There are plenty of old things stored in the 1900 Main Street building that is the Star office. Among these are manual typewriters — and a full set of window screens. I cannot remember the last time they went up. There simply are too few flying insects around anymore to bother. It is as if the familiar high-pitched “bzz, bzz” has been replaced by pure silence.
Mosquitoes that in past summers had people running from their cars to safety indoors seem scarce. On a recent evening when normally we would not have been so brave, three of us sat outside watching the light changing over the salt marsh. Earlier this year, I patched the wire mesh on a screened porch, thinking that it would provide a place of respite; it has not been needed.
Ticks are another matter. There are plenty of them around to make tick checks necessary after a walk in the woods or grassy roadside. Green flies and gnats are aplenty at Three Mile Harbor. And I was stung by a wasp while pulling weeds in the driveway. But where the hell are the mosquitoes?
Some of the things in the outdoors do shift around from year to year. There are next to no beach plums in the dunes near the house, but it is already proving an outstanding summer for blackberries. Striped bass and bluefish have their cycles of abundance and dearth. Yet there are others that seem the same, like spider crabs and whelks, whose bottom-crawling ranks never seem to shrink — or particularly swell.
Insects might be annoying, but their varying declines and booms around the world may be yet more signs of a global crisis. There is no denying the fact that something precipitous has taken place here in East Hampton Village, too. Some day soon perhaps the historical society will put a screen window on display, an artifact no longer needed of a time too quickly gone.