Main Street in East Hampton will never be the same for many of us now that Cam Jewett is gone. Mrs. Jewett was 102 when she died of pneumonia on Jan. 27 at Southampton Hospital — and what a fine, long life she had.

    I first got to know Cam, as she was known by just about everyone, when I was just a child. My grandmother would take me over to Cam and Edward Jewett’s house to play backgammon. The house, where she lived right to the end, is just to the south of the Maidstone Inn, overlooking Town Pond.

    To me, a boy of perhaps 10, the Jewetts seemed impossibly aged, which is funny to think of now, as they were then only in their 60s. Then again, I do not recall Cam’s appearing to age from then to the last time I saw her, perhaps at the front gate of the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair last summer.

    After my grandmother’s death, and during the years I was away at college and working in New York City, I certainly did not see Cam much. But once I returned to East Hampton, and to the Star office in particular, we had frequent chances to chat.

    One thing that I could entirely depend on was that if and when a car ended up in Town Pond, and I walked down for a look, Cam would be there, usually with her camera. She told me she believed that she had a photograph of every single vehicle that had plunged into the drink there since she and her husband first lived in the house. Cam said she had a box of the photos somewhere and that one day she was going to dig it out for me to take a look at. For years afterward, she would recall this when I ran into her here or there and again promise to find it.

    If there is a secret to longevity, thinking about Cam suggests that a sunny disposition must be at the heart of it. She was unfailingly upbeat, ready with a smile, and a pleasure to talk with. As I have with many older people here, I had made a mental note to stop by and maybe have a cup of tea with her. I also intended to remind her about those photos.

    I’m sorry I did not get to say goodbye, but the decades of hellos that Cam and I shared were lovely enough.

    I can’t imagine anybody working at a newspaper suffering from the condition known as writer’s block. At a newspaper, you live by a simple creed: Write or die.

    Writing has always seemed natural to me. Whether I was writing copy for advertising or writing a poem or a play, it has always been about hearing the words, then writing them down. Hearing the words, and voicing them.

    Everyone has a voice.

    Today, we all write constantly, a waterfall of words. We tweet and instant-message and blog and email, using single letters and symbols for words and expressions of thought. But I wonder in this waterfall of words, if we don’t, at some point, drown out the sound of our own voices.

    The following letter came out of a large cigar box filled with papers from a Missouri family. How it got to East Hampton, I have no idea. It is a letter home from a Union soldier during the Civil War, Adam O. Branstetter, a private in the 49th Regiment of Missouri.

    I have dutifully researched the writer of this letter. He was born on May 19, 1834, in Pike County, Mo. Son of an innkeeper, he became a hatter. He married Carolyn Little in Wellsville, Mo., on April 1, 1862. On May 16, 1863, his wife gave birth to their only child, a girl, Stella A. Branstetter, whose father enlisted in the Union Army in August 1864.

He wrote this letter in a fairly neat script, but his spelling was hit-or-miss. I added punctuation and paragraph breaks, but left spelling as is.

    A couple of the words I couldn’t make out, but they are just words.

    March 17th 1865

    Dauphin Island Alabama

    Carrie Branstetter

    Wellsville, Mo

Dear Wife,

    I answer your letter dated March 2. I have bin sick for four weeks but am well at this time. I look as gaunt as a race horse, you would not know me. I had the leinil Diarear, it give me fits.

    I am sorry to hear that the baby is sick and father is blind. It grieves me to hear such news.

    We have done some hard marching since we left. Now we lay on the lake for three days in a storm. We have plenty of fresh oysters here by gathering them.

    This Island is about 12 miles long and one mile wide and covered with soldiers. I saw William Motley from Louisiana, he belongs to the Thirty Third Mo. Reg, and several others that I know.

    I expect we will start to Mobile in a few days wher we will have some fighting to do.

    I see something new every day. After we left New Orleans we crossed the Lake Ponchertrain and Mobile Bay. We saw the Bubbles gun boats on picket and we passed Fort Powell.

    This Island is covered with pine. It is a beautiful place and very healthy. There is not a woman on this Island.

    We are only 28 miles from Mobile. We can here the cannon every day. It sounds beautiful.

    I sent a blanket and over coat and one pair of drawers and some other little things. I would like to know if you got them or not, and all the general news, and if the Ualilha has been called out. I never hear a word about Miram Louis’ Family.

    You must be saving of your money for I don’t expect to get any more till my time is up. That is along time. I do not know what you will do for money.

    Nelson is well, so is Peyton, Ben, and Tom is well also, and all the balance of the Boys.

    Give my love to Miram’s Family and Brother Andrew’s family. My love to Father and Mother and Sister Poly Tell  Moly and Bud to be good children, and kiss that sweet little Babe for me. Tell the Babe to kiss its Mother for me.

    You must excuse this bad writing for I am to week. I cant hardly write. I must close.

I Remain Your True and Affectionate Husband Till Death

A.O.  Branstetter

Direct your letters Co B 49th Reg Inft

Mo Vol. 16 Army Corps 3 Division

2 Brig

    Adam O. Branstetter died on May 30, 1865, in Montgomery, Ala. He was first buried at the Montgomery National Cemetery, then exhumed and reburied in Marietta, Ga., at the Marietta National Cemetery.

    On July 23, 1866, the Treasury Department’s second auditor awarded Carolyn Branstetter $145 as a war widow, “less clothing overdrawn, $1.67.”

    T.E. (Tom) McMorrow covers police and crime for The Star. 

    It was 17 degrees that morning, so maybe the reason the conversation turned to warm water sailing was to put our minds over matter. I had been coiling a heavy orange extension cord, which was no longer needed near my desk, and announced rather smugly to a co-worker who happened to be standing nearby that I knew how to coil lines correctly because I had spent a lot of time on boats.

    “You got all but two turns right,” he said rather seriously as he took the cord to put it away. That my score was only fair was embarrassing.

    For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, keeping the lines on boats stored without kinks or twists is one of the first things sailors learn. A line that doesn’t flow out when it’s needed to, say, tie up at a dock or throw to someone who’s fallen overboard can cause trouble, indeed.

    So I told Paul, my co-worker, a story that I had repeated to others over the years about how little I knew about boats before I came to live in East Hampton. “I was afraid of rowboats in Clove Lake,” I would tell people, referring to a park on Staten Island that my friends and I frequented as teenagers from nearby Bayonne, N.J.

    One of my first lessons in what real boating was all about occurred when my husband-to-be and I sailed to Greenport in an old wooden catboat he had just bought, the first of several we eventually were to own. As instructed, I jumped onto the dock at which we were about to tie up, holding a heavy coil of line. I then stood there befuddled as he yelled — twice — “Take a turn around it.” A seafaring man of considerable experience, he was able to get on the dock, grab the line from my hand, and wind it several times around a heavy piling before the boat crashed into anything.

    Our winter conversation then turned logically to tying boats up at moorings rather than docks, and the tension that might ensue. Paul laughed and told me how he and his partner had rented a boat that was bigger than they had experience with, and how difficult the necessary communication became when they had to pick up a mooring in a crowded anchorage. Nowadays, Paul’s boat is of a size they manage quite well. But even though it is usually moored in a cove near their house, he runs a pick-up line between the real buoy, anchored into the harbor bottom, and a second one, providing an easier way to hook on.

    Before we got back to work, I had another story to tell. One fall day in the 1980s, I, my daughter, and a Star reporter took out our family’s last cruising catboat, which we kept at a small marina on the cove near the entrance to Three Mile Harbor. We were coming into our slip under power when the engine conked out. My daughter sailed the boat in with ultimate grace, evoking approbation from a few people on shore. That she was good at sailing was almost genetic.

    The conversation was then about to veer to ice-boating, but we decided that subject was better left for a hot summer’s day.

    In fewer than the allotted 140 characters, someone  took to Twitter to make note of an obituary that appeared in The Star last week, but it was a first. Social media has become ubiquitous, but somehow, to my knowledge, no one had tweeted before on what we had written about a loved one who had gone.

    For those of us in local news there is the knowledge that we have far more readers now than we ever had before, thanks to the Internet. What we write now has a long reach and an extraordinary degree of persistence.

    The comment about the late Yolanda Gross came from a nephew who recalled her as a lovely person. He directed his Twitter followers to our website. Two others responded to the obiturary with tweets of their own, spreading word a little further.

    I took particular interest in this, as I guess I am The Star’s web-geek-in-chief, something I can trace back to a beginning computer class at East Hampton Middle School around 1976. John Ryan Sr., I believe, supervised a small group of us as we took turns phoning in to a remote computer, storing little programs we wrote on yellow paper punch-tape.

    Equally, though, I had taken note of Ms. Gross as information about her life had come into the office the previous week. A retired teacher, sometime Springs School librarian, accomplished cook, and classical pianist, she was the kind of person we would have liked to profile in the paper while she was alive. Hers was the best kind of obituary, one that leaves us wishing we had met.

    It is funny to contemplate how far technology has come from those days in the mid-’70s when remote users could connect to distant time-sharing computers, but not to one another. Not that many years ago, it might have been weeks before Ms. Gross’s relatives and friends elsewhere saw her obituary in a clipping sent by mail. Today, word of a death can be instantaneous once it is published online.

    We now realize we are not just writing for a local audience, but that the whole world can look in. Or, as with Yolanda Gross, a wide and affectionate circle of family and friends.

    “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in a book, “Where Do We Go From Here — Chaos or Community?” that was written in 1967, and into which I dip every year around this time.

    He said that almost 50 years ago, when there were three social classes in this country. Now, it’s pretty much fair to say there are two, the gap between them continuing relentlessly to widen.

    Those who’ve been left behind have yet to raise their voices sufficiently, and those with power, closeted as they are behind gated communities and cosseted as they are by policies over-friendly to wealth, haven’t felt the need to raise theirs except when periodic mention is made — as is happening more and more frequently nowadays — of this festering social wound and their role in it.

    Brandeis, Keynes, the pope (in his ringing “apostolic exhortation”), President Obama, and now Oxfam have been quoted in stories on the subject recently, nor should the economist James Henry’s finding in a report in The Guardian a year and a half ago that tax-haven wealth — estimated then at about $21 trillion — would be more than enough to pay off developing countries’ debts to the rest of the world be forgotten.

    The Oxfam report says, among other things:

    That “the wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion — 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.”

    That “seven out of 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.”

    That “the richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.”

    That “in the U.S., the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.”

    And that “this dangerous trend can be reversed . . .  to the benefit of all, through more progressive taxation, public services, social protection, and decent work — all of which can be possible, the report says, should the majority make its voice heard in political forums.

    Perhaps the time for a more equable world, and a more equable society here, has come.

    Dr. King, whose birthday we celebrated this past week, had reason to hope that “a people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself.”

    Will we become more just? Or will it for us just be more?

    I want to thank Mr. Ira Rennert. Really. 

    Years ago when he began work on his compound in Sagaponack many were outraged. How could he take that lovely unbroken vista, Fairfield, and build something on it?

    Rumors swirled as more and more work was done in this huge ex-farm field overlooking the ocean. People tried to get a look at it. They flew over it and crept up from the beach to try see what was going on.

    There were stories: a garage for 100 cars, a footprint the size of Grand Central Station, hundreds of windows, tens of thousands of square feet! It would be a hotel, a hostel, a yeshiva, a corporate retreat, a university. Who needs a house that big, the neighbors wondered.

    People talked and whispered, and the traffic slowed to a crawl on the nearest roads. The work continued and continued.

    The fences went up and the sets of security gates. It was taking years to complete.

    Technology finally caught up with the project and satellites photographing every inch of the coastline enabled the curious to finally see the outlines of the parterres and allées and courtyards and driveways and accessory buildings. It was, in fact, huge, very sedate, very formal, with zillions of trees and acres of sod.

    Passers-by were positive this project would ruin the look of the area. They huffed and they puffed and they sort of hoped they could blow the whole thing down.

    And yet, it turns out the visual impact on the landscape is basically nil.

    The huge expanse of sand colored buildings are nestled snugly into the property and while the volumes are astounding when viewed from the air (or diagonally from a side road) the structures aren’t really any taller than the allées of trees. The Rennerts do not have any ungainly towers, swooping porches, portcullises, porte cochers, assorted mismatched rooflines, or encyclopedic variations on window sizes and shapes that can be found elsewhere locally.

    Folks, the Rennert house is subdued in its hugeness.

    I thank the Rennerts for buying the property and preventing the predatory developers (you know who you are) from making clusters of generic faux Shingle Style trophy houses for the nouveau, nouveau nouveaux.

    Across the street from Rennert-land, the sky is pierced by a combination of gambrel/mansard/pyramidal/hipped and semi-hipped, and simultaneously cross-gabled rooves sprouting more chimneys per structure than trees in the yards.

    Many of these faux-architectural specimens sport very tall stonework turrets at the corners of the shingled starter castles, with eyebrow windows breaking the hundreds of square feet of cedar shingles or terra-cotta tiles or both. MelangeHampton. Neighborhoods of flat ex-farm fields sprout tight groupings of spec houses spaced like suburbia — the Hamptons version of Levittown. Is this preferable? If you build it, they will come, and they have, and they will, as the land fills up with ticky-tacky.

    And then there is the previously scorned Rennert property with its low-slung European-style villa, formal gardens, and amazingly nonaggressive presence. Yes, the Rennert place is huge, but the compound is nowhere near as dense as those clumps of developer houses, or the watchcase factory mini-village in Sag Harbor.

    So thank you, Rennert family, for not letting that little piece of heaven sprout at least 480 English-style brick chimneys on at least 60 shiny new bad reinterpretations of the Shingle Style. Thank you for only having one tennis court and one pool, and not overstressing the land. (Each mini-castle in those developments has a pool and tennis and a septic and multiple dishwashers and triple machine laundry rooms.)

    Thank you for leaving room around your buildings for trees and grass. Thank you for keeping your house low so you don’t block the sunrise.

    Yes, dear reader, it’s big. But the alternative to the Rennert big is lots and lots of big. The farm fields will be growing more and more of those very big, generic houses they call McMansions, filling up the vistas with massive rooflines and hedges.

    The Rennerts have finished their building project, and what they have is better than what we imagined it would be and preferable by far to what it could have been.

    Thank you, Rennerts, and by the way, could I come over and borrow a cup of sugar some time? Maybe you could give me a little tour?

     Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, has photographed dozens, possibly even 100 or more, houses and gardens for the paper and its special sections.

    About 20 years ago, when my husband and I were courting, we came across one of Dr. Dean Ornish’s  books, “Eat More, Weigh Less.” The word  “wellness” was not in the air at the time, but we were ready, and old enough, to give serious consideration to alternative ways of improving our health.

    The book is comprehensive, with tables on such things as the nutritional content of various foods and sections on motivation and meditation. Dr. Ornish spurns the word “diet,” saying that what he offers is a life-choice program. He makes a strong case for eliminating almost all fats.

    Years later, he was accused — perhaps unfairly? — of contributing to Steve Jobs’s death because Jobs reportedly followed Dr. Ornish’s regime.

    We weren’t swayed by Dr. Ornish for very long. Although we had dog-eared pages with such recipes as couscous with a vegetable tagine and a ragout of lentils, squash, and apricots, I can’t remember making these virtuous meals. As far as I was concerned, Dr. Ornish might as well have called his book “Vegetables, Vegetables, Vegetables.”

    Don’t get me wrong. I love vegetables; I’d rather order broccoli with garlic sauce than almost anything else on a Chinese takeout menu. But my husband and I do frequently feast on the foods Dr. Ornish advises his readers to avoid like poison: red meat, poultry, and fish. (If it has, or had, a face — or a mother and father, as the vegans like to say — Dr. Ornish really doesn’t want it on your plate.)

    Fast forward to 2013. An inveterate reader of The New York Times, my husband was intrigued last summer when he read that Americans were  cooking their way  through “Jerusalem: A Cookbook,” by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, in the same way they had taken up “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” or “The Silver Palate Cookbook” in decades past. He bought a copy and began cooking his way through it.

    “Jerusalem” concentrates on the vegetables and grains that Dr. Ornish touted — lots of eggplant, kohlrabi, chard, sorrel, and so forth, plus a few extremely difficult-to-find items like barberries or dried limes, but it also calls for a lot of chicken and lamb. Chris ordered some of its exotic mixtures of spices, like baharat and ras el hanout, by mail and began preparing more than his usual share of dinners, which was certainly fine by me. An excellent dish of eggplant with bulgur and yogurt, a barley risotto with marinated feta, and turkey and zucchini burgers with green onion and cumin were among the highlights.

    Inspired (or perhaps not to be outdone), I began digging out the vegetable recipes I’d held onto for years. I now have followed Chris’s lead, finding and making an old Florence Fabricant recipe from The New York Times for a curried eggplant casserole (very tasty) and a ratatouille with butternut squash from Nigella Lawson (terrific). The other day, though, as we drove by a local fish market I wondered if we had taken the healthy eating too far: We hadn’t had any fish in weeks! There has to be something wrong with that.

    We have two friends who tell us their not-so-incidental ailments have been cured by vegan diets. Much as we admire them, we aren’t apt to head in that direction. Just last night I wantonly added sausage to a dish of chickpeas and spinach. Dr. Ornish would probably have a very grim opinion of this, but if age has taught me anything, it’s moderation in all things.

    Air travel is a conundrum, at once wonderful and terrible. It is wonderful to travel so far so quickly, but terrible to have to leap over all the hurdles it throws in your way.

    (By the way, if our family friend Maria Matthiessen is reading this, I warn her that she should stop right here: I’m about to engage in a binge of what she calls “route talk.” And if you don’t get that reference, I refer you to a recent episode of the public radio program “This American Life,” about the five topics that without fail make conversations boring.)

    After Christmas in Nova Scotia, my husband and I hopped, skipped, and jumped down to Massachusetts for New Year’s. Although we encountered no ice storms, no canceled flights, and no geese on the runway, we almost missed our connection in Toronto. I don’t think we would have made it to Boston at all if my husband hadn’t used a wheelchair when we transferred planes.

    The modern airport can be like an obstacle course you’d see in a movie about military training, can’t it? It really isn’t a user-friendly space. Not everyone is able-bodied enough to hike the long distances between gates and security checkpoints; and not all airports have people-mover conveyer belts or carts to take the tired, the lame, or the aged from one holding pen or line to another. Airport navigation is about the only circumstance I can think of that can make a person feel grateful for being reliant on a wheelchair (though I guess athletes who participate in wheelchair races probably consider that sport to be another upside).

    As is so often the case, our flight was a half hour late arriving from Halifax into Toronto, and after we landed — “deplaned,” to use the lingo — we had to move like Ethiopian middle-distance runners to catch the connecting leg to Boston. Three different airline assistants moved us to the front of lines when we went through security (for the second time that day) and then United States customs.

    We arrived at the departure gate with frazzled smiles on our faces, just as boarding was announced for “those traveling with children or needing assistance.” Since there were only a few daily scheduled flights that would have gotten us down to New England on Canada Air, I felt certain the wheelchair had spared us a night in Toronto.

    Some time ago, a woman of a certain age whom I barely know confessed that she was in the habit of requesting a wheelchair in airports even though she didn’t really need one. Perhaps guilt loosened her tongue, but who knows? Maybe she was bragging about her wiles. I myself shoot dark looks at those drivers I sometimes see parking in places reserved for the handicapped, ever watchful because my husband has, and needs, a handicapped tag. I don’t believe in taking advantage of it when I am alone in the car.

    Our trip from Nova Scotia to Boston took 14 and a half hours, a little longer than a nonstop to Beijing or Dubai. Looking at a map, I think we might have rowed the 300 or so miles across the Gulf of Maine in better time.

    Sharp-eyed readers of a nautical sort may notice a small but significant change in this week’s newspaper. For what I think may be a first, the tide table, which usully appears in the sports section, no longer gives the times of the daily highs and lows at Promised Land. Instead, it lists the ups and downs for the Three Mile Harbor entrance.

    Our decision to do this reflects two things. The first is that government tide tables are easily available for Three Mile Harbor, and the second is that no one much knows where Promised Land is anymore.

    Time was, Promised Land, facing northwest on the shore of Gardiner’s Bay, was a port of some importance. The Smith Meal company ran a menhaden processing plant there, and the Edwards Brothers brought fish to their dock. A railroad spur off the L.I.R.R. main line once crossed what is now part of Napeague State Park to reach the area.

    Seasonal workers, most from the South, traveled there each year to work on the menhaden boats — bunker steamers in the local vernacular — or in the steaming, hulking factory. When the plant was in full operation, it was hard to miss. The overwhelming smell of thousands of pounds of menhaden being steamed down for their oil and fish byproducts was something one might never forget. Employment there meant money, good money, the story goes, making it a “promised land.”

    Our house, about a half-mile to the west along the Gardiner’s Bay shore, was the nearest to the fish factory, as we called it, until well after it closed in 1968. It was the last of a number of smaller fish-rendering plants that had operated in the area; remnants can be found along the eastern, interior shore of Napeague Harbor and on Hick’s Island.

    According to “The South Fork,” my father’s, Everett Rattray’s, book, the owners of the Hick’s Island factory ran a two-mile-long water pipe from a pump house at Fresh Pond, Montauk. Fresh water was essential to the steam-run operations. When I was out at Napeague recently I noticed what I suspected was a piece of the old pipe now exposed by the shifting sands.

    With the fish factories all but gone, so too is the sense of what was once promising about Promised Land. Boaters do not end up there very much now, except for occasional drifts for fluke or if blown over from the Devon Yacht Club. People who work or play on the waters here are far more likely to be familiar with Three Mile Harbor, and so the change to our tide chart.

    Promised Land remains a place name, however, at least for us locals, and if you really want to know what the tide will be doing there, you can just subtract about a half hour for an approximate time.

    Leo the pig has hit what appears to be his adolescence — constantly leaving a mess on the floor and trying to carve out a little space of his own just to be left alone.

    For those of you unfamiliar with the story of our pet house-pig, let me explain that he joined our family over my most strident objections. My wife, Lisa, and elder daughter, Adelia, had fallen for what appeared to be an online con, a Texas breeder who claimed that it would weigh no more than 10 pounds as an adult. Don’t ask how much he cost us or to ship by air.

    More than once I said if we got a pig, I would move out to the shed.

    “Fine,” Lisa and Adelia said.

    Oh, he was cute when he arrived, all pink and tiny and seeking warmth under our chins. I said they were crazy and warned that he would ultimately be about the size of our Lab mix dog, albeit with stubbier legs. Now, at about 2 years old, he weighs more than 30 pounds — all muscle and determination — and he still wants to cuddle up under our chins.

    As such things often go, Leo has become more or less my pet, or to be more precise, my problem. Lisa wanted to send him back for a refund; Adelia is entirely indifferent. I find him interesting and amusing.

    Since I get up well before the rest of the household, it is I who puts him out in the morning, and it is I who makes his breakfast while fending off his aggressive nuzzling of my ankles. If I am not fast enough, he makes his displeasure known by knocking over the antique kitchen chairs; already one has been taken away for repair. He is not much put off by shots from a spray-bottle, which we keep handy. Often my first words of the day are, “Leo, cut it.” Well, perhaps with a bit more profanity.

    Just this week, the beast took to tearing up The Sunday Times with his hooves, then pushing the shreds into his dog bed by the radiator and nestling down amid it all. Midday on Monday, my wife sent a phone photo; Leo had curled up for a nap inside his recently cleaned litter box.

    Shortly thereafter, Lisa was headed for Bridgehampton. I said she should get him a room of his own, or at least swing by Agway to look for a nicer bed.