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

Jayma Cardoso, the owner of the Surf Lodge bar and restaurant in Montauk, went online last week and disputed a photograph that appeared on The Star’s website that showed several men urinating into Fort Pond. “All I see is a group of friends standing knee deep in the water,” she told our friends over at the always entertaining Curbed Hamptons. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I figured I should check it out. So I talked for a second or third time to the staff member who brought us the photo in the first place.

She said that the source (whom it turned out I know and trust) wanted to remain anonymous due to his position in the community. He had observed the men begin to relieve themselves against the Surf Lodge bulkhead from the Industrial Road causeway and then grabbed his phone to record the moment. I have every reason to believe his account rather than the self-serving nonsense offered by the person most directly responsible — other than the pissers themselves.

But sometimes I think that the Surf Lodge is blamed too much for Montauk’s problems with bonkers nightlife — and public urination. Consider that on two separate Saturday mornings at about 6:30 I have gaped at organized bicycle outings of perhaps 20 riders stopping for a pee break at Georgica Beach. The  problem there is that the restrooms do not open until 9 a.m.

It is quite a sight, watching four, five, or more men emerge, pulling up their Spandex short fronts from behind the old Coast Guard building, where, presumably (I did not check this out) they’ve just let it flow into the grass. Making this more annoying, it is less than three miles from Georgica to the village’s privy in the Reutershan parking lot off Main Street; you would have thought these bonnie captains of industry could have held it until 7 a.m. when it opens.

The other morning when a friend and I were pulling into the lot at Georgica to check the surf, we saw one guy not even bothering to get off his bike peeing without a care in the world into the weeds and pine at the edge of the bicycle rack area. I had told my friend to expect this; he was not disappointed.

“You’re kidding me, man!” he exclaimed as we passed the dude.

It’s interesting how the story of the summer has been the summer itself. And it’s interesting how so many people, not just the Montauk nightlife knuckleheads of the sort most of us once avoided in high school, treat this place like their own personal bathroom. Um, excuse me, I have to step outside now.

I imagine few people end their summers in the Hamptons without at least a couple of good tales to tell.

My own stories started in 1989 when I was 8 years old and my family began taking summer trips to the South Fork. Back then, my first time parasailing in Montauk began to cultivate in me a thirst for adventure that later led to a hang gliding excursion in North Carolina’s Outer Banks and skydiving on the coast of California. I’ve taken in my share of really awesome music at the Stephen Talkhouse over the years, and this one time a friend and I saw a beached whale, but I’ll admit I passed my 20s without ever experiencing the Boardy Barn.

I live out here now, and I’ve got a new story to tell.

It begins at Guild Hall, where I took in my first show a couple of weeks ago. It was called WordTheatre, and the premise was famous actors performing dramatic readings of award-winning short stories and poetry, produced and directed by oneof the foremost voiceover talents in show business. With some of the stories’ award-winning authors present in the audience, including Richard Bausch, Andre Dubus III, and Peter Orner, I got the sense that the whole production — which was a benefit for the prestigious Pushcart Prize — had accomplished something really profound and authentic. It was spectacular and intimate at the same time. The fangirl in me would have been satisfied with snapping selfies with a few of my favorite actresses after the show. That happened, but the story doesn’t end there.

Somehow, after the show, a friendly conversation with some of the behind-the-scenes folks yielded an invitation to a post-show gathering at the home of Philip Spitzer, the literary agent, who has a house in East Hampton. The authors were to be present, and if there’s one thing I love more than a good movie or theatrical show, it’s a good book. Midnight approached, but my fatigue dissipated and I graciously accepted the invitation.

The thing is, I’m an aspiring author myself. Maybe it was the cabernet sauvignon, but I started fantasizing that somehow I could absorb their language, their mannerisms, their own storytelling techniques, perhaps by way of osmosis if I was lucky or lazy or, more realistically, by observing, listening, and drawing some keen conclusions. Maybe that way, my own literary future could be as illuminated as theirs.

To be an author, it turns out, you don’t just have to be great at writing. You have to do it all the time. You also have to be a patient diplomat with the ability to endure readings where few people show up and take your reviews in stride. You’ve got to save your energy for when you’re writing your future best seller.

Apparently, you’ve got to be adept at practical jokes, too, and be able to deliver a good punch line with a straight face, which they did until nearly 2 o’clock in the morning. Regrettably, though, I was too captivated by them to be able to recall any of the jokes I like to tell, so I was unable to actually contribute to the impromptu comedy show transpiring in Mr. Spitzer’s torch-lit backyard. So I know I have a long way to go.

Earlier in the evening, I’d been introduced as a journalist who had penned a full-length novel that’s on the cusp of being published. And so, in a brief conversation near the end of the evening, one of the authors turned to me and said, “What’s your book about?” I stammered through a description.

“What’s it called?” Great title, he said. Use your own name, not a pen name, he advised. From another: Keep your day job until you’ve become well established, then keep it for a little while longer. Grateful for the words of encouragement, I thanked them and returned home, where I promptly drafted an entire outline for a new story I’d been thinking about lately.

If many stories conclude with a simple “the end” and that’s it, here’s hoping that this story is really only the beginning of something bigger.

Christine Sampson reports on education for The East Hampton Star.

Summertime,

And the livin’ ain’t easy,

Sirens are wailin’

And the prices are high

Oh, your daddy’s at Ditch

And your mom’s driving while texting

So hush little baby

Don’t you cry

One of these mornings

You’ll get your own iPhone

Then you will turn your face down

And forget the blue sky

But until that morning

There’s lots more to distract you

With Daddy at Ditch and Nanny standing by

Summertime,

And the stomach turns queasy

Fish are gaspin’

And the E. coli’s high

Your daddy’s bit by a tick

And your mamma ain’t cookin

So hush little baby

There’s always Wi-Fi

“Travailler, rien que travailler,” Rodin said to Rilke, and that is for the most part true. Work — at least work that you’re good at, and, one hopes, work that you like — is redeeming.

But some of us work too hard, and our health — it’s no surprise that it’s summer as I say this — suffers because of it. And so it was that one of my co-workers, Kathy Kovach, who has made me look good week after week, year after year, decade after decade, came fairly close to being carried away by pneumonia this past week.

Of course she wants to come back right away. You are the best, Kathy. Don’t get carried away. I hope you can live easy for a while. It’s summertime after all.

A longtime member the Star staff who had a moderately bad day on Monday asked rhetorically whether someone could really go through a day at this time of year here without running into some kind of annoyance or obstacle. Short of never leaving the house or hiding out at work from dawn to after dark, at some point we all have to come into contact with the juggernaut that is the South Fork in high season.

For example, the other day, I thought I’d avoid the inevitable frustration of driving into East Hampton Village to go to the bank by taking the time to walk there from the office. But then, fording Main Street at the crosswalk near Huntting Lane, I took a little chin music — as the baseball term for a close, inside pitch goes — from an irrigation company truck whose driver neglected to stop. Crossing back was okay, but I had to walk a slalom course around two other pedestrians peering at their smartphones.

As things worked out, however, I did get a little quiet time that evening, running my powerboat around from the house to its slip in Three Mile Harbor. Lisa and the kids were at various places and I would not be needed for driving duty until 8 p.m. I had an infrequent hour and a half with absolutely nothing to do.

After lifting the anchor and stowing it on the 24-foot lobster boat, I floated on the wind awhile before even starting the motor, then ran roughly northwest toward Cartwright Island. I slowed where the incoming tide piled up on the shoals, where a day before I had seen two immature sooty terns, ararity here, picking at leaping bait. They had moved on.

There was one other boat in sight, fishing, from the looks of it, near Cartwright. I headed off to the north, catching and releasing a small bluefish in Cherry Harbor. After that, I kept the motor off and just sat.

Even on a still evening, like this was, you don’t hear much that far out in the bay. Sound carries, but once beyond a mile from the mainland, all you hear are the birds, the wind, and the slap of small waves against the hull. Had I not had to meet Lisa for a ride back to my car at the office, and then to collect one of the kids at a friend’s house, I might have stayed there all night.

Call me a tree hugger. I like deer. I even like the deer who bed down in a hedgerow between our house and the library, or across the lane in a bushy area between two neighbors’ houses, or at the far, overgrown side of the property, beyond the barn. (Yes, even I admit, there have been too many deer in the village, too many for comfort and too many for traffic safety, too.)

Regardless of the damage the deer had done to our garden, I had always been happy to watch their comings and goings, as they strolled or trotted across the yard, or, on occasion, settled down for a rest smack-dab in the middle of the lawn, as if they were in charge. I have been known to pride myself on not having put up elaborate deer fencing to keep them out. But then we decided to get a dog.  

Goodie — our late, lamented, last family dog — had been allowed to roam the neighborhood unsupervised, but times have changed. How long would a free-range dog live with traffic as crazy as it now is? How long has it been since that beloved, footloose basset hound (whose name I can’t recall, though I bet someone will write in to remind me) was the unofficial mayor of Newtown Lane? 

Once we had decided to get a dog, we had to face the reality that either we would need to take it out on a leash for regular walks or we would have to fence in our backyard. 

I admit I felt like a bit of a hypocrite when we decided on the latter. The modest, and all but invisible dark-wire fence we put up is only five feet high, but so far it has kept out the deer. I guess our particular deer aren’t up to scratch as jumpers. 

We are beginning to observe various old shrubs and flowers that had been fodder for the deer coming slowly back to life. A few very old rose bushes, I’m happy to report, are going to survive the deer-ravaging they had suffered over the last few years. I imagine that soon we’ll even be able to remove the protective wire barriers we had placed around the roses; maybe we’ll even plant some new ones.

 My friend Galen Williams, who has designed gardens here for decades, dropped by the other day and made note of the fact that tiny hosta leaves were poking up and daylilies trying to sprout. The daylilies had been totally devoured and had long since disappeared from view. The hostas, planted by a previous generation decades ago, used to surround the house in profusion, but ferns had taken their place in recent years. Now, I’m trying to give away ferns to any friends who would like transplants.

It seems amusing that, these days, the deer are free-range villagers and the dogs are captive, from Main Street to Northwest Woods. 

Sookie, our delightfully shaggy new mutt from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, isn’t much of a barker, but she whines and barks excitedly — and dances on her hind legs like a circus dog — when she sees deer in the front yard, beyond the fence. Clearly, her heart’s desire is to escape and get at them. But she loves her backyard realm and hasn’t, at least so far, figured out that she probably could dig her way out if she put her mind to it. 

Will the deer stay away, or will they get hungry enough come fall to venture a leap over the fence? And, if they do leap across, will little Sookie’s bad-girl terrier displays chase them away again from the old roses? Only time will tell, but so far, the score is deer zero, dog one.

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.

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.

“The fields are alive with the sound of athletes,” I sang, in my best Julie Andrews imitation, to Mary, who was happy the other day to hear it.

Girls and boys were playing soccer, and the football team was doing agility drills on the turf, and on the varsity baseball diamond it was East Hampton versus East Hampton — Vinnie Alversa’s gray team against Brian Turza and Mike Rodriguez’s maroons.

Alversa said that perhaps it’s been a dozen years since East Hampton had Senior (13-to-15-year-old) League teams. I don’t think I recall East Hampton High’s fields being so intensely used in the summertime. And that’s not to mention that three softball teams of seventh-through-12th graders, got together by Jason Biondo and Rich Swanson, are playing each other at East Hampton’s Herrick Park Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Or that cross-country runners meet at the track every Tuesday evening with John Conner, a former age-group recordholder in the mile.

When at a recent school board meeting Jim Nicoletti said he feared that the Bonac athletic program was, for various reasons, in a bad way, I worried that I might not have much to attract my attention hereafter. Nicoletti, to underline his case, had pointed out, for one, that three varsity coaches had been ousted as the result of parent-spearheaded drives that had outflanked the athletic director in the past 18 months, and that, consequently, at least some young teachers were reluctant to give coaching a try until tenure were accorded them.

He added, moreover, that the administration had in some cases he knew of passed over Bonac-born-and-bred applicants who had returned here to teach, and that given the fact most teachers now live up the Island, it stood to reason they would want to leave at 3 p.m. rather than coach a team.

And yet there is this seeming renaissance of sorts that greeted my eyes the other day. . . .

Obviously, inasmuch as it constitutes a great part of my life, I hope the ship of sport here will be righted. I’ve not had much of a spring in my step the past three springs. It hasn’t just been softball, but baseball and lacrosse as well.

It’s not so much the winning (though that is nice) I yearn for — it’s a competitive spirit. The Pierson girls basketball players had it, though they weren’t world-beaters. They — at least in the game I saw in Bridgehampton’s gym — were fiery and scrappy. What most spectators want to see is a good game. What most players want is a good game.

May we field teams again who, win or lose, give their opponents good games.

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?