The East Hampton Divide, by Richard Rosenthal

Kris Talmage cleans my house and food-shops for me. Every Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, she is here, scanning my face for signs of deterioration and warning me to take care of myself or else, that she’s a tough Bonacker and I’d better not mess with her. I respond that I am a stubborn old Jew, a match for tough Bonackers. She snorts disbelief and then smiles hugely when I tell her I’d just been to Louse Point to see the winter sunrise.

“It was gold dust,” I tell her, “in a frame of deep black clouds.”

“Back in the ’70s,” she tells me, “a friend and I rented a house on Louse Point Road for the winter. We’d get up at dawn and go crabbing in the bay or for a walk through the marshes and grass on the inlet side and dig for clams and mussels. There were tons of them. Louse Point is as beautiful as any place in the world can be and it’s within five minutes of where I grew up.”

Kris Talmage wants passionately to protect Louse Point.

Cile Downs, a founder of the Accabonac Protection Committee, shares this passion and is a marvelous advocate. Ask her anything — about the shellfish, the water table, the farming heft of the soil, or the status of Louse Point’s osprey marriages — and you get a fascinating, informative answer. Cile Downs and Kris Talmage should be active allies.

Instead, there’s a deep divide between them, the East Hampton divide.

Ms. Talmage is vexed by Ms. Downs’s letter to The East Hampton Star in August in which she wrote, “I am so puzzled that there is controversy about formula stores — big boxes, cut-rate outlets, whatever you call them — here in our town. As a customer who goes once in a while up to Riverhead for one of these things, and is glad to travel that far, because heaven forbid it should be any closer to here, I am quite satisfied with the arrangement we have.”

“And as I look at the poor, godforsaken wreck that Riverhead is now, how grateful I am that we never developed a terrible strip like theirs to gradually bleed the life out of our pleasant town.”

Ms. Talmage is not glad to travel that far, even though prices for food, clothing, and other basics are much lower in Riverhead than on the South Fork. “Riverhead shopping usually winds up costing me more,” she says. “I work a long week. I have a daughter and granddaughter to take care of. The travel costs, the lost income from the time it takes, the unforeseen trip to return a purchase that doesn’t work. It all adds up. I have a different life than Cile Downs has. I want a Walmart, here in East Hampton.”

My liberal reflexes kick in. Walmart wipes out local businesses. Walmart workers are so underpaid that in 2013 it cost U.S. taxpayers $6.2 billion in public assistance payments for them, according to Americans for Tax Fairness. (Walmart’s recently announced intention to pay a $9-an-hour minimum is still far below a living wage.) And yes, Walmart stores, “big boxes” indeed, are not aesthetic triumphs. Maybe in my heart of hearts I don’t want a Walmart either.

But fear and loathing of Walmart, however justified, does not tell us how people who struggle to live from paycheck to paycheck are to get by in one of the country’s most expensive municipalities. Ms. Downs’s go to Riverhead admonition is not an answer.

Perhaps there is no answer. Or are we so wedded to our “pleasant town” brand we don’t look hard enough? Why not negotiate for a modified Walmart, Target, or the like? Maybe with East Hampton’s prestige and some determination from our town government, we can work out an attractive, affordable store that gives decent wages and benefits to its employees.

If it’s vulgarity that dismays us, why do we indulge the summer Montauk partying scene? Or the looming threat of Gurney’s conversion from a community resource to a corporate retreat? Or the disappearance of Sweet 16 birthday parties from Guild Hall? And is the Riverhead strip of malls truly more obnoxious than our Main Street, with its prices way beyond the reach of most of our year-round residents? According to Ms. Talmage, “No way can you claim that Main Street maintains the flavor of old East Hampton. It’s useless to me.”

Let’s man up to our hypocrisy and see what we can accomplish. We glorify the Bonackers’ baymen traditions and work ethic. We chuckle affectionately at their accent and pithy expressions and produce plays and photo arrays celebrating their nobility. But when it comes to their need, and that of so many others here to put food on their tables and clothes on their backs, even one of our leading environmentalists tells them to get in their vehicles and take a ride, at least an hour each way and often twice that, through gas-guzzling traffic to a place she detests.

“East Hampton,” says Kris Talmage, “is an environment of both natural beauty and interaction between people. You don’t have to like everybody, but you do have to care about them.”

“Kris Talmage” is a pseudonym. Richard Rosenthal is a retired town employee and the author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire on inequality in the Hamptons.