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I’ve been a casual gardener for the last twenty years, sticking some petunias in a pot, zinnias in the bed, tomatoes in a cage, anything to keep the place from falling into total overgrown entropy — with some success but mostly due to my wife who has the veritable thumb verte.

I’m learning the hard way that there’s a few things you shouldn’t put in the ground because they will ruin your life. They include:

• Morning glories. Pretty blue flowers that self-seed and before you know it start to crawl up the gutters and smother everything in their path. Never again.  Robert Stone wrote in Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties:

“Across the highway, on the far bank of La Honda Creek, were more morning glory vines. They were there because Kesey had taken his shotgun and filled the magazines with all the mystically named varieties of that flower’s seeds and fired them into the neighboring hillside.”

• Bamboo. Haven’t planted it but have been told it is evil.
• Horseradish: ditto.
• Asparagus
• English Ivy — this stuff will take down a tree, ruin your house and split boulders if you don’t go after it with a machete
• Chinese lantern: I got this disaster plant as a gift and it is taking over. We’re talking Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My mission in life is to eradicate it but I fear it’s too late. Pray for me.

And now, I’m adding to the list: strawberries.

For it is strawberry season and my garden is speckled with  lots and lots of little ripening red balls of sweetness, just begging to be picked and sliced and scattered over my Cheerios. I planted two strawberry plants in the garden two summers ago, figuring, “hey, really fresh strawberries = good.” Then they spread. And spread. And spread. Now they own 25% of the bed. Yet I protected them with netting two weeks ago when the first berries appeared  so the birds wouldn’t peck at them, but lo and behold, whenever I see one that looks ripe for the picking and worm my hand under the net to snare it I discover each and every one has a bite mark. Not the green ones, not the half-ripe ones … no, the vandal responsible for the ruination of my crop waits until each berry is right at its peak of perfection and it gives it a little chomp then leaves the rest for me. The villain doesn’t finish one berry, no, it bites every berry.

Chipmunks are the issue but I can’t bring myself to exterminate them. Which gets me thinking about the psychological advantage squirrels and chipmunks have over their brethren the common rat. People don’t say “eek!” and climb on chairs when they see a chipmunk stuffing its cheeks with sunflower seeds under the bird feeders. But let a big grey, naked tailed rat appear and the exterminators are called in. It’s all about the tails and whether or not your species has been deemed cute by the cartoons. Chip and Dale and Alvin guaranteed the chipmunk would get immunity for life. No one can poison a chipmunk or set up a pellet-gun sniper nest to pick them off. But the rat… the rat gets Willard and that weird cartoon where a “nice” rat cooked French food in Paris. Rats equal the Black Death. Buboes and disease. Chipmunks equal Christmas carols sung in falsetto and good humored Disney mischief.

But my strawberries ….. the insolent little f%*^*^%er stood there the other day, ten feet from me, as if to say: “You looking at something bro? Come at me. Do you even lift?”

After I salvage what I can I’m ripping up the plants. I can’t stand the tragedy of watching 11 months of strawberry plants turn into a chipmunk vandalism project ever again. I know I can cut the bitten parts off and make strawberry jam …. but who has time?

I’m sticking to zinnias from now on.  (which are prone to being raped by earwigs, those delightful creepy insects that freaked me out as a kid because I assumed they were called earwigs because they crawled into one’s ear canal and made their homes in a bed of ear wax ((for more on insects in ears, see the account of African explorer James Hanning Speke who, according to our friends at Wikipedia: “Speke suffered severely when he became temporarily deaf after a beetle crawled into his ear and he tried to remove it with a knife.”)))

“One of these horrid little insects awoke me in his struggles to penetrate my ear, but just too late: for in my endeavour to extract him, I aided his immersion. He went his course, struggling up the narrow channel, until he got arrested by want of passage-room. This impediment evidently enraged him, for he began with exceeding vigour, like a rabbit at a hole, to dig violently away at my tympanum. The queer sensation this amusing measure excited in me is past description.

I felt inclined to act as our donkeys once did, when beset by a swarm of bees, who buzzed about their ears and stung their heads and eyes until they were so irritated and confused that they galloped about in the most distracted order, trying to knock them off by treading on their heads, or by rushing under bushes, into houses, or through any jungle they could find. Indeed, I do not know which was worst off. The bees killed some of them, and this beetle nearly did for me. What to do I knew not.

Neither tobacco, oil, nor salt could be found: I therefore tried melted butter; that failing, I applied the point of a penknife to his back, which did more harm than good; for though a few thrusts quieted him, the point also wounded my ear so badly, that inflammation set in, severe suppuration took place, and all the facial glands extending from that point down to the point of the shoulder became contorted and drawn aside, and a string of boils decorated the whole length of that region.

It was the most painful thing I ever remember to have endured; but, more annoying still, I could not masticate for several days, and had to feed on broth alone. For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed. Six or seven months after this accident happened, bits of the beetle—a leg, a wing, or parts of its body—came away in the wax.”

The real opening day is today, Wednesday June 12 in Cotuit. I’m clearing the calendar and hitting the road from NYC a lot earlier than usual so I can cover the 250 miles in time.  I found this little gem of a promo on the Kettleer’s website.

Not finding a digital version of the 2013 Kettleers’ schedule on the team’s website, I manually made a simple one in Google Calendar.

The XML version is here: https://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/iokp41b1c1s8djcsd999ic1t40%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic

The iCal version: https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/iokp41b1c1s8djcsd999ic1t40%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

and the HTML version for access through any browser: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=iokp41b1c1s8djcsd999ic1t40%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

The official version can be found on kettleers.org here.

Opening Day is Wednesday June 12 at Lowell Park.

I painted the bottom of the boat yesterday and realized as I got more and more woozy from the fumes of the bottom paint (nothing like a lungful of a substance designed to kill barnacles and slime to make one feel good about one’s self) that it’s one of my favorite chores — not because of the satisfaction of the job well done — but because of the simple pure pleasure of listening to a baseball game on the radio.

Even though the radio broadcast a terrible game as  the Red Sox went down in flames on Mother’s Day,  listening to them do so, while outside on a splendid May afternoon, paint brush in hand, is one of those quintessential multitasking things that make me happy.

Then, this morning, in a grand birthday gesture, the Red Sox ticket office phoned to let me know my patient stint on the season ticket waiting list was over and I am now an official season ticket holder. I decided to start small and took seven games in the bleachers — where it all began for me so many years ago — and must confess to a feeling of personal real estate ownership out there by the Pesky Pole in right field in section L43, Row 32, on the aisle in seats 1&2. This is my view more or less.

At the hardware store yesterday — on one of three trips for screws, nuts, washers, etc. — the guy behind the register saw my Cotuit Kettleers hat, the nasty sweat-stained one I use for painting, and asked when the season was going to start: “June 12 at home against Orleans,” I replied, a Wednesday I will make sure I am in Cotuit for and not behind my desk in New York City.

The Kettleer newsletter arrived this weekend with the good news that the Cotuit Athletic Association has renewed Coach Mike Roberts’ contract for another three years. He’s been with the Kettleers since 2003 and is a genuinely wonderful man, the kind of guy who appears out of nowhere on the morning of the Library’s annual book sale to help lug boxes of books out of the basement and onto the tables set up on the front lawn. Coach Roberts is a baseball legend. He coached the Tarheels for a very long time, is the father of Baltimore second baseman Brian Roberts, and headmaster of the Roberts School of Cape Cod Small Ball, his annual training camp for the best  collegiate freshmen and sophomore ball players in the intricacies of the hit-and-run, sacrifice bunts, the double-steal, and even, swear to god, the hidden ball trick. One of his proteges, Vanderbilt’s Mike Yaztrkemski, was the subject of a great Tyler Kepner profile in the Sunday New York Times.

With a new snackbar and restroom, the ball park is looking sharp for the 2013 season, testimony to the CAA’s fundraising efforts and the loyalty of Cotuit’s fans.

The lilacs are about to bloom, the lily-of-the-valley is coming up behind the kitchen and my birthday is only days away which can only mean one thing:

The fish are back.

Or should be back. They weren’t here  last weekend. I went out twice and was skunked both times, but that’s part of the fun of spring fishing. Fisher, Cousin Pete and I kept the local waters honest on Sunday with a brave slog out of the Wianno Cut to Lone Rock in the Good Ship Wet looking for squid. Pete saw the squid fleet arrive and depart a few days before, so either the squid run isn’t happening this year, or the squidders got out too early because the Cape is  experiencing a delayed spring with lower than usual water temps brought on by a thoroughly shitty winter. Who knows. Maybe this weekend.

On Sunday we cast our squid jigs down to the bottom, bounced them up and down —  little pink torpedos festooned with pins which supposedly tick off the squid who attack them in the belief they are fish after their eggs. These are good eating squid and the big fleet of commercial fishermen who line the horizon of Vineyard and Nantucket Sound the first week of most Mays are testament to their value. Pete, Fisher and I like to catch them for dinner and to put away some in the freeze for fluke and striper bait later in the season, but I hear these are really prized squid for the table and command a high price on the market. On a good day an angler with a single rod and a couple jigs can easily fill a 5 gallon bucket. I’ve learned that a half-dozen are all I need. They are a pain in the ass to clean and according to one local expert, rinsing them in fresh water ruins them — apparently  only saltwater should be used. I can’t cook them. Squid confound me. Always come out tougher than inner tubes. Like fish flavored rubber bands. Some say to either cook them for ten seconds or ten hours. And as for calimari? That was a disaster. My attempt to clone the awesome grilled squid from Inaho in Yarmouthport?  A cat wouldn’t consider it. (digressionary recommendation: Jiro Dreams of Sushi, fantastic documentary on the sushi master of Tokyo, the first to get three Michelin stars).

Squid are very fun to catch — they change colors like a hippie lightshow at the Fillmore, blast jets of black ink in protest, and, if handled correctly while being de-pinned from the jigs, can be aimed at one’s fellow squidders to coat them in the stinky stuff. The boat is always a disaster afterwards. My old friend Bob used to go out with a bunch of beer, dressed in a white painter’s pants and a white wife beater just to really get down and dirty in the ink.

Anyway, we rolled and staggered with our yet-to-be-learned sea legs, beam-to in a big Nantucket Sound swell coming out of the southeast (“Wind east, fish bite least”) and even though it was very nearly shorts and t-shirt weather back at the house, the ocean still feels downright March-like. I need to check the water temperatures, but we were bundled up in fleece and windbreakers and may stay that way until Memorial Day.

Ten minutes squidding and there was nary a sign of them at the rock, so we ran in with the seas to the Cotuit channel, switched the squid rigs for day-glo orange surface plugs  – Rangers and Ballistic Missiles — and made a half dozen big casts to see if we could induce an early bluefish scout to attack. Nothing happening. So we ran all the way up inside of the bay, beached the skiff at the west end of the Narrows, and threw little Rat-L-Traps and Sluggos into the channel looking for a spring schoolie striper. Nothing there either, so we cracked a beer, shrugged and decided we were a week early.

I’ve caught bluefish in late April. There were squid around, so that may explain the missing link. I used to catch tons of striped bass this time of year, tagging them for the American Littoral Society — but I’m not so into catch-and-release anym0re, not wanting to mess up a fish just for the sport of playing it on light tackle. The Cape Cod Times is reporting a keeper-sized bass taken in Cotuit (I need to check what the rules are now, in my mind a “keeper” will always be 36″), as well as a bluefish off of Popponesset, so I know where I will be tomorrow afternoon when I return to the Cape from NYC.

And, to kick off the piscine season, I even remembered that the Commonwealth now requires a saltwater fishing license, and like a good citizen I paid the state my $11 bucks for the slip of paper. The regulars at Reel-Time used to get all heated on the topic of licenses. Libertarian anglers are pretty common. Me, I favor licenses if the funds are earmarked for fishery protection and yes, I believe striped bass should be declared a gamefish and put off limits to the commercial guys.

My son wants to learn the maddening art of fly fishing this year, so I cleaned up an old Scott 1o-weight and will get him going on the lawn this weekend, elbow tucked into his side like he was holding a bottle of gin, casting with his forearm only, stiff wrist, making a long oval in the sky with the rod tip, double-hauling, feeding out more and more line until he turns into a regular Lefty Kreh.

As for the tackle shop that lives in my garage…. well, it’s also where I store the galvanized garbage cans full of bird seed — so the rodents have infested the drawers and cabinets with their balls of  fuzz and sunflower husks, peeing all over everything and probably exposing me to some ugly hantavirus. I found one fly rod case with the end chewed off and a family of field mice inside. Little $%^%^&&%$#’s …..I’m buying a lot of moth balls and will see if I can resort to chemical warfare to keep them away.

There are few OCD pleasures in the world that compare with fiddling around with fishing tackle. I’m an obsessive when it comes to the old saying that most fish are caught the night before. Bimini twists, wire leaders, split rings, new 4/0 trebles on the bluefish plugs, splicing 30 lb leaders onto the striper rods with Albright knows and a bead of Pliobond rubber cement to ease the knot through the rod tip; cleaning the fly lines, cataloguing the flies and putting together a box for early season bass, poppers for bluefish, a hookless plug so I can use a spinning rod to tease the blues up to the fly fisherman; leaky waders, wader belt, line basket……the list is staggering, but given the evil price of tackle these days, it pays to scrounge the high water wrack line on Dead Neck every fall for the plugs and lures that wash up there. For the price of a new hook and a little TLC I can resurrect a $10 lure and absorb some of my own losses due to bad knots, boneheaded casts, or overpowering fishies.

Found money — an old wooden popper found on the beach with the paint worn off

update: duh, thanks to andy for pointing out this post was originally entitled “Old Post Road)

Last week the town surveyed Old Shore Road and the stretch of Putnam Avenue/Maple that runs along the Ropes Field. Lots of wooden stakes with pink ribbons popped up and then a gaggle of town officials toured the area on Monday — part of a larger village tour organized by Cotuit’s town council representative, Jessica Rapp-Grassetti, Precinct 7.

I talked to the councilor this morning about the Old Shore Road situation. There’s a few of issues at play so I’ll just relate the highlights:

• Old Shore Road is one of the most important points of access to the waterways and its usage is pretty intense and crowded during the summer season. Parking and congestion and blocking homeowners’ driveways are issues.
• The boat ramp at the foot of the hill was improved a few years back, changing a nearly unusable sand “ramp” into a durable launch ramp that Cotuit long needed but that has attracted more vehicles and trailers. These take up a ton of parking space — at least two ordinary parking spots — and can clog up the traffic leading to one-way standoffs between two cars trying to pass in opposite directions. This is a scenic vista (see the header image on this blog) so there are lots of people who drive down to look at the water, eat their lunch in their car at the seawall, and watch their kids take their sailing lessons at the yacht club.
• The public beach at Ropes — which isn’t in the best of shape — has gone from an official bathing beach in the 1960s complete with bathhouse, water fountain, and lifeguards to a little piece of sand encroached by a mob of dinghies, kayaks, catamarans, paddle boats, and other little watercraft. Still a popular sunbathing spot but swimming isn’t advised. Water quality is iffy (Councilor Grassetti has persuaded the town to resume testing there and at Riley’s Beach, something the town stopped doing for cost reasons and which Three Bays assumed responsibility for last summer) and the bottom is pure black clam muck.
• The beach has been invaded not only by dinghies and little watercraft, but phragmites, the tall rushes that choke things up. A freshwater spring flows here — where the little footbridge stands — and there is a lot of endangered banks that hold saw grass, mussels, etc..  The town has been working with the Civic Association and concerned villagers to clean that up.
• The little strip of public beach is also where the yacht club conducts sailing lessons, the Cotuit Rowing Club launches its shells, and groups of kayakers converge to launch for a paddle around the bays. Getting from the parking lot to the water involves a narrow path. People walk their dogs on the beach out to Handy’s Point. Fishermen use it to get to the stripers. Clammers …..

Take one very popular road serving one of the better boat ramps in town and one of the best  points for recreational access to the water and Old Shore Road is under some pressure.

The town made the smart decision three years ago to ask dinghy owners to get all boats off the beach between November 15 and April 15 (which sucks for me as I keep my boat in the water 10 months a year and have to remove my only way out to my boat during the closed off-season months; exemptions are given to commercial interests like shellfishermen and mooring servicers, but Joe Boater like me is out of luck). This identified the derelict hulks and give the grass and mud banks a chance to recover and get some air and sunlight over the winter. That probably won’t solve the problem of where to put them so the town may have to go to a dinghy permit/registration system much as it did with moorings in the late 80s. Too much demand and not enough room means some system has to be in place to put a cap on the proliferation of little boats. Oh for the good old days when my father would throw a wooden skiff on the bank without thinking twice. Those days of unregulated, uncongested use are as long gone as clear water, eel grass and schools of scup.

Thomas Fisher hanging out on the beach by Old Shore Road

The town wants any dinghy owners who have built racks or put down wooden pallets to remove them.

Possible traffic solutions include:

• No trailer parking north of the boat ramp to the seawall at Ropes Beach, only up the hill north of the rowing club and west up the hill towards Main Street
• One way traffic from Main Street down to the ramp, and two way traffic from the hill at the top of Putnam down to the parking area in the beach. This would let parents drop their kids off for sailing and turn around exit the same way they came down to the beach.

I’d like to see the road closed to sightseeing before hurricanes when boat owners are rushing to haul their boats out at the ramp. I feel sorry for the people who drive down hoping to see nature’s fury and instead find themselves in the middle of a traffic jam as eight trailers wait their turn to back down the ramp. The police should put up saw horses at each end of Old Shore and only let boat owners in during the short window when the hauling happens.

This is a great spot, literally my backyard, and one of the jewels of Cotuit. Getting the cars, the forest of signs, the clutter and the pressure off with a few rules and changes seems a good thing to me. Heaven forbid someone decides it’s a good idea to widen it and turn it into a trailer parking lot. That I would oppose.

Jessica said the next meeting of the Conservation Commission on the island dredging project is May 15.

Karen Ann Hill passed away this week after suffering a fall. She was 73 years old and arguably the best known face of recreational fishing on Cape Cod.

For Karen owned Sportsport, the little tackle shop in Hyannis that she inherited from her father, a beloved institution marked by the familiar sight of the Old Salt fishing in the parking lot wearing yellow foul weather gear, rain or shine. I knew the Old Salt before I ever met and became friends with Karen. It was one of those icons I first saw as a kid and have carried with me ever since, despite how much the rest of the Cape changes around me. Some motorist took him out a couple years ago. Karen had sold the shop already and retired. But the new owners knew that Sportsport wasn’t Sportsport without the bearded man in the red boat, and he fishes on to this very day.

I didn’t get to know Karen until 1991 when I first moved to Cape Cod full time to raise my family. Churbucks weren’t a fishing family when I was a kid. My father prohibited fish (aside from frozen Gorton’s of Gloucester fish sticks served to his kids) from ever being served (some old dislike he probably picked up in the 40s when a bluefish was about it when it came to protein for the table) and he certainly didn’t fish but he sure loved to clam. My grandfather wasn’t a big fisherman as I recall.. So there weren’t a lot of the father-son-grandpa-bonding-over-fishing-scenes in my youth. When I did fish it was with my brother, a dropline and a cracked open quahog from the Town Dock for scup and eels, the latter species terrorizing me.

When I became a townie in 1991 I noticed the locals all driving around with fishing rods on their roof racks in the early spring and fall — something was going on that I didn’t know about and I decided I would take up fishing. Obsessive maniac that I become when I really get into something (fishing, Italian bicycles, watching complete archives of a TV series in one binge), I started to really get into fishing, developing a fishing jones I couldn’t appease. I read nothing but fishing books, bought nothing but fishing tackle, and coveted rods and reels like a sex fiend. I woke up at 3 in the morning to fish. I fished at 10 pm in January during a snowstorm on a beach in Sandwich  near the Cape Cod Canal on the stupid hunch that I might catch a tom cod. I didn’t but it was worth it for the story. I risked drowning night after night standing in the foaming surf on sandbars off the beach in Chatham fishing for a “keeper” (a striped bass over 3-feet long) and marveling at the wildness of the stars and the Atlantic all in front of me. I waved a fly rod so much in the wind that my shoulder fell apart and I had to stop for six months of physical therapy.  They say there are 365 fresh water ponds on Cape Cod? One for every day of the year. I tried to fish them all. Livelining, chumming, trolling, roll casting. You name it, I wanted to try it.

I even started “the Internet Journal of Salt Water Flyfishing” – Sportsport was the first advertiser.

And Karen Hill fed my habit. I basically moved her tackle store ten miles west into my garage over ten years, one sinker, one bobber, one hook at a time. I could have betrayed her and gone online, but that would have meant missing out on the unique retail experience that was Sportsport under Karen’s ownership.

First, there was no such thing as “ducking in real quick” for something at Sportsport. Karen never rushed. Ever. Stepping inside the door and getting out again in under 30 minutes was a miracle. The place could get very busy, and Karen would be winding new monofilament on somebody’s reel while a mob fidgeted to pay for their bait and get back to the fish. She had to hang up the phone to swipe a credit card. She totalled up all the little bits of fishing stuff — swivels, lures, buckets of writhing eels — on a scrap of paper, totalled it up on a calculator, and then put the total into the register. She usually swore at the register.

Second, she was the CIA of Cape Cod fish. If there were rumors of fish, Karen heard them first. And to get her to part with this intelligence meant buying something, even if it was a $0.30 lead sinker. eCommerce fishing tackle sites doesn’t whisper to you that “they’re murdering them at Dowses on purple Deadly Dicks” A photo of one’s self on the door of the bait refrigerator meant you were a made man. Cousin Pete and I schemed to freeze an October bluefish until February (they migrate to the Cape in May), thaw it out, drive it to Hyannis, and ask Karen to take a picture of us holding the earliest bluefish of the year for the fridge. I regret we never did it. She would have howled and called bullshit and then taken the picture anyway.

And then there was Karen’s School of Fishing. Feeling bored and beset with cabin fever on a sunny day in early April, weeks before the stripers and blues return? Karen would teach me the ins and outs of fishing for winter flounder and I’d walk out $50 poorer with flounder rigs, a chum pot, and the advice to fill it with crushed mussels and cans of cat food.

Her assistant Mark became a good friend and great fishing buddy. We sort of enabled each other’s addiction and would drive from one side of the Cape to the other just to catch the favorable tides at Menahaunt on the southside and Bone Hill on the north.

But most of all Karen was a friend, a good wise motherly lady in a business not known for a lot of ladies. She was blessed with a great sense of humor, a way of making you feel you were the most important customer she’d seen all day, a great laugher, and a true Cape Codder;  a veritable Old Salt herself.

One of the greats has passed. I’ll kiss my next fish on the head and let it go to swim another day just for Karen.

The Cape Cod Times and its sister weekly, The Barnstable Patriot, are for sale. News Corp has put them on the block, after picking them up as part of the deal that saw the company acquire the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft Family and Dow Jones.

I started my journalism career at the Cape Cod Times as a “special writer” the summer after graduating from college in 1980, a sad summer spent sorting out my father’s affairs after he died the March before in a car accident. The Times was a refuge for me, an incredibly rich world of facts and deadlines and mordant wit that proved to be just the antidote for a grieving 22-year old. I will always be indebted to Bill Briesky, Milton Moore, Peggy Eastman and Don Brichta for their patience and good humor in teaching me the rudiments of reporting.

A few weeks ago, while speaking to the Cape Cod Technology Council, someone asked me about the Times now that it was for sale. That was news to me. I hadn’t heard, but yes, it is true and ever since I heard the news I’ve occasionally thought what I would do if I owned a local paper in this parlous time of upheaval and transformation in the media world, one I suppose started the summer I worked at the Times when it was only a few months away from moving off of typewriters, scissors and rubber cement to one of the first computerized editorial systems. I take huge pride in having seen the very end of the analog era, of having literally performed “cut-and-paste”, and then hung on as the momentum began building towards the place where papers stand today, devoid of advertisers and readers, their staffs fleeing for shelter.

I believe a strong civil society needs a newspaper in some form: paper or digital or whatever.  I am an idealist who clings to those Jeffersonian ideals of an independent fourth estate that informs the electorate, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. I don’t believe in journalism schools and I don’t regard journalism as a profession but see it more as a craft.  I applaud a world where anyone with the ambition can try to become a citizen journalist. I pay for good news. I can’t imagine living in a community without a definitive source of news. Without one the world will quickly become a darker, more ignorant place.

If I owned the Cape Cod Times I would do the following things:

1. Stop printing it. I’d  have the presses in Independence Park  dismantled, placed on barges, and towed away and give them to a third-world country that needs a big honking press. Rip off the bandaid.
2. Sell the trucks and fire the drivers. No press, no paper, no trucks, no drivers, no gas.
3. Double down on local news. Put a reporter in every town on the Cape and Islands. Let them work from home, but get them as local as possible. It’s all about local and local is the only thing unique to the franchise. Not the AP wire. Not the Red Sox scores. But the local sports, the local planning board, the church socials and the bake sales. It’s local local local. The thing that has been weakest about the CCT in recent years is its local coverage at a time when it was the only defensible turf the paper stood on.
4. Pay the staff a decent base salary with the usual performance modifiers based on traffic and comment engagement.
5. Have reporters moderate their readers’ comments and engage with the mob directly.
6. Provide a citizen’s blogging platform and use it as a farm system for full time talent to join the masthead. Extend the platform to any group, advertiser, or gadfly who wants it under a liberal acceptable use policy
7. Launch a digital news radio station and go on the offensive
8. Push harder on video. Eric Williams and CapeCast is the diamond in the rough I think.

And how would I pay for it all? Well, if wishes were fishes and all that ….

• Drop the paywall. I hate paywalls. The New York Times can get away with them, but the Cape Cod Times needs as many readers as it can get and charging the loyal readership is like penalizing an act of goodness.
• Local advertisers are already in bad shape thanks to eCommerce hammering local retailers. There are too many alternatives where they can spend their small ad budgets, so rates need to be slashed on display which are largely programmed buys via ad networks anyway. I’d kill display advertising to tell the truth. The banner is dead or dying.
• Bundle a SMB digital marketing service and re-sell it to the advertisers: Lexity for ad buys, Hubspot for digital marketing, etc.. Offer digital marketing services as a value-add to the advertisers and wean them from local radio (there’s is very little local TV on the Cape to worry about). SMBs are starving for help with digital.
• Restructure the rate card around sponsorships and give the advertisers ownership of a topic or section. Get away from run of site and give them some “adjacency” to the editorial
• Provide lead generation support to advertisers emphasizing one-time unique coupon redemption for attribution and ROI justification

That’s it. Who knows if it would succeed, but I am convinced an emphasis on local news/sports, digital radio and video, and a big commitment to SMB digital marketing services could carry the Times forward until the next big unforeseen disruption. What do I think will happen? Some private equity-backed community newspaper roll-up will probably buy the Times for a song and gut it on the altar of efficiency and centralized management.

I confess a morbid fascination with plane crashes. I’ve watched enough of them on YouTube to know I will never go to an airshow, fly on a Russian airline, or find myself in the grandstands at the Reno air races. The funny thing is I’ve never been afraid of flying and have grown to actually enjoy severe turbulence as a perverse airborne amusement park ride.

I take that back: I was afraid of flying from 1995 to 2000 when I flew between Hyannis here on Cape Cod and New York’s La Guardia airport on a little regional airline, Colgan Air, and its fleet of Beechcraft 1900s. I nicknamed the planes “The Flying Cigar Tubes of Death” – not because they were infamous, but because they were cramped little things that one sort of crouched down and crawled into. I always made it a point to sit in one of the exit row seats over the wings, not wanting to wrestle some old lady for the right to be first off should the pilot have to put it down in Long Island Sound or the woods around Hyannis. There were some wild rides on those planes, true white knuckle oh-my-god flights with people screaming and praying out loud as we rocked our way blind through the fog in a March noreaster, convinced we were moments away from meeting our Maker.

The worst thing about that commuter airline was the fact that there were two takeoffs and landings on each leg. The flight always stopped at Nantucket, an airport allegedly built on the foggiest part of the island by the Navy so student pilots could practice in the worst conditions.

This past weekend I indulged my secret vice for plane crashes by reading Cape Cod author Robert Sabbag’s Down Around Midnight, his account of surviving the crash of Air New England Flight 248 one foggy June night in 1979 while returning from LaGuardia. He was in his early 30s, riding the fame of his book Snowblind, a best-selling non-fiction account of the world of cocaine smuggling. With $5,000 tucked into his sock, Sabbag was minding his own business as the DeHavilland DHC 6 Otter made its approach over Yarmouthport into Hyannis around 11 pm in a thick fog. Up front, at the controls, the pilot, George Parmenter, was at the end of a 14 hour day. Tired, of questionable health at the age of 61, the vice-president of Air New England made his last mistake and put the plane into the thick woods of a Boy Scout camp near Willow Street and Route 6. Right on page one of the 200-page book, Sabbag gets to the point:

“The plane hit the trees at 123 knots. It lost its wings as it crashed. They were sheared off, taking the fuel tanks with them, as the rest of it slammed through the forest. In an explosion of tearing sheet metal, it ripped a path through the timber, cutting through thick stands of oak and pine for a distance of three hundred feet. Whatever memories time erases, it will never erase the memory of it.”

It took Sabbag thirty years before he could tell the story, pushed into confronting the event by the discovery of an old day planner he found in a box of personal financial records, the pages soaked in fuel, leaves and pieces of twigs from the woods still in between the cover slashed by some violent force. He goes through the story as any good reporter would, interviewing the other passengers in the cabin (those that would talk to him), but he also doesn’t hide his own biases and theories as to who and what were to blame for the Cape’s worst commercial air disaster.

Underneath the lurid details of an aviation catastrophe lies one of the better stories about life on Cape Cod, a perceptive and accurate look at the regular people who live here year round, the nurses and the firemen and EMTs who found him, back broken in the woods, and carried him out to a long recovery.

Way to go Falmouth. The Cape Cod town that is home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one-third of Cape’s estuaries, and the state’s Alternative Septic System Test Center  wants to restrict lawn fertilizer in an attempt to cut back on the amount of nitrogen flowing into its estuaries; those coastal ponds and embayments that tragically have a tradition of turning colors and killing fish.

Guess who doesn’t like the idea?

In this morning’s Cape Cod Times, Sean Teehan reports the town is working on a bylaw that:

“…would prohibit nitrogen-containing fertilizer applications between Oct. 16 and April 14 each year. It would ban applications during heavy rain or within 100 feet of water resources and bar applications to turf of more than one pound of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet each year.”

Yes, most  of the nitrogen polluting the harbors, bays, coves, coastal rivers and streams of Cape Cod comes from urine, aka wastewater. It also comes from dogs who take dumps during their beach walks, Canada Geese who deposit their green cigar turds, and, most maddeningly, those big ChemLawn trucks with their sloshing tanks that trundle down streets with names like Oceanview and Seaview and then spray their chemical contents all over the lawn of some CEO’s starter castle so it will look all lush and green like the back nine at Augusta when Courtney gets married to Alistair this summer.

Opposed to Falmouth’s bylaw are:

• The Massachusetts Association of Lawn Care Professionals
• The Retailers Association of Massachusetts
• Scotts Miracle-Gro Co.
• Assorted local landscapers

They are arguing to the Massachusetts Attorney General that Falmouth’s proposed bylaw conflicts with a pending regulation that would let the State Department of Agricultural Resources regulate the stuff. Seems logical to categorize lawn grass as agriculture. I  enjoy tucking into a nice bowl of mower clippings myself.

Unfortunately, it appears Falmouth is pushing for the fertilizer limits so it can discharge some of its effluent from its wastewater treatment plant, a request the state has said no to because the town is already exceeding its nitrogen limits:

“DEP officials granted a discharge permit for Falmouth’s wastewater treatment plant on the condition that the town eliminate other sources of nitrogen in the groundwater, Town Counsel Frank Duffy said. They ordered the town to look into controlling fertilizers.”

The Cape Cod Commission and every other town on the Cape needs to get a copy of Falmouth’s bylaw and enact it from the Sagamore Bridge to the Pilgrim Monument in P-town.  Cleaning up dying harbors and bays seems more important than lush lawns or a green golf courses overlooking floating mats of brown slime and algae.  Wastewater treatment solutions, sewers, composting toilets, and the like may take decades to happen, but banning or cutting back on fertilizer can happen now and make a bit of a dent as well as a strong statement that the Cape can be mended and not written off like Long Island or South Florida.

Last July Falmouth’s Little Pond suffered a fish kill when warm weather and eutrophication depleted the oxygen in the salt pond and left a lot of dead striped bass on its shores.  Another fish kill happened in North Falmouth the year before.

Lawn lovers of the Cape, think twice this spring before you load up the SUV with a couple bags of TurfBuilder and spread it over your grass. Embrace the Brown and let it die this summer. Save on your water bills, your back, and your future and just say no to the ChemLawn.

If you want to take care of your lawn, then do it organically. There’s a lot of free advice, I’d start with organiclawncare101.com which has an interesting history of the lawn, and how in America, it is a relatively modern phenomenon with roots in Levittown on Long Island:

“In the middle of the 20^th century, three overlapping developments helped promote the lawn across North America. The first was Levittown, one of the first cookie-cutter affordable-dwelling suburbs, built between 1948 and 1952 by Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred on Long Island. This was the first American suburb to include lawns already in place when the first tenants took possession (see Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb).

“The Levitts, who also build subdivisions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cape Cod [emphasis mine, ed] , and Puerto Rico (several of them also called Levittown), pioneered the established lawn, which residents were required to keep up but forbidden to fence in. The importance of a neat, weed-free, closely-shorn lawn was promoted intensely in the newsletters that went out to all homeowners in these subdivisions, along with lawn-care advice on how to reach this ideal.”

Update:

Some resources on the topic of limiting fertilizer runoff:

Town of Nantucket Regulations: these are proof local municipalities can take some steps to limit landscaping fertilizer impacts. http://www.slideshare.net/savebuzzardsbay/town-of-nantucket-board-of-health-regulations

The Buzzards Bay Coalition has a ton of stuff on the topic: http://www.savebuzzardsbay.org/DecisionMakers 

Through the thickets of Norway maples, budding forsythia and dormant lilacs I can occasionally catch a silver-grey glimpse of Cotuit Bay from my office windows. A waterview, or at least the hint of one, is one of the few benefits of a Cotuit winter, but thankfully it disappears when the trees leaf in May, reducing my property taxes four-fold when it vanishes from the view of the town assessor.  This near-coastal perch does give me a nice front row seat to view the flocks of ospreys that glide high above the water’s edge. cruising for herring and menhaden to dive bomb and drag back to their nests on the chimneys, flying bridges, and man-made aeries along the shore.

On Sunday I heard a loud commotion between a colony of herring gulls and a murder of crows, the kind of scuffle that means there’s an avian dogfight going down over Cotuit Bay. Usually these battles are between two opponents, but as I looked up into the blue sky above Hooper’s Landing, rake in hand, I saw a third bird, wings stretched out and never flapping, just serenely cruising in a circular gyre; the first osprey of 2013. I would not want to mess with an osprey. They are serious birds of prey, the Stukas of the harbor, with a set of talons that would shred any gull or crow stupid enough to call one out.

I never saw a single osprey when I was a kid.  I never knew they even existed. These were the birds that inspired Rachel Carson to kick off the environmental movement with Silent Spring, the birds who sat atop the food chain and ingested the DDT that made the shells of their eggs too thin to support their weight, condemning the nesting birds to crush their own futures beneath them. By the 1990s they were back, urged on by volunteers who erected crosses in the salt marshes and along the shores of the coves to incite them to nest. Now there are so many it seems improbable they can find enough food, the skies above the bays ringing with their strange high pitched keening peeping calls.

My ancestors knew better than to live on the water. The old family, the Handy’s, lived on the far side of Little River since the 1700s when they migrated from Mattapoisett to build ships on the shores of the inner harbor near the site of the present Cotuit Oyster Company. My great-great grandfather, Thomas Chatfield, married Florence Handy in Centerville in 1853, and after conceiving their first daughter, promptly sailed for the Pacific to hunt whales, returning a few years later to start another daughter before sailing on the September tides from Edgartown for another trip to the Okhotsk Sea.

“Being fixed for future employment I spent the interval here in Cotuit, which I had come to consider as my home, going two or three trips coasting more for recreation than for anything else. It was then that I became acquainted with your mother, and being much together during the summer we became interested in each other, and when I sailed again in September there was a tacit understanding between us that we would be married when I returned, which usually meant at the end of three years. But it turned out differently, for we were very successful in taking whales, and I was home again eighteen months after we sailed. That is, in March 1853. I think your mother was not at all ready to marry so soon. She had looked forward to three years more girlhood. But I was not to put off another voyage, which mean three years extra, so the day was set for April 19, 1853, when were were married in Centerville by Ferdinand G. Kelley, then Town Clerk, also Justice of the Peace. It was the usual way. Very few of our people were married by ministers in those days.”

After one voyage he sailed home from Edgartown, home port of his ship — the Massachusetts – and stepped ashore to return to the home he left on Handy’s Point only to find a strange family living there. He hopped a ride into the village on a horse-drawn cart, and after a bit of searching rediscovered his wife and daughters living in the center of the village. Florrie had sold the place, fed up by the isolation of living on the wrong side of Little River alone with young children, far from the church, the general store and what society there was in Cotuitport.

“When I left home, and the last time I heard from home, the family lived at Little River, and when we reached the road leading to that part of the village William Jones drove past. It was the first time I ever saw him. I called his attention to that fact, but he only laughed and said he knew what he was about, that my family did not live at Little River. When he stopped at the gate (right here) it was the first time I knew that we had abandoned the old home for all time. I was not any too well pleased with the change. I liked Little River, and I felt strange up here.”

On Sunday my son and I cleared out some brush and dead branches thrown around the yard by the winter storms. I phoned the fire department to let the desk lieutenant know we wanted to burn our branches and sticks, an annual conflagration that seems to always kick off my spring cleaning impulses. Burning season runs until May 1st, so now is the time of year to light the bonfire, but my three-year old brush pile was too close to the big boat on its stands to risk sending it up in flames, so we dragged everything out from behind the boat sheds to a big divot in the driveway, buried the brown remains of the Christmas tree under an old rotten church pew, a stack of dead tree limbs, decrepit lawn furniture and rose bush clippings and sprinkled some bad motorboat gas over the heap to really get things going.

Having learned the hard way that the time to set up a garden hose is before lighting the blaze, not after it’s gotten out of control, I turned out the outside spigots, feeling semi-confident the pipes won’t freeze, ran out a hose, noted the leaky nozzle, and whoomp, up it went in a big ball of orange flame. The first bonfire back in 1992 was the biggest and worst of them all, consuming about five decades of Churbuckian trash and crap next to the lean-to where the skiffs are stored. That lit the shed on fire, peeled the paint off of the side of the car garage, and made my children, then 4 and 5 years old cry with panic as I ran around like a crazy person with buckets of water, eyebrows singed and eyes red as a stoner’s from the smoke.

At the end of that day, when the flames were gone and the embers were smoldering, I was poking around in the ashes with a pitch fork, opening things up so the oxygen could get in  and finish off the job.  As I rooted around I heard a distinctive metallic, hollow ping! Digging deeper I saw some buried steel, then the unmistakable shape of an abandoned propane tank. Uh-oh. I asked my wife to escort the children into the house, followed close behind, and phoned my brother, the pyromaniac former Green Beret demolitions instructor.

“Tom? Question. What would you do if you found a propane tank buried under a burning brush pile?”

He laughed and replied, “That depends if it was full or not. If it was full then I wouldn’t be on the phone asking questions, I’d be sitting in a shallow crater wondering who dropped the nuke.”

Obviously I dodged a big one that day, hitting an empty tank left over from the old Sears Roebuck grill my brother used to light by letting it fill with gas before flicking a match at its pilot hole. A successful ignition would blow the lid open. Thankfully it didn’t blow down the old captain’s second home.

Some news coming out of the Barnstable Conservation Commission’s hearing on the plan to dredge 800 feet or 11 acres off of the western end of Sampson’s Island last night:

• The Commission is still in fact-finding mode and did not make a decision last night. Whenever they do vote, they are not the last word.
• Dozens of letters were received by the Commission from local residents for and against the application. Forces are mobilizing on both sides of the debate.
• Three Bays Preservation and Massachusetts Audubon amended their three-year plan to a four-year/four-phase project with public review after each phase is completed
• The town Shellfish Commission and the town’s marine biologist have written letters stating there is no significant shellfish impact but they are concerned about impacts on shellfish elsewhere in the three-bay system
• Conservation Commission administrator Rob Gatewood confirmed in January with the Cape Cod Commission that the ConCom is free to proceed with hearings and that the project, while the Cape Cod Commission is aware of it, is not within their jurisdiction as a project with regional impact
• The law firm of Nutter, McClellen & Fish has been retained by Cotuit waterfront property owners and has hired the Woods Hole Group to perform a peer review of the project, particularly the coastal engineering studies performed by Applied Coastal Engineering of Mashpee.

I did not stay for the complete conclusion of the hearing, so I can’t report on the next steps, other than to assume the commission will continue to gather facts and make its ruling for or against, or with recommendations of modifications. The application does have a somewhat torturous journey through the bureaucratic system, including a review by the state’s Natural Heritage and Endangered Species program. With several members of the public urging an “independent review” of the application, and with the news that any citizen can request that the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Agency review the project, I would not bet on a quick approval of what is admitted by both opponents and proponents as a significant project affecting 800 feet of spit and a total of 11 acres of sand, mud and grass.

[The March 2013 Dead Neck/Sampson's Island Coastal Processes and Flooding Study by Applied Coastal Engineering was, in my opinion, the highlight of the hearing. It can be downloaded from Three Bays website here]

I thought the applicants and their engineers were well prepared prepared last night,  obviously modifying their presentation a bit based on the feedback they’ve received from their experiences before local civic associations, the initial January 8 ConCom hearing, and reviews by the town’s shellfish and waterways committees. Some points to note from the presentation and summary of the project:

• Lindsay Counsell, the executive director of Three Bays Preservation, reminded the commission that this application is a continuance of a “maintenance dredging” permit issued to the previous owners of Sampsons Island in the 1930s. “Maintenance” raised some eyebrows as 11 acres is hardly a trim and a shave, but more of a decapitation, but technically it means removing sand from a defined area and not the net new removal of material.
• Counsell reiterated that the island is private property, not a public beach, but that 3-Bays and Audubon have no intentions of restricting public access in the future. This was an obvious response to opponents who decry the loss of beachfront for summer recreation.
• John Ramsey, the coastal engineer from Applied Coastal Engineering, made a strong presentation based on historical aerial photos about the state of Sampson’s over the last 125 years and the erosion impacts the spit’s growth is having on the Cotuit shoreline, especially in the area of Riley’s Beach. He emphasized that the gradual constriction of the Cotuit channel and the fact that the ebb (falling) tide is strongest in Cotuit, is causing the current to accelerate over time and scour the channel and adjacent beaches, “winnowing” away the sand and leaving behind gravel and stones.
• The “do-nothing” option raised the dire prediction by the applicants that Dead Neck would eventually breach and the eastern end of the island would join Oyster Harbors while the Cotuit spit could join the mainland. Audubon said such a situation would be a disaster for nesting terns and plovers as it would open the island up to predators from the mainland.
• The project is now being proposed for four years based on a reduction in the available window for winter work based on concerns by the shellfish committee and the state’s department of Marine Fisheries which has expressed concerns about impacts on the winter flounder population (I would personally love to see a healthy winter flounder population return to Cotuit Bay as I have tried several times to catch one and have never succeeded). Work would commence in mid-January and have to conclude before the spring season.
• The bad guy in all of this are the Wianno Cut jetties (more on that in a future post) and the groins along the Cotuit and Mashpee shore. Only one person, David Rickel of Cotuit, raised the point that nowhere is anyone discussing the cause of this situation which seems to consign us to a major dredging every ten years to fix the impacts of the Osterville jetties on the natural flow of sand from east to west.
• Opponents expressed concern about losing an important barrier beach to protect Bluff Point and Cotuit Bay from the impact of significant storms. Ramsey showed a photograph taken during Irene in 2011 when the spit was overwashed and flooded, and argued that the shoals south of the island and off of Oregon are natural wave barriers. Brad Wheelwright of Cotuit made a strong case for not dredging in anticipation of forecasted rises in sea level, a rise which is already obvious along some bayside beaches and which the ConComm chairman said could rise as high as nine three feet in this century.
• It was depressing to learn that the last time Three Bays dredged and reinforced the eastern end of Dead Neck was in 2000 when the same amount of material (approximately 180,000 cubic yards)  was taken from the internal channels of Cotuit, Seapuit and West Bay that is being proposed by this application.  Add that to the crazy helicopter project and other minor dredging and reinforcement attempts and it is obvious that the protection of the east end of Dead Neck from breaching is a veritable Sisyphean exercise.
• The funky mud bank that has emerged south of the spit over the past few years will be removed, taken to Loop Beach, where it will be “de-watered” and trucked away. Why? Because it appears the mud may not be “naturally deposited” — giving credence to the rumors that someone dumped it there. Apparently “boat hooks” and other debris have been pulled out of the strange mess.

I didn’t speak up last night, but continue to favor the project based on my recollection of the 1968 dredging and how a diminished Sampson’s is more the norm than the exception. I also believe something has to be done about the narrow Cotuit channel for navigation reasons, to reduce the appeal of swimmers stupid enough to attempt the crossing from Riley’s, and to reduce the velocity of the current and its impacts on the Cotuit shoreline. I hope it will have some positive impact on water quality in lower Cotuit Bay but share some opponent’s concerns that the disruption of the environment could negatively impact what little life is left on the bottom of the harbor. A Dead Neck breach and the impact on Seapuit would be disastrous in my opinion.

I am more of the opinion that Conservation and Three Bays need to start talking about the removal of the groins  and jetties that “armor” the coast. Until that happens, this insanity is going to repeat itself forever.

I’ve never seen this chart of the region, dating back to the 1890s before the construction of the Cut and its jetties as well as the “armoring” of the coast by waterfront property owners over the last 100 years. Click the image for a full view and note what the natural configuration of the shoreline was — and how some former features such as the Popponesset Spit, Rushy Marsh, and the channel between Sampsons and Dead Neck have been lost due to some bad decisions made in the early 1900s.

I close with this quote by Ernest R. Matthews from his work Coast Erosion and Protection (1934):

“The marine engineer has no greater problem to deal with than this. The construction of harbors upon a sandy coast is always risky, resulting in no end of trouble and expense … The interference with the natural sand-travel upon a coast cannot but be injurious: the breaking of any of Nature’s laws has a detrimental effect.

The Barnstable Conservation Commission will return to the application by Massachusetts Audubon and Three Bays Preservation to dredge 800 feet off of the west end of Sampson’s tonight at the hearing room at town hall beginning at 6:30 pm.

I’ve heard some interesting rumors about the project over the past few weeks, so tonight’s meeting is probably going to be as lively as the last one was in terms of participation by foes and proponents. I’m planning on attending and may speak my mind on the project. I’ll post any remarks if I make them.

To that end I’ve been asked to post the following statements from a proponent and opponent to the project:

In favor is Andrew “Oggie” Pesek,  an officer of Three Bays and director of the Wianno Yacht Club, who forwarded this letter asking the membership of the Wianno Yacht Club in Osterville  for their support for the project. (disclosure: my family were briefly members of the WYC in the 1970s): DNSI_WYC_Letter

Opposed is Brad Wheelwright, a Cotuit resident, member of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club (more disclosure, I am a lifelong member of the CMYC and former president of its association), and ace Cotuit Skiff racer. Brad sent the following:

“I am writing to express my views on the proposed Sampson’s Island dredging project.

I am strongly opposed to the project, mainly because I’m convinced that it would constitute inappropriate use of public funds and resources. An undertaking of this magnitude and expense should be easily justified from every perspective, not widely controversial and based upon questionable assumptions, as this proposal is proving to be.

However, even if dislodging, moving, and placing 11 acres of land wasn’t going to cost a great deal of money and require great quantities of labor, fuel, and machinery, I would still be firmly opposed to this project. First of all, moving that much sediment will cause dirty, disrupted water conditions for quite some time, undoubtedly harming the ecosystem of Cotuit Bay and West Bay. Shellfishing is a longstanding source of recreation, subsistence, and commerce for the residents of the count and should not be compromised without clear justification.

Secondly, I do not think there is a valid boating safety concern, as some proponents have indicated. I use those waters frequently and there is plenty of room for safe navigation as the geography stands. I believe my point of view on this matter is supported by a lack of any alarming history of accidents at the site. In fact the only fatality (or injury, for that matter) that I know of occurred nearly thirty years ago, when the distance from Reilly’s Beach to Sampson’s Island was much greater.

In addition, careful study (conducted by those in the hire of the project’s proponents) has demonstrated that widening the entrance will not in any significant way increase the Bay system’s tidal flushing or lead to cleaner water in the more inland connected waterways. The root of that problem clearly lies with septic inputs and fertilizer pressure, and it is of some concern to me that members of the public seem not to know how thoroughly the coastal engineering studies prove that dredging will not begin to address the issue.
The part of Sampson’s Island that is proposed to be removed is a heavily used recreational resource. Crowding is already a problem, and the destruction of many hundreds of yards of beach will only compound it (and perhaps also lead to unanticipated and unwelcome water safety concerns).

While it has been pointed out that several vacation houses on Grand Island and the navigability of the Seapuit River are at risk without the addition of sediment at the eastern end of Dead Neck, I do not think this justifies the proposed dredging project. Neither protection for the private residences or the easy availability of a Seapuit channel are publicly necessary; private funding could and should secure the former, and there are two very reliable alternative water routes between West Bay and Cotuit Bay, one of which is entirely protected.

Finally, I would like to bring attention to the worst case scenario associated with such intensive dredging of a protective barrier island. Typically, the failure of a coastal engineering project is marked by a return to the status quo (witness the Rushy Marsh Pond debacle). However, the dynamics of a bay entrance are beyond complex, and I believe there is potential for catastrophe here that very few people have considered. It is possible that this project could lead to dramatic, unanticipated changes to the area. Bluff Point, without protection, could be destroyed. The Cotuit entrance channel could become too shallow for conventional navigation. The balance that has allowed for a viable Bay entrance could be upset beyond all hope of repair.

Why do I think this could happen? Strikingly, the sea level has risen approximately four inches in the last sixty years, and according to some science, may rise twelve inches or more in the next sixty. There is reason to think that coastal storms will become stronger and more frequent. In so many ways, our climate is not the climate of the mid 20th century.

Some proponents believe that because the dredging will return the outline of Sampson’s to a former state, it is inherently a good thing. First of all, with the sea level four inches higher, and a catastrophic worst-case scenario accordingly possible, there is absolutely no reason to think that such an outline is sustainable now. Furthermore, this argument represents a flawed method of consideration; the historical proportions of Cotuit Bay once included a shipping channel where Cupid’s Cove now exists. Should we engineer THIS alteration, simply because it once was? (It’s really no more outlandish than the present proposal, in terms of scope and the amount of sediment that would need to be moved.)

Finally, I would like to point out that Three Bays Preservation has continually implied that dredging projects in the system improve water quality significantly, something that is not backed up by any of the data. Just as one example, their website mentions improvement and prospects for improvement, but on the very same website one can find evidence that eel grass existed within the three bays in 1995 but not in 2002, a timeframe that spans their first two dredging projects. Furthermore, the anticipated improvement in water quality (as estimated by their own engineers) is minimal enough that it doesn’t even appear within proposal documents as part of the list of expected benefits.”

I am “cautiously” in favor of the project with some modifications. I’ll post my points for and against later.

Cape Cod has a unique geological feature known as a “Pamet.” Like archipelago, peninsula, tombolo or isthmus, a pamet is a specific geological landform, in the case of Cape Cod, one defined as a dry stream valley on a glacial outwash plain.

The term was first coined in 1934 by Woodworth and Wigglesworth as a “long depression in a thick deposit of stratified gravel and sand … resembles a valley formed by running water but its sides and bottom has the forms of mounds and hollows produced by irregularities in the deposition of glacial drift, either ice-laid or water-laid.”

The word “pamet” is derived from the name of a Wampanoag tribe that lived in present-day Truro near the northernmost extremity of Cape Cod along the Pamet River, a beautiful valley that bisects the finger-like extremity from east-to-west, spanning Cape Cod Bay near the site of Corn Hill (where the Pilgrims discovered, and plundered, a cache of corn buried in the sand in baskets by the Pamets) eastwards to Ballston Beach on the Atlantic Ocean.

There are other pamets on the Cape, particularly in East Falmouth — visible from Route 28 between Waquoit and Teaticket — marked by streams such as the Coonamesset, Quashnet, and Mashpee Rivers and in some cases, developed in the 19th century into cranberry bogs which rely on the fresh water streams for irrigation.

 On Friday of the past week, during the most recent northeaster of this terrible winter of 2013, the storm surge and relentless surf punched through the dunes at Ballston Beach and poured into the Pamet River, making North Truro and Provincetown technically an island unto themselves.

Here, courtesy of the Cape Cod Times’ CapeCast (hosted by the inimitable Eric Williams) is some great video showing nature in her full fury:

 

Just a reminder the Conservation Commission will continue its hearing on the application of Mass Audubon and Three Bays Preservation to dredge off the western end of Sampson’s Island to restore the beach at the eastern, Osterville end.

The hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, March 19th and begins at 6:30 pm.

The annual herring census conducted at the Marstons Mills run at the intersection of Routes 149 and 28 will be discussed Saturday, March 16 at a meeting   at Liberty Hall in Marstons Mills from 3 to 5 pm. I can’t make it, but I hope to volunteer my time to the cause.

The herring project has a blog with more information and contact info.

The fish generally arrive in mid-April (I always associate them with school vacation and Tax Day) and continue into early May. The population has crashed in recent years (theories abound as to why) but the taking of herring has been banned by the state (as well as Rhode Island and Connecticut) for the past several years to the dismay of striper fishermen who love to live line for the first run of spring bass. The first scouts should be reported in a couple weeks at the Middleboro  and Aquinnah runs which seem to see them arrive first.

A good source of information about the alewive and blueback herring project (as well as the moratorium on their taking) can be found at the state Division of Marine Fisheries’ website.

I read with interest the news reports of the massive erosion to Sandwich’s beaches following the blizzard that hit that northside coast head on with 70 mph winds and big storm surge inflated seas two weeks ago. What I was unaware of was the simmering resentment by the town over the big pair of jetties that guard the entrance to the Cape Cod Canal, jetties built at the turn of the century when the canal was completed, put there by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the entrance open and flowing.

I mention this only because of the widely held belief here in Cotuit that the Wianno Cut and its two jetties are responsible for the present situation where Dead Neck is starved of sand from its eastern end by the jetties, a situation the owners of the island — 3 Bays and Mass Audubon — believe can only be temporarily relieved by dredging sand from the growing western, Cotuit-end of the island and piping it back to the eroded section. As I’ve written before here, the littoral drift of sand is not a straight-forward, perpendicular dynamic where waves push and pull sand in and out of a beach, but where sand flows along the beach, driven by the prevailing winds and currents. A jetty interrupts that flow, backing up sand “upstream” while starving everything “downstream.

The situation in Sandwich is deplorable enough that the town is telling the Feds to fix it since the Canal and its jetties are Federal property. Not so with the Wianno Cut, where I believe the cut was sponsored and paid for by the town (initially with a wooden, planked jetty) at the urging of the people of Osterville who wanted easy access to Nantucket Sound.

Quoting the Cape Cod Times (paywall in effect):

“A big frustration for some is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Town officials believe a source of the erosion problem is the Cape Cod Canal, which is controlled by the Corps. A jetty system built in the early 1900s to keep sediment from building up in the canal is starving the beach of sand needed to replenish the dune system.

“The end result: Scusset Beach has too much sand and the coastline from Town Neck to Spring Hill doesn’t have enough, Selectman James Pierce said.

“I agree with others,” Pierce said. “The feds caused the problem and the feds should pay to fix it.”"

And speaking of Nantucket, fans of whaling history know the story of how that port’s dominance of the whaling fishery ended in the mid-19th century when its harbor entrance was obscured by a sandbar, leading the novel and desperate measure of building a floating dry dock known as “The Camel” to lift whaling ships over the bar and into the city. The failure of the harbor and the Camel solution are widely regarded as the reason New Bedford took over from Nantucket as the primary whaling city on the East Coast. There’s a great article on the Nantucket Bar and efforts to overcome it at the Nantucket Historical Society’s website.

Cousin Pete and I were swapping text messages yesterday afternoon. “IS PWR ON?” “WTF NSTAR?” (Nstar is our electric company) “I AM BAILING” “IF I BAIL THEN LIGHTS WILL COME BACK”

72 hours of a 19th century lifestyle (I don’t know what Pete was bitching about, he had a Honda generator plugging away on his back deck all weekend) but without the whale oil lamps, just crappy scented candles, LED lanterns, and the family collection of flash lights, and I was ready to shovel out the garage and decamp in the sedan for my Manhattan apartment. Instead I hit the gym and made arrangements to take a pity shower at a friend’s place in Osterville. The other squatters had just had their power restored and were decamping, so I took them up on the suggestion to spend the night there, came home, packed up the dog, some food and some old DVDs and settled in for a night of Swedish cinema, leftover coq au vin, and a glass of Talisker on another person’s couch.

Pete texted me at 8 that the power was back in Cotuit. So I turned off the tube, packed up the dog, and returned home to Cotuit in thick fog to a cheery house; a house alive for the first time in three days with the hum of furnaces, refrigerators, blinking alarm clocks and radiant heat.

Here’s what I learned in the darkness.

• Reading is everything. I plowed right through Charles Dubow’s first novel, Indiscretion on my Kindle, using a LED lantern to illuminate the e-ink. Then I resumed my reading of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War.
• The Grundig YB 400PE “Yacht Boy” radio is an amazing device. I bought it in New York in 1996 and it has become a cherished possession, living on my boat during the summer for listening to the Red Sox, in my shed in the spring to keep me company while I paint the boats. From a decent sound to the ability to pull in shortwave signals, this radio is what I want with me during any storm or zombie apocalypse. The sounds coming out of it broke the eerie silence of the house and kept me company. NPR (WCAI in Woods Hole), reggae music from the U-Mass Dartmouth radio station (WUMD) and folk from WUMB kept me from going full-Shining.
• Natural gas makes all the difference. The Vermont Castings gas stove and the four range-top burners on the stove kept the house around 55 degrees, even on Saturday night when temperatures where in the teens. No gas and the house would have been a freezer, likely bursting pipes and causing a complete disaster.
• Candles are pretty but useless and scare the hell out of me. Old wooden houses like mine tend to burn down in five minutes because of candles. The things are useless in terms of real illumination, are a pain to move around (hot wax drips everywhere), and can’t be left unattended.
• One thinks a lot about life before electricity. It’s a well known fact that rural electrification reduces birth rates and increases literacy, but to look out at the village center, streetlights (see post below) gone, only some dim flickers of orange from candles in the neighbors’ windows, and one can’t help but speculate about what life was like before electricity, especially in Colonial times, when the night meant the world shrank to the penumbra of the lantern, where candles were made by hand by rendering down pig fat and then dipping, over and over, strings suspended from sticks like we made in first grade. How did readers read and writers write? What happened to society at sunset? Families must have gathered around the fire, shared a candle or two, and talked. I know the old-timers kept one or two rooms heated and basically dressed and undressed there, bathed there, ate there, but slept in cold rooms (hence the old bedwarmers) under piles of blankets and comforters.
•  Bed time came more out of boredom than necessity. I was in bed by 10 each of the dark nights. One wakes at the earliest possible light because sunlight means life and the ability to get something done.
• Life off-line for a few days was a good thing. Sprint seems to have lost its cell signals in Cotuit as I was in roaming mode on my smartphone and barely able to get mobile data on the device. Roaming seems to chew through battery life, so I needed to turn the phone off while I slept, forgot to turn it on, and was unable to respond to text messages and calls asking if I was okay. The spare power cell that came with my Duracell Powermat was a great thing to have. I will not take Google for granted again. If I needed to know the frequency of a radio station, I needed to Google it. If I needed to know what percentage of Barnstable was in the dark. I needed a connection. If I wanted any media other than a book, I needed a connection. The news that the Obama administration is getting serious about Cyber warfare is timely: if the bad guys shut off the power the chaos will be astonishing. The thought is enough to turn a skeptic into a full-blown Prepper.
• My car became my charging station. I’d go for rides with the dog just to give the phone and spare battery a little charge.
• People drive like morons after storms. I think it’s the “soft and puffy” effect where they think the snow banks and pretty trees give them some cushioning, but in truth driving is still treacherous, especially because of the piles of downed trees sitting right on the edge of the road. Frozen storm drains create deep puddles, warm winds blow think mist across the streets, subtract the street lights, add in the usual winter-learning curve of remembering how to drive in icy conditions, and its a wonder I didn’t have an accident. (I did back into the house while trying to get out of the driveway, but that’s another story.
• Bird feeders become an amazing thing after blizzards, especially if one provides the birds some water.
• The power company’s “outage” map is a nice thing, but couldn’t they hire someone to provide a little more information? It was especially frustrating to see half of the village with lights and not know why or what the problem was. Obviously there is some sort of prioritization going on when it comes to restoring electricity — hospitals, public safety, traffic lights, commercial accounts come first — but how does the power company even know who is in the dark and who isn’t? How do they dispatch their trucks and crews? How does the power grid work? Why don’t we bury our power lines once and for all? Can you imagine the danger and agony of standing in a bucket truck in a full fledged blizzard splicing big cables together?
• I need to suck it up and install a generator.

I’ve wimped out on New York City today thanks to a single word in the National Weather Service’s storm warning.

“Historic”

I don’t want to be part of history and I don’t want to sit in the dark with two feet of mashed potato snow to shovel on Sunday morning but that seems to be my fate. I was in college in ’78 — the National Guard had to dig us out — and won’t ever forget the monster dumping that hit Cotuit in 2005 when we had drifts over the first floor’s window sills.   This one is forecast to drop a foot of snow and blow hurricane strength late Friday night through Saturday afternoon.

So time to start cooking, do what needs to be done where electricity is required, and get ready to make some history.

One of my earliest memories is from the age of two or three, riding in the back seat of an old Plymouth being driven at night by my father, my mother beside him, along some Greater Boston parkway, probably on our way to Melrose to see my grandparents. No kiddie seat. No seatbelt. Just me alone in the backseat, unattended and laying on my back, looking up through the rear window at the street lights flashing past in a hypnotic green pattern.

Street lights cast a green splash of light then. Bare incandesent bulbs suspended under a scalloped metal reflector hung over the streets, probably the 1.0 or 2.0 version of electric street lights, the first generation to be installed after they did away with horses and buggies and gaslights. I’ve always missed that greenish hue, though lord knows my brother and I did our best with our delinquent friends blasting out the bulbs with our WristRockets and pockets full of ball bearings salvaged from an old Pachinko machine we got one Christmas.

At some point the street lights of my childhood were all converted to orange high pressure sodium vapor lamps — salmon colored light that made everything flat and ugly. I hated them when they appeared in the 1970s. As one fellow sodium vapor hater, Hal Espen, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 2011:

“Following the economic imperative to use the most cost-effective lighting—high-pressure sodium lights consume half as much energy as mercury-vapor lamps and can last up to 16,000 hours longer—transportation departments and cities embraced sodium light. It was as though someone said “Fiat lux sulfurea—“Let there be light from hell.” The relentless spread of sodium streetlights is documented in NASA night photographs from space: New York City and Los Angeles are circuit boards of glowing orange, and Long Beach, one of the world’s busiest ports, is a flare of tarnished gold. It’s even worse in the United Kingdom, where 85 percent of streetlights use sodium. The jaundiced weirdness of sodium light has become a vexing challenge to photographers (one filmmaker, Tenolian Bell, called it “the ugliest light known to the cinematographer”); movie cameras simulate its color by using a gel filter named Bastard Amber.”

I never realized how much I hated them until one night in late November in 1980 when I was delivering an elderly 60′ plywood catamaran named the Dushka from Falmouth to West Palm Beach and entered Chesapeake Bay in bad weather.  I had never been that far south and we made landfall on our second night out of Falmouth — a sleepless 48 hour stretch because I was the only person on board who could navigate let alone sail the demonic craft which sailed so fast it left the tops of the ocean swells and went airborne from time to time with terrifying results.

As we coasted down the Delaware and Virginia coast that afternoon I had a very good idea of where we were. I was dead reckoning — essentially estimating our position by keeping close track of distance, speed and time — and cross checking that with the depth finder and an semi-useless radio directional finder. As we screamed along at 15 knots, past the Chincoteague Island  (home of the wild horses, where the children’s book Misty of Chincoteague was set)  I was very aware of the failing light and the unfortunate timing of our landfall with the Chesapeake. I thought about standing offshore for the night and coming in the next morning, but the NOAA radio was talking up a gale and I was really looking forward to some sleep. As we blasted along the shoreline, about two miles out, I said goodbye to the setting sun and stared at the orange street lights popping on one after another, all the while imagining the boardwalks and shuttered amusement parks underneath them in places like Rehoboth Beach and Ocean City, Maryland. And then I thought about the lucky people in their warm houses watching television after they finished a real meal, not one cooked by a seasick person who destroyed a pot of American Chop Suey by vomiting in it because he couldn’t unclip himself from the gimballed stove in time to make it on deck and the leeward rail (which was probably for the best given that American Chop Suey has so much wrong with it in both theory and practice).

Anyway, pardon the sailory digression, but things got very confusing as we tacked off of Virginia Beach and Cape Henry to make our run down the shipping channel into the Bay. Two things confused me in the darkness. First was the mental image I had of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel. I pictured either a bridge OR a tunnel but not both. There was this really long string of orange sodium street lights marking the bridge. I got that part. But then there were none. Where did one steer? Was there a high span to the bridge that one crossed under? For some reason I was confused by the concept of a bridge that suddenly turned into a tunnel for a short stretch, but that was indeed the situation. So I aimed for the dark spot in the span — where the lights ended — and trusted that we wouldn’t meet our deaths when I drove the miserable multihull into a dark abutment at full speed.

(this is why it is better to sail into strange places during the day)

Compounding my confusion was the presence of a LOT of random orange street lights in front of the bridge, really weird clumps of them. Those turned out to be big ships riding out the night at anchor. Container ships, freighters, tankers, etc.. A whole flotilla of them moored in the open ocean. I didn’t know ships did that. I thought they made straight away for the big ship equivalent of a marina, but no, turns out big ships will wait outside of a port the way semi-trailers park in rest areas on Route 95. Makes sense. You don’t want to haul a load of toilet paper into downtown Manhattan at three a.m. when there is no one around to unload it and no place to park until there is. You pull off into the Thomas Edison Rest Area and take a nap.

As we drew closer to the entrance and passed a couple of the moored ships all lit up with their street lights, I figured out the phenomenon of big boats anchored out in the big ocean but still had to trust the navigational chart and fight my innate instincts. I had to trust that the black gap in the bridge lights was indeed where one entered the Bay.  It was. We shot through the gap and were safe inside, the angry Atlantic behind us. At which point the storm hit and began to rain buckets. I had no idea of where we were going other than the plan was to use the Intercoastal Waterway from Norfolk, Virginia south to Morehead City, North Carolina to avoid the Graveyard of the Atlantic, aka Cape Hatteras. I gave the wheel to the one person I trusted the most to steer the boat, popped down below, and studied the chart for the nearest possible place to anchor and ride out the storm. There was a very nice little harbor right inside of the bridge called Little Creek. The chart showed docks, just like a marina’s slips. I thought just maybe there would be a restaurant still open. With a bar.

The crew of the good ship were very happy by my decision to seek the nearest port in the storm. We doused the sails, fired up the engine and motored right into Little Creek. It was 3 AM. The place was quiet. I used a big flash light to pick our way down the channel. I guess the “Warning: Keep Out” sign should have been sufficient warning, but it was really howling and raining so I held my course. We passed through the breakwaters and into the middle of a big industrial boat basin lined with immense grey naval ships. Uh oh.  Turns out the full name of Little Creek is the US Navy’s Joint Expeditionary Base/Little Creek-Fort Story, the largest amphibious warfare base in the world. I motored around the perimeter of the world’s most powerful navy’s collection of amphibious assault craft looking for a place to tie up to the dock, but it was wall-t0-wall with ships and then some more ships. Big ominous war ships all lit up with big orange streetlights. So I decided to anchor in the middle of Little Creek, as far away from the warships as I could get;  lit the Dushka’s dim little masthead and anchor lights, and hit the rack for some sleep. And I slept. For about two hours. Then the bullhorns and sirens started.

“ATTENTION. ATTENTION. THIS IS THE UNITED STATES COAST GUARD.”

That is a very effective alarm clock. I climbed on deck wearing only boxer shorts. There was a Coast Guard 44-foot patrol boat beside us, covered with serious Coast Guardsmen holding serious guns. The rest of our motley crew came on deck and gawked.

I waved like an idiot. “Heyhowareya?” I asked. Playing dumb because I was. The Coast Guard came aboard, looked at the boat’s documents, asked some polite questions, and basically agreed with my statement of the obvious that the weather the night before had been really shitty and what was a 21 year-old knucklehead to do at three a.m.?

Last night, as I drove home after a week away, I realized that forty years of stark nacreous orange light in front of my house on Cotuit’s Main Street had been replaced by something new, something sharp, something clear and almost green-like (but more blue-like in truth). After years of a malfunctioning light that lit up, triggered the photo sensor into believing it was daylight, and then switched off again — over-and-over-and-over — the Prudential Committee of the Cotuit Fire District (or some other higher municipal power) has replaced the street lights with really bright modern LEDs.

Apologies for the blurry cell-phone picture, but you can see the old sodium lights to the left over the hill by the former Cotuit Inn and the new LEDs of which I blog in the foreground. I guess I’m easily pleased, especially in depths of a Cape Cod February when the biggest action in town is when the harbor manages to freeze over. According to the Barnstable Patriot, LEDs save a ton of money and are being phased in across the Cape.

Death to sodium vapor lighting.