Peter Boody

When the newly refurbished Sag Harbor Cinema opens its doors, presumably sometime this spring, and patrons are finally able to settle into the comfortable, brand new seats for a state-of-the-art film experience in one of its three theaters, they just might encounter a familiar face running the place — especially if they have been regular customers of the nearby UPS Store. That’s because Thierry Balihuta, 33, who joined the staff last fall as the cinema’s manager, most recently managed the Sag Harbor UPS Store where he could be relied upon to help customers ship parcels, design brochures or produce marketing materials.

My love for local history began when I was archiving the collection at the Sag Harbor Historical Society’s Annie Cooper Boyd House on Main Street. By March 2018, when the Suffolk County Historical Society mounted the Eastville Community Historical Society’s exhibition of tintypes celebrating African Americans and Native Americans, I was compiling a bibliography of local primary resources on Native American history. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the first peoples who lived here. I kept thinking we are all living on stolen land, and I couldn’t reconcile myself to it.

They gathered on the dock in the Port Du Cadiz in the south of Spain: three archeologists, two college students, three captains, one cook, one engineer, two scuba divers, one able-bodied seaman and Laurie Zaleski, a marine geologist, who had just signed up for the adventure of a lifetime. The 2004 months-long mission to locate a pair of 200-year-old shipwrecks using multibeam sonar was among the first of its kind. And they were sailing, quite literally, into uncharted waters.