There are a lot of nice places in the world to get a tan. Many are more remote, some are prettier. But none have the particular cachet, the built-in proximity to power, the sheer New York navel-gazing snob appeal of the Hamptons

Way out at the edge of America, the seaside towns of Long Island's South Fork are connected by a meandering main road that dead-ends at the Atlantic at Montauk Point. Long Island–born Walt Whitman watched the waters crash against the cliffs here and sang the praises of "the wild unrest, the snowy curling caps—that inbound urge and urge of waves / Seeking the shores forever."

Almost since Whitman's day, another urge swells up each year at the first sign of spring. I refer to the tidal return of the Summer People, that crashing wave of moneyed Manhattanites seeking these shores forever—or at least for that period known as "the season," which lasts roughly from the vernal awakening of Memorial Day through Labor Day, when the migratory rich close up their houses and fly away.

Traffic is the great preoccupation of life on the East End. There are others: new money versus old grudges; celebrity infestation; when things used to be better and how other people are ruining everything. But traffic is the unifying theme, an equal-opportunity bummer. Route 27, the Montauk Highway, is a clogged two-lane artery overfed by the Long Island Expressway and the pumping heart of New York City, one hundred miles to the west. On warm weekend afternoons, the traffic flows like fudge on cold marble. Mercedes follows Mercedes, slowly, slowly, as if along some dreamlike assembly line at a Stuttgart-by-the-Sea.

It's hell, but it's a self-selecting hell. And while nobody is going to cop to this, I'm sure that most folks lucky enough to be stuck in this glamorous gridlock wouldn't have it any other way.

More than a place, the Hamptons is shorthand for attainment and opulence and elegance and vulgarity. Today, Fitzgerald's "fresh, green breast of the new world" is tarted up—the Paris Hilton of summer retreats. A once-bucolic, now bling-befouled American Eden.

Don't get me wrong. I like the Hamptons. I like graying cedar shingles and wild dunes and wide-open Atlantic beaches. I like pretty girls in summer dresses, vintage Mercedes 280 SL roadsters rolling along with their tops down, overpriced lobster salad, and fussy menswear stores with pink pants and green sweaters. I like flooring it on the wild, unpopulated stretch of Route 27 between Amagansett and Montauk, past the roadside Clam Bar and Napeague State Park. I like going days without wearing socks or even shoes and marching single file late at night down someone's private boardwalk to look out at the moonlit ocean.

Jockeying for tables at the "in" restaurants isn't especially relaxing (it's more fun in Manhattan, and the food's better). Seaside nightclubs are as idiotic as they sound. But I admit to liking the amusing but meaningless sight of Steven Spielberg driving himself down the main drag in East Hampton village. I like the feeling you get out in Montauk watching the surfers at Ditch Plains; you know you're just an afternoon's drive from the city, but the sun is shining and the scene on the water is pure Southern California.