What were they thinking when they sped by me on the Napeague stretch one Sunday morning this spring? What were they thinking when they honked but did not stop?

Were they wondering for a split second what those people (many decidedly over 30) walking along the road with black bags, gloves, and pickup sticks were actually doing?

Were they thinking, “Those poor folks must be working off community service after getting D.W.I.s”? Were they thinking, “Those silly geezers; I hope they check for ticks”? Were they thinking, “Suckers! Nothing better to do than pick up other people’s trash”? Were they thinking, “Those poor seniors must need the money” or were they wondering if we were a chain gang and were all prisoners? Did they even see us?

Did they slow down to pass us in a safe way? Did they look at the coffee cup they were thoughtlessly going to throw out the window and have a change of heart? Did one of them consider stopping smoking instead of pitching that burning butt out the window? Were they thinking (thought bubble) “I have something really important to do” like yoga or tennis or 800 calories of pancakes to dive into?

Were the folks speeding east thinking of anything or did they tune out the stretch as they hurried to trash downtown Montauk, celebrate a birthday by releasing balloons into the air, or let their dog poop on the beach before it closed to dogs for the day?

And the folks heading west (because we picker-uppers worked both sides of the road), you were worse than the folks heading for the mayhem of Montauk. You had made your mess, spread your seeds, spat your spit, and bought your beers for the trip back west. But oops, a little woozy on the stretch, and maybe a cop, so many, many, many of you decided to throw the cans into the woods so they wouldn’t nail you for an open carry. Now, the cop will know that you are impaired by your driving, open beer or not, empty or not (and in my opinion, anyone stopped on the stretch for a D.W.I. should get an automatic littering ticket too, but that’s just me).

So they sped by us on that Sunday morning, nursing hangovers or heading to church or Ralph Lauren, the car wash, or their second or third jobs to make ends meet. If they noticed us on the side of the road, or they even saw the black bags, did they maybe wonder if last week’s pizza box or Styrofoam takeout container was in one of those bags or still in the woods? If maybe their spent lighter, dead batteries, or the contents of their ashtray got picked up and taken away in those bags? The tissues, the strips of plastic, the cans and the cans and the cans. Maybe next time they consider throwing garbage out the window or leaving their household trash at the beach, maybe, maybe they will have a tiny memory of the adults who wanted to make their world tidy, if for just one day.

Maybe they will learn by example and not entitlement, reject some hierarchy that says there is always someone lowlier than I am to pick up my droppings.

This is what I pondered as I picked up stuff by the side of the road. I wonder if they thought well of me or thought of me at all.

We’ll see at the next cleanup if anyone but us “got it.” Thanks Dell Cullum, and the rest, for trying.

See you then, I hope.

By the way, stopping to get close to Mother Nature’s little sister, the Napeague stretch, revealed lady slipper orchids, ferns, and some tiny white flowers that resembled clematis but were not vines. Open your eyes, folks; the world is an amazing place. Please leave it cleaner than the day you arrived.

Durell Godfrey, who said she “gets annoyed easily,” is a contributing photographer for The Star.

It was with utter dismay that I was again made aware this week that the country to which I have pledged allegiance since childhood continues to engage in force-feeding, which is — quite rightly — considered torture by many in the medical profession. Some of us expected the election of Barack Obama to put a stop to this sort of thing, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

 To be sure, the Obama administration ended the practice of waterboarding, and it was recently reported that the American Psychological Association had faulted those members who, after Sept. 11, helped the Pentagon justify such extreme interrogation techniques. But force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay continues.

A story about it appeared on page three of Saturday’s New York Times. The headline read: “Guantanamo Hunger Striker’s Petition Divides Officials.” My first thought was that it would be a ho-hum story: Disagreement among officials of any sort is par for the course. But then I read it.

A prisoner (or a detainee, which is more politically correct) named Tariq Ba Odah “has been on a hunger strike since February 2007 and now weighs less than 75 pounds,” the story read. It reported that a lawyer had asked a judge for Mr. Ba Odah’s release because of his “severe physical and psychological deterioration,” and because he seemed “to have developed an underlying medical problem that is preventing his body from properly absorbing nutrition no matter how much he is force-fed.”

According to The Times, the detainee is “about 37 and has been held for more than 13 years.” He was arrested in Pakistan and accused of being at its Afghanistan border seeking to join the Taliban and of having “received some weapons training.” As is common at Guantanamo, there has been no trial.

In 2009, The Times said, a “six agency task force recommended” that he be transferred out of custody, but that did not occur because his country of origin was Yemen, which was in chaos then as it is now.

There was national focus on force-feeding about three years ago when more than 100 men went on hunger strikes at Guantanamo. The military argued then, as it apparently still does, that force-feeding is necessary in order to maintain the health and safety of those who undertake hunger strikes. Who is kidding whom? 

The international community, including the Red Cross and the United Nations, have recognized the right of prisoners of sound mind to go on hunger strikes, making force-feeding a violation of international law for that reason as well as because it is widely thought to be cruel, inhumane, and degrading.

Descriptions of the pain that accompanies force-feeding, of the medical complications that can arise, and of the possible dreadful effects of an anti-nausea drug sometimes administered are easily found on Internet search engines. They are horror stories.

It is intolerable that under such circumstances the force-feeding of Mr. Ba Odah continues and that Justice Department and State and Defense Department officials allow themselves the privilege of debating what the government should do about him.

In whose name? In yours?

Sky watchers say this week’s Perseid meteor shower will be a good one. This is the annual show of sparkling streaks that last year was obscured by the light of a full moon.

Looking at the forecast for tonight and tomorrow, it appears that local conditions are going to be ideal, with clear skies and light to calm wind after dark. Early in the night, the meteors will be lower on the horizon, gradually appearing higher in the sky and increasing after midnight.

In our part of the world, the trails of flaming comet debris will be most frequent to the northeast, so open spaces with little light pollution and a view to the north will be ideal for watching. We are lucky that the South Fork has a lot of options that meet that description. I think of the bayfront, such as Long Beach in Noyac, Maidstone Park in East Hampton, the Alberts in Amagansett, and Navy Beach in Montauk as among the better choices.

For those eager for a little education with their sky show a free program will be offered by the Montauk Observatory at the Ross School Tennis Center on Goodfriend Drive in East Hampton this evening at 8. Following a talk about what is known by science about the Perseids, everyone will be invited outside to sit back and watch or take a tour of celestial bodies using telescopes the organizers will supply.

One of the repeated points on a number of websites advising how to see the Perseids is that you should get out of town, away from artificial light. It is sad that even here, where we still like to think we live in the country, this is true. Residential, municipal, and to the greatest degree, exterior commercial illumination has cast an unwelcome amber glow over many parts of the East End. Even where I live, down near Promised Land in Amagansett, we can see an orange haze from Connecticut.

For me, the Perseids are a reminder that a dark night sky matters, that creeping urbanization comes at the cost of getting in the way of our even contemplating space, our modest place in the universe, and the infinite sublime. That, and just enjoying a really, really good show.

“Cuidado,” I said to the guys who were digging holes for deer-eschewing perennials in our garden plot, a large arced one at the edge of our front yard that I’d abandoned years ago when the deer began to come, “Nuestro gato es enterrado alla.”

We’d buried our cat, Little Man, by the tree trunk, on which he used to lie, seemingly asleep on his side, slit-eyed, ever watchful. The trunk’s no longer there, so I wasn’t sure. Anyway, the diggers missed him, I’m happy to say.

Soon after, Alex Silva, who presided, said, “They’re asking me where you buried your money.”

“No tengo dinero,” I said, but afterward — it’s always afterward — I thought I should have run out and said, “Here! I think it’s here. . . . No, no . . . over here!”

At any rate, we were very thankful for their work, and now we have again a garden, of coreopsis, vitex, lavender, butterfly bushes, hardy geraniums, and lichnis that Alex says is about as deer-proof as you can get.

The very next morning, not long after dawn, I saw a mother and two fawns at its edge. But, lo, they went on their way. The next day, there were the two fawns, one of which began to nibble at the coreopsis as I tapped menacingly at the window. They seemed surprised — after all, we don’t begrudge them the birdseed in the backyard — and backed away.

Mary put the dangling ruby-colored nectar jar that is supposed to attract hummingbirds in the new garden, and a pensive statuette that looks like a sepia photograph of my mother on her grandmother’s farm in Ebensburg, Pa., when she was about 5 or 6.

We look upon it as a sacred place. It was Little Man, after all, who first taught us how to die — leaping forth as he breathed his last.

“Only we see death; the free animal has its demise,” says Rilke in the eighth of his Duino Elegies, “perpetually behind it and always before it / God, and when it moves, it moves into eternity, the way brooks and running springs move. . . .”

“WE, though: never, not for one day, do we / have that pure space ahead of us into which flowers endlessly open. . . .”

Now, if only the deer and we, who tend to kill the things we love (some do it by overwatering), will let them.

My parents met in New York City while working for the same accounting firm. I always thought theirs was a boring story: meeting at one of the most notoriously dull jobs, getting married six years later, having three kids, and living happily ever after.

All of the fairy tales and rom-coms told a different story: Boy sees girl from afar, falls in love instantly, overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles (usually in adverse weather conditions), and rides off into the sunset with his true love.

Where was the excitement in real life? Where were the passion-filled, standing-in-the-pouring-rain, tear-jerking moments?

Well, I thought I got my answer when I was 17. Boy saw me from afar, claimed to fall in love instantly, valiantly faced my disapproving family and friends, and promised happily ever after.

To make a long story short, let’s just say this one wasn’t Prince Charming after all, or even a toad.

Numerous blocked numbers, a few changed passwords, a couple of about-to-call-the-cops moments, and three years later, I actually got my answer. That excitement and those dramatic moments are exactly where they belong, in the movies. Maybe that was obvious to everyone else, but it certainly took a lot for me to realize.

So I reconsidered my parents’ story.

They’ve been together for 29 years, “Twenty-nine long, hard years,” as they always joke. Together, they went from two broke kids just out of college to homeowners, parents, and life partners. They did what they had to do, which included taking those accounting jobs, to pay off their student loans and pursue the things they wanted. They’ve had their share of obstacles to overcome — watching me quite literally waste away when I was 17, for one.

Clearly, things weren’t always perfect; to be honest, I don’t know if things are ever perfect for anyone. But neither of them expected perfection, or even asked for it.

I don’t pretend to know if two people are “meant to be together” or if “true love” exists, and frankly, I’m not interested. All I know is that every day that they’re not together, even days filled with anger, disappointment, or heartache, Dad always calls Mom, and she always picks up.

If I had understood their story when I was 17, maybe I could have avoided some things. The excitement might not have been there, but if I looked closely, I might have seen that something else was.

Kelly M. Stefanick is a summer intern at The Star.

Those of us who have been around awhile remember when there were no Hamptons. The South Fork was composed of towns and villages and hamlets that had singular characteristics — unique histories, unique environments (both natural and manmade), unique social characters. Few of us were savvy enough to anticipate a time when “the Hamptons,” as a place of the popular imagination, would become more familiar to the American people at large than, say, East Hampton ever was.

As it has come to pass, the majority of those who live or vacation in Amagansett or Springs or Wainscott or Water Mill have drunk the Kool-Aid and now refer to “the Hamptons” as if it were a homogenous unit. It is interesting that Montauk rose to its current phenomenal success as a weekend destination (or its ruin, depending on your point of view) largely because it stood apart from all this. It was supposedly a “un-Hampton,” that is, perceived not to be in or of the Hamptons. Sag Harbor was always a place apart, too.

These observations are not new, but I got thinking of them afresh while looking at some of the free, glossy summer magazines that are now ubiquitous here and that trample over each other for public attention and public space.

In them, the Hamptons are almost universally lumped together as a common denominator. I hesitate to say the “lowest” common denominator because luxury is what they are supposedly all about.

The glossies that brand themselves as covering the Hamptons, be they published in Manhattan or theMidwest, are sales vehicles. They promote celebrities, fashion companies, luxury-goods makers, home goods, and decorators and designers. Don’t get me wrong, almost everyone, even the old fuds among us, can have their interest piqued by pictures of what lots — and lots — of money can buy; there is a curiosity factor at work. But what these Hamptons-themed publications boil down to is commercial. They are selling products.

In case you are wondering, yes, I do think that a paper like The East Hampton Star is different: The Star and similar publications use words and images to disseminate news, whether it is about the government or a Little League team or a neighborhood sculptor. The entities that buy advertising space, be they commercial or cultural, piggyback on the content that we generate for our readers.

In my opinion, trading editorial space for advertising dollars is not only a questionable practice, but a dishonest one, since readers are unlikely to realize that stories and photographs have been paid for. It’s not surprising that such trade-offs are common among some of the lesser glossies you glance at on your way in and out of the gourmet food store.

By contrast, The Star will lean over backwards to ensure that no strings are attached to its coverage. We have always tried to keep the boundary between editorial and advertising sacrosanct. For example, we go to great lengths in our annual dining guide, A La Carte, to include every eatery here rather than limit coverage to those that advertise. Our publications are intended as a service for our readers.

The late Everett Rattray, in his more than 20-year tenure as editor of this paper, and his parents before him, set this standard. The rich and famous have come here since the late-19th century, and The Star has always wanted to help them get to know and appreciate the East End. We have never expended much energy attempting to exploit their celebrity (or notoriety, as the case may have been) to sell papers. We have championed the idea that the uniqueness of this place — of any place, and that is my point — should be guarded and cherished through careful stewardship of local lore, local place names, and local knowledge. We’re still at it.

There is a lot of talk in the culture these days about buying local. Everyone wants their corn grown and their beer brewed as close to home as possible, not just to support members of the community financially, but — as globalization continues to homogenize the world and our experience of it — to protect the natural variety that makes life worth living.

It is my opinion that, slowly, readers are coming around to an understanding that the “going local” philosophy can be applied to newspapers and magazines, too.

A treasure as July slips into August is that the shorebirds arrive as suddenly as the calendar’s turn. Shorebirds, for those unfamiliar with the term, are the thin-legged birds that make their living along the water’s edge or on flats at low tide, at least around here. There are inland species as well, those that favor farm fields and grasslands, but we know those that find their feast by the sea.

The late Peter Matthiessen called them collectively wind birds, whose wistful calls, he thought, made them the most affecting of wild creatures. I recommend the beautifully illustrated “The Shorebirds of North America,” for which he wrote the text, to anyone interested in diving deep into their world.

On a weekday evening this week, I took a more portable bird guide and my father’s old but still clear Navy binoculars down to the Gardiner’s Bay beach. Setting up a beach chair, I put the book in my lap and scanned the low-tide edge. For about an hour, I sat there and looked. There were some birds whose names I knew; others were unfamiliar. And in that, at least for me, lies the charm of watching birds, not knowing and slowing down the day long enough to look for the tiniest clues.

It is still early in terms of the massive shorebird migrations to come, and the vanguard I saw seemed to go about their work on the sand without urgency. A whimbrel, buff-colored with slight mottling and a moderately long downturned beak, was picking at sand crabs in the company of a lesser yellowlegs. A ruddy turnstone, stouter than the other two, and with its characteristicpatches of bronze and black, wandered among the exposed rockweed as black-backed gulls tore into spider crabs they had just caught. Farther off, several semipalmated plovers, smaller than the others, dashed back and forth.

There were other shorebirds in the distance, too far away to see. That I might be able on another day to figure out what they were is something to look forward to.

Richard Barons was leading a historical tour group late in the afternoon on a recent day. I was inside The Star reading in The New Yorker about Joe Gould, whose oral history really did exist, waiting for some interviewees who were not to show, and invited them in, unlocking and drawing back the weighty door.

“The paper’s been here — well not exactly here where we’re standing — but it’s been in existence since 1885,” I said. And, after waiting a beat: “And so have I.”

“The funny thing,” I said to Mary afterward, “is that nobody laughed.”

They’ve been talking about us getting Twitter accounts here lately — Titter would be a better word — and I confess I’m resistant. I just want to know enough technologically to get by.

“Nobody takes notes anymore,” our daughter who’s in the newspaper business said the other evening as I handed her a margarita.

“Well, I do,” I said. “Not that I can read them.”

I still remember fondly the time a Newsday reporter, who later took offense that I’d described him as “tweedy,” got into it with an East Hampton Town Board member who said the reporter had misquoted him when it came to his views on the (late lamented) Bypass.

I looked on, fascinated, as the reporter, his notebook having been flourished, said he happened to have the notes of that conversation at hand, and proceeded to thumb through the pages until he found what he was looking for. . . . “Ah! Here it is. . . . ‘When asked for his opinion on the Bypass, Councilman White . . . umm, uhh. . . . Councilman White said . . .’ ”

I resolved to throw away all mynotes after that, mindful of what an editor once told an interviewee who complained, to wit, “It may not have been what you said, but you should have.”

Equally delightful is the speaker at a public hearing who later says (and I’ve actually heard this) “that may have been what I said, but it wasn’t what I meant.”

One strives to be creative within journalism’s four-W-one-H straitjacket, and so it is that I find myself at 4 a.m. thinking of new voice messages. Then I try them out on Mary, who insists that they not only be witty but brief, knowing my tendency to go on.

The latest is this: “This is Jack Graves, the sports editor. I’m either stepping up to the plate, looking for a sign, or catching in the rye. Please leave a message.”

As Oscar Wilde said, “Life’s too serious to be taken seriously.”

At least I think he did.

Seriously.

Few people know that I moonlight as a longshoreman, occasionally helping to unload lobster boats in Montauk, or, in the early morning, packing shipments of same, thousands of them boxed, iced, and trucked to restaurants and markets near and far. It’s punishing work for a scrawny type like me, and it doesn’t pay nearly as well as catering, but I don’t mind.

Anyway, I don’t want to do catering anymore. Serving the 1 Percent has helped to keep me afloat these last few years, especially in 2012, when my bartending gig at Spring Close crashed and burned along with the restaurant itself. But forbearance isn’t my forte, and I just can’t steel myself to stand there for hours with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, or fetch drinks from the bar, or haul long folding tables and crates of liquor, mixers, and ice from trailer to sprawling, kelly green lawn and back. The money is good, but now I am weary.

I never play the piano anymore. I just don’t have the time, those catering gigs I’m turning down notwithstanding. There’s the office, and then there is dinner to be made, and the dishes to be washed, and the laundry, and the ironing, and if there is any time left over it’s down to the ocean, what with the days already growing shorter and the autumn bearing down.

And anyway, even if I became good at it, someday, and performed publicly, who would listen? No one, in my observation. Case in point: I recently heard from a professional pianist who’d quickly aborted his summer residency at a certain Hamptons restaurant-cum-nightclub. Why? “It just became overwhelming,” the musician said, “in terms of the noise and the confusion. . . . It’s just too trendy, too fast, too in-your-face. It’s not the Hamptons I remember. I have no plans to go back.”

He could have been Wolfgang f’ing Mozart and nobody would have listened, is my guess. And think of the poor customers: How can they be expected to listen to the American Songbook with a cellphone pressed to one ear while the other senses are devoted to scouring the crowd for celebrities?

A few Saturdays ago, I was due at the docks to help unload one of those aforementioned boats. As it happened, the 7 p.m. start time coincided with that of a particularly big concert at the Surf Lodge. After enduring the 35-miles-per-hour traffic all the way from Amagansett, and then the 10 m.p.h. crawl through town, I was running late and in a real mood on Edgemere.

Just outside this so-called surf lodge, the out-of-state motorist in front of me came to a complete stop, and another cut off all traffic, zipping out from Industrial Road as if shot from a cannon, and a team of cyclists rode three abreast on the shoulder, and a thousand beautiful people stampeded toward the chaos, and that was when I sort of lost it. When the blaring of the horn had subsided, along with a stream of expletives that would have made my father very proud, no lives had been lost. It could have gone differently.

When the work was done, I got back in the car for the 20-minute drive back to Amagansett. Except this time it took 65 minutes, thanks to the D.W.I. checkpoint at the easterly side of Napeague.

It’s just too trendy, too fast, too in-your-face. It’s not the Hamptons I remember. Where have I heard that before?

Forty summers ago, we all got into the old Buick and drove from Montauk to the East Hampton Cinema. It’s a long time ago, but I faintly recall the movie, a fable, perhaps, about a giant shark that eats people in a Northeastern resort town, and a mayor who, for too long, puts the local economy ahead of public safety and refuses to close the beaches.

There’s a lesson in all of this, I bet, but damned if I know what it is. I’m too tired to think.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

“May you live in interesting times,” a familiar and ironic way of wishing bad news to descend on others, is not the ancient Chinese curse it has been purported to be, but more likely a 20th-century construction, whose popularity has sometimes been attributed to Robert Kennedy.

 Well, the 21st century is standing the curse on its head. We do live in interesting times and instead of disaster they are bringing positive change, at least to Americans. Our culture is spinning, and we’ve not even reached the first quarter of the century.

The slogans of our time are indications of profound recalculation of our collective mores. Black lives matter. Gay marriage. Gender identity. The 1 percent. Income inequality.

A group of friends at an annual barbecue last weekend, some two dozen of us, were all beginning to show our age. There may have been only one honestly brown, rather than gray, head among us. “Who’d have thought . . .” was the topic of the afternoon.

Between the ribs and the watermelon, we agreed that none of us expected majority opinion on the social issues we cared about to change as quickly as it has — if we had thought there was a chance of its changing at all. None of us imagined the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman and was adopted by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. That EdithWindsor, the octogenarian widow who won the case against DOMA, lived in Southampton brought the decision close to home. And who expected the court to find marriage between persons of the same sex constitutional two years later even if Ireland had already done so by popular vote?

Conversations at the barbecue, at least those I heard, did not dwell on negatives. The national controversy about the Confederate flag, for example, was not on the table. Nor was there much lamenting about political polarization. No one mentioned the Iran nuclear agreement, although had it been broached; my guess is that the tone would have become tense, with some hailing the agreement as an extraordinary achievement toward Middle East peace and others avidly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position that the agreement is a “historic mistake.”

On another occasion, after dark perhaps or if Congress proved irrevocably divided on this issue, the discussion may have veered into difficult territory. But because the food was delicious and the weather beautiful, no debate became heated. Actually, though, I think it’s more likely that the party remained upbeat because we really were friends, and friends of friends, who respected and admired each other — and we were ready to bask in the good news of the interesting times in which we live.