The fashion police are making a steady exit from the Village of East Hampton, New York, this September 2015. Also: The National Guard is being considered as a remedy for the poor post-11 p.m. behavior that took place in open view on the streets and beaches of Montauk, New York, this past summer 2015. A group of National Guardsmen may station on Montauk for the summer of 2016 as a deterrent to bad behavior.

It came to the attention of certain residents of the Village of East Hampton that a group of 14 undercover agents of the fashion industry has been operating along Main Street, Newtown Lane, and other East Hampton locations. These agents are easy to spot: They carry iPhone 6s clearly identifiable by their custom cases: purplish yellow red or some uniquely gaudy color scheme. These agents also wear nice fresh clothes, the newest fashion summerwear. Cute, snappy colors, no socks, bright sneakers — talkative individuals they are, always taking snapshots and selfies with whatever or whomever may constitute a new fashionable concept. Mary’s Marvelous on Newtown Lane has become the fashionista headquarters for clandestine fashion meetings.

Not to be played the fool, an unnamed individual who lives near Mary’s Marvelous secretly recorded many of the fashion agents’ meetings. The tape recordings were quietly distributed and listened to by at least 30 East Hampton residents. The cat is out of the bag.

The conversation took place along these crescendos: “OMG . . . locals dress like crap . . . something must be done about this. Did you see the guy in his pajamas checking the surf? What about that mom who showed up to get her daughter at the Jitney wearing a long, worn-out L.L. Bean nightgown, robe, or whatever it was?”

Fashion Agent 2 said, “On the other hand, did you see that sparkling Scoop Beach dress worn by that gorgeous lady? Take note, people will buy that.”

Agent 3 said, “Oh my — the Lilly Pulitzer short dress that 20-something wore on Newtown Lane was to die for. I have the photo . . . mass-produce a version . . . sell, sell . . . sell, sell.”

This was early in the summer season of 2015. The conversations at Mary’s Marvelous among fashion agents, secretly tape-recorded, are now known as “The Fashion Tapes.” Mothers took their young sons aside and put clean, colorful new shirts on them. Wives told their husbands, “Shave, get a haircut, you look scary.” Grandparents called their grandchildren and told them, “Dress better.”

Men told their friends, “The fashion police are here, dress nice; they think we are slobs. Do you want your slovenly image posted on Newsday.com or Patch with the caption ‘Slovenly dress pervasive among East End residents: They just don’t care’?”

The fashion police took notes on many things, including a man who had his money wrapped in a rubber band at the Hampton Market — lots of it? “That lady’s hair looks like Ireland circa 1200 . . . OMG, what is up with the 1967 Raleigh bike?”

The fashion police are pure capitalists. They have ways of selling East Hampton people: clothes, bikes, cars, trucks, bracelets, rings, handbags, wallets, scarves, designer shirts — accessories galore.

The fashion police have returned to tall buildings and nice offices in N.Y.C., L.A., Chicago, Paris to discuss their findings from this summer past in East Hampton. The agents agreed upon these subjects: The Springs hamlet is a hopeless situation — getting those people to buy new clothes is not going to happen. Amagansett is gentrified, a hard market to crack! Ugly, gaudy T-shirts — provocative. Clothing: Sell the stuff out on Montauk. The Village of East Hampton is prime territory — fill it to the rafters with great clothes and accessories.

The fashion police have power. They have decided on big sales and fabulous items of every pedigree to be placed at Scoop Beach, Lilly Pulitzer, Ralph Lauren, Theory, Cashmere Hampton, Lexington. Starting Nov. 12, “Operation Barrage” will begin. The best clothing and accessories are currently being packed and sent to Village of East Hampton storefronts. Love shopping, love the fall atmosphere here, love Starbucks — it is a natural fit.

Even die-hard East Hampton residents are thinking of participating. Possibly a sporty new coat for $165 discounted from $325? How about a satchel briefcase? That would portray a certain skill set. The days of highly skilled craftsmen, guildsmen, artists of merit, politicians, writers, walking around the area in holey sport coats, torn flannel shirts, worn shoes, fishing vests, old blue jeans, cocksure hats, old safari jackets Wingate-style, OMG and bandannas for the longhairs, are coming to an end.

Maybe sad, maybe happy: Residents do not want to stick out like a sore thumb. Clean up, fit in — participate! February will be here soon enough! An older brother told his younger brother, “Ha, shaving is optional by January.”

Item 2: The National Guard plans to be on Montauk during weekends, summer of 2016. Local P.D. are tired of staying up all night shepherding around people who drink excessively. A variety of town personnel have had it with the weekend visitors’ absurd behavior. The homeowners’ thus taxpayers’ funding the good Town of East Hampton see no reason to pay extra taxes for personal police to watch over moronic weekend visitors.

The National Guard will set up tented areas in municipal parking lots to house people who behave badly. The Long Island Rail Road has agreed to send them west for free. It is a win-win? The 40 National Guardsmen will be housed for free on weekends by local residents. The guardsmen will split shifts, giving them plenty of leisure time for the beach and locally sponsored picnics — normal stuff. A great vacation for the National Guard is in its future.

Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

At a time of year when everything — the lack of crowds, the halcyon weather, the start of school — coalesces to underscore how good the life we lead is, we might tend to take it all for granted. But despite manifestations of extreme inequality (some members of our community depend on food pantries to eat, while others invest in second — or third, or fourth — homes that are far beyond anything we might have considered reasonable in size and cost only a few years ago), we share so many privileges here on the South Fork.

It is more than the gorgeous weather and traffic-free streets that have prompted these thoughts. As I write, today is the second day of the Jewish New Year, with the observance of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, arriving next week. From the time I was a child, I have eschewed formal religion, but some profound messages have sunk in. The Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy instruct Jews in giving, or “tzedakah,” a word casually defined as charity, but which biblical scholars have explained is derived from the Hebrew word for justice, which I guess is the more accurate definition of the ideal that the observant are expected to pursue.

Never having studied Islam, it hadn’t immediately occurred to me that the Qur’an might also instruct its believers in justice. Searching the web, however, I found a text that explained that the Qur’an “not only lays stress on such great deeds of charity as the emancipation of slaves, the feeding of the poor, taking care of orphans, and doing good to humanity in general, but give sequal emphasis to smaller acts of generosity.”

Of course, Christians share the Old Testament and share similar traditions. Although church-going has, for the most part, declined in this country, congregants can be counted on to be charitable and to do the right thing for others. And many of us certainly try to, in the words of a popular hymn, “Brighten the Corner Where You Live.”

These ruminations may imply that I am turning to religion (supposedly the thing to do as one ages). But no, it is just that I am strongly reminded this week of the commonalty among the major Western religions at a moment when their basic tenets are being distorted in war and in the brutal treatment of refugees in Europe.

Let us count our blessings. Politically, here at home, our fights are about how to achieve an appropriate “quality of life,” not about how to protect our lives from harm. Yes, airport noise and beach trash might inspire passionate emotions, but these problems are also reminders of just how lucky we are and, perhaps, just how insulated from the violence of the world. Is it merely money that insulates us? Or is there, in fact, something in our system of government that — despite all appearances to the contrary — allows foes and debating factions to live relatively peaceably side by side? I don’t know.

I do know that how we react to headlines alerting us to others’ hardships depends on the values we learned at our elders’ knees, as much as it does on our ability to be of practical help. We don’t have to support those organizations that provide food or medicine or shelter to those in vulnerable circumstances. We don’t even have to read the headlines. But most of us do.

Recently I’ve noticed yard signs around town advertising the business of a prominent building company: “Live the Life,” the signs beckon. Is the good life we lead really defined by bulging, multimillion-dollar Shingle Style mansions? Or is it defined by our common will to extend a hand of friendship to our neighbors (or, at least, not to kill them)?

Ellis, our 5-year-old, started kindergarten last week. And, since he attends school where, and in the same building, I did when I was about his age, a lot of memories are being stirred.

Most of what I remember has to do with my friends at the time. We were all at the Hampton Day School, which occupied a former potato farm on Butter Lane in Bridgehampton. Later, Hampton Day briefly became the Morris Center School, then was taken over by the Ross School as a campus for its lower grades. Ellis’s room this year is in the old four-square farmhouse, the same space where my friend Mike and I exchanged blows those many years ago.

We could not have been more than about 8 when it all went down. I was drawing a drag race car, and Mike strolled by to make a comment. “That’s not how you draw a car!” he said.

I responded that if he said that again I was going to hit him. He did, and I did, striking him alongside his perky little nose with my pencil. By way of reaction, Mike ran into the school kitchen and smashed a dish. But he got even, poking me with a pencil on my cheek a few days later.

To this day, we both have more or less matching graphite marks, which we inevitably point out to one and all when we are together and have had a few drinks.

Upstairs in the same old farmhouse is where Milo McFarland and I found a cache of marbles in a bathroom access panel. We divided the spoils between us. I still have my half in a metal box in the basement where I keep my tools. Mike and I have remained close; Milo died in 2002, and we had long lost touch by then.

The cycle of life and death is fresh in my mind this week. Mike’s mother, the late Deborah Ann Light, will be remembered in a gathering at Quail Hill in Amagansett, which was, if anything, my second home during the early ’70s. She was an imposing figure, tall, yes, but more so for her manner, a kind of knowing imperiousness with which she viewed the younger generation’s varied transgressions, of which there were plenty.

We weren’t bad kids exactly. It’s just that we chafed at the constraints of this place and found relief in various kinds of mischief. Later, when Deborah had moved to East Hampton Village and Mike and I were older, there were more shenanigans; we only found out much later that she found this stage of our youth amusing. If she imparted a lesson it was that it was okay to do one’s own thing, but, under no circumstances were we to be overly dumb about it.

We will celebrate Deborah’s life this weekend. Then, on Monday, I’ll take Ellis back to school, back to the room where, once, I was a child as well.

Several outstanding young athletes have decamped recently, preventing me from recounting in florid language their triumphs every week, but Godspeed, I say, for, as has been shown in the past, mileage generally must be logged if great athletic ambitions are to be realized by East Enders.

So, goodbye, Chasen Dubs, Kevin Fee, and Charles Manning. East Hampton’s and Bridgehampton’s high school teams are obviously the poorer for your having departed, but no one can argue with your desire to enlarge your purview, and by so doing improve your games.

(And, wonderful to tell, these leave-takings may inspire those left behind to step up their games!)

I read in the paper the other day about someone who said that everyone’s ambitions (life-affirming ones, of course) ought to be given free rein, and that it was a shame if they weren’t, and I agree. Why else are we here if not to cheer one another on in fruitful endeavors?

Yet obscene amounts of money continue to be diverted from the generative work in which society ought to be engaged to atomic arsenals, prisons, walls, and things, whether injected or ingested (as in ideological bile), that stifle the spirit.

I have in mind when it comes to walls not only the needless 2,000-mile one proposed for our border with Mexico, needless because the immigration wave has receded, but also those of gated communities.

Aren’t many of us descended from families on the run? Illegals, if you will, who declared ourselves free and legal after curtailing, in a manner of speaking, the freedom of those whom we found here, and, later, those who were brought here to do our bidding.

Perhaps we have been evolving . . . perhaps, though there are many reasons to think that for all our grand talk we are not. As for making America great again, I would like to think we’re being enjoined to reawaken its purported spirit of fairness, its greatness of spirit — something that, frankly, I thought was dealt a mortal blow in 1968.

And, of course, you don’t regenerate greatness of spirit by building walls, by saber-rattling, or by stoking irrational fears of the other. You do what you can to ameliorate the exigencies of life, to let talent flourish, and to praise it when it does.

So, in that spirit I say, Godspeed Chasen, Kevin, and Charles!

The first photograph of mine that was published in this paper was, I believe, in 1979. It was on the cover, and it was of Pete Kromer, a haul-seiner and a friend, kneeling on the ocean beach at the end of a giant bag of weakfish while simultaneously tossing two in the air to his truck.

It was one of those Decisive Moment kinda photographs, that still stands with the best of my work. It was also shot on Tri-X, the once much-revered weapon of photojournalists the world over. The only problem with this photograph was the caption, which I didn’t write and only saw when the paper came out the next day.

The caption read, “Bass, mostly.” This meant striped bass, and the problem with that was that there was not a single striped bass in that net. They were all weakfish.

We haul-seiners at that time were facing mounting pressure on the political side and from the lobby of sports fishermen, who were trying to end a way of fishing that was a tradition out here for over 300 years. So any reference to large numbers of striped bass caught by us were just used as ammunition against us. Needless to say, I was in a boatload of trouble for weeks back down at the beach.

I had caption trouble and just plain photo trouble two more times at The Star, and while I won’t name the person who did me in the second and third times, I will say that I had nothing to do with either incident.

The second debacle came when I gave a photograph to the then-photo editor to hang on her refrigerator to help motivate her to stay on her diet. It was a photograph of my good friend Carlos Anduze sitting cross-legged on a kitchen floor in the Dominican Republic with a makeshift white turban on and dark sunglasses. Lisa de Kooning was with us, and being the animal lover that she was, there was a lot of canned dog food at our cottage that she would give freely to all of the underfed island dogs.

So my (it was just a joke between Carlos and me, and he even said, “Cono, take my picture”) photograph of the sinister-looking Arab with a heaping spoonful of Alpo inches from his mouth goes on the letters page of The Star. I don’t even remember what that caption said, and it did not matter because the angry “how dare you, there are starving children in the world” letters to the editor came pouring in.

The third and final incident involved a photograph that I took and would have actually put in the paper myself, but again, it was the caption that hung me out to dry. These three incidents are in my mind not a bad track record considering the fact that I’ve probably had thousands of my photographs in The Star.

Anyway, this was an early morning, nicely lit pastoral scene photograph of a black woman holding a white baby down near Town Pond. Again, I took it and I would have, and probably did, put it in the paper myself. It was the caption (that I didn’t write), the single word “Harmony,” that brought on a second torrent of “How dare you? Racial inequality, you should be ashamed of yourself” and on and on, letters to the editor.

I really disagreed with these people because I took this photograph and I didn’t see that at all. It was the caption, I guess, that really rattled them.

In defense of The Star, there are many people out there poised to strike whenever anything is printed these days, and although it is now more in the form of an online comment, as opposed to a letter to the editor, many of them, plainly put, have nothing better to do than chip away back and forth on and on at any topic. The ones who are really good at it can take a topic a simple as making gazpacho and turn that into a hateful tirade against President Obama.

Tonight, I’m traveling to Greece for a week, and hopefully the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, which is now home to over 90,000 people who have fled the war in Syria. The camp is eight miles from the border of Syria. It is in these two locations that I hope to take a lot of photographs that don’t need any captions. Not one single word.

Doug Kuntz, an award-winning photojournalist who once served as this paper’s photo editor, is now a contributing photographer to The Star.

For year-rounders, summer is not generally the time for relaxation. Beaches and outdoor pursuits beckon, but for us working stiffs, the nonstop revelry of July and August feels like an endurance test. This season’s almost uninterrupted sunshine provided vacationers with extra days of beach and pool and paddleboarding and tennis, but for the most part we year-rounders were looking forward to the pressure easing after Labor Day.

Over the weekend, however, I did somehow manage to belatedly get into that vacation-relaxation mood. I think it was an anticipatory sense of impending relief that gave my husband and me permission to take it easy and enjoy the home stretch.

At lunchtime on Saturday, Villa Italian Specialties in East Hampton was packed to the bursting point. Three different lines were set up, one for customers clamoring to place orders, another for those paying for their readymade pastas and salads, and a third for those waiting, patiently and not so patiently, to be called when their Villa Combos were ready.

Like most year-rounders, I usually avoid food-shopping at peak hours, but we dove right in, and I felt like a real tourist joining the long-weekend scrum. We took our eggplant Parmesan sandwiches home, set the table outside under a big copper beech tree, and watched the perfect blue sky through the branches.

I felt like a tourist again on Sunday, when, stopping at Breadzilla in Wainscott after yoga, I found myself among a crowd of first-timers who obviously weren’t familiar with the protocol — where to stand, how to order. Later that day, my husband and I took one of our 5-year-old grandsons for a leisurely browse at the Sag Harbor Variety Store (a.k.a. the 5 & 10), where little Teddy — who has been nicknamed Speedo this summer for his incredible energy and propensity for running — displayed remarkable restraint, carefully inspecting every toy and game before selecting a small pack of Pokemon cards as his special treat.

If the Sag Harbor Variety Store isn’t exactly a high-glamour destination, a shopping errand there is undoubtedly a delight for jaded city people, for those too young to remember when 5 & 10s were common, and for those nostalgic for small-town life. It sells every imaginable household gadget and craft supply, and there is a mechanical pony outside, which kids can ride for 25 cents. From its cheerful façade and vintage sign to its modest prices, it is thoroughly unHamptons.

(From time to time rumors have been spread of the store’s demise, but they haven’t been true. Frankly, I think it is a historic landmark that should be preserved. Would the citizens group Save Sag Harbor take that on if the dark day ever arrived?)

After our little Pokemon-buying excursion, we took our grandson to Buddhaberry on Sag Harbor’s Main Street, where, this time, I was the tourist too clueless to navigate the system or the crowd. Frozen-yogurt fans stood two deep in front of the fro-yo and candy-topping downspouts. Teddy had been there before and helped us oldsters figure it out.

The end of summer is supposed to be bittersweet, more melancholy, in theory, than anything else. But those of us who have been holding our breath until September, when calm returns and traffic eases, see the opposite side of this coin: The end of summer is a happy ending. I guess that is why we grinned and enjoyed its waning days.

 Back in East Hampton on Monday, Labor Day itself, I walked down Main Street accompanying an older grandchild while she shopped for a swimsuit. We found one at Gubbins, then stopped at Starbucks for some sort of frozen strawberry shortcake Frapuccino concoction. That afternoon, I actually sat down and read a book! Finally, my husband and I wrapped up our mini-staycation by indulging in dinner at a waterfront restaurant, taking advantage of the view before the fine weather ends, as end it must.

It would be best if I spared our eldest child my emotional confessions, but the house is now very different with her packed off to school in Delaware.

Her room will need a cleaning, but it is mostly empty with all the clothing she cared about taken along, the rest in piles for hand-me-downs. Leo, who was supposed to be her pig, remains, of course, resting on his bed by the fireplace as I work this morning. It is bittersweet; I know it is the best thing for her, but I miss her a whole lot.

Parents of younger children tend toward incredulous when I offer my observation that by the time kids reach their early teenage years they have learned just about all they will from their parents. I suppose it depends on the individual child, but it seems to me at least that by high school, the real education comes from peers, teachers, and interactions with all that can be found beyond the walls of home.

The seminomadic herding people of East Africa send their boys away to tend the animals and roam the hills when they reach that volatile moment, when they are first becoming men. I had heard it explained as a way to keep their meddlesome adolescent energy at a distance from the home camps, but it seems to me as much an education by doing as anything else. Can we find a parallel in our shooing American children out of their rooms and away from their smartphone screens for their next big phase of self-development? Maybe.

Boarding school was really our daughter Adelia’s choice. If she found a place that suited her, and we could afford it, we were not going to stand in her way, we said. There was a period during the process when she seemed eager to get as far away from East Hampton as possible.

“Daddy,” she said more than once, “can I go to school in London?” We visited a school in California. She asked about Paris. Obviously, this was not a kid we were going to be able to keep down on the farm, as the old song goes.

It is a cliché that childhood goes too fast, and it is difficult to write about this without getting maudlin. It is astonishing to think, though, that the baby who so few years ago would not go to sleep unless she was being bounced and held, is now off on her own in the great big world.

Good luck, kid. I’m proud of you.

I was thinking of calling the Hampton Jitney to see if I couldn’t get them to wrap one of their buses with a photo of me and fellow septuagenarian Gary Bowen, winners this past Sunday of East Hampton Indoor’s men’s B doubles championship, but modesty prevailed.

“In case you missed it on ESPN,” I emailed my son, “Gary Bowen and I won E.H.I.T.’s men’s B doubles championship!”

Frankly, I hadn’t held out much hope that we would. Not only were our opponents far younger, but we weren’t given much time to rest up from a semifinal agon the day before.

“Don’t come, Mary,” I said to my wife early Sunday morning, “it’s going to be a slaughter.”

Like a creaky torero with his best passes behind him, I laid out my Fred Perry tennis whites on the bed. There would be blood on the Har-Tru — and, unless I brushed my teeth, bad breath in the afternoon.

At least you will have spent yourself in a worthy cause, an inner voice confided. You will not be on this day among those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Gary had been telling me all during the tournament to “play up, play up,” and so I did, beating back as many serve returns as I could. We won the first set with relative ease, at 6-2.

“You’re a lion at the net!” Gary, who in the early ’60s played basketball at Brown, marveled at one point.

But our opponents were more inclined, I’m sure, to think I was a-lyin’ when late in the second set, which they won 6-4,  Scott Rubenstein overruled an out call (“by one ten-thousandth of an inch”) I’d made.

“It’s in,” he said, and the battle continued.

When it was over at last, I sank to my knees, bowed my head, and raised a hand to heaven. Gary, who had played wonderfully, was over the moon.

It was proposed the post-match photo be taken at the site of the damn spot, which prompted Scott to say, “I called it in and you still couldn’t beat these guys in their mid-70s.”

Their day will come, and rather soon too, I expect. Meanwhile, I went on to the Classic later that day with a light heart and the wheels singing, the first time, I think, that that’s ever happened.

Oh, and Mary did come — somewhere along in the first set. It was like the golden-lit scene at Wrigley in “The Natural,” only she’s prettier than Glenn Close.

He is Jamaican. He is a big man, tall and broad. He gets on in Montauk with me at 7 a.m. We both sit down in front, where there is more legroom. We are riding the 10C.

The 10C makes its run from downtown Montauk to the East Hampton train station and back five times a day. It travels the old highway between town and Hither Hills State Park, then it’s Montauk Highway the rest of the way.

It is one of the few routes in the Suffolk County transit system that operates on Sundays.

In between its East Hampton runs, it circles around Montauk, starting at the Jitney stop, up Second House, up Flamingo to Gosman’s, then to Ditch via West Lake, and back to the beginning.

The 10C is the path of least resistance.

For most of the year, its clientele are a mix of Jamaicans, Latinos, and whites. The riders of the 10C are the workers, the people behind the curtain who enable the Hamptons to be the Hamptons.

In the summer, a few of the European students who have come to Montauk to work and play can be found riding the 10C.

During your summer ride, you hear a mix of languages and accents.

No one rides the 10C because they want to. They ride it because they have to.

You have to get from here to there, you don’t have a car, and the L.I.R.R. service on weekdays on the South Fork is nonexistent.

You’re thankful each time you get on during the summer to find the A.C. is working. Ditto the heat in the winter. Neither is guaranteed for your $2.25.

Have to be in East Hampton from Montauk by 10 a.m.? The 7 a.m. 10C is your only option.

The 10C is a portal to the rest of Suffolk County. Once you arrive at the East Hampton train station, you can transfer to buses headed to Bridgehampton or Riverhead or even Center Moriches, if you’re feeling exotic, though you’ll have to do an extra transfer to get there.

The ride does have its moments. In the dead of winter, as the bus heads west along the old highway, you get to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic, a stirring sight. No extra charge.

The electronically generated voice that announces the stops has its own take on local names. Napeague Harbor is “Nah-puh-kee Harbor.” Amagansett is “Ah-muh-gan-set.”

There is a rack on the front of the bus that holds up to two bikes. That is the key to my modus operandi when I am carless: The bus takes me to East Hampton; the bike does the rest.

I nod at the faces I recognize as they pass down the aisle. Sometimes they respond, sometimes they don’t.

A few days ago, I had a long talk with a man from St. Thomas. He is an attendant at Gurney’s Spa, and lives in the back of the resort. He got on at the East Hampton train station carrying a brand- new microwave he had bought in Bridgehampton.

He told me he likes the new management at the resort.

The next morning, he got back on the bus at Gurney’s carrying the same microwave. It was damaged goods. Another trip to Bridgehampton.

Occasionally, I spot a face I know from East Hampton Town Justice Court. They have pleaded guilty to D.W.I., and have lost their license for six months, or a year. Awkward, but it occasionally leads to an interesting conversation.

The big man sitting next to me is singing to himself. He has a pleasant, deep voice.

He is riding the 10C.

T.E. McMorrow covers crime and the courts for The East Hampton Star.

Quahog chowder for 100? That’s right. In years gone by, with the bay beach in front of our house, we did things in a big way. The chowder was a hit for a couple of summers and then — oh, dear — we made a bouillabaisse. The latter recipe is lost to history because we wanted to forget about it.

What happened was that we left the huge soup kettle, which wasn’t empty, on the beach overnight and the smell was so bad in the morning that we had to drag it across the dunes to bury what was left.

The recipe for quahog chowder for 100, however, was published in “The Potato Book” by Myrna Davis, and it just happens to be in the Habitat section of The Star today. It calls for a bushel of chowder clams and 15 pounds of striped bass, which gets me to what I have been thinking about all week. 

Striped bass is a family favorite, and we have just celebrated a birthday with a huge one, poached, decorated with thin cucumber slices as scales, and served with dill sauce. Delicious.

I was surprised at how costly striped bass is. One reason is that only fish between 28 and 38 inches can be caught commercially and each fish has to be tagged. Tags cost either $32 or $195 (for 32 or 195 tags), and a state Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman told me that 450 fishermen bought shares this year. Striped bass caught on rod and reel have to be at least 28 inches as well, and only one fish is allowed per person per day.

When haul seining was permitted here, striped bass was the money fish. You’re not apt to see a crew hauling a seine full of bass onto the ocean beaches these days, or to have one tossed to you as a gift, although I understand that a few baymen still seine with gill nets.

I got talking to Charlotte Klein Sasso of Stuart’s Seafood Market in Amagansett the other day, and she confirmed that the cost of striped bass was up there with the best-quality tuna, about $25 or $27 a pound. (I found out later that striped bass was $32.99 a pound at Citarella this week, and tuna was $29.99.)

Speaking about local fish, Charlotte said customers were beginning to realize that instead of dorade or branzino, which come from foreign waters, the waters around the South Fork are teeming with wonderful fish in season, like bluefish, porgies, and Spanish mackerel, and cost a lot less. At Citarella this week, for example, bluefish was $7.99 a pound, but it didn’t have any. I love them all, not only because they are good as well as inexpensive, but because they are caught locally, and fresher than fresh.

To tell the truth, the birthday boy, my husband, likes bluefish even more than striped bass, but I wanted the presentation at dinner to be impressive, like a salmon you might see at a wedding.

My own fondness for bluefish goes back a long time to the first I ever caught. I hooked the fish in the Three Mile Harbor channel as we were sailing in on our old catboat. Quick-thinking, the boat was brought about, and I overcame my excitement to bring the fish aboard. This memory is hard to forget.

As for quahog chowder, what could be more local than that? Although you might want to check out monkfish or weakfish or another local fish if you plan to buy 15 pounds.

Click for the recipe for quahog chowder for 100