Beachgoing — or, more basically, proximity to the ocean — is probably the only answer some of us can dredge up when someone who has left this place asks why we stay, as harassed as we are by the damn fools wandering languorously in the middle of the road talking with their real-estate broker through their Bang and Olufsen earbuds, the college kids parking lime-green Lamborghinis akimbo across three parking spaces, the $22 egg-salad sandwiches, the too-frequent bad manners of the rich.
(I often tell my children to notice how having wads of cash in pocket — or millions offshore in Grenada banks, or wherever people with spare millions stash them — is clearly not toggled in direct correlation to good etiquette. My new friend the sexton of the Presbyterian church — that is, the custodian, who fixes the lawn mowers and vacuums the sanctuary — has much better manners and is far more gracious than some of our neighbors who fly between vacation homes by helicopter or private jet but behave like they were, as my father used to say, brought up in a barn. Sometimes donkeys and jackasses carry Goyard bags while princes carry their lunch in a brown-paper sack.)
This July Fourth weekend was a banner stretch for beachgoing, which is to say a reminder of why we still live here, despite it all. I spent three afternoons down at my favorite spot, Egypt Beach, bobbing in the waves, staring at the horizon from a beach chair, eating unripe peaches, and holding on my lap, but not actually reading, a biography of the Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum titled “Baby, I Don’t Care.” I haven’t seen any whales yet this summer; have you?
Egypt Beach is where my grandparents rendezvoused with my young dad, when he was small, and his siblings for regular, workaday lunch picnics back in the 1930s and 1940s; my late Aunt Mary, at the very end of her life, said she could see my grandfather Arnold in shirtsleeves coming over the dune to sit beside them and eat a sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin on his lunch break from the newspaper office. Egypt Beach is close to my house but not indeed the closest ocean beach to my house, but I prefer it because there are fewer people there on any given day than there are at Main, Georgica, or Two Mile Hollow. It seems to me that a fair number of people not from around here mistakenly think both the beach and the roadway belong to the Maidstone Club, and are timid of turning south off Further onto Old Beach Lane, but of course they do not. If I had a larger readership than I do, I’d hesitate to mention this in print, lest more new people pile onto the sand . . . but I think everyone who reads my column, small club that it is, is already in on these secrets.
You don’t have to walk a half-mile from the parking lot access path to get a good spot with an unobstructed view of the water at Egypt Beach. Of course, being a local person and thus perpetually, perennially aggrieved, the thinner crowd doesn’t stop me from resenting the other beachgoers innocently sunning themselves and enjoying another ideal day and another ideal blue sky. On Saturday, I overheard a woman in an unusual daisy-decorated bathing suit walking past in a west-to-easterly direction from the precinct of the Maidstone Club announce ostentatiously to her male companion: “. . . and this part is the public beach.” She wafted her hand in our direction, the volume of her voice set to ensure that her membership in the Club could be understood over the sound of the crashing waves.
I replied out loud, to myself, though not loud enough for her to hear my retort, because, naturally, I have enough grievance to complain but not the courage of my convictions: It’s all public beach, lady.
Whose beach? Our beach.
It’s probably wrong, but I very earnestly hope the rules about parking at East Hampton Village beaches never change and that more cars and more people are never permitted at Egypt Beach. It’s definitely wrong. I know I’m in the wrong. But I don’t care.
Anyway, one of the (few) delights of middle age is that my level of no longer caring much about my own appearance in a swimsuit, on the vertical Y-axis, has intersected with still being physically able to swim in the ocean without blowing a hip or knee out of its socket, on the horizontal X-axis, creating the perfect coordinates (0,0) on the Cartesian plane. There’s never been a better age for making the most of the beach.
I’d suggest this as a dinner-party entertainment the next time you manage to convince friends to leave their summer hidey-holes and meet you on the patio for grilled swordfish or kielbasa kabobs: a fun existential game called “Why Stay?”
I would put “white corn” high on the list of reasons I haven’t left after lo these many generations (14 generations if you count my kids). You only get the good white corn in August, of course, and fewer vendors sell white corn these days. Only Pike’s in Sagaponack seems to have it, come August. Is white corn and ocean swimming reason enough not to sell up and flee to, I don’t know, rural Vermont or Prince Edward Island?
Let’s see. Lazy Point and Louse Point are still good reasons to stay, especially if you have a friend with a shallow-bottom boat and a shellfish permit. Think, think, think, as Winnie the Pooh used to say, while sitting and thinking, or just sitting.
Of course, 14 generations, in and of itself, carries the weight of entropy. A really cute, curly-haired literary editor, whose own family had lived in North Carolina for 12 generations or something, once urged me, around about the year 1997, to stay in East Hampton because there was no possible way I could ever, ever give up and give in and end the string of generations. He was very charming and handsome and he insisted that I had to stay here on behalf of the family genealogy alone.
A charming and handsome literary editor’s opinion isn’t a good reason to stay, but it approaches the truth. If I examine my soul as I sit and look at the waves and at the birds revolving in that high, perfect blue sky — myopically but optimistically, as I always do, mistaking a common gull for a bald eagle — I’d say that my real reason for not selling up and moving away is because . . .
“They can’t have it!” I don’t want to give up my patch of sand and be run off Egypt Beach. All these other people can’t have it. It’s not a decent or defensible attitude, but, baby, I don’t care.