About The Hamptons Shortcuts

Every once in a while, I run into somebody from years ago who remembers me as The Guy Who Told the Hampton Summer People about the Secret Back-Road Shortcuts. It’s not true that I did this. Nevertheless, when someday I pass on, people attending my funeral will talk about how, finally, they’ve gotten rid of The Guy Who Told the Hampton Summer People About the Shortcuts.

As a result, even though it doesn’t matter anymore — today, Waze and Google Maps on your cellphone show the best shortcuts — it matters to me.

The fact is that for nearly an entire century before Wi-Fi, the best way to handle shortcuts was to have a person sitting in the passenger seat with a folded-out roadmap of the area picked up at a gas station or chamber of commerce office hoping to guide you out of a traffic jam. It was a dicey business. You might wind up in another traffic jam. It was better than nothing. But not by much.

Then, in the 1990s, traffic got so bad that summer people began grasping at straws. Could the locals know all the back-road shortcuts but then keep them secret? Would they really do that? The summer people were the engine of the economy. Why won’t the locals tell? It became an issue. New York Magazine reported on it.

As this discussion heated up, I wandered into the fray with a Dan’s Papers column in which I revealed, as a local person, exactly which back roads to take to get around Southampton, Bridgehampton and East Hampton. Sort of.

The shortcuts started off seriously.

“Heading east for a half a mile crawling through the traffic jam on County Road 39, turn right at North Bishop Lane and go half a mile to Moses Lane. Six hundred yards further along, turn left at a red barn, then 200 yards later, turn right at the big boulder next to an elm tree.”

Readers at this point might have begun to think something else was afoot. Then, each of the three shortcuts ended in this identical big finale.

“After turning right onto Sheep Fold Road heading for the ocean, slam your foot on the accelerator to speed up so when you hit the big sand dune at the back of the beach, your car will leap up and pass over of the sunbathers without injuring anybody before crashing into the sea.”

Boy, was that a mistake. The lesson I learned from publishing this was that a lot of people sometimes read the beginning of a column and then choose not to continue to the end. It was a lesson in journalism.

Six months later, now that the cat was out of the bag and I was to blame, a woman named Jodi Della Femina came out with a small Hamptons guidebook that with great accuracy revealed the actual shortcuts. She called the guidebook Jodi’s Shortcuts. So she was to blame, not me.

Well, nobody believed me. And they still don’t.

A year later, I wrote an even more outrageous column about the traffic. I purchased a dozen orange baseball caps from the Houston Astros official store. The letter “H” in white was sewn onto the brim. Buy one. If you wear this cap and come to a halt at Montauk Highway from a side street, other motorists, seeing the cap, must stop and let you make a left turn. The hats were magic. To my horror, a few people bought them.

Speaking of beating the traffic, nearly every Tesla sold in America, 2 million of them, have recently been recalled so a flaw in the car’s Autopilot computer software can be fixed. Autopilot takes over the driving of your car in certain circumstances. But it turns out that when Autopilot gets in trouble, some of its driver-alert software is inadequate. As a result, drivers don’t realize that Autopilot is in over its head and you, the driver, need to take over.

I think the problem has come about because Tesla calls it Autopilot. Buyers expect it to live up to its name. And it can’t. Forbes reports that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reviewed 956 crashes for which Autopilot was alleged to have been in use. And 17 people have died while it was on. Hey, it’s called Autopilot. Nobody should die. How terrible.

But Autopilot, even with that flawed name, is far safer than every beer-drinking, marijuana-smoking, sleep- deprived, cell phone-chatting, passenger- kissing, poodle-on-your-lap-cuddling human drivers. During this same time frame, human drivers have killed tens of thousands of other motorists. Hundreds of thousands of injuries have occurred. A better name should have been Autocopilot. That, in fact, is what it is.

Finally, I would like to report once again on a heist in the Hamptons that resulted in a high-speed auto chase with the police in hot pursuit. In an earlier column, I speculated that the first of these incidents — and perhaps I’m wrong — could have been just a brilliant marketing scheme. The 48 pocketbooks stolen from the Balenciaga store in East Hampton were worth about $2,000 each, a total of $94,000. The heist went viral.

Coming onto Manorville Road at 100 miles an hour, the SUV escape vehicle blew a tire and pulled over. The five thieves piled out and fled into the nearby woods to be later rounded up by cops, dogs and helicopters — so, now you and everybody else knew where to buy these high-priced luxurious pocketbooks.

Last week, it happened again. This time the thieves struck the T.J. Maxx store in Bridgehampton. T.J. Maxx sells clothing at bargain prices. These new robbers raced shopping carts full of unpaid-for clothes out to their sedan and when pursued by police, tossed individual bits of clothing out the window. Perhaps the cops would skid on some $1 socks. But at Hayground Road in Mecox, the cops surrounded the four women inside the car, and though the perps drove it gently into the side of a police car, the cops prevailed.

Well, perps today don’t get to stay in jail after being arraigned unless serious violence is involved. So maybe it’s true: It’s paid performers hired to conduct a marketing scheme.

Hmm. T.J. Maxx is now king of the cheap. So what’s next? Cops chasing Carvel ice cream cone perps? Millions of hits. A video game. A feature on TikTok. Carvel: the best ice cream on Earth!

HELP PRESERVE DAN’S PAPERS 1960–2023

Stony Brook University intends to digitize the complete set of Dan’s Papers back issues (1960-2023) preserved in the Dan Rattiner Special Collection at their climate-controlled Whitman Library. $125,000 is needed. Currently $72,300 has been raised. Every dollar helps. Contribute? Write a tax-deductible check to “Stony Brook Foundation” marked “for Dan’s Papers archive” and mail to Stony Brook Foundation, 230 Administration, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-1188 or visit sbugiving.com/danspapers.