Hear The Un-Buzzing My Friend

It's back to conspicuous consumption in The Hamptons as Irene's wrath fades into the backdrop of sales on Newtown Lane, while in farm fields nearby Canadian geese flock to begin their conventions north and keeper bass swim thru the gut opened by Mother Nature herself at Scott Cameron.

It's a picture perfect Labor Day Weekend as snappers flop and coo in the bays. How quiet and calm it was with the lights out and the buzz un-buzzing. Even the most must-see-event-driven among us must have enjoyed a moment of solitude and thought, why don't I do this more often?

As school kids soak in the last vestiges of summer va-ca and young Manhattanites scurry to regain their too-cool-to-care weekend 'tude in search of true love south of the highway, count the days on one hand that you dug your toes deeply in the sand at Napeague and savored the wee things that scurried for cover in the shallows.

A Hurricane Like All Others

Excuse the hint of glee you detected in the check out line as you scrambled for flashlights and double D batteries at the hardware store. It is small compensation in dubious times that finds the native among us mildly entertained as the newly initiated prepared for a hurricane to rake eastern Long Island. By all official accounts you should be scurrying about like a rabbit in search of its tail in preparation for the big blow.

Yet see the steady, determined stride of the farmer and fisherman among you (though they tend crops and seabeds of a different ilk these days) as they emerge from beneath the yoke of modern times, lean toward their ancestral pride and stand firmly. For these, Irene is a long awaited adversary that will be likened to the brethren before her, heralded for her width and girth and deep barreled breath as she washes leeward.

For there remain some among us who can tell the tale as their own of the water that rose to divide Montauk from the mainland and the wind that toppled the spire from its protestant perch above the Old Whalers pew. New Englanders are a salty crew and Bonackers I dare, the most crusty of the lot, stalwart and determined to hold fast to a shifting dune and muddy clam bed.

As the great equalizer approaches, with her 800 mile reach and 130 mile per hour howl, undaunted by designer show houses and black American Express cards, it is the farmer and fisherman among us who fear the least. For they know that after this beastly blow a calm returns to the sea and a vitality to the field born of this baptismal rite, having washed free the veil of modern conventions. It is the pilgrim that lives lightly on the soil that weathers the most severe of storms.

All the while, deep in the furrows of Sagaponack and beneath the eel grasses of Accabonac, Peconic, Noyac and Nappeague, lives the birthright of The Shinnecock, The Montaukette and The Amagansett, laid claim by the Gardiners, the Lesters, the Millers, the Hildreths, the Halseys and the many named among us who remain invisibly beside you at hardware store, flashlights in hand.

Say You Did And Stow Away

There's a new psychological state emerging from The Hamptons this summer in a mash up of over stimulation and waning desire as event signs propagate along our back roads announcing the must-see-must-do fab event of the weekend. Even the most willing of circuit-going minds tires along the circuitous route from Seven Ponds Road to Hands Creek in search of farm stand and cell tower, texting missives to the posse gathering outside Round Swamp Farm stuffed like sardines on the grill.

Even if you wanted to take a gander at Escape To New York, with their quirky campsite village outpost behind the Elks Club on County Road 39 or trip once again into the ever-expanding Hamptons Designer Showhouse, take in a producer's chat at John Drew Theatre or make your pilgrimage drive to Rushmyere's in Montauk, there's plenty of opportunity to talk yourself out of it while stuck in the bumper to bumper traffic getting through Water Mill, Wainscott and Amagansett.

Yet, at 10:20 p.m. this past Saturday night I actually counted five empty spaces on Sag Harbor's Main Street -- which had me wondering what was awry with the universe. I know that they've discovered what they think might by a sludgy water on Mars but parking spaces in Sag Harbor is an entirely other matter... one to raise an eyebrow or two as August turns the calender her haughty direction. For this is the month we must pack it all in, whether we are particularly in the mood or not because with Labor Day goes the fanfare of party tents and the casually clad summer set looking perfectly disheveled for an evening of hobbing and nobbing.

Luckier to find one's self lost among the simple pleasures of an afternoon's dip in the ocean come mid-week, digging clams in Northwest Harbor as the sun sets down, taking an idle walk through Green River Cemetery in search of Frank O'Hara and looking up old friends in the backyard of youth. See the beach plum begin to turn its bluish blush plumping on Long Beach and sit idle for a time as the terns make ready their sandy beds.

If we're luckier still, no hurricane will come to wash away all but what is elementally essential and bring us back to our colonial senses for ours is a cyclical pact to keep balance here on The East End as the world rushes in and the lighthouse bears down on eroding rock to even the keel.

Enter SAGOPOLIS- A Coney Island Of The Mind

It's official - Friday is the new Saturday in The Hamptons as caravans arrive with expectations beyond realization come Thursday afternoon winding their way along the LIE in search of Exit 70 and Eastport/Manorville Road. Likely none of them have ever set foot in Eastport or any of the other minor villages that dot the south shore west of Westhampton Beach. Never mind that they have the same Atlantic Ocean lapping their shore line and the same quahog and mulluscs burrowing in their bays. They are not The Hamptons.

Neither were The Hamptons the hamptons when I was a youth attending Southampton parochial schools and its public junior high. The phenomenom of The Hamptons as a regional brand and social state of mind came into focus towards the end of my teens in the late Seventies as the hippies faded into a final tequila sunrise lost to the back beat of something heady called disco. Enter the wanton Eighties - when late Sunday afternoon tea dances at The Attic and The Swamp ruled traffic flow for miles along the Montauk Highway. These were free spirited times of chest bare bronzed boys on amyl nitrates singing 'It's Raining Men, Hallelujah'. Lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes was still vaguely affordable at $28 a pound and Sag Harbor was that little village with the reputation of having more local bars than locals.

There were a few artists and writers who had managed to grab a listing salt box on John Street from the old whaling line and neighbors remembered having a cup of coffee with John Steinbeck at The Paradise in the days when you ordered your eggs over easy from George. There were vacant parking spaces on Main Street and for a time you could go hear Rickie Lee Jones and Tina Turner perform at Bay Street when it was a dance club. Hilde's served the most delicious scrambled eggs and that giant blue gas ball that sat in the back parking lot reminded us all that we were the sons and daughters of the working class - a blue collar community on the rise.

Fast forward to Summer 2011 -- where July is the new August and a $22 hamburger seems reasonable after waiting 40 minutes for a table in the baking sun to be served by surly waitstaff who appear to have no idea why you would want a fork and napkin. It's the summer of the Farmer's Market circuit, the grass-fed organic air breathing feet-never-touched-the-ground I-don't-eat-meat-sort at the hamburger joint trying to place an order. It's the summer of endless sunshine and paddle-board mania as the minions discover standing on the water is all it is cracked up to be. It's not even the 20th of July and already the Tomato Lady is in full harvest, corn is chest high in the fields and the blue fish have begun to move out of the bays in search of cooler, less motor-ridden waters.

It's forage at your own risk come Saturday morning for the foolish among us who forgot to pick up a quart of milk or the avocado and limes for the fluke ceviche tonight. For the village is not ours three days out of seven when the streets clog to capacity and the produce sections run bare at the IGA and farm stand on Scuttlehole. Little East Hampton we, so on trend to be edged out of our own shops and restaurants while our kids learn the value of a $100 tip from the big spender on table 9, eyeing the Ferrari parked outside.

Summer, At Last

July 5th - A calm comes over the marshlands as the heavens shift to this more weighty equinox of families setting up camp at bay beaches for elongated days of seashells and fiddler crab. The main streets swell to their bloated selves, making room for the vaguely directed muddling from IGA to the last Five and Dime this side of the canal. For this is summer, at last.

Lightning bugs spark in the growing dusk at days end, after the yoga worshipers who dawn the beach, the career joggers who pace the roadways, the youngsters reluctantly belting their life preservers at sailing camp, the aging, sitting beneath wild cherry at the water's edge in their folding kitchen chairs. The wind ebbing off the tide as a lone swimmer strokes the length of Long Beach. Summer, at last.

Away from the buzz of trendy night and this year's rave, drinking sun brewed iced tea at a neighbor's picnic table. Away from Justin Beber and his Canadian girl pal nabbing tweets - spotted at the surf and sport shop in Bridgehampton. Away from Howard Stern, wife in hand, looking particularly middle-aged, navigating onlookers on their way to grab a hamburger. Away from the table hustling wanna-be, parking space thief on the ready to redirect blame. Away from the office and its constant gnawing, the daily mail and monthly reminders.

Summer, at last - in all its overheated, sun-drenched, salt crusted headiness, breathing deeply into the garden bed and exhaling out over the tree tops, tomatoes on the vine. Crabs in the inlet come grab us by the toes and lead us out over our heads for a while to bask in a dead-man's float and let the sky worry.

Summer, at last.

Why Pop Up Shops Rule Madison Avenue East

As the Big Weekend looms, for there are only three, we witness a rush to rouse the sun gods into casting a congenial mood of loosened purses nudging spending goblins to have a little fun in the sun. Fair game in resort towns where the assumption is you are here to be taken in by the shiny objects d'art and all the entitlement they suggest. It's swim at your own risk and for the majority dipping into boutiques to browse the eye candy suffices the urge to splurge, escaping unscathed by purchasing an accessory or two.

The dance is a familiar one and the maestro knows his mark far better than most, erecting six foot tall sand castles in his display windows, making commercial icons of our most idle summer memories. After decades of steady space consumption, the Ralph Lauren empire is so comfortably ensconced on East Hampton's Main Street that one could easily wonder if they've entered East Lauren instead of the Promised Land. This, in a village where rents have soared ever so close to the sun that it takes the deep pockets and immense wingspan of such a retail empire to not fall from the sky come Labor Day.

Enter the Pop Up Shop -- a perky moniker for the most cynical of merchant trading -- where the trend-fa-la tenant convinces the more greedy landlord to hand over the keys to the kingdom for two short months when the commerce is swift. This short-term payoff leaves Main Street bare the remaining 10 months of the year, but that's okay 'cuz the locals won't mind, they don't shop here anyway. Of course these savvy mega merchants don't see it quite like that because they hightail it out of town just as the blush of August begins to wane. This 'you might as well rent it to us at an ungodly fee for two months' come-on has worked on more than a few landlords who are more keen on holding onto past glories than securing conventional tenants at fairer fair-market rates. For this is East Hampton, where retail footage rates topped out at $200 per.

This is also the very same East Hampton which has sold it's birthright. Gone are the local merchants who peppered Main Street with their news store and cheese shop. Gone are the shoe repair, Five and Dime, and record shop. Here on Madison Avenue East the international retailer rules the roost in a Village where its year-round residents would rather drive 28 miles to shop Home Depot, Best Buy and the outlets. For those of us who remember a less-cynical Main Street in the days when East Hampton was voted the "Most Beautiful Village in America" the transformation has been disturbingly complete.

Makes you wonder if back in the firebrand days of open space rezoning (for those of you who weren't there, that would be the mid-Seventies), in all our zealousness to preserve a way of life and the natural environs, three and five acre zoning traded a generation's birthright to the monopoly playing retail mammoths that now occupy a Main Street that once hosted the great cattle runs from Montauk.

Digging All That Was The Week That Wasn't

The week after Memorial Day - that no-name span of days that don't add up to anything more than good weather, passable streets, recovering holiday weekend ATM balances and that most coveted of all East End phenomenons, empty beaches on 78 degree afternoons.

It's that magical time before beach attendants, parking stickers and "that was my spot" altercations on Main Street -- when herb gardens are on the climb and the return of that pre-summer notion that this year you will manage to maintain a semblance of casual order in the vegetable garden. Bikes are rolled out of the basement, potting soil freed from the dark damp recesses of the shed, unfinished watercolors returned to an easel perched in the upstairs loft ready for idle inspiration to find its way back to your yard.

These are the weeks we cherish like raindrops after a long drought before the minions arrive, cars packed with their own summer- 'field of dreams' -type yearning for something gone missing since grade school.

Soak it up while you can for it is a fleeting time of choke cherry and rose hip blooms, June bugs and strawberries. Come month's end we'll be counting fireflies and avoiding parking tickets to see the mad drummers at Sagg Main, cursing the traffic on the Fourth of July.

Midnight In Paris Meets East Hampton 6:45 p.m. Memorial Day

Pent up expectations fueled the weekend masses as they foraged the East Hampton Farmer's Market early Saturday morning for organic mushrooms from the sleepy-eyed mushroom guy in his floppy hip hop hat and dread locks- a first stop on the trail to the quintessential weekend round up. While further on down Three Mile Harbor Road the keenest of house scouts ran reconnaissance elbowing their way through the maze of delectables at Round Swamp Farm in search of the perfect Strawberry Rhubarb Pie. This was jungle warfare disguised in Yves St. Laurent sunglasses and Tory Burch, elbows locked and iPhones ready.

Saturday afternoon painters and carpenters were still putting the finishing touches on the entrance at Club Capri over in Southampton two blocks away from Hampton Jitney's command central. But in the damp fog that blanketed County Road 39 round 11 p.m. the doors were open and a determined few lingered on the freshly painted railing taking a smoke.

By 10 p.m. Sunday night the overflow from Sen and Phao on Sag Harbor's Main Street looked like its own universe of dance club exiles not particularly phased if a table or spicy tuna roll ever materialized. Like schools of blowfish they swayed in the tide moving this way and that, hovering at the hostess stand, sticking to their kind.

So venture out we did come Monday evening ever hopeful - only to find Midnight In Paris sold out by 6:20. It had rained earlier in the day so foolishly we figured the crowds had left and a 6:45 movie would be the perfect cap to a record-breakingly popular Memorial Day Weekend. We had earned an evening to ourselves after the onslaught of Mini Coopers careening the back roads breaking the sound barrier to our otherwise silent spring. But city girls have their ways and being a guest in my own hometown - a native among them - who was I to argue, plopped 3rd row center, neck arched, soaking up Woody Allen's unabashed love poem to 1920s Paris tripping off Owen Wilson's befuddled lips? There we were planted in a sea of New Yorkers watching their favorite New York satirist spin wittily on the charms of a bygone age in this most New York of East End towns - stars in our own casting call.

A Case For Extremes

The very same weekend André Balazs launches StndAIR service in The Hamptons with his eight-passenger Cessna 208 Caravan Amphibian aircraft lighting down on Peconic Bay, replete with complimentary glasses of rose and nibbles of Swedish Fish, former East Hampton High graduates Alex Esposito and James Mirras (both 24) put their entrepreneurial heads together to launch Hamptons Free Ride, featuring a six-seater electric shuttle that will run free trips to and from village beaches.

It's the kind of over-the-top gotta-have-it immediacy The Hamptons wittingly attracts that will keep StndAIR booked at $495 a ride from Manhattan on Friday evenings, and god bless 'em that's got the dough to soar above the L.I.E., the great equalizer of the road-bound where Maserati and Honda duke it out for the HOV lane. Our vote goes to the local grads who make good on an environment loving, free-ride sharing experiment that we hope makes it passed the onslaught of Independence Day. And what brilliant branding will they engender as the entire venture is to be funded by video advertising on the back of the free seats.

For those of us who remember the early days of The Hampton Jitney when something like three bucks bought you a bike tow from the beach to the village as the brown caravans made their way from Main Beach to Main Street, you have to wonder just how far Hamptons Free Ride will take us.

The Eye Of The Beholder

For the idle visitor beauty taunts the day tripper with her must-see list of trend stops as she rushes from Jobs Lane to Newtown, eager to be among the see-and-be-seen weekend bound. Yet for the shopkeep, fairy dusting for the onslaught, this is a land of stark contrasts where deafeningly quiet mid-week afternoons this mid-May do little to bolster the bottom line as UPS deliveries pile stack high in the back room waiting for suitors.

The annual gearing up is upon us. And oh the gumption these merchants must muster to light a spark to ignite even a modest consumption from the working crowd among us, keen on keeping their own heads above water as the economy sputters its way to a half throttle. Choice rentals linger non-committal, unnervingly close to the starting bell despite talk of a sprightly Spring among brokers just a month ago as the weather hangs in mid-step between chilly damp and foggy dawn. Like reluctant suitors leaning against the porch railing feigning nonchalance, they wait.

And all that would be as it is if only it weren't so damn true to form, overflowing and then running bone dry. Too much lending and spending what wasn't ours has left a tide line of discomfort where once a spiny fortitude shouldered the off season. The boat that rocked has long since dropped anchor in search of solid bottom to latch hold - adrift still without a sail.

So come and spend your hard earned cash on the elusive beauty that promise offers. We welcome your arrival, this year more than most it seems.

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?