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.

Among the mountain of depressing news surrounding President Trump’s decision to end the program that protected from deportation some 800,000 young people brought illegally as children to this country was the observation in The New York Times that when Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals began, some immigrant advocates and lawyers warned against participation.

Registration was key to DACA. Applicants had to provide details about who they were, when they arrived in the United States, and where they lived in order to sign up. They were told their information would be secure and never used to start deportation proceedings. That was not good enough for some advocates, who cautioned that the government could not be trusted to honor that pledge. 

According to estimates from immigration policy groups, Suffolk County had about 7,000 DACA-eligible residents, the majority from Mexico, but also large numbers from China, Guatemala, Ecuador, and the Caribbean. In East Hampton, where the resort and second-home economy squarely rests on the shoulders of immigrants, the implication of the president’s crackdown, if allowed to take place in the absence of new and rational congressional action, is alarming. What would happen in an already difficult employment picture if this young, smart, and ambitious portion of the population disappeared is terrible to contemplate.

There is a ray of hope in the response by New York State officials, among others, who have vowed to sue to block the federal government from using the information provided by DACA applicants against them. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not said what it will do if and when the president’s six-month deadline passes without action from Congress, but the risk that it might tap people’s private data and use it against them remains a terrifying, un-American possibility.

We all have those special places. Places we go for respite or rejuvenation, where we relax and unwind. Places where we seek refuge from a storm. St. Thomas is that for me, but last week a storm found the island and wreaked havoc. 

Hurricane Irma unleashed its wrath on several islands in the Caribbean. While it did not level St. Thomas as badly as St. Martin/St. Maarten, Barbuda, or perhaps even St. John, it is in shambles.

The American news media was slow to report how widespread the damage was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, perhaps forgetting it is a U.S. territory whose residents pay taxes and deserve federal aid. The Weather Channel played the same clip on rotation of palm trees bending in 185-mile-per-hour winds. 

On social media, I was able to find some real-time information by searching by location to see strangers riding out the storm in some of my favorite spots. But with the strong winds and loss of power so went the cellphone service and the updates. Local news sites were down. 

I found a group on Facebook called “What’s Going on St. Thomas?” where news slowly started to seep in. Lives were lost, the airport was flooded, the hospital roof flew off, buildings were destroyed, and roads were impassable. 

Lyn Shoemaker, who owns land where the Golden Age Ranch was founded in 2011 as a horse sanctuary, was out of town in Massachusetts when she posted ahead of the storm that Jerry, who runs the ranch, had made a trial run, putting all 27 horses in the barn — three in each stall and three on cross ties in the aisle. 

The last she heard from him during the storm was at 11 a.m. and the horses — and Jerry — were riding it out in the barn. “Close quarters but all behaving,” she wrote. “Jerry sounded confident and upbeat. Need to calm frightened horses.” 

By Friday afternoon she got miraculous news. Jerry, the horses, and even the barn, which he had built himself, and the shelter in the paddock had made it. A friend had even sent a photo to prove what otherwise might not have been believable. 

The destruction and cleanup are all horrible, of course, but it is the long-term impacts that make me frightened for all the good people of St. Thomas. They survive on tourism.

The horses, too, depend on the tourist economy. Once abandoned or unwanted, many from the local racetrack, the folks at the Golden Age Ranch support them financially by leading trail rides down to the nearby Lindquist Beach. Tourists, mainly, pay good money to take the ride down the rocky terrain to a wooded trail to the sandy white beach. 

The horses, with names like Captain Morgan and Bushwacker (a signature drink on the island that we know here as B.B.C.s), go right into the turquoise blue water. I’ve ridden in some pretty fancy riding facilities in my day, but nothing compares to riding with your feet in the water under the Caribbean sun. Knowing my mount, Budweiser, was saved from the glue factory and being treated kindly and supported by the trail ride fee makes it that much sweeter a ride.

Now the trails are impassable. Lindquist Beach — where my husband and I were married two years ago — is bare, from what I hear. Not to mention, the tourists won’t be coming if the rest of the island’s infrastructure cannot support the tourism. 

The news caught up early this week once major organizations like CNN were able to get to the island. The National Guard arrived on St. John. President Trump will visit the U.S. Virgin Islands later this week.

Tim Duncan, the retired N.B.A. champion, quickly donated $250,000 and pledged to match $1 million raised to help the islands. A native of St. Croix, which was devastated by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, he knows firsthand how long it can take for an island to recover. Then a swimmer, when the Olympic-size pool was destroyed on St. Croix he turned to basketball. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade.

There is so much to be done in the weeks, months, perhaps even years ahead to fix what recent hurricanes have undone. Let’s not forget about the islands we run off to to get away from harsh winters and our everyday lives. Let’s not forget about our favorite places or our friends — two or four-legged.

Taylor K. Vecsey is The Star’s digital media editor.

“What is truth,” Lisa’s father asked me at East magazine’s party at the Golden Eagle the other day.

“Beauty,” I said.

“And?”

“Ugliness too. Truth’s beauty and ugliness, I’m afraid.”

“And what is the ugliest thing that you can think of?”

“At this moment? Trump?”

“That’s it!”

I had passed the test. We spoke after that of our fathers and lamented wars and tyranny and dark, ego-enslaved psyches from which, it appears, little in the way of enlightenment can come.

I might have gone so far as to liken our new regime to an eclipse, but was happy I hadn’t, for the eclipse a few days on was to prove to be quite the opposite — a phenomenon through which people were united rather than divided, blown away, as it were, by such a rare and wonderful natural occurrence, rather than blown apart by benighted fanatics.

Earlier in the day, I joked that if no one were willing to share eclipse glasses — the library’s supply having been doled out by the time I arrived at its front desk — I would chide them for denying me the chance to realize how insignificant I was in the grand scheme of things. 

But people were quite willing to share. 

“It looks like a croissant,” I said of that part of the sun that was over the moon. 

We were all over the moon in fact. Paul held a colander through whose celestial holes the sun’s light shone onto a slab of white cardboard. We passed the pair of special glasses among us and thought how we might have thought thousands of years ago that two wolves were chasing the sun and the moon.

“If celestial bodies can align, why can’t humans?” Mary asked. 

Maybe it was a good omen. I saw the president look. Did all of the other world leaders? Did they feel like nobody too? I pray they did.

It’s the day after Labor Day, perfect for tallying up what was best and what will be most missed about summer. That’s certainly true for me, because I went around saying this summer wasn’t anything much, at least for me. But the night of Labor Day changed all that. This was the summer of grandchildren — and that’s where happiness lies.

It’s fair to say, without remorse, that three of my grandchildren have more or less aged out of everyday activities with grandma. But I was lucky enough to spend goodly lengths of happy times with four of them, who were often at my house this summer, and that deserves a big hooray. It wasn’t any particular thing we did together that brought the smiles but simply watching and listening.  

They did many of the conventional things kids do. They went to day camps and had play dates. They tossed balls around and flew small plastic planes. They hit softballs and kicked soccer balls on the front lawn. They did a jigsaw puzzle or two. Two of the four fulfilled a characterization bestowed by my husband as the running Rattrays, which means they ran throughout the house, back and forth, for no reason we could ascertain except they prefer to run. 

They played hide and seek. (I laughed out loud when one or another tried to squeeze into closets that had no standing room.) They did artwork. They took pictures with new cameras. They used iPads to play video games. One also had fun photographing another and then changing the result by imposing different eyes, lips, and hair.  

They played pencil-and-paper games of some mysterious sort. There were board games, too, but more often the games were, you might say, home-brewed. Word games, for example. We all indulged in a game called What. All you do is hang out with everyone and try not to use the word “what.” You’re out if you do, and it isn’t as easy as you might think. They picked beach plums, and I helped stem them.

One of these four spent the better part of an afternoon baking and icing a birthday cake, which was wonderful to both watch and enjoy. One of the grandchildren even sat down to watch the “PBS NewsHour” with my husband and me, sharing concern about the people in Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey. 

It’s often said that if you are lucky, like I am, you have little responsibility for bringing up your grandchildren but can instead offer some of the most important things in life: caring attention and love. You can also help them understand their heritage.

On the night of Labor Day, four of the grandchildren took over the playroom in my house, which goes back to the 1930s. It has a tiny stage, curtains and all, but it had been quite a while since the kids had the time or inclination to put on a show.

This night, they went full out. They found and got dressed in old costumes that had been put away in dresser drawers or closets and forgotten. They made tickets and numbered the seats. And then they opened the curtains on a variety show. The eldest was a riotous M.C. while the others presented individual and joint acts that were loud, rowdy (spilling off the stage at times), and hilariously appropriate to their personalities and talents. It was a great way to end what was a good summer, after all.

Reading about the lawsuit former East Hampton Village Police Chief Jerry Larsen has brought against Mayor Paul Rickenbach, a village force retiree, and Richard Lawler, a village board member, I kept saying to myself, “Wait a minute — none of these guys ought to have been doing these things to begin with.”

You want to bang nails, mow lawns, shovel driveways, clean chimneys, or take care of pools, fine, but policemen (or elected officials) providing security, parking cars (or booting them), and roping off sections of the public beach so that well-heeled riparian owners and their guests won’t be discomfited by strollers along the public strand, that’s another.

Why, I wondered, did I think this way? The answer, which resulted from a minimal amount of digging through our hoary files downstairs, was close at hand.

In November 1967, following a grand jury investigation into the removal of Montauk Manor furniture — the then-forlorn building being watched at the time by an off-duty town police officer — to a fishing lodge in North Carolina, we wrote that the town board had adopted a set of moonlighting rules for the East Hampton Town Police Department.

Those rules said in part: “Off-duty jobs are restricted to work which is NOT [emphasis mine] related to Police Work and does not impair the reputation of the Department. . . . No Police Officer can use any police equipment on outside jobs. . . .”

“All off-duty men who have outside employment must have a work permit issued by the Chief on the recommendation of the Board’s Police Committee. The request for a permit must be in writing and state the employers’ name, type and place of business.”

I know that was a long time ago, and I know that the village is different from the town, and I know not if those moonlighting rules I’ve referred to remain in effect to this day, though they always seemed to make sense to me. 

Not to say that such transactions are corrupt per se, but you can’t help but wonder about the possible attendant ramifications, which is why the moonlighting rules were adopted in the first place.

From The East Hampton Star, September 7, 1967

The two-month-long grand jury investigation into the alleged looting of the Montauk Manor by one or more East Hampton Town policemen ended last Thursday morning. The grand jury returned a secret indictment, and a lengthy report, also secret, which reportedly makes several strong recommendations about the East Hampton Town Police Department. 

District Attorney George J. Aspland confirmed that the indictment names one defendant, but refused to comment on the grand jury report. 

So there we were in Pittsburgh, my eldest daughter and I, and she said why not go by the old house I had told her my mother and I had lived in, when I was 10 and she was 34, beginning again after a painfully sad divorce.

Three families lived in that house, at 5649 Northumberland, in 1950, the Bonavoglios upstairs, the Busicks downstairs — I think he was the super — and my mother and I in the middle, at the head of an impressive staircase, my bedroom on the landing side of some Japanese screens behind which my mother took refuge. 

Those were parlous, betwixt and between, times for her, literally, though that never dawned on me until I was much older, until Mary enlightened me. She had no skills to speak of, and had to make her own way, taking typing and stenography courses, the child support being meager, though I, oblivious, as usual, and preternaturally happy, perhaps obscenely so, have always thought of those days fondly when I had her all to myself. 

I looked across the street at the broad dark brick house with its high-set gray front porch, and said to Emily, yes, that was it. Rather than go up to the front door, however, we went down South Negley a ways and came at it through the alley (Pittsburgh has many of them), to three people working away in the back, a couple and an older man, who were instantly welcoming when I said I’d lived there some 70 years ago.

Come on in, she, Lauren Grim, said, and so with no further ado we did. All the partitions on the bottom floor were gone, it was opened up, though the stairs with the landing were as I remembered them. What had been the door to my bedroom was walled over, the bedroom in which I had imagined a dark figure standing in the corner all one long night, the kitchen in the corner was gone. . . . The configuration of the rooms wasn’t entirely as I’d remembered. 

“I think that was the living room there,” I said, pointing toward the left streetside corner where there was no longer one. “That’s where the Chinese-red American Flyer bicycle was on Christmas morning.”

Lauren and Will Oberman, who had bought the house two years ago, just before it was to be condemned, and who are well on the way toward giving it new life, had us go through some old black-and-white photos from the period, photos they’d found in a cranny, hoping that I might find that they were of my mother and me, or of people we might have known, but they were of another family, no one I knew.

We weren’t there long: My mother and I moved a lot in those days, beginning on Howe Street, with my aunt’s parents, then to Linden, then to Northumberland, then back to Howe Street, 5712 — where Robert Gwathmey told me he too had once lived when he taught at Carnegie Mellon.

I felt blessed then. I still do. 

That’s just what it costs, or so I was told when I got through venting to someone on the Star staff this week about a plumber’s bill that I thought was highway robbery. I’d identify the plumber, but, if what the office wisdom says is true is, in fact, true, everyone is doing it.

People complain a lot about the price of gas on the South Fork. State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. even sends out reports on a regular at-the-pump survey, which indeed indicate folks here are paying a Hamptons premium. By the numbers, however, the real banditry, at least in percentage terms, lies elsewhere.

Take deli sandwiches, for example. A turkey with mayo and lettuce or a roll might punch a $9.50 hole in your wallet in Amagansett but only set you back $6 in Riverhead. Plumbing? Forget about it. The invoice for getting The Star’s upstairs toilet and small basin reinstalled to existing pipes after the floor was replaced came in at $600 for labor.

Naive, I thought the plumber had accidentally added a zero to the invoice. When I asked, however, he knocked $150 off the labor portion of the bill. Lawyers and shrinks charge hundreds an hour, but the real money seems to be getting on one’s knees with wrenches.

Not expecting honest answers from people in the trades, it is hard to figure out what is going on. The “Car Talk” guys who gave automotive advice on National Public Radio for decades used to make cracks about boat expenses and mechanics’ need to keep up with them. Chances are 50-50 it’s the same with plumbers. 

Or it could be that the labor shortage here means that firms have to pay more to keep their people from defecting to the competition. On the other hand, maybe they can just get away with it. Who knows?

Ever since Bucket’s on Newtown Lane closed some years ago, I more or less stopped going out to buy lunch. Instead, I try to stop at the North Main Street I.G.A. at least once a week for some cold cuts, lettuce, bread, and mayonnaise and mentally pocket the savings. Deli sandwiches, plumbing — who knew that they were luxury items? Then again, maybe I just need to get with the times.

East Hamptoners, both full and part time, are in a heightened political frame of mind these days, which doesn’t seem to be quite so true in Southampton. This may be due to the Democratic primary that took place on Tuesday, while there was none next door. 

Evidence of passionate political concern can be found in the marches held here in protest of  various actions of the Trump administration. It also can be found among the rank-and-file Democrats in a group known as East Hampton Resist and Replace. 

Similar groups sprang up from coast to coast after the inauguration, spurred in part by the wallop Democrats took in the election and in part by many Americans’ growing sense of horror that the institutions of our democracy — from the independent judiciary to the free press — were under attack. It wasn’t just Facebook memes that helped spread what might be considered a movement, it was the rise of energized political action commitees (like PAC for a Change, whose logo is a pair of boxing gloves) and “resistance” groups of all stripes. Here on the East End, there are now quite a few resistance organizations, both new and simply newly focused, including Indivisible Riverhead (now Indivisible East End), the loose coalition of folks based around a Facebook page called Let’s Visit Lee Zeldin, and Progressive East End Reformers, a.k.a. PEER/NYPAN.

East Hampton Resist and Replace was brought together by David Posnett, a retired physician who lives in Springs. The group has grown rapidly and is currently working to get second-home owners to register to vote here. The idea, which grew on social media over the last year, is that if enough new voters are Democrats, they could outnumber the First District’s Republican majority. That would be an extraordinary feat, given the district’s demographics and given that Mr. Zeldin won election by more than 58 percent of the vote. But these activists do not seem deterred.

Further evidence of the populace’s mood was on display at Guild Hall this summer with full houses at its Hamptons Institute programs on “The Trump Presidency and the Constitution” and “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” as well as one on climate change. Applause and questions expressed the boisterous audiences’ opinions.

And then came a reading at the John Drew Theater of Guild Hall on Saturday night of excerpts from the transcripts of hearings in the 1940s and ’50s by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The program, titled “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?” was sold out more than a week in advance, which has to tell you something. 

The well-heeled audience, and by that I mean fashionably dressed, may have been drawn to the event because James Earl Jones, Matthew Broderick, and other well-known actors were among the some 25 members of the cast doing the readings, but their interest in today’s politics came over loud and clear.

Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of the John Drew who worked with the actor Harris Yulin to bring the production here, was also in the cast, having some pertinent lines from the director Elia Kazan’s testimony before the committee. Mr. Kazan had appeared once, refusing to answer questions, but changed his mind and asked to appear again. This time, he explained, as Josh read, “I want to tell you everything.” Kazan was widely condemned for naming eight men and women as having been members, as he had, of a Communist wing of the Group Theatre, which the committee had targeted. Regardless of what evidence may or many not have been presented, many of those named lost their livelihoods, reputations, and, in some cases, even their lives.

Kazan, however, avoided being blacklisted and went on to direct some of Hollywood’s most enduring films. Condemnation followed him throughout his life, as the anti-Communist madness subsided, even reaching Main Street, East Hampton, when a longtime activist stood outside Guild Hall with a placard protesting Mr. Kazan’s appearance there years later.

We are, as the proverb would have it, definitely living in interesting times. I don’t know which way the wind will blow, but it is obvious that the nation and the world are at a historic turning point. Some days, when I hear of the ways in which new media can connect us and can provide a bulwark against oppression, I think that’s a blessing. But most days, when some fresh horror — whether brutal evidence of climate change or unabashed acts of hatred against minorities — is in the headlines, I feel these Interesting Times are indeed a curse.

Because Helen Harrison is an expert on 20th-century Ame­rican art and has written about it, her latest book should not have come as a surprise. On the other hand, what would your reaction have been upon first encountering her first work of fiction, a paperback novel called “An Exquisite Corpse,” with a cover drawing of a figure wearing a dark mask with a chicken foot on one leg, a boot on one hand, and an umbrella in the other? Surprise! 

 Ms. Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, where Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, lived and worked, has just published an engaging and hilarious whodunit peopled with characterizations of well-known Surrealists and familiar members of the art world, their lovers, and a good number of cops and robbers.

“An Exquisite Corpse” is based on a parlor game that the Surrealists are said to have played. The game involves passing a piece of paper on which you write some words or do a drawing and then fold so what you have done cannot be seen by the next person to get it. Ms. Harrison provided her exquisite corpse with just such an inexplicable outfit (and must have had fun doing so).

Andre Breton, a Surrealist who wrote its “manifesto,” has said the game, like the artwork itself, was “designed to provide the most paradoxical confrontation possible” between elements. It is he who sets the story in motion, finding a fellow artist, the Cuban Wilfredo Lam, sprawled dead wearing a bizarre costume that might have been drawn in such a game.

The book is self-published, which has limited the critical attention it has received, and that’s too bad, especially among those interested in the Surrealists and Greenwich Village of the 1920s, who recognize such artists’ hangouts as the Cedar Tavern, and who are familiar with art world figures such as, for example, Roberto Matta, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Harold Rosenberg. They all play a part. 

Ms. Harrison’s characters speak and behave personally in ways that seem thoroughly appropriate, given what is known of their real lives. She also manages to give them secretive, fictionalized roles in a smuggling operation, on which the story spins. Anne Matta, one of the artist’s real-life wives, is the key to the mystery. In the fiction, she absolves the artists of murder, while at the same time keeping their involvement in drug smuggling undiscovered. She even undoes the misimpression that a murder was committed.

Even though I spent a good part of the 20th century here and knew some of the figures in this book, I didn’t remember the work of Wilfredo Lam, although he was a prominent Surrealist whose idiosyncratic Afro-Cuban images were highly praised. The real Lam, whose background explains the mask that the fictional Lam was wearing when found dead, was a good target for fiction, although he did not die until 1982. 

Ms. Harrison, whose best known book until now is “Hamptons Bohemia,” reads a lot of mysteries and uses credible police lingo. She told me she often found what happens in the books she reads implausible, so she decided to write one herself. She’s working now on a sequel, although this time it’s a love story. 

I hope you are intrigued. “An Exquisite Corpse” is available at Amazon and BookHampton.