It’s April and the dandelions are back.

    “We hate dandelions,” sniffs the soccer mom in a Scotts lawn care commercial as her husband, agile and bonny, rolls for a Frisbee on an expanse of pristine grass.

    Cities, states, and even a branch of the United States government agree.

    “Grub them out,” roars the California Agriculture Extension, warning of clumps that reduce the aesthetic quality of turf grass and golfer footing on the fairways. Topping California, a Utah State University horticulturist, Jerry Goodspeed, has warned that dandelions employ a “wicked plot” that “attracts any passing child” to “whimsically blow the dreadful seeds around the neighborhood.”

    The wicked plot can cost you. The city code of Pueblo, Colo., decrees a $300 fine plus eradication costs for dandelions that grow to 10 inches (easy for a well-fluted specimen) on a property’s lawn. Aberdeen, S.D., outlawed them as far back as 1909, when its mayor, Alva Aldrich, beseeched residents to “eradicate this evil from their lawns.” Over the years, the local government paid bounties on dandelions equivalent to the prevailing price of wheat. With help from the American Legion, tons of dandelions were burned.

    They’re still at it. In 2006, Sue Gates, a columnist for The Aberdeen American News, wrote that 100 years after the war was declared, “the fight to eradicate the pesky weed from the lawns of Aberdeen continues.”

    In 2000, East Hampton experienced a crackdown by the feds. An inspector from the Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered the manager of Windmill Village to eliminate all dandelions from the lawns there because they were beneath HUD standards for the Hamptons.

    Botanical nativists label dandelions as undesirable aliens. My 88-year-old sister, a Berkeley liberal long before the term meant much, gladly welcomes aspiring immigrants of all stripes, but snarls at dandelions, though they were brought here from Europe in the early 19th century (to succor honeybees), decades before our own forebears arrived.

    To the Taraxacumophobe, it matters not that poets from Shakespeare to Lowell to Ginsberg, as well as Emerson and Thomas Wolfe (“the inchoate sharp excitement of hot dandelions in young spring grass”), have rhapsodized about their beauty, or that chefs such as Pierre Franey, Julia Child, and Craig Claiborne extolled their culinary virtues, or nutritionists their vitamin and mineral content (more iron and calcium than spinach, more beta-carotene than carrots).

    Dandelion lovers revere what dandelion haters detest: their unpredictability. “Their only sin,” asserts one admirer, “is that they have not learned to grow in rows.” Another equates dandelions with the 19th-century buffalo — noble, useful, and targeted for extinction.

    Both sides see dandelions as a moral issue. Robert Fulford, a Canadian writer and dandelion admirer, observes that the presence of dandelions on a lawn indicates to lawnistas that “sloth has taken up residence in paradise and is about to spread evil in every direction.” To Mr. Fulford a bumpless, weedless lawn champions the intrusive values of imperialism — control and cleansing one’s surroundings of the unkempt.

    On the other side, Pastor Donald J. Gettys of the McDonald, Tenn., Seventh Day Adventist Church preaches that “Sin and dandelions are a whole lot alike. They are a lifetime battle that you never quite win.” He advises us to “Give the problem to Jesus.”

    I cheer them. Dandelion greens, plucked from vacant lots of San Francisco, were a basic vegetable for my family during the Depression. John Giannaris, owner of the Hellenic Snack Bar and Restaurant in East Marion, tells me that in Greece during World War II dandelions kept his family alive. In Germany in 1945 I saw Polish displaced persons and German Army deserters survive on them.

    Busy proliferating, often where one least expects to find them, the dandelions remain impervious to all this. On a sunny day last spring, I found them sprouting through the base of a street lamp, the shell of an air-conditioner, the trunk of an oak tree, and the wood of an inside windowsill.

Though at their peak in spring, dandelions continue to pop up through the year, into those early January days when the temperature nears 50. Bend close to grass that has not been sprayed and you will find one. Pick it. Nip its stem and hold it in your mouth. Relish the juice that will refresh your lungs and bear the flower’s progeny to the next cycle, and the next, and ever beyond where dandelions will continue to taunt and sustain us.

Richard Rosenthal is the author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire on Nimbyism on the South Fork. An East Hampton resident, he won the Alliance for Community Media’s 2010 Jewell Ryan-White Award for the quality of nonmainstream broadcasting on his LTV program, “Access.”

   Mary and I met an ornithologist while perched at the Hyatt Regency bar in Bethesda a night not long ago, and our conversation immediately took flight.

    First off, Mary wanted our new acquaintance, Viviana Ruiz, to know the trick I’d played on her of old, by saying with such conviction, when asked what a certain bird was, “It’s a tufted towhee.” While Viviana smiled, Mary told her she’d since learned the truth, to wit, that there ain’t no such thing as a tufted towhee, that it had been a conflation. Frankly, I hadn’t known whether there was or wasn’t: I’d been asked for an opinion, and, without hesitating, delivered myself of it. That’s what columnists do.

    Viviana asked me what I did, and I said I covered local sports. Mary added that I also wrote a column.

    “For how long?”

    “For a millennium!”

    Hadn’t I ever had writer’s block?

    “Oh yes. I used to run to Mary and say, ‘Geez, what’ll I write about? My deadline’s nearing.’ And she would come up with at least 10 ideas.”

    “None of which he ever used.”

    “The best thing, I’ve found, is not to have any ideas. Things often turn out better that way. I let my fingers do the talking, just like magpies. We saw one in Ireland. We didn’t know what it was at first. When I described it to a woman at a pub, a big black-and-white bird, she told us what it was and that ‘If you see one magpie, it’s sorrow. If you see two, its joy.’ Of course, with us it was two. Or maybe it was one and I was seeing double.”

    As she laughed, I said, “But I didn’t see any nightingales. I’d been hoping to.”

    Then we told her of the time we’d been with Audubon magazine people on Gardiner’s Island, in a truck driven wildly up hill and down dale by the late Lord of the Manor, scattering all the birds (and anything else that moved) before us as Tony Hiss called out to the group in the other truck, which was following behind, “You just missed a golden eagle, a rough-legged hawk, and a snowy owl!”

    Viviana said she was primarily interested in tropical birds, which made sense because she was from Costa Rica, by way of Amherst High School and Cornell.

    When she heard we’d never been to Costa Rica, she gave us the address of her mother, who was retired now, and said in so many words that when we flew down there we should alight at her mother’s house inasmuch as we all were, it seemed, birds of a feather.

    Rules for Cars 101: You should never, not even for a second, leave anything on top of your car unless it’s tied down. This includes pocket books, Java Nation coffee cups, important papers, and, especially, small children.

    Some members of my immediate family have not always heeded this sensible dictate. Recently, my wife arrived at work without her laptop computer and panicked. She had once left things atop her Rav 4 and saw them blow off as she accelerated.

    “Don’t worry,” I told her when she called, flustered. “I was planning on going home for lunch today anyway. I’ll go look for it.”

    As it turned out, this particular story had a happy ending. Lisa had left her computer safely in the house while struggling to get out the door with the baby and who knows what else.

    A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday night, I was driving east on Montauk Highway, heading home with our 6-year-old and some takeout Mexican food. It was just about dark. As we passed V and V Auto on Montauk Highway, we saw something flutter off the top of the vehicle in front of us. Papers drifted everywhere — napkins, I thought. It was only when I distinctly saw an unmistakable piece of United States currency being blown toward the shoulder of the road that I realized this was not someone’s garbage bag, but a wallet.

    I pulled over and backed up the truck. Money, credit cards, checks, and dozens of receipts were strewn across the median, and a northwest wind was pushing things here and there. Evvy stood watch for other vehicles as I gathered what I could.

    After a while, it got too dark to continue messing around in the road, so Evvy and I got back in the truck and went home.

    Though I could find no phone numbers on the papers we had picked up, I recognized the name of the wallet’s owner and knew at least one person who worked with her. With a little e-mail and Facebook work, I was able to get the word to her, and we arranged a hand-off the following morning.

    When we met, the woman said the last place she had used the wallet was at a gas station and that she probably had placed it on top of her car while fueling up. She had not even noticed it was missing.

   Somewhat like October, April finds the East End in transition. The madness of the summer — and the crowd it brings — is not yet here, but with the warmer weather and brighter days, one knows it looms, lurking somewhere around the next corner.

    Having an economy so dependent on tourism and the various service industries it requires tends to breed contradiction. Hearing locals complain about the “summer people” and their poor driving, their lacking manners, and the like, is rather like biting the hand that feeds you. Most of us desperately depend on the infusion of cash the summer brings to local businesses, since the economy out here is one that really thrives only during beach season.

    Further, the East End peaks culturally during this time, as the artistic community balloons and the crowds encourage goings-on of every kind.

    Is there a way, then, both to object to the insanity of the summer months and embrace the attendant economic and cultural benefits? There must be.

    The physical beauty of this place is undeniable. And thus its draw. That we year-rounders sometimes are overwhelmed by the summer rush is just our frustration that this is not a private haven, but one well known for its beaches, its shopping, its niche as a vacation town that has great proximity to New York.

    So why not simply come to terms with the fact that having easy access to a cultural metropolis during the lull of winter is going to work in reverse during the warmer months; that traffic on 27, that fender-bender on Main Street, being blocked in when parking is tight at a restaurant — these are unpleasant moments, sure, but are essentially a tax paid to keep the economy creaking along out here during the hibernation of the interim. Like a bear, the East End needs to fatten up over the summer if it is to survive the cold and lonely winter.

    Watching the weather improve these last few weeks, the apprehension about incoming traffic is there, but so ought to be appreciation. The cycle must perpetuate itself, the throngs of beachgoers, bar-hoppers, and foodies must reappear. And with them come some of the theater, film, and music events that bring people out here, rather than draw us to New York City, adding a cultural richness to a place that sometimes can seem thin and superficial, especially in America’s collective cultural imagination, where The Hamptons are merely a decadent retreat.

    After all, it is the escapist hedonism summer visitors bring that provides such a boon to the economy. The popular image of The Hamptons so many of us love to hate is really a feat of branding, a marketing tool that provides receipts for bars, restaurants, and hotels. We can despise the reality shows and vacation specials set out here, but we might not be as well off without them.

    Indeed, if the masses of summer folk were ever to fail to materialize, delight at having the place to ourselves would quickly turn into terror that our angelic retreat was running out of gas.

—

    Matthew Taylor is a reporter for The Star.

    As we read with horror about the meltdown of the nuclear plants in Japan, most of us wonder, How could this have happened? How could this tragedy have occurred in one of the most technologically sophisticated countries in the world? What went wrong?

    On the East End, we figured out in 1974 what was eventually going to go wrong with nuclear power. Through tedious and expensive litigation the Long Island Farm Bureau, together with several East End towns (including East Hampton) and the League of Women Voters, exposed the dangerous fiction developed by the nuclear industry to sell their magic elixir. Our Yankee common sense cut through the deception. We exposed what will go down in history as a shameful corporate fraud.

    In a nutshell, nuclear power is a dirty, dangerous, and expensive form of electrical energy. All it does is boil water to turn electric turbines of century-old design. Nuclear fission doesn’t magically create the electricity; the turbines still do that job, just as they do in the old coal-fired plants. As a result of the disaster in Japan, the entire world now sees the danger of this water-boiling technology. The industry ought to be doomed now that the worldwide pollution and catastrophic taxpayer expense to clean up its toxic consequences have been exposed. Nuclear power ought to be off the table as a viable energy source.

    There is one place in America where the nuclear option is off the table, and that is eastern Long Island. Trust me. Here’s the story.

    It was the winter of 1974 when three young farmers visited me in my law office above an appliance store on Main Street in Riverhead. They were worried about the Long Island Lighting Company’s plans to build two nuclear reactors at Jamesport on the North Fork. (Jamesport is about 20 miles from East Hampton as the crow flies, or, in this case, as the radioactive emissions migrate.) Bill Nohejl, Robbie Hartmann, and Cliff Foster, officers of the Long Island Farm Bureau, had a budget of a few thousand dollars and retained me to represent them in the state hearings on the transmission lines that would cut through and divide the farms in the most fertile and scenic agricultural corridor on Long Island.

    Together we began the fight that would ultimately bring nuclear power to an end on Long Island. What we learned about the nuclear industry during that time would greatly alarm us, and, because of the recent tragedy in Japan, we know now that little has changed.

    After 80 full days of hearings and the testimony of dozens of expert economic, scientific, and engineering consultants hired by the farm bureau, we defeated LILCO’s plans to build a “nuclear power park” of 19 plants, which were to be built from Wading River east to Orient on the North Fork and from Westhampton east to Montauk on the South Fork. Yes, you read that correctly. And the first two in the series were to be built at Jamesport.

    Through cross-examination in the Jamesport proceedings, the farm bureau secured the four-inch-thick Nuclear Power Park Report, which included site plans and surveys of the future locations of the reactors. LILCO intended to supply the entire East Coast with electricity, using the essential cooling waters of the Atlantic Ocean, so readily accessible on the relatively unpopulated East End. Sites in Montauk and Sagaponack were included.

    The farmers were not persuaded by the editorial writers of The New York Times and Newsday who regularly argued that the farm bureau and others raising questions about the safety and false economics of the nuclear industry were misguided and misinformed.

    With a straight face, the utility scientists testified in Riverhead that there would never be an accident that would exceed the radiation limits in the regulations. On cross-examination they were forced to admit that during an accidental event maximum radiation limits are suspended. In other words, during an accident an unlimited amount of radiation could spew from a plant and the utility could accurately assure the public (as they are doing now in Japan) that the emissions did not exceed safety limits.

    The utility scientists testified that no released radiation would be immediately harmful to residents in the vicinity of a nuclear plant. On cross-examination, they were forced to admit that no one dies immediately from cancer and leukemia, but that it takes a period of time for these “health effects” (as they euphemistically called them) to occur. In other words, the utility could accurately say (as they are doing now in Japan) that there is no immediate danger to the residents of the area.

    The utility scientists testified that the Jamesport plants would not kill any fish as a full 10 percent of the waters of Long Island Sound was sucked through an eight-foot pipe during the course of each year to cool the nuclear core. On cross-examination, they were forced to admit that the water would be heated 32 degrees, thereby killing billions of fish eggs each year, decimating the number of fish that would spawn in the Sound from then on. Although the Sound would essentially be sterilized, they defended their statement that no fish would be killed by saying they wouldn’t exist to begin with!

    Over time, it became clear to everyone at the hearings in Riverhead that the nuclear industry was built upon an elaborate deception of the public and of public officials who were making energy decisions that would commit us for decades to come. The corporate “science” simply could not be trusted. Apparently the government of Japan trusted the American companies selling these nuclear plants.

    And that is what went wrong.

    Fortunately for us on the East End, the farmers refused to back down. They decided to take on the industry. In a ferocious eight-year legal dogfight, the farmers argued that it made no sense that the biggest machine ever made by man would never have an accident, would never have pumps fail, would never overheat.

    And they argued that if an accident happened, even just once, it could sterilize a large portion of Long Island with radiation contamination for generations. They argued that, even if an accident were not catastrophic, the crops on Long Island would forever be tainted in the minds of the public, ruining a billion-dollar agricultural industry (as is happening now in Japan).

    They argued that the cost of these gargantuan machines was intolerably high and that they were being built only because of massive tax subsidies for the corporations to build them and later protect the nuclear waste from terrorists and the environment (for which no solutions existed, then or now).

    The farmers engaged in years of grassroots fund-raising in order to be able to submit reams and reams of testimony from qualified scientific experts regarding these issues.

    During this public battle, the farmers kept saying there had to be a better and cheaper way to boil water to turn turbines. Clean natural gas would be the better way to boil the water. They argued that “painless conservation” — better air-conditioners, appliances, and programmable thermostats — would produce more energy than the 104 nuclear plants in the country combined. And that’s before solar and wind energy was even factored in.

    Fortunately, the farmers and other well-informed activists convinced Gov. Hugh Carey and subsequently Gov. Mario Cuomo in one-on-one meetings that common sense should prevail. Both governors listened to the arguments of the farmers and their allies, and they both had the political courage to squash the Jamesport nuclear reactors and, years later, the Shoreham reactor.

    Just think about where we would be right now if the editorial writers and the utility company had got their way and the East End were ringed by 19 nuclear reactors. Just think if things had gone wrong here.

    For a while as winter waned, I thought the deer family of Edwards Lane, East Hampton, where I live, had gone on vacation. It had been quite a while since I called a grandchild’s attention to one on the front lawn or followed another till it ran behind the barn, only to show up impertinently in front of the barn a few minutes later.

    Then, suddenly, about two weeks ago, they were back.

    I drive cautiously, especially at dusk, and can say that I’ve been surprised by only two or three deer on the evening roads in the last year. But it never occurred to me before that I would have to be watchful in my own driveway. One night I came upon a big one there; it ambled off pretty quickly behind the evergreens. Now, however, they’ve become omnipresent.

    I walked home from the office one afternoon this week to find three loitering on the front lawn. One was lying down; the other two just stood there with their big brown ears pointing up and their eyes staring at me as I walked toward the house about 20 feet away. They didn’t bother to move.

    It seems that the deer like the front yard better than the back, although it must have been deer who chomped the leaves off two camellia bushes out back that are now bare to about shoulder level (while higher up  they are in full leaf and bloom). I’ve never caught deer at the camellias, although I’ve watch­ed them nose around the garden and empty the bird feeders. It could be that they are keeping in check the yellow wildflower that invades the lawn at this time of year, which would be something of a plus.

    Two nights ago, as I drove out in my car, I said goodnight to five deer in front of the house. I was quickly startled by two more, which jumped from Edwards Lane over the split-rail fence at the edge of the library’s property.

    It seems that our friendly neighborhood herbivores are getting out of hand. What were seven does doing on a small lane in the heart of the village? And what had driven them to take a hiatus?

    My husband, who has taken to sardonically calling any deer he sees Bambi, blames the village invasion on the folks who have settled in Northwest Woods and put up six-foot-tall fences like fortifications around their properties. I’m not so sure about that theory . . . and he’s got another thing coming if he imagines the town will do something about it. (Outlaw deer fences?) Besides, I haven’t told him yet about a new deer fence much closer to home.

    When a member of the East Hampton Garden Club asked if I would mind their putting up a new fence along the border between the Star property and Clinton Academy, whose native plant garden the club tends, I said, “Of course not.”

    It’s pleasant to be able to look at the garden from our windows or to go out there for a breath of air. The club had gotten tired of seeing a large patch of smooth grass flattened where deer obviously had a habit of bedding down. Now, a tall but unobtrusive black wire fence stands guard.

    Yes, I know: If I don’t want deer in my yard, if I want to plant some annuals for our pleasure rather than theirs, I can put up a fence, too. But what will East Hampton Village look like if every house lot — all right, every other house lot — is ringed by a tall fence? And where will the deer go?

    Sing along: In my Easter bonnet with all the dog hairs on it I will be the hairiest in the Easter parade.

    Yep, dog hair is my new accessory — long, wispy strands of golden dog hair from my boy, Brodie, a golden doodle. Although Brodie was given to me, his chief selling point was that he was a hybrid mixed to be a non-shedding, hypoallergenic breed. Boy was I hoodwinked!

    It’s typical of my luck that he sheds terribly. And of course, we realized this after we fell madly in love with him. I always wanted a golden retriever but didn’t get one because I knew them to be heavy shedders. I have one highly allergic child and an excess of dog hair in the house could have sent her into an asthma attack. Luckily, she no longer lives at home.

    When the thick clumps of hair began showing up like tumbleweeds on the wood floor of my hallway, I thought it was just his puppy hair coming out. When friends were compelled to point out in the I.G.A. that I had dog hair on my coat, I laughed and said, “Ah, Brodie’s becoming a man and losing his puppy fur.”

    But I’ve since learned otherwise. Brodie sheds all the time. It’s not only in my hallway but on my clothes (which is tough because he’s blond and I wear a lot of black), on my rugs, on my furniture, on my bed, and even in my mouth. Yes, I cough up hairballs these days. Look the other way if you see me choking in public.

    He’s also not hypoallergenic. I have a good friend who often comes to visit on a weekend night so we can shoot the breeze at my dining room table. She, too, is allergic, and now instead of shooting the breeze she shoots nonstop sneezes. We might have to start going to her house.

    My mother, who is so not a dog person, recently visited. My husband and I took her shopping one day and let her off at the store’s entrance. I watched to make sure she got inside okay and as she walked away from the car we couldn’t help but giggle at the blond strands of Brodie hair covering the back of her black jacket. Revenge was finally mine for the dumb Easter outfits she used to make me wear.

    One in particular always stands out. We did wear Easter bonnets when we were children and mine that year was a red pillbox like the one Jackie Kennedy used to wear. I wore it (actually I should say I was made to wear it) with a blue polyester coat with big gold buttons, white tights, and white patent leather shoes. My mother had set my hair the night before in rollers and teased it into a bouffant the next day. I looked like a first lady. I was 12 years old. I should not have looked like the wife of a president.

    As we took pictures on the beach on City Island, where I grew up, the hat flew off my head and landed in the chilly water of the Long Island Sound. I was fine bidding it adieu, but one of my brothers felt it was his duty to retrieve my Jackie Kennedy hat. While the others searched the beach for long sticks to grab it with, I watched and silently called upon the Lord on the holiest of Catholic holidays to let it sink. I guess he was too busy to listen to me because the hat was retrieved, soggy but still intact.

    I’ve never been a fan of hats and think that episode probably has something to do with it. And so on Sunday I will not be wearing an Easter bonnet. But who’s going to be looking at me anyway? Unless, of course, I’m standing to the side coughing up hairballs and wearing a coat of fur.

—

    Janis Hewitt is a senior writer at The Star.

    Since the crash that killed two Sag Harbor men on April 9, I have driven past the accident site on Brick Kiln Road several times. It has had relevance for me, if at a remove, because my older daughter was in another vehicle that happened to come on the scene just seconds after the apparently speeding Mustang struck a tree.

    Adelia had been riding with a friend and the friend’s aunt, westbound on Brick Kiln, the same direction that Thomas Wheeler and Manuel Cunha had been traveling. She said that a tire from the wreck was still rolling as they passed, then it came to a stop and flopped over. Smoke, she said, was rising from the twisted metal; the flames that quickly engulfed the car had not yet erupted.

    She saw the driver’s head slumped to the side. She saw the passenger’s air bag suddenly and belatedly inflate. It was a lot for a 9-year-old to have to see.

    Unofficially, police sources have said that the Mustang must have been going close to 100 miles an hour when Mr. Cunha, who was at its wheel, lost control. The car went into the oncoming traffic lane, then shot back, striking the tree. As a father, my mind plays the what-if scenarios: What if the car my daughter was in had been going the other way? What if the Mustang had come up behind them on the twisting, up-and-down road?

    In my work for the paper, I have been to plenty of accident scenes. Many of the worst have been, as this one was, on sunny weekend afternoons — often in the “shoulder season,” before Memorial Day or after Labor Day. In most, it is very difficult to know what really happened. Had the drivers been drinking? Were they just caught up in the exuberance of a day off? Is it all random — just chance?

    So, finally, I went to the Brick Kiln site for a closer look. Fresh flowers, a heart-shape wreath, had been left for the victims. Aside from a gentle curve a hundred yards or so up the way and a dip in the pavement, the road was straight.

    A man was sitting in a small car parked opposite the memorial smoking a cigarette, the window down. I thought about Mr. Cunha’s and Mr. Wheeler’s families, and wondered what had happened. There were not, and there never will be, real answers.

    One of the pleasures of hanging around the East Hampton Star office is the chance to explore its archives, a veritable Wunderkammer of interesting historical tidbits. I sometimes wish I had nothing else to do but go through the crammed old-photo files in the back room, which always yield surprises.

    So it was that in preparing our latest garden supplement — which has a theme this year of trees — I searched the cabinets for images of East Hampton’s Main Street, with its glorious elms.

    One image of the streetscape before the 1938 Hurricane can be seen in the garden section. But what really fascinated me was a black-and-white page from a magazine or catalog of an oil painting by Childe Hassam called “Under the Elms.” The scene was undoubtedly East Hampton, and I got the idea that a full-color image of it would make a perfect cover for the supplement.

    Frederick Childe Hassam is among the most renowned American Impressionists. He summered in East Hampton from 1919 until his death in 1935, and visited here earlier. The photo of “Under the Elms” that I found was dated 1910. It certainly inspired fantasies about what our town was like when it was a dozy rural place, and a few dozen summer visitors were considered a crowd. I was dying to see it in color.

    You can find many images of Hassam’s work on the Internet, some put up by galleries, others by poster companies. I spent too much time at the computer looking unsuccessfully for “Under the Elms.” (And in the process learned that Hassam is credited with an amazing 3,000 works of art: oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs.)

    I wasn’t ready to give up the hunt, however, and after making calls to a few local aficionados, got in touch with Terry Wallace of East Hampton’s Wallace Gallery (in the shopping area off Main Street that we used to call Eastman Way). He suggested that I call the Hirsch and Adler gallery in the city, where I spoke with an exceedingly helpful woman who told me to call Sotheby’s. It had recently sold two Childe Hassam paintings at auction.

    Now the trail was getting hot.

    It turned out that one of the paintings auctioned was in fact the one whose image I coveted. Sotheby’s sent me a copy by e-mail, but since it had been sold to a private collector, it could not be released for publication without approval. Given our deadline, the trail had to be considered cold.

    But Terry came to the rescue. He showed me a painting by William J. Whittemore of a girl and small dog in a field backed by flowering trees, which looked a lot like East Hampton, and I decided to use a detail from it for the section’s cover. I can’t wait to see how it turns out, once the hard copies hit the streets Thursday morning.

    Whittemore lived from 1860 to 1955, a long life indeed, and, he, too, lived in East Hampton. He is not as well known as Hassam, who was a contemporary, but I think we can safely consider him “one of ours.”

    Meanwhile, if by any chance there is anyone out there, reading this, who recently bought “Under the Elms” as an ornament to their stately home south of the highway, please give me a ring at The Star. My curiosity is killing me.

    It was cold on the beach. Five a.m. or so, waiting to set nets, fishing with the Havens crew in Amagansett. I was almost 15 and had left the boarding school I attended in ninth grade a bit before the end of the school year (long story). I moved to my parents’ summer house in East Hampton, where Doug Kuntz, an on-again, off-again boyfriend of my older sister’s who was in need of a place to live, was installed to keep an eye on me. He was my ticket to fishing with the Havens family, haulseiners for generations.

    Haulseining was taught to white settlers by the local Indians and remained much the same over the centuries, with the exception of four-wheel-drive trucks with winches replacing hauling the nets by hand, and rowboats being retired in favor of 20-foot motorized dories towed to the beach and launched through the surf.

    Our dory would launch just before dawn, when the truck towing it would back quickly and violently into the ocean and come to a sudden stop, letting momentum pull the boat free. While the truck pulled out of the water as fast as possible, sometimes with the help of a tow line already set in place and wrapped around a winch of another truck, the dory would power through the beach break, wader-clad fishermen preparing to drop nets after clearing the waves.

    They’d head toward the horizon paying out net, the end of which was still tied to a truck, setting it in a deep arc before returning through the waves far up the beach. Crews manned each end of the net; one would work the large spinning steel winch that towed the net to shore while a second neatly coiled the rope. As the net at last began to pull clear of the ocean we’d run shots of line to the water’s edge and tie it around the net while the other end was wrapped around the winch to continue the haul.

    It could take two hours: shot after shot of rope tied on, untied, then rushed back to the water as the trucks periodically moved toward each other, leaving a trail of netting above the surf line as the arc in the ocean tightened around the catch.

    By the time the trucks were shouting distance apart, the tension would be an almost physical presence on the beach. Fish would have been cleaned from the net as it was retrieved, but that set’s success or failure was dictated by what was in the bag, a giant sock of netting at the center of the arc that held captive the fish that had hit the net and turned to run offshore. A full net could mean an early day and a run to Stuart’s market to deliver the catch. More likely, though, the process would be repeated at least once. But expectations were always high for that first set; the wisdom of haulseiners for generations said the best time to get your nets in was as the sun just came over the eastern horizon.

    We woke up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. to fish. We’d sit in the dark living room of my house, Doug would smoke cigarettes, and we’d try to wake up enough for the drive to Amagansett in his drafty ex-Postal Service Jeep. Once at the Havens home we’d hop in the crew trucks for the drive to the Napeague strip.

    It was sleepy, cold, noisy, chaotic movement before dawn, before the rest of the Hamptons bothered to get out of bed, with the roads empty except for our small convoy of trucks heading east before turning onto the two-track through the dunes leading to the ocean and our first set spot. Everything had an odd edge to it: the air, the lights on the dune grass, the cigarette smoke in the truck cab, the sound of the trailer humming behind. I’m not convinced anyone but the men in the dory fully came awake before we started to see fish on the beach, but attempts were made in those few slow, precious moments of calm while the boat made its long trip out and back.

    Men would smoke, stand on the cold beach and talk about the day’s prospects, and toss causal, affectionate insults at one another. They’d tell me to be careful of bluefish, that one had leapt off the beach and latched on to Nicky’s upper arm once, that they’re dangerous fish, aren’t they? Yes, yes, bub.

    I never knew if they were trying to scare the city kid, but when I was finally insulted by one of the crew (I won’t be specific, but it had to do with my potential ability and supposed propensity for bed insects), I felt in some small part (very, very small part) a member of the crew, at least for a time. Never fully, of course, that would have been impossible for a number of reasons: I was young, I was obnoxious, I was born in the wrong state.

    But I didn’t care; the fact that I was there getting yelled at was what mattered. These were, after all, Real Men. Real Men who did Real Work, who smoked, who drank, who fought, who feared nothing I could think of. They were larger than life and stronger than gods and they let me fish with them in the spring of 1978.