The Suffolk County Legislature is getting in on the nationwide campaign to get consumers to take along reusable bags when they go shopping (which is even touted on posters in post offices). A hearing is to be held today on a proposal to impose a five-cent surcharge on every plastic or paper bag distributed by a retailer in the county.

    That plastic bags are an environmental menace is understood; reportedly, only 1 percent of the many billions used in this country every year are recycled. That paper bags have a large carbon footprint because they take a lot of energy to manufacture is a problem, too. Municipalities around the country are trying to do something about all this, including East Hampton and Southampton Villages, which have approved bans on the use of most plastic bags.

    Suffolk’s Legislature has a long history of being first on environmental laws. It started the eventually widespread ban on phosphates in detergents years ago. It was the first county in the nation to ban electronic cigarette sales to minors. More recently, it was the first governmental entity to ban the toxic chemical biphenyl A in baby bottles.

    The legislation under consideration today comes from Vivian Viloria-Fisher, the legislator from the Fifth District. The Citizens Campaign for the Environment, an advocacy organization founded in 1985, is urging passage. A similar law — adopted in Washington, D.C., two years ago — has resulted, according to the group, in the use of 75 percent fewer plastic and paper bags.

    Still, it’s my guess that there is little chance the proposal will be approved, at least in its present form.

    Here’s why: Under the proposed law, if I’m reading the slightly complicated wording correctly, retailers would automatically get to keep one penny of every five-cent surcharge; if the store chooses to offer a carry-out bag credit program to its customers — that is, rewarding them for bringing their own bags — it will get to keep an extra penny. The rest of the money collected would go to the county treasurer to be put in a dedicated stormwater remediation  fund.

    So far, so good. But to make this work, retailers would be required to submit detailed reports on how much money came in and how much was kept. Fines of up to $500 could be levied for violations.

    It’s hard to imagine that this hassle will go over terribly well with the chamber of commerce. A federal ban with an amortization period for manufacturers to get out of the bad bag business altogether might work better, but that seems out of the question.

    Perhaps I’ve had my head in the sand, but the recent attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency by some of the would-be Republican candidates for president, which I probably should have expected, came as a shock: Has the recession really brought us to such a dire extremity that our politicians are campaigning on the premise that business interests are to be protected at any environmental cost? I’ve had an even gloomier reaction to President Obama’s and the State Department’s willingness to allow a 1,700-mile crude oil pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Texas coast.

    If ever there was a time for environmental activism, it is now.

    The miracle that is September after Labor Day is upon us, and what might have seemed impossible a few weeks ago is now within the realm of possibility.

    A week ago Friday, I had Ellis, our nearly 20-month-old, in the truck, going along on North Main Street in East Hampton. Noticing that the farmers market in the lot next to Nick and Toni’s was open and that there was a parking spot directly across the street, I pulled over.

    Had this been August, not only would there have been no parking space but the thought of carrying our brawny toddler into a crowded market would have been unappealing. As it was September and a gloriously crisp day, and with drivers seemingly magnanimous about jaywalkers, Ellis and I made it across two lanes of traffic unscathed.

    I don’t know how the morning went for the vendors, but for Ellis and me, the relative absence of other shoppers was a pleasure. I was comfortable letting him down to wander a little while I chatted with several people I knew. Having spotted a stand with cartons of fat, bright-yellow-and-red peaches, Ellis led me by the hand clear to the other end of the rows of stands and pointed out ones he wanted.

    The ease with which you can get through the day at summer’s end, I think, helps social interactions, too. At Bucket’s Deli one lunchtime this week, I fell into conversation with someone who in July might have been too harried to talk. The idea of visiting friends in Sag Harbor no longer fills me with dread about driving over there.

    I notice more tables set up in front of private houses selling this and that. I stopped at one on Middle Highway in East Hampton the other day and, for $10, bought two jars of preserves — blueberry and blackberry — which will help make up for the fact that I didn’t manage to put up any of my own this season.

    All of this can be symbolized by the fact that I can again make a left turn out of The Star office driveway. This simple act opens up a world of possibility. I might just stop by yet another farm stand on my way home.  

    There is a fellow who often has his hand out for a ride from Damark’s to the village on Thursday morning at the time I go to work, and perhaps he’s begun dreading the sight of me pulling over to give him a lift, for it gives me a chance to practice my Spanish.

    “Ah! Ahora puedo practicar mi espanol!” I said in opening the passenger side door for him this morning.

    He asked me my name and I asked him his, though it took a while for him to get his across. When he said ‘Roberto,’ I said, cheerily, “No puedo oir!” And when he then printed the letters on my sun-block tube, I said, “No puedo ver. . . . No puedo manejar tampoco!”

    I hope he took that as the joke it was meant to be. I’ve been cautioned in Spanish class not to play too fast and loose with the language, that in doing so I may risk putting my foot in my mouth. Of course I run the same risk in English. But I sweet potato what I sweet potato, as a Japanese character transplanted to California in a T. Coraghessan Boyle novel once said. I yam what I yam.

    At any rate, I told Roberto that I thought it was a fair exchange (intercambio) — to wit, that in return for lifts, he would have to put up with my butchering his native tongue. I hope he doesn’t come to think of me as a bit of a bore, as in Evelyn Waugh’s “The Man Who Liked Dickens.”

    If he does, I may be the one beseeching him as he stands across the street from Sam’s holding a cup of coffee in one hand and sticking his thumb out with the other.

    “I hope I’m not imposing, Roberto, but could I give you a ride to the village?”

    “Are you going to speak Spanish?”

    “No, no, ni una palabra.”

    “You said you wouldn’t speak!”

    “Oh, lo siento. I mean, I’m sorry.”

    “No, no that’s it, that’s it.”

    “To Round Swamp then?”

    Of course I’m imagining all this, but I am determined to one day be insufferable in two languages, maybe even three, not just in one.

    I was practically speaking in tongues, in fact, when, after six days without it, LIPA restored our power last week. It was so exciting to resume our wonderfully boring lives that, to celebrate, Mary did three loads of laundry, restocked the refrigerator and freezer, cooked a gourmet meal, and ran the dishwasher as I sang “Que nadie sepa mi sufrir” over and over again in the shower.

The city was killing me. I had lived in five suspended-in-the-sky Brooklyn boxes in five years. And had commuted through Grand Central Station for three of those years, navigating the sweltering shuffle of feet in a kind of fish-feeding frenzy, darting between sharp elbows and swinging suitcases, muttering halfhearted “Sorry”s as I stuffed myself into the subway car before the doors slid shut with that metallic bing bong.

    And then there was my office, tucked into Midtown East. A gray-on-gray cubicled affair, filled with the pallid faces and fluorescent-lighted sighs of my co-workers, whom I loved, but kind of pitied, along with myself. The dull click of everyone’s computers — we were all writers for a trade publication — was the droning buzz of a hive. I just couldn’t shake this nagging feeling: I needed air, light, space, the heady stench of dirt. Slowly, like a sheet slipping from my legs, it dawned on me. Gardening. That was it!

    My great-uncle had bought a house in Amagansett in the 1960s. My family and friends visited periodically, but our country jaunts were basically limited to Indian Wells Beach, the I.G.A., and the occasional bacon run to Brent’s on Sunday morning.

    We had always rented the house during the summer, but this year it was empty and beckoning, its gray shingles and sun-dappled roof singing its siren song. A house by the sea, a house in the forest, a house!

    I gave my two-week notice and started combing through the classifieds of the newspapers in the Hamptons. The general reaction to my decision to flee the teeming streets of N.Y.C. was one of pleasant confusion. “Gardening, really?” they’d exclaim, nodding their heads slowly. “Wow, yeah, I think that sounds great.” They thought I was crazy. Yeah, crazy like a fox.

    Meanwhile, my boyfriend, a day trader (he’s not that “type” really, honest, he’s just excellent at math; he wears Megadeth T-shirts), had managed to convince his company to let him trade remotely.

    We gave away everything we could, packed up the rest in appropriated bodega boxes, stuffed them into my Volvo, and headed east. And then suddenly — well, as suddenly as a storm you see rolling in that spills its sodden belly from the sky — we were living in Amagansett and I was working as a gardener.

    Dressed in jean shorts and a T-shirt, slathered in sunscreen, and padding about in sneakers, I was at “the yard” by 8 a.m., greeted by a team of men, some Hispanic, some surfer-type college kids, some from the Shinnecock Reservation, but all humble and hard-working. The air was cool, the sun low. We’d lug the day’s tools into various vehicles — personally, I was in charge of the black pickup truck with a slipping transmission — and head into the fray.

    Federico and I were almost always together, tending to the yards of seven or eight houses a day, pulling weeds, pruning rosebushes, planting a kaleidoscope of peonies, lantana, impatiens, cosmos, and morning glories. And, of course, staking a slew of hydrangeas whose heavy heads would languish in the mud following any rainstorm.

    Bouncing along in the truck with the wind rustling my hair, the radio spilling out some classic rock, and Federico swilling horchata in his sun hat, I was happy. I savored the dirt beneath my fingernails and my aching back. I fell asleep to the winged roar of insects and awoke to birds. And my boss? El jefe? Kind, gentle, forthcoming, and lanky. He was frazzled but funny, strict but sweet. It was a pleasure working for him.

    Then, at a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, I fell off my bike. Hard. Road rash covered my entire left thigh, and my back was so thrown out I could hardly walk. I don’t know if it was crouching in the sun or slamming my spine onto gravel, but whatever happened, I couldn’t garden anymore.

    Strange but true (and isn’t that how life always tends to be?), the same week that I tumbled from my bike into a bed-ridden state, The Star offered me a part-time position, elevating me from freelancer to reporter, complete with my own desk. And window! If Midtown East could see me now.

    Here a new chapter has fluttered open its pages and I’ve been just as happy. It’s a different kind of stress; no longer do I fret over overtrimmed bushes or broken-necked tulips. Instead, it’s deadlines, fact-checking, parsing the correct hamlets for the police reports, and convincing a rather ancient Dell to print out my stories for editing.

    I’m not sure what’s next; I’m a bit daunted by the prospect of winter here, to be honest. What I do know is that my seemingly irrational, fly-by-night decision to uproot and upend my life was one of the best decisions I ever made. I only hope I can keep trusting my instincts.

—

    Catherine Tandy is a reporter at The Star.

    The story was supposed to begin here at an illegal poker hall in Hicksville called the River, but the River ran dry and I was left staring at a blackened door with a mailbox next to it that said Fish. It must have been a marker or tag for new players to locate the building. Fish swam in the river, right? More than likely, the River was flowing somewhere else, but I had no idea where to find it.

    My contact at the casino wasn’t old enough to buy beer, yet he’d been sinking and swimming in the River for over a year. He wore an ace of spades charm around his neck and had been counting the days until his 21st birthday since he was 16.

    “I just can’t wait to get to Vegas,” he said, toting the latest poker bible around and quoting random passages. “It’s a game of skill,” he insisted. “I could make a living off this if I didn’t have to go to school.”

    “Ace” just completed finals at a college in the area and was willing to take me to watch a tournament. He said they’d have a few games running at once and that there would be no problem getting in. If there were, then a guy named Pretzels would tell us. Pretzels ran the house at the River and worked the door. Pretzels was a problem-solver and I couldn’t wait to meet him. I was actually en route to the place when I got the call.

    “No good,” Ace said. The casino was dark and no one was returning calls. “They must have been shut down. Sorry.” Ace said he’d try to find another game, but I haven’t heard back from him.

    The River had it all and I wanted it back. I needed to see how a tournament was run. I wanted Pretzels to size me up. Without Pretzels and Ace, all I had was an idea.

    I started to see Long Island as a map with an enormous deck of cards flexing over it, waiting to burst across two counties. It didn’t take long before I stumbled on the right Web site. Long Island popped up within the New York listings and I was on my own. Many of the locations described their atmosphere as “friendly,” which meant I could probably visit their club or tournament without being robbed or kidnapped.

    I made several picks based on proximity to home and desired buy-in range ($300 to $500), steered clear of the contact who called himself Goodfella, then admitted my total beginner status to everyone. I had half a dozen offers by the end of the day.

    The clock on the wall says 8:30, but the time here is always now. I’m somewhere in the heart of Suffolk seated at a poker table in somebody’s basement. I’m absorbing my new surroundings and waiting for the goose bumps to settle. The Internet may have changed the world, but it will always be a bit creepy. One minute you’re on your way to play poker with total strangers, the next you’re hanging upside down in somebody’s dungeon.

    I’m not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. The inside is decorated like any other suburban basement: wood paneling, support pillars, a pool table opposite the bar with pictures of Marilyn and Elvis swooning back at me. I could have had my first kiss in this basement. I could have gotten drunk here in high school.

    “Relax,” the dealer opposite me says. “We play a friendly game here.”

    Of course you do.

    The dealer is a big guy in his 40s who we’ll call Mike. This is Mike’s basement and everyone here is his guest. He runs the game from his wheelchair and pays himself 5 percent of every hand. His guests can play cards until their money runs out, drink as much beer and coffee as they like, or wait for Mike’s wife to serve her lasagna in catering tins warmed over a Sterno flame.

    I pay my buy-in to the dealer and he slides me my chips. I just handed Mike grocery, gas, and rent money, but now I’ve got all these wonderful chips stacked before me and anything is possible. There are seven other guys at the table thinking the same thing, only they’re totally serious about their chances.

    The conversation revolves around the evening’s possibilities, all possibilities of the past and any in the near future. There are tales of going bust in Atlantic City, beatings taken at Foxwoods, and last-minute winnings in Vegas, baby, Vegas. Someone mentions the remote chance of a casino being built on the Island’s East End by the Shinnecock Indians and the room falls silent with possibility.

    “Hey, you gettin’ a job for the summer or what?” a heavyset lifer asks the fresh-faced 20-something to my right.

    “Me?” he says. “A job? Why would I do that when I can be checkin’ and raisin’ all summer long?” Laughter spreads across the table like a free round of chips, the type of guffaws shared by men with similar addictions. A cellphone goes off three heads to my right. A deeply tanned guy in his 30s answers, tucking his chin into the phone to speak.

    “Yeah,” he says. “You knew this is where I’d be. . . . I told ya I was workin’ tonight.”

    It’s probably time to admit I’ve never played a true hand of poker in my life. I came looking for a story and have more interest in the players than the game. My subjects, however, are into winning money the way I’m into stories. I’ll get what I want eventually — and so will they.

    There is one thing I did in preparation for my first card game. I made a poker starter kit for myself. Since my knowledge of the game began at zero I went with the obvious choices. I bought a copy of “Poker for Dummies,” rented “Rounders” with Matt Damon, and found a decent memoir on the underground game called “Poker Nation” by Andy Bellin.

    My kit was heavy on atmosphere, but details of the game were still whizzing past me. Damon loses the girl but comes to terms with what he is, heading out West for the World Series of Poker. Bellin introduced me to the underground life and taught me some important jargon, and chapter one of “Poker for Dummies” is just plain hysterical: “Poker has always been a microcosm of all we admire about American virtue. . . . Call it the American Dream — the belief that hard work and virtue will triumph. . . . It is an immigrant’s song, a mantra of hope; it is an anthem for everyone.”

    Back in Mike’s basement, the first hand is about to begin. I’m peering around the room, taking in all these proud Americans and sons of immigrants and realize the true hunger of the place. Mike shuffles the deck and lays down the button.

    My first two cards come sliding toward me. I have two pair of something or other, but I’m not sure where it falls in rank. There’s a crumpled piece of paper in my pocket that lists the hands, lowest to highest, but I don’t dare sneak a look. Mike realizes my rawness by the way I hold my cards out in the open like some Hollywood cowboy. He catches my ineptitude by the way I repeat the phrase, “Hit me,” like Danny DeVito’s character in the poker scene of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

    Mike tacitly agrees to become my interpreter, letting me know when it’s time to check, raise, or fold. After each hand is played, he tells me whether I made the right choice. Through some fluke of nature, I end up winning the first two hands. Then the razzing begins:

    “What kinda beginner’s luck is this?”

    “He ain’t no beginner. This guy knows exactly what he’s doin’.”

    “I know. I think I seen him at Binion’s last week” (a hard-core casino in Las Vegas).

    “He’s probably a mechanic” (slang for a professional cheat).

    “Yeah, or workin’ undercover for the bunko squad!”

    “Hey, what exactly do you do?”

    I identify myself as an English teacher and the table automatically does its best to mind its grammar and syntax. When one of the younger players, who had been shoveling pasta all night, announces with a full mouth, “Yo, these freakin’ meatballs are retarded!” another player looks him over.

    “Is that supposed to mean good?”

    The kid wipes his mouth and nods.

    “Well, maybe you could speak English from now on so the teacher over here doesn’t have to shoot himself.”

    I’m learning the game, making fast money, and winning new friends. I start to relax and proceed to lose $350 in approximately 70 minutes. My chips diminish at a steady rate; the other players’ stacks grow high. Mike clinks another 5 percent after every single round. I take my beating quietly, thank the table for a nice evening, and leave Mike’s place for good.

    It wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own. I had shown very little patience, even with Mike’s guidance, and often stayed in just for the excitement, despite having junk cards. There’s a cherished quote that veteran players often repeat. It was used in the movies I had watched and the books I had read and it goes like this: If you look around the table and can’t figure out who the sucker is, then that sucker is you.

    But what do you call someone who volunteers for the job? I’d kissed that money goodbye long before I ever stepped through Mike’s door. It was story money, a well-spent investment.

    Mike, for his part, turned out to be a very good host. He was good at his job and seemed genuinely pained after I’d been wiped out. I wonder if he or any of the others could understand a guy who set himself up on purpose, someone who actually wanted to lose. I wonder if their psyches would allow such a notion.

    “Well,” they’d probably say, studying my empty seat, “every deck has its jokers. . . . Who’s in?”

_______

    J. Bryan McGeever’s stories have appeared in Hampton Shorts, The Southampton Review, and Thomas Beller’s “Lost and Found: Stories From New York.” He lives in Brooklyn.

    The East Hampton Library was my home away from home for six days last week while the power was out. I spent hours and hours there, writing, editing, checking e-mail.         Thanks to the library’s proximity to The Star and the generosity of its director, The Star was able to get out a paper despite the fact that our generator had only enough juice to fire up the most important equipment. We were able to run two heavy-duty extension cords from the library across the driveways that separate our buildings. E-mail was working at the office, but I wasn’t able to plug in my computer.

    If truth be told, I have had a problem with libraries since I was quite young. I can still see myself standing in front of a high desk being told I was too young to take out books from the adult stacks. (I don’t remember how old I was, but I had outgrown in the children’s room.)

     Although I worked as a library intern for a while in college, this early bad impression stuck with me, even affecting my choice of a major. It was going to be history, until I realized I would have to spend a lot of time in the library’s damp recesses searching for original sources.

    The East Hampton Library has changed all that. I have a family feeling about it, in part because the reference room is dedicated to the memory of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, who had been on its board of managers.

    The library was jammed last week with people who, like me, had no electricity at home. It turns out that there are an awful lot of outlets available, although not as many surfaces on which to set up computers. At one point, seeing a man sitting on the floor while he worked, a member of the staff brought around some folding chairs.

    For the most part, I gravitated to an alcove not far from the library’s back door. Every carrel was occupied, and, anyway, I preferred being near a window rather than in a hidden corner.

    An unspoken sense of camaraderie developed among those using the library this way, and decorum was honored. People tried not to hog space, for example, and we stepped outside to use cellphones — although, I must admit, not everyone was with the program.

    One day, a gentleman in a nearby carrel made a call. He had a booming voice. Chat. Chat. The couple at a table in the alcove across the aisle and I exchanged glances. Then, the man on the phone, said, “Do you want to meet at Nichol’s for lunch?”

    Something got into me. I chimed in, loudly, with one word: “Sure!” He couldn’t have missed the chorus of laughter that followed.

    The tussle over language and local place names has entered my own house, with my elder daughter announcing this week that she had taken a singing lesson in the Springs. I shuddered. As anyone who grew up here can tell you, it’s Springs, not “the” Springs, but my daughter doesn’t believe me.

    There is no telling where the “the” thing started, but it seems to have been quite some time ago. Back when I was a kid, in the 1970s, hanging out during summers at Indian Wells, the city kids we knew would say they lived in the Springs. To which we, born and bred here, as it were, just snickered.

    Controversy brewed some years ago, as I recall, when a group had signs made welcoming visitors to the hamlet, placing an out of place “The” in front of its name. Though carvings of scallop shells on the signs were quickly lifted by vandals, the signs remain, as does the misnomer.

    Authoritative sources, including Springs’s grade school, the East Hampton Town Code, the United States Census, and the classic, if I say so myself, East Hampton Star calendar all call the place Springs. Still the “the” endures and, who knows, may actually be increasing in use.

    Place names are mutable, sure, especially when many people are relative newcomers. My grandmother, who wrote books on local history and came from a family with 17th-century roots here, for example, left the “S” off Ditch Plain, a tradition we at The Star follow to this day. Do I think we will prevail and the thousands who have made Ditch Plains the Malibu Beach of the East will change their tune? No, I do not. But with Springs, I think there is a chance that tradition will prevail.

    What Springs or anywhere else is called may not seem to matter, but I would argue that it does. If oral tradition can be bent in this way, the qualities that make Springs appealing to its residents may also may be bent. Strong senses of place make for strong communities; change the name and more changes may follow.

    As far as the elder daughter is concerned, Dad is wrong no matter what argument he makes on the subject. “When they change the sign,” she said, “then I’ll change what I call it.”

    I have in hand the LIPA newsletter that accompanied this month’s bill, and I want to share some of it with you (especially you who have been without power these last six days, as has been the case with me and, from what I can gather, numerous other working stiffs in Springs).

    Interestingly, the newsletter has as its heading, “LIPA Is Prepared for Hurricane Season, Are You?”

    And so to begin: “LIPA prepares year round for not just hurricanes, but all storms. Our preparations include; numerous storm drills, reviewing and updating storm emergency procedures, enhancing customer communications, and a continuous ‘tree trimming’ program to identify and trim tree limbs in rights of way and along easements that could potentially cause outages during or after a storm.”*

    “Last year, LIPA aggressively implemented a new communication program in order to better inform customers about outages and restoration times. . . .”**

    Well you could have fooled me.

    I asked a neighbor, a Verizon retiree, what the matter was in our neighborhood, and he said a circuit breaker at the corner had “popped” during the storm. Not a big deal, I should think, and yet since 10:20 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, until 4:15 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 2, we had no electricity and no water.

    I have a radical proposal — actually, several. Aside from the obvious priorities, such as hospitals, nursing homes, and public gathering places, fix first the easy things, especially in neighborhoods which have private wells, as most of Springs does, before tending to those who know by the visual evidence — trees draped over power lines, splintered poles, and downed wires — that they’ve been screwed.

    Then, really do trim the trees, with an augmented work force if necessary, in the non-hurricane months.

    Or let them flourish and exfoliate and bury the power lines. Of course, the cost would be sky-high, but would it be so out of sight compared to the costs incurred by periodic emergencies such as this one that cause LIPA to augment its maxed-out work force with crews from far-flung places? Bring the actuaries and climatologists in. Are more and more storms like this in store? If so, then maybe burying the lines would not prove to be so unthinkably onerous in the long run.

    A neighbor with whom I stood on line at Starbucks last Thursday morning, and who was as baffled as I about the lack of attention to the aforementioned circuit breaker, said relatives living in the Outer Banks, where the lines, he said, are buried, had had no outages.

    And remember, “LIPA Is Prepared for. . . .” No, no, I’ll not belabor the point.

_____

    *Mary said she saw many limbs hanging on the lines along Springs-Fireplace Road before the storm hit.)

    **On day five, Mary got through to a LIPA spokesperson, a Mrs. DeVito, she thinks, whom she described as “a very attentive, very empathetic listener deserving of a raise,” but who, in the end, could offer little more than solace.)

    It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since I was running down the street with a building chasing me. Ten years. While it feels like a long time ago, I can close my eyes, and it all comes roaring back in a second.

    On Sept. 11, 2001, I was teaching high school 100 feet away from the World Trade Center. Conjuring that day — the sounds, the smells, the taste, the feeling of time suspended, the homeless man covered in ash pantomiming something on a park bench — is a blurred rush, but it is the fear that I carry with me the most.

    Even writing this, my breath quickens, and I have that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. That day fostered a culture of fear, or rather, as time allots a more critical perspective of tragedy, we simply caught up with the rest of the world. Previous generations of Americans are familiar with this uncertainty, having lived through world wars, the Depression, Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis, and the cold war. But as recent years have been relatively devoid of conflict, terrorism, and its prankster element of surprise, has finally permeated our culture on a grand scale, and has presented an entirely new threat.

    How this fear shapes future generations remains to be seen. For now, we comply with the national defense tactics in place at our airports and dutifully take off shoes, endure an inappropriate grope, or smile for the full-body scan that renders us naked to a Transportation Security Administration agent. It is questionable whether all of those photos really make it to the trash. Sure, these measures are preventive, but have they made an actual difference or are they now just mundane? When I go through security checkpoints, I always look for flaws and think about ways to thwart the system. But experience has resigned me to the fact that if someone wants to do something, they will.

    Heightened awareness is supposed to be the first step to combat an unpredictable attack. There has been a consistent public transportation campaign in Manhattan for the past 10 years with signs in subways and buses that read, “If you see something, say something.” This mantra is embedded in the city’s consciousness, and when you live there, you feel it. But time has softened the urgency, or is it that we have become more accustomed to it?

    After Sept. 11, 2001, I walked everywhere for as long as I could. Friends who were with me that day did the same. We wore sneakers, and shoved money, keys, and licenses in our pockets; we were ready to run again if we had to. When walking to work was no longer a viable option, I convinced myself the bus was safer than the subway. As we rolled along First Avenue, I realized how ridiculous my decision was, and had a panic attack. When I got to work I was coated in sweat, but I made it.

    Conquering the subway was next, and then it was routine. Until an unanticipated stop in the middle of a tunnel or a sudden flickering of lights brings it back in a flash. Over the years, my reaction to subway malfunctions has lessened, but a lone sneaker on the subway this past spring gave me pause. No one else seemed concerned, but I could not shake the narrative in my head that it was a bomb. Torn over what to do, the calm around me won out, and I kept my paranoia to myself. The pragmatic reality of a dirty lost sneaker under some seats on the subway trumped my fear, but will that be the right choice next time?

    Have Americans elsewhere absorbed the nuances of terror, and are we prepared to live in this cultural landscape? Proximity is everything. My experience on Sept. 11 was one layer, with each person who was closer to the buildings another, and then another. When we ran out of land and were standing outside in Battery Park, I remembered a movie on TV when I was younger about a nuclear holocaust and the end of the world. My parents would not let me watch it, and suddenly I realized why.

    In that moment, I visualized a future where people fought over canned goods in a permanent blown-out gray background. However, throughout the rest of that day, and for many months after, New Yorkers came together to demonstrate the more positive aspects of human nature.

    Sept. 11 changed me. An ex-boyfriend said it takes a lot to jar me, and he is right. I am considerably more mellow, and when a situation gets out of hand, I am able to maintain a true level of calm. After my school was displaced for six months, we returned to work downtown. The building next door was still covered in soot, and you could taste a layer of dust in the air. Our building was not cleaned properly either, and recently, I have developed asthma. Loud noises used to bother me, sometimes I still jump once in a while, and I am always surprised when I do.

    But it is a touch of disaster that really throws me off. When the Con Edison building on my block in the East Village had an explosion a few years ago, and smoke wafted into the air, I was gripped by a flashback of fear. It was the same thing when I saw the smoke from a fire on 42nd Street. It does not last long, but the feeling of panic and uncertainty is an exact replica of the fear I experienced on that day. As my family lives in Maryland, minutes after the recent earthquake here on the East Coast, my mom forwarded me an official government e-mail and said everyone was okay. I was taking a walk and thought my bout with vertigo had returned, but her e-mail flooded me with fear, and there I was, stomach churning, and shaken for an hour.

    I always want the drama surrounding Sept. 11 to hurry up and be over. While I understand the commemoration aspect, I feel that it is personal, and I cannot stand the media hype and patriotic verve. Most important, though, while I know it is childish and unrealistic, I just want my fear to go away. In another decade, hopefully this fear that exists for me and so many others will be vastly diminished, and we will no longer feel so susceptible.

—

    Heather Dubin, a reporter at The Star, was an English teacher at the High School of Economics and Finance on Trinity Place in Lower Manhattan in 2001.

    It was a late-summer morning as I sat facing the bay in an Adirondack chair, drinking my first cup of Barry’s Irish tea. I was at our summer rental cottage. It was the beginning of the hurricane season. The temperature ominously dropped 10 degrees and the wind picked up, indicating an approaching storm. I could see what looked like a tornado enveloping me in its dark fury, its funnel shape passing directly overhead.

    The Weather Channel said there might be a hurricane coming up from Florida. The charcoal mass of trailing clouds was threatening and had blocked out the scorching sun a few minutes earlier. The wind blew the umbrella into the bay. Then raindrops fell on my head like sharp exclamation points. I got wet but it felt good in the heat.

    It turned out to be just a summer storm, not a tornado or hurricane, but I was scared by its intensity. It roared quickly over and around me. It was good to be in the weather, surrounded by it, and not just watching it from a window. But of course hurricanes are a very real danger to this narrow peninsula of land. Last year the water rose six feet above normal, stopping inches from the backdoor. The cottage could easily be flooded.

    One morning while in bed I thought we were under an air attack, but it turned out to be seagulls dropping shells on the roof to break them so they could eat the succulent clams inside. The seagulls make a racket with their “Aawk, aawk, aawk” announcing their arrival or departure, and the geese at the end of the summer honk in unison.

    The cottage doesn’t have air-conditioning, but with the lively cross-breezes from North Sea Harbor and Davis Creek it doesn’t need it. The antithesis to the hermetically sealed McMansions air-conditioned to an arctic chill.

    Sometimes small is better. The Latin phrase  “multum in parvo,” a lot in a little, tells the story. This cottage is perfect for the summer. It’s what the Hamptons used to be: a small paradise. The rustic hunting and fishing shacks were used only in the summer during the 1920s and ’30s to hunt wild turkey and Long Island duck and to fish the plentiful waters and harvest oysters, clams, scallops, and crabs. The simple cottages were passed down from generation to generation of the same family.

    I keep a large rubber inner tube with a rope that I tether to the steps so I won’t float away. In the afternoon I sit in the water and read in my bikini, rear end in the water, legs draped over the edge. I wear a big straw hat for protection from the sun as I bob in the water. The rhythmic sound of the bay lapping against the dock lulls me and I doze.

    The front yard of the summer cottage is beach grass, so no lawn to mow. A rabbit family, maybe the Flopsy Bunnies, lives in the tall warren of spiky leaves. A baby bunny poses like a garden statue and then flicks his ears and wriggles his nose as if to receive a satellite transmission. The soil is too sandy to grow much so I fill pots with thyme, rosemary, basil, chives, oregano, and mint and use them as my kitchen-cutting garden. Terra-cotta pots of red geraniums on either side of the front door add color.

    Out the back of the little house is a weathered wooden deck bleached by sun and wind to silver-gray. Wooden steps to the bay. The backyard is fenced so my dogs won’t go marauding in the neighborhood, stealing steaks off neighbors’ barbecues. Clammers appear in small boats every Tuesday, and sometimes we buy right from the baymen to throw the clams on the barbecue and watch them hiss open. This year blue-claw crabs were back in force.

    A swan family comes every day to be fed. I give them multigrain pita and leftover scones and old sourdough bread. They gobble it all up. The huge father hisses at the dogs and fluffs himself up to an imposing height. I wouldn’t want to mess with him. The mother is more sedate and hisses delicately. There are five cygnets, three white and two gray. I’ve heard that swans mate for life, an appealing thought, being a long-married person myself.

    Another afternoon I was watching the tide go out and people wander in, playing on the sandbar. I could see a golden retriever sloshing through the water, shaking off a stream of wetness and making a water rainbow. A seagull’s footprints in the sand looked like scratchy Egyptian hieroglyphics. Small motorboats were anchored to the shore, people clamming with strenuous strokes to find the bivalves for a dinner of linguini with clams. Bodies walking in and out of view like a William Merritt Chase painting come alive. Then I looked up and the tide was in and the people were out. Gone.

    Across the bay is Conscience Point Marina, so watching the boat traffic on weekends is theater. I saw a Lab sitting proudly at the prow of his boat, ears blowing in the wind, guiding its master to shore. Flotillas of red, orange, yellow, and blue kayaks come close enough for the paddlers to say hello as they pass.

    Friends come for dinner by boat and then sail off into the sunset afterward. Our cottage comes with a two-person kayak that we use to explore and pretend we’re Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn on the African Queen. There’s a nature preserve just opposite, and we launch ourselves on its waterways and listen to birds talking. No people-sounds at all. We are only 10 minutes from Southampton Village but we could be on a remote island off the coast of Maine.

    One evening at dusk I walked to the end of Towd Point Road and saw clusters of prickly pear cactus. I thought they grew only in the desert in Arizona. The land is a nature preserve, so no one had planted them — they must be indigenous. But how could they survive the harsh winter? A protective microclimate must shelter the cactus, because when I walked by in June, I saw big, showy yellow blossoms thrusting themselves into the salty air on the prickly pear plants.

    The interior of the cottage is all whitewashed beams and studs. There is no insulation or heat. There’s a downstairs bedroom and a loft bedroom upstairs where we set up his and her offices with dual computers. A simple wooden farm table with a bench and a couple of chairs is all that’s needed if we want to eat indoors. A small, light-filled living room has windows on three sides for a constant breeze. You can smell the marine life. Some days it smells very salty and fishy and other days it smells clean, like the inside of an oyster.

    The cottage has one and a half bathrooms but my favorite is the outdoor shower, one of the greatest luxuries of summer. This one’s not fancy, just functional. There are hooks on the outside to hang a bathing suit and a towel. It’s rustic looking but fully enclosed, with a marine hook-and-eye.

    It is my sanctuary, my outdoor temple and shrine to the pagan gods. I bow my head to apply shampoo. I suds up in a religious frenzy with bubbles bursting, water splashing everywhere, frightening the resident spiders. In my devotion and liberation I celebrate the ritual of getting clean.

    I love the feel of the air on my body. It reminds me that I am alive in my summer chapel. I am free. I can be naked during the week when no one’s around. I am a druid dancing around the monolithic stones at Stonehenge on the eve of the summer solstice. I can splash and sing. The vibration in my chest empowers me and resonates through my head.

    The light changes every day and sometimes fog veils the opposite shore in a hazy cocoon. I marvel at the glorious sunsets and toast them with a glass of white wine. Some evenings it looks as though someone took a paintbrush dipped in raspberry jam and streaked it across the sky. As I watch, the colors change into abstract compositions.

    Votive candles are used for outdoor lighting, and I prepare simple suppers of local corn and grilled whole fish. In the sandy backyard we made a stone circle. I feel atavistic, like a cave dweller, as I gaze into the driftwood bonfire. A few conch shells decorate the perimeter. For dessert we roast marshmallows for s’mores and talk late into the night with the full moon illuminating the water. Stars tell us when to go to bed.

* * *

    Summer’s over. It’s the end of showering alfresco. The church closes its doors for the season. I pray for an early spring. The spiders take over and build their webs with abandon, knowing I won’t be disturbing them until next year. It’s back to the old tub for me. But all winter long I can remember my freedom and look forward to that first warm day at the end of May when the weather changes and I can revel like a sybarite in my outdoor shower at Camp Paradise.

    I only hope the cottage isn’t washed away.

    Joanne Pateman is a former advertising art director. She has an M.F.A. from Southampton College, and her writing has appeared in The Star and The Southampton Review.