Dan's Papers - May 22, 2009 - Secret Pleasures

I have a confession to make. This deep recession has been lousy. But there is one thing about it that I have secretly loved with a vengeance. And I have never written about it before. I love that you can go into any town in the Hamptons and park right in front of the store you want to go into.

I know everyone else loves this too. And I know everyone else will not talk about it. But now that things seem to be easing up a bit and there may a light at the end of the tunnel, I think it is time to discuss this.

I also have to say, and I am pulling seniority here, that I love the many parking spaces more than just about anybody else and that is because I have lived here a very long time, and I was an adult with a car BEFORE the horrendous traffic thundered in. Indeed, one of the joys I savored when my parents moved us here in the 1960s when I was a teenager was that very fact. You could park anywhere. You could park at any beach. You could park on any street. You could park in the center of town, and wherever you parked, with rare exception, you could leave your car there without paying and for any amount of time that you wanted - for the whole summer if you wanted. You could even make a u-turn on any Main Street. There were no traffic jams.

I had grown up in the suburbs. We had traffic jams, rush hour, signs reading No Parking 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., No Parking Loading Zone. But now, nothing. You just parked.

And I remember exactly when things changed. In the summer of 1976, I was single and putting out this newspaper from our new offices in Bridgehampton, but making my home in a joyful hippie commune in East Quogue. Among other things we 30 people there did, besides plant crops, raise animals and celebrate our devotion to one another and all the rest of the human race, was hold group sessions to hammer out our personal problems.

People would sit in a big circle. One person would have their time. When it came my time one day just after the Fourth of July, I talked about all the summer people and their cars jamming up the highways coming into the Hamptons on Friday nights. I found it horrifying. It had never happened like this before. There was a three-mile long jam between the Bridgehampton traffic light and downtown Water Mill. Getting through Southampton was a nightmare. Driving from Quogue to Bridgehampton was a mess. I wept. I moaned. I hated it.

Writing the above, I find it all hard to believe that those things happened in that year, that I lived in a commune and that I was terrified of the suddenly appearing traffic. I cried out for the old days at that session. I said I wanted to just crawl under the bed for the summer.

"Some things," Nick, the leader of the commune, said wisely, "we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept them."

It wasn't much. But it told me that others were experiencing this too. It was enough.

So yes, all through the last half of the 1970s - beach stickers had come in the year I just mentioned - and the 1980s, the 1990s and the first half of the first decade of the twenty-first century, I quietly sucked it all up. I loved the Hamptons. Still do. But the traffic was a mess. And then, in 2005, in the Hampton in which I live, which is East Hampton, I experienced a morning where I drove into the center of town to get something, and not only could not find a parking space near to the store I wanted to go to, I couldn't find a parking space AT ALL. I turned the car around and went home to try again when I thought the traffic might have eased up. On several occasions after that, I experienced the round trip again. It was just something to learn to live with, as Nick, bless his heart, had said all those years before.

And so yes, when the economy fell into the dumps this winter, there were some truly awful things that came to pass. Retail sales slumped, the real estate market froze, people lost their jobs and went hungry. But damn, you could park on the street downtown right where you wanted, even right in front of the store or restaurant.

This past weekend, the weekend before Memorial Day, I realized the days of free parking were over. At Cedar Street in East Hampton, there were lines of cars at the light backing all the way up to Sherrill Lane. On the Montauk Highway in Water Mill, there were lines of cars backed up from downtown to the light at Hampton Road in Southampton. There were lines of cars on the Sunrise as you came to the end of it at the Lobster Inn.

They're here. And they are waiting in their cars - Porsches and Audis and Mercedes and Escalades - patiently listening to XM or talking on their cell phones (wirelessly of course) and looking forward to the joys of the Hamptons to come.

A thrill went through me. Traffic. It's the end of parking anywhere you want. We are saved.