Approaching Indian Wells, I stopped my truck on the beach to look at a flock of small sparrow-like birds. It was about a week ago. I figured I would take a few last casts of the season into the ocean. Big bluefish and a few striped bass remained around, or so I had heard.

Small birds are not my thing. To me, all the sparrows and warblers look pretty much alike. Not that I wouldn’t want to be able to tell the varieties apart, it’s just that I didn’t learn about them as a kid and that there are too many of them that move too fast to truly get to know at this busy point in my life. Seabirds, gulls, raptors, these I take a stab at identifying.

Yet the flock drew my attention. From a distance it looked like the birds were hopping. Once the truck was no longer moving and I peered through binoculars, I could see what they were up to. Each bird would jump onto a stalk of beach grass, its feet clasping around the fat seed heads. The bird and stalk would drop to the ground together, the bird would let go, the stalk would whip up, and the bird would pick at the seeds that had fallen. The process would be repeated.

This was, mind you, on the Amagansett National Wildlife Refuge section of the beach, where there are no snow fences on the natural, sloping fore dunes. Elsewhere, I have noticed lately, snow fence does indeed trap windblown sand, as intended, but also creates a barren microenvironment of little interest to the birds. It crossed my mind to wonder if anyone had ever done a rigorous impact study or really asked whether all the miles of snow fence were, on balance, doing good.

Birds’ adaptations to the Long Island environment never fail to amaze me. Though there were no fish interested in my offerings that day, scoters dove just offshore, picking something, I knew not what, off the bottom. Gulls worked the edges of the bar at low tide, eating small fish or invertebrates exposed by the outrushing water.

The flock of seed eaters moved away to the west before I could get a good enough look at them to try to find later in a bird book. There was plenty more beach for them to comb.

A longtime reader of The Star has given me a copy of pages from an 1839 diary kept by a Long Island woman named Maria Willets, which describes a seven-and-a-half-day tour she and her husband, Stephen Willets, took in August that year, more than 175 years ago, from Westbury to Montauk and back. 

The typewritten transcript of the diary (I would love to see the original) uses correct English spelling, although the place names are largely archaic. Maria draws vivid pictures of the appearances of landscapes and villages, but doesn’t record much about the people with whom they take tea, dine, or find accommodations. East Hampton, for example, is simply a “pleasant village.”

Nor does she describe the horse-drawn carriage in which they traveled, or whether her husband or a hired hand was the driver. She does point out, however, that they usually set off before the sun rose and traveled for 50 or 60 miles before arriving at their destination at 8 or 9 in the evening. A young mother, she writes that she left her “precious little daughter and dear friend” at home.

After visiting “old Man’s Rock Point, a rough place near the sound,” they arrive at River Head “mostly through woods and bush with no fence and just room for the carriage to pass” and “occasionally stopped and took some twigs of whortleberrys [blueberry] bushes.” 

They went to Ocqueboe, Mattituck, Cachogue, Jamesport, Greenport, and Oyster Pond Point before stopping for “breakfast at Ferry’s at Southport . . . and passed on to Canoe place, a name given on account of being so narrow that the Indians could carry their canoes across.”

They “reached Sag-Harbor for dinner . . . were nicely accommodated at Nathaniel Hand’s” in Amagansett, and “at 1/2 past 4 o’clock on 6th day morning we set off for Montauk Point.” They traveled “through innumerable hills of fertile appearance on which large numbers of cattle and sheep were feeding” and were among the early tourists to see the Montauk Lighthouse, which had been constructed just 43 years earlier.

“As we did not wish to spend a night on the point we industriously employed our time in surveying the shore where the mighty ocean beats with violence. . . . The sublimity of the scene is calculated to inspire the mind of man with a feeling of his own insignificance . . . but a speck in the creation he can but stand and silently wonder and adore.”

Continuing homeward, they left East Hampton and “passed through a fine farming neighborhood called Sag, also the village of Bridge Hampton to South Hampton . . . and soon entered Shennecock Plains.”

Here, at Shinnecock, Maria for the first time in the diary describes how the people lived. She calls the residents the “poor outcast of society” who have found “asylum.” She says they “appeared to be in a way to obtain a comfortable subsistence,” but goes on to say they do not appreciate schooling for their children. Finding only “two or three books for the whole. . . . We purpose to furnish them with some addition.”

It is impossible to gauge whether Maria’s words are condescending or compassionate, although because I learned through internet research that she died at the age of 82 in 1885 and was a member of the Society of Friends, I prefer to think well of her. 

Diaries like this are more than family heirlooms, and I will suggest that this one be added to the expansive Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library.

I read that Francis Bellamy, the Baptist minister, and socialist, who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which first was recited in 1892, had wanted it to read “. . . one nation, indivisible, with equality and fraternity for all” before thinking better of it, given the weight of anti-woman and anti-black sentiment at the time. 

Thus “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

“Under God” was added in 1954.

There have been advances since Bellamy wrote the Pledge (to accompany a Columbus Day celebration and to promote the sale of flags to schools), but the body politic in this country remains far from perfect, and to demand somehow that people, when facing the flag or reciting the Pledge, effectively ignore this fact is to exert an unreasonable constraint upon conscience. 

Not everyone believes we are one nation under God, not everyone believes we are indivisible — to do so, in these days, would be risible. And not everyone believes that the flag embodies all that is pure, equable, and just. 

Presumably we aspire to those things, and, yes, many have died (African-Americans disproportionately so in Vietnam) to keep that flag waving, yet to wish for a better union is not to demean the sacrifices of the dead.

Maybe if we all knelt — not just professional football players, many of whom risk brain damage as we violence-addicted fans cheer them on — when the national anthem is played, it would be better. Since not so many go to church anymore, where kneeling is de rigueur (an anti-clerical protest, I suppose, would involve standing), maybe universal kneeling — and genuine reflection rather than rote obeisance — would promote the healing that this country needs.

To demand, as our superpatriot leader (who reportedly avoided military service because of a heel spur) has, that all stand when the anthem is played is to treat the players, most of whom are African-Americans, as minions — millionaire minions albeit, but minions nevertheless.

A nation devoted to individuation, and those who play a team sport in which singular, eye-catching performances are celebrated in particular, ought not to be hectored into lockstep. We live in a republic, not in a dictatorship. (That’s obvious, right?)

Linking arms and kneeling, in all-for-one, one-for-all fashion, is, come to think of it, an exemplary way to celebrate this country’s strengths and to protest its failures.

At the end of the season in 1909, Frank B. Wiborg had a $261 balance due to Strong Bros. Livery Stable. This I learned from a tattered, cloth-covered ledger that was in the office attic.

There are any number of old records like this around The Star. My grandmother Jeannette Rattray was a local historian, having prepared what stands for East Hampton’s only official genealogy. Knowing this, people with ancient documents stopped by from time to time to see if she wanted them. From the quantity of material she left when she died in 1974, it is safe to say she wanted it all.

Wiborg, for whom a village beach is named, had a busy household. His account shows almost daily freight runs in 1909 for the months of September and October, likely for work on the Dunes, as his 80 acres on the ocean near Hook Pond were known. For the actor John Drew, the ledger records a July 2 auto trip to Canoe Place in Southampton and many entries related to the boarding of dogs.

Strong Bros. was like the Uber of its day, both a taxi service and a short-haul trucker that met the needs of farmers. There are multiple notes about loads of manure or sand going here and there. Summer ledger pages are filled with surrey trips to and from the beach, presumably loaded with folks planning to bathe or take in some sun. Lumber teams could be ordered. On June 17, 1910, the Base Ball Club is down for a hay wagon, cost $1.50. On Sept. 5, the club needed a stagecoach; that ran $3.

Frank Wiborg continued to order services from Strong Bros. In 1910, he asked for a runabout for fishing on Sept. 16 and almost daily stages. Change was in the air that year, too; the Wiborg account lists frequent purchases of gasoline starting on the eighth of June.

A scrapbook kept by Gerald and Sara Murphy of life at the Dunes (Sara was Frank and Adeline Wiborg’s daughter) contains a photograph of a shining, dark auto from about that time. The scrapbook is in the Yale Library’s collection, and I found a copy online. 

It is tempting to believe that this was the car for which the Strong Bros. recorded providing five gallons of gasoline and a quart of oil on June 9, 1910. Perhaps it was; perhaps it was not, but it is intriguing to think about. Mr. Wiborg did not order much beyond gasoline for the rest of the month.

A group of us were on the beach Sunday night watching the sunset over the hills across the bay as a sound like thunder rolled across the water. Because it was not quite dark, our assumption was that it could not be fireworks, and no distant sparks could be seen on the horizon, and some among our group of picnickers assumed the end was nigh.

I am only half-kidding. Though I declared that it was likely the rumbling had come from a festival finale in Greenport, someone pulled out a cellphone to check if the North Koreans had attacked Connecticut.

It has been a long time since fear of potential devastation swept the country, and I am not sure that the current foolishness between President Trump and Kim Jong-un really counts. Still, the thought did collectively cross our minds, as we sat and watched the sky change, that missiles could be flying.

In 1991, as the United States military and its allies began retaking Kuwait with a barrage of missiles and bombs, a single thunderclap rang out over East Hampton Village. Watching the news on television in the apartment I lived in at the time near Hook Mill, I felt my heart drop.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans were sure that terrorists were about to attack everywhere and anywhere. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited a close friend here because someone had heard him talking about a visit to Iran. During the anthrax mail scare the same year, some people opened their letters outdoors wearing protective clothing and respirators. There was a run on pharmacies for Cipro, an antibiotic that could fight the toxin.

It was with a familiar, if long sleeping, sense of dread that our sunset dinner suddenly turned ominous. Intellectually, we knew that North Korea’s long-range arsenal, if it works at all, could reach only into the far Pacific, not halfway around the globe, and was not able to target anything we might notice from Amagansett.

During the Cold War, as we did our duck and cover drills at East Hampton Middle School, we thought the submarine base across the Sound at Groton might be something that the Soviet Union would want to destroy in an all-out nuclear exchange. Still, huddling in the basement, in my memory, we were hardly scared at all.

Now, as adults, perhaps the world seems more frightening. More than 20 years of violent surprises, culminating when terrorists flew jet aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, leaves us perpetually on edge. It is strange, yet perhaps not surprising, that some noises off the north at dusk can make us worry for a moment that some new war has begun, as far fetched as that may be.

They say that half of life (maybe more than half) is showing up. Well, I have been showing up, but the teams I’ve expected to cover have not.

On a recent Saturday, I went to what I thought would be a rugby game at Herrick Park only to find the field empty, not even lined. “What’s become of the rugby club?” I said later in a message left with my usual source’s machine. No answer. Perhaps he’s away. 

It was the second time this season I’ve gone to Herrick expecting to see a game only to find no one there. 

It’s getting so there’s not all that much to write about, which makes me anxious. First, it was men’s soccer. (No, actually, first it was the men’s slow-pitch softball league, which several years ago stopped playing games at the Terry King ball field in Amagansett.) Then, this past summer, it was men’s soccer. East Hampton had one of the top teams in the Island’s premier division, but players weren’t showing up for away games, and thus John Romero said that was it. He held out the possibility that he might enter a team in the Calverton league, but apparently has not.

Then, thinking I’d jump on the over-30 men’s bandwagon, I drove one recent Sunday to Manorville to cover a Suffolk Cup game at the Dayton Avenue Elementary School there, only to learn on my return home after having seen no familiar faces that the field had been switched at the last moment. 

That one was on me. I should have had a cellphone. About twice a year — three at the most — I can think of a reason to own one.

And now rugby. I’ve always liked it that there were adult teams here to cover, not just high school teams, but they seem to be vanishing, along with high school football, which, even under the best of circumstances, apparently won’t reappear here for three or four years.

Chris Pfund thinks it’s owing to children no longer riding bikes. Their parents drive them to and from school, obesity is on the rise, and, for various reasons, they’re not playing sports with the verve that we used to.

I told him I saw all kinds of cyclists, in their 40s and 50s, riding in bright-colored ribbon-like pelotons along the roads here, at least on the weekends, but it was true, I said, that I hadn’t seen kids riding in any numbers, even in our tranquil neighborhood.

I rode a bike in the city, from the East Village to The New York Times, in the mid-1960s, and for the better part of my first 10 years here commuted on one, in all kinds of weather, though I agree that the traffic and the heedlessness of driv­ers eventually rendered me cautious.

Which leads me to wonder: Have we become too cautious, too spoiled, in fact, when it comes to leading active lives?

That’s not good for weekly sportswriters. There are only so many crossword puzzles I can do.

I popped Facebook open this morning and was surprised to see a video advertisement featuring Jeff Bragman, who is running for a place on the East Hampton Town Board. With the sound off, it did not make all that much of an impression, but it registered, which is probably the point. Jeff looked relaxed and confident in his blue button-down shirt as he walked in a wooded setting, presumably somewhere in town.

Scrolling down, I saw a photo of Rick Drew, an East Hampton Town trustee seeking re-election, holding a huge striped bass he had just caught from a paddleboard off Ditch Plain. In the text accompanying the image, Rick made a pitch for why he wanted to stay on as trustee. Definitely no Russian hackers involved here.

The tech may have changed, but the concept is the same: Get your face before potential voters however you can, and as often.

I was reminded of an election season long ago when Russell Drumm and I sat down in The Star’s upstairs production room with the Republican trustee candidates and one of them, damned if I can remember his name, produced three fresh hard clams, placed them on the table between us, and declared he had just dug them that day.

Facebook is different. Working on a story about campaign donations and spending, I learned that Manny Vilar, who hopes to be the next East Hampton Town supervisor, had been dropping a few bucks there, though I had not seen any of his posts. This may be because Facebook perceives me as more of a Democratic voter, based on the activities of my close online “friends,” which is odd, since I pretty much accept every friend request as long as the requester seems to be a real person and not one of those scammers using stolen images of women with impossible cleavage.

On the other hand, maybe why one sees something from one local candidate and not the other has more to do with their industriousness than anything else. Gary Cobb, taking a first shot for town trustee, is a case in point; his posts pop up in my feed now and then and get his point across effectively. On the other, other hand, Gary’s posts often have to do with boats and fish and the like, and Facebook probably knows that I find such things irresistible.

Scrolling farther down this morning, I see that Susan McGraw Keber, another trustee candidate, was at the Tyler Valcich car show in Amagansett on Saturday.

There was no sign of the Russians.

As of two months ago, I live on an island on an island off an island. Deep in the Mashomack Preserve, our house is separated from the rest of Shelter Island by a two-and-a-half-mile driveway, making it one of the most remote spots you could live in these parts. The quiet is quieter than anything I’m used to, the nights darker, the sunrises and sunsets more remarkable.

When my husband took the job as director of the Nature Conservancy’s Ma­sho­mack Preserve, an unspoiled haven of woods, meadows, and rocky coastline that makes up nearly a third of Shelter Island, it was that unpaved driveway that had me most worried. Two months after the move I’m still timing every trip back and forth, in part to prove to myself that I’m not really that far from East Hampton after all. 

At first it was eight minutes from one end of the driveway to the other, now it can be six, depending on the time of day. The trick is to finesse the smooth spots, slow down on the rockier bits and where the trails cross the road, and be ready to brake for the hikers during the day, the wildlife in the evening, and the neighbor who walks his dogs in the morning when I’m driving my kids to school. And the real trick — one I haven’t quite mastered yet — is to slow down, stop looking at the clock, and just enjoy the ride. 

Traveling a road like that every day you quickly develop a relationship to it and the habitats it passes through, even when you are in a hurry to get from one end to the other. It becomes a character in its own right, ever-changing. A meadow that you can spot from the South Ferry is my favorite part of the drive, and as fall sets in, its colors have made it even better. 

My 9-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son have named the three foxes we often see at the edge of the meadow, which we call the Fox Zone. They are Hunter, Jaden, and Jay. The kids swear they can tell them apart, and who am I to question that? 

Now I look out for our three fox friends and maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I usually say hello if I see them. It’s a thrill to catch the glint of their eyes in the dark at the edge of the road. 

We’ve noticed that the rabbits are plentiful near the spot where dirt meets pavement. That’s the Bunny Zone. In the beginning, the kids were naming the rabbits near our house, too, starting with Kevin, but there are just so many.

Most impressive of our animal neighbors so far are the bald eagles, which can usually be found farther into the preserve but will occasionally circle and dive over the big lawn near Masho­mack’s large manor house. One morning while loading up the car for the drive, a juvenile bald eagle swooped down not 50 feet from me, riding the wind and probably looking for food. 

Every day, Jade and Jasper come to me with some new discovery. Jade is busy making friends with everyone who works or lives at the preserve or teaching herself the piano at the manor house. Jasper chases down tiny frogs, tries to catch minnows in a net at Bass Creek, or tracks the progress of egglike mushrooms as they emerge from the ground and then shrivel. 

There is a lot to explore and so much more to discover as we settle in.

The sun is setting in a different spot than it was nine weeks ago when we first made the move. The leaves have thinned just enough that, sitting on our porch, we can see the South Ferries passing each other all day and into the night. And the driveway, so dreaded in the beginning, has become less of a barrier separating me from the broader world and more of an introduction to the wonders of this new little world where we find ourselves, eight and a half minutes from the South Ferry, 30 minutes from East Hampton, 35 from the ocean on a good day. But who’s counting?

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor. 

So (cough, cough) we are encouraging more burning of coal, while China, they say, is about to take the lead in the manufacture of electric cars. 

What’s wrong with this picture; haven’t we always been the presumptive leader of the world — the can-do society, no challenge too great, all for one and one for all, leading the charge into the future? 

Can’t imagine an end to America’s hegemony? History can. It’s always been about ebb and flow. Often nations conspire against themselves, as we seem to be doing. Yes, we are, in certain respects, free, all well and good, but of what value is this freedom if through it we come apart at the seams, if our vaunted freedom leads to fissures rather than to a shared purpose?

Communications never were better, the means for reaching consensus never were better, yet we don’t communicate, we fall way short of consensus. Will this society disintegrate because in idolizing the individual so much we forget about togetherness? 

I’m not saying this will happen, but it’s something to think about, and in doing so I am reminded of Orson and Ben Cummings’s “Killer Bees” documentary that premiered here in the Hamptons Film Festival this past week — a film chiefly about the togetherness of a team of players, individuals with singular skills, further honed by a coach, a former standout Killer Bee himself, who sees the big picture, as does his volunteer assistant, “the Michael Jordan of contemporary artists,” who says at one point that the Killer Bees — of the past, present, and future, with talents ranging from modest to great — are all part of a river. 

That is as good a metaphor as any for America, at least for the America that most of us, I think, would want to see.

You may have been pleasantly surprised, as I was, on Friday when the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Doing so in effect recognized its 468 member organizations in 101 countries around the world. 

However, no one I know was in the mood for celebration at the time, given that President Trump had just said the United States would “totally destroy” North Korea and Kim Jong-un, its supreme leader, had responded by saying he would “definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.”

You might say that peace advocates and the leaders of these two countries are on opposite sides of a seesaw. Does the future depend on who weighs more?

Then, too, like me, perhaps you weren’t paying much attention on July 7 when the United Nations adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is to become legally binding when 50 member nations both sign and ratify it. As of this week, only one nation, Guyana, and the Vatican City had ratified as well as signed it. Although 53 nations so far have signed but not ratified it, the nuclear-weapons pack — the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, France, Israel, India, and Pakistan — is not among them.

I wonder if the ambassadors to the U.N. from this country and Great Britain noted any significance in the timing of the treaty, its being adopted on July 7, a date rather close to July 4. The Declaration of Independence went on to change the world; the U.N. treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons is likely to be acknowledged only on the dusty shelves of history. 

Nuclear matters also were on my mind last week when a friend who is a physicist sent me a copy of a historical and technical report on the Chernobyl disaster, which he wrote for the Federation of American Scientists. 

As a preface to the text, he said, “I believe that it is important to get the Chernobyl story right, since, more than any other single event, it has shaped the view of the world on the viability of nuclear energy.” He describes what went wrong and why, and reports that there are 11 nuclear reactors of the Chernobyl type, which he says was flawed in vital ways, active in the Russian Federation today. 

Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island, the world’s three most serious nuclear accidents, are no longer household names here, as Americans turn their attention to the potential for a nuclear weapons catastrophe. There were 61 commercial power plants operating in the states in July and two more under construction. 

And while we seem to have become rather complacent about the possibility of radiation getting into the atmosphere or the water following accidents at reactors, alarm bells have sounded about whether the agreement between Iran and the United States and its allies about Iran’s nuclear future will hold.

Perhaps it’s time to tip our hats to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and go for a walk.