When the world intrudes
At polo last weekend my attention was periodically distracted from the game by the American flag over the scoreboard—it was flying at half-staff to recognize those killed in the terrorist bombings of the American embassies in Africa. With this terrible event, the outside world had definitely intruded into the golden cocoon of our August days and nights in the Hamptons.
It doesn’t happen too often—intrusions like that. August is not the month for hard news and compelling stories. It’s the month of parties and frivolity and games, of mornings in the surf and afternoons under a tree, of light reading and take-it or leave-it kind of news. Our minds are not in high gear, and we usually get away with that. But not always.
The sight took me back a year. It was on the Sunday morning of the Grand Prix at the Hampton Classic that we learned of the death of Princess Diana. Since some people there, riders and patrons, had personal attachments to her, it seemed something should be done, and the British flag was lowered to half-staff. On tall flagpoles running the length of the bleachers and high above them, the flags of countries with connections to the show are displayed. The Union Jack just happened to be dead center. It was a powerful and sad sight, one that I will not forget—looking across the show ring, seeing a single flag in the line lowered to tell us of her death.
For most of the past three and a half centuries, the eastern end of Long Island lived in relative isolation. People lived quiet lives as farmers and fisherman, homemakers and teachers, ministers and shopkeepers. Sag Harbor was the first to acquire a cosmopolitan flavor, in the early to mid nineteenth century when it developed as a whaling port. Its active trade brought sailors from around the world to its Main Street, but as the whaling industry declined after the 1840’s, so too did this exotic aspect of Sag Harbor. The first summer visitors to Southampton and East Hampton came in the late nineteenth century, first the art crowd, who wrote about and painted the natural beauty. The money crowd, who not only liked the sand dunes and sea air, but also were willing to pay for it, soon followed them. The railroad followed after that, and this forever ended the isolation of two hundred and fifty years and led to the kind of residential resorts we now know.
We are now a destination for people from abroad. As I looked around the tent at polo I saw friends from all over—Bill Tozier and a bunch of rowdy Brits visiting from London; Stephano Cirela and Paulo Nardi from Milan; Tatiana, the beautiful German model—all visiting but quite at home here. It was a lovely afternoon at polo. I thought about those earlier East End residents, and I realized that even though we build this summer cocoon, we cannot isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we can’t choose just the good parts either, like having European visitors at the polo match. When I looked at the lowered flag I thought of the nasty and bloody events that took place far from our beautiful villages but nevertheless impinged on the life of our nation.