The season is almost here again. Every May the small towns on the furthest reaches of Long Island begin to swell with the ranks of “summer people,” many of them well-off Manhattanites who have their own version of what it means to go to “the Hamptons.” Then there are, of course, the people who live there year-round, some of whom have watched towns like Montauk grow from a sleepy, working-class fishing village to a destination where beachfront Memorial Day weekend hotel rooms can go for $5,000 a night. 

Amanda M. Fairbanks’s new nonfiction book, The Lost Boys of Montauk, lives at the intersection of those two worlds, using the story of a 1984 maritime disaster to chart how privilege, wealth, and community have grown together—and collided—on the eastern edges of New York. The four men who died on the fishing boat the Wind Blown—Mike Stedman, Dave Connick, Michael Vigilant, and Scott Clarke—hailed from different worlds, but all wound up losing their lives on the same boat. In her book Fairbanks traces a wide range of stories that connect back to the men, from the history of Montauk to the men’s relationships with their fathers to how tilefish became such a prized catch for fishermen in the ’80s. The result is a sweeping, and often devastating, portrait of a community on the brink of transformation, and of how grief can ricochet across generations. 

Fairbanks, who is now a full-time resident of Sag Harbor after first arriving among the “summer people,” speaks below about how she used her outsider status to tell the story of this fishing community, the responsibility of interviewing people about the tragedies of their past, and her contacts with the divers who are still trying to find the lost hull of the Wind Blown, somewhere not that far from the Montauk Lighthouse. 

The Lost Boys of Montauk: The True Story of the Wind Blown, Four Men Who Vanished at Sea, and the Survivors They Left Behind will be published on May 25 from Gallery Books. 

I like that this book could be pitched as an unsolved mystery, to find out what happened when the boat went down. Did you go into it thinking you could unravel this mystery? Or did you go into it just knowing that there was going to be a bunch of different stories to tell and the mystery aspect of this lost boat was part of the story but not the goal of the story?

I never ever went into it thinking I would solve the mystery of where the boat is located. And to be honest, I mean the dramatic event obviously takes place on this boat in 1984 and these four beautiful young men lost their lives. But to me the real drama of this book takes place on land. And it’s really the survivors and the women who were left behind and the mothers and the girlfriends, and Mary, obviously the widow. And that was really what intrigued me the most.

Although there is this whole fascinating genre of shipwreck finders. And just this last week someone reached out to me, this young guy who lives in Amangansett, who’s like obsessed with finding the whole of the Wind Blown. I wish I had known about him before I had sent in my final manuscript. But he just actually emailed me this morning that he had gone out. And I was like, “If you go out later this summer, I would love to accompany your dive team.”

I do think that it will be solved. It’s a steel hulled boat, it’s not like at went off hundreds of miles off shore. So I do hope that it’s found. I think it would provide a degree of closure. I feel like humans need a period at the end of a sentence, or a body found, or something tangible that shows an ending. The mystery of this I think has its way of unraveling people, as you saw in the book.

What level of maritime knowledge were you starting with when you started reporting this book?

I would say negative. Absolutely zero. I don’t know how to fish. I still don’t know how to fish. I mean, I love the water and I grew up on the West Coast. I love swimming and that’s about all that I know about the sea.

Did that intimidate you in going into the process? 

So I interviewed more than 100 people for it. And I would say of those 100 people, I had very, very extensive interviews with over a dozen commercial fishermen. I would literally send them sections of the book where I was very technical and they would correct me. And then we’d talk again and we’d go back and forth. As you know, when journalists write about much of anything, we become like these mini experts. And it was the same for surfing. It was the same for grief and trauma and loss. Certainly for commercial fishing, it was the most technical, but I needed to wrap my mind around it. I think as an outsider, I’m always going to be an outsider to this culture. And so I did my best to learn as much as I could. Yeah.

You’re really aware, and kind of explicit about your role as an outsider in the book. Why did that feel important to lay your own cards out on the table?

I mean, I don’t want to make too much of it. Obviously journalists are generally outsiders to the stories that we tell, but I do think there’s a specific dichotomy to these summer resort towns where there’s a population that comes in the summer, and then there’s a whole separate population that exists year round. And I’m kind of in the middle of that. Now I live here year-round. You don’t even say you’re from here unless your lineage goes back several generations.

And then as I went on and I started uncovering different layers of the story, it was almost as if I felt like an outsider had to tell the story because an insider would tell a totally different version of it, or they would be beholden to a family member or a cousin. I didn’t have that boundary and limit.

And you kind of sit in the discomfort between versions of the truth that come up in your reporting. Is that just a necessity when you’re dealing with those decades old memories, that the truth may or may not ever exist?

What’s fascinating with interviewing people about traumatic events is that typically they either remember everything like it had happened yesterday, every single detail, or they’ve kind of blocked all of the details out and they remember it very peripherally. When there were those huge discrepancies in the reporting and the narrative, I wanted to alert the reader to that, to draw their own conclusions.

There are so many details and stories threaded throughout this, and it goes back and forth in time, all the way to the founding of Montauk. How did you find a structure to assemble it all? 

Since it’s my first book and I had only ever reported and written newspaper and magazine stories, I probably did enough reporting for three books. And there are a whole bunch of chapters that were left on the cutting room floor. But as I dove into it, I really wanted to know about tilefish and what kind of tilefish they were catching.  And then it became important to me to know where in the lineage of Montauk these guys found themselves, and why they were there in the first place and their relationships with their fathers. All four of them had these really interesting, complex dynamics with their fathers, and yet they all four found themselves on the fishing boat. And the sort of class dynamics that we were just talking about that are present here with the summer people versus the locals, and then the working class versus the very, very affluent. As a journalist who’s endlessly fascinated by class, there was this socio-economic current on this one fishing boat on this particular day when they all lost their lives. 

Given the way that the wealth gap has expanded in all of America and in the Hamptons in past decades, can people do what Mike Stedman and Dave Connick did, grow up in a privileged class and become a commercial fisherman?

The times that I’ve been out on the docks and interviewed contemporary modern day fishermen, I think it’s largely a working class profession. I certainly didn’t see any Yale or Harvard graduates roaming around, although I didn’t ask everyone’s credentials.

In terms of thinking about America and specifically the East End and the South Fork, ’84 was a really interesting turning point because it was before all the crazy Wall Street money and the bonuses started rolling in and people were buying McMansions. And wealth in the ’60s and ’70s, even if you came from family money, was much more understated. It was much more muted. You weren’t driving around town in a Range Rover and giant diamonds and it was just different. And now obviously local affordable housing is really difficult. And so I think this dream they were chasing in some ways was sort of unique to that era. And the world changed quite rapidly thereafter.

As a journalist, you get used to asking people questions that they don’t necessarily want to answer. When you’re having these conversations, how do you take that on for yourself, the weight of knowing that you’re digging up stuff that these people might not want to be thinking about?

To be honest, that was really hardest part of this book. There are a whole bunch of other things that were not in the book, that will never leave my computer and my notebook. Many, many, many things were shared with me that are off the record that obviously aren’t in the book. Anyone who grew up here knows the layers of the story. So it’s not like I’m exposing company secrets or things no one’s ever heard of. I just think life is usually a little more complicated than maybe we’d like to admit. And I became comfortable with sharing my version of the reported story. And I tried to tell it with as much empathy and respect and admiration as I possibly could, because I really do care for all of the people that I’ve written about in the book.

Well isn’t the idea also that you’re preserving a story that these people don’t want to be forgotten? 

Exactly. And honestly, the story was there were many people who passed away in the course of my reporting it, and this story was very nearly lost to time and the ravages of time. And I think there is something really great about a living history and talking to someone who’s still alive rather than reading their journal entries. I think it deserved all of these layers to be revealed. But obviously it’s my opinion.

Do you plan to keep pursuing this story?

What’s really funny is now random people on the internet will solicit, do you want to write about this shipwreck from the 18th century?  I’m not interested in doing another sea story necessarily, or in general. But yeah, if these guys  go off diving this summer and they have a diving boat and I can go on the boat and maybe we can find the Wind Blown, that would be the coolest ever. 

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