Something Brilliant Comes

To those of us who grew up counting cars backed up on The Montauk Highway Sunday afternoons in late July, the season approaches with its distinct mix of aversion and mild curiosities, having to share once again our back roads and Ice Age beach line with whom ever has mustered up the consumptive gumption to snag for themselves a summer rental the price of a four-bedroom saltbox in 1972.

This year the voracious may quell their idle impulses as gasoline climbs its way to $4.44 a gallon, affording the bulk of us a kinder-gentler turn on the merry-go-round for amble we must as tourism is our stock and trade. It is early in the season yet to call it, though it was imaginable for a time when aging VWs lined Flying Point Beach, their rag tops down, that we all seemed to happily co-exist for the sheer authenticity of a Carvel and ticket to the Bridgehampton Drive-In on Thursday nights, in the days of Rigley's Steak House and James Brown at The Hotel St. James.

The monied were undetectable then and its hard to say who liked it more, they or the farmers they commiserated with at the post office counter buying 4 cent stamps. Let it be said at the onset, everything must change and in the changing rearrange one's original point of view for in as much as all that which has been turned over by developers and the newly acquired, we have broadened the provincial binoculars from which our ancestors once scoured the horizon for whales at sea. As the native among us continue to dwindle in numbers we kindle to our hybrid neighbors planting organic gardens and convincing us of the virtues of free range chicken eggs, original farmers we.

Who is to say - in the middle of this wild experiment where culture and landscape make odd bedfellows of us all - as we swap text messages on line at the movie theater and vie for the same parking spaces on Main Street, that something unexpectedly brilliant this way comes?