On Tuesday morning, I took a shower with a clam rake; it made sense at the time. I had just come up from the bay after a swim and needed to rinse off the salt. So, too, did the rake.

Old-time lore is that you should not eat oysters during months without an “R” in them, that is, May through August. Modern refrigeration and health departments have undercut that advice, but as far as personal shellfish digging, as opposed to commercial, there is something questionable about picking oysters, clams, and such from tepid, olive-brown water.

The East Hampton Town Trustees recently closed Georgica Pond after a toxic algae bloom was noticed there. Most of the time, the pond is open to crabbing, despite pretty regular indications of perhaps more disturbing bacterial contamination. This never stops the crabbers, however. 

Out in the boat the other day, my son, Ellis, who is 8, asked me if there were crabs that could swim. Yes, there are, I told him.

The blue-clawed ones we catch at the dock can do so. Most of the rest of the crabs he knows, especially the monstrous spider crabs feasted upon by black-back gulls on the beach in front of our house, do not swim.

Ellis’s question got me thinking about going crabbing — then not going crabbing until the water cools next month. The problem is that by late September, all the obvious spots are crabbed out. Ellis and I went last year at about that time and all we caught on our submerged chicken necks was a single, enormously fat eel, which quickly wriggled out of the net, accompanied by our shouts. 

I saw a photograph the other day of a massive blue claw whose pincers would span a garbage can lid. Apparently, Callinectes sapidus, or beautiful swimmers, do just fine amid the toilet flushings of the super-rich. As for me, I tend to hold off until September at the earliest: You know, a month with “R” in it.

I lived in Montauk as a child, and spent several summers there as a young adult, but it wasn’t until years later that I finally visited the Montauket.

It was approaching sunset on Sept. 15, 2001, and I was dazed and out of focus, detached as if observing myself from a thousand yards, lost in a strange new world. 

I’d arrived in Springs, from Brooklyn, on the evening of the 13th, collapsing under the unbearable heaviness of the attack, good friends graciously taking me in for three nights. 

There was no plan but to be far away from New York City, and I was happy to do anything, to go anywhere, to turn off the damn television and pretend all was well, and going out to Montauk for drinks at sunset sounded pretty good, under the circumstances. 

Standing on the lawn with a hundred or more others, we clutched our drinks as the late-summer sun cast its warmth across everything and all of us, gathered under the blue sky on Fort Pond Bay. 

I’m not much for jingoism, but damn, the seemingly spontaneous swell of a disparate choir, friends and strangers alike singing in unison and with complete abandon, brought the first, microscopic sense of comfort, even strength. “From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam, God bless America, my home sweet home.” 

I always think of that moment on the few occasions I’ve been back at the Montauket. Maybe I’ll get out there next week, for a cold beer and quiet reflection.

A most gorgeous streak of perfect late-summer days had blessed the Eastern Seaboard that week, the furnace of New York’s wretched summer finally yielding to cool nights, low humidity, skies a clear and beautiful blue. The morning of Sept. 11, like those before and after it, heralded another perfect day. 

I was getting ready for the commute from Brooklyn to my office at Ninth and Broadway when the crackling voice on WCBS NewsRadio 880 said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. In the first minutes, eyewitnesses said that it looked like a twin-engine aircraft. This was going to be a long day, I thought. 

Then, incredibly, another plane crashed into the other tower. America is under attack, said the voice on WCBS. 

We were all staggered that day, slow to process the surreal scenes on the television and before our eyes. For a long time that morning, I still intended to go to the office. Only later did it occur to me that the subway may not be running, and later still did I grasp the enormity of what was happening.

On the television, the south tower collapsed, but surely everyone had gotten out, I thought, and how strange the skyline looked now, and the sight of just one tower would take getting used to. 

I walked out of my apartment, still bound for the office. But as the door closed, another opened, this one at the top of the staircase leading to the roof. A neighbor across the hall, a beautiful young woman from Ukraine, stood at the top of the stairs. 

The building was a few blocks from the East River, and across it was Manhattan. The roof offered a close, clear view, and it was there that my neighbor, her roommate, the superintendent, and I watched the north tower burn for several long minutes, until it too collapsed, disappearing into an eruption of smoke and dust and flames. 

We all stared, silent, for a long time. Someone had a portable radio, and we listened to reports of a plane crashing into the Pentagon, and another in a field in Pennsylvania, and in the fog the truth was obscured: Now there were eight planes unaccounted for, now there was a fire on the Mall in Washington. Or not. 

Guy, an Englishman who lived three floors below me, was a friend. We had been in a band together a few years earlier. He did web design for Deutsche Bank, at 4 World Trade Center. 

I went downstairs and knocked. He answered, very shaken. He had been a little late for work, he said, and had just emerged from the subway when the second plane hit, the explosion and fireball directly overhead, people jumping from the highest floors to their death. 

He’s dead now, too. Eighteen months after Sept. 11, he got some very rare cancer. There were tumors growing all over his organs, on his spine, eventually on his brain. He went back to England, and he died. I was too broke and callous to fly over for the funeral. 

Smoke poured into the sky for many days, and the enormous empty space where the World Trade Center had stood seemed illusory, the notion that the towers could simply be gone ludicrous, impossible. 

In the twilights to follow, what remained of Manhattan’s skyline was majestic, that unique profile that everyone knows from pictures, from movies, from standing on a roof in Brooklyn. That night and the next, I went back and stared long into nightfall. But for the huge, billowing black smoke emanating from the site, it had never been so beautiful. What an unlikely juxtaposition, I thought, remembering the thousands dead and, looming over the horizon, the wars and death to come. 

I walked past “missing” posters affixed to every inch of every wall, each a plea for information painstakingly handwritten around an image of happy people at some spirited celebration — a birth, an anniversary, a graduation, or just a perfect summer day. Every last one of them was dead, buried beneath thousands of tons of steel and glass. 

I walked past firehouses where a dozen men were lost, and the evening news told of 25-year-old widows and fatherless infants and those who would soon be born into this terrible new world. 

And that was the worst thing, that unbearable heaviness, and it filled me with a sadness for everyone, but mostly for the children who might never know the innocence of awakening to the world, a welcoming, endless summer awaiting.

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer for The East Hampton Star.

Among the pleasures of a late summer day here is being at the beach and watching small shorebirds race to pick food from the wet sand as each wave recedes. As the next wave advances, they dance up the beach, returning in a seeming instant to probe again with their beaks.

Plovers and sandpipers live at top speed, as befits birds that follow migration routes twice a year that can reach many thousands of miles. In miniature, their bursts of flight from one place to the next along the water line, like confetti shot from a cannon, give a hint of their lives on a hemispheric and global scale.

World Shorebirds Day, as declared by a group of British birders, is today, with bird counts by individuals and organizations accepted through Tuesday. Here, Frank Quevedo, the director of the South Fork Natural History Museum, is leading a count beginning this morning, the third SoFo has done.

The idea is that annual tallies by volunteers and professionals around the world can provide details about the birds’ distribution and population trends, and pinpoint species in need of greater conservation effort. As this is a digital age, checklists can be submitted by a smartphone app, ebird, available for IOS and Android.

On a still, muggy morning this week, I was disappointed not to see a single shorebird on the Gardiner’s Bay beach. Five or six cormorants lingered on the wooden swim raft floating out front; maybe 25 more had staked out the nearby pound trap and were arrayed at wings’ length along the lines and stakes. On the beach itself, immature gulls of differing size stood impassively.

On most September days there are at least a few sandpipers around. That morning, with only the high-pitched love songs of insects on the air, nothing seemed to move, not even the water. Given the threats to shorebirds from all sides — habitat loss, climate change, competition from other species — it is difficult not to worry when none cuts through the stillness with a shrill call or the soft beat of its wings.

Our cat taught us how to die, leaping into the vastness, the slugs, taking their own good time, taught us how to love, and Henry Haney may have taught us how to live when he said life was what you made of it — in other words, that we could be the agents of our salvation. 

At least that’s how I understand him. No church to lean on, no secular liturgy, no manual to be consulted for the fashioning of ourselves — which is good because I am not good at following instructions. 

So we make it up as we go along, trial and error, stopping every now and then to take stock, asking ourselves what we want to make of it.

I was confronted with such a question some 34 years ago. What were my intentions, Joe Gordon’s son wanted to know, when it came to the woman with whom I’d come to the Giffords’ party. For, if I was serious, he said, he wouldn’t continue to press his friend’s suit. 

Yes, yes, I was serious, I said, in my diffident way. I liked her, I liked her very much.

 And still do, so much that on leaving the store that has Robin’s painted cards, of birds, often pairs, and flowers, this afternoon, the sadness which I guess is always underneath welled up, and I stopped for a moment, aching and thinking could we have one more insouciant moment, one more tango in Zihuatanejo. 

The birds on the card face each other, a couple, balanced and content, amid red, orange, and yellow leaves. 

Suspended so they seem to see clearly that it’s eternal and momentary. 

There was a time before we had spirits, and bodies, and this time now, the happy occasion of our 33rd anniversary, when we face each other and toast one another, a pair of birds amid red and orange and yellow leaves.

That’s what I make of it.

I know I’m repeating myself, but it was a while ago — in the mid-’70s, I think — when I last rhapsodized about keeping your eye on the ball.  

Tennis was my subject, as it is today, though Steve Bromley Sr., my doubles partner at the time, thought I’d gone a bit overboard in arguing that it — keeping your eye on the ball — was the key to bliss in general.

So let’s just stick to tennis. There are good days and there are bad, I’ve been told by my partners, who add that I should simply accept the fact. Far fewer good days, I’ll warrant, than bad in our cases.  

For pretty much the entire summer, I’ve been playing indifferently,  though cursing creatively — full-throated cris de coeur that resonate even more wonderfully when we are indoors.

This morning, being the last of the summer insofar as the Friday morning men’s doubles league goes, I resolved to see the ball as best I could, on both the forehand and backhand sides — for once. And I could tell, from the moment we began warming up, that my swing would be true, and that that would be all I needed to know.

That we won was beside the point — a lesson that’s taken me years to learn. Willing it won’t necessarily get you there. In fact overweening exertion can be a hindrance. Simply letting it flow may better guarantee victory, but, in the end, winning is beside the point: Knowing you’ve done your best is all you need to know.

“You were in the zone,” said Mary.

“Yes, I was seeing the ball come off the racket, on both sides, and — win or lose — that was all that mattered, all that matters.”

“That’s it!” she said.

“I think it’s the first time I’ve felt like this on a tennis court in some 40 years. Why are these moments so rare?”

“You’ve got to get out of your own way, and when you do it’s beautiful.”

“And that’s the truth,” I said.

For reasons that I think require explanation, I have never registered as a member of a political party. To put it simply, I was the editor of this paper for more than 20 years and thought it quite enough to have an opportunity to express opinions large and small in print, including who should be elected or re-elected to local or national office. 

Not being on a political roster also was an attempt to appear nonpartisan, to set The Star apart as well as keep it away from the internecine warfare that sometimes occurs within majority parties. Over the years, however, I have been criticized for obfuscation: The Star’s reputation has almost always been described as liberal, so who did I think I was fooling?

David Rattray, The Star’s editor for the last 15 years, writes its editorials, and has honored me by giving me a look before they are published. We’ve a collegial relationship; I respect what he has to say, and if there is an occasion when I disagree strongly with his point of view, we talk it out. 

This sounds enlightened, I suppose, but when heated controversies come along, I often wish I had a direct voice. Let’s face it; it has been a long time since the East Hampton Town Board was politically divided. If the heart of the debate is taking place within a majority party, it’s pulling punches to stay out of the ring, right?

It turns out that a number of friends who used to vote in New York City have taken my advice (and my husband’s) and registered to vote here. It was easy to convince them their votes would count more here than in thoroughly Democratic Manhattan. I also would argue that if they were aghast that the Trumpist Lee Zeldin was entrenched as the First Congressional District’s representative, voting here was imperative.

There also are two strong factions among Democrats vying for control of East Hampton Town government facing off in a Democratic primary next week. David Gruber, a longtime mover and shaker here, is considered the Reform Democrats candidate, while David Lys, who is new to political candidacy, is pegged as the Establishment Democrat. 

The Star’s letters to the editor prove this is a hot-button issue. There were 14 letters about Gruber and Lys among the 37 in the Aug. 30 edition, with another 28 among the 52 (yes, 52) letters this week. My guess is that more will come in even though there will be no opportunity for them to be published before the primary, Sept. 13. 

Carissa Katz, The Star’s managing editor, recently explained political philosophy this way: When a group used to controversy has sole control it invariably finds an adversary.

Perhaps it is just as well that I remain unregistered.

Digging opened Saturday for the East Hampton Town Trustees 2018 Largest Clam Contest. I should say officially opened, since it is my well-nursed suspicion that somecompetitors prospect for potential prizewinners all summer long, reserving the heftiest quahogs in deep hidey-holes for a shot at September glory.

The winning clams are big all right, as big as your head almost. I’ve never seen the like, and I’ve been clamming on and off for over about 50 years. Damned if I know where the really huge ones are found — other than Napeague, from where, without fail, comes the crowning bivalve.

Other than glory and bragging rights, there is no big money or valuable prize. Still, the story goes that one year when someone entered a Napeague clam claiming it was from one of the lesser harbor categories, the sharp-eyed judges were able to pick out the fraud. I don’t know for sure; I wasn’t there.

On Sunday, the day after digging officially opened, as I said, Ellis and I and my oldest friend, Mike Light, headed out in the boat to a favorite flat with our rakes. The clamming was slow at first as it often is. Mike pulled up a few near where we had anchored. But the action wasn’t active enough for me, so I went prospecting. Closer to shore, I felt the bottom change — softer, with a layer of fine gravel on top. I jammed the rake down. One, then two, then three. “Hey guys,” I shouted, “I’ve hit the mother lode!”

There is an odd thing about clamming. Once you hit a good vein, it is near impossible to force yourself to stop. As our baskets filled, I went to the boat to grab an official trustees clam bag, into which I transferred them by the dozen. Still we could not pull back.

“I am going to put my rake in the boat,” I promised, pausing three times to scratch up a few more. Mike begged me to take the rake out of his hands. Ellis could not be stopped. With sunburned backs, even after we had stowed the gear aboard, we kept at it, probing in the sand with our fingers and toes, cramming clams into our swim shorts pockets.

We won’t know until the contest Sunday whether the fat, nearly pure white clam that Mike found or a thick, mean-looking number of Ellis’s will be in contention. They are safely in one of those hidey-holes keeping hydrated until we enter them in advance of the deciding weigh-in.

The rest of our 50-pound haul has various obligations to look forward to in the kitchen: clams casino, clam chowder, clam fritters. That is, other than the two dozen we had for lunch over linguine an hour after getting home from the boat; they are already gone. Ah, September. 

A dead whale washed up at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett on Monday. Another hit the beach east of the Maidstone Club yesterday. Predictably much of the response was downcast. “Sad,” some said, implying that human activity in the sea was to blame. 

Maybe it was the hand of man that killed this particular whale, a minke, or maybe it was not. The cause could be determined conclusively after a study of its carcass and tissues by biologists. Like all living creatures, though, death must come, and a hard east wind like the one we have been having on and off for the past week will drive some of them ashore.

Time was that drift whales, as they were called, were of tremendous importance here. In the early days of the East Hampton plantation, there were few laws, but a good number of them, as well as agreements with the native inhabitants, concerned whales found along the beach.

 The 1648 deed for East Hampton executed with the local sachems reserved for them the “fynns and tails of allsuch whales as shall be cast upp.” Moreover, the colonists agreed to pay 5 shillings to any Indian who found a whale. Unequal treatment was true from the beginning, though; a white “man of ye Towne” would be entitled to a piece of the valuable blubber three feet wide.

At the Town Meeting of November the 6, 1651, John Mulford was ordered to “call ont ye towne by succession to loke out for whale.” Two months later it took a Town Meeting to resolve a dispute over how a whale would be divided among residents. 

Wyandanch, the sachem of Long Island, put his mark on a deal by which Thomas James, the town minister, would get “one halfe of all the whales or other great fish shall at any tyme bee cast up uppon the Beach from Napeake Eastward to the end of the Lland. . . .” Lion Gardiner, of the island that bears his name, would get the other half. What, if anything, Wyandanch got was not described. 

James and Gardiner, perhaps the leading citizens of the time, were exempt from the communal dirty business of cutting up whales. Instead, they were to “give A quart of licker a peece to the cutters. . . .”

Whales were valuable enough at the time that debts could be settled with their oil or bone, the baleen. And they were valuable enough that the Town Court was called to settle several disagreements in the early days, including one in 1674 when James Loper sought redress after John Combes stole a portion of a whale from Loper’s cart. Combes countersued, claiming that Loper had snatched up bone and whale that belonged to him. 

Town Meeting in about that time established a law dealing with whales found floating dead without visible marks of a wound from a harpoon. By then the men were busy with the chase during whale season from small boats, and under the sharp eye of the watch, dead whales could be claimed well before they ever hit the shore.

These days, after the biologists’ work is done, whales are loaded onto a truck and taken off for incineration. As far as I know, none of the Montauketts living in this area has asked for their promised fins and tails for hundreds of years.

Hurricane Esther had weakened into a tropical storm by the time its winds doubled back on eastern Long Island in September of 1961, and as a newcomer to East Hampton with no experience of the effects of heavy weather in coastal regions, I was excited and looking forward to the storm. The headline in The Star on Sept. 28, 1961, read: “Hurricane Esther Finally Dies of Old Age: Few Regret Passing of Two-Timing Line Storm.”

By then, we had moved a small, four-room house from the head of Three Mile Harbor to family property on Gardiner’s Bay in Amagansett, and considered ourselves adventurous to have settled year round in such an exposed place, where we had no neighbors for a mile or so in either direction. I remember being ready to witness the worst of it, and we drove out to Louse Point to have a look at the water before things got bad. 

But we weren’t brave, or foolhardy, enough to stick it out in the house as the hurricane approached. As we did during subsequent blows, we went to town for the height of the storm. I think that year we stayed with my mother-in-law in her house behind the Star office.

During Hurricane Belle in 1976, now with three children, we decamped to join friends at the imposing three-story house at the corner of Buell Lane and Main Street in East Hampton Village owned by the Morris family. Quite a crowd gathered there. We grilled hot dogs in the living room fireplace and the kids ran wild. Despite warnings about the danger of falling trees and flying debris, I was determined to take my old Cadillac (which a friend called the Brown Cloud because it had a tan body and white hard top and such a smooth ride) out for a spin, because I wanted to find out what it was like out there in the wind. I drove around the block, I think, and returned safely. 

Everyone had plenty of drinks during Belle — it was the 1970s, after all — and when night came, the five of us snuggled into a big bedroom on the second floor . . . and that’s when we got a lesson in hurricanes: An old elm at the intersection came crashing down on the side of the house, damaging a wall and a window. As it turned out, we would have been safer down by the bay on Cranberry Hole Road, where there were no trees to fall and where, despite the storm surge, the waves did not come over the dunes. 

We thought the whole episode pretty hilarious at the time, and I think there remain several families who remember that unforgettable house-party night at the Morris house and our near-miss with the elm. 

I wasn’t laughing this week, however, when Florence came ashore in the Carolinas. By Monday, Florence, even though downgraded to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of only 35 miles an hour, had killed 10 people in North Carolina and six in South Carolina, the result of continuing heavy rainfall and unparalleled flooding. 

We thank our lucky stars for being spared  this time. One of these days, the experts tell us, we won’t be so lucky.

They say “The Bookshop” is boring, which, of course, quickened my pulse. I have loved boring movies for years, and, in fact, once suggested that a new studio, M.B.M. (More Boring Movies), be formed to market them. 

Americans as a rule love action, blood, explosions, guts, glory, though it’s not particularly my cup of tea, “Godless,” whose women really could shoot straight, being an exception. 

In other respects, though, I’m typically American, a lover of sport first and foremost as the surest way to salvation. 

“Ah, you ran the 800!” I’ll say to a mother of two whom I wrote about in her high school days. 

“I remember you at the age of 6 crying when your pom-pom got rolled up in the mat at a gymnastics class,” I’ll say to another, now the stepmother of a terrific high school long-distance runner. 

“Mr. Graves,” still another will say, on running into me on the street 20 or so years after having graduated, “you misspelled my name throughout my high school career.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “I’ll run a correction this week.” 

(Indeed, it would probably take an entire issue to run corrections of all the errors I’ve made over the course of a 50-plus-year career — an interesting idea when you come to think of it, and that I have come to think of it on Yom Kippur seems to me especially serendipitous. I must atone, I must atone. . . .)

Anyway, it’s by their sports that I know the younger generation — younger generations, I should say. It’s how I stay connected.

I remain connected to my for-the-most-part boyhood home through the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, though, as we’ve been reminded lately when it comes to the Steelers, it’s not so much “the Steel Curtain” as it is the Steel Sieve, and the extracurricular carrying-on among some of the players has risen to the level of low farce. “The centre cannot hold,” I sighed, as Russell Bennett commiserated, “especially when it comes to kicking field goals and points-after.”

However, locally it is wonderful to consider the season that is upon us. I don’t think I ever remember a fall when so many of the high school’s teams were so compelling. As I’ve said, you don’t have to win all the time to catch my attention, just make it interesting. And this from one who loves boring movies. Go figure.