The Torrents of Sag Harbor
To the relentless pounding of the water from the heavens was added the terrible story of the young men in the Russian submarine, trapped under water. We talked about it as we ran to our cars. Engulfed by water, day after day.
And while it poured, the Battle of the Roundabout raged, becoming so vitriolic that it made its way into Newsday, the Long Island paper of record. Basically, the story is this: at the end of Main St. in Sag Harbor, Rte. 114 (the back road to East Hampton), the bridge to North Haven (and by extension to Southampton) and Main St. all meet. Because there are so many people out here now, traffic can get awfully congested on the weekends. The village board of trustees has been looking for solutions to this problem.
Putting in a roundabout at the end of Main St. was proposed by the state of New York. Villagers divided for and against. My next-door neighbor Jennifer was elected village trustee on the against ticket. When I arrived in Sag Harbor on July 1, the battle was already joined.
The curious part of this is that there already is something of a little roundabout at the end of Main St., and if you watch where you are going, it's fine. Nothing is going to make the number of people and cars, which is really the problem, any better unless cars are banned and public transportation improved, but that's another story.
At any rate I hung over the fence and asked Jennifer what the problem was, and she said quite simply that if they constructed a proper roundabout it would take up a lot more space up there by the Long Wharf, and that's all I had to hear and immediately I was against it too.
Sag Harbor is a small and lovely historical village. Up there at the end of Main St. is the harbor of Sag Harbor, and the old Long Wharf, and it's beautiful and simple, and if you took more land away from that area, it would change the whole look of the thing and it would suddenly be about cars and traffic signs and not help that much and what's the point of it?
But here's what's happened: the village board voted it down and the state advocate resigned, flinging charges of "backroom, closed door, and even illegal tactics" and the state Dept. of Transportation was so furious that it is refunneling state grant money allotted to Sag Harbor to other communities and the town board is crying "blackmail." Which is how Sag Harbor got into Newsday.
Then, last Tuesday afternoon, about the time we were all ready to fling ourselves to the God of the Sea, the rain stopped on a dime and the sun came out. The air was crisp and washed clean. The light was golden and shot its warmth across the lawn in fat drying beams. And just from seeing the color, we cheered up.
And it was just in time for the Sag Harbor Volunteer Fire Dept.'s annual carnival. They set up a bunch of rides over at the kids' beach. And that night, everyone who is anyone was there under the full Aquarius moon?from Claudia Cohen to Paul McCartney rushing about with his new girlfriend, who is a nice, unpretentious-looking person.
I love the carnival. But when Lu was three, I had to have words with the boss carny. They sold me tickets, then said I couldn't go on the rides with her, and she was, of course, too little to go alone. He was a classic guy, reed thin, cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, shifty-eyed, with the aura of a lean, hungry wolf. He snarled at me, but he did give me my money back.
Anyway, this year, because of the rain, the whole town was there on the first night and not only the whole town but a lot of people from our playground in the West Village in Manhattan, too. There are these concentric overlapping circles in modern life. And I do believe, no matter what anyone says, that the set theory of mathematics was conceived in Manhattan society.