Whenever I call my mom at our home in Portland, Ore., she always gives me the latest news happening on our block, which for the last several years has included a controversy after a permanent unisex bathroom (the cleverly designed “Portland Loo”) was installed in the neighboring public square. The metal stall has drawn drug addicts and campers at night. The Loo advocates argued that the city needed to install a public restroom because so many visitors come to the park — which is really just a city block filled with a grassy patch and a chlorinated fountain that attracts a crowd of toddler-size bathers on hot summer days. To try and appease the anti-Loo residents, a lock system was put in place for after-dark hours. This didn’t stop the irate neighbors though from complaining and trying to get the bathroom dismantled. The Loo is still there.

Much of my love for Portland lies in these hyper-local gripes, issues that only people living in the surrounding area would even notice. I hardly think the parents and children who frequent the fountain realize a whole uproar has been caused by the bathroom they, probably thankfully, stand in line to use throughout the summer months.

Before coming to East Hampton as a seasonal reporter, I had not spent time on the East End other than a few weekends with my parents in Montauk, which included enjoying the beach, shopping, and eating in other hamlets. I picked up The Star before Memorial Day this year and read through the Letters to the Editor section. It is my favorite part of the newspaper because the letters often entail the kind of tales, objections, and applause that only come from attentive residents in a small town.

One I remember in particular rehashed a conversation the writer had with a woman standing in a designated nonsmoking area by the train station. She asked the woman why she was smoking, and she replied, “Because I want to.” The letter writer then wrote, “Sums up the summer attitude neatly, no?” I found it a precise illustration of the difference between locals and out-of-towners.

After only two months here, it is obvious how much the locals care about the East End. I’ve seen uproars around overwhelming partying in Montauk and the withdrawal of Uber, among other smaller, more personal issues that my sources have been just as passionate to expound upon. These are the types of stories that make news many places, including metropolises like New York City. But I feel there’s a greater sense of importance here somehow, a need to protect something precious that is in danger of destruction or change by outsiders, which is also a perceived threat in Portland as more people find out about its attractions and flock there.

One reason I became a journalist was to understand from the inside communities and the people who inhabit them. Each day, I see more through the eyes of locals than when I first arrived. I’ve started to understand problems, like share houses, that I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. My time here has turned me into a local, however brief my stay, and whenever I return next I will see the East End for the people who live here and the place they’re constantly striving to make better.

Now when I call my mom, I’m the one telling her about the neighborhood gripes. I talk about the people who disagree with what I write, and how I’ve learned that they usually have a point. I talk about the people who stop by the office grumbling about or praising an article. And much of my love for the East End has blossomed from these experiences. Affection for a city or town, like Portland and the South Fork, is revealed through the people who persevere to put pressure on officials or show up at board meetings to voice their concerns.

Had I not called this place home for the past two months, I probably would have never realized the kind of pains and efforts locals go through to defend their home. I would have been like those people obliviously standing in line for the Loo in Portland, unaware that the luxury they enjoy is a result from many hard-fought compromises by the community.

Britta Lokting, a seasonal reporter at The Star, will be moving on to report on a different community after Labor Day.

A longtime member the Star staff who had a moderately bad day on Monday asked rhetorically whether someone could really go through a day at this time of year here without running into some kind of annoyance or obstacle. Short of never leaving the house or hiding out at work from dawn to after dark, at some point we all have to come into contact with the juggernaut that is the South Fork in high season.

For example, the other day, I thought I’d avoid the inevitable frustration of driving into East Hampton Village to go to the bank by taking the time to walk there from the office. But then, fording Main Street at the crosswalk near Huntting Lane, I took a little chin music — as the baseball term for a close, inside pitch goes — from an irrigation company truck whose driver neglected to stop. Crossing back was okay, but I had to walk a slalom course around two other pedestrians peering at their smartphones.

As things worked out, however, I did get a little quiet time that evening, running my powerboat around from the house to its slip in Three Mile Harbor. Lisa and the kids were at various places and I would not be needed for driving duty until 8 p.m. I had an infrequent hour and a half with absolutely nothing to do.

After lifting the anchor and stowing it on the 24-foot lobster boat, I floated on the wind awhile before even starting the motor, then ran roughly northwest toward Cartwright Island. I slowed where the incoming tide piled up on the shoals, where a day before I had seen two immature sooty terns, ararity here, picking at leaping bait. They had moved on.

There was one other boat in sight, fishing, from the looks of it, near Cartwright. I headed off to the north, catching and releasing a small bluefish in Cherry Harbor. After that, I kept the motor off and just sat.

Even on a still evening, like this was, you don’t hear much that far out in the bay. Sound carries, but once beyond a mile from the mainland, all you hear are the birds, the wind, and the slap of small waves against the hull. Had I not had to meet Lisa for a ride back to my car at the office, and then to collect one of the kids at a friend’s house, I might have stayed there all night.

Jayma Cardoso, the owner of the Surf Lodge bar and restaurant in Montauk, went online last week and disputed a photograph that appeared on The Star’s website that showed several men urinating into Fort Pond. “All I see is a group of friends standing knee deep in the water,” she told our friends over at the always entertaining Curbed Hamptons. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I figured I should check it out. So I talked for a second or third time to the staff member who brought us the photo in the first place.

She said that the source (whom it turned out I know and trust) wanted to remain anonymous due to his position in the community. He had observed the men begin to relieve themselves against the Surf Lodge bulkhead from the Industrial Road causeway and then grabbed his phone to record the moment. I have every reason to believe his account rather than the self-serving nonsense offered by the person most directly responsible — other than the pissers themselves.

But sometimes I think that the Surf Lodge is blamed too much for Montauk’s problems with bonkers nightlife — and public urination. Consider that on two separate Saturday mornings at about 6:30 I have gaped at organized bicycle outings of perhaps 20 riders stopping for a pee break at Georgica Beach. The  problem there is that the restrooms do not open until 9 a.m.

It is quite a sight, watching four, five, or more men emerge, pulling up their Spandex short fronts from behind the old Coast Guard building, where, presumably (I did not check this out) they’ve just let it flow into the grass. Making this more annoying, it is less than three miles from Georgica to the village’s privy in the Reutershan parking lot off Main Street; you would have thought these bonnie captains of industry could have held it until 7 a.m. when it opens.

The other morning when a friend and I were pulling into the lot at Georgica to check the surf, we saw one guy not even bothering to get off his bike peeing without a care in the world into the weeds and pine at the edge of the bicycle rack area. I had told my friend to expect this; he was not disappointed.

“You’re kidding me, man!” he exclaimed as we passed the dude.

It’s interesting how the story of the summer has been the summer itself. And it’s interesting how so many people, not just the Montauk nightlife knuckleheads of the sort most of us once avoided in high school, treat this place like their own personal bathroom. Um, excuse me, I have to step outside now.

Three of East Hampton’s most admired coaches of the past generation — Jim Nicoletti, Ellen Cooper, and Kathy McGeehan — appeared in wholehearted support of Lou Reale, the ousted championship and award-winning softball coach, at the school board’s organizational meeting on July 14 — Bastille Day.

And while the turnout for Coach Reale was impressive — there were upwards of 60 there — the battlements were in the end not stormed. (That the “pros” outweighed the “cons” by about 97 percent apparently failed to persuade.)

But at least the “mess” surrounding Coach Reale’s forced resignation, as one board member, John Ryan Sr., called it, had somewhat of an airing, in contrast to the usual the mute rubber-stamping by school boards of administrative decisions.

The superintendent, Rich Burns, said he had taken it upon himself to overturn the athletic director Joe Vas’s recommendation that the 20-year veteran be rehired after having been “inundated over the past month and a half” by Reale’s detractors and supporters.

(At one point, apparently, during that span, Mr. Burns said he would second Mr. Vasile-Cozzo’s recommendation, and then, apparently following further meetings with interested parties, decided he wouldn’t.)

The overwhelming turnout of the “pros” was interesting to me, for when I used to cover public hearings held by the town and village boards it was always the other way, with the antis’ numbers far exceeding the pros’. If the antis in this case felt so strongly, as Mr. Burns indicated they did, you would have thought they’d have shown up.

Coach Reale is still in the dark, as far as I know, as to all of the allegations made. At the very least, he ought to have been given a chance to respond to them by the superintendent, who at the meeting, with his lips pursed and his voice lowered, hinted that the partisans would change their tune if they knew what he knew.

As to allegations of “verbal abuse,” it seems strange that players dating to his early years here, players who presumably were subject to the same “abuse,” would come out to praise him.

Mr. Ryan, when asked the next day if he thought the board might override Mr. Burns — as apparently it can — said he didn’t think there was enough support, though he did not altogether rule out the possibility of an override, or the possibility of a vote on the matter that would put everyone on record.

One thing for sure, as Mr. Nicoletti said, the coaching situation here is in a perilous way, given the fact that on three occasions in the past 18 months — in the cases of R.J. Etzel, who had moved back here from Miami so that he could coach varsity baseball, Steve Redlus, the former varsity football coach, who had initially promised “a total rebuild” of that program, and now Coach Reale — the superintendent has effectively disempowered the A.D.

I doubt that it used to be this way. Mr. Nicoletti said he couldn’t remember similar instances in the past.

It’s as Hughie King has often said, “The inmates are running the asylum.”

Call me a tree hugger. I like deer. I even like the deer who bed down in a hedgerow between our house and the library, or across the lane in a bushy area between two neighbors’ houses, or at the far, overgrown side of the property, beyond the barn. (Yes, even I admit, there have been too many deer in the village, too many for comfort and too many for traffic safety, too.)

Regardless of the damage the deer had done to our garden, I had always been happy to watch their comings and goings, as they strolled or trotted across the yard, or, on occasion, settled down for a rest smack-dab in the middle of the lawn, as if they were in charge. I have been known to pride myself on not having put up elaborate deer fencing to keep them out. But then we decided to get a dog.  

Goodie — our late, lamented, last family dog — had been allowed to roam the neighborhood unsupervised, but times have changed. How long would a free-range dog live with traffic as crazy as it now is? How long has it been since that beloved, footloose basset hound (whose name I can’t recall, though I bet someone will write in to remind me) was the unofficial mayor of Newtown Lane? 

Once we had decided to get a dog, we had to face the reality that either we would need to take it out on a leash for regular walks or we would have to fence in our backyard. 

I admit I felt like a bit of a hypocrite when we decided on the latter. The modest, and all but invisible dark-wire fence we put up is only five feet high, but so far it has kept out the deer. I guess our particular deer aren’t up to scratch as jumpers. 

We are beginning to observe various old shrubs and flowers that had been fodder for the deer coming slowly back to life. A few very old rose bushes, I’m happy to report, are going to survive the deer-ravaging they had suffered over the last few years. I imagine that soon we’ll even be able to remove the protective wire barriers we had placed around the roses; maybe we’ll even plant some new ones.

 My friend Galen Williams, who has designed gardens here for decades, dropped by the other day and made note of the fact that tiny hosta leaves were poking up and daylilies trying to sprout. The daylilies had been totally devoured and had long since disappeared from view. The hostas, planted by a previous generation decades ago, used to surround the house in profusion, but ferns had taken their place in recent years. Now, I’m trying to give away ferns to any friends who would like transplants.

It seems amusing that, these days, the deer are free-range villagers and the dogs are captive, from Main Street to Northwest Woods. 

Sookie, our delightfully shaggy new mutt from the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, isn’t much of a barker, but she whines and barks excitedly — and dances on her hind legs like a circus dog — when she sees deer in the front yard, beyond the fence. Clearly, her heart’s desire is to escape and get at them. But she loves her backyard realm and hasn’t, at least so far, figured out that she probably could dig her way out if she put her mind to it. 

Will the deer stay away, or will they get hungry enough come fall to venture a leap over the fence? And, if they do leap across, will little Sookie’s bad-girl terrier displays chase them away again from the old roses? Only time will tell, but so far, the score is deer zero, dog one.

I like Jay Schneiderman. We go way back. I first met him when he was chairman of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals and I was assigned to the beat. We have kids roughly the same age. I figure his heart is in the right place. But if there is any other local politician now who slings as much jive, I don’t know who that is.

Case in point: About three weeks ago, I was asked to do a cameo appearance at a forum at the Parrish Art Museum called “Can This Town Be Saved?” At the outset, the moderator, Maziar Behrooz, warned that it wasn’t going to be saved that night. The audience, about 80 people, laughed. Jay, a Suffolk legislator now, was one of the panelists, with Filipe Correa, who is an accomplished urban planner, architect, and Harvard assistant professor. I was brought in to provide some population numbers, which led to a bunch of work that will eventually become a story for The Star.

During a question-and-answer period, a member of the audience asked about climate change and sea level rise and if East End governments were paying attention. Jay, a former Montauker who is running somewhat implausibly for Southampton Town supervisor, leaned in toward the microphone. Then he said something to the effect that the County Legislature was talking about it every day. He went on in this vein for a while.

Standing off to the side at a lectern, I resisted the urge to laugh and searched my recollection. Could there have been some initiative I missed? Jay mentioned having a hand in the money to elevate Dune Road in Southampton; I think that was about it.

Fact is, no one is doing much of anything, from East Hampton to New York City Hall. Albany wonks have produced a couple of highly detailed studies filled with recommendations, but they have not been taken up by any of the communities The Star covers. There is a whole lot of talk, but next to no action. Building goes on in danger zones near the bays and oceans. Questionable infrastructure investments continue to be made despite clear indications that the water is coming. And East Hampton’s supposedly binding waterfront plan designed almost 20 years ago to control coastal development is largely ignored.

In East Hampton, Mr. Schneiderman had his chance as a two-term supervisor to get something meaningful going. He did not. In fact, the only town official of our memory to even suggest that major shifts had to come soon was Bill McGintee, and you know what happened to him.

The other day, Hillary Clinton released a climate change plan calling for substantial increases in renewable energy with the goal of reducing global warming, and by extension, sea level rise. It’s a starting point, but local governments shouldn’t just wait around for help from Washington. And officials, even those running for office, shouldn’t be tolerated when they paper over the fact that so far, nothing has really been done.

Few people know that I moonlight as a longshoreman, occasionally helping to unload lobster boats in Montauk, or, in the early morning, packing shipments of same, thousands of them boxed, iced, and trucked to restaurants and markets near and far. It’s punishing work for a scrawny type like me, and it doesn’t pay nearly as well as catering, but I don’t mind.

Anyway, I don’t want to do catering anymore. Serving the 1 Percent has helped to keep me afloat these last few years, especially in 2012, when my bartending gig at Spring Close crashed and burned along with the restaurant itself. But forbearance isn’t my forte, and I just can’t steel myself to stand there for hours with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, or fetch drinks from the bar, or haul long folding tables and crates of liquor, mixers, and ice from trailer to sprawling, kelly green lawn and back. The money is good, but now I am weary.

I never play the piano anymore. I just don’t have the time, those catering gigs I’m turning down notwithstanding. There’s the office, and then there is dinner to be made, and the dishes to be washed, and the laundry, and the ironing, and if there is any time left over it’s down to the ocean, what with the days already growing shorter and the autumn bearing down.

And anyway, even if I became good at it, someday, and performed publicly, who would listen? No one, in my observation. Case in point: I recently heard from a professional pianist who’d quickly aborted his summer residency at a certain Hamptons restaurant-cum-nightclub. Why? “It just became overwhelming,” the musician said, “in terms of the noise and the confusion. . . . It’s just too trendy, too fast, too in-your-face. It’s not the Hamptons I remember. I have no plans to go back.”

He could have been Wolfgang f’ing Mozart and nobody would have listened, is my guess. And think of the poor customers: How can they be expected to listen to the American Songbook with a cellphone pressed to one ear while the other senses are devoted to scouring the crowd for celebrities?

A few Saturdays ago, I was due at the docks to help unload one of those aforementioned boats. As it happened, the 7 p.m. start time coincided with that of a particularly big concert at the Surf Lodge. After enduring the 35-miles-per-hour traffic all the way from Amagansett, and then the 10 m.p.h. crawl through town, I was running late and in a real mood on Edgemere.

Just outside this so-called surf lodge, the out-of-state motorist in front of me came to a complete stop, and another cut off all traffic, zipping out from Industrial Road as if shot from a cannon, and a team of cyclists rode three abreast on the shoulder, and a thousand beautiful people stampeded toward the chaos, and that was when I sort of lost it. When the blaring of the horn had subsided, along with a stream of expletives that would have made my father very proud, no lives had been lost. It could have gone differently.

When the work was done, I got back in the car for the 20-minute drive back to Amagansett. Except this time it took 65 minutes, thanks to the D.W.I. checkpoint at the easterly side of Napeague.

It’s just too trendy, too fast, too in-your-face. It’s not the Hamptons I remember. Where have I heard that before?

Forty summers ago, we all got into the old Buick and drove from Montauk to the East Hampton Cinema. It’s a long time ago, but I faintly recall the movie, a fable, perhaps, about a giant shark that eats people in a Northeastern resort town, and a mayor who, for too long, puts the local economy ahead of public safety and refuses to close the beaches.

There’s a lesson in all of this, I bet, but damned if I know what it is. I’m too tired to think.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

“May you live in interesting times,” a familiar and ironic way of wishing bad news to descend on others, is not the ancient Chinese curse it has been purported to be, but more likely a 20th-century construction, whose popularity has sometimes been attributed to Robert Kennedy.

 Well, the 21st century is standing the curse on its head. We do live in interesting times and instead of disaster they are bringing positive change, at least to Americans. Our culture is spinning, and we’ve not even reached the first quarter of the century.

The slogans of our time are indications of profound recalculation of our collective mores. Black lives matter. Gay marriage. Gender identity. The 1 percent. Income inequality.

A group of friends at an annual barbecue last weekend, some two dozen of us, were all beginning to show our age. There may have been only one honestly brown, rather than gray, head among us. “Who’d have thought . . .” was the topic of the afternoon.

Between the ribs and the watermelon, we agreed that none of us expected majority opinion on the social issues we cared about to change as quickly as it has — if we had thought there was a chance of its changing at all. None of us imagined the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman and was adopted by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by President Clinton in 1996. That EdithWindsor, the octogenarian widow who won the case against DOMA, lived in Southampton brought the decision close to home. And who expected the court to find marriage between persons of the same sex constitutional two years later even if Ireland had already done so by popular vote?

Conversations at the barbecue, at least those I heard, did not dwell on negatives. The national controversy about the Confederate flag, for example, was not on the table. Nor was there much lamenting about political polarization. No one mentioned the Iran nuclear agreement, although had it been broached; my guess is that the tone would have become tense, with some hailing the agreement as an extraordinary achievement toward Middle East peace and others avidly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position that the agreement is a “historic mistake.”

On another occasion, after dark perhaps or if Congress proved irrevocably divided on this issue, the discussion may have veered into difficult territory. But because the food was delicious and the weather beautiful, no debate became heated. Actually, though, I think it’s more likely that the party remained upbeat because we really were friends, and friends of friends, who respected and admired each other — and we were ready to bask in the good news of the interesting times in which we live.

It was with utter dismay that I was again made aware this week that the country to which I have pledged allegiance since childhood continues to engage in force-feeding, which is — quite rightly — considered torture by many in the medical profession. Some of us expected the election of Barack Obama to put a stop to this sort of thing, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

 To be sure, the Obama administration ended the practice of waterboarding, and it was recently reported that the American Psychological Association had faulted those members who, after Sept. 11, helped the Pentagon justify such extreme interrogation techniques. But force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay continues.

A story about it appeared on page three of Saturday’s New York Times. The headline read: “Guantanamo Hunger Striker’s Petition Divides Officials.” My first thought was that it would be a ho-hum story: Disagreement among officials of any sort is par for the course. But then I read it.

A prisoner (or a detainee, which is more politically correct) named Tariq Ba Odah “has been on a hunger strike since February 2007 and now weighs less than 75 pounds,” the story read. It reported that a lawyer had asked a judge for Mr. Ba Odah’s release because of his “severe physical and psychological deterioration,” and because he seemed “to have developed an underlying medical problem that is preventing his body from properly absorbing nutrition no matter how much he is force-fed.”

According to The Times, the detainee is “about 37 and has been held for more than 13 years.” He was arrested in Pakistan and accused of being at its Afghanistan border seeking to join the Taliban and of having “received some weapons training.” As is common at Guantanamo, there has been no trial.

In 2009, The Times said, a “six agency task force recommended” that he be transferred out of custody, but that did not occur because his country of origin was Yemen, which was in chaos then as it is now.

There was national focus on force-feeding about three years ago when more than 100 men went on hunger strikes at Guantanamo. The military argued then, as it apparently still does, that force-feeding is necessary in order to maintain the health and safety of those who undertake hunger strikes. Who is kidding whom? 

The international community, including the Red Cross and the United Nations, have recognized the right of prisoners of sound mind to go on hunger strikes, making force-feeding a violation of international law for that reason as well as because it is widely thought to be cruel, inhumane, and degrading.

Descriptions of the pain that accompanies force-feeding, of the medical complications that can arise, and of the possible dreadful effects of an anti-nausea drug sometimes administered are easily found on Internet search engines. They are horror stories.

It is intolerable that under such circumstances the force-feeding of Mr. Ba Odah continues and that Justice Department and State and Defense Department officials allow themselves the privilege of debating what the government should do about him.

In whose name? In yours?

Sky watchers say this week’s Perseid meteor shower will be a good one. This is the annual show of sparkling streaks that last year was obscured by the light of a full moon.

Looking at the forecast for tonight and tomorrow, it appears that local conditions are going to be ideal, with clear skies and light to calm wind after dark. Early in the night, the meteors will be lower on the horizon, gradually appearing higher in the sky and increasing after midnight.

In our part of the world, the trails of flaming comet debris will be most frequent to the northeast, so open spaces with little light pollution and a view to the north will be ideal for watching. We are lucky that the South Fork has a lot of options that meet that description. I think of the bayfront, such as Long Beach in Noyac, Maidstone Park in East Hampton, the Alberts in Amagansett, and Navy Beach in Montauk as among the better choices.

For those eager for a little education with their sky show a free program will be offered by the Montauk Observatory at the Ross School Tennis Center on Goodfriend Drive in East Hampton this evening at 8. Following a talk about what is known by science about the Perseids, everyone will be invited outside to sit back and watch or take a tour of celestial bodies using telescopes the organizers will supply.

One of the repeated points on a number of websites advising how to see the Perseids is that you should get out of town, away from artificial light. It is sad that even here, where we still like to think we live in the country, this is true. Residential, municipal, and to the greatest degree, exterior commercial illumination has cast an unwelcome amber glow over many parts of the East End. Even where I live, down near Promised Land in Amagansett, we can see an orange haze from Connecticut.

For me, the Perseids are a reminder that a dark night sky matters, that creeping urbanization comes at the cost of getting in the way of our even contemplating space, our modest place in the universe, and the infinite sublime. That, and just enjoying a really, really good show.