You might think shopping for a new car would be fun. After all, you get to drive lots of them, maybe get a free hot dog, and spend the day tooling around showrooms peering at vehicles you might never consider actually calling your own.

    But after two trips to Riverhead, several hours of sales pitches, and winding up no closer to making a decision than when we started, my wife, Lisa, and I had had it. The two sessions we have had so far were not without their amusements, however.

    A Honda salesman told me a great story about working some years ago as a Federal Express driver. When he knocked on Billy Joel’s Further Lane front door, a woman in a big, floppy hat and a bathing suit came to it and signed for the package. But as the salesman told it, he was unable to make out her scrawled signature. He said Christie Brinkley had been distant to him ever since he asked her who she was so he could key the name into his handheld delivery recorder.

    At the Volkswagen and Subaru dealership, we met a salesman who had once worked at the Madison Market in Sag Harbor, well before it became one of a succession of Mexican takeout joints. I told him that the old market sign still hung on the building, but that it had become nearly illegible.

    As to cars, we drove this one and that one, then looked at the interior space of yet another. Lisa was to return yesterday for some more. The trick is that we are apparently looking for the impossible — a leased vehicle big enough for our family of five that is good on gas mileage but does not cost a bundle in monthly payments. And it has to be safe, of course. Lisa has been spending hours and hours studying Consumer Reports online and combing the federal crash-test statistics without finding a clear answer or guidance.

    If it were up to me, I’d probably lease the Volkswagen, though I guess we need to drive the Subaru first. It looks like yet another ride to Riverhead is in the cards for me, too. I can only hope I get some more good stories out of it.

    A magical name — Zihuatanejo. The one-word message left in a hiding place at the end of the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” creating an image of Mexican fishing boats, palm trees, turquoise water, and tropical weather.

    Given the snowstorms and frigid temperatures last winter in East Hampton, Zihuatanejo seemed a paradise found — sunshine, sandy beaches, sea breezes, fish dinners of just-caught dorado, sailfish, mahimahi, and tuna.

    Hotel Susy in Zihuatanejo, a hotel economico in Centro, was my home last January. How happy I was in anticipation, imagining weeks of no shopping, no cooking, no dishwashing. Three meals a day in local restaurants — enchiladas, beans and rice, or beef or chicken stew. A comida for 40 pesos (less than $3.50), including a fruit drink (watermelon, jicama, melon), at Bananas. Breakfasts of eggs, bacon, beans, potatoes, and tortillas for even less.

    After three days, the novelty wore off. My friend Sally and I took every recommendation to heart: “The best ribs I ever ate,” “the best pancakes and coffee,” “the best huachinango in Zihua” (red “shopper,” as it appeared on one menu). We became restaurant critics; nothing came close to our idea of “the best.”

    And the beaches: Playa Principal, full of sailboats and fishing boats at anchor, was not a clean beach for swimming, we were told. We tried Playa Madera — too quiet. Las Gatos, which took a launch to get to, had a rocky ledge running the length of the beach and the snorkeling was disappointing. Finally the jewel in the crown of Zihuatanejo Bay — Playa la Ropa. In this beach town everyone was either going to la playa or coming from it.

    Restaurants on the beach, chaises, and hammocks strung between palm trees under the palapas: I had found my oasis. And by the end of the month, I found La Perla Negra, the Black Pearl, where the dorado fish kebabs and coconut shrimp were heaven. So was the coconut ice cream with chocolate syrup. There were upscale restaurants for special meals, but I was watching my pennies.

    The heat and humidity were getting to me, so I shopped for something cool. The summer clothes I had packed were too heavy for the tropical weather. Stepping into a shop on Calle Ejido, I bought two pairs of cotton shorts and wore them day and night for a month. It was in that shop that I met Ricardo, an adorable young man who was working there. And he spoke English!

    Ah, Ricardo — 27, a chemical engineer returned to Zihua to help in his father’s shop. Dark curly hair, a crooked smile, dark eyes with long lashes, and a voice and eyebrows that shot up when he was amused or surprised. He offered to help, to take me on excursions. Sally and I traveled to Barra de Potosi, Ixtapa, Troncones, and Majahua in his father’s air-conditioned car. What a kind young man. He wanted no recompense, even when we insisted over his protestations.

    Before I left the Hamptons, acquaintances who knew Zihuatanejo said, “There’s nothing to do there.” My friend Carole from the East End Poetry Workshop was renting a condo on Playa la Ropa with her husband, so I organized a poetry workshop. Our first meeting was in a cafe across from the open-air fish market. There were four of us, including a poet from California, Jay. With his wife, Monique, he had left Paris after World War II. They were in their 80s. Their daughter Claudia and son-in-law, a boat designer, had an 80-foot catamaran, Picante, that offered day trips and sunset cruises.

    After Jay left, our small poetry group met at Carole’s condo for lunch on the balcony, where we delighted in the paragliders rising from the beach, flying over the treetops. After lunch we worked on poetry and ended the day with a swim at Las Residencias’ Olympic-size pool, surrounded by palms, almond trees, and hibiscus. Las Residencias was a stark contrast to our balconied and old-fashioned Hotel Susy in Centro.

    Cruise ships stopped in the bay at Playa Principal occasionally. One day while crossing the little bridge spanning the lagoon just outside of town, I noticed a small crowd on the bridge, peering down at the edge of the lagoon bordering the beach. Oh, my goodness, yes indeed — there was the snout of a cocodrilo poking out of the yellow-green water. Soon a crowd from the ship that had anchored that morning gathered on the beach, watching police and firemen capture the huge reptile.

    First they lassoed the croc, then hauled it up the four-foot ledge of the lagoon and tossed it on its stomach in the sand. They tied a rope around its snout, then a fireman took off his T-shirt and placed it over the croc’s head to keep it calm. He sat on the back of the beast and secured its short front and rear legs with rope, pulling them back. Then he tied the croc like a Christmas package.

    The crowd that had gathered cheered and applauded. It took three men to carry the trussed seven-foot animal to the bed of a waiting truck, which they used to transfer it to the enclosed lagoon at Playa Linda in the nearby resort of Ixtapa.

    Day after day at my shady oasis at La Ropa, I sat under the palapas and palm trees, enjoying my new friends Bob and Joan from Iowa, the baby cabrito (goat), and the miniature parrots. A group of Italian woman from Toronto invited me to play boccie when I wasn’t too drowsy to get out of the hammock. Occasionally there was a funny smell at my oasis that I wondered about but didn’t pursue.

    One evening as I was leaving the restaurant Arena, I saw a rush of water from the lagoon pouring into the bay, the gush cutting deep channels in the sand. The next morning the beach was smooth. I wondered where the torrents of water were coming from. A day later, arriving at the beach early, I waded through yet another rush of water that was calf-deep. As I reached the other side, holding my beach bag high, a young woman said, “Wash your feet — the water is polluted.”

    With horror, I learned that a sewage-treatment plant regularly released treated sewage into the lagoon that flowed into the bay. The next time I saw Ricardo I asked him about contaminants in the water. As a chemical engineer, he had read and understood the government reports. My “oasis” was toxic, as was the other end of Playa la Ropa and the snorkeling beach, Manzanillo. From then on I reserved my swimming for the pool at Las Residencias. How sad I was, to learn the facts about my paradise.

    I hope in the future that the municipality of Zihuatanejo becomes more vigilant in protecting its remarkable resources. And I send a great big thank-you to the Accabonac Protection Committee and others who wisely monitor our beautiful bays in East Hampton.

    I hope the crocodile is happy in his new lagoon.

____

    Carol Sherman’s books of poems include “San Miguel Sketches” and, most recently, “The Art of Gargling,” a collection of humorous verse. A founding member of the East End Poetry Workshop, she lives in East Hampton.

I know it’s St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s not corned beef and cabbage I’ve been wanting. It’s a Reuben sandwich: corned beef, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese, on grilled rye. There is nothing wrong with a good, traditional corned beef and cabbage supper — with boiled potatoes, I can taste it right now! — and maybe this evening I might find myself tucking in at the St. Pat’s dinner being thrown by the Lions Club of Sag Harbor, at the Whalers Church. But, still, as far as I’m concerned, a Reuben is in a class by itself.

I had eaten a Reuben or two over the years before I came to The Star, of course, but back in the 1980s, when I was editor in chief, one of our assistant editors, Eric Kuhn, used to order them all the time, and I joined in. A Reuben may be a deli sandwich, but it is nothing like the overstuffed corned beef or pastrami sandwich you would find in a genuine Jewish deli in New York City. And, with that slice of Swiss on top of the salty beef, it is not at all Kosher, even if it is made with caraway-seeded Jewish rye. 

People can get pretty carried away arguing about the nuances of Reubens. The ones Eric ordered all those years ago came with Russian dressing, which I believe is an authentic and essential part of the recipe, and certainly part of the fun. This is a messy sandwich. You have to expect it to drip. 

Not long ago, I was hornswoggled by what purported to be a Reuben at a local food shop. It was the worst. The meat was so dry you could crack off pieces, and, as for the anticipated rye bread, it was on some kind of a wrap. Oh, dear. The words “wrap” and “Reuben” don’t belong in the same sentence.

The closest you can get to the great Jewish rye of my youth around here comes from Goldberg’s Famous Bagels, which is almost as good but not quite. (Sorry, Goldberg’s! We really do love you, though.) Eli’s Bread makes a rye that doesn’t cut the mustard — in my kitchen, at least. I noticed an internet suggestion just now that a Reuben should be made with “Russian rye,” but — current Russian scandals aside — that just sounds all wrong. (Imagine if it came with raisins in it, like dark bagels do?

I am not alone in remembering fondly the special “ethnic” foods of childhood. Ukrainian-Americans have their borscht, Scottish-Americans have their haggis, old-line WASPs have their lobster rolls. In my case, we rarely ventured to a real Manhattan deli, so a Reuben wasn’t actually a feature of my youth. More often, we had creamed pickled herring, which my father brought home in huge canisters from meetings of the men’s group he belonged to. Can you imagine a child today getting excited about a big tub of creamed pickled herring? I think the only huge canister of food that would interest my grandchildren in the slightest would be filled with Skittles.

As far as kosher eating goes, when I was a kid I never understood why a cream sauce should be okay with herring while Swiss cheese was not acceptable with meat. Actually, to be honest, I still don’t quite understand that. 

Anyway, all this talk of corned beef brings to mind Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side. During World War II, it put up a sign saying, “Send a salami to your boy in the army.” Does anyone remember that? I’ve been told the sign is still there. I bet Katz’s does Reubens, but, come to think of it, I bet Goldberg’s on Pantigo Road does, too. I think that might make a fine way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.  Goldberg’s, here we come. Top of the morning to you.

    There are 78 letters to the editor in this week’s edition of The Star, which is a record as far as I know. Who says print is dead?

    The occasion for the verbosity is, of course, Tuesday’s election in East Hampton, in which control of the town board is in play. A digest of the letters might go as follows.

    We start this week with several letters of thanks, support, and remembrance, one for a village employee, another for a friend, one for the 1686 Dongan Patent. Then it’s off to the races. Readers like or dislike one or the other of the highway superintendent candidates; others announce that they are candidates and seek support.

    In the main event, writers decry an ad in which one side was characterized as “thugs,” while some on the other side say, yes, indeed they are. There are letters for Zach Cohen and those for Bill Wilkinson for supervisor and letters accusing each of them of all kinds of things. Letters for Mr. Cohen outnumber those in support of Mr. Wilkinson, the incumbent. Whether this can be seen as more of a reflection on the industriousness of each man’s friends we can’t know until Tuesday night.

    A couple of things stand out for me among the letters. First are the new voices, many of whom identify themselves as friends of one of the candidates. After years of publishing messages from the same writers, first-timers are especially welcome. It is one of the pleasures of living in a relatively small town that so many residents know at least a handful of the candidates and are willing to vouch for them.

    The top issues reflected in the letters pages this week include the East Hampton Airport, beach access, and financial management. There are letters from former and current elected officials.

    It was a chore going through all of them, correcting punctuation, fixing indents, spelling out acronyms, but worth it. East Hampton is lucky to have so many who care so much, and we at The Star are proud that they choose our pages to express their points of view. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

    Please remember to vote.

    My sister said the other night that she was feeling a bit low, and attributed the feeling to “the changing seasons.”

    I commiserated, saying I too felt a certain sadness this time of year, what with everything that had once been green and flourishing falling into the sere, the yellow leaf. And then, adding to the atmospherics, I began to hum a few bars of “Autumn Leaves.”

    When I hung up, I found that Mary was not of the same mind. Winter, she said, was the sad time for her. “To the contrary,” I said, “I find winter energizing because you’re often contending with it — digging out from snowfalls, bringing in firewood, drinking schnapps . . .  that sort of thing.”

    The next day, Jane Callan, who makes our windows at The Star look like the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, set me straight. “It’s a time when they’re gathering strength,” she said of the plants and the flowers and trees, “so that they’ll come back even stronger and bigger than they were before.” That, she said, was why she loved the fall.

    I couldn’t argue with that. “It reminds me of the Italian guy I read about who said when he was asked if he believed in an afterlife that there might well be a resurrection of sorts, just like the plants. I better phone Christy and tell her what you said.”

    “And maybe you shouldn’t hum ‘Autumn Leaves.’ ”

    “Nor ‘September Song,’ ” I said. “The ice cream truck song would be better. It’s stuck in my mind ever since the guy began coming around our neighborhood this summer: ‘Do your ears hang low?/Do they wobble to and fro?/Can you tie them in a knot?/Can you tie them in a bow?’ ”

    Revival, if not resurrection, is often on my mind when I try to coax interlocutors from their doldrums with jokes.

      And it occurred to me at about 3 a.m. today that in each week of my sportswriting life I undergo a cycle of germination, budding, flourishing (as in “See, Mary. . . ? See what I wrote this week. . . ?”) and death (yellowed columns taped to the walls of my office, columns I’d once thought lively, if not profound, attest to it).

    In my case the seasons change every week. Spring begins it, building to sultry summer, in the form of overheated prose, segueing through wistful fall (“Did I forget to put that in. . . ? Did I misspell her name. . . ?  It’s taken a long, long time to get to that story. . . .”) and on, inevitably, to winter (the printer).

    And every Thursday, at around midday, I am reborn!

    Though frequently forceps have to be used.

    I recently flew to Fort Worth, Tex., to attend a dinner in honor of Dr. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science. I assume that most readers know who she is, but for those who don’t, I suggest visiting her Web site at grandin.com. The dinner was sponsored by the American Humane Association and held at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Before the dinner, a friend who works for the association, knowing of my interest in animal behavior and human psychology, introduced me to Dr. Grandin and ushered us into a small room where we talked for about an hour.

    Dr. Grandin is a plain, sturdy woman in her mid-60s with intense blue-gray eyes and a shock of gray hair tied loosely in back. She favors colorful cowgirl shirts and boots, and that afternoon she wore a yellow four-in-hand that gave her a dashing appearance. At first, her face was expressionless. She stared ahead at nothing in particular, and when we shook hands, she looked down at the floor. She made eye contact only after we sat down and started talking. Then her face came alive with an intense look that lent weight to everything she said.

    She struck me as direct, down-to-earth, highly intelligent, and well informed on the subjects we talked about. At the same time she seemed wanting in those everyday social skills we normally take for granted that make a conversation go smoothly. For example, she began and ended her bouts of speech abruptly, waiting until I asked a question before she spoke again. It was also a one-sided conversation in that she never asked me about myself. But I knew about her autism before I met her, and her idiosyncrasies didn’t surprise or bother me.

    The first question I asked was about autism, how she experienced it and dealt with it. She explained that autism is a developmental disorder that affects people differently. “It’s a continuum with many degrees of severity,” she remarked, and went on to say that many autistic people lead productive lives in spite of, or perhaps because of, their autism, “Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, for instance, and a lot of people in Silicon Valley.”

    “I think in pictures,” she said. “When I think about anything, I have clear pictures in my head, like a movie. That’s the way I think. I can’t help it.”

    Our conversation ranged over many aspects of human and animal psychology, how children and animals think and learn, what the best methods of training are (positive reinforcement), and how teachers and trainers get the best results when they’re aware of the particular strengths, abilities, and intelligences of the creatures they work with and foster those inherent qualities rather than try to suppress or override them.

    Since early childhood, Dr. Grandin has had a special affinity with, and feeling for, animals. Her first love was horses, then cattle, but she relates easily to all animals. She talked about chickens, remarking on how they bob their heads when they walk and how that natural behavior makes them comfortable and puts them at ease. How cruel, then, to confine them in cages where they haven’t enough room to walk and bob their heads.

    Cattle, she said, don’t like being prodded and yelled at, which is what we humans unthinkingly do when herding them into corrals or the chutes that lead them to slaughter. “It frightens and confuses them,” she said. In the abattoirs she designs, workers are forbidden to prod the animals or to yell at them. But inevitably a few individuals do just that, so she has introduced TV cameras to monitor what goes on and insists that those workers who consistently break the rules be let go.

    I asked her about the “squeeze machine,” a device she invented in her youth that consisted of a pair of wooden boards hinged together in such a way that she could get between them and gently press them against her body. She found great comfort in the physical pressure, she said, even though she doesn’t use the machine anymore. It was a way of lessening sensory overload, whether from sights or sounds or touch.

    Oversensitivity to stimuli is part of her autism — she is careful, for example, about the clothes she wears, preferring a loose fit — but it’s also what allows her to relate to animals. “A dog or a cow is like an autistic human being,” she said, explaining that they are acutely sensitive to the nuances of behavior in others, particularly humans. We ought to be aware of how we come across to them, she added, and how hurtful and disturbing some of our actions and behaviors can be.

    I told Dr. Grandin about my own interest in animals, which also began at an early age. First it was dogs, but I fell in love with horses when my family spent a summer at a ranch in Montana, where I learned to ride. I was 8 years old at the time. Later I rode with a Russian cavalry officer well known for his gifts as a trainer. I described his method as positive reinforcement combined with patience and kindness. He never punished an animal but rewarded it immediately with a caress and a gentle word of praise whenever it performed in the manner he wished for. He took the same approach with his human trainees. He said little, but when he spoke, it was always with a few words of praise and encouragement.

    Dr. Grandin nodded in approval and said it wasn’t surprising that the same basic approach worked in classrooms and workplaces. Find ways to praise before you criticize or correct, whether you’re working with animals or people. Her expression turned to one of impatience at the thought that some people don’t get it. Perhaps they themselves were abused or punished early in life, she ventured, and then internalized the notion of punishment as a means of controlling the behavior of others. It just doesn’t work.

    We talked along those lines until it was time for dinner. About 150 guests turned up for it, and I had the honor of being placed at the same table as Dr. Grandin. Once again I noticed that she avoided making eye contact, although she turned in the direction of those she spoke to, as she has undoubtedly trained herself to do, knowing that it’s what people expect even though it’s not a behavior that comes naturally to her.

    Later that evening, Dr. Robin Ganzert, president and C.E.O. of the American Humane Association, introduced Dr. Grandin and presented her the association’s National Humanitarian Medal “for her inspirational work and her lifelong dedication to animal welfare.” Dr. Grandin went up to the podium to say a few words of thanks, and the audience gave her a standing ovation.

    Back home in Amagansett, I think of Dr. Grandin whenever I see chickens walking around freely, bobbing their heads, or whenever I encounter dogs, those autistic creatures who lack language. We are all of a kind, each of us with a place on the continuum of life.

__

    John de Cuevas has been a summer resident of Amagansett since 1958. Now retired, he was until recently a science teacher and writer at Harvard and Lesley Universities in Cambridge, Mass.

    When I read what people occupying Zuccotti Park are saying I tend to nod my head in agreement, except when it comes to those who would — with the help of dei ex machina, presumably — overthrow the entire system, which, I’m afraid, we’re stuck with.  

    No doubt, capitalism can be exploitative, which is why, though not in a union myself, I’ve always supported them. If there had been no unions — and thus no middle class — this country would have seemed like a third world one insofar as income inequality is concerned far, far sooner.

    But the unions have been bashed for years, and people have bought the snake oil, beginning with Reagan, that wealth will lift all boats, rather than scuttle 80 percent of them, as has been the case.

    Since wealth has been redistributed upward through overgenerous fiscal policies during the past 30 or so years, why can fiscal policy not be adjusted so as to re-redistribute some of it in order to achieve a semblance of fairness, which, along with individual freedom, is also a hallmark of this alleged democracy. I doubt that the C.E.O.s who have made away — and continue to make away — with obscene salaries and payouts vastly in excess of what their employees make would miss it.

    How much money does one need, anyway? No less a patriot than Ben Franklin once suggested that once a man had provided sufficiently for his family he should give the rest back to the government whose laws enabled him to amass his fortune. Warren Buffett has said, in effect, it’s the luck of the draw. Had he been born in Africa, things would have gone differently for him.

    And on the subject of patriotism, the ducking of taxes by myriad corporations seems to me no less than treasonous. Where’s their patriotism? Somebody has to pay for our wars, our maimed, and for our terrorist drones that know no borders and incinerate at will — innocents as well as those on our hit list, which, because of our enormities, promises to be ever-expanding. Like octopi we’ve occupied the world.

    I peeled from my office wall the other day a column written 20 years ago at about this time. And, frankly, I see no reason to alter what I said, to wit, that we needed “a consensus economy aimed at maximizing the well-being of the land and its people rather than profits.”

    And I went on to say (I always go on to say!) that “if there were indeed peace and fellowship in the land, there wouldn’t be the huge gaps between rich and poor that capitalism spawns, there wouldn’t be racism and the ghettos it spawns, and people wouldn’t feel . . . that things were so out of control that only divine intervention could make a difference, whereas we, the people, have within us the wherewithal to effect change.”

    And so I’ve entered the height of the autumnal fray, and while I’m left pining for the proverbial hallmarks of fall — those telltale tumbling leaves in sharp shocks of red and yellow, which seem to have been stunted by the sea-strewn air — I am still consumed by the gust of nostalgia that finds me every year about this time. It finds that tender spot on my neck and I collapse my ear to my shoulder, pinching its warm muzzle. It finds the gap between my shirt and my pants and with a yelp things are tucked in and pulled up, but to no avail. The winds of memory that vacillate between hot waves of a feverish fire and the drizzle-shiver of a gray morning will not be denied.

    Suddenly I’m tumbling in a half-sodden pile of leaves, squinting against a sky so bright I close my eyes instead and relish the sound of the wheelbarrow passing over rocks and roots and wait to be dumped into the pile. Fall is the Black Watch plaid of my father’s shirt, the sound of geese fleeing the scene, the maddening crunch-crunch that marks each step. It’s the yellow bus rounding the bend, a new backpack filled with the gentle spirals of an unscrawled-upon notebook, the hope that (please, please, please) that boy will finally notice me, I won’t hate math as much, and maybe my brother will discover I’ve grown incredibly cool. Ah, such are the joyful delusions of fall.

    It is not on New Year’s Eve that I feel my skin shedding, but in the blustering days and shadowy evenings of autumn. This fall is perhaps one of the most poignant of my life — I find myself staring in space, recalling faces, places, moments, and knowing, truly knowing, that I’ll never see them again. That was then and this is now and oh how much is lost in the gap between. Entire people! Gobbled up. Entire relationships! Reduced to dog-eared letters. I think of a reluctant clam. Fingers straining, I still can’t pry the shell open and reclaim everything inside that’s been lost to me.

    Following my six-month stint in Amagansett, fall has found me once again, and I’m reminded it’s time for a change. And while I still mourn my former city-self and the memories of those five years flicker past my eyes in the yellowed windows of a subway car, I know I can’t go back. I’ve got to be braver, more creative, more alive. I’ve got to creep closer to the horizon and taste a different sort of air, the kind that tastes a little like kimchi, perhaps.

    I’ve applied to teach E.S.L. in Korea. Well, to be more accurate, because that statement indicates a level of bravery that I simply haven’t got (the dragon-slaying sort), we’ve applied to be teachers in Korea — my boyfriend and I.

    I relish the reactions, which range from what you’d expect — utter enthusiasm or sheer confusion — to my grandmother’s response, which was marked by a kind of astonished repulsion, a unique combination that was especially enjoyable. She’s worried that A, my choice to move to Korea is actually a “regression,” a deathblow to my career path, and B, that Korea is simply an unsavory country.

    “I could understand Europe,” she said, “Paris,” she sighed, “but Korea?” The word became a sliding sneer that slipped into her lower register, indicating that it was most likely accompanied by a saddened headshake.

    Personally, as a writer, I believe an Asian adventure will serve as fantastic fodder for my memoir (albeit a dusty and disorganized piece), and that alone is reason enough to board the plane.

    Now, you may be thinking this is a difficult decision but an easy process. You apply, you go. To view the situation faithfully, however, I’d suggest standing directly on your head. This was an easy decision and a difficult process. The level of hoop-jumping bureaucracy rivals a three-ring circus — Barnum and Bailey’s has nothing on EPIK (English Program in Korea). We’ve been reduced to the finest of show ponies, mincing about on our hind legs, pompoms all a-rustle. And let me tell you, the tasseled women riding on our backs weigh a ton, and the crop? It stings.

    In addition to two formal applications (one to the recruiter and one to EPIK itself) and two formal interviews via Skype (one with the recruiter and one with EPIK itself), we’ve had to produce two recommendation letters, college transcripts, and our diplomas, which not only have to be notarized in the state of their origin, but also apostilled by the secretary of state.

    It’s not a pretty process. The only upside is that someone totally crazy could never manage this level of organization, which significantly reduces our risk of being hacked up and put in a bubbling stew somewhere outside Seoul by a fellow teacher.

    I can only hope that come January (when our background check from the F.B.I. returns — a two-month waiting period), I can tell everyone we indeed are going. While I utter with certainty the statement “I’m going to teach English in Korea,” I am simultaneously cursing my confidence. How unbelievably uncomfortable it will be to tell everyone through a smiling wince, “Yeahhh, actually, those plans didn’t work out.”

    And yet we press on. When David asked me if I wanted to write an “exit Relay” — this is my last week working at The Star — I could think of no better way to exorcise the demons, to tear back the curtain and realize that fall bears me no ill will, that change is not a fanged beast. I’d be lying if I said the past wasn’t haunting, that it didn’t brush up against my legs like an arching cat — slinking, seductive, shocking in its silence — but I can also feel my excitement shooing it away.

    Emboldened by love — how wonderful to clutch his sweaty palm in mine — we channel David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” stepping through the door and floating in the most peculiar way.

—

    Catherine Tandy is a reporter at The Star.

    A couple of weeks ago, I scheduled an appointment for an eye exam, my first in about 10 years. A decade ago an optometrist told me that there really wasn’t any need for me to get a prescription. This year, after plowing through the mountain of letters to the editor, staring at a computer screen for days on end, I thought the outcome would be different.

    Though last week I wrote that the number of letters we ran in last week’s Star was a record, what I meant to say was a record for the time that I have been responsible for sifting through them each week.

    Yes, we had 78 in last Thursday’s issue, but, as Ilene Roizman, who used to be the letters editor, wrote in an e-mail after reading my assertion, she recalled the tally reaching 100. Others here remember our having 11 pages of letters just before Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole in 1996. Nonetheless, 78 letters is still quite the pile of prose, and by the end of the day Monday, my eyes were shot and my back a tight knot.

    The lights were dim in the ophthalmologist’s office I visited in Southampton. The north-facing windows had a view of wide farm fields stretching off toward the hills of the glacial moraine and North Sea. I looked through one piece of equipment, then another. The doctor reported that my eyes were still in good shape for someone my age. He scribbled a prescription for the mildest sort of reading glasses, and said I should return in a year.

    To be honest, I was surprised that the time had not come for real glasses. The doc said I might try using artificial tears when my eyes felt strained. He advised me to head to a Target store where four pairs of the plus-one reading spectacles he prescribed could be bought for $10.

    It was a good thing for the ocular health of the editors and proofreaders that this week’s letter writers did their part, cutting back on their output (we presumed) until after the election results were in. Next week, of course, it’s off to the races once again.

    It wasn’t long ago that my old friend Kitty Monell came up to visit me in our old family blockhouse in Indian Field. “Daniel,” she said as she sat down on the living room couch, “we’ve gotten old.”

    There was no denying it. Kitty and I had started to roam the hills of Indian Field when we were kids some 50 years ago. That was long before Suffolk County purchased the land, at the insistence of my mother, who saved the most beautiful place on Long Island and maybe the world from development. As bureaucrats will, county bigwigs have renamed the park several times: Indian Field County Park, Montauk County Park, Theodore Roosevelt County Park, and who knows what next? Hilda Lindley County Park wouldn’t be a bad idea, to honor the woman who saved it and much of Montauk from rapacious overdevelopment. County Legislator Jay Schneiderman has at least taken a first small step forward in that direction by officially naming my mother’s house the Hilda Lindley House.

    Kitty and I had met as infants on the beach between Shagwong Point and Oyster Pond, when her parents landed in a boat and were surprised to see my parents on that then-deserted strand. The two young couples had been determined to ignore one another until they discovered that Kitty’s father and mine had gone to camp together in Shinnecock Hills many years before, and so they became friends.

    As soon as we could walk, Kitty and I began roaming the hills of Indian Field. We were mostly left to our own devices, crisscrossing every inch of it, sometimes alone together, at others with a passel of kids on foot or horseback. Much of our time we devoted to fishing and gathering: dewberries and shadberries in June, wild blueberries in July, and fox grapes and beach plums in August and September. From Reed Pond, we’d catch white perch and largemouth bass; eels, bigger perch, and winter flounder came from Oyster Pond, buckets of blowfish from Lake Montauk, usually off Kitty’s father’s boat, the Surf Scoter, moored behind her family’s house.

    My mother worked in the city to support us kids, coming out weekends, and Helen, our cook and maid, watched over us weekdays as a sort of surrogate mother. Coming from the South, Helen kept to a simple philosophy: Fruit was for pies and fish for frying. Fried fish and blueberry, blackberry, and apple pies were the staples of summer, breakfast through dinner. Sometimes her husband, Richard, would drive out from the city and add porgies to the menu after a day fishing with friends on Montauk party boats. Once when I was very small, he gave me some of his catch, and I placed them in our duck pond, not understanding that 1) they were saltwater fish and 2) they were dead. Richard and his friends just laughed, scooped them out with a crab net, and prepared them in a fish fry accompanied with copious amounts of Rheingold beer and 7 Crown whiskey for the adults.

    When he needed extra cash, which was often, Richard would hunt snapping turtles down at Reed Pond, usually returning with a couple of turtles as big around as dinner platters. He’d lop off their heads and hang them upside down from our clothesline, later stuffing them into burlap sacks when they were sufficiently bled and throwing them in the trunk of his beat-up Chevy for the long drive west to the city, where he’d sell them to restaurants. These days, the practice may strike some as cruel, but Richard was one of the kindest of many kind adults I remember from my youth in Montauk. He couldn’t get a haircut in town, though, because he was black, and so he had to drive to Riverhead for that. He died barely into his 40s, of rheumatic fever, leaving Helen a young widow.

    On those rare occasions when we weren’t picking berries, catching fish, or digging clams — steamers in Oyster Pond, Little Necks and cherrystones in Lake Montauk — Kitty and I would scout Indian Field for arrowheads and dead animals. Mice, voles, sparrows, and any other small, lifeless creatures we found were stuffed into empty Ohio Blue Tip matchboxes before we gave them a proper burial accompanied by lugubrious rites.

    In hopes of soaking up some of our abundant youthful energy, my mother had bought us a trampoline, and most days a noisy bunch of kids — Monells, Carleys, Prados, Joyces, and whoever else was around — would be bouncing around on this contrivance, occasionally flying off it into the blackberry brambles nearby but somehow never cracking their heads open on the concrete U.S. Geodetic Survey marker set in the ground nearby like a small memento mori. Of all the trampoline acrobats, Kip, Kitty’s brother, was the most daring, executing elegant somersaults and back flips as he bounced higher and higher, practically pushing the mat to the grassy ground with his teenage energy each time he landed. He, too, died young, blowing his brains out with a shotgun at his parents’ house before he was 30. As a young man, he had become schizophrenic.

    Frequently we’d ride horses around Indian Field, when space and time seemed endless. Kitty had a sleek bay named Pal; mine was a chubby hack named Tumbleweed, one small step short of the glue factory. Our friend Sandy Boomhower nicknamed him Stumblefoot. We might take the horses for a swim in the Sound or Reed Pond, or ride by Grace Foley’s, one of the few houses east of East Lake Drive in those days, where she’d invite us in and give us bologna sandwiches — the best I’d ever tasted. Other times, we’d take in the vistas from Prospect Hill, which we called Cactus Hill, then devoid of houses, or simply fly along the then-deserted dirt roads at a mad gallop.

    That was difficult to induce in Tumbleweed. Most of the time, he knew no other pace than a slow and grudging walk, and if he felt especially inconvenienced, he’d simply stop, lie down, and roll around on his back like a flea-ridden dog, sending the rider sprawling. When dusk approached, however, he’d come to life, knowing it was feeding time at Deep Hollow Ranch, where he boarded. His ears would prick up, he’d let out a whinny or two, and I’d lean into his big body, wrap my arms around his neck, and hang on as best I could as he raced off to Deep Hollow for his evening’s ration of oats.

    There were a bunch of cowpokes over there at the ranch — Rusty, Elbert, and Harvey among them, as I recall — and as cowpokes will, they felt it important to indulge in cowpoke high jinks and pranks, of which young red-haired Rusty often seemed to be the butt. The most memorable cowpoke of all was Phin Dickinson, who wore a Western shirt over a potbelly and a big ten-gallon hat. He liked to bark dire warnings at us as we rode out — “Watch out, kids, there’s cattle coming!” — or cast aspersions on someone’s equestrian abilities: “He rides like one of those damn motorcycle riders!” Adding to the drama were the skeet shooters practicing their shaky aim behind the ranch as we loped under cracking clay pigeons.

    Cattle grazed freely across Indian Field in those days. Sometimes they’d get into our yard, disdaining the barbed wire fence but fleeing from our little dog, Sparky, who nipped at their heels. Occasionally we’d stage an impromptu rodeo, never staying on even the mildest cow for more than a few seconds.

    On some of our ramblings, Kitty and I would run into Fanny Gardiner riding down a dirt road on horseback, always alone, it seemed. Her riding habit was all black, complementing her weathered face, which had the color and texture of beef jerky. Once as we walked down to Reed Pond for an afternoon’s fishing, we crossed paths with this woman and her horse. Glum and forbidding as a wraith, she told us to be on the lookout for a trail rider who’d fallen off his mount and was thought to be wandering the moors, potentially deranged due to his head wound. It was with great disappointment that Kitty and I didn’t come across this Montauk madman that day, though we looked for him.

    There were other wanderers in Indian Field, then a remote and isolated backwater in a world of accelerating speed. Most prominent among these was an older man with a long gray beard and a bulbous belly whom we’d see ambling along the dirt roads when we were out collecting arrowheads or interring small animals. He always went shirtless, wearing only a bathing suit and sandals, but he never spoke to us. Indeed, we never ran into him directly; rather, we’d see him walking in the distance, but then he’d disappear, like some mysterious, shy, portly troll. Perhaps he lived in one of the hollows or thickets of sumac and sassafras, or maybe in one of the abandoned cars that people used to leave in the sandy stretch north of Reed Pond. In later years, others told me they’d also often seen the same man wandering Indian Field and assumed that he was squatting in what some called the Shagwong Hilton — a small cluster of abandoned cottages that once stood on a cliff overlooking Shagwong Point. Someone said he was a German.

    The years have come and gone. Indian Field has changed, yet remained the same. I’m still eternally amazed and thankful that my mother saved it those many years ago from the jaws of misguided developers. As a boy, I had nightmares about honky-tonks and houses surrounding Reed Pond, lining the beach around Shagwong, and perched atop Squaw Hill. Thanks to my mother, Indian Field remains the beautiful place it has always been, and its treasures have been mostly protected so far. Only memories remain, but I like to think that Indian Field’s spirit and spirits remain too.

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    Daniel Lindley is a writer, editor, and college instructor who now lives in southwest Florida.