Some time in the next couple of days, former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, herself perhaps soon to be a candidate for president, will arrive in Amagansett for an August vacation. Their visit is interesting to think about from where I sit in a second-floor office that has a bit of a view of East Hampton’s Main Street.

We spend so much time here complaining about traffic or prices or whatever that we sometimes forget about the outside world. The Clintons’ visit is a reminder that there are concerns beyond what some developer or other wants to do to a favorite vista or why we couldn’t get a table at a favorite restaurant.

If I were able to get the Clintons’ attention, I’d like to know how they plan to spend their week here and why they choose the South Fork for their getaways. But I would also like to know whether they have any promising ideas about how to improve the economic future of those with low or middle incomes. The rich are doing just fine. But can the Clintons, from the comfort of Further Lane, as we’ve heard, empathize with people who have not seen a meaningful wage increase in a decade?

I’d like to know about climate change and whether, as they gaze out at the ocean, they realize that thanks to related sea-level rise, the view is one of the frontlines of the crisis. Will they be prompted to think about how to get Washington past its partisan battles to make a difference?

Do they know that some South Fork schools are half Latino? Will they reflect on this new American reality, in which traditional educational approaches can find it difficult and prohibitively costly to properly teach all the country’s children?

August seduces us to just dig our toes into the sand and forget about all the rest. And yet we — and they — cannot escape the fact that we live in a complicated and troubled world. If I had a few minutes with a former president and a woman who may be the next, I’d like to ask them about some of things on my mind.

Perhaps the gentrification of the Turnpike and its environs is inevitable — James Gambles, then the Bridgehampton Child Care Center’s director, said it was in an interview with The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins 41 years ago.

But if property values trump the other values we profess — neighborliness and good will, and the attentiveness to local history that strengthen those feelings presumably being among them — we will be the poorer for it.

Perhaps some day all will be prettified and mown and upscale and there will be no more to offend — or attract — the eye. Hedges will be clipped (shit, I just remembered, I’ve got to clip mine) and there will be attractive fencing as far as the eye can see. I don’t yearn for that homogenous day, though. When we will be buried, buried in beauty.

Poseyville’s fishermen lived in small houses. Who cared? They had the sea and the bays and the creeks.

I lived in one of them once — you had to stoop to get in — and loved it, just the fact that, as the result of Francis Lester’s neighborliness and good will, I found myself in close proximity with those who were in close proximity with natural beauty, not the man-made, manicured kind.

With the sea, with nature, with a roof that doesn’t leak overmuch, plumbing that works, and a good book, what more does one want? I don’t understand this deification of grandiosity.

But there I go again, biting, if not the hand that feeds me, the hand that feeds many here, and it is because of these hard-working men and women that we have at least the semblance of normality that attends a community, a community opposed, I’ll warrant, to being labeled or branded as “The Hamptons.”

I think that besides having some acquaintance with the history of this place, it also helps to talk to one another, even as we dance to the resort tune. (Speaking of which, we followed lively dance music we’d heard in our neighborhood the other night to its source down the street, a graduation party, where, once introductions had been made and assurances given that we were neighbors and hadn’t lodged a complaint with Code Enforcement, we congratulated the graduate and danced with the hosts.)

All by way of saying there is more here than meets the eye, that there are truths deeper than the facts.

Back in April at the height of the daffodil season, I wondered in this space whether hijacking your neighbor’s flowers — considering that the neighbor’s lot was just a gritty wasteland waiting for the construction of what would probably be yet another blight on the block — was really such a bad thing.

This particular place had been a floral showstopper before its modest house was demolished. The two gentleman gardeners who’d lived there had lovingly tended a riot of shrubs, trees, and flowers that spilled over beyond their fence onto the semipublic strip of land adjacent to the road, where, from mid-March to mid-May, “a host of golden daffodils” — also orange, red, and pink, Mendelian colors that Wordsworth could not have conceived of — “stretched in never-ending line.” Hundreds of them, maybe as many as a thousand. A host, for sure.

Every year in daffodil season I used to go out of my way to walk on that side of the road. But this spring, while the stunning procession marched down the aisle as always, there was no house, at least not yet; no trees, no shrubs, no owners that anyone knew of, no nothing. And it had been that way for a year. Likely a corporation waiting to resell and make a killing, we surmised.

So I didn’t think overmuch about doing a little expropriating. Rather than stopping and ogling and walking on, as in the past, I cut some daffs every few days and took them home, or to work, to admire. There were so many flowers that no one could possibly have told the difference if I hadn’t then gone and written about it, asking whether this small act of insurrection was, in fact, stealing.

Two things happened not long after that column ran. One, earth-movers arrived to begin construction. And two, I got an email from the property owners.

“Irene,

“. . . We are not a corporation, but a couple, who also love Amagansett and respect the house and land that we bought.”

“. . . Unfortunately, the house we purchased was ramshackle at best, held together by a paint job. The plantings, which we completely admired, were one of the reasons the house and land were so compelling for us. Had you taken a little more time to notice, before stealing our flowers, you might have seen how we actually transplanted as many of the beautiful trees the former owners planted that were viable in the back of our property, creating a nursery to protect them as we construct our house. Had you bothered to try to contact us, you might have understood that we actually had issues with a builder and had to call a halt to our construction until things could be sorted out.”

“We purchased that property not as a corporate plaything, but as a place where we could actually build a dream house — on land where we understood and respected the love with which the former owners tended their property. Our house will be beautiful and will reflect and respect the former owners as well as the neighborhood. Maybe you would have preferred a McMansion to be constructed in a few months’ time. It is unfortunate that you have chosen to characterize and ridicule us without any attempt to find out who we might be or what we might be doing.”

“Yes, the daffodils are beautiful and the land is beautiful. But there is more to this story. Your conflict with whether or not stealing our daffodils is actually stealing is actually a conflict. Yes, it is stealing. And even more, you have completely disrespected us. All our best wishes.”

Disaster. Here were people who had been hurt not once (okay, it was stealing) but twice (by writing about it). How to make amends?

“Buy them daffodil bulbs,” was the office consensus. “Drop them off with a nice note.”

Before I could do that, though (bulbs don’t come in to the nurseries until fall), the Amagansett Fire Department’s 100th anniversary parade took place. I was standing in the crowd on Main Street waving at the old pump trucks when along came a couple I hadn’t seen in years, and as we were catching up along came another, and the four of them started talking. And that was how I met the writers of the email, who, after an apology on one side and some initial wariness on the other, turned out to be the diametrical opposite of everything I’d been so sure about.

Better yet, the house has, too. It’s maybe half-finished now, going up slowly, as good houses do. I check it out every day as I go by. It’s going to be a knockout.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor-at-large.

Recently, I read of someone who was described as “a great herder of cats.” Leif Hope, a great ballplayer, by the way, who moves like a cat on the mound and bats like a lion, is one of those — an artistic manager of swing-for-the-fences egos in the service of the greater good.

The betterment of life in this town has been the prize on which Leif’s eyes have been cast for the almost 50 years now that the Artists-Writers Softball Game has been played as a benefit, for such organizations as the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center, which began here as Head Start, the Retreat, which offers a haven to victims of domestic abuse, Phoenix House, which helps to free people from addiction, and East End Hospice, which enables the terminally ill to remain in their houses.

Leif is a doer of good leavened with a sly sense of humor, however, a sense of fun that has served him, and The Game’s receipts, well over the years, during which the myth he’s spun of solipsistic, closeted Writers intent on annually bludgeoning the insouciant, life-loving Artists has been undone by the cold fact that Artists, while perhaps less obsessive than Writers, like to win too. And indeed they have as many times as the Writers have in the past 25 years.

Leif’s aim has always been to put on a good show, and thus he ought to be forgiven, I think, for playing fast and loose with his players’ bona fides. John Leo, once the Writers’ manager, said he guessed that in his opposing manager’s eyes anyone who was not a writer was an artist.

In rebuttal, Leif has said the Writers were the first to transgress, insisting in the 1970s that two lawyer ringers from California were eligible to play for them because they “wrote legal briefs.” But I think that riposte came after Leif played two auto body guys, Andy Malone and John Johnson, who in their work repainted cars.

A lover of women, Leif has not hesitated to enlist them in tweaking the Writers’ egos, often subbing in for a few innings all-female lineups recruited from the East Hampton Town women’s slow-pitch softball league.

In the famous “Battery Show” of 1977, he introduced a lights-out pro pitcher, Kathy Neal, and her catcher, C.B. Tomasiewicz, whom he and Tom Twomey had flown over from Connecticut, as “two folk singers from Omaha.”

It soon became evident they weren’t. Bowing to authorial pique, Leif played them in the outfield from the second until the ninth inning, at which point, with runners on first and third, and with the Writers about to tie the game up, he called them back in to pitch and catch.

A popup, a strikeout, and a popup, and that was it. The Artists won 13-7. “Some guys didn’t talk to me for five years after that,” said Leif, who, when it comes to The Game, puts it all on the line, always has, and always will.

My one regret is that he, a great ballplayer, as I’ve said, hasn’t played more in all these Games for which he’s been the impresario. But there’s more than one way, I suppose, to skin a cat.

Let’s play it again, Leif, play it again.

There is no shortage of lettuce in my house. Or cucumbers or zucchini or string beans. And come fall, the larders will be laden with mounds of potatoes and squash.

No one is more committed to the farm-to-table ideology than my mother, which is why, on any given evening, my family can be found eating homemade, homegrown organic basil pesto, with a side of sauteed zucchini and lemon balm. Eternally present at the table is a salad that consists entirely of vegetables that can be found either in our backyard or at my mother’s plot at EECO Farm.

My mother tends her garden lovingly, putting as much effort into it as she does her two daughters. She works less now than she did when I was growing up, but a large portion of her free time is devoted to coaxing tomato plants up stakes and eradicating scourges of potato bugs — she picks them off by hand; no pesticides are used on her plants.

She explained to me recently that this year she’d grudgingly made the switch from seedlings to already sprouted plants. She had seen the other farmers at EECO Farm unabashedly plant quarter-grown tomato plants purchased from Agway last season, and eventually decided that this was the easier way to go. My mother has a green thumb, but baby tomatoes need round-the-clock care. She does lament, though, that the plants will not have been raised organically for their whole lives.

She showed what can only be called mother-like devotion to her plants a month ago, after she was injured and ordered, not only by the doctors, but by my father, myself, my sister, and her boss, to stay in bed for a few days. Needless to say, she could not be kept away from her garden for long, not trusting the weatherman’s assessment that it would rain soon, nor was she satisfied with a fridge that was slowing growing empty. These days we don’t buy any vegetables from the grocery store, and as a family of vegetarians, we’ve come to depend on Mom’s garden.

Despite headaches and bruises, she has not shirked her responsibilities to the garden, nor has she asked for my help. My parents never hired a baby sitter when my sister and I were younger; they didn’t trust anyone else with their children, and I doubt I would be trusted in the garden. Besides, it has become a point of pride for her that the food on our table is made or grown by her hands alone. She is constantly encouraging me to pack a salad for lunch or slipping a bag of snap peas into my bag for work. I may finally be in my 20s, but when I hurt my hand recently and was unable to wield a knife, my mom made me lunch.

Truth be told, the two organic gardens that she tends are merely an extension of her cooking empire. She is a skilled chef, though she is hard pressed to admit it, and excels at whipping something up out of thin air. We eat dinner late, around 9 p.m., and many a time I have walked into the kitchen at 8:45 to find my mother sipping a cup of tea, a mystery novel in hand. Like magic, though, by 9 p.m., she creates some fantastic concoction, perhaps an Indian dahl with naan bread on the side, or a pasta dish that has been passed down in her family for generations. She is also an A-plus pastry chef and, not to rub it in, makes the best pie crust I’ve ever tasted.

In recent weeks, she has hauled out her old pasta machine, a relic from a past life in California, a time that my father has deemed “before baby.” She has taken to making fettuccini and spaghetti from scratch, declaring that it’s easier to make it herself than drive all the way from Springs into East Hampton Village to buy pasta. Two nights ago she used her pasta machine to make buckwheat Soba noodles. My father and I thought that the results — a stir fry of noodles, shrimp, and vegetables — were exemplary, but my mother did not agree, claiming that the noodles came out too thick and that she would have to try again.

Lucia Akard is an editorial intern at The Star. She will be a senior at Skidmore College in the fall.

Sunday night I was out in my boat on Gardiner’s Bay as the moon appeared over the Hither Hills highlands. It was a still evening, no wind to speak of, and only a little ripple under the hull as I passed the bluffs at the old Bell Estate, where the Clintons are staying for a couple of weeks.

Nights like this always puzzle me. So calm, so beautiful, and yet so few vessels on the water. There were no signs of the former president and former secretary of state or their security team, either. A single blue-hulled cabin cruiser lay at anchor off the Accabonac Harbor channel buoy. Another, smaller boat made its way northwest, and in the distance, a sloop was tucked up off Gardiner’s Island for the night.

It had been a long day, beginning for me with a fuel line problem that cut the outboard engine in the middle of the Three Mile Harbor breakwaters. On an incoming tide, I let the boat drift back onto a clam flat where I climbed overboard and worked it back to the dock, half walking, half swimming, with a line attached to the bow.

Back at the slip, talking through the boat’s problems with Palmer Smith, who keeps a runabout next to mine, the repair suddenly became obvious. I had the part I needed, and before too long I was on my way again.

My plan had been to run the boat up on the beach near our house as the tide switched around midday. Only a bit behind schedule, I managed to do so by lunch. That afternoon, as the hull sat dry on the sand, I took care of what needed to be done and waited for the bay to come in again. It did, while I was not watching, the way people say a pot won’t boil when it is being watched.

I had gone up to the house for something or other, and when I returned the boat had swung on its anchor line and was floating, swimming distance from the shore, in the light southwest wind. We were under way shortly thereafter.

We already suspected what the public perception of us was, but now we have something akin to hard proof: In a “readers choice” survey by Condé Nast Traveler, “the Hamptons” was rated as the eighth most unfriendly city in the United States among a list of 10. Newark, N.J., at number one, was the worst, and Miami just made the list, at number 10. Imagine! “The Hamptons” was only two slots friendlier than Detroit and — if that doesn’t make your hair stand on end — four slots better than Atlantic City. 

I, myself, don’t really believe those Condé Nast Traveler readers really knew what they were talking about when they filled out the survey. I think the votes were based on a vague cultural perception.

Sure, in East Hampton, and everywhere else on the South Fork, we have plenty of issues, but kindness isn’t tops among them; residents, visitors, and civic organizations continually attest to lots of generosity and caring. Who would deny that we have an unusually strong sense of community here? The letters to the editor of The Star are often filled with thank-you notes to individuals and volunteers who stepped out of their way to help others. 

I went to the magazine’s website in hopes of finding out just who participated in the survey, but didn’t have much luck. I ended up taking it (well, some of it) instead. Readers were asked to name cities they had been to and then evaluate them on a scale from poor to excellent — for not just friendliness and unfriendliness, but arts and culture, scenery and sights, restaurants and food, accommodations, shopping, and value. Among the friendliest cities, a disproportionate number of high scorers turned out to be in the South: Charleston, S.C. (which I’ve been meaning to visit since a former Star reporter moved there), was deemed the friendliest, followed by Savannah, Ga.; New Orleans was at the mid-mark, despite its problems, and Asheville, N.C., was number 10.

Perhaps those who marked “the Hamptons” as an unfriendly city had visited on a chaotic weekend in the summer, and run into someone in a shop who was tired and cranky. That certainly, ahem, happens. But, really, there’s a lot to quibble with in this survey ranking. First of all, even if we allow the Hamptons to be considered a single geographic entity, they (it?) are hardly a city. Hamptonization may have blurred some of the distinctions between the South Fork’s villages and hamlets, but their basic characters have not disappeared. In East Hampton, at least, people “from away” have been part of the equation for well more than a century; we’re not exclusionary. 

In his 1979 book, “The South Fork: The Land and the People of Eastern Long Island,” the late Everett T. Rattray said that although this place was “native now to a relative handful, it could be native to thousands more if they would undertake the necessary naturalization exercises, which include some long looks beneath the surface of things.” I can’t help but wonder what he would say about the conclusions of Traveler’s survey. Its voters probably didn’t engage in any naturalization exercises. 

Ah, well, perhaps it’s best that they didn’t. Our unfriendly rating may be good news, in the end, for this overcrowded peninsula. Given what things are like each July and August, we don’t really need any further announcements or broadcasts to the effect that our streets are filled with celebrities, that our restaurant kitchens are staffed by world-class chefs, that our visual arts heritage is second to none, that our farm and ocean produce is near-miraculous, and that our beaches are still incredibly beautiful. Grouchy survey-takers? You are welcome to stay home. 

The Hamptons, as it were, have been described as a mighty unfriendly “city” in a recent Condé Nast poll, though I’d beg to differ. On the contrary, rather than brutish, I find people here, if not beatific, quite giving.

So much so that I think every now and then — when I’m not in traffic — that we’re an island of sanity in an insane world.

But there I go again, arrogating to this place an exceptionalism that could well be overstated. Were we in a war zone — and there are many now in the world to choose from — I’d undoubtedly be singing a different tune, dirge rather.

Hobbes said life in the raw was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, a description that even today may be true in many places, though I, an optimist by nature (against all odds), cannot help but demur.

It’s all how you look at it, and from what vantage point. Our vantage point here is rather serene, most of the year, and I sense a feeling of community (that the Condé Nast poll-takers apparently did not) that is sustaining and abiding. What more can you hope for in life than that?

There being no crying need to be brutish here, we can, to some degree at any rate, be friendly, living our lives as we please yet helping one another when there is a need. I’ve seen this happen time and again on the South Fork. If it’s anything America has to teach the world, it may well be this — that life need not be the way Hobbes described, that it can be bountiful, pleasant, endlessly engaging, and long-lived (my dentist said recently that like the Stoics he tried to treat each day as his last, and that he wanted to live forever).

There’s more to power than force and domination. There is, indeed, power in numbers, in numbers of well-meaning people who have worked to free themselves from the tyranny of their emotions, to the extent, at any rate, that they can, having achieved a certain degree of equilibrium, or equanimity, if you will, devote themselves at times to the greater good of a community rather than solely to self-aggrandizing (and often self-destructive) pursuits.

While an antipathy toward tyranny has informed America’s past, as I heard someone say on the radio this morning, by the same token it has a heritage of charity and fairness as well. I would guess in that connection that if a poll were taken, this “city” might be in the forefront when it comes to charitable work. But, again, that is just my surmise (which, of course, is unimpeachable).

Looking at the bigger picture, taking in life’s beauty and joys as well as its ghastly enormities (natural and man-made) ought, I think, to persuade us that there is more to be gained from amity than from hate. Granted, it’s easier to think that way when you’re not coming under fire, but, in the end, if humankind is to survive, if not thrive, it must free itself from the chains of pride it has forged.

Part I: The Saga of Winter, 2011

Santa Claus managed to get two big red kayaks down our chimney. The grandeur of the boats in front of the fireplace, amid wrappings of varied shapes, was as beautiful as consumerism gets.  

Kayaks are a perfect present, except if it’s winter, when their use seems a little far off. It is actually not so far away, according to my mom, who has read about the wonders of wintertime kayaking online.

It is blustery when we strap the kayaks to the top of the car and drive to Louse Point. Perhaps it is my holier-than-thou, I-went-to-sailing-camp-and-you-didn’t attitude about the dangers of being on the water in high winds, or maybe it is the adults’ we-bought-these-freaking-things-and-we’re-going-to-have-fun mind-set, but either way no one is listening to my safety concerns. The outing proceeds.

It is the day after Christmas, so we are wearing down jackets under our life vests, while my dog wears her doggie life jacket over her natural coat. I get settled in one boat with my mom, while my dad, sister, and dog pile into the other. We struggle to push off, but once we do, we are away.

Away in a bad way — a speeding-uncontrollably-into-open-water, away-forever bad way.

About two minutes in, I hear a splash. Beside their capsized kayak, my 10-year-old sister is struggling in one direction, toward shore, and my dog is sloshing out in the opposite direction. My dad doesn’t actually end up having to demonstrate that the dog is his favorite child. He bides his time, staying in the middle and yelling at both of them till eventually my dog changes course and swims in their direction.

My mom appoints herself to some damage control. She abandons our ship, jumps in the water, and swears when she feels the temperature. It is certain that my mom loves me and would never want to lose me, so I am confused when she then yells, as I am being pulled away in an unmaneuverable kayak, “Stay! There!”

I decide her authority on this mission is terminated, so instead of staying in the boat and starting a new life alone at sea, I jump in the water to join her on the push to get back to shore. I deem it appropriate to swear too when I feel the water, which is painfully pricking my skin as my coat and Wellington boots weigh me down.

After a bit of paddling, I am able to touch bottom, and trudge along. My dad pulls my dog and sister along by the straps of their life jackets. The cold combined with the current makes our approximately 10-minute return to shore feel like the ice age.

The boats are out of sight when we get to the edge of the shore. We are blue-lipped, but have vanquished the water’s wrath, so aren’t feeling too blue. Except that my mom then places her feet in some viscous mud and falls flat on her face. Anyone treading in that mud would meet the same fate, so helping her up and out is a delicate maneuver. My dad eventually saves her with a branch with which she has to grapple and roll around.

My sister and I grapple too, with an effort not to show we have just seen an awkward and funny fall, given that our mom is in a serious situation. We do one thing successfully — we drive home. All take hot showers, including the dog. After our showers, my mom forces my dad to turn around and go back out with her to find the kayaks, and they do. One has washed up on Gerard Drive; the other is back up on Louse Point.

Part II: Reflections

Our kayaking extravaganza is now immortalized in print, for the public embarrassment of my otherwise capable family. It also is in a painting on a big canvas that I did as a present for my mom that year.

In my mind, when the Queen of England was new to the throne, she might have looked to the portraits on the walls of Buckingham Palace for a confidence boost, an affirmation of her royal lineage. Likewise, when the kayaking painting was hung up in our house, my family and I would look to it for a laugh, affirming our nautical ineptitude.

Nowadays, I’d bet the queen doesn’t blink when she passes by those portraits; she knows she’s the queen and nothing less. Neither do we feel the need to reference the kayaking painting and further rehash the story. We know we’re beach-walkers and nothing close to kayakers.

Part III: The Saga Updated

We still try to inch closer to kayaking status though. A few times we’ve had the satisfaction of a sunny day on placid water. If we were swimming it was voluntary. On Saturday, however, we encountered some windiness during our kayaking. The picnic beforehand was the highlight.

Bella Lewis is an editorial intern at The Star. In September she will begin her sophomore year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

It was late in the day, after a child’s birthday party had moved from the beach up to the house, that something I had never noticed before drew my attenton to a raft of black-backed gulls that had gathered near the shore for an evening hunt for crabs.

I have lived on this stretch of shore nearly all my life, with breaks for college and time in New York City. Like many of us who know the coast well, gulls, like the ones I suddenly became aware of, generate little interest. Their squawks and cries fade into the background usually. We note their presence as nuisances more often than not or not at all. Visitors might point and ask us what they are. We, dulled by the gulls’ constant presence, respond, “Oh that? It’s just a gull.”

Novelty has its attraction, of course, but so too does looking more closely at everyday things. The gulls that caused me to pause and look were making a sound that was familiar, a kind of rhythmic caw that I had heard too many times before to count. But I turned that way nonetheless. What I saw surprised me and I wondered why I had not been aware of it before.

Three of the birds, the noisy ones, were engaged in synchronized head-bobbing. As if by some subtle cue, they would begin calling and nodding, swimming tighly in circles, or walking together along the water’s edge. Nearby, indifferent, others rose on their wings and plunged under the water every now and then to pick up a spider crab. Those that were successful took their catch to the beach, flipped it over, and pecked at the soft parts underneath.

Down the beach, another group of gulls did the same head dance, likewise, for no purpose that I could see. Closer observers than I might explain what these birds were up to; I also suppose I could look it up. But that might spoil the mystery, might provide too many answers, might tempt me to look away again.