IT’S GROUNDHOG DAY IN SAG HARBOR

The other day I was driving through Sag Harbor when “I Got You Babe” came on the radio somewhere around my third loop through town, and I started to get a funny feeling in my stomach. At first I thought it might be vertigo from circling the same four blocks again, but then I realized it was something else: déjà vu. I had passed this Range Rover before. I had waited for this exact family to cross the street before. I was fairly certain the woman in white linen had been standing outside Tutto il Giorno since breakfast. I am Bill Murray. Sag Harbor is Punxsutawney. Except everyone is thinner, the real estate is considerably more expensive, and the groundhog has apparently just gotten off the boat.

Let me be clear: Someone has always just gotten off "the" boat. Not a boat — the boat, theirs presumably, though ownership is never actually confirmed and nobody’s rude enough to ask, because there’s an unspoken town ordinance that if you’re damp, tan, and squinting like the sun personally owes you money, the boat is yours until proven otherwise. You’re allowed to drift down Main Street radiating maritime main-character energy while ordering a rosé at eleven a.m. and saying the word “quaint” like you invented it.

“Sorry, the hair — we just got off the boat.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you had a boat!”

“We don’t. We’re boat adjacent.”

I have never once gotten out of my car in the Municipal lot and announced to a stranger, “Sorry, we literally just got off the Volvo,” but I think about it every single time, because the Volvo also involved circling for forty minutes, also involved a passive-aggressive standoff over a parking spot, and if that’s not a nautical ordeal I don’t know what is.

The teenagers, meanwhile, have colonized the vintage shop and are running, frankly, a tighter operation than the boat people ever will. They are not “just going to Sag Harbor.” They are sourcing. They vanish into a rack of other people’s old clothes and reemerge triumphant, holding up a single Y2K windbreaker that costs more than my entire Round Swamp haul and will be worn with the exact specific irony that guarantees they’ll be insufferable on a dock of their own in twenty years, just with better archival taste and a very long story about how they found it first.

In between the two economies are the stores that sell everything and nothing at once — candles shaped like fruit, a rack of “curated items” that nobody can really define but seem better than the same 11 sweaters that have been at the store next to it since May, and tote bags printed with phrases that are either profound or completely meaningless depending on what you took to sleep the night before. I have walked out of there with four items I cannot account for and no memory of choosing any of them, only the vague sense that at some point someone handed me a tiny ceramic lemon that I apparently thought would make a nice house gift.

Then there’s the yogurt place, where the same women who won’t touch a peach at the farm stand unless it’s organic, foraged, and personally blessed by a couple who run a farm will happily walk up to an open wall of spigots and pump their own dairy product out of a nozzle several hundred strangers have touched that day. Sandy children, men who just got off "the" boat, teenagers clutching vintage windbreakers — everyone has had a hand on those levers, but thinking about that would ruin the yogurt, so we don’t. Instead, we proceed directly to the topping bar, a few steps to the right during which we lose all dietary religion and pile on gummy bears, crushed cookies and something called “cake batter crunch” with the uninhibited abandon of people reverse-engineering a childhood they swore they’d outgrown.

And underneath all of it, the whole town loops — same cars, same six blocks, same cop directing traffic who looks more confused than you do, same golden retriever, same stroller doing figure eights past an ice cream line that has not moved since June. I mean, really, what’s better than walking with tremendous purpose toward absolutely nowhere, because you’ve already been there, twice, and you’re going back anyway? That’s not indecision. That’s tradition. That’s the whole point of summer.

Most things don’t get to stay this recognizable. Somehow, this has. So we circle it one more time.

See you on Main Street.