The permit I picked up at East Hampton Village Hall this week makes it official: We’re going to have a yard sale! I’ve talked about one for so many years — decades, even — that saying so has become a joke around our household. 

Heaven knows the South Fork is a great place to get up early on a Saturday and go scouting for things you want, need, or are just crazy about. But our family, you could say, specializes in old things — I suspect some of the Rattray clan started yard sale-ing and thrifting even before the terms came into common usage — and our house is stuffed to the gills already. I myself gave up going to such sales a long time ago. Instead of dreaming of the next great find, I’ve dreamed of the great unload.

At Village Hall, the application you fill out reads “Garage Sale.” We don’t seem to have any of those these days; I don’t remember seeing a classified advertisement for one in The Star for years, and we are the prime source for such ads. In point of fact, the sale isn’t going to be in our yard, exactly. Instead, it will be in front of the 18th century barn on the lot adjoining our house. And that brings me to the real reason we are finally having our yard sale.

If all goes as planned, the East Hampton Historical Society will be taking the barn apart this spring, moving it to the Mulford Farm, across Main Street, and restoring whatever needs restoring. Robert Hefner, the village preservation consultant, told me it was the last untouched old barn in the village.

Word got out about the barn a couple of years ago, and the historical society has found a heritage-minded donor who will make it all possible.

We will be very sad to see the old barn gone, but — after years of wondering if we should convert it to a house, and many discussions of how we might shore it up, if we didn’t — the time has come for it (and us) to move on. It’s wonderful to know the barn will be seen and appreciated by the public for years to come.

I rather hoped the historical society would call it the Edwards barn, but history is history: Experts in local lore call it the Hedges barn because when it was built it was an outbuilding to the Hedges house, which once stood where the East Hampton Library’s north wing is now. (In our family, the Hedges house was known as “the purple house,” and Jeannette Edwards Rattray was born there. It now forms part of the East Hampton Town Hall complex.) 

At any rate, instead of a yard sale I suppose we could legitimately say we are having a barn sale, which somehow sounds a bit more alluring. Some of what will be offered are objects that family members, and friends of cousins, and friends of cousins’ friends have stored there and forgotten about. (Does anyone windsurf anymore? Croquet, anyone?)

Judging by the many ads in The Star, yard sales, tag sales, moving sales, and estate sales are practically an economy in and of themselves out here, with so many being held on autumn weekends. Perhaps calling ours a barn sale will make it stand out as a tad more unique.

The bad news is that it is approaching much too quickly for comfort, on the weekend of Oct. 18. We have a lot of sorting, hauling, and lifting — and, no doubt, bickering — to accomplish before we open the cash box. We will, of course, advertise in The Star and welcome all comers. No early birds, please!

With the film festival in town last week and into this, an unusual number of people walked back and forth in front of our office. I counted myself among them, as a late addition to the festival’s documentary jury, which meant, among other things, that I spent quite a considerable bit of time on foot between the office and town, as we call it, and then hustling back south to Guild Hall, and back again.

One thing was clear from this: I don’t walk enough. Credit is due to Jack Graves, The Star’s eminence grise and sportswriter, who makes his way into town rather regularly. My father, who ran this paper until his death in 1980, was a walker, too, as was his brother, David.

David Rattray the elder, with whom I share a name, was not quite the equal of the legendary Stephen Talkhouse as a walker, but remarkable nonetheless. He, like my father, is gone now, but before his illness, he would take epic hikes, perhaps from Amagansett to East Hampton along the beach in the depths of winter.

He was foremost a poet, among his many other talents, including the ability to read and translate a host of languages and play concert-level piano. I read from one of his poems at a New York City tribute to him a couple of years ago. “West From Napeague” speaks of three figures afoot in the distance on the beach: himself, my father, and my aunt, Mary Rattray, who lives in Springs and in her time was as much of a walker as her brothers, I think.

Someone, Kierkegaard, perhaps, wrote that he walked himself into his best ideas. I have always liked that notion and tended to agree. Some walks are better than others, of course. On Main Street, East Hampton, I am as likely now to be buttonholed by a reader about something or other or just distracted by a loud truck going by.

And yet, we get a feel for a place while on foot that is like none other. A California writer whom I met recently has said that in walking we take measure of the earth. I plan to do a lot more measuring, then, now that fall has come.

The dark comes so early now. I shudder to think of the end of daylight saving time, barely a week away. But Tuesday was so mild and biking up Further Lane after work has become something of a mild exercise habit as I try to hold onto these great outdoors until the frost comes. So it was already getting dark as I pedaled east, then south, then west.

From long driveways, a few landscapers straggled toward home. A lot more deer, stock still, stared quizzically as I pedaled past, laboring on the cheap folding bike. This was Further Lane in the dying of the light in late October.

I stopped several times, to stare back and have a word with the deer, or take a snap of the horizon, pink and dusky gray-blue over blue-gray. Heading toward Old Beach Lane.

The outdated iPhone’s camera never gets it right. It doesn’t come close. The digital snapshot is dull and dark and small. It cannot capture it. But neither can I.

On the sand, a man practiced tai chi and another stood motionless and reverent at water’s edge and an elegant woman gazed at the sea and sky as her cavalier and happy spaniel ran freely. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” she exclaimed.

I thought a long moment and said yes, I think I have. “But it’s still magnificent.”

“It’s magnificent,” she said.

I wish I could speak in glorious Technicolor. But no, just black-and-white. “It’s hard to put into words,” I said, and corrected myself. “I can’t put it into words.”

“You can’t put it into words,” she said.

The night before, I’d learned that a young man I knew, just 20 years old, had died unexpectedly. His mother and I are friends, and the shock and sorrow for those who have lost him has made concentration difficult in the hours since. The awful news has also jarred a dark memory of a month and six years ago when my then-wife’s brother had also, at 27, passed away without warning. How is it that I had made it that far, and then so much farther, there on Further Lane?

I thought back to India, its colorful, fanciful gods and the Bhagavad Gita and Sri Krishna’s tender reprimand. “You are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor the dead.”

“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.”

“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.”

The southern sky steeped in deep blues above, a long and delicate brush of powdery pink between, the relentless roll of the ocean below, and we four or five souls, helpless and bewildered on the sand before the terrible beauty at the end of Old Beach Lane. The elegant woman, barefoot, walked east, the galloping little dog charging into the twilight until I couldn’t see them anymore.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The East Hampton Star.

The holidays aren’t here yet, not by a long shot, but my mailbox is already stuffed with letters seeking big and small gifts. Many of the requests come from institutions I am familiar with and wish I could do more to support, but I also seem to have gotten on the mailing lists of tons of organizations that I know little or nothing about. I guess donor lists are shared and shared again, until your address has been reproduced exponentially. 

I don’t remember ever communicating in any way with the New York Public Library, for example (although in years gone by I sat on the steps between the lions at the main branch on sunny afternoons). Nevertheless, in today’s mail the library addressed me as “Dear Friend” and asked me to make a donation from $25 to $1,500. There is, the solicitation reads, greater demand for the library’s resources and services and consistently less public funding.

The library does sound like a good cause, I’ll admit. I also was asked to help Long Island Cares, which operates the Harry Chapin Food Bank; it is seeking contributions to provide more than “6 million meals to 320,000 hungry Long Islanders.” That’s a vital cause, I agree again.

So how do you choose whom to give to? 

My rule of thumb, in general, is to donate as close to home as possible. There are food banks here in East Hampton that do a great public service, especially as the weather turns cold and seasonal workers find less work. Another really true-blue hometown organization that needs assistance is the East Hampton Fire Department. In addition to putting out fires, attending accidents, and saving lives, the Fire Department showers the community with a great big fireworks show every summer (and to me that’s no small public service). Arriving on my desk this morning, the Fire Department’s appeal says that calls have increased but “donations have dropped by half.” 

Another fine organization from which I receive pleas, both electronically and by snail mail, is much further afield: Doctors Without Borders (a k a Medecins Sans Frontieres). I was first drawn to its fight against childhood malnutrition in impoverished parts of the world. And, of course, today it is among those leading the charge against the horrendous Ebola epidemic. This week, The New York Times said it “has heroically provided much, if not most, of the care in the stricken countries.”

On a lighter note, I’ve been bombarded electronically with pleas from Democrats on behalf of men and women running for election or re-election to the Senate. I can’t help feeling like a bit beleaguered as Election Day approaches and the volume of these pleas increases. There must be people out there who understand why these candidate requests are for $3 sometimes or $80 at other times; these seem like curious numbers. I guess algorithms are involved. Whatever those are. (I just had to look up how to spell the word.)

It turns out that America ranked first among 153 countries in a new global survey of philanthropy. That’s great news, but I would feel a lot better about it if I knew that donations to political action committees were not included in that tally.

“Christopher Walsh celebrated his eighth birthday with a party on Saturday at his Cleveland Road home.”

It’s right there in the Sept. 13, 1973, issue of The Star, there in the Montauk notes. You can look it up.

In truth, it was my seventh birthday, and I lived on Hudson Road, just off Cleveland. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to see my name in the newspaper. Imagine my delight, almost 40 years and a thousand or so bylines later, to see it in The Star again, this time as a reporter.

Recently, I found the website of Mitchell’s NY, a company that delivers The Star to subscribers in New York City, after I deliver it there on Thursdays. A name on the contact page struck me, a man named Alan. He had the same name as my best friend at the Acorn School, a neighborhood preschool that I attended at age 4, and maybe 3 as well, when it was on East 20th Street in Manhattan.

It’s a long time ago, but I retain some memories: Alan and I laughing hysterically as we walked to school, my mother a few steps behind. Alan and I playing in the classroom, and in the enclosed playground as mothers gathered beyond the wall, awaiting our dismissal. Miss Cook, the teacher, and her assistant, whose name now escapes me. Twin girls (I think) named Payton and Paxton (I think). A boy who could run very fast, always first to the toys and art supplies.

A couple of weeks ago, Mitchell’s relocated to a nearby facility in Long Island City, and I was having a miserable time finding it. I drove to the old place and was given directions to the new one. But I just can’t figure out Queens.

Fortunately, my cellphone rang. “Hi, Christopher? This is Alan from Mit­chell’s.” He gave me directions, and when I still couldn’t find the place and called him back, he suggested we meet at the old facility, where I could then follow him to the new one.

Back on 32nd Place, Alan stepped out of his car and I was pretty sure it was him. Once at the new facility, he helped me unload the newspapers. “I have to ask you something kind of crazy,” I said. “Are you from New York?”

“I’m from Manhattan,” he said.

“Did you go to the Acorn School?” Alan looked at me as though I were a sorcerer. “You’re scaring me,” he said. “We were best friends,” I said.

Alas, Alan had no recollection of me. But I understand — it had been 43 years, after all, and in my experience most people have little or no recall from that age. I’m kind of a freak about memory.

In the evening, Cathy and I had dinner at Surf Bar in Williamsburg, a restaurant in which surfboards are prominent, clam chowder is plentiful, and the floors are covered with sand. Something like 14 years ago, my friend Larry and I went to the Surf Bar’s progenitor, which I think was called Hurricane Hopeful, a couple of blocks to the east. Hurricane Hopeful was a tiny storefront, an urban chowder shack serving little else but beer. Larry, a surfer who had also grown up in Montauk, and I struck up a conversation with the proprietor, who as I remember it told us that the place was inspired by Ditch Plain, where he used to surf.

Around the time of that birthday note in The Star, I used to go to the beach at Ditch Plain, when not at the ocean at the bottom of Cleveland Road. I haven’t been there in a long time, but on Labor Day I drove home from the office and biked to Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. It was after 5 and people were beginning to trudge through the sand to the parking lot, perhaps for the last time, as, immersed in the rejuvenating sea, a familiar jumble of gratitude and melancholy washed over me. Summer is over, I’m another year older.

Lying on the sand, the waves rolled in, one after another after another, and I was back in my bed on Hudson Road, listening to far-off waves through open windows as I drifted into blissful slumber on breezy, long-ago summer nights.

Another byline for Christopher Walsh, who is a reporter at The Star.

Taking a swim in the bay on Sunday, I was once again struck by how incredibly beautiful the waters of Gardiner’s Bay are and how lucky our family has been to have a slot on the sands facing them.

To be honest, my swim was more of a paddle, and by paddle I certainly don’t mean S.U.P. but a belly-down flop on a boogie board. The tide was relatively low, the water as clear as I ever remember, and there were no hazards lurking, like jellyfish or overactive crabs.  

My son and two of my grandchildren were taking it easy on the beach, although the youngest, 6-year-old Ellis, managed to forget about Pokémon for a while and went kicking vigorously on another board in shallow water in both directions regardless of the tide, which tried to send me eastward. His sister Evvy was immersed in the fourth Harry Potter novel.

We had built our house on Gardiner’s Bay in the early ’60s and it is still a paradise to me. I’m not sure if the lack of many shells along the beach was good or bad news, however. A few small oyster shells dotted the sand, as did a few conchs, and one fat mussel had been devoured. There were a handful of clamshells, to be sure, but not as many as I expected. And in years gone by there would have been jingle shells and quarterdecks in rows, at least that’s how I remember them. Not a scallop shell was to be found, but a couple of clumps of Sputnik grass, the tubular, slimy seaweed that put in its first appearance here in the 1950s at around the time the Russians put a satellite of that name in orbit, reminded me of old times.

When we built our house on Cranberry Hole Road, it was the only winterized one between the Devon Yacht Club and the Smith Meal fish factory. Worried about winter’s northeast storms, we forwent big windows with wide water views. Since that time, houses have gone up on both sides of the road, and although they have big wide windows and undoubtedly have insulation and heating, they are empty more often than not come cold weather.

And if the bay and the bay beach have remained wonders of nature, so too has the land there. Years ago, without prompting, Larry Penny, then the East Hampton Town natural resources director, explained its topography, writing:

“The water table is only a few feet below and fresh groundwater continually wicks up to supply the bearberry and heather with enough water to keep them thriving. Trees don’t stand a chance, except for the pitch pines in the little hollows, as the winds sweeping across from south to north in the summer and vice versa in the winter keep any from getting a toehold. This close-knit dunes plain as far as I can tell is the only one of its kind in New York State, maybe all of America.”

Imagine that — the only one of its kind in the state! I hope the new homeowners in the area understand what Larry had to say about the land on which they were able to build. The community preservation fund does what it was meant to do here, and I wish it could do more.

An erupting fight over the former East Deck Motel property in Montauk has pitted a wealthy new property owner against scores of residents and visitors who would like to see Ditch Plain Beach remain the way it was for so long. More than 2,000 people have signed an online petition opposing J. Darius Bikoff’s plan to convert the iconic motel into a private surf club, of sorts.

The scale and “screw you” message of the proposal brings to mind the epic battle here in the 1980s and early ’90s over Barcelona Neck, some 341 acres then owned by Ben Heller, which eventually was bought by the State of New York for $40 million in 1992. It also seems an echo of the plans for a luxury development on 99 oceanfront acres in Montauk known as Shadmoor, which the town, county, and state bought for $17.3 million in 1999 from Robert Bear and Peter Schub.

Every few years, another bete noire emerges to energize preservationists. Mr. Bikoff would seem to be bidding to try on this ignominious mantle if he persists in seeking approval for the East Deck makeover — effectively privatizing a shoreline considered in short supply.

The town alone or in concert with other levels of government could make a bid to buy the site from him and his unnamed partners in the limited liability corporation called ED40 that bought the place. In hindsight, the $15 million they paid to the Houseknecht family while making flimsy promises about respecting the integrity of the place looks like a bargain — and perhaps the biggest single missed opportunity on the land-buying front of the previous town administration.

Mr. Bikoff has touched off what will surely be a long and bitter confrontation. It would be a terrific turn of events if he would work with local officials on a public deal to preserve the site. The price would be steep, I suspect, but as with Shadmoor and Barcelona before it, time has proven that those involved did the right thing.

Summer does not so much make a light escape here as a noisy one, so that we, the birds who stay, and who indeed will shiver, rejoice.

Thus the seasons are for us rearranged, and the waning of summer, what for many is a signal of decline, brings promise here.

A photographer friend, who has been shuffling all summer to the numbing rhythms of real estate interests, has been saying for the past three months that he can’t wait for summer to end and for fall to begin, so that he can be freed, somewhat, from exigency, and participate again in the dance of life. That’s why I made note of the high school teams’ first scrimmages and games at the end of this week in my calendar, which ordinarily I would stop at Wednesday.

Soon we will be caught up in so much activity — but of a much more joyful kind than we’ve known of late — that we’ll be able to delight, if not forever, at least for some months to come, in the present.

A Terrible Duty

His world was narrowing, Mary said, and ours was too. He was almost there when he went, at our hands — a terrible duty that this terrible beauty exacts.

The last time at Louse Point, in the golden light, he tugged gently at the leash at the water’s edge, and I wouldn’t let him go, not wanting to be possibly inconvenienced, though I said to myself and others, who could see that he was old, that it was for his own good.

I should have let him, I should have let him go. Forgive me, Henry.

Everything’s so clean and neat now.

And silent.

And empty.

The kitchen floor is bare.

Your eyes were so beautiful, though I hadn’t realized eternity was in them until the day we let you go.

A friend sent an email to me and a slew of others this week, using Gmail, that warned against opening any email that might arrive from her Hotmail account, which had been hacked. I don’t know what can happen if you open a hacked email, and I don’t plan to find out, but I do know something about my friend that she hadn’t intended: the email addresses — and many of the names — of her friends, acquaintances, and business connections, some 350 of them. 

I’d been thinking about the information that is sometimes divulged unintentionally by email since June, when other friends invited me to their anniversary party. They didn’t realize, I am sure, that the names and addresses of everyone they were including arrived along with the invitation. There they were, on the “CC” line of the Apple Mail program.

Most of the guests were people I was delighted to see, and I already had some of their addresses. I thought about saving those I didn’t have, as potentially useful future contacts, but then reconsidered. What would Miss Manners say about taking advantage of someone else’s privacy goof? Of course, all these contacts are probably still floating around in my computer somewhere (and I just don’t know enough about technology to tap into them).

I do know enough about technology to have grasped the use of the “BCC” line, but just how you would BCC some 350 names and addresses boggles my mind a bit. I guess if someone held a gun to my head I’d be able to create a “group” in my Gmail address book, and use that, but so far I haven’t had the occasion.

Sometimes at The Star, I’ve received electronic press releases showing the name and address of every person or news outlet to which it was sent — quite a bonanza, when celebrities, moguls, and editors across the country were on the list. My journalistic curiosity is piqued, and I find myself examining these lists like Miss Marple. I admit I once forwarded a long media list received that way to the person responsible for sending out releases for the Choral Society of the Hamptons, of which I am a member. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. 

Then there was the party to which the hosts intentionally sent out five separate email invitations. Actually, the first and second were identical, one having been pasted into an email and the other sent through Paperless Post. But the third through fifth were unique, containing updates and tips, telling us what games were going to be played (golf), what to wear, that there were going to be two D.J.s, and adding a link to a hangover cure (Sprite) and others to taxi transportation. Each used assorted sizes and styles of type in coordinated shades of blue and turquoise. Talk about email virtuosity! 

To be frank, Chris and I were only on that guest list because the bash was going to be a noisy affair and, well, our property backs up on theirs. We laughed at the obvious fact that we had raised the median age of the invitees, but we went nevertheless and had a swell time. Naturally, these young party-throwers were computer whizzes, and the names and addresses of everyone else invited were nowhere to be seen.

You hear from time to time how tight East Hampton Town is when it comes to handing out construction permits. “You can’t get anything approved around here,” the complaint goes. Well, that is not really the case. Although the paperwork may mound up and the review process be painfully slow, you can generally get what you want.

During a late-August getaway, I visited a California community that was really restrictive and puts East Hampton’s supposedly hard-nosed preservationism into sharp perspective.

Bolinas, a town of about 1,500 residents on the Pacific Coast in Marin County, decided about 40 years ago to simply stop time. No, they said, to the California suburban sprawl creeping over Mount Tam from Interstate Highway 101. And it worked. There are no chain-type convenience stores, no obvious mansions belonging to the new San Francisco tech elite, and nothing to tell you that it’s not, say, 1971, other than the Honda Priuses parked along the road to the beach.

Chief among the tools that Bolinas pushed to limit growth was an absolute cap on the number of water meters. It is today, as it was when Johnson was in the White House, a hippie-surfer paradise, and it is likely to stay that way.

That the place could have remained unchanged is all the more astounding when you consider that it is but a one-hour drive from the new-money capital of the United States. Like Montauk, for example, Bolinas is flanked by preserved land and the sea. It, too, was once envisioned as the home of a massive resort project, including, in its case, a four-lane highway and marina for luxury yachts.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, activists began to build a metaphorical wall between themselves and the ravages of the time.

Visitors will find no sign on the main road indicating the Bolinas turnoff. Residents supposedly stole it so many times the authorities just decided to forget about another replacement. Montauk, on the other hand, and the rest of the Hamptons — well, we know all too well what has happened here.

Several times during my weekend there with an old friend, we passed a person dancing in the street in full shaman regalia — a cape, staff, beads, and, dangling from his decorated hat, a talisman that reached between his eyes to the end of his nose.

Okay, so Bolinas is definitely not East Hampton Village, where a shaman might be urged to go along. But it is interesting to consider what we might have looked like had we really held back East Coast excess and powerful real estate interests to make sure our policies lived up to their perception.

In East Hampton, officials and most residents just shrug, believing there is nothing they can do in the face of all that New York money. But it is illustrative to see just how far one community managed to go to keep its identity, and it is sad to realize the extent to which we’ve blown it here