The Beaches I
Pizza boxes, cracked lobster claws, napkins, beer cups, empty bottles of good wine, plastic tablecloths, half-eaten salads, disposable forks, paper plates, a box of fava beans, broken umbrellas, blown-out chairs, a snapped body board. These are just a few of the things left scattered around the trash bins that we saw on several early morning tours of the ocean beaches during the last few days.
At Georgica in East Hampton Village, s’mores sticks and assorted debris surrounded both the bins on the beach and those in the parking lot. At Two Mile Hollow around 7 a.m. Sunday, a trash can was smoldering and puffing smoke as if it were a tiny coal locomotive. At Main Beach on Monday morning, Coca Cola cups and Pepsi cans spilled onto the sand from a receptacle too full to hold any more.
It is unacceptable that those who head to the ocean beaches in East Hampton Village, and to a similar degree the town beaches, have to look at these messes on what seems a daily basis now. Seeking serenity and nature’s beauty, visitors instead contend with having to tiptoe around the prior evening’s debris and listen to the squawk of the seagulls as they dig amid it for something to eat.
Human nature being what it is, many are the people who apparently think it is okay to leave their trash on the beach so long as it is in relative proximity to a garbage can. Maybe this is because so many summer folks are New Yorkers, inured to the sight of garbage piled along the streets. Maybe not. But it is up to our local officials to figure out how to manage the mess — and that does not mean forcing village employees to start their mornings picking up disgusting waste that ought to be handled in a better way.
The East Hampton Town Trustees have begun to make an issue of the village’s approach to beach trash. Unfortunately, instead of doing something about it, the village has taken a petulant, almost arrogant stance. Meanwhile, when dawn breaks, the beaches look like hell. Come on, East Hampton Village, how difficult could it be to get this right?