by I was watching a YouTube video about Montauk, on Long Island, (I love this guy’s videos, Peter Santenello) and they mentioned haul seiners, which is a kind of fisherman who practices a certain method of fishing. They said haul seining had slowly been outlawed. And it made me feel nostalgic, the whole video made me feel nostalgic because Montauk, when I knew it, was pretty much the last refuge for middle and low income people out east on Long Island, and eventually they will be pushed out of there too one day. (I grew up on Long Island, in the 1960s and 1970s.)
There’s this slight hill between Montauk and the Hamptons and my friends used to joke how people in Montauk would rarely go over that hill into the Hamptons, and they preferred it on their side of the hill. I was not a poor fisherman, but I identified with them more than the glitterati (a group I very definitely did not belong in either).
Anyway, I spent one summer in Amagansett in the 1970s, and I was coming home from work as a cocktail waitress when I decided to drive to the beach and watch the sun come up before going home to bed. A bunch of haul seiners were there setting up their nets and I took pictures of them. (My camera went with me everywhere in those days.) Amazingly, I went digging for the negatives and found them! Here are two shots from that batch.
