A week ago Sunday at Accabonac Harbor for a picnic, I announced to a friend that I was going to set off to search the shoreline for Native American stone tools. I had gotten excited about the prospect looking at images from the Montauk Indian Museum of arrowheads and other things picked up on the beach here and there. “I’ll be back shortly,” I said.

Seven minutes later, by my friend’s estimation, I was back, a white-quartz triangular tool about the size of a half-dollar in hand. I was pleased, but puzzled. It was an astonishingly beautiful thing, but was it legal for me to have picked it up?

New York law prohibits the collection of archaeological artifacts from state land without a permit. Where I was, inside Accabonac Harbor with my feet in the water, is East Hampton Town Trustee property, but as far as I can tell from a cursory look, trustee regulations and town law have nothing to say on the matter. If the trustees want to claim the stone point for their collection or want me to put it back where I found it, I will comply.

Meanwhile, I have the tool in my office, where I pick it up from time to time and wonder about its intended use. Two of its three corners are gone, though I can see from the fine and symmetrical edges that it was crafted with exceptional care. Holding it, I think about the person who made it and who might have used it and then discarded or lost it while hunting along the shore.

For thousands of years, native people lived and thrived and dreamed and died here, leaving behind indelible, if often overlooked, signs of their presence like the probable spear point now on my desk. To think that someone I will never know chipped this perfect thing out of a featureless stone and held it in hand so long ago simply fills me with awe.

“Don’t play it again, ’Nam,” I said to Mary as we agreed we weren’t up to watching what I’m sure is a very well done, years in the making Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

The lessons should have long ago been learned, though, admittedly, they probably need learning again, the most important being not to act rashly lest you (and many others) get burned. 

Our extraordinary military might ought to have made us humble, and yet it seems the opposite has occurred, as in “My stockpile’s bigger than your stockpile, my stockpile’s bigger than yours. . . .” Oppenheimer tried to nip a nuclear arms race in the bud, but Truman was deaf to his entreaties, writing the father of the A-bomb off as a wimp. We were the sole nuclear power for a few minutes, then the genie was out of the bottle and we were off to the races.

Will brains or brawn win out, Buckminster Fuller wondered. We’re still wondering . . . well, maybe we’re not.

The obituary of a Soviet officer whose gut instinct (and distrust of a hastily put together early warning computer system) prevented what could well have been a nuclear war in 1983 was in the paper the other day. It was, he said in later years, at best a 50-50 guess. Should the U.S.S.R. counter what appeared to be five Minuteman missiles heading its way? Given just a few minutes to decide, he concluded that if the U.S. were really serious it would have launched many more than five, and so, bless him, he guessed right — the satellite had misread the sun’s reflection off the tops of clouds as a launch! We should remember this close brush with Armageddon, and we should remember his name: Stanislav Petrov. Maybe we should put up a monument to him at the U.N. “To Stanislav Petrov, whose cool-headedness in the Cold War prevented World War Three.” Will cool heads or hotheads win out? That is the question, now more than ever. We know nothing of great importance apparently of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, except that he is pretty ruthless, as dictators are wont to be, and is an avid basketball fan. Dennis Rodman might be of value in that regard — a mutual exchange of touring N.B.A. and tae kwon do teams trumping an exchange of missiles in most people’s minds, I would guess. By contrast, we know quite a bit about our leader, and are about equally as dismayed. 

Most people, the everyday, average, normal sort, would rather there were no nukes, I imagine, but, given their prevalence, and the distrust that exists among nations, nuclear disarmament is wishful thinking, I’m afraid. (And, yes, I am afraid.)

It’s not wishful thinking, however, to ask that the world’s chiefs of state think, that they not think the unthinkable, and that they remember Stanislav Petrov.

The Ethiopian-American population of the United States is 2 million, with Ethiopians second only to Nigerians among people of African origin. The number is significant even given Ethiopia’s current population of an incredible 104,396,011, as estimated by the United Nations.

One of the world’s oldest civilizations, Ethiopia is also one of the world’s poorest countries, with per capita annual income estimated to be $590. Primarily agricultural, it has experienced hunger and poverty for most of its long history and malnutrition in children remains prevalent. That is probably the most common public face of Ethiopia, but those who know the country think of its grand history, of castles and the Queen of Sheba, when the subject comes up. Ethiopia became Ethiopia (Abyssynia) a thousand years before Christ was born, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity began when Europeans were still pagans. 

Parents brought their kids to the ninth annual Ethiopian Heritage and Culture Camp in Virginia last weekend so the kids could get to know others who share their heritage, and so the whole family could learn more about the culture of their roots. Mekdes Bekele, an Ethiopian-American who had herself struggled to raise a bicultural child, founded the camp and has met its complicated challenges remarkably well.

I was privileged to be one of six grandparents among the 215 adults and 160 children there last weekend, and I was constantly surprised by the range of programs available for children, who ranged from toddlers through high school. Most of the children were adopted from Ethiopia. Several older teenagers were returnees who had become counselors-in-training. There were plenty of games (not just soccer), lessons in traditional dancing, music-making, pottery, fishing, swimming, cooking, hair and skin care sessions, storytelling, and lessons in Amharic, Ethiopia’s national language.

While the kids were busy, adults could enjoy Ethiopian coffee, made with ceremony while sitting on the ground, or attend discussions on such topics as raising first-generation Americans, traveling in Ethiopia, and mindful parenting. They also could try some Ethiopian dancing, pottery-making, and cooking of their own. An adult program that mimicked one for the kids was an introduction to spoken Amharic, and I have to admit to being phonetically challenged, or, to put it mildly, a slow learner. I did learn that many words are differentiated by gender, as well as to say the words for “hi,” “peace,” “okay,” and “it is.” Other adults went on to speak in simple sentences.

Because I had gone with my daughter to Ethiopia when she adopted her second child, I was familiar with the grain called teff, which is cooked into the traditional Ethiopian flatbread called injera, with which one scoops up food from the plate with fingers. As it turned out, I enjoyed the two Ethiopian meals we were served much more than the American fare.

The program for adults that I found most moving was presented by four women in their 20s, who shared, often tearfully, personal stories about how they had been treated by other children as well as adults while growing up in this country, and the overwhelming challenges of trying to figure out what their identity was in America.

An emanation of human warmth had been evident from the moment we arrived at the camp. It was symbolized for me by a sweet 41/2-year-old Ethiopian child who spent a lot of time playing with my granddaughter. This little girl didn’t have much English, but she heard my grandchildren saying hello to me and quickly figured out what my name had to be. Thank you, Amara, for calling out “Grandma” whenever we met.

I awoke Tuesday to the cries of fledgling ospreys soaring overhead. Every year about this time, the young occupants of nearby nests launch into the air for their first flights at the beach and, exuberant, at least to my ears, screech in evident delight as they earn their wings.

I did not know this sound as a child living near the same beach. As recounted in The Star’s most recent East magazine, which came out last week, osprey were once all but extinct. Among their few last refuges was Gardiner’s Island, where, although in a single 1905 count a local naturalist had found a nesting colony with as many as 600 breeding adult osprey, they had dwindled to a point in about 1966 at which only three or four fledglings survived.

Scientists knew what was going on: DDT, a common mosquito control pesticide, was weakening the birds’ eggs to the point that they would crumble in the nests before the year’s young could hatch. Once DDT was banned nationwide in 1972, the osprey came back.

The path to the ban, however, was not smooth, as Glyn Vincent described in the recent East. Dennis Puleston, an amateur ornithologist, and Charles Wurster, a biologist at Stony Brook University, took the osprey’s protection to the laboratory first and then to court, suing the county mosquito commission to stop the use of DDT. Publicity surrounding the case eventually led to a state ban.

From New York, the anti-DDT movement spread widely. Soon, the Environmental Defense Fund, which grew out of the Long Island effort and was headed by Mr. Puleston, scored a victory in federal court, which ordered the then newly created Environmental Protection Agency to take DDT off its approved list. Slowly, the ospreys returned.

Osprey are relatively plentiful these days, to the point that they almost are just part of the avian background, like seagulls or starlings. Though, as the young ones just out of the nest make their first madly joyous flights at the beach, I cannot help but pause to marvel.

Until last weekend, I was in total denial about computer security. Sure, computers were being hacked, people were getting scammed, all the time — but not me. 

I have used Chase bank’s straightforward and convenient system for paying bills for a long time. On Saturday, planning to do just that, I was surprised when I went to Chase and, before I could put in my password, a pop-up window appeared telling me my account needed to be “authenticated.” I was surprised, but not surprised enough. I called the phone number given, and reached someone who identified himself as a certified Apple technician when I asked if he represented Chase. My computer is an Apple MacBook Air, so I took him at his word.

The “certified technician” said my computer didn’t have a firewall, which was necessary for security. He asked if I had ever used a security program and when I hemmed and hawed, he replied: “A ha! It was expired.” 

Satisfied that Chase had sent me in this technician’s direction, I engaged in a lengthy back and forth with him, ostensibly to correct the problem. He asked me to click on this and that, but, before long, when some of his directions didn’t seem to help me access my Chase account, he asked permission to access my computer remotely to complete the necessary fix. Someone a little more sophisticated or suspicious than I might immediately have recognized that as a red flag. But not me.

Providing him with access to my computer wasn’t easy, either. Again, he told me to do this and that and, fi nally, using some sort of remote desktop software, he was able to move around my cursor. (I know. At this point in the story you are slapping your forehead at my naivete, right?)

I was assigned a “Case I.D.” number of 1100478. The diagnosis was: “Security Breach and S.S.L. Certificate Missing.” S.S.L. certificates provide secure, encrypted communications between a website and an internet browser, but I had never heard of them before.

Blythely convinced I was in good hands, I went along with this whole process, taking note dutifully of another pop-up note that appeared on my desktop:

Error and Warning

IP address

Clean Network Connection

Malware 

Spyware

Optimize Computer 

50 to 70 Mins 

That was when I learned there would be fees. And they wouldn’t be small. Security and support for one year, the tech said, would be $299.99; three years, $499.99, and lifetime security and support, $699.99.

Aghast, I asked to whom the fees would be paid. The answer was “livepcexpert247.com — 888-331-8954. Tech name: Joe. Extension: 438.”

Finally alerted to what had been going on, I asked the man on the phone to wait a minute and sneakily asked my husband, who was half listening to all this in the same room, to dial up Geekhampton, the Mac store in Sag Harbor. Whoever answered the phone immediately recognized livepcexpert. com as a scam.

That should have been the end of it, but I had given whoever this was access to my desktop, where most of my passwords were stored. Fearing the scammers might use them to buy things or run up charges on Chase, Chris and I hopped into the car and drove to Sag Harbor for professional help. 

Before the whole thing was over, I had wasted the better part of a day. However, as far as I know, no financial harm was inflicted, although the egg on my face didn’t feel good. The moral of this story? I’m not sure there is one, but if some random website or pop-up ever requires you to phone a friendly technician, maybe you should go talk to the real, live computer folks in a brick and mortar store.

To the dismay of many, Labor Day weekend has arrived, and for Hamptoners it officially marks the end of summer. White, beachy apparel, nautical stripes, and floral bohemian dresses will be stored away for next-summer use, or likely for the holiday season when St. Barth’s, the Bahamas, and Palm Beach seem better suited for weekend tans and holiday getaways than the windy, white winters on the East End. 

For locals, on the other hand, Labor Day weekend marks the finale of a long-awaited three months of pop-up shops, celebrity sightings, summer concerts at the Surf Lodge, hours of traffic, and the inability to get a reservation at just about any and every restaurant.  

While locals will revel in the tranquillity, and travelers will anxiously wait for next year’s Memorial Day weekend to mark a new beginning to summer, ambivalence is undeniable when you’re in not one, but both of these groups. 

Having left home at 15 years old for boarding school, I grew up yearning for summers in the Hamptons, and so did all of the friends I made. Maybe they’d heard about it from their parents, listened to librettos from a multitude of music artists, watched “White Chicks,” or wanted to experience a real-life “Gossip Girl” episode (all of these have ways of infiltrating conversation when you say you’re from Southampton).

Though I suppose the South Fork can be all of those things, the reality of hectic summer months — no beach parking spots, bustling Main Streets, lack of dining availability, and heavy traffic — while far from the glamour “the Hamptons” exudes, had an air of excitement . . . maybe because I, to a degree, was a vacationer . . . a faux local. 

Memorial Day marked my arrival and Labor Day my sendoff to Sheffield, Mass., and eventually Winston-Salem, N.C., but now my days in academia are over. This year I will outlive the expiration date on my summer beach parking sticker and end the seven-year streak of spending September elsewhere, and while it’s a bit unsettling, I’m equally thrilled. The weather (insert emoji with heart eyes)!

For the record, all those episodes and songs . . . they’re misleading. Sure, summer is great, but oh, the fall. . . . The air is crisp, the fields are voluminous, the ocean is warm, the leaves transform into every shade from fiery red to canary yellow, the roads are open, light beams glisten and bounce off everything in their direct line, and the sunsets. . . . Civility takes the wheel and ruckus patiently sits in the passenger seat for a ride through the fall, winter, and spring seasons. 

Maybe it’s the frenzied summers that make falls on the East End so glorious. Maybe it’s just as beautiful, only now we have time to digest it. 

Jackie Pape is a reporter for The Star, and about to spend her first fall on the South Fork.

Would she want to learn how to make beach plum jelly, I asked my eldest child one morning this week. We were in the truck, driving to a college prep class, and she was going on only a few hours’ sleep.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like the taste.”

“But maybe it would be good if you learned so if you wanted to make jelly some day, you would know how,” I said.

“That’s what the internet’s for,” she answered.

She had a point, but it was one that made me instantly melancholy. I had picked up jelly making in our kitchen as a child. My father, who had learned how to do it from his grandparents, if I recall, passed on a skill that connected me to them, and through them to a long line of Huntings and Edwardses and so on, back to the 17th century.

I think about the people who lived here long ago just about every time I go onto the dunes when the beach plums are ripe. I think about the Native Americans who arrived millennia before the Europeans and how they must have exalted as the days of summer drew shorter and the sweet and tangy purple fruit began to swell. 

Early European visitors observed that the native people cooked meat with the fruit that grew wild on these shores. They also saw them preparing dried sheets of the pulp to save for the cold, barren months.

I could tell from the broken pottery and fragment of fire remains that used to spill from a dune across the road from my house that native people indeed had been here at some point in the past. A new summer palace for a part-timer rises about where as a child I used to find dozens of quartz flakes, evidence that someone long ago had made stone tools there.

It is perhaps sentimental for me to feel a connection through beach plums to the European ancestors and the people whom they deliberately displaced with a thicket of legal restrictions. Early East Hampton Town records are filled with laws restricting native people’s access to guns and powder and penalizing them sharply for the most incidental transgressions. 

I think about all this each year in the beach plum patch, which no one, even the most determined 16-year-old, is going to find on the internet.

As host of the third panel on timely, serious issues under the umbrella of Guild Hall’s Hamptons Institute on Monday, Alec Baldwin wore a number of his many hats comfortably. The topic, “The New Normal in News: Ideology vs. Fact,” was explored by Mr. Baldwin and a prestigious panel: Nicholas Lehmann, former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a frequent essayist for The New Yorker, Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!,” the long­time muckraking radio program, and Bob Garfield, the author of five books and a podcast on journalism and advertising and a co-host of the radio and online program “On the Media.”

Mr. Baldwin said he has been a news junky since he was 10, something we know here at The Star from the letters to the editor he has submitted over the years. As president of Guild Hall’s board of trustees, he helped plan the panels and took this one to heart, asking tough questions and eliciting generally jaundiced views of the corporate media and TV pundits from the panelists. He even found an occasion to bring down the house with his comical and by now familiar Donald Trump impersonation.

Acknowledging that the panelists could all be considered liberals, he said Guild Hall had tried but failed to get an avowed conservatives like Tucker Carlson to take part. And he drew out an apparent lofty consensus: Despite apocalyptic change in how and where people get news, and the many questionable sources, intellectual honesty continues to be the reporter’s credo.

As someone who has dedicated more than the last 50 years to newspapering, it was an evening well spent. The conversation was informative, sometimes provocative, and helped put “fake news” in perspective. Besides, Nicholas Lehmann had quite a few things to say about today’s Columbia School of Journalism, where the late Everett Rattray, who edited this paper from 1958 to 1980, and I met and sealed our fates.

The panelists bemoaned the lack of press coverage of local and state government across the country, saying it resulted in the loss of an informed citizenry, and Mr. Baldwin cited the Los Angeles Times as a major newspaper that managed to do it all. I couldn’t help think he could have applauded The East Hampton Star for being a community forum, where issues are brought to light and opinions of all stripes are published week after week in our expansive (and sometimes exhaustive) letters pages. Turn this page and take a look. There are 40 letters this week.

A hurricane passed well east of us this week. The storm was born as a low-pressure area in the Atlantic off the Turks and Caicos. Sometime around Sunday, it pulled itself together, and the National Hurricane Center gave it the eighth name on its current list.

Gert was, for us, the first tropical storm of the season. On land, one scarcely would have known of it, except for a rumble of suddenly high surf. At the beach, it was different. As the day ended Tuesday, the sea began to stir, and lifeguards at the village beaches talked about whether to drag their stands to higher ground for the night. 

At the popular surfing spots, the summer’s small-wave torpor seemed shaken off. Young men in pickup trucks sped into the parking lots, loudly checking with friends before pulling on their wetsuits and running down to the beach.

Hurricanes and big tropical storms offshore change everything in the water. Surfers from who knows where show up, tangling the lineup of locals used to one another’s ways. There is a subtle etiquette among the waves that may be unfamiliar to people from away or perhaps just not universally shared. What are unspoken rules here may not apply at breaks up west.

Here, there is sort of a rotation. If you catch a wave from a certain place, I have an expectation that I will be next for a shot. If I miss my chance, the next person in this rough line gets his or her chance. Surfers maintain a polite distance from one another, don’t sit in front of each other, and don’t paddle aggressively past someone to get quick priority. It’s all a bit like waiting at a takeout counter; in the absence of a line, hungry folks get grumpy fast.

There is a point where the order breaks down, even among locals. When too many people gather at a restaurant or a surf break, the cues become harder to read. We glare, look for familiar, commiserating faces, and roll our eyes. Then we catch a wave or get our dinner and all is well again.

“You’re good to go,” my dentist, Perry Silver, said after cleaning my teeth.

“That’s what I said yesterday to Mary after we had the cesspool pumped,” I said. 

I don’t know, there’s something about the way you feel after you’ve had your cesspool pumped — cleansed, ready to begin anew. 

I’ve been reading Jung lately, about the unconscious and its repressed contents that we ought to face if we really want to know ourselves, and there before me, once the cover had been pried off and we were peering down, was the unconscious metaphorically speaking. 

“Not bad,” the pumper said. I gloried in his words. “Not bad, that’s good,” I said. 

My daughter was coming, that was one thing that prompted me — an avoider as well as a voider — to take action. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened just prior to a festive dinner out there in Ohio, a root-caused massive cloacal contraction that cast us to the winds — Emily, Anderson, and the kids going to his parents’ house for the night, and Mary and I to his brother’s down the street, which was unoccupied that weekend.

Mary loved it that Todd’s house was so neat, so uncluttered. “Is he an architect? An engineer?” I asked. At any rate, its sleekness was the polar opposite of ours, whose dark living room with its raggedy books, sideboard, knife boxes (so the servants couldn’t steal the knives), velvet love seat, and dining room table that can be folded up against the wall when you’re having guests over for champagne, gavottes, and quadrilles is more 18th century than 21st.

Emily wants us to open and brighten it up, to consciously face our collective mess by ridding ourselves of the ratty oriental rug, by painting the classic burgundy window trim white (maybe Anderson will get to that when he visits next week), by replacing the three-cushion Jennifer convertible couches with one or ones more conducive to conversation, and by putting the plasma TV up over the fireplace, which we won’t do because that’s where Billy Hofmann’s beautiful painting “Louse Point,” with its moody allusion to the collective unconscious, is. We never tire of it. I’m glad I told him so once at One-Stop.

A founder of the Maidstoners softball team, the other being Dan Christensen, Billy, who could also pivot neatly in turning a double play, used to say he presumed Thoreau was my guide, and that if he wasn’t, he should be. This morning, in a review of a new biography of him by Laura Dassow Walls, I read that he once said, “Surely joy is the condition of life!”

He’s batting 1.000 in my book then.

But back to the unconscious, I dreamed the other night that my late stepfather was maniacally at the wheel of a car in which I and my mother were captive passengers. He was careening down the street toward a bank — we couldn’t stop him — and, as we feared, smashed the car right into it. A shot rang out.

I’ll admit it was puzzling, until I remembered that my basketball-playing grandchildren were on their way here and that they had great bank shots. Voila. Don’t talk to me about the unexamined life.