When the Surf's Truly Up

At Ditch Plains on September 1, 2008, the photographer Blair Seagram was there to capture an astonishing day for surfers. His remarkable photographs are for sale at Tulla Booth's friendly and fascinating gallery in Sag Harbor. These are wide, artful, exquisitely printed images that clearly illustrate why Montauk is, when all the conditions of tide, swell, wind and waves are just right, one of the best surfing venues on Earth.

THE END'S Beauty of the Beaches Award

THE END’S award of extreme admiration and respect for the beauty of beaches goes to a woman from New Jersey who calls herself Melissa, and who visits near Ditch Plains for several weeks in the summertime. Each morning around sunrise she walks to the beach with an empty kitchen trash sack and starts her stroll southwest toward the cliffs. She reaches down for and picks up every scrap of Klondike aluminized ice cream bar wrappers, all sorts of potato chip bags, single rubber flip-flops, disgusting latex tubes, deflated rubber or aluminum foil party balloons, sweat socks, beer bottles, cigarette boxes, and a small book’s worth of ugly and loathsome detritus that swinish beachgoers leave behind. In the first picture Melissa starts out with her nearly empty sack; in the second she is dragging it back after picking up as far away as the rock piles below the bluffs. If you wonder why Ditch Plains is so appealing and pristine a place to stroll after sunrise in July and part of August, the reason is Melissa. May there be many more like her out there for what ought to become known as a Montauk Beach Walk, which means when you walk any beach you pick up, bag, and dispose of unsightly trash simply for beauty’s sake.