Connections: The Road Less Traveled
So what was everybody talking about last weekend? People. Too many of them!
A taxi driver told me his weekend began on Thursday, not Friday. I am sure this was true, because by Friday morning the parked cars were chockablock on either side of North Main Street when I ventured out to the dry-cleaners. I wandered up the street to find out what was going on, and discovered that they belonged to people browsing in the farmers market in the Nick and Toni’s parking lot.
Farmers markets, which everyone waits for eagerly in the off-season, are one of the nicest things about summer. But first thing Friday, the crowd on North Main was such that perhaps it was more delightful for the merchants than the customers. Poking along among the vendors, I stopped at an alcove for Sang Lee Farms, a fine organic-food enterprise on the North Fork, and actually was elbowed aside by a woman who didn’t even look to see whom she had hit. (I persevered anyway and bought some delicious sweet-potato sliders.)
On Saturday, when the weather was glorious, I went on an outing with some of my grandchildren to LongHouse, which was staging its annual Family Day. I went to LongHouse, that is, along with an estimated crowd of more than 700 others. LongHouse is an extraordinary oasis of multiple gardens and weaving pathways, with large-scale outdoor sculptures dotted here and there in surprising nooks. Having recently been to Winterthur, the gardens at the Rockefeller estate in Delaware, I think I can attest that LongHouse is more interesting, not just because of the greater variety of plants, large and small, but because of the sculptures. Still: 700 people in a garden on a Saturday afternoon? It was a delight for the youngest members of our group, who played noisily with friends on the lawn, but I cannot say that it was a peaceful idyll.
Asking others if they noticed unusually large crowds in other places on Saturday, I heard there may have been 300 people on the grounds of the Montauk Brewery, although the line of those waiting to sample beers and ales, they said, moved quickly. The melee at Starbucks on East Hampton’s Main Street could have fooled a year-rounder into thinking a film shoot, or something else extraordinary, was going on. But it wasn’t. It was just Saturday morning on Main Street on Memorial Day weekend.
Year-rounders like me learned long ago to avoid main thoroughfares, food stores, and restaurants when the season is high. There is a story, apocryphal perhaps, about a man on a supermarket checkout line shouting that the woman in front of him, whom he presumed to be a local, should not shop on weekends.
But even the back roads were buzzing with traffic on Monday. Cars. Cars. Cars. They were playing dodge-’em under the railway bridge on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton, and as I drove back home from a morning appointment in Sag Harbor, the vehicles headed northwest on Route 114 weren’t quite bumper-to-bumper, but they were close. At the intersection of 114 with Swamp Road, a line of cars waited to make the turn, too many cars for me to count.
Memorial Day weekend isn’t supposed to be as busy as July Fourth, but it seemed to have reached that point this year. Enough is enough, we all cry. Of course, we say that every year, don’t we?
The only moment of peace and stillness came, ironically, during the deluge of rain that fell as the veterans in their uniforms lined up to march from the flagpole at the town green toward the veterans memorial at Hook Mill. At least on our end of Main Street, the crowds waiting under umbrellas to honor the veterans were thin to nonexistent. A few stepped out from offices or stopped on the sidewalk to stand in their rain slickers and watch.