I was wrong, and the nuns were right. It turns out Hell does exist.

    I was not going to argue. I knew I deserved this. Still, I didn’t know what had happened, only that when I awoke, I was in a parking lot a short walk from the gates of Hell.

    I got out of my car and walked through the strangely frigid air to the ticket machine. There were signs posted everywhere about putting a ticket on your dashboard — as though you were ever coming back, once through those gates.

    It should go without saying that both machines were broken, yet the signs’ directive was unambiguous. I punched every button on the machine’s keyboard, to no avail. “To hell with this,” I muttered. I probably wouldn’t need that car anymore.

    There were many other arrivals. Some were combative, indignant. Others wailed in anguish. But most were stoic, silent, resigned to their fate.

    I shuffled to the back of the very long line that snaked through the arrivals hall and waited. A few seconds later, another of the departed turned to me. “The end of the line is there,” he said, pointing over my shoulder. I turned, and saw another 100, each staring at me with their cold, dead eyes. The devil sure knew how to make a guy feel bad, and then worse.

    Satan’s little helpers were nice enough. Bored, probably overworked and underpaid, their rote recitations underscored the eternal struggle above. They had seen innumerable souls the day before, and would see just as many tomorrow. “Stand next to the rope,” one ordered. Then, “Proceed into the main hall.”

    One thing is sure: No nation has cornered the market on vice, or virtue. It seemed that every nation, every ethnicity, every language was represented, a veritable United Nations of unredeemed sinners. We were all stuck here, forever.

    Another thing about Hell: On the wall-mounted flat-screen TV, instead of the Super Bowl, say, or that Grammy Salute to the Beatles, ran an endless loop of vehicle collisions, surely designed to inflict maximum pain. Cars ran through intersections and crashed into garbage trucks. School buses plowed into two-seaters, and police cars screamed down thoroughfares in pursuit of deviant, wicked motorists.

    The younger arrivals, instead of whooping at a particularly violent tackle or improbable kickoff return, would exclaim, “Damn!” at every collision, in a loop as endless, as predictable as the car-crash program itself.

    After 90 minutes — maybe 90 centuries — I was called to the front. Like Satan’s helpers outside, the benign, almost welcoming expression of this one was bewildering. Until, that is, she told me to sit down again. Obediently, I sat and waited. And waited some more. And then waited some more.

    And then I was directed to a small room, where a very old man, clad in black, sat before me. A helper, on either side of him, looked ready to pounce. My heart raced and I waited.

    The rest is a blur, really. All I can remember is being on a long line again, and an interminable wait to reach the front of it. And then, miraculously, I was free, stepping into that frigid air, where, to my astonishment, my little car, devoid of parking tickets, awaited. Somehow, I felt exactly $246 poorer, but it was a small price to pay for a rebirth.

    And if anyone tries to tell you that I’ve got it all wrong, that I’m confusing Hell with the Nassau County Traffic and Parking Violations Agency, don’t believe them. The devil mixes truth with lies to deceive us, you know.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

    Did you hear that 111.5 million people watched the Super Bowl on TV Sunday? This number may not be an eye-opener for sport fans — apparently, this was the fourth time in five years that the Super Bowl has set a record as the most-watched television event in United States history — but it was a stunner for me.

    I am fascinated by numbers, expecting them to provide a story of their own or, at the very least, to tell us something that words alone cannot say. Numbers are collected and appraised by many sources these days, and the Internet makes it easy to find out what you would like to know, even if you do not entirely understand it. I certainly wish I had a better understanding of statistics.

     Going to Google to learn more, I discovered that almost one-third of every man, woman, and child in this country — according to statistics for 2012 — watched the game. In the United States alone, almost as many people tuned in as there were residents of Russia in 2012, which was 143.6 million. There were almost twice as many Super Bowl viewers here than the 63.7 million people who lived in all of the United Kingdom that year.

    Of course, television wasn’t the only medium by which the game was broadcast. This year’s Super Bowl was reported to be the most-streamed sport event in online history. It was the biggest live TV event ever tweeted about in the U.S. At halftime, with the Broncos down 22-0, an astonishing 50 million people posted 185 million game-related remarks on Facebook.

    I didn’t find out how many people may have heard the play-by-play on AM or FM radio, although some of the passengers on the Jitney when we were coming back from the city Sunday night appeared to have been listening or watching on iPhones.

    The Super Bowl numbers are so huge that they have to be meaningful in some way. Certainly they are indicative of what our proclivities and sympathies are as a culture. We must be a rah-rah nation that values brawn above all else, and admires the winners, especially, right?

    I’ve always tended to think of myself as odd woman out, appreciating the angle on things being a member of a minority can give you. Beyond the music world, where I sing in a chorus, I’ve never really been a joiner. (And this has been re-enforced for the past 50 years by the journalistic standard of independence we hew to at The Star, which has guided me to avoid membership in social or political organizations.) I’ve definitely never been a follower of team sports.

    But something occurred to me this week: The Super Bowl, in a way, gives the lie to this concept of America as a nation of sports fanatics and cheerleaders. If almost a third of Americans tuned in, it means that more than two-thirds tuned out. And that makes the dissenters the real mainstream — the great majority.

    Everything I said last summer that I would get done in winter has not yet gotten done. When the roses were still in bloom, I had plans to strip down and then paint a corner cupboard for my dining room, clean out the big closet in the living room, and organize my shoe closet. There are just been too many distractions, one of which is watching reality television at night.

    It’s odd how you can fall in love with people who you don’t know, and even stranger when you feel sorry for someone you’ve never talked to. I happen to love the Robertson family, that grizzly bunch from “Duck Dynasty.” It took awhile, and I never expected it to happen to me, a person who hates reality shows and prefers reading to watching television, a person who loves animals and hates to see them hurt, much less killed. I often have to look away from some scenes.

    My love affair with the Robertsons started out of jealousy. While cleaning up after dinner I would hear my husband and son laughing, hysterically at times, while watching the show. I’d roll my eyes and settle in with a good book or magazine. But their laughter became intrusive, and I had no choice but to turn my attention to this wacky bunch of duck hunters who remind me of the Waltons, the redneck version. I wanted to laugh too.

    They pray before every meal and are vigilant about eating what they kill. When Phil Robertson, the family patriarch, got into trouble a few weeks back for some racist and homophobic statements he made during a magazine interview, I actually felt sorry for him. And though I’ve fallen for this family, I don’t think I’d ever eat a meal with them.

    Their menus include fried frog legs and squirrel brains, which Miss Kay, the family matriarch, proclaims to have loved since she was a little girl. “I don’t know why, but I’ve just always loved those little squirrel brains,” she says in her Southern twang while wiggling between her fingers a de-furred squirrel, readying it for the batter and hot oil sizzling in a pan.

    For Phil Robertson to knock anyone else is like someone with nicotine stains still on their fingers saying, “Oh my God! You still smoke?” three days after they’ve quit. When his remarks got him in trouble, the network decided to put Phil on hiatus, which I imagine he got a good chuckle over. He couldn’t care less about being on television. He’s all about hunting and fishing, and they often have to go hunting for him when he’s scheduled for an appearance.

    This family has made their millions, and he would rather be wrestling with the alligator that’s sunning itself on the river bank that runs near their home — a mobile home that has all the coziness of an all-American home, complete with white lights strung through the trees and frequent visits from the grandchildren — or trying to get rid of a beaver that’s causing damage on his property, deep in the woods of Louisiana.

    Except for the addition of another doublewide trailer attached to it, it’s the same house that the “Dynasty” boys grew up in, the same house where Papa Phil used to beat their behinds with a belt when they acted up during childhood. They used to pad their backsides when they knew a “whupping” was coming. Yes, Mr. Robertson was a mean alcoholic and at one time threw Miss Kay and the little boys out to fend for themselves. That man has demons rattling in his brain.

    But Miss Kay wasn’t much better back when the boys were young, and one of the brothers, the youngest of four, blames his balding head on her for all the hair-pulling she did to him.

    I don’t think there could be any crime worse than beating a child. The closest I ever came to corporal punishment was when one of my children was given a smack on the side of the head, really a swift pat, for driving in cars with boys that the child was forbidden to drive with. The child, I should add, had quite a full head of hair, so it was really more a matter of messing up the child’s hair. The child smacked me back! That’s how things go in this house.

    I learned about the family’s early years from the book Phil (supposedly) wrote called “Duck Commander,” which I picked up from the library hoping to learn how I, too, could make a million dollars. My thought was if this group of hooligans could do it, I should be able to do it. But the only thing I learned was that Mr. Robertson was a mean young father — and good looking, actually, before he let all that facial hair get in the way.

    It turns out that they made their money by creating a distinctive duck call. How does one who lives in a fishing community emulate that? Do fish even respond to the noises made by other fish? Could you imagine the havoc we could create if we developed a fish call that makes fish rise to the water’s surface?

    It’s something I’ll have to keep working on. But while I remain focused on becoming a millionaire, I will keep watching this family. And before winter fades you might want to catch an episode. Even if you can’t laugh with them, you will laugh at them. That is, if you can get past the grizzle.

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer for The Star.

    The surgeon general’s first report on how bad smoking is for the human body came out on Jan. 11, 1964. Fifty years later — perhaps in connection with the report’s anniversary? — CVS Caremark, the huge drugstore chain that has a branch in East Hampton, announced on Feb. 6 that it would no longer sell tobacco products. When I read the news I let out an audible hooray.

    I’ve always been particularly down on cigarettes, among all the many things that are bad for you. (Clearly bacon and Häagen-Dazs don’t do a body any favors, either, but — despite our culture’s current bacon-obsession zeitgeist — I don’t believe they are quite as addictive, or pernicious.)

    Spurred by the CVS announcement, I went to The Star’s archive of old newspaper clippings this week to see if I could find an antismoking column I wrote years ago. There in the file drawer it was: “Connections” from the edition of Nov. 20, 1980.

    Noting that it was Great American Smokeout Day, a designation adopted in 1977 by the American Cancer Society, I wrote about one of my childhood friends, who had become a smoker at the grand old age of 11.

    We still had smokers on staff here at The Star in 1980, and they would have been surprised and offended if anyone had asked them to take it outside. Your only recourse in those days, really, was nagging: “Stop smoking!” I said to a colleague, without looking up from my typewriter, as the aroma of tobacco filled the newsroom air.

    Back then, newspapers, including small ones like The Star, often carried cigarette advertising, but I had banned it that year after my husband, Ev Rattray, who became the editor of The Star in 1958, died of cancer. I wrote that Ev had given up smoking a decade before the disease appeared and that he had asked one of his doctors whether that was ironic: giving up smoking and still getting cancer. In my column, I quoted the doctor’s reply: “The evidence is mounting. Perhaps in giving up smoking 10 years ago, you actually slowed the growth of the cancer and, in fact, extended your life.”

    I didn’t know then whether the doctor was speaking honestly or just being nice, but I took to heart what he said. Today, I believe, the research is pretty clear that every year without a cigarette improves your chances at longevity.

    The Star’s ban on cigarette advertising didn’t mean much to our bottom line, I must admit, and I don’t know if readers were even aware of the gesture. The money we may have given up would have been relatively paltry — infinitesimal in comparison to the $2 billion in sales that CVS has estimated it will lose.

    Nevertheless, I feel, retrospectively, that it was clearly the right move. What else can we do? “Brighten the corner where you are,” as the saying goes. And if that doesn’t work, try nagging.

    “‘I gave up masonry in November,’ ” Ken Raf­ferty told me in May of 1978. “ ‘I could stay down here and paint 14 hours a day. I get my hot cocoa and dash around back through the snow. People must think I’m crazy. One abstract I did I called, ‘It’s Snowing on My Cocoa.’ ”

    “While he’d rather keep his paintings — ‘They’re like my babies’ — at times the wolf at the door can’t be ignored. ‘One guy was down here looking at a graphic I did in cobalt blue. He said, ‘What’s the title?’ I said, ‘LILCO.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, I see . . . the nuclear power plant. . . .  Is that why you named it that?’ I said, ‘I named it that because if you buy it I can pay my LILCO bill.’ I said to myself, ‘I got to make this sale to this guy — they were going to shut my lights off. I had to be honest. The guy said, ‘That’s even better! That’s real soul, to have that nerve. . . .’ ”

    “ ‘So, after that I named others, Rent, and IGA. . . .’ ”

    “Over the Colonial doorway to Nancy Boyd Willey’s historic house in Sag Harbor was the injunction: ‘Remove Not The Ancient Landmark Which Thy Fathers Have Set,’ and etched into the dining room mantelpiece, ‘I am the BREAD of LIFE . . . He that Cometh to ME Shall never HUNGER . . . and JESUS said And He that BELIEVETH on ME Shall Never THIRST.’ ”

    “Putting a finger to her chin, Ms. Willey said, ‘And to think that I lobbied against billboards.’ ”

    “The signs in the Chowder Bowl concession at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach reflect the feistiness and versatility of its proprietor, Roney Marasca.”

    “ ‘We do not sell or give away cups and/or ice! Please do not ask for them — you won’t get ’em!’ ”

    “ ‘Sorry! Sat & Sun only — Bagels & Hard Rolls are available but NOT TOASTED after 1 p.m. “‘I gave up masonry in November,’ ” Ken Raf­ferty told me in May of 1978. “ ‘I could stay down here and paint 14 hours a day. I get my hot cocoa and dash around back through the snow. People must think I’m crazy. One abstract I did I called, ‘It’s Snowing on My Cocoa.’ ”

    “While he’d rather keep his paintings — ‘They’re like my babies’ — at times the wolf at the door can’t be ignored. ‘One guy was down here looking at a graphic I did in cobalt blue. He said, ‘What’s the title?’ I said, ‘LILCO.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, I see . . . the nuclear power plant. . . .  Is that why you named it that?’ I said, ‘I named it that because if you buy it I can pay my LILCO bill.’ I said to myself, ‘I got to make this sale to this guy — they were going to shut my lights off. I had to be honest. The guy said, ‘That’s even better! That’s real soul, to have that nerve. . . .’ ”

    “ ‘So, after that I named others, Rent, and IGA. . . .’ ”

    “Over the Colonial doorway to Nancy Boyd Willey’s historic house in Sag Harbor was the injunction: ‘Remove Not The Ancient Landmark Which Thy Fathers Have Set,’ and etched into the dining room mantelpiece, ‘I am the BREAD of LIFE . . . He that Cometh to ME Shall never HUNGER . . . and JESUS said And He that BELIEVETH on ME Shall Never THIRST.’ ”

    “Putting a finger to her chin, Ms. Willey said, ‘And to think that I lobbied against billboards.’ ”

    “The signs in the Chowder Bowl concession at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach reflect the feistiness and versatility of its proprietor, Roney Marasca.”

    “ ‘We do not sell or give away cups and/or ice! Please do not ask for them — you won’t get ’em!’ ”

    “ ‘Sorry! Sat & Sun only — Bagels & Hard Rolls are available but NOT TOASTED after 1 p.m. “‘I gave up masonry in November,’ ” Ken Raf­ferty told me in May of 1978. “ ‘I could stay down here and paint 14 hours a day. I get my hot cocoa and dash around back through the snow. People must think I’m crazy. One abstract I did I called, ‘It’s Snowing on My Cocoa.’ ”

    “While he’d rather keep his paintings — ‘They’re like my babies’ — at times the wolf at the door can’t be ignored. ‘One guy was down here looking at a graphic I did in cobalt blue. He said, ‘What’s the title?’ I said, ‘LILCO.’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, I see . . . the nuclear power plant. . . .  Is that why you named it that?’ I said, ‘I named it that because if you buy it I can pay my LILCO bill.’ I said to myself, ‘I got to make this sale to this guy — they were going to shut my lights off. I had to be honest. The guy said, ‘That’s even better! That’s real soul, to have that nerve. . . .’ ”

    “ ‘So, after that I named others, Rent, and IGA. . . .’ ”

    “Over the Colonial doorway to Nancy Boyd Willey’s historic house in Sag Harbor was the injunction: ‘Remove Not The Ancient Landmark Which Thy Fathers Have Set,’ and etched into the dining room mantelpiece, ‘I am the BREAD of LIFE . . . He that Cometh to ME Shall never HUNGER . . . and JESUS said And He that BELIEVETH on ME Shall Never THIRST.’ ”

    “Putting a finger to her chin, Ms. Willey said, ‘And to think that I lobbied against billboards.’ ”

    “The signs in the Chowder Bowl concession at East Hampton Village’s Main Beach reflect the feistiness and versatility of its proprietor, Roney Marasca.”

    “ ‘We do not sell or give away cups and/or ice! Please do not ask for them — you won’t get ’em!’ ”

    “ ‘Sorry! Sat & Sun only — Bagels & Hard Rolls are available but NOT TOASTED after 1 p.m. Too busy!’ ”

    “ ‘Our Motto: Sibili Si Ergo Fortibuses

    In Ero. Nobili Demmis Trux Seewatis

    Enim Cowsendux.’ ”

    “Four years ago, Robert Dash said, he had done ‘a gigantic landscape of Sagaponack. Somebody saw something in the lower right-hand corner and asked what it was. I said it was a For Sale sign.’ ”

    “One of the reasons Mary Damark calls everyone ‘dearie’ and ‘honey’ is because she admits she’s bad on remembering names. She is very good at remembering faces, though, and to underline the point she told of instantly recognizing a former Wonderbread salesman whom 15 years prior she had threatened with hard raps on the head with a frying pan if he didn’t get out of her kitchen.”

    “Asked what she thought of the new rich-peasant look, Mrs. Damark guffawed: ‘They look like the mad Russians. And next year,’ she said, hitching up her skirt, ‘they’ll be up to here. . . . And if they can’t sell them that way, they’ll put patches on the ass and sell them that way.’ ”

    “ ‘Kids. They’re like a bunch of gypsies,’ Mrs. Damark said. ‘These kids — though they’re much older than we were at their age — don’t take anything serious. They run and run, and after they get there they find that what it was they were after isn’t there.’ ”

    “Whereupon Lori Hasselberger, who works at the store, announced that Mrs. Damark’s granddaughter, Wendy, was taking off for Arizona in a few days.”

    “Mrs. Damark absorbed the news, and said, ‘How far you think she’ll get?’ ”

    Feb. 2, 2014, Ditch Plain, Montauk: The voice rings out, “Lads, paddle, a set is coming.” Four men on surfboards ranging from 9 to 10 feet paddle 30 yards farther seaward to wait, positioning themselves for the four-foot winter set.

    Three of the men had been talking, light Irish brogues distinct, pleasant enough topics, not much at all, prior to the sighting of the three-wave set, clearly visible 250 yards offshore. The fourth surfer had mentioned to one of the three Irish guys, “You need a hood.”

    The man has hair long enough to more than cover his head and ears, yet it is February in Montauk. No hood in Montauk in February, even with a mild across-the-board temperature of 45 degrees water and air, is a stretch. The man with no hood shrugged, spoke about industrious work completed earlier in the day, and then was out on the water, indifferent to wearing a hood.

    The set arrives, glassy, cement-like, smooth, as very cold water seems. The four men paddle, catch, stand up Waikiki-style, surfing shoreward. Possibly three are actually standing, yet for the sake of the tale, let’s make it four. The sun, a hallowed gray sun from west to north, blankets the surf spot in more than adequate light.

    Waikiki-style is arms spread out, cruising gracefully toward land, smiling, without a care in the world.

    Dec. 27, 2013, Ditch Plain, Montauk: John, one of the local Ditch Plain prophets of the summer past, roams the parking lot, not thinking much, just on a surf check. He had had responsibilities to attend to in New York City the past week. A surfer walks up to him fully suited and says, “Stay away from people who drive expensive white luxury cars.”

    John looks quizzical, wondering what that means.

    The suited surfer mentions “not the ones with the white trucks, no. People who have white trucks are actively employed doing something honest enough.” The surfer continues, “John, stay away from people with cars like this.” The surfer points to an expensive swayback S.U.V., a brand-new white Range Rover with all the newest and greatest surfboard rack apparel adorning.

    The wetsuit-clad surfer says, “John, it’s pretty obvious that they could be involved in, you know, shady business.” The surfer continues, “I have a distant uncle who says that anyone who buys or rents a fancy white car is involved in . . . one of two occupations. This is a family beach; I’ll tell you later.”

    He continues, “No one goofs around more than us, or has as much fun, yet those people could give the sport a bad name.”

    John muses, thinks blissfully about sitting in his beach chair near his older-model Chevy truck during Labor Day weekend past. What fun that was, how he loves Ditch Plain on the holidays: What a celebration! John thinks about the attractive lady he was sitting with Labor Day past — she was sipping a Budweiser bottle of beer, gracefully.

    John snaps out of his daydream, laughing about the fancy white car with all the surf trimmings, and says, “That’s hilarious.” John walks back to his Chevy truck, smiling.

    Sept. 28, 2010, Radar Base, Montauk: Left-breaking five-foot waves crease laterally across the western rock shelf a hundred yards offshore connecting to a sandbar closer to shore. Surfers ride the waves moving and bending, tucking into the cylindrical formation waves make known as the tube.

    Birders, bird-watchers, ornithologists, with scopes, just a few, are positioned on the bluffs, intent on their excursion. Not more than 160 yards offshore to the southwest, a small charter boat of approximately 38 feet in length drifts quietly with 10 people aboard. The sun glimmers as only during New England fall.

    A five-wave set blankets the late-afternoon rock reef. Surfers, not many, slide across the overhead walls of water. Simultaneously, pow, pow, pow, the sound of shotguns resounds from the small boat drifting directly off the surf break. The lightest scent of cigar smoke drifts inward. The afternoon winds are beginning to shift from offshore to onshore.

    Pow, pow, pow, pow, poof, boom. Maybe someone on the duck-shoot charter is carrying some black powder high-gauge gun. The birders are moving like squirrels along the Montauk bluff cliffs, in clear view of the gunners. The bird enthusiasts’ scopes glint as the instruments cross paths with the southwestern afternoon sun.

    Two small groups of bird-watchers move along the cliffs. The shooting boat drifts in close enough, after a volley, to give the air a hint of gunpowder. The slightest trail of white smoke bursts from their guns after each volley. One can almost imagine a silver-inlayed shotgun, family heirloom, no doubt, a family flask silvered to match.

    An intoxicating scene, in the sense of: This has taken place before, long years before, this surf session in late September. The waves break in patterns of five, every 17 to 20 minutes, generated by an offshore tropical depression. The birders watch, the surfers surf, the duck boat shoots, all drifting together like a symbiotic painting of lore.

    Passports to the Island of Montauk are currently being issued for the summer and fall of 2014. If you are not in possession of a legitimate 2014 passport by May 14 you will be required to leave the island by 8:30 p.m. or sunset. The families, as they exist on Montauk, need peace and quiet, at least at nighttime.

    Morgan McGivern is The Star’s staff photographer.

    A friend sent an eBlast this week that offered a balm to the winter-weary soul. Using a service called Paperless Post, his email bore the subject line winter 2014, but its contents, the poem "in time of daffodils" by E.E. Cummings, heralded spring.

In time of daffodils (who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why, remember how

In time of lilacs who proclaim

The aim of waking is to dream. . . .

    We may not quite yet be in the time of daffodils, but I was only too eager for any promise of warm weather, especially after learning that while Malverne Mel and Holtsville Hal — Long Island’s own furry prognosticators — have called for an early spring, Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil and Staten Island’s Chuck beg to differ. Both Phil and Chuck say there will be six more weeks of winter. Apparently, Staten Island Chuck has the highest accuracy rate of them all, 82 percent, so he is not a groundhog to be trifled with. Add Chuck’s grim forecast to recent news reports that our hard winter might be attributable to a change in the path of the jet stream itself — due to warming in the Arctic — it looks very like we have a while to wait before the thaw.

    Of course, the record cold has had its silver linings, especially for the young and frisky, who have braved snow, sleet, and hail to sled, make snow angels, start snowball fights, construct igloos, and skate (not to mention gloat over all those days off from school). Like many people our age, my husband and I have quite enjoyed being snowbound, spending long, quiet nights at home, cooking, reading, feeling cozy, and following the Winter Olympics. And when the sun decided to come out while the snow still (as the song goes) lay round about — deep and crisp and even — East Hampton looked more beautiful than ever.

    There’s something about extreme weather — whether it’s a hurricane, a blizzard, or a heat wave — that sets our memories in motion. When I ventured outside to broadcast an ice-melting compound on the front walk and do a little shoveling,  my own thoughts turned to winters past. Unlike my children and their children, I didn’t have very frolicsome winters as a kid, maybe because I wasn’t brought up in the country. I can’t remember ever building a snowman or riding any toboggans down any hills, and I didn’t learn to skate until I was in college.

    One of my happiest remembrances of winter is of skating as an adult on black ice on Montauk’s Fresh Pond. I couldn’t contain my exuberance and burst into song as I went along, imagining I was as graceful as Sonja Henie. I also remember skiing on snowy-but-sunny days even longer ago. I was hardly an athlete, compared to others, but the feeling of skiing in the great outdoors was like none other, almost transcendent. I remember the pride I felt when I mastered a perfect stem Christie. (A stem Christie, which isn’t taught anymore, is described as “a turn made by stemming the uphill ski, transferring weight to its inside edge, and bringing the other ski into a parallel position midway through the turn.”) I can almost see myself, with a big smile that matched my bright-orange parka.

    Another email this week, however, gave me the shivers rather than any foolish hope that this endless winter might soon be ending. Friends who live in Marquette, Mich., on the Upper Peninsula, sent news that their city had broken a record set in 1978 of 72 days of below-freezing weather (with many of those below zero). More than 200 water mains have broken this year in Marquette, the email said; snow banks have risen to six feet, and 98 percent of Lake Superior has frozen. Compared to Michigan, I’d say, East Hampton has been a winter wonderland.

Sunday was one of those days, you know, the kind that get people saying that’s why we live here.

It had started in an ordinary enough way. My friend Hammer and I had decided to go oystering. Hammer had even bought a new bottle of quality vinegar and shallots for mignonette in anticipation of watching the hapless Giants later accompanied by a dozen or so on the half-shell.

A year or two before on a similar cold-starting day, another friend and I had located a prodigious cache of oysters in a location easy to get to but out of other harvesters’ way. When we got to the landing, however, we noticed several trucks and trailers and then more trucks lining the shore across the water. People were scalloping, but why; we thought that opening day was still about 24 hours away.

Hammer got his nickname years ago, when he was working for a house builder here. Sometimes a man of few words, when we would ask how he was doing or what he had been up to, he would answer simply, “Hammer, hammer, hammer.”

There is something of a laconic tradition around here when discussing one's labors. Years ago, a sometime commercial fisherman used to reply, “Eel, bait, eel,” when asked the same thing. Story was that he eventually spray-painted the phrase on the side garage doors at Stuart’s Seafood in Amagansett. As payback, the boys took a payloader and buried his rusting, beige AMC Pacer, which never ran anyway, in a hole in the gravel-and-shell parking lot, or so the story went. Hammer and I were honestly baffled, thinking that scallop season in town water had been moved to Monday. It was Sunday. Could all of these people just have jumped the gun? We went to check it out. A Marine Patrol officer was checking for permits at the entrance to the beach like a club bouncer looking at IDs. We asked. The town trustees, he said, had decided to open the season a day early for noncommercial scalloping. Somehow, I had missed this. Not so, the dozens of people out in the harbor. Hammer and I stood around for a few minutes, then went and got our gear and joined them.

It was easy pickings. By the time we started, about midday, people were already staggering out of the water under the weight of full baskets. The sky was silver and the water was, too. In ones and twos, harvesters peering into their look-boxes slowly moved around in the waist-deep mercury water.

Hammer and I took only about as much as we each felt like opening. It was indeed one of those days.

    Today . . .     Mostly sunny, though clouded conditions resulting from a high-pleasure system that moved through the region late may take a while to clear. By noon, however, one ought to be able to face the day, even though temperatures will continue to be unseasonably cold. By midafternoon undifferentiated thoughts of escape can be expected to arrive from the south-southwest, though the disturbance may be of short duration given that everything’s booked anywhere warm.

    Tonight . . . Dreary with snow late, following a broad depression caused by newly mailed episodes of “Breaking Bad,” a mood only slightly elevated by a half pitcher of margaritas and our wishes that Walter White had been our chemistry teacher in high school, for then we might have a better handle on things by now. 

    This new storm system, moving from the Midwest to the Northeast, will bring plenty of recriminations, coarse language, and gnashing of teeth, causing even more trips to the dentist, provided the roads have been plowed and the potholes filled in. Snowfall could accumulate a total of 1 to 3 inches, or, in some areas along the South Shore, as much as 10. The prospect will likely bring with it fitful dreams of impotence and of polyurethane fumes seeping down the hall from the recently redone room, though by midmorning the snow is expected to change to drizzle. (Happy Days!)

    Tomorrow . . . A bit of . . . what? Yes, yet another disturbance moving across the region in the early hours, which promises to bring with it a strong urge, as the skies slowly lighten, to remain under the covers forever.

    Thursday, Friday . . .  A chance for a bit of a blizzard Thursday, though don’t get hot under the collar, you can always play Gin Rummy. Friday may be a much milder day for struggling against entropy, though if Johnna calls from San Diego, don’t pick up the phone.

    Almost by chance, but aware that it was Black History Month, my husband and I went to Shelter Island on Friday night for a program on the history of slavery sponsored by the Shelter Island Library and Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. We had been primed by Mac Griswold’s penetrating book, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island.”

    The Shelter Island Library is small, and the event had not been widely publicized. Nevertheless, it drew an overflowing — and, I must add, multiracial — crowd. We had come to see “Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North,” a film about the slave trade, and to hear a conversation about it.

    The film is relevant to Sylvester Manor (which was farmed by slaves in the colonial era and beyond), but it also underscores something most of us don’t much think about: the complicity of Northerners in the perpetuation of slavery. We tend to forget that Abolitionists were a minority here in the North, and that the good citizens of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states not only dominated the American slave trade but also owned slaves well into the 19th century. Many fine old families made their fortunes on the backs of slaves.

    The film is about the DeWolf family, illustrious and wealthy merchants of Bristol, R.I., who are said to have run the largest slave-trading company in United States history. Katrina Browne, a seventh-generation descendant, was born in Philadelphia, but her background in cultural anthropology and theology drew her to explore the personal as well as national consequences of America’s “peculiar institution.” She directed and wrote the film on a mission to find out, for herself and others, how so many otherwise decent people and respectable organizations either actively participated in the abominable institution of slavery, or looked the other way.

    The film was eight years in the making. Along the way it took the filmmaker and nine other DeWolf descendants to Ghana in West Africa, where they visited dungeons in which those to be sold as chattel were imprisoned, and to Cuba, where the DeWolfs both sold slaves and held many captive on their five plantations at great profit.

    The Triangular Trade, in which the Sylvester family of Sylvester Manor also took part, involved the cultivation of sugar for rum, which was used as currency (with other material goods) to buy Africans, and transport them in horrific conditions through the Middle Passage to the West. As is noted in the documentary, some 11 million people made the passage, a million dying along the way.

    For Ms. Browne, who spoke after the screening, awareness was the first step toward uncovering hidden personal ideas about race and challenging herself and as many others as possible to open their eyes to our shared cultural legacy and begin a process of healing and reconciliation. “I was shocked . . . when I realized that instead of being the exception, the DeWolf family was just the tip of the iceberg of the vast complicity to slavery in New England,” she said in an interview.

    Joining Ms. Browne in the conversation that followed the screening were her brother, Whitney Browne, Georgette Grief-Key, executive director of the Eastville Community Historical Society, Peggy King Forde, former director of the New York City African Burial Ground Project, and Sandra Arnold, who, under the auspices of Fordham University, is developing the National Burial Database Project of Enslaved African Americans. The audience was clearly moved.

    First screened at the Sundance Film Festival, “Traces of the Trade” is available from the Tracing Center, an educational organization pursuing Ms. Browne’s mission.

     There are lessons in this history for all of us. One of the DeWolf descendants makes a particularly insightful remark in the film, saying that he left for the trip to West Africa believing that his ancestors engaged in the slave trade centuries ago simply because that was the way things were done at the time — but that he returned home understanding that they “knew it was evil, but did it anyway.”

    I think Ms. Browne’s idea of challenging ourselves to more frankly acknowledge our nation’s racist history is one all thoughtful people should embrace. And I wonder: Will our own descendants question our own complaisance? Will they wonder at our passive acceptance of today’s lingering, institutionalized racism, and the social injustice that still walks with it hand in hand?