montauk Airport, had offered to take me up for a look at this place I call home. And so, on a beautiful morning last week, before the heat of the day had affected the air quality negatively, it was time.

I’ve never been a fan of jet flight, and have always marveled at the lives of those for whom flying is commonplace (Hillary Clinton, for example, when she was secretary of state). In the late 1980s and early ’90s, though, I discovered how easy — and pleasant — jaunts in small planes could be. I jumped at whatever opportunity came my way to go to New York City by air and, on a few occasions, to Massachusetts and Rhode Island. 

The goal last week was not to get someplace but to share the experience of seeing the landscape from a new perspective. My friend the pilot explained his essential check-list routine, strapped me into the passenger’s (or co-pilot’s) seat, put me in a life jacket (just in case), and adjusted my headset. After a few bumps as we took off, it was smooth sailing, at between 500 and 1,000 feet, for an hour and a half.

It was great fun to float over places I knew intimately and to get a bird’s-eye view of waterfront palaces. It was astonishing to see certain aspects of this tip of the South Fork in ways that aren’t possible except from the air. 

It’s hard to tell while driving or walking near Accabonac Harbor, for example, that it stretches horizontally as far as it does — and seeing the houses on Gerard Drive from above made the folly of their location clear. The extensive oceanfront campground at Hither Hills State Park and the long row of trailers on Gin Beach in Montauk were evidence that you don’t have to be a millionaire to have a beautiful vacation spot here.

Straight lines in pretty hues on tilled farmland in Amagansett (100 acres of it, I think) were lovely to look at, and two dark-brown circles in Gardiner’s Bay, which I was told were made by schooling menhaden (that is, bunker), were an exciting surprise. 

I had forgotten that Gardiner’s Island has a primeval forest, and I learned that Cartwright Shoal is much longer than I remembered from the days when we picnicked there in years gone by.

As we circumnavigated the tip of the island from Three Mile Harbor to Montauk Point, what lay below no longer seemed the series of alternating developed and open spaces I know — nor a series of different beaches, waterways, and woodlands — but a coherent and breathtakingly beautiful whole. 

We are fortunate to have so much public parkland here and that voters  continue to endorse the use of their tax dollars to protect scenic and environmentally valuable properties. But if everyone were able to see the landscape from the air, as I did, I think preservation would be guaranteed.

Three bronze nails sit on my desk. They are hand-forged, about the width of my palm, heavy, and thick. I look at them with a magnifying loupe, hoping for a clue about what they might have come from, but there is nothing.

My son, Ellis, and I found the nails while snorkeling in the bay on Sunday. Given the fact that they are bronze, that they were underwater, and there were scattered bits of copper around, I assume they are all that is left of a shipwreck of some sort. 

Russell Bennett, who works in the front office here, said he remembers a ship’s decaying timbers at the spot, which were visible when he was a child. The bay held more of these secrets when we were small, half a century nearer the time of wooden boats, and when a busy commercial fishing fleet operated out of Promised Land.

I had been at a memorial gathering of surfers on Saturday for The Star’s late Rusty Drumm. Rusty would have liked my three nails, no doubt. He was an inveterate beachcomber, like me. Many were the Monday mornings when we would arrive at the office to regale each other with tales of the past days’ finds before getting down to the (to us) far less interesting business of newspapering.

It was Rusty who gave me the idea of rifling through washed-up eelgrass on the ocean beaches in search of the money and other treasures that wash out of swimmers’shorts. At Georgica one summer not all that long ago, my kids found $30 in water-tumbled bills, along with a load of trinkets and trash. It was just as Rusty had said.

There is just something better about what one finds on the beach, as if its transport from sea to sand gives it some special meaning. My bronze nails are not just nails; they are part of what had once been a ship that moved from place to place, carrying people or fish or what we can only imagine.

Rusty’s send-off on Saturday was an appropriate sea-going affair. Perhaps 150 of his friends paddled out past the surf line at Ditch Plain, forming a rough circle and holding hands to the extent possible as the heaving wind swell pushed us apart. 

Someone said a few words, and then the circle drifted apart. A few of us lingered on the outside, maybe waiting for a wave to ride back to the beach, maybe just to think. A couple of flower leis left behind in Rusty’s honor floated by, and before I turned to head to shore, I put my hand on them and said goodbye.

As I said, I have three nails on my desk now and when I look at them, I’ll wonder where they came from. But I’ll also remember that Rusty would have said that just finding them was enough.

My body was well ahead of my mind and its left hand was spraying shots everywhere, into the back fence, the net, and then Gary served and I began, began to realign, and once we’d tied the score at two games apiece, things, as they say, started to come together. 

When, at last, the connection was made, we won 10 straight games after losing, owing to my volatility, the first two.

“I don’t know,” I said to our eldest daughter later, “it takes me a while to get in sync. I told Gary that, like the brain patient written about in the Sunday magazine, I was arguing with myself. And that, worse, I was losing the argument.”

Later in the match, when things had been going swimmingly for a while, I turned to him and said, “I’m still arguing, but I’m winning the argument now.”

It all, I suppose, is traceable to trying to exert one’s will, rather than trying to be at one with things. At times, I think I’d rather spin confounding serves into the far corners of that good night than go gently. 

There was a time, a delightful time, when I played paddle on grass, and really didn’t care whether anything I hit was in or out, and, of course, wonderful to tell, most everything I hit was in. I called High Times the next day to offer my services as its sportswriter. 

Since then, I — my body and mind, with the inner eye looking on, in bemusement, I trust — have been arguing with myself. And, periodically, I have to check myself in for a realignment.

Mary is helpful in that regard — she, I would say, is my best mechanic. It is to her that I bring all my petty complaints and excuses and it is before her that I shamelessly preen, peacock-like.

“Be Zen,” she says. “Play Zennis.” 

She is right. It’s all one: the mind, the body, the spirit. . . . What’s outside, what’s inside. It’s really a beautiful game when you think of it.

When you think of it.