In a resort community like ours, there are beach days . . . and then there are days when there is, as the kids complain, "nothing to do." Paradoxically, staying indoors to play backgammon, make a panzanella salad with Round Swamp tomatoes, or toy with a jigsaw puzzle is completely out of the question even though Mom and Dad have dropped tens of thousands on a July or August rental.
What a difference the weather makes on Main Street.
When the sky is overcast, vehicles back up for a quarter-mile or more in both directions in East Hampton, coming from Pantigo Road and from Woods Lane, as everyone and their mother heads to the village to grab a chai latte at Amber Waves, peruse terrycloth coverups at Sunshine boutique and flowery dresses at Obligato, and flip through the "Walk With Me: Hamptons" photobook at BookHampton. Sidewalks fill to elbow-jostling capacity.
Overcast days in early July make it evident that there may just possibly be a staffing shortage in the traffic-control department here in East Hampton. In years past, an officer would have been dispatched to direct traffic on Saturday during the St. Luke's Fair, for example, mitigating the more-than-usual mayhem at the corner of Main Street and Buell Lane, but "all cars," as they used to say on "Adam-12," were, it seemed, called to other scenes. (And a Jeep full of teenagers, trying to make that daredevil lefthand turn off Buell, bounced off the flagpole in the late afternoon. Thankfully, no one was hurt.) Reasonably or not, calls to this office as well as comments on social media -- by which we mean angry people posting on Facebook and that Nextdoor app -- inform us that the driving public has now come to believe that fewer traffic-control officers, or T.C.O.s, have been patrolling the commercial district this summer. And, boy, do we need them more than ever.
But the gray-sky situation on Main Street has its upside for a certain cadre of locals: the misty weather beachgoers. Overcast days are when some of us, secretly relieved, sneak off to the waves on our lunch break. The Reutershan parking lot gets blocked off because it cannot accommodate one more car, but the lots at Georgica and Wiborg's are nearly empty. Lifeguards nap between their shifts wrapped in towels. Gulls and sandpipers reclaim the shoreline. Here and there, beachgoers in sweatshirts and blankets sit staring out at the ocean or reading a book. So what if the sun doesn't shine? We have the beach all to ourselves.