Hampton Tide Notebook

Author: Timmy

Long Island in July is like champagne soaked in the sun, and the sea breeze carries the fog horn of the Montauk Lighthouse across the lavender fields. My escort Clara appeared at the Southampton train station wearing a fisherman's straw hat, her linen skirt stained with blackberry juice picked by morning dew, and a ring made of shark teeth on her left ring finger - a souvenir from her time leading a marine expedition team. "The real Hamptons is hidden behind the private dock." She turned the key of the antique Ford Mustang, revealing a wonderful combination of surfboards and iced Riesling bottles in the trunk.

As we went deeper along Saffron Lane, Clara demonstrated the essence of escort service. She pushed open the side door of a Georgian manor with familiarity, and the gardener was spreading freshly caught scallops in the shade of a century-old wisteria; in a second-hand bookstore in Bridgehampton, she pulled out a first edition of Moby Dick, with Truman Capote's lipstick annotations on the title page; when the sunset dyed the vineyard into gold foil, she suddenly knelt on the sand dunes and pulled wild oats, revealing a Morse code iron box left by the Coast Guard during World War II.

At night, Shelter Island floated in the moonlight, and Clara took out a waterproof map from her canvas bag: "This is made up of the yacht routes of thirty divorced rich people." She pointed at the fluorescent marks, and each coordinate corresponded to a secret: No. 17 was an underground cellar for brewing rum, No. 23 was a shell museum of a hedge fund tycoon, and the farthest No. 39 was marked with "E.H." - Hemingway fished for marlin here in 1936. When we parted, she gave me a piece of blue glass that was polished into a heart shape by the sea: "It was salvaged from the shipwreck area of ​​the North Fork, and it is bluer than the one in the Tiffany window." Three months later, I received a postcard from her in the Bahamas, with a dried bougainvillea pressed on the back: "It turns out that all islands share the same moon's tides.