Leilani was blessed on Sunday. For over 20 years, I took photographs from the deck of the Montauk-based cutter Ridley, and the Point Wells before it, as the harbor’s fleet of fishing boats, yachts, sailboats, and a kayak or two, many of them well supplied with water balloons, paraded by during the annual blessing.

    Sunday was the first time a vessel of my own, a Bristol sloop purchased over the winter, received the protection of the good Lord via four distinguished prelates who stood  robed and making the appropriate gestures, this year from the deck of the party boat Marlin VI Princess.

    It felt good, although not every mariner believes in the blessing. Quite the contrary. I remember Capt. Dave Krusa putting extra lines on his boats to keep them fast to the dock during the blessing.

    And, speaking of lines; those made fast, paid out, coiled, spliced, laid up, and written, I confess my love of sailing has a lot to do with my fascination with rope. It was among humankind’s earliest inventions. It is as close to an extension of our own muscle and sinew as one can find. Sailboats have a lot of it to to haul, coil, and cleat, and to be wary of. Rope can turn on you if you’re not careful.

    Which leads me to shamelessly plug the book I have just finished writing titled “A Rogue’s Yarn.” The title refers to the one length of twisted yarn that is dyed an identifying color before being twisted together with many other yarns to form the finished rope. Originally, it was meant to show prospective buyers that the rope was the real deal, not made of inferior or recycled fiber.

    My book is a yarn spun by one particular rogue, a homeless surfer with a dark obsession who dwells undetected in the basement of Waikiki’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel. He believes plants are conspiring to reclaim the Garden of Eden and he becomes a guru of sorts to the homeless who live in Kapiolani Park. Meanwhile young women continue to disappear mysteriously from the tourist capital of the world.

    “Rogue” will be launched as an e-book within the next couple of weeks with cover art designed by Dalton Portella.

    So, after being blessed Leilani motored out the inlet, set sail, and turned west toward Gardiner’s Island, her sails filled by a 15-knot breeze from the south. Then came that moment we sail for, when the boat’s two-cylinder drumming ceased, replaced by a peaceful exhalation, a powerful silence.

    It’s not the destination, it’s the journey, or some such old saw that defines the difference between motoring and sailing for me. I’m a recreational sailor with the luxury of not needing to get any particular place at any set time. But I like the idea of being able to navigate using what nature provided sailors prior to the invention of the iron wind. Sailors must be forehanded, that is, able to plan ahead using nature’s variables, a mental exercise one can never master, nor tire of attempting to.

    Timing a tack, for instance. Put an extra wrap onto the winch, turn the wheel hard-a-lee. Wait for the luff of the sail to say when, then sheet it home. A new boat, a new book, a new direction, and coils of spun yarns. 

    Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

   If you believe that a multimillionaire who did well for a small group of wealthy investors by putting money creation ahead of job creation actually is a champion of the middle class, I’ve got a fridge I’d like to sell you — one whose vertical freezer section we can’t get into.

    Mesmerized by the refrigerator’s stainless steel exterior, Mary and I, in our collective wisdom, failed to take into account its design, whose faults soon became evident once we’d squeezed it into the hole between the counter and the sliding glass door. It looked good — it still does. Perhaps it is fitting that the freezer section is pretty much stuffed, not with frozen food, but with various-sized ice packs for the alleviation of pain — the valueless repository, if you will, of pain capital.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve nodded my head in assent when someone refers to “the collective wisdom of the electorate.” To the contrary, I have found that, since Reagan (another candidate who looked the part), we have not collectively been very wise. The income gap has become since Reagan an abyss, a dislocation that poses a dire threat to our national security. Will only the wealthy henceforth be effectively educated? Will only the wealthy be able to pursue happiness? To afford medical care? Will only the wealthy be spared the corrosive results of environmental degradation? Will only the wealthy continue to call the shots?

    When an acquaintance of one of my sisters-in-law said she might well vote for Romney because he was good looking, and was duly assailed on that count, the acquaintance said, “Well, Obama hasn’t done anything.” He had done things, my sister-in-law replied, and if he hadn’t done as much as he’d wanted in his first term, she continued, it was because cynical Republicans had blocked him at every turn. They had made a mockery of governing.

    I, for one, had hoped he’d do more. He had the bully pulpit, if nothing else. Latinos are right t0 wonder whatever became of his campaign promise of immigration reform. Workers are right to wonder why he did not do more to stimulate the economy, and why the palms of progenitors of the crash were greased. Those weary of our military’s overreach are right to urge that we begin to put our own house in order (the present financial mess having been caused in large part by “war on terror” profligacy) and insist that our allies step up.

    I’ve commenced a War on Error. The first order of business is to puff out the cheeks, purse the lips, and blow hard into the hole made by a closed fist whenever Mitt Romney says he’s an advocate for the middle class. I’ve got $10 that says he’s not.

   The North Carolina Legislature earned no small degree of derision recently in attempting to tell scientists there how to predict sea level rise. A bill pending in the Southern state would constrain how its coastal commission calculates the rate of increase, requiring that numbers be based on trends only since 1900. This would leave out exponential shifts that may follow unforeseen changes, such as accelerated melting of the polar ice caps.

    In coastal parts of that state, officials will have to skirt the new law to plan for what current research says could be sea level rise in excess of the limit. As on Long Island, much of North Carolina’s coastline is highly vulnerable to inundation. Policy makers will have to take that into account, the state capital be damned.

    That some municipalities there have actually passed resolutions prohibiting work on meeting the challenges of the predicted inundation is beyond belief. Of course, that may be a step or two better than what has happened here, at least in the Town of East Hampton, where officials have sidestepped the issue for years and acted as if it will all go away.

    These are big problems, and you can understand why elected officials, very few of whom have a background in the sciences, are not equipped to deal with them. Still, the best available evidence shows that the sea is coming and long-term preparations must be made.

    Where I live, on the bay in Amagansett, the beach has moved landward at the rate of about a foot a year for almost 50 years. The erosion is irregular; some years nothing much happens. Then, in one night, 12 or more feet can be sheared off the low bluffs. And, guess what? It never comes back.

    Back in the early 1960s, when my parents chose the site for the house, they put it as far back as they could, buying us time. Neighbors were not so cautious, and after the last bad northeaster, several of their foundations were battered by the waves.

    As lawmakers dither, somewhere King Canute must be smiling. He was the Norse leader whose courtesans told him he was so powerful that he could hold back the tide. Legend has it that to prove them wrong, he had his throne carried to the water’s edge, and, as the sea rose, he pointed out the hubris of his sycophants.

    Canute was making the point that no man, not even a great leader, could force heaven and earth to bend to his will. North Carolina lawmakers, it seems, have not yet learned this lesson.

    Earlier this month I was invited to travel from New London to New Orleans aboard the Coast Guard’s training ship Eagle. A story appears elsewhere in this issue about Eagle under sail.

    I first joined the ship in 1994 as a journalist, crossed the Atlantic, wrote a story for Smithsonian magazine, and joined her again in Hamburg, Germany, in 1996 on the anniversary of her 1936 launch from the Blohm & Voss shipyard. She was christened Horst Wessel in the presence of none other than Adolf Hitler.

    He was the product of a paranoid, hateful mind. She was born of a proud shipbuilding tradition. She escaped World War II. Fortunately, he did not. I wrote about her first nine years as Horst Wessel, and her next 56 years as Eagle, in a book titled “The Barque of Saviors.” Eagle turns 76 this year.

    I’ve spent a lot of time on the ship and learned a great deal, but I had never tackled celestial navigation until now. Fortunately, Eagle is supplied with an ample number of sextants, navigational almanacs, and a bible known as Bowdich, a tome written by Thomas Edward Bowdich, a boy genius born in Bristol, England, in 1791.

    Also on board were a number of people willing to pound into a mathematically challenged mind the concepts, the first being that Ptolemy was right all along, the earth is the center of the universe with the sun and all the other celestial bodies revolving around us.

    This is a necessary mind-set if one is to understand the geometry of celestial navigation — quite simple once you see it. Computing LAN, or local apparent noon, was not difficult. More challenging was using the sextant to fix one’s position using stars when they first become visible at the time of day known as civil twilight (great title for a murder mystery), that is, when the sun is just three degrees below the horizon.

    Getting the angle from the sextant is relatively easy, but identifying the stars and doing the computations using corrections printed in the navigational almanac gets a bit dense.

    So there I was, reveling in my new knowledge aboard a wind-driven vessel, finding my place on our watery sphere using the sun and stars, no stinking GPS, no man-made satellites — aaargh. At the same time I was forced to admit I was still flummoxed by the jungle of calculations.

    One of my volunteer instructors was a young merchant seaman not long out of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy for whom navigation of all sorts had become second nature.

    Seeing I was having difficulty with the computations, Phil blurted, “But you don’t have to do all that. There’s an app called Starfinder. You just point your iPhone to the sky and it identifies the stars and planets, then you take your angle with the sextant and plug the numbers into a Web site that does the calculations for you.”

    What? An app? Is there no end to it? Does Apple have no sense of propriety? Why not just find my position on a hand-held electronic global positioning gizmo and the hell with the sextant? I could feel the great navigators — Bowdich, James Cook, William Bligh — sniggering. What happens when an asteroid wipes out the man-made satellites that GPS and Starfinder depend on, they ask?

    In my case I’d be up that creek without a paddle, so I have vowed to either learn it the old-fashioned way or sail well within sight of land.

—

    Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

        When I was young, I loved to travel. Not the flying part of it, no, not that at all, just the idea of going to a new place. And, well, whatever it took to get there. Which is, generally, flying.

    I never boarded an airplane as a toddler or even as an adolescent, unlike all parents now who haul their infants with their paraphernalia and their noise on board every flight, all the time. My parents took cruises and flights to Paradise Island and Las Vegas, but the children were never invited on vacations with them except once, just me, on a driving trip to North Carolina, after my siblings got married or were too old to be interested. Durham, N.C., was the destination — I remember my stepfather, fat cigar in his mouth, drove us down there from Brooklyn in his 1965 Oldsmobile Starfire as my mother, smoking cigarettes, pushed the buttons on the radio, searching for Sinatra.

    What I also remember of that car trip was where we wound up — “the cigarette capital of the country,” where my mother loaded up on packs and cartons that ultimately contributed to her downfall.

    Okay. This is meant to be a fun (sort of) piece.

    The first time I got on an airplane was when I was 19 years old in 1967, when some friends and I jetted off to Acapulco, me puffing away in the smoking section at the back. Nervous all the while, wondering whether the plane, with its bumps and swoops and crackly P.A. announcements, was destined to go down.

    You do feel vulnerable on a plane. Admit it, everybody does. Up there in this lonely silver tube in the sky with its rattles and its lunges and the ever-present possibility of it going down. Going down in the middle of a silent, dark, moonlit ocean in the middle of the night on the way to Europe. Going down on a commuter flight. What with my often going to Cincinnati to make presentations to the Procter & Gamble clients I work for — meetings that don’t always go so well — I often think, If the plane is going to go down, let it go down on the way to a bad meeting versus on the way back.

    So far, none of my planes have gone down, thankfully, after hundreds and hundreds of flights mostly for business but often for pleasure. A blessing. But, can we talk? How insane is flying now?

    (I wasn’t fully prepared to be this open about what happened to me on a flight I took 10 years ago, but it’s certainly relevant to my story.)

    During one American Airlines flight just around New Year’s 2002, tan, happy, relaxed, and still dressed for the beach in shorts, a Lacoste polo, and flip-flops, unprepared for winter in New York and still hanging on to the aura of St. Barts, where I had just spent two glorious weeks with my partner, David, I got into some trouble. Trouble? An understatement. I got arrested for causing a disturbance on the flight, appearing threatening and terrorist-like. I have Arab roots — my biological father was born in Syria, and I did tend to resemble a terrorist, especially when I had thick black hair and a full-on black beard — but I’m the furthest thing from a menace, except if you ask some people.

    That flight was just months after 9/11 and days after someone had tried to light up his shoelaces, of all things (on an American Airlines flight, by the way), and years before the averted underwear bomber and the forbidden liquids and all. It’s unfathomable to me how all this explosives business no longer involves a wick and a cartoon-like black ball bomb. Everything is so different now.

    Anyhoo, I needed to use the loo. I have this problem with pissing. Nothing serious, it’s just that I drink a lot of liquids and have a high level of anxiety that provokes the pissing, which is further accelerated on a flight. I just had to use the john. The plane was beginning its descent and I really, really had to go. One lavatory was out of order, another one locked, so I wandered into first class, where I was told by a flight attendant (remember when they were called stewardesses?): “Sir, you must take your seat! You have to sit down and fasten your seat belt, and stay seated until the plane lands!”

    When you gotta go, you gotta go, and I really hadda go, so I ignored her and entered the restroom. And I did go, then got back to my seat, but not long after, over the crackly P.A. system, as the plane landed and taxied to the gate: “We have a situation here. Please, everyone stay in your seats until the situation is resolved.”

    “This means you. You’re the situation,” David said to me. Now, this was long before the Situation from “Jersey Shore” became known as the Situation. I was the situation? Boy, was I ever, as I was greeted by a copse of cops as I deplaned. I eventually learned that I had been aggressive with my bathroom urge and had threatened the flight attendant who’d stood in my way.

    I went, all right. Straight to a holding cell at Kennedy for a few hours and, blah, blah, blah, $12,500 later to a lawyer and three months after that, I was gratefully cleared of whatever the charges were. “Threatening to a flight attendant.” Done in by my burgeoning, bulging bladder.

    Profiling? (Check out my Arabic last name.) Nervous flight attendant in the aftermath of increasing airplane terrorism? Perhaps either. Perhaps both. Perhaps something else. I insist I was treated unfairly — the ride from the plane to the holding cell, handcuffed behind my back yet, overhearing the two police officers in the front seat complaining about their jobs, cursing and complaining, wow, did I get an earful and a lesson. And a further lesson not to drink alcohol on a flight no matter how much one’s nerves need calming. It will only make you need to use the men’s all the more.

    Flash forward: Stephen Slater, remember him? The JetBlue flight attendant? Activating the chute and saying something like, “I’m outta here,” beers in hands after a nasty exchange with a passenger about the overhead bins? When I fly coach with my carry-on, I feign a limp so I can get on early as someone needing special assistance and secure a spot for my carry-on. Those carry-ons: one more cause of pressure in the cabin — so many bags, so little space.

    In the last six weeks, two stories were of particular interest to fliers, be they frequent or occasional. First, the woman: the flight attendant on American Airlines who freaked out and screamed something about bombs and terrorists and crashes while the plane was still on the ground. That wobbly video over CNN with sound is chilling. The screams! The aisle of confused passengers, her being restrained. And then escorted off the plane and straight to a hospital for mental evaluation.

    But wait. It gets worse.

    Later last month, there was that JetBlue pilot who also snapped and also screamed on that crackly P.A. about bombs and terrorists and crashes. He had to be locked out of the cockpit, restrained, and this time the plane was 35,000 feet up in the air! One could only imagine the panic on board during the long minutes of that tirade. He, too, had to be whisked off to a hospital, but unlike the female flight attendant on American Airlines (I wonder if it was the same crazy one who blew the whistle on me 10 years ago), the pilot might be charged with charges. As well he should be.

    I hate flying. I strap myself in and pray that I get to my destination alive. I hope that my luggage is not rifled through and that I am not humiliated by being felt up or X-rayed to nudity or any other degradation. Now I have to fear that a flight attendant may go berserk and decide to open up the cabin door midair, passengers and seats, tray tables, and carry-ons hurled out into the stratosphere to land, splattered, God knows where. Now I have to worry about pilots who will take it upon themselves to scream, “Yahoo! It’s kamikaze time!” taking all of us captive customers with him to kingdom come. Now I have to wonder if I should wear a Depends adult diaper in the event I need to take a whiz while we are warned, and warned rudely, “Get to your seats!”

    Bette Davis’s famous line in the 1950 movie “All About Eve,” remember? “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” That line was never so applicable to flying in 2012.

     Hy Abady is the author of "Back in The Star Again: True Stories From the East End." A creative director at a New York advertising agency, he lives part time in Amagansett.

    The Clearwater Beach Property Owners Association is a formidable organization. Unlike many homeowners groups, which tend to evaporate after their first few years, the Clearwater association spread its wings, taking under them what was originally known as Lion Head and the neighborhood farther east.

    There are 870 homeowners who are eligible to be members, and 550 have paid their dues! When they do, they have first dibs on a 119-slip marina at Hog Creek and access to a gated and protected bayfront beach and a barbecue and picnic area.

    The group’s president, executive secretary, and dockmaster each had messages in the association’s recent spring newsletter, and it is clear that they feel lucky to live in a special place. The newsletter encouraged residents to participate in Earth Day last weekend, to volunteer at a forthcoming barbecue, and even to try a few recipes. But it also asked its members to do something about “illegally overcrowded single family homes.”

    Our challenge, the newsletter says in big bold letters, is to “UNOCCUPY SPRINGS.” The slogan is more than eye-catching. Standing the Occupy Wall Street movement on its head, the words strike a foreboding tone. They have aroused concern among a few readers who brought the newsletter to The Star.

    That low-wage workers and their families are more often found living in Springs than in other hamlets in East Hampton, that many houses there are overcrowded, and that East Hampton Town has not been able to do much about the situation is a serious problem for our community as a whole. However, urging residents to turn in their neighbors, to “file complaints . . . and follow up with [the] Freedom of Information Law” is, in my view, a bit too reminiscent of the sort of message you might expect in a repressive regime.

    As the newsletter indicates, governments have a responsibility to protect the environment and to make sure that living conditions are safe. The association is correct that stuffing more people than the law dictates into houses is dangerous as well as illegal. But the association, in its newsletter, also makes the rather inflammatory assessment that overcrowded houses “are destroying our school, raising taxes . . . and diminishing our quality of life.”

    We all know that most of the overcrowded houses in Springs are occupied primarily by Latinos — but I will refrain from interpreting the newsletter’s rallying cry as an example of bias. It is always unwise, in the heat of the moment, to ascribe the worst motives to those who take strong positions in civic controversies.

    Instead, I want to point out that new immigrants have become a needed and necessary part of our community. The Latino demographic in Springs is, largely, part of a labor pool that many long-time residents have come to find indispensable. Grade schools, like the Springs School, have an obligation, moral and otherwise, to educate the children in the district — and to help these students learn English, if need be. Having classmates who are only just learning English isn’t something for kids or their parents to be alarmed about; it is at the core of the American experience. (Who taught your Polish or Persian grandfather how to say “chalk,” or “chocolate bar”?)

    Dealing with this situation constructively and creatively is in the interest of all of us. First and foremost, municipalities ought to take the responsibility of trying to provide housing opportunities for all those among us who have a hard time finding decent, legal places to live.

    Ten or 12 years ago, East Hampton was host for a while to Study Circles, organized gatherings that occurred nationwide as a response to instances of discrimination. The idea was to help people from diverse backgrounds understand each other and develop trust. Instead of spying on one another, instead of calling meetings that serve mainly as a forum for venting rage, instead of fear-mongering, community leaders might try to bring people together.

    Perhaps if the good neighbors who live in Clearwater were given a chance to learn, firsthand, about the problems and needs of those who live nearby in marginally acceptable quarters, practical — instead of simply incendiary — solutions might begin to emerge.

   I had meant to close off the kitchen exhaust vent so the wrens could not get inside.

    About a month ago, while sitting in the living room at home, I was startled by a metallic thumping from somewhere within the walls. The racket, it turned out, came from a pair of what I think are Carolina wrens. They had begun stacking sticks inside an open vent louver on the exterior of the kitchen.

     Feeling somewhat bad about having to chase them out but relieved that the female had not yet begun to lay her eggs, I cleared the sticks and hung a birdhouse nearby. Next, I closed the vent and made a mental note to do something to make sure it stayed closed when the fan was off. Apparently the note should have been put down in ink.

    On Monday morning as I was getting some pancakes ready for the kids, I saw a brown shape flash by the window over the kitchen sink and heard a raspy cheeping sound from above my head. The wrens, I realized, had returned while I was not watching, and they had built a new nest.

    There is no way I am going to move the nest this time, and I’ll place a bit of tape over the vent switches to avoid disturbing the little family.

    Looking for details on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s remarkably complete Birds of North America online site, I was relieved to read that wrens take care of the business of breeding and fledging young relatively quickly. Assuming that the first nestling emerged Monday, we should be able to use the stove exhaust again by the week before Memorial Day.

     We are lucky, though, that at this time of year it is okay to open the house windows facing Gardiner’s Bay so that with a little cross-ventilation the smoke from morning pancakes can clear quickly.

   So many things were so comically awful at the restaurant we chose for Saturday night dinner in Pittsburgh last weekend that the consensus among our foursome was to give it the award for the worst restaurant we had ever been in — and the most pretentious.

    We had only an afternoon and evening in Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges, following two days on a Frank Lloyd Wright pilgrimage to the nearby countryside. We spent two nights in one of his late and most simple “Usonian” houses, which had been moved to Pennsylvania from Illinois, and were thrilled to tour his monumental Fallingwater and a smaller, elegant residence called Kentuck Knob.

    In Pittsburgh, a decision to take the funicular, known as the Duquesne Incline, to the top of Mount Washington for the fun of it, as well as the view and dinner, was preordained. But as for the restaurant we chose, which has apparently been named Pittsburgh magazine’s “best overall and most romantic restaurant for 2010 and 2011?” Ay caramba.

    We should have left when we learned there was no a la carte menu on Saturday nights. But after taking a rickety old car up the incline and a short but steep walk to the restaurant, on Grand View Avenue, we decided to stay put, hoping the expensive seven-course prix fixe would be a treat.

    The view of the city, where the Allegheny and the Monongahela meet the Ohio River, was spectacular, and fascinating. Lighted riverboats and a long coal barge inched along. What could go wrong? Almost everything.

    The most disappointing thing was that there wasn’t much flavor to be found despite highfalutin garnishes described for every dish on the menu. Here’s a small sample: stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns, oyster crema, pecan gremolata, golden raisin jus, and ramp chimi­churri.

    As it turned out, the portions were from small to minuscule, which was okay with us because a taste here and there was all we really wanted. And when the $10 glasses of wine turned out to be poured no deeper than three-quarters of an inch we just shook our heads.

    Three choices were offered for the four principal courses (appetizer, fish, meat, and dessert), with an amuse-bouche, a sorbet “intermezzo,” and salad. The amuse-bouche was a tiny bean of some kind dusted with crushed sesame and accompanied by a frond of frisée. Not bad. But, as the meal progressed, we found that the descriptions on the menu were far more flavorful than the food.

    We were continually surprised; expecting jolts to the taste buds, we got, well, nothing much. Okay, so the ricotta-filled crepe I chose as an appetizer was crispy, but the best thing I could say about the warm octopus salad, which I chose for the fish course, was that the strands were chewy. (And I’m an adventurous eater, who loves to eat octopus.) Chris liked his appetizer, little chunks of sea scallop tartare, molded with rhubarb, cherry bomb radishes, and preserved lemon, although he couldn’t taste the rhubarb. You get the idea.

    The illumination was so low and the type so small that we had resorted to using an iPhone flashlight app to read the menu. The decibel level was so high that we had to lean over the table, get as close as possible, and then shout to be heard. When one of us, laughing, said, “I can’t see and I can’t hear,” another chimed in: “And you can’t afford it!” We roared.

    Aside from the view, which we saw first during daylight and then after dark, the only thing we took away from Isabela was the memory of a few good laughs and a photograph that the host took and presented to us.

    If, like us, you plan to go to Pittsburgh for the first time, take heart. It is filled with public buildings (museums, a conservatory) that are legacies from the titans of industry (Carnegie, Phipps, Frick) — and there are plenty of better places for dinner.

   I couldn’t sing, but that didn’t stop me from being a lead singer.  

    It was the early 1980s, and New York City was the coolest place in the world.

    There was danger and sex and excitement, crime and punishment, one-night stands with someone you just had to sleep with, and anarchy everywhere.

    And if you didn’t have a band, you were nothing.

    I lived at CBGB’s. It was the only place to live. I was working at the club as a bouncer. The pay was $15 a night and all the Screwdrivers you could drink.

    When I wasn’t bouncing or drinking, I was writing lyrics. I needed someone to write the music. I went to see Mike Paulin, a friend from growing-up days in Queens, who lived a few blocks from me in Chelsea. He was a good guitarist, very clean, his idol being Eric Clapton.

    Every day when Mike was done with work, we’d work on the songs. We put an ad in The Village Voice and found a good bass player, Richard Badenius, who had a great look and a good sound.

    Drummers were always an issue. They came and went, rehearsal after rehearsal. We started gigging, and the drummers kept rotating.

    And still, I could not sing.

     We gigged at small bars and clubs, any place that would let us play, running around the East Village, SoHo, and Tribeca when we weren’t playing, pasting our posters on abandoned buildings and lampposts.

    We were the Detours.

    Some of our gigs worked, and some didn’t. Rich had great energy and stage presence, and he and Mike were musically tight. Mike’s stage persona was aloof. His clean sound might have been a bit too clean, but he sure had the chops. The drummer was always a crapshoot.

    When the audience dug what I was doing, we were cool, when they didn’t, not so cool, but it was working.

    We finally got a date at CBGB’s that wasn’t just an open mike. We would have one set.

    The next day, at rehearsal, Mike told us he had been putting too much time into the band and had to drop out. But we still had the date.

    Rich and I hooked up with a guitarist named Steve DeMartis. In his leather jacket, he was wild and energetic. We had one rehearsal, going over the songs. That night, we hit the stage.

    It worked. Far from being aloof, Steve was wild, having fun, we all had fun, and the audience dug us.

    Performing onstage when the audience is with you is a super high, especially when it’s rock and roll. You tingle all over, electric, every moment making sense and then not mattering. You sweat, you’re wet, you come off stage dripping, alive, sit down for a moment in the back dressing room, every pore breathing, some girls come over to look at you, be with you.

    We got an offer to go up to Toronto to do a gig in a hot club. Steve didn’t want to go. He had a couple of other bands he was playing with. Mike had been in the audience that night. He wanted back in.

     We rehearsed with our drummer du jour. He had good drive, but was nervous. We had to keep things straight and easy for him, or he’d get the jitters.

    The deal in Toronto was we’d have second billing. We’d use the drum kit and amps of the headline band. We sat in one of the hotel rooms, going over a new song. The drummer was picking it up. We felt good.

    Things started falling apart at sound check. The headliner’s drummer kept lurking around, telling our drummer not to hit his kit so hard. Our drummer was getting nervous.

    When we hit the stage, the place was packed. They were not there to see us, we were an afterthought. We started playing “Driven to the Rhythm,” our drummer started hitting, when the hometown drummer jumped up onstage behind our drummer and said something. Our drummer fell apart. The set fell apart.

    I looked out at the worse-than-uninterested  audience. There was a pause, the kind of pause when you’re onstage where you understand that anything is possible, and I said, “Toronto is a beautiful city, but not enough people piss in the streets.”

    I have no idea why I said it or what it meant, but I could feel, at that moment, the incredible power of the stage, as the entire audience turned on us.

    We got out of there alive, how, I do not know.

    Rich holed up in his hotel room that night with a girl he’d picked up. Mike and I talked and drank for a while, and I went to bed.

    They all split the next morning. I stayed in Toronto an extra day. They have a lovely indoor botanical garden there.

    I headed back to New York that night, changing trains in Buffalo. I walked through the Buffalo Central station, built the same time and along the same lines as New York’s Grand Central. It had become an empty, unused mausoleum, a tomb for Buffalo’s past.

    I smoked a joint and boarded the train for New York.

    The detour was over.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter at The East Hampton Star.

    One of the benefits of the very, very mild winter just past is that outdoor chores that would be still hanging over my head are more or less done.

    A couple of weekends ago, in fact, I pruned the grapes and brambles around the edge of the property and cut back branches along the driveway. This was well before the ticks were again afoot and the poison ivy had begun to grow.

    Since then, the garden beds have been turned and the compost spread, though nothing has been planted in them yet, pending better deer fencing and the time to install it. I had designs on a stand of bamboo at a friend’s house, good for cutting and building a lattice-work barrier, but a divorce and a quick sale of the property put an end to my plans. It can wait.

    With the must-do list shortened, I was able to turn to something I’ve really been meaning to do. On Sunday I drove to East Moriches on the chance that the Henry Leuthardt Nursery had a few apple trees left. It did, and I spent an enjoyable hour talking to John Leuthardt about business and how times change, as rain and a cold wind tapped at his barn roof.

    Mr. Leuthardt did indeed have a couple of trees for me. I bought six bare-root, dwarf saplings, three for our property and three for my mother’s. It is difficult to say how my three will do at our place down by the beach. I am willing to experiment. Our tiny raised garden beds do well by tomatoes, leeks, and lettuces; carrots, for one, do not grow at all. We will know in a year or two whether apples will thrive protected in the lee of our house.

    Already, I see trouble in the form of nearby cedar trees showing signs of an orange fungus that may be apple rust. This appeared before I brought my saplings home. Mr. Leuthardt suggested I try two disease-resistant varieties, the patriotic-named Freedom and Liberty, as well as the iron-skinned Roxbury russet.

    I planted my mother’s trees at her place in the village on Sunday afternoon. One went in the rear dooryard and will eventually replace an apple of unknown variety that was planted long ago and shows the signs of age.

    I did not get around to putting mine in the ground until after work on Monday. Then, the following morning, I dug up the russet and moved it to another location, one that should allow it more room to spread.

    We’ll see how it goes.