The Mast-Head: Keep Them Out

Thinking about President Trump and his southern border wall the other day, and realizing that it somehow seemed to ring an ancient bell, I understood that growing up here, my friends and I often talked about a barrier of our own — at the Shinnecock Canal.

It is difficult now to empathize with my teenage self, who, along with a lot of other year-rounders, fantasized constantly about keeping city folk from getting here. High tolls were one notion. Getting rid of the canal bridge altogether was another. Ours, like the president’s, was an arbitrary distinction: Our friends from the city and their parents were cool; everyone else was not cool.

Okay, so this is not to say that we were exactly like Mr. Trump. He arrived by helicopter on his one memorable visit to the neighborhood, during which he attended a beach volleyball match played by a bunch of models. Still, in the same way he demonizes Latin Americans, we blamed the summer influx of “outsiders” for all our ills. What we did not realize then was that we had met the enemy and he was us.

East Hampton has had a love-hate relationship with people from away for more than 100 years. We like the money, but resent the changes and think we can have it both ways. As kids in the 1970s, for us, it played out in whom we hung out with at Indian Wells. 

In my own adolescent group of friends, the city girls provided the opportunity for a date. Or maybe it was that, wisely, the local girls knew enough to want nothing to do with us. But, at the same time, we would whine about the city people messing everything up while the grown-ups allowed the farm fields to be carved into house lots and the woods trails to be blocked off by tennis courts. Sure, the folks from the big city might be buying, but we were the ones selling.

When we were a little older, a friend put an ad in the paper with a drawing of a Jeep with a laser mounted where the rear seats would have been. His business — entirely a fantasy, mind you — was called the McMansion Eliminator or some such foolishness. We all thought it was hilarious.

Fact is that East Hampton was and is inextricably tied to the city and suburbs to the west as Mexico and Latin America are to the United States. My friends and I eventually wised up. It is a pity that the Build the Wall! crowd never did.