Letters Real Estate Business Working
COMMENTARY MARCH 26, 2020
EDITORIALS
I
Connections
Foresight Was Lacking
t is not surprising, given the human tendency to seek scapegoats, that year-round East End residents might direct their anxiety over the COVID-19 crisis toward the wave of people from away who washed in during the last week. Fanned by irresponsible speculation based on anecdotes and the internet, some among us objected loudly as unfamiliar faces plowed through supermarkets loading their shopping carts. The fear was that the new arrivals were scooping up all the essentials, leaving nothing for the locals. Some residents joked about putting up a wall or blowing up the bridge over the Shinnecock Canal, while at the same time engaging in the panic-buying they accused the city folks of. But once the initial spree began to die down, most items returned to stores. The East End is far from starving, as we have noted before, even if out of cleaning products and worryingly low on toilet paper for the moment. The truth is that from a groceries and household supplies perspective, East End stores and delivery systems are relatively well poised to deal with periods of excessive demand -- as over a Fourth of July weekend. Where the sudden influx more legitimately raised an alarm is in the capacity of the region’s hospitals and emergency service personnel to cope with a predicted swell of virus cases. Related questions are about town-level preparedness, for example, whether local governments have stockpiles of masks, gloves, gowns, and medical supplies. Another concern is the focus of disaster preparedness; has it been too narrowly predicated on a direct strike by a powerful hurricane rather than other threats? It is shocking that town residents and officials must depend on the county and state for medically based decision-making. During the 1918-19 flu pandemic, the Town of East Hampton had its own medical officer, who was given broad authority to close places of assembly and initiate setting up a temporary hospital to help meet the need for convalescent beds. This centralization of authority has left town and village officials with little more to do than send out directives delivered to them from above. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his staff have responded admirably, but if Albany had been dithering and indecisive, ground-level leaders would not have had a ready alternative with which to impose required measures to protect their populations. The problem evident now is that the towns failed to calculate the cost of ever-increasing residential development. It has long been clear that in the critical areas of water supply, pollution, and emergency medical services the ultimate effects of growth have not been adequately anticipated. Less important, but still an example of lack of foresight, is high-season traffic and the shortage of parking. Given that the threat is now real and immediate, it has become clear that local government failed to prepare at all for what past experience and the scientific community said was inevitable. It is not the fault of seasonal residents that they were allowed to build and buy houses at so high a concentration in relation to the landmass and scale of local infrastructure. It is their right as owners and renters to live where they please. It is also their right to arrive en masse and scramble to stock their empty summer or weekend houses with what they need to get though the next couple of weeks or months. If there is anger to be directed anywhere, it should be toward the elected leaders and staff planners whose jobs it should have been to see a crisis coming.
A
Humanitarian Need
lmost as soon as the order to shift restaurants to takeout only, both waitstaff and kitchen workers’ jobs were in peril. They were not alone. In a region dependent on the service economy, when demand drops to near zero, so too does the income many East End residents need to get by. This means the most acute humanitarian need right now is food. Without a clear prospect for returning to work, many will need help just getting by. Mortgages can wait. Taxes are not due until July. But people need to be fed at a time when seasonal workers’ budgets may already have been stretched to the limit. In response, the region’s supplemental food programs and meals for students and senior citizens have been increased. At the East Hampton Food Pantry, the timing of distributions jumped from once a month to twice a month. To fulfill its mission, it and the other food pantries need cash more than anything else. Information about making contributions in East Hampton is available at easthamptonfoodpantry.org. In Southampton Town, contact can be made through heartofthehamptons.org. One can also go to montaukfoodpantry.org and springsfoodpantry.org. Panic shopping for staples in excess of what one actually needs should be discouraged. If members of vulnerable populations do venture out to the supermarkets, it is important that they be able to find what they need on the shelves so as not to risk multiple trips and a greater chance of virus exposure. Another way to help that might be less obvious is ordering takeout meals from the otherwise dormant restaurants and food shops. Workers in these, especially those for whom tips are a big part of their income, may directly benefit. Ordering meals to go also can even out gaps in the food supply and be a bit of an antidote for the hoarding impulse. Keeping people fed and healthy in this time of need is an obligation we all share. Thursday’s Thought
HAKAI MAGAZINE — Remains of meals eaten by people living in northern Norway about 8,000 years ago show they were tainted by massive amounts of toxic heavy metals — with concentrations up to 22 times higher than the levels allowed by modern food safety standards.
B
T
How We’re Doing
he admonition from health and government officials that everyone stay in place in order to curb the spread of Covid19 suits my husband and me just fine. Many friends have expressed concern about us, as we are living in the Peconic Landing retirement community, where several residents in a skilled-nursing wing of the main campus have fallen ill. Chris and I, however, are nestled comfortably in an ample cottage some distance from that facility, and we have kept ourselves snug as bugs in a rug. Indeed, we have not seen anyone or let anyone into our quarters for nearly three weeks! For the first two weeks of isolation, my only jaunts outside the cottage have been solitary walks to look out over Long Island Sound, following a common thoroughfare at
Peconic Landing called Thompson Boulevard. Almost every house appears empty, but there are many daffodils in bloom. I wonder where the residents are? Perhaps they are snowbirds who had gone south to North Carolina or Florida? Over the weekend, however, we were tempted out of our snug abode by an email from a friend and neighbor, who recommended a private getaway drive to the end of the North Fork, out by the ferry terminal at Orient Point, and into Orient State Park. Ever watchful, this good fellow had the presence of mind to warn that our car, a 2006 Honda hybrid, had batteries that required recharging. We took his advice and not only recharged the car, but ourselves. It was a treat, although the ospreys — which, I’m told, have alContinued on B5
The Mast-Head
E
The world keeps turning
Durell Godfrey
GUESTWORDS: By Andrea Grover
Creativity in Age of Corona I’ve always loved disaster films, I just never hoped to be living through one. A few years ago, I heard Max Brooks (the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft) on NPR talking about how he became a writer of zombie books and a sought-after consultant on epidemics. It turns out that his celebrity parents had an apocalyptic plan in place, just in case, and would ask questions over dinner like, “At what point would we eat the family dog?” I grew up in an environment with similar imaginations. My mother was an artist and a forager who would often pull the car off the road to pick some wild berries that she would shove unwashed into our mouths, and my father, a boatman, tested our skills by leaving his five kids clamming on an island in the Great South Bay, with no sunblock, food, water, or tools, and a vague time for pickup. We’d come home sunburned, with matted hair, and he’d have a good laugh while my mom cleaned us up. It wasn’t cruel, it was fun for us. We loved their creativity and spontaneity. One day we’d be in Catholic School, and the next morning we’d be sailing to the Bahamas, seven people on a sailboat meant to sleep four. My bunk was a bookshelf with a floatation cushion. We fished for our dinner, survived foul weather, and fought over stale cookies. Every one of us was nearly left back a grade in elementary school for unexcused absences. Jump ahead to 2019. After a hard day’s work, I became hooked on a few streaming TV series: “The Leftovers,” “Wayward Pines,” “Under the Dome” -- the first series brilliant, the second two terrible. But they all had one thing in common: An unknown catastrophic world event has happened and a group of unrelated people are forced to be together in a small town for eternity because the rest of the world is unsafe or inaccessible. Kind of like the 1990s hit TV series “Northern Exposure” if everything outside of Cicely, Alaska, was a zombie wasteland. Or like the 1972 disaster film “The Poseidon Adventure” (with the all-star cast of Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Albertson, Shelley Winters, and Red Buttons), in which people of disparate backgrounds are forced together to cooperatively figure out a way out of the hull of an overturned ship, or die. The cast typically includes a doctor, a former athlete, the sheriff, the businessman, the waitress, the priest -- one of every type. As I binged on “The Leftovers,” a masterpiece about a community trying to act normal after 2 percent of the global population disappeared from life mid-sentence, I wondered why we had a surge in the genre of small towns dealing with the
aftermath of doomsday. There’s always a reason certain subjects come to the fore at different periods in history. The “Heimat” film (wholesome bucolic stories) was a soothing staple of postWorld War II Germany as the country was grappling with a new toxic identity. Horror films about mad and dysfunctional families, like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Hills Have Eyes,” were box office hits during and immediately following the Vietnam War, when American ideals of the perfect nuclear family were dismantled as young soldiers returned home with physical and mental trauma. I often say, artists see the future. Authors of speculative fiction have an especially advanced capacity for imagining tomorrow. In 1945, the writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites 15 years ahead of NASA’s launch of Echo, the agency’s first experimental communications satellite project. In 1941, Isaac Asimov popularized the term “robotics” in his short story “Liar!” long before robots became part of the vernacular. Aldous Huxley foresaw cloning in “Brave New World,” 1932, decades before Dolly the sheep was made incarnate (again), and countless other authors and artists envisioned the future before it was written. More recently, in 2011, Steven Soderbergh directed the film “Contagion,” which imagined how a deadly virus could travel globally in a matter of weeks by, guess what? Touching your face. Jump ahead to March 21, 2020: We are in the early stages of a very real global pandemic related to the spread of COVID-19 and being told to stop touching our faces, or anyone else, for that matter. I am quarantined in the small town of Sag Harbor, with a cast of characters that includes my two teenage daughters, Lola and Gigi, my husband, Carlos, and a handful of friends who I take “safe distance” beach walks with daily. Suddenly, every parent is a homeschooler, and everyone is an artist. Joseph Beuys was right. We’re playing music, performing, dancing, writing stories, and making art. Creative expression is at an all-time high. Who could spare the time for this two weeks ago? Priorities back then that seemed critical, like getting to work on time and keeping the mortgage paid, have radically shifted. Could we live smaller? Work less? Spend more time together?
Wartime Gardening
ntirely by coincidence the other day, I found my East Hampton grandmother’s victory garden diary. It is in a blue-covered notebook with blank pages, beginning in 1942 as the United States was entering World War II. Victory gardens had been promoted by the United States government, as well as governments abroad, as a way to ease food demand at home to aid the nation in the first World War and then revived in the second. From what the diary says, my grandmother was not all that familiar with gardening. She had been a teacher and journalist whose father was a whaler and fisherman turned businessman. She was a diligent record-keeper, writing on the first page how in March she planted daffodil bulbs from Mrs. Hamlin. In early April, Louis Vetault came by to plant daylilies. Then came pars-
ley, chives, onion sets, and peas. My father, not yet 10 years old, helped with watering and turning the soil. Turning the page of the diary again, I found her plan for the garden drawn across two sheets. She was nothing if not ambitious; not only did the plan note the day of planting but how each variety turned out at harvest time. Lettuce and peas were prodigious; basil and beets were not. By June, she was working in the garden nearly every evening, but she was too busy to keep up the daily record, or so she wrote. Amid the coronavirus crisis, many thoughts around the East End have turned to gardening. There is both time now, what with movement more limited than usual, and a sense that supplementing one’s own food supply with homegrown fruit and vegetables is a reasonable precaution. Continued on B5
Point of View
Interplay I did worry for a while that I had got “it.” Someone with whom I'd been talking had coughed, though not in my direction. I think it would have had to make a 180-degree turn to get to me; I was six feet away. Mary said I should have stepped back two feet farther, but anyway. So, there I was, on Wednesday last, with a stuffy head, and a very, very occasional cough, rheumy eyes — as usual — but wondering. . . . No fever, though. Thus Mary didn't think I had it. “But the nurse who came out when we went to pick up your prescriptions yesterday said it wasn't necessarily the determinant,” I said. The next day, I was more sanguine, and she, when she listened to my rationale, seemed a little less so. And so it goes with us — we play off each other, a give-and-take that I find to be fun and enlivening — except when we don't play off each other and, momentarily, go head to head.
“I think I'm beyond it,” I said to her. This being last Thursday. “That Frenzy we drank last night cleared my head! Drink Frenzy to allay panic!” “There was that guy who coughed, though. What's his name again?” I told her, but, again, I reiterated that he'd turned to the side, even though he didn't cough into the crook of his arm, as we're told to do. Besides, I thought I had cleared the five-day incubation threshold. “Five days?” she said. “Are you sure you're that far along?” “Yes, yes. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. . . .” “Are you counting Sunday as a whole day?” “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . well, I admit, I might be on the cusp, but I think I'm fine.”
Continued on B5
Continued on B5
Andrea Grover is the executive director of Guild Hall and a curator, artist, and writer.
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