There is a particular kind of freedom in the middle of the Hamptons that costs $35 a night.
Hither Hills State Park. Montauk. The Hamptons — that mythological address where America’s most aggressively wealthy came to build monuments to their own invincibility, right on the edge of an ocean that has never once read a Forbes list and does not intend to start.
The Last Beach: A Montauk Pilgrimage Before the Ocean Takes It Back – Story and Fine Art Nature Photography by Maxwell Alexander, MA(FIT), BFA(SVA), Artist/Activist, Photographer, Journalist and an Actual Human
I come back every spring. Before the helicopters. Before the rosé. Before the Range Rovers form their seasonal migration patterns along Montauk Highway like an invasive species nobody has the political will to manage.
I come for the beach when it still belongs to itself.
The first thing you notice, if you’ve been coming long enough, is what’s no longer there.
The dunes are disappearing.
Not slowly, not poetically, not in the tasteful way that lifestyle magazines might frame as “coastal evolution.” They are being eaten. Sixty, seventy percent gone in sections. The crosswalks that once led families from the campground to the beach now dead-end into air — the sand beneath them already claimed by water that answers to nobody’s property deed.
Hither Hills has closed most beach access points. The ones that remain are survivors, not infrastructure.
Meanwhile, half a mile down the shore, a billionaire’s beach house sits on a foundation that no insurance company in America will touch anymore. They know what the billionaire’s lobbyists spent decades pretending not to know: the ocean is coming, it is coming faster than projected, and it does not have a Hamptons share.
The irony is almost too clean for fiction.
The same fossil fuel agenda that built those fortunes — the pipeline politics, the Middle East resource wars, the regulatory capture dressed up as energy policy — is the exact mechanism grinding those dunes to nothing. The beach under the billionaire’s infinity pool is being liquefied by the decisions made in the billionaire’s boardroom.
The ocean, it turns out, also got the memo.
But here is where I have to stop and tell you about the sand.
Because before you can dismantle anything, you have to actually look at it.
Get down on your knees on a Montauk beach at low tide and look — really look — at a single handful of sand, and you are holding a library. Each grain is a document. Quartz. Feldspar. Garnet. Tiny fragments of shell, of coral, of geological events that predate every empire ever built on this continent by hundreds of millions of years.
The beach was here before the Montaukett people were dispossessed. Before the Gilded Age fortunes. Before the hedge funds. Before the summer shares and the bottle service and the private beach clubs with their velvet ropes installed, absurdly, on a shoreline that belongs to the Atlantic Ocean and always has.
A sea shell is calcified history. It will outlast every LLC currently holding title to Hamptons real estate. It has already outlasted empires it never knew existed.
I arrived young to this country. Naive in the way immigrants are naive — carrying the facade version, the brochure. The Empire State. The land of reinvention. I landed in the Hamptons eventually, because water is my element, because the ocean here speaks in a frequency I recognize somewhere older than language.
I came as a dishwasher and a prep cook at one of the most exclusive clubs in the Hamptons. Lobsters, shrimp, oysters — creatures I had never seen before, exotic aristocrats of the sea, handled daily by people making $7 an hour. And then there was the tuna salad. The billionaires’ tuna sandwiches — served on pristine white linens, ordered by people who arrived by seaplane — were made from the same industrial-size can that sits on every diner shelf in every working-class neighborhood in America. Same tuna. Same mercury. The only difference between the billionaire’s lunch and the peasant’s lunch was the truffle aioli and the zip code. Democracy, it turns out, is alive and well in canned fish.
What I did not yet understand was the full cost of what I was admiring.
The pristine beach. The light on the Atlantic in early spring when nobody is there yet and the waves crash with the indifferent authority of something that has been doing this since before humans had opinions about it. All of that beauty — real, undeniable, mine — sitting on top of stolen land. Maintained through policies paid for with stolen resources. Surrounded by wealth extracted from the labor of people whose names the Hamptons does not commemorate.
The beauty is real. The crime is also real. Both things require looking at directly.
A driftwood log at sunset on a Montauk dune does not care about any of this. It is simply the most beautiful object in the universe at the exact moment you are looking at it. The grain of the wood, worn silk by salt and time, catching the last gold light before the horizon takes it.
This is the practice: to see it fully, without the numbness that power structures require of the people living under them.
To notice the shell’s architecture — the geometry, the patience, the absolute indifference to quarterly earnings — is a political act. Attention is resistance. Beauty, looked at honestly, makes the absurdity of the current arrangement undeniable.
The ocean is expanding.
The next Sandy — the one they know is coming — will reorganize certain real estate portfolios quite dramatically. The uninsurable mansions will meet the unimpressed Atlantic and the Atlantic will win, as it has always won, as it won against every previous civilization that built too close to the water and called it permanence.
The billionaires are not a protected species.
The sand grains will remain.
The shells will remain.
The Montaukett ancestors, whose bones are in this ground, will remain in the only way that matters — in the land’s memory, in the water’s memory, in the specific quality of light over this particular stretch of Atlantic that no development permit has ever successfully privatized.
I paid $35 for my campsite. I set up a tent under a sky that belongs to everyone. I walked a surviving crosswalk to what remains of the beach and I photographed it like it might be the last time, because it might be.
The glamping setup glowed warm in the blue hour. The hammock held the weight of a person who showed up for the pilgrimage. The ocean did what the ocean does.
Renewal. Erasure. The two things that are actually the same thing, if you watch long enough.
Come back every spring before the helicopters.
Pay $35.
Look at the sand like it’s the last sand.
It might be.
PROTECT PUBLIC LANDS. TAX THE BILLIONAIRES. LET THE OCEAN DO THE REST.
Earth Day 2026: The Empire and the Ocean
Earth Day was born in 1970 from genuine alarm — from people who looked at the Cuyahoga River literally on fire and decided that setting rivers on fire was not a sustainable economic model. It produced the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA. Real things. Hard-won things. This spring, we are watching all of it dismantled in real time, fossil fuel leases handed out like party favors while the coastlines that were always the first to pay the price continue their quiet disappearance into the Atlantic.
Empires do not announce their endings. They erode. The infrastructure crumbles while the military budget expands. The middle class dissolves while the billionaire class buys a second superyacht and calls it innovation. The beach vanishes while the beach house lobby buys another decade of denial. Montauk already knows how this ends. The ocean doesn’t accept lobbying dollars. It doesn’t grant extensions. It just keeps coming — indifferent, ancient, and absolutely correct.
This Earth Day, the most honest thing anyone can do is go somewhere the earth is still telling the truth and just listen. The sand will remain. The shells will remain. The ocean will remain. Empires are the temporary ones.
PROTECT THE EARTH. TAX THE RICH. THE OCEAN IS ALREADY DOING ITS PART.
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