Life peaked for me at the age of 9. It didn’t go downhill too much after that, but stayed at a plateau for quite some time. Class president and author of a handful of books, I was at the top of my game.

    Most of the credit has to go to my third-grade teacher, Queen Davis-Parks, who I learned passed away this month.

    Before I opened the envelope with the school’s insignia emblazoned on it the summer before I was to enter third grade, I knew that she was the teacher I wanted. I had no good reason for wanting Mrs. Davis-Parks except that my sister had had her two years earlier.

    When I saw her name on the paper before me, something that I would not identify as anxiety until many years later rushed over me. While I knew she was the teacher for me, I also knew that Mrs. Davis-Parks had a reputation for being tough. I was not so sure that I was up for the challenge.

    She stumped me right off the bat when she assigned an acrostic poem based on my first name, then a story using that

poem as the title. Too bad for me, I didn’t have an easy name to work with, but Mrs. Davis-Parks took the reins and even illustrated my book, “Lonnie Eats Incredible Green Houses,” about a monster with periodontal disease.

    She gave the book to my father that year, and it sat in his dental office until he retired several years ago.

    I learned what collard greens were when Mrs. Davis-Parks hosted a soul food lunch for our class that February. Not only was the history of each of the mountains of trays of food explained carefully to the class, but Mrs. Davis-Parks also had cooked every one of the dishes.

    For a woman with a stern reputation, her class had more parties than any other. Every holiday a celebration, every day an adventure.

    Mrs. Davis-Parks would tote a clunky record player into the classroom and play Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For.” She knew all the words and wrote them down, copying them for each of us. We were to learn the words and then sing the song in the school’s playground after our class election that year. All of us did, and we were surprised to hear the tune again during our eighth-grade graduation, when Mrs. Davis-Parks’s husband, Leon Parks, our social studies teacher, produced a video montage of all of us growing up. He played the song in the background.

    Even the students — by then newly minted but nonetheless jaded teenagers — cried openly.

    Mrs. Davis-Parks perfected my penmanship, as I was able to copy her flawless handwriting from the blackboard, and taught me how to write in cursive.

    The most priceless gift of all from the teacher I loved so much was the gift of understanding what was important. In fact, Mrs. Davis-Parks was my first editor — striking more than a handful of pages from a 20-page run-on sentence I had written about a horse.

    There were few waves in my third-grade career. But I have a keen memory of a day I forgot to complete a homework assignment. This was unusual for me, and as I stood in a line leading to Mrs. Davis-Parks’s desk to have her review my work, I panicked. Sweating, near tears, and thinking of how I would survive her wrath, she gave me a warm smile, put her hand over mine, and said it was okay.

    Turns out being a student of Mrs. Davis-Parks’s was not as much of a challenge as I expected. Even though she was every bit as tough as she was known to be, she was also one of the most inspirational and special teachers that I ever had the luck to spend a year with.

    After my big elementary school graduation, I received my first report card from my fourth-grade teacher. I can honestly say that Mrs. Davis-Parks had everything to do with my new teacher’s assessment of me when she wrote, “Wow. Leigh is ready for NASA.”

—

    Leigh Goodstein is a reporter at The Star.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    I don’t understand why there has been all this brouhaha having to do with deficit reduction. Simply make the people who have benefited from the fiscal handouts in the past 30 or so years pay their fair share. That’s not Communism — it’s equity.

    Mary wondered recently whether I ever got mad. Well I did, I said, especially when my tennis partner the other night called me off a ball near the net that was clearly mine, I being at the time closest to it. “First to the ball,” I said, “that’s an unwritten rule of doubles!” I was fuming, really furious.

    If I could translate that dudgeon into national and international — not to mention local — affairs I would be a virtual firebrand, and in a state every day, losing sleep because of the transmogrification into dreams of the plaints of my waking hours.

    But then I wouldn’t be a card-carrying WASP.

    (Confession: As it is, I do get up at 3 a.m. to pee, though without the angst.)

    The French side of my family used to call me Morpheus, and it is true that even to this day I am quasi-narcoleptic, drifting off while reading, while watching TV, while at my wooooooord process.................

    But to the point at hand: I could begin with overassessment and the coddling of south-of-the-highway denizens, and then segue into executive pay, gun-running and the absurd availability of semiautomatic weapons, nuclear power, nuclear proliferation, the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, the scapegoating of teachers (long live whatever unions that are left), the war against Planned Parenthood, the packing of prisons, foreign policy overreach, the tyranny of health insurance companies, deficit obsession at the expense of jobs, the worship of false gods, xenophobia, quackery of all sorts, bloviating of all sorts, the plague of social media, swine flu, staph infections, plate tectonics, and overwriting.

    There. I feel better, cleansed.

    Yes, there is plenty to be mad about to be sure. I’ve about got to the point where, with Peter Finch, I’m inclined to say, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

    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.

    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?

   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.

    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.