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Sad news in Marstons Mills, as Kevin Galvin, 63, owner of the magnificent red colonial on the mill pond at the herring run on Route 149 and Route 28 and the blogger who’s maintained the Marston Mills River herring count blog, has passed away from rabies contracted from a bite from a brown bat.

He was a big friend to the herring, along with my former Latin teacher and his wife, Tom and Pieter Burgess.

He’s the first person to die from rabies in the state since the 1930s according to the Cape Cod Times.

I like this post of his on how he knew when to check the run for herring in April:

“I’ve lived right beside Mill Pond for 10 years now and have developed a pretty good sense of the events and cycles that occur at the pond and the behavior of the swans, the blue herons, migrating birds, osprey, turtles, frogs & toads, owls, etc, etc.

I learn more and more as time goes by, but one thing I’m certain of is this: the only time of the year that the aptly-named Herring Gull is on Mill Pond is when the herring are running – and the gulls arrive on Mill Pond exactly when the herring do.

What’s even nicer about this is that I don’t even have to look for the gulls, as I can simply just listen for them. And that unmistakable screech is notice to me to get the folks out to start countin’.

Now sometimes the gulls will show up a few days early and kind of just poke around, but there isn’t any noise, because there’s to nothing to fight over. But when the herring arrive (yum!) the fighting and associated screeching begins, because as with many animals, the easiest way to find food is to try to steal it from one who’s already found it.

So we have a few gulls poking around the pond today, and they’re quiet as expected. But my guess is that within a couple of days two things will happen: there’ll be the sound of screeching gulls and we’ll be counting herring…”

It’s been while since I’ve had cause to commit a clamming post. This recent CapeCast tells the tale of one unfortunate Provincetown clammer who stepped into some sucky mud and lost his boots. I did the same thing years ago on Sandy Neck while cruising around for steamers and years ago my youngest, while wearing waders, got seriously stuck in the muck inside of Seapuit River and needed to be pulled out of the waders to be released from the suction.

Cape Cod muck is horrible stuff, especially the black goo up inside of the bays that smells like the clams that live in it. This is Jurassic muck, black as night and has the consistency of entrails.

The video is notable for the guest star appearance of Provincetown’s shellfish officer, Tony Jackett.

The best piece of property in the Cotuit/Osterville area is for sale — Bunny Mellon’s Seapuit estate is on the market for a mere $28.5 million (which actually feels like a deal given my deep affection for the place).

I row by the place every time I circumnavigate Oyster Harbors. It stretches for half a mile of rolling beachgrass, allegedly man-man sand dunes, and discrete weathered roofs tucked down low to minimize their impact on the landscape. Tasteful doesn’t begin to describe the place, but I know whoever buys it will tear it down and build a hedge fund-fueled Castle of Glass on it. Guaranteed. I just hope they keep the cabana, a fascinating little shed which my Cousin Pete the builder has declared his favorite structure on the planet. (picture to follow eventually).

Bunny, the Listerine heiress, is the widow of Paul Mellon, the banker/philanthropist who’s largesse helped put me through Yale and the Scholar of the House program. As she is over 100 years old, I guess the time has come for a changing of the guard on Seapuit, the pretty little “river” that runs behind Dead Neck.

tip of the hat to Thorne Sparkman for the alert

The tradition of a New Year’s Day swim has grown in popularity year after year until it has become as common a calendar celebration as the Boston Marathon or Opening Day at Fenway. Thirty years ago the act of hurling oneself into the Atlantic Ocean from a New England beach on New Year’s was restricted to a bunch of organized lunatics in South Boston: the famous L Street Brownies who started their New Year’s swim in 1904, and as far as I know, a bunch of rowdy miscreants  that included myself and were affiliated with the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club.

New Year’s swims are classic photo opportunities for the local newspaper,  and I would guess there were probably 12 swims around Cape Cod today, all competing for front page placement tomorrow in the Cape Cod Times. You know your swim has made it when the television cameras show up, but in days gone past the Cotuit swim took place at night, ostensibly at the stroke of midnight (but usually around 3 am when the party started to stagger and someone got motivated to lead the way), with no one around to spectate and marvel at the insanity but those brave enough to do it.

My first Cotuit swim was in the 1970s at Oregon Beach at the very end of Main Street. Oregon is a very shallow beach — about a quarter mile of foot-deep water before it drops off to any respectable depth. The rules of the swim were simple. First: your swim didn’t count unless your hair was completely wet, so wading in up to the knees and splashing a little was a definite failure. Second, if you were over 30 the swim was optional. And third, he who made it back to the host’s house first, was the only person to get a hot water shower.

The most memorable swim for me happened in 1978 (the winter of the infamous Blizzard of ’78). There was a foot of snow on the ground and the dirt road to the beach was filled with frozen potholes and ruts of frozen slush. The edge of the water was frozen and cakes of frozen saltwater paved the beach down to the water. Oh, and it was dead low tide so it would be a challenge finding enough water to splash in let alone actually swim in.  There were maybe a dozen or two of us planning on swimming/wallowing that year, and the fact that midnight came and went with no move at the raging party to get the swim over with was an indication of how much we dreaded heading outside to meet the 15 degree night. These were not leisurely swims that involved undressing on the sand and carrying towels. We nuded up at the party, ran barefoot down the road, and returned naked.  Nothing about it was smart or good.

Around 3 am my step brother and a good friend, Phil, decided it was time to swim and use the cold water to sober up and thereby breathe a second wind into the party. So we stripped — men and women alike — and off we went down the road to la plage.

My bare feet immediately turned into frozen, totally numb pegs, so I was slow arriving at the beach. Most of the crew was in the water, shrieking and flailing in about six inches of water, rolling around to get their hair wet before ricocheting out and past me on their way to the single shower back at the house. So much for the hot shower. I didn’t wait and consider the consequences, I just went into the water, crunched through some skim ice and starting forging out into the darkness, looking for enough water to flop down in and finish what was quickly becoming the worst thing I had ever done to myself.

I dropped. Hit the bottom. Rolled around. Screamed and stood up. The world went blurry. Had my head shrunk from the shock of the cold water and given me brain damage? Was I that drunk on the Green Death (Haffenreffer Ale) and DeKuypers Peppermint Schnapps?

I had gone swimming with my glasses and they were gone.

I was truly completely Screwed with a capital S. I stood up and looked at the smeary flashes of the lonely navigation buoys out in Nantucket Sound and the orange loom of the lights in Hyannis to the east.  I had to return to college the next day, had no extra glasses, and these being the archaic 1970s, there were no Lenscrafters same-day-glasses places to get a replacement pair.  I couldn’t drive without them. So my initial instinct to just say f%$k it and rejoin the party wasn’t going to work. I was going to stay in the water and find them, my lost pair of gold wire framed John Lennon wanna-be spectacles.

I started clamming around with my toes, but couldn’t feel anything. They were too numb. My hair froze. I leaned over, dropped to my knees and started crawling around in a foot of water feeling around with hands. Clump of sea weed.  Oyster shell. Rock. There was no one else in the water with me by this point and I started to think about the hypothermia tables but gave up because I had no idea what the water temperature was.  Ten minutes? 30?

Success, improbable, but needle-in-the-hay stack success.  I ran from the water and started down the dirt/slush road back to the house, hit a frozen pothole and flew into the air, breaking the ice with my left buttock and covering myself with muddy water. That same ice gave me a nice cut on the butt and the mud, well, it was not taken for mud when I returned to the party one minute later, crazed and bloody, naked and smeared with brown goo. The elder non-swimming contingent was impressed.

The scene in the bathroom was total chaos with six people wedged into the shower stall and the rest shouting at them to hurry up and let them in. I was last in line but at least I could see.

There were many other swims. None of them were exactly pleasant, but all of them were memorable. As far as tribal rites for my circle of friends, the New Year’s Eve midnight(ish) swim was a big one. Wherever I am on New Year’s Eve, I think of my friends back in Cotuit screaming and splashing out of the water in the darkness.

After a decade-long break from the swim (rule 2, optional for anyone over 30), I decided to swim today at noon, in balmy 50 degree sunshine, participating in a mass swim organized to benefit the Mashpee Food Pantry. Essentially I donated $20 to dunk myself. We were blessed by the village minister and a photographer from the Cape Cod Times was there to record the hilarity. I wore an actual bathing suit, had a towel, and was completely sober. While my son and a hundred people watched I threw myself off the deep side of Loop Beach in a nice shallow dive,  screamed underwater, and emerged babbling to thrash my way back to shore where the towel was handed to me and I could say in all honesty: “That wasn’t so bad.”

Phil on the left, me on the right.

The Official Cotuit New Year's Swim

It was not an extraordinary swim to tell the grandchildren about, but it definitely was a brisk way to mark the beginning of 2012 and I’m glad I did it and I probably will do it next year.

Thanks to Marta, I have my new favorite hero.

Alcohol was involved? No way!

I just finished Charles Shield’s  biography of Kurt Vonnegut: And So it Goes: Kurt Vonnegut:  A Life  largely on the strength of Christopher Buckley’s  review in a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review.

I’ve read most of Vonnegut’s novels, but wouldn’t necessarily put anything other than Slaughterhouse 5 on a list of must-read literature.  Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater: I read them, enjoyed some, didn’t enjoy others, but would not rank Vonnegut among my favorite authors of the late 20th century’s post-modernist school.

I’m not a big fan of literary biographies because they tend to be so predictable  in their accounts of misfit personas, alcohol consumption, failed marriages, alienated children, ambiguous sexual preferences, and the simple bleak fact that most authors go quietly insane over the course of their lifetimes thanks to sitting alone for hours at a time at their typewriters.  Dysfunction sells books. Normalcy does not. Read enough literary biographies and you’ll come to believe that all authors are miserable human beings, and other than some rubbernecking urge to watch them self-destruct, there is little in their lives that is commendable. Any biography of Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hunter S., Jack Kerouac, Hemingway usually is a catalog of misfit urges and terrible behavior.

Vonnegut smoked too much, drank too much, divorced his wife after 30 years of marriage, and was petulant when reviewers trashed his work.  He fooled around, screwed over his agents and publishers, and preened a little in the 1970s as a modern Mark Twain after Slaughterhouse made him rich and famous. He was also fairly prolific, wrote some good novels, was a hero to the counterculture and very much a man of his time. That he died old and unhappy – well, I would argue happy 84-year olds are fewer than ill and unhappy ones.

Although Shields enjoyed “official” status and access to Vonnegut in the writer’s final months, Mark Vonnegut wrote one reviewer to assassinate Shield’s account as a fabrication:

“I’m happy to reassure you that Kurt did not die a bitter man who kept thinking he was a failure.

Charles Shields spent very little time with a much diminished 84 year old who right up to the end showed more flashes of brilliance and warmth than most. There’s a ton of evidence, including his art and writing that he fought hard and largely succeeded to overcome PTSD from WWII and a quirky, but not altogether unloving childhood to have mostly loving and supportive relationships with his siblings and children and even his allegedly distant father. Shields had to ignore most of what I and other people who knew Kurt and most of what he read in the letters to come up with these shocking truths about a beloved writer.
It’s too good a bit to go away, but Kurt had next to no interest in investments or expensive things and never bought Dow stock.

Why don’t people employ a modicum of critical thinking before buying into the truth of a book whose existence is completely and utterly dependent on a picture that Shields would have made up out of whole cloth if he had to. Not a perfect man or father and I’ll grant you two failed marriages.

My best regards to someone whose affection and respect for my father shines on.”

I met Vonnegut in the late 1990s at a big Forbes event. He was quite avuncular and we sp0ke a few minutes about life in Barnstable Village here on Cape Cod in the 50s through the 70s. Vonnegut moved to Osterville in the early 50′s, rented an office over the Osterville Package Store on Wianno Ave., mentions Cotuit Bay as the place where Eliot Rosewater’s mother died in a boating accident (aboard a Cotuit Skiff I like to imagine), and then moved to the northside, to Scudder Lane in Barnstable Village where his wife Jane raised their three children and his late sister’s four.

Vonnegut owned the first Saab dealership in the U.S. – which failed — but when I drove a 900 purchased from Hyannis Saab I always liked to think it had some psychic connection to Kurt.

Vonnegut bailed on Cape Cod in the 70s, shacked up with the photographer Jill Krementz (whom he eventually married), bought a townhouse on West 48th Street, and then a place in the Hamptons — transforming him from a “Cape Cod Writer” (of which there are very few) to a classic New York Literary Luminary. He made some returns to Barnstable, but never called it home again after leaving.

His books were popular with my parents and their friends in the late 60s and 70s, and I recall the excitement whenever a new Vonnegut novel was published. Again, they didn’t do as much for me as Barth, Pynchon, and Heller. All of whom faded when the new realism emerged in the late 70s with Raymond Carver and his ilk.

As for the biography, well, if you want to get a little depressed, then by all means, go right ahead. If you’re a writer looking for some profound life’s lesson, then it comes down to this the guy worked his ass off and found success when he figured out how to tell the story of how he survived the fire bombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. Other than that — it’s petty stuff.

Over the past few years I’ve had a commenter’s relationship with another Cape Cod blogger, a young woman named Rebecca whose last name I never learned. She would cheerfully comment on one or another of my posts from time to time, leaving behind a link to her blog — Girl on the Loose. I found her years ago on a blog-of-blogs that listed other Cape Cod bloggers. I liked her writing and sense of humor.

Like me she liked to ride bicycles. Loved her dog Diesel. And occasionally reviewed local restaurants. She also had breast cancer, and wrote about her battle with that disease and her constant trips to Boston and local doctors.

Today I learned, months after the fact, that she died. Her blog is still online, someone in her family posted the sad news and an invitation to a celebration of her life. I missed both until today and I’m sad and a bit moody about morbid thoughts of words and pictures that outlive us.

I’m glad that Rebecca’s digital life goes on.

I took a hike around Great Island hike in Wellfleet yesterday with a college friend and his wife. A mere 14 mile, four hour slog to the tip of Jeremy Point under scudding purple December clouds with the Pilgrim monument in Provincetown a prominent finger to the north. Our only company was a half-dozen orange coated hunters with shotguns — one of whom told us to stay out of the woods unless we too were wearing orange, which we were not. So out of the woods we stayed and to the beach we went.

We walked down the bay side beach, made it south to the point, and then returned along the inner beach facing Wellfleet Harbor, stepping over countless clumps of wild oysters sitting on the sand, begging to be picked up. Near the end of the walk, inside the cove and marsh, we came upon a large, white, grey blob the size of a table laying in the wrack and flotsam.

It stank. It was gelatinous, and in an advanced state of decay. I looked for a minute and deduced it was a dead ocean sunfish, or Mola mola, one of the weirder fish in the sea.

First — they are all head. Seriously. No body to speak of. Just a massive head with fins.

Second — they are the heaviest fish in the sea, weighing up to 2,200 pounds.

Third — they swim very very slowly, preferring to drift on their side, right on the surface, sunning themselves as befits their name.

Fourth — their fin flaps lazily overhead in the air as they bask and some people mistake that fin for a shark.

This one is one of the dozen or so that have stranded on the Cape this fall. When the temperatures plunge the fish are stunned and can’t survive. According to the Cape Cod Times:

“The Mola mola is a frequent visitor to Cape waters and the season is under way for finding them stranded on the shores of Cape Cod Bay, Carson said. Although there are three types of ocean sunfish, the Mola mola is the one most likely to be sighted off the Cape’s shores.”

Here is link to a gallery of photos at the Time’s website of a marine biologist examining a dead Mola mola on a Cape Cod Bay beach in Brewster in October.

Some of my favorite childhood literature memories were the bookcases filled with pulp novels from the first two decades of the 20th century.  These were the books my grandfather and father read in the years before television. Cheap hardcovers with coarse yellowing paper that smelled like a dusty basement.

The original Tom Swift series was a big favorite, the Thornton Burgess books, and closer to home, three novels written by a family member, Charles Pendexter Durrell, who lived across the street in the 1930s and was my cousin Peter’s great-grandfather. Those three novels were published as The Bluewater Series, by Milton Bradley, the Springfield, Massachusetts game publisher best known for The Game of Life. They featured Sam Hotchkiss, the son of a wealthy Boston businessman who is ordered to the peaceful southside village of Saquoit (a concoction of Santuit, Cotuit, and Waquoit)  by his physician to recover from overwork and bad health. Sam is irked to be exiled to the remote shores of Cape Cod and cops a sulky attitude upon arrival. He’s eventually introduced to Captain Seth Nickerson, an old salt who could be patterned on my Great-great grandfather, Thomas Chatfield, to whom the first book, The Skipper of the Cynthia B. is dedicated:

Captain Seth patiently takes the young boy under his wing and takes him sailing on his trusty catboat, the Cynthia B., named for his devoted wife, and tagged with a “B” because it is considered bad luck to have a boat’s name end with a vowel.

The book describes Sam and Captain Seth’s sailing and fishing adventures, and is interspersed with tales from the Captain’s whaling days in the Arctic and Pacific. There’s a some drama in the plot involving a catboat race, and the book has some wonderful illustrations by the Chatham, Massachusetts illustrator, Harold Brett.

Some of Brett’s painting of the book’s dust jacket covers hung in the house across the street when I was young.  They were beautiful things that are gone now, taken away by the inevitable generational divisions of property. But they were very impressive examples of the Brandywine School of illustration as Brett was a student of Howard Pyle.

The three books in the series are:

• Skipper of the Cynthia B
• Heave Short
• Lights Off Shore or Sam and the Outlaws of the Bay

They were published in the 20s and 30s, and are, to my knowledge, the only novels set in Cotuit other than Clara Nickerson Boden’s The Cut of Her Jib (another distant relation of mine).

What I know about Charles Pendexter Durrell is that he was born in Maine in the 1880s, lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, and married Chatfield’s daughter Susan granddaughter, Mildred Chatfield Fisher. They had one child, Elizabeth Durrell, who married Fred F. Field and lived across the street and was my grandmother’s best friend. They collected shells together, made beach plum jelly, and carried on like two old Cotuit ladies with a lot of memories would carry on. Elizabeth, or “Betty” as we called her, took care of me one summer because of some family medical dramas, and fed me awesome hamburgers on Wonder bread with yellow mustard. Her grandson Peter Field is my youngest son’s godfather and in some convoluted fashion due to proximity, along with his brother Tom, like a first cousin even though he is probably twice removed or however that works.

Durrell died in the 1950s. His books live on, available used or online in Google Books at the links above.

Ten years ago, on a perfectly windless day when the water of Nantucket Sound were flat and mirror smooth, I ventured a few miles offshore from Cotuit to Horseshoe Shoals — a long curving sandbar that can be a great place to catch bluefish throughout the summer months. I had my son and daughter with me and after we caught a nice 12 lb. blue for dinner, I shut off the engine and enjoyed the strange experience of floating calmly over the shoal without the usual three to four feet of surf and chaos that usually cover the two-mile long crescent of glacial sand and pebbles during a brisk southwesterly breeze and a flood tide.  The Horseshoe is a fascinating place. Remnants of an ancient forest have been discovered out there. The controversial Wind Farm is proposed for the general vicinity (which I support). And, navigationally, it’s interesting because it is the location of both the shallowest water in Nantucket Sound and the deepest — the two extremes only less than half-a-mile apart — an indication of the massive hydrodynamics of the east-west current flows and infamous shoals that have long made the Sound a bad place for shipping.

I stood on the bow of the skiff, fly fishing, casting in hopes of tempting a spanish mackerel or bonito, but nothing was biting. The current would sweep us across the shallow, the bottom rising pale green, then yellow up from the depths until the boat passed over the shoal itself, the bottom just a few feet below us.

I gave up the fly rod and just watched the bottom, at one point, as we crossed over a new section, I swore I saw a pipe or something man made sticking up from the sand. I turned on the engine, circled back and took another look. Gradually, as I opened up my field of vision, the perfect outline of a boat revealed itself… just the outline, no hull, as if someone had drawn the concept of a boat on the bottom.

It was a wreck. The first I had ever seen in the Sound.

But which wreck? What had happened out there and when? Had people died? Was it fifty years old, 100? It was both creepy and thrilling in a macabre way. It was definitely something to avoid as there were some portions of the superstructure that seemed to be close to the surface.

Once ashore I started researching the wreck lists for the area and found nothing. There had been a light ship at Cross Rip (a nearby shoal) in 1918, but that vanished during a winter blizzard, carried off station by ice and never found with all hands lost. Since that ship, the LV-6, was last seen adrift at the eastern end of Nantucket Sound, 15 miles away, I ruled it out.   I recalled old navigational charts of the Sound showing an icon for a half-submerged wreck south of the Horseshoe, yet I never saw any such boat out there as a kid.

Here’s a 1968 Coast Guard chart of the area.

And specifically, here’s a zoomed-in look at the spot where I saw the hulk that day ten years ago.

Once ashore, I started telling people about the wreck, asking if anyone knew what it was or if they had ever seen it.  ”Ask Leonard Peck,” someone said. He’d been around for a long time and was one of the saltier people in Cotuit, but Leonard passed away before I could ask. Other old timers shrugged and said they didn’t have a clue. So I gave up but talked about it with my fishing and sailing friends, looking for some information about the hulk I had glimpsed lurking out there.

Then, this morning, in the Barnstable Patriot, the local weekly newspaper, the “Early Files” section that excerpts news from past editions of the paper had this entry under 1971:

“Three hundred pounds of explosives demolished the submerged Navy patrol boat off Horseshoe Shoals last Thursday after several weeks of delay caused by weather and tides. The Ad Lib II struck the wreck last month, resulting in the deaths of Dr. James L. Chute of Osterville and Harland L. Matthews of Cotuit. The explosion removed all the wreck’s superstructure and part of the submerged hull. Coast Guard expects the wreck buoy will remain at its present location.”

Mystery solved. Sort of.  A little knowledge makes one thirsty for more.

First I went looking for any information about the tragedy that occurred in the fall of 1971 when the Ad Lib II struck the wreck. I found this lawsuit filed by descendants of  the two dead local men against the Federal Government. Made sense since Horseshoe Shoe is outside of the state’s three mile territorial limit and officially in federal waters. Second, it was a US Navy ship. But why was it there? How had it come to be wrecked? What kind of ship was it?

The lawsuit, Chute v. The United State of America, dated February 17, 1979 has the details:

“…plaintiffs have brought this action to recover for the deaths of their respective fathers as a result of the sinking of the boat AD LIB II on September 30, 1971 in Nantucket Sound. Both decedents had been guests on the AD LIB II, which was owned and operated by Dr. Robert L. Baxter, a friend. Plaintiffs allege the AD LIB II sunk when it struck a submerged wreck on Horseshoe Shoals in Nantucket Sound, approximately seven to eight miles south-southwest of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. The plaintiffs contend that the wreck was improperly marked by the defendant, the United States. The wreck consists of a Navy ship, PC1203, which had been deliberately grounded on Horseshoe Shoals in 1949 for use as a bombing target.”

The law suit tells the story of how the Ad Lib II sank:

“Between 7:00 a. m. and 8:00 a. m. on September 30, 1971, Dr. Robert L. Baxter (aged 69); his wife; John Ohrn (aged 34); and the decedents, Dr. James L. Chute (aged 75) and Harlan L. Matthews (aged 77), departed from Lewis Bay on the AD LIB II and proceeded to Nantucket Sound to fish. The AD LIB II had a length of 24 feet, a width of approximately 10 feet, a mean draft of 3 feet, and a fiberglass hull. Dr. Baxter was an experienced mariner in the Nantucket Sound area, having fished in the area for some 40 years. He had also taught local courses in navigation and therefore knew that a wreck buoy is not placed on top of a wreck.

According to the lawsuit, a few days immediately following the Ad Lib II tragedy, Chester Crosby, chairman of the Town of Barnstable Waterways Commission (and owner of the Crosby Boat Yard in Osterville) asked the Coast Guard to mark the wreck.

“The plaintiffs had sought to introduce two letters of correspondence between Chester Crosby and Lieutenant Commander Ransom K. Boyce, then the Assistant Chief, Aids to Navigation Branch of the U. S. First Coast Guard District. Crosby was Chairman of the Waterways Committee, an advisory committee to the Board of Selectmen of the Town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, with regard to problems around the harbors and waterways. Writing to the Coast Guard in his capacity as Chairman, under date of October 4, 1971, Crosby expressed concern as to the adequacy of the marking of the wreck of the PC1203. As will be discussed in this court’s Findings of Fact, the buoy set up to mark the PC1203 was not placed directly on the wreck, but at some distance from it. The letter from Crosby, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 15, refers to a previous request to have the Coast Guard attach a day beacon to the wreck and the fact that that request had been refused. It further acknowledges the problem of placing buoys close to submerged wrecks, but suggests that “since the United States Navy placed the wreck on the shoal, couldn’t an eventual solution be to have them dynamite the remains [of the wreck] during the late fall after the fishing season and remove the debris.” Boyce’s response, dated October 13, 1971, Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 16, states that the Coast Guard had decided “to blow up the remains of the wreck and wire drag the area to the depth of five feet below the reference plane,” and concludes that “[i]t is felt that this is a satisfactory solution to the problem.”"

There are no online archives of the Cape Cod Standard Times or the Barnstable Patriot available for 1971 — so I need to get in the car and drive to the Sturgis Libraryif I want to read the contemporary accounts of the wreck of the Ad Lib II.

As for the PC1203 — she was a 175-foot patrol boat with a crew of 59 men, of the PC463 class, built in 1943 by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Corporation of Morris Heights, New York. I have no information where she was assigned or if she ever saw action. Apparently the 1203 was decommissioned, towed out to the middle of the Sound, and scuttled on a sandbar to serve as a target for pilots flying out of Otis Air Force base. The Cape and Island were very active with military training activities during and after World War II, with landing craft operations practiced out of Cape Candoit in Cotuit’s North Bay and Mashpee’s Popponnesset and Waquoit Bays.  Another famous target practice ship, the Longstreet, was a Cape Cod Bay landmark for years off of Wellfleet off of the shore of the Cape’s northside, and Noman’s Land, the island south of Martha’s Vineyard, was pummeled for years by strafing fighters and practicing bombers.

According to the lawsuit:

“…little, if any, of the remains of the PC1203 wreck was above the water’s surface except at low tide when small portions of the vessel broke the water’s surface. The depth of the water in the vicinity of the wreck varies according to the tides from approximately 2 feet to 4.8 feet. From 1949 to 1961, the area where the PC1203 was grounded was designated as a danger area. In 1961, the danger designation of the area was removed. During this period, the PC1203′s location was unmarked except for a pipe affixed to it by persons unknown. This pipe, however, was destroyed during a hurricane in the mid-1950′s.

Obviously for Mr. Chute and Mr. Matthews, that wasn’t enough to prevent their deaths by drowning after the Ad Lib II succumbed to the gash in her hull and sank.

I can only imagine the chaos out there that foggy afternoon as the water gushed through the rip in the Fiberglas hull. Despite an experienced skipper, life jackets, and relatively warm water. Two men died.

From the law suit:

“After the AD LIB II struck the wreck, the decision was made to “try to make it” back to shore. However, the boat was taking on a lot of water and subsequently Dr. Baxter turned the AD LIB II toward the shoal, hoping to be in shallow waters. While in the turn, however, the boat sank and the parties were forced into the water.

In the end, the court ruled for the plaintiff, and found the government liable for not adequately marking the wreck with a buoy, light, rip-rap or structure directly on the wreck itself.

I can’t find much about Harlan Matthews, the Cotuit man who drowned. His daughter Helen Dottridge,  one of the plaintiffs in the 1978 lawsuit, passed away in 2007 at 86,and was a well known figure in the village historical society and Federated Church: the Dottridges being one of Cotuit’s oldest families. The owner and skipper of the Ad Lib II, Dr. Robert L. Baxter, was a former commodore of the Hyannis Yacht Club and navigation instructor.

If you pick the right day and tide and have a good pair of polarized sunglasses, the remnants of the wreck of the PC1203 are still out there, perfectly outlined in the rocky sands of Horseshoe Shoal.  The modern edition of the chart may not show the half-exposed icon any longer, but some versions do show the simple word “pipe.”

If you want an idea of what coastal life will be like in 2080, after seventy more years of global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, then go down to the beach today and tomorrow around noon (in Cotuit) when the tide is high and exhibiting the rare, but annual phenomenon known in the southern hemisphere as a “King Tide.”

King tides are high tides that occur when the moon, sun, and earth line up in a straight shot called “perigee” and “perihelion.” The earth experiences two such King tides per year, always during either perigee or perihelion and during a forthnightly spring tide which occurs on a full or a new moon.

The moon is new now, and we should see high tides at levels, according to the scientists, that will be in line with forecasts for overall, normal high tides in 2080. The New York Times today quotes Kate Boicourt, an ecologist with the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program: ““What we’re seeing Wednesday and Thursday is probably what we normally will be seeing by 2080.”

I have personally noticed, and others have commented, that the Cotuit shoreline can get especially innudated on a spring tide, making beach walks impossible along popular stretches of sand such as Ropes Beach and Codman’s Point. In fact, on a moon or spring tide I have to remember not to take the dog on a stroll during my lunch hour as high tide in Cotuit during a full or new moon always coincides with noon and midnight.

Low tides are also extreme during King Tides, so expect to see some extraordinary exposure of sandbars and mud banks — making shoreside clamming a little more interesting as hither before depths become accessible making the older chowder-sized quahogs vulnerable to raking.

Tidal science is interesting stuff — I got a taste of it in the mid-1990s when a partner and I tried to get a tide table capability on our saltwater fly fishing site, Reel-Time. We gave up, but there is a good example of such a site at Capetides.com.

Regular readers of this blog (hello Mother) are probably a little tired of the old photograph that runs along the skyline of the homepage. It’s a scan of a wide panoramic black and white photo I found in a family collection of daguerreotypes and assorted old scenes of Cotuit. The scene is the upper end of Cotuit Bay, facing east towards Osterville’s Grand Island, over Old Shore Road, near what is known today as Ropes Beach. I think it was taken around 1910. Old Shore Road is unpaved, probably just two bright white tracks of crushed oyster shells, and the pier at the far right of the scene, with a small shack on the end, is where an ice cream parlor once operated. The stubs of the ice cream dock’s wooden pilings  still stick out of the mud today at low tide, the ends worn down to nubs.

This is a very familiar view to me. Probably the most Proustian view in my life. I took swimming lessons on the beach at the far left, sailing lessons a little further down at the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club. A video transcription of an old 16 mm home movie exists of a two-year old version of me, in a sagging cloth diaper, toddling in the mud. The family has always moored its boats in this part of the harbor. At the top left corner, where the beach and bluff ends is Handy’s Point — where my oldest Cotuit ancestors, the Handys, once lived and built ships in the 18th and 19th century.  I drive past this view four times a day on average. In the winter I can see a blue heron wading on the boat ramp in my headlights. This is my cove.

Every afternoon, around 3, when I was working from home, the dogs would annoy me to take them for a quick walk down the hill and out to Handy’s Point.   The three of us would do this nearly every day that we could from October through April, even in blowing snow storms (especially in blowing snow storms), me impatient with them pissing on every phone pole and tree alongside Old Shore Road, tugging at their leashes and reminding them that the sooner we got the beach, the sooner the leashes would get unclipped and they could run free and collect some new ticks in the beach grass.

The highpoint of the walk, the one point of dramatic tension, was the crossing of Mister Rickel’s Marsh Bridge. Mister Rickel is David Rickel, a good friend, a great carpenter/electrician/plumber and fellow lover of Gator Hammock hot sauce from Felda, Florida. Some ten or fifteen years ago David decided to build a trim little planked arched bridge over the natural spring that flows out from underneath Old Shore Road into the harbor.  He then fenced off the marsh with posts and ropes, erecting a little sign that says “Fresh Water Spring.” By doing so he cleared the area of dinghy’s and Sunfishes and other grass-killing boats and the result has been a nice rebirth of the spring.

The bridge has a graceful arch, is founded on some stout posts that rest atop the sand, and gains its strength and arc from a stack of laminated stringers crossed with unpainted planks. The dramatic part was getting two leashed dogs and myself over the bridge without knocking one or both or all of us into the sluggish stream below. The late terrier Ned was fond of taking a very large, very public roadside dump before venturing across — the reason I always stuffed a blue New York Times delivery bag in my pocket before departing the house — I guess he was probably jettisoning ballast before making the traverse, but the foot of the Rickel Marsh Bridge was his preferred toilet and where I got to get all disgusting with a blue bag over my hand.

During the recent almost-Hurricane Irene the bridge washed away and was in danger of being crushed beneath an errant Grady-White sports fishing boat that wound up on the tarmac of Old Shore Road. The bridge floated away and became wedged beneath the chine of the wreck where I couldn’t tug it free. The bystanders seemed surprised I would expend so much vigor on a long weathered piece of wood instead of trying to push off 10,000 pounds of run-away Fiberglas — but the bridge was the Mostar Bridge of Cotuit and had to be saved at all costs.

Eventually Old Shore Road recovered from the storm. Huge cranes lifted big boats off the  beach and the bridge destroying Grady-White was returned to the harbor. But the bridge lay a bit tattered next to a driveway, waiting for reconstruction.

As Ned took ill and began to decline, I resolved to give him one last beach walk, but alas, he was too weak to make that trek and we had to content ourselves with one final stroll around the Town Dock (his second favorite place) where he took one last embarrassing poop in front of everyone and then rolled in a puddle of seagull shit for old times sake. Three days later he passed away, and every time I drove down Old Shore Road past the missing bridge I felt a twinge of nostalgic regret that he didn’t get to trundle over the bridge one last time.

Then, last weekend, there was Mister Rickel, proudly standing next to the restored bridge. I rolled down the car window and hailed him with a “It’s back!” and he replied with “I keep reading that Internet thing and there hasn’t been anything new to read for while” — a subtle reminder that I’ve been slacking off in blog matters.

On Monday of this week, the last Monday of the summer, under turbulent skies with a scudding northeast wind that presaged the Fall, I went for a walk with Ned’s partner in beach walks, the diminutive tyrant known as Esme. She took her time sniffing and peeing all the way down the hill and I thought for a second she might find one last whiff of her couch partner. We turned the curve at the foot of the hill and there was the bridge.

I took a picture for old time’s sake and over we went, the arch slightly flexing under my weight.

It was a sad walk out to Handy’s Point.  It was the first of the beachwalk season (dogs aren’t permitted on the beaches between May 15 and Sept. 15)  and our first without Ned snuffling in the grass and looking for dead fish and spider crabs to roll in. A murder of crows sat portentiously in a silver locust tree at the base of the bluff. The Lowell’s dock, conveniently dismantled by Irene, was neatly stacked for the winter above the high tide line, the stink of the barnacles on the pilings attracting yellow jackets.

I plodded along in the sand, nervous that the little dog would get picked off by a coyote, stepping over the little rivulets of freshwater that scrawled over the sand from the springs under the bluffs, grateful to be barefoot.

At  Handy’s Point — the turnaround point — I stopped to watch a blue crab swim sideways in Little River. Across the four-foot span of the stream was the former home of my great-great-grandmother, Florentine Handy Chatfield. Now rebuilt and remodeled to the point that it looks like a wooden wedding cake, the house sits on a slight rise above the harbor. It became the summer home of Mark DeWolfe Howe, a Boston Brahmin man of letters, and was, in its time, a literary retreat of sorts for the likes of William and Henry James. My family may curse the decision of Florentine to abandon Handy’s Point and the waterfront, but evidently she felt very abandoned and stranded there in the Little River district of Cotuit during the hard winters when her husband, Captain Thomas Chatfield, was off chasing whales with her brother Bethuel in the Okhost Sea off the coast of Siberia.

While Little River is indeed little, a woman with young children couldn’t be expected to ford it in the winter to make it into the village of Cotuitport for provisions. The only other way is to walk the long way around on the Old Post Road past Mosswood Cemetery and then up Putnam Avenue. So Florentine moved the family right to the center of the village, across from the village green to the house where I live today.

My great-great-grandfather was perturbed to return from his last whaling voyage to find the family had moved.

“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) [854 Main St., ed.] 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. I had made up mind that after twelve years steadily in the same ship I would spend one year at home before I sought employment again: but everything had changed before the year was out. The election in the fall of 1860 resulted in the choice of Mr Lincoln as President, and brought the Republican party pledged to oppose the extension of slavery, into power.”

Little River was once bridged, there are stubs of old pilings on either bank. I must ask the local historian Jim Gould who lives on the Cotuit side of the stream if he knows when the bridge existed and where the path would have gone.

I stood and admired the marsh and vacant bay for a while, all too conscious that this was the usual point in the walk when I would yell at Ned to get the f%&k out of the water in the middle of February. He liked to wade — never swim — like a water buffalo, his coarse salt-and-pepper coat floating up around him and then climb out to throw himself, face first, in the sand and roll and roll and roll, wriggling on his back, collecting as much sand, seaweed, and stink that he could for the walk back home, into the eye-watering wind, and then back over his bridge and finally home for an afternoon in front of the fire, the little dog lying like a parasite on his back for warmth.

John Steinbeck opens his memoir, Travels With Charley with an account of rescuing his 22-foot motorboat from Hurricane Donna in 1960. I remember reading that story before ever experiencing a hurricane myself, and I was impressed by Steinbeck’s willingness to risk his life for his beloved boat, wading into the waters of a harbor on Long Island Sound to free her from the clutches of some other boats and then power her up and steam safely to a safer anchorage. Since then I’ve repeatedly suffered the peculiar paternal anxiety of a boat owner confronted with the possibility of losing a boat, especially during those terrible storms where there just isn’t enough time to pull it safely from the water. When that happens it’s just wait and watch.

I own a 26-year old 33-foot Endeavour sloop — the Bald Eagle Too – a gift from some good friends who were going to consign her to a charity auction after her last owner passed away (I’ve retained her name out of the superstition that a renamed boat is bad luck). The boat is a total joy — who can argue with a gift? — and it has become the center of summer life for me and my family these past three years.  The first  twinges of boat anxiety began to build when Irene started to threaten early last week. I phoned the local boatyard on other business — to organize the pullout of the yacht club’s motorboats — and the owner answered his cell phone with an abrupt: “If this is about your big boat, tough titty…..” I never expect to be on anyone’s priority list for boat hauling as I maintain the boat myself to save money. Big spenders get pulled first so they can continue to spend.

On Friday my son and I stripped off the sails, took down the dodger and spent an hour attending to the mooring lines, insuring the chafing gear was in the bow chocks and running a third backup line from around the mast, down the bow roller for the anchor line and then down to the splice in a bowline where the mooring pennant met the chain in a blob of sea squirts and barnacles. Somewhere down there in the black muck was a fairly new 500-pound mushroom anchor. Hefty, but still, past hurricanes have ripped moorings that size out of the mud before. When we finished pumping the bilges dry, switched off the electrical system, and made one last paranoid check we motored up the harbor to check out a hurricane mooring I was given last year during the threat of Hurricane Earl. Alas, it had a little swim float tethered to it — 2,000 pounds of serious yacht insurance for a little wooden float — but hey, not my mooring, not my place to bitch and moan, and the Bald Eagle was just going to have to tough it out on her own.

All around us, out on the edge of the mooring field, the other owners of the big sailboats were making the same preparations we had. You can instantly gauge the saltiness of a boat owner from how thoroughly they approach their storm preparations. My good friend the Judge, who has been through hurricanes dating back to the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944, was doing the same thing I was — get all the canvas off the spars and spend a lot of time on the mooring pennants and chafing gear. Less experienced owners were leaving their roller reefed jibs on — a fatal mistake as the gusts will pick them open until the boat is literally sailing unattended at the mooring, wildly tacking back and forth until the mushroom is dislodged.

The danger in a mooring field isn’t necessarily what happens to one’s own boat, it’s what the 0ther boats that break free will do to you. In fact, late during yesterday’s storm a very new and hot looking racing sloop just to windward of me broke free late in the storm — probably due to the lines rubbing through, and blew down wind, just missing me but hanging up stern to bow on a small sloop that had stoutly made it through the worst of the blow, only to get dragged off by the combined weight of its own hull and the runaway. If I were the owner of the second boat I would be irate this morning, as he’s totally high and dry on the northern beach next to the boat that took him out.

I first went down to the water at 6 am on Saturday, just when the first storm bands were blowing in, and things looked fine. A party barge had broken free, but otherwise it was a good eight hours before the peak gusts were scheduled to arrive around 2 pm. I took the family out to breakfast at a seaside restaurant, but the windows were moaning so loudly in the gusts we lost our appetites. We returned home and for me, the worst was just starting.

The helplessness one feels during a storm is overwhelming.  You stand at the shore, pick a good angle to view the boat, and with every hard gust that blows the tops of the waves into the air, every blast of green water that goes over the bow, the boat hobby-horsing on its tether at a 45 degree angle up and down into the air and troughs ….. Yes, I could have spent the storm out on the boat. The thought occurred to me. One tactic is to keep the diesel running and then feather the throttle during the gusts to relieve some of the tons of pressure from the mooring. But, as I learned in my younger days as a surfcaster when a wave nearly flooded my waders and drowned me while I was fighting a striper –no fish, and no boat, is worth drowning for.

The crowd at the foot of Old Shore Road was mostly gawking at a motorboat thrown into the middle of the street and the occasional sailboat dragging down onto the sands. A gorgeous Tartan sloop from Annapolis came in right at my feet, the mooring float still tied to the cleat on the deck, the boat a victim of bad chafing gear. The fact the sails were still on the spars and a big inflatable dinghy was still hanging from the stern davits was an indication the owner hadn’t prepared for the worst, yet I heard him on his cell phone being very angry with the boat yard that rented him the mooring.

I’d watch for an hour then walk back up the hill to the house for a drink of water, some food, and a few minutes of pacing around telling myself que sera, sera – no need to go back down, what will happen will happen and there isn’t a thing you can do about it. That blithe rationalization lasted about a half hour until I pulled the orange Grunden back on and made my way down the shore road, nervously watching the tree limbs over my head, convinced I would get crushed by a falling maple branch on the next puff.

At noon the police arrived and kicked everyone off of the landing, putting up crime scene tape at the top of the hill to keep gawkers from driving down. High tide followed 30 minutes later at 12:30 — the storm surge coinciding with the new moon extreme tide — and Old Shore Road flooded, carrying a sportsfisherman right onto the road and blocking it closed. A big cruising catamaran, the Split Ticket, dragged ashore — the wind catching under the cabin sole between the two hulls and just muscling it slowly down the harbor into the beach grass. Blocked by the police from the beach and losing my mind at the house, I called a friend who lives on the water and has a view of my boat to see if I could come pace and fret on his lawn.

“I’ve got bad news,” he said. ”She’s gone.”

That sucked. She had broken loose. “Do you see her on the beach?” I asked.

“I don’t see it. It might be up in Inner Harbor near the Oyster Company.”

As soon as I dropped the F-bomb my wife and son knew the worst had happened. We piled into the car and starting driving to the section of the bay where she would likely come ashore. As I turned the car past the cemetery the phone rang again.

“Never mind. I see her now. I guess I couldn’t get a good angle from my kitchen.”

I said another bad word. This was like the punchline of a bad doctor joke. “I’ve got good news and bad news ….”

We drove to his house and with a beaming smile (Har, har, April Fool’s!) he handed me a set of binoculars. The Bald Eagle was still out there, getting pounded as hard as I’ve ever seen any boat get hit at anchor. I handed the binocs to my wife. She stared for a few seconds, handed them back, and turned away.

“I wish I hadn’t seen that,” she said.

I snuck back down to the landing and remained there all afternoon. Pacing. Staring. Wincing. You could tell who the boat owners were. We all stood silently, arms crossed, staring. The gawkers and spectators were snapping pictures of the boats canted over the road, laughing, socializing, caught up in hurricane fever; but we owners were together but lost in our thoughts.

The Bald Eagle late on Sunday afternoon

Then more bad news as the gusts started to hit even harder. The Polaris, a gorgeous blue ketch, perhaps one of the prettiest boats in the harbor, was ashore just north of Lowell Point. I felt for the owner and his sons as they slogged through the surf and eel grass towards the spot just out of sight where she was rolling in the shallows. Then the C-Team, a grey sloop went on the beach at Handy’s Point. A sportsfisherman went into the trees under the bluff. The Lowell’s finger pier vanished in a tangle of planks. As I stood and spectated I felt a sharp twinge in my neck, and for the rest of the day couldn’t turn my head without wincing. I dug my finger into the spot — the kind of pain one gets from sleeping wrong — but nothing would make it go away.

My boat continued to plunge. And plunge. And careen under the impact of the williwaws and gusts. The hull heeled at a crazy angle under the force of the wind. At one point I thought I heard a jet engine out over the harbor — perhaps a stormhunter or Coast Guard Falcon jet from Otis Air Force Base? No, it was the sound of the wind honking through the spars and rigging of the 30 boats in the bay, an eerie mechanical, unnatural wail. I started to lose it. Just make it stop now. Throw a switch. Enough is enough. The boat had been riding hard for eight hours. I visualized the mooring lines where they came through the bow chocks and ran back to the cleats: a cartoon image of frayed dacron line, down to one Coyote-and-Roadrunner thread, waiting to snap with a little “plink” …..

I walked through the flotsam and wrack to Lowell’s Point to see if I could help with the Polaris. The owner and his sons were wading big anchors out into the surf and then using the jib winches to kedge the stern off of the beach. Coming ashore at half-tide was a good thing if they could keep her from being pushed any higher up on the sands. The next high tide might float her enough to be tugged free; otherwise, as in Hurricane Bob, a big Sikorsky SkyCrane helicopter with slings might be needed to get her off.

The Polaris ashore

And so it went through the late afternoon. At 7 pm I made my last trek down to the harbor. The wind had veered to the southwest, sustained at 40 knots with an occasional gust up to 60. They had said Irene was not so much a high impact storm as a big, long duration one and they were right. It blew for 12 solid hours. The longer it blew the more chafing I had to fret about, and as boats continued to break free and drift down on her right up until darkness there was no celebration on my part that the worst had passed. Coming home for the last time before nightfall I saw the boat’s mooring ball on the deck. A friend had found it on the beach. Ironic the float made it ashore while the boat didn’t.

I must have knocked on wood a dozen times yesterday, looking for a tree every time I said, “She’s still out there.”

By the twilight's last gleaming ....

At ten I went to bed, mentally exhausted. My wife and son were both exhausted and enervated by the long day of worry and helplessness. We all crashed.

….At so, at six today I woke to bluebird skies and the ringing of the first chainsaws. I pulled on fresh pair of shorts and walked down the lane, stepping over the downed limbs and pushing through piles of green leaves. More boats had come ashore during the night. One had a white hull with a blue stripe …. was it my boat? I thought for a moment my luck had run out.

In the blazing twinkling sun, too bright to see through with sun glasses and a hand visor, I looked out to that space in the harbor where she should have been and with immense relieve saw her hull, placid and bobbing safely on her mooring. She made it. I could safely celebrate without knocking on wood.

And the pain in my neck is completely gone.

I went to the beach at 6 am in time to see the first boat come ashore. Three hours later things were pretty intense, even though high tide was another three hours away and the peak gusts aren’t due to arrive until 2 pm.

Ropes Beach is pretty crowded with gawkers, but I’m glad we pulled the Cotuit Skiff fleet yesterday and got the dock out of the water. My boat is still out there, riding bravely and looking good. For now.

I’ll post more videos until the power goes and I lose my connection.

This first series was shot at the Town Dock.

The annual August arrival of the President on Martha’s Vineyard brings with it a couple plane-loads of black SUVs, burly Secret Service agents, and – according to the New York Times – portable cell phone “towers” to insure the Commander In Chief has four bars on his Blackberry at all times.

Ironic that suddenly the little village of Chilmark has cell phone service when the place is famed for being one of those rare spots where one can take a vacation and never have to worry about what mayhem is unfolding in one’s inbox for the simple truth that you can’t connect. There are no excuses for being unplugged on the western end of MV during the summer — you just can’t get connected there. No wonder I love my annual fly fishing vacation in late September in Menemsha — I can spend six hours baking in the sun waiting for a school of bonito to explode in the channel and not once will the phone ring.

Except of course unless the President is in the area, in which case paradise is temporarily lost to the invasion of the always-on/always-connected tyranny of life in the Blackberry lane:

“But others — especially those who live or vacation in Chilmark because it is remote — rolled their eyes when asked about the improved connection with the outside world.

“A lot of the people who vote here, who live here year-round, couldn’t care less if the people who invade them in the summer get to talk to their Hollywood producers in the middle of the Chilmark store,” Ms. Fox said.

Ms. LoRusso said the lack of cell service “keeps things up-island and rural.” Mr. Ford, who has spent the summer working on a farm here, said: “Personally, I like being disconnected. I like the privacy.”

Yesterday my friend Om Malik remarked on my screed about Cape Cod crime and asked me to expand on this digression:

“I came here full-time in 1991 in my early thirties as a technology enabled telecommuter and even went so far as to write a  big utopian story for Forbes on how tech was going to transform the hinterland into a paradise of ISDN-enabled day traders, software programmers, and affluent bohemian “knowledge workers” who would phone it in via telepresence technology. Ha. As one old timer told me early on at the village post office, “You can’t be a fireman unless you live near the fire.” The story of my career has been: “Raise the family on the Cape, earn the living elsewhere.”

So I did. Here is the story of me and telecommuting and ultimately how we’re all telecommuters:

Among my many journalistic mistakes was a story I wrote for Forbes Magazine in the early 90s that painted a utopian picture of a wired rural society where ISDN-enabled “knowledge workers” would revitalize quaintly inexpensive farm towns and resorts with their  Manhattan-sized pay checks direct deposited into their accounts at the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Goodbye to the tyranny of two-hour commutes and endless NPR fund drives, freed from the tedium of office cubicles and petty office politics and hello to Jetsonian H.246 teleconferencing, parents who could actually raise their kids (and home school them!) and a return to local life for the first time since the Industrial Revolution ripped our great-great-grandparents from the farm and chained them to a machine in a mill.

Ha. Having evenly divided my career between newsrooms/offices and home offices in bedrooms and various outbuildings, I am here to pass on what one old retiree told me in 1991after I decamped from Boston with my family to Cape Cod in search of pre-schools less competitive than Harvard, an actual backyard, and a quieter pace: “How can you be a fireman if you don’t live near the fire?”

Consider that twenty years ago – when I was writing that silly article — fax machines were marvelous things, most companies didn’t have email (if you needed email then you had MCI Mail or CompuServe). There was no Internet. The fastest PC was a 486, John Scully mismanaged Apple, and the height of wireless technology was a Motorola cell phone that resembled a Humvee. Videoteleconferencing cost a gazillion dollars. Digital cameras, let alone web cams were years away.  Basically, life was lived at 9,600 baud on a Hayes modem, dialed into pre-Internet services like The W.E.L.L. and various BBSs.

I ordered an ISDN line from Verizon. They sent men in white coats and hard hats to come look at my house. I wrote an entire story about the ordeal. I was a pioneer. I was wired.  CallerID was coming. I couldn’t wait.

The tools I needed to work from home came down to a PC that could dial into Forbes’ ATEX production system using a floppy-based program called “Send/Fetch,” the aforementioned fax machine to receive story proofs, and a touchtone phone with a headset for conducting interviews. That was it. Life was lived on the phone since no one had email other than a few geeky sources. I woke up, got the kids on the school bus, cleared the decks for the day, made a pre-emptive call to my editor to punch the virtual clock and then worked until three or four in the afternoon until the kids got off the bus. After dinner was when Forbes went to work – editors or fact checkers would call and keep me busy until nine. It was good. I started flowers from seed and learned how to fly fish.

This life was revolutionary at the time. None of my colleagues – present or former – did anything remotely similar. Everyone I knew worked in an office.

I grew my hair long. I wore atrocious slob clothing, attempted a moustache, and gained weight from seeking inspiration in the refrigerator. I joined the local library board.  I was 32 years old and growing senile on what the optimists were calling “The Silicon Sandbar.” In all my time telecommuting from Cape Cod I never met a fellow “knowledge worker,” just carpenters, landscapers, fishermen and retirees.  Where were the hedge fund managers? The coders? The novelists?

Given that Forbes only published 26 issues a year, it wasn’t surprising that I became one of the most prolific writers on the magazine’s masthead. I wrote out of boredom, looked forward to my monthly visit to Forbes’ elegant headquarters on lower Fifth Avenue, and was constantly bugging my editor for permission to travel to Silicon Valley or Seattle in search of cool technologies to write about. In other words, I was bored.

Within three years of arriving on Cape Cod I needed some cultural and social stimulus and a decent Indian restaurant. Those wishes were fulfilled in 1995 when I started Forbes.com and suddenly had a business to run and a staff to manage. What followed were five years of weekly plane rides on a Beechcraft 1900 from Hyannis to LaGuardia, living out of a suitcase, and trying to ride the Web 1.0 wave in Silicon Alley while maintaining a family 250 miles behind me on Cape Cod. All the video teleconferencing in the world wouldn’t have permitted me to manage Forbes.com, so, like a good fireman, I went to the fire. Any time I tried to get things done from the Cape all hell broke loose in some bizarre variant of Murphy’s Law. When my staff at Forbes.com broke the Shattered Glass expose I was in Paris trying to enjoy my 40^th birthday with a Toshiba laptop, a useless cell phone, and a stack of useless phone and voltage adapters.  So much for being there.  My head wasn’t in France and my ass wasn’t in the newsroom in the midst of its biggest scoop ever.

The cultural swing between the work week in the city that never sleeps and the deserted winter beaches of Cape Cod was a bit too intense. The best advice on going home I received at the time from a fellow Cape to NYC commuter was: “No one missed you while you were gone, so when you get home, find a chair, sit in it, and eventually someone will come sit in your lap.”

Generally that someone was the family dog.

When I left Forbes and journalism to join McKinsey another wise soul said, “The virtual office virtually works.” Right. I found myself commuting 80 miles a day by car from the Cape to the lifeless Route 128 suburb of Waltham to sit in a cubicle and produce endless Powerpoints. Thankfully that operation had its plug pulled by McKinsey and I was transferred back to New York City, and once again was living the Cape Cod to Manhattan lifestyle I thought I had escaped in 2000. The only time telecommuting at McKinsey was actually a blessing was in the terrible days following 9/11 when flying was out of the question and very few people wanted to be in the city, including those who lived there.

The worst telecommute was Zurich to Cape Cod. Once big time zones get introduced then telecommuting becomes a misery. Swiss managers – to hopelessly generalize – like their staff to be under their noses.  Trying to manage my staff from the Cape or the company’s Wall Street offices was impossible. After Zurich I worked for a Chinese company with offices in Raleigh, North Carolina and there I discovered commuting to work meant flying from Boston to the Research Triangle only to sit in an office staring at pine trees and spending most of the day on massive global conference calls while making fun of whoever was talking through instant messenger with my colleagues. The only difference between taking those phone calls from Cape Cod was latitude and better barbeque. Woe to the call participant who forgot their mute button. We learned to know the barks of each other’s dogs, the screams of unhappy children ….. The amount of travel – Bangalore, Beijing, Istanbul – meant I was basically telecommuting again, but instead of doing it from Cape Cod and a former whaling captain’s house on an IDSN line I was doing it from one hotel room or business lounge after another on $20 a day Wifi.

Today? Three days a week I work out of a nice townhouse near the Museum of Modern Art on 54^th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues – pretty much right in the middle of the action. With one child remaining at home with only a year left before college, my wife and I are 13 months away from moving back to a city and letting Cape Cod revert back to being a weekend/vacation spot.

We’re all telecommuters now and it’s not paradise in the mountains or on the islands. We still live in the angry suburbs, commute bumper to bumper and cheek to cheek, but this time we’re also expected to be 100% available and well informed all the time, be it in the car, on the runway, or in a beach chair.

Enjoy your beach chair this August. The office will be waiting for you when you come back.

The New York Times has made Cape Cod’s dirty secret national news this morning with a story on the property crime epidemic spawned by pain killer addicts looking for flat panel televisions and GPSs to feed their pill problem.

I experienced it first hand one night last summer when my cars were ransacked in the driveway, unlocked as they have been forever, gleaned of anything worth fencing. The police came, expressed their sympathy and said we were only one of many Cotusions to get hit in recent weeks.

Since a set of keys were stolen from one of the cars the locksmith was called and the locks were changed on the house. Hasps and padlocks went onto the garage doors and suddenly, I was locking my doors in Cotuit for the first time in 50 years.

The culprits aren’t urban invaders or some “new” element that has arrived along with sprawl and pollution, but young white kids: teens to young adults living in what I would consider to be one of the worst places for a young person to begin a life in terms of economic opportunity and urban excitement.  I’m urging my children to get out and stay out until they find some opportunity elsewhere, and then they can return as vacationers.  I came here full-time in 1991 in my early thirties as a technology enabled telecommuter and even went so far as to write a  big utopian story for Forbes on how tech was going to transform the hinterland into a paradise of ISDN-enabled day traders, software programmers, and affluent bohemian “knowledge workers” who would phone it in via telepresence technology. Ha. As one old timer told me early on at the village post office, “You can’t be a fireman unless you live near the fire.” The story of my career has been: “Raise the family on the Cape, earn the living elsewhere.”

The Cape, following the torrid building boom of the 70s through the 90s, has never generated much of a year-round economy. A few tech companies here and there, nothing major and certainly no “Silicon Sandbar” as was hoped twenty years ago. There’s no manufacturing to speak of, and of course the resort/vacationer economy that has been the mainstay of the region for the last sixty years dies every winter, when even the local restaurant owners close their doors and head south to escape the snowless tedium.

The Cape has a large elderly population, mostly middle-income retirees drawn here by the prospect of light snow and the Patti Page mythical idyll of “Olde Cape Cod.”  They appear to be especially victimized by the spate of home invasions as the addicts rifle through their medicine cabinets in the middle of the night.

On the good side, at least we don’t have a meth epidemic, though I should watch my words and knock on wood.

Meanwhile the doors are locked and something has been lost that isn’t coming back ever again.

The definition of melancholy came to me last night in the top row of the home side bleachers at Cotuit’s Elizabeth Lowell baseball park: it’s watching 30 college freshmen and sophmores dressed in white and cranberry pin-stripes hug each other goodbye at the end of their first summer swinging a wooden bat in the Cape Cod Baseball League.

The last game started at 4:30, a half-hour earlier than usual due to Cotuit’s wonderful lack of lights and inability to play ball deep into the gloaming. I arrived on time, scorebook in hand, and staked out the top row for myself and my two kids while they bought t-shirts and caps from the Kettleer’s Store with my credit card. For some reason I thought Cotuit had a shot at making the playoffs, but alas, that was not the case. The team that won the championship in 2010 was finishing the western division of the CCBL in fat last and yesterday’s game was the swan song, the final act, curtains on an all-too-brief season that began in early June, seemed to never end in July and suddenly, like the day after Christmas, was over and done.

The worst part for me is February, when bored out of my mind and numbed by the black and white colorless movie that is Cape Cod in winter, I eventually turn my car into the parking lot and and idle in front of the home plate gate, staring through the chainlink backstop at the blue tarp protecting the pitcher’s mound and the stand of pines arced behind the outfield fence.

“Somehow the summer seemed to slip by faster this time,” wrote A. Barlett Giamatti in his famous sad ode to the game. It’s been accelerating for years it seems.  Where summer used to end in a procession of station wagons with bikes strapped to the roof on the afternoon of Labor Day, sad faces pressed to the windows in the line of traffic waiting to cross the Sagamore Bridge, it now peters out in mid-August, as the schools open ever earlier, pre-season soccer eats into sailing, and hurricane season lurks off the coast of Africa waiting, making me fret: “Will this be the year of the big one?”

Cotuit went out with a win over Brewster. A crisp 3-0 win where all went well, no major dramatics, some heroic catches and the usual eccentricities of Cape baseball. I ate a hot dog and popcorn. My children were next to me, their friends next to them. A friend I hadn’t seen since 1974 introduced herself and her children and I think we both felt older because of it. Ivan Partridge, the ageless booster of the Kettleers, who stands steadfastly at the chainlink fence and yells “Have a Hit!” at every Cotuit batter, stood before us in the stands and exhorted us to make some noise and “let the boys know how much you appreciated them this summer.” And so we cheered, dropped our bills into the plastic kettles passed out by the children, bought our 50/50 raffle tickets from the players working the stands, and scurried to the snackbar when the announcer declared it was two-for-one time as the concession owner tried to empty the shelves before lowering the shutters and locking up for the next nine months.

I started to regret every missed game, those lost chances to sit in the stands for three free hours and watch the timeless game, a little maudlin that this team would vanish forever, to be replaced by a new one next year, in the same uniforms but all different young men. Some would become stars in the big leagues. This year’s designated hitter, Victor Roache, was a pleasure to watch every time he came to the plate, and yesterday he received the top prospect award from the major league scouts who prowl the games looking for talent. So one never knows looking at the rosters which few will go on to become the next Chase Utley, Buster Posey, Jacoby Ellsbury, Nomar Garciaparra — but some will, and knowing that makes the process of getting acquainted with every year’s new team so worthwhile, so that someday you’ll be able to say: “I remember when he played for Harwich in 2008 …..”

Regret is a silly thing, so I stood and applauded while the boys hugged each other out in the middle of the diamond, stuck my pencil behind my ear, collected my trash, and headed for home.

“I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” A. Bartlett Giamatti, former commissioner of Major League Baseball and president of Yale, The Green Fields of the Mind, from A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti

My step-sister’s husband (step-brother-in-law?) was out fishing in Nantucket Sound near the test tower for the wind farm. He came across the carcass of the whale that the Coast Guard has been warning mariners about the past week or two.

He gave me permission to post these pictures. He said the smell was terrific and alleged there have been reports that some great white sharks have been snacking on it. After reading “In the Slick of the Cricket” — the story of Montauk’s Frank Mundus, one of the models for Quint, I can believe it.

An interesting project, Hear Cape Cod, is recording sound samples at select locations around the peninsula to create a record of what life on Cape Cod sounds like in 2011.

The integration with Google Maps is very cool. Click on a waypoint and the recording will launch. Everything from gulls squabbling at the Pamet River to the wind turbine at the Falmouth wastewater treatment plant.

The Starter Castle Movement that has raped the Cape’s coastline since the late 1980s shows no sign of abating.  The ongoing tear-down and replacement of the original inventory of old shingled summer mansions built at the turn of the 19th century with wedding caked, turreted displays of Pella windows and Chem-Lawned swards of grass is enough to make me launch into a jeremiad of nostalgia. The view has changed, at least for we peons who sail by and have to peer up at the messes, but for the wealthy waterfront homeowner, the view out the window towards Nantucket Sound remains as pristine as ever. No coincidence that this upper echelon of the public led the hue and cry against the construction of a wind farm three miles offshore: the thought of anything sullying their vistas broke out the checkbooks in a flurry of environmental hand wringing.

Another thing that drives me nuts is the new obsession with outdoor lighting and the resulting light pollution. Some of these quaint $20 million haciendas are lit up like ocean liners at night, their balustrades and eaves covered with big honking spot lights to either deter pain-killer crazed burglars or show off the nitrogen-leeching Kentucky Blue Grass growing under the sprinklers. For someone on the opposite shore, the glare is beyond annoying and inspires fantasies of a Seal Team 6 sniper with a scope the size of a wine bottle.

When I was a cub reporter for the Cape Cod Times in the summer of 1980, one of my beats was the waterfront.  At a hearing of the department of natural resources on the legality of clamming with hydraulic pumps, an interesting clash of the two poles of Cape Cod society occurred in town hall. On one side of the room were three dozen commercial quahoggers: eternally tanned, biceps the size of footballs from wrestling with a bullrake all day,  hands stained black from the primordial mud at the bottom of the bays, mostly moustachioed and bearded like a biker gang. On the other side was a half dozen waterfront matrons dressed in Lily Pulitzer pink and green. They hated the sight and sound of the quahoggers working the shallows in front of their manses and wanted it stopped. A local real estate agent kicked things off by reminding the town fathers that these poor ladies paid a disproportionate amount of taxes, only resided in the town three or four months out of the year, and at the very least deserved some peace and quiet. Then, one brave matron took to the microphone and in describing how close the clammers came to her rose garden said, “They’re out there, making all this noise, about a nine-iron shot away.”

I’m convinced the  clammers won the right to keep clamming thanks to the golf reference.

Thirty years later and the current hypocrisy of the burghers of Popponesset Island has to remarked upon. Popponesset is in Mashpee — probably one of the most weirdly incorporated and developed towns in the State thanks to its historical status as the “reservation” of the Wampanoag Indian tribe. Property ownership and development in Mashpee has always had some controversy, with land titles clouded, ancient burial grounds unearthed as nitrogen-spewing golf courses are bulldozed,  and the tribe constantly rattling the legal threat of reclaiming its ancestral lands.

A commercial clammer — the term now is probably “aquaculturist” — sought permission from the Town of Mashpee to maintain a shellfish grant off the shores of Popponesset Island, a place my alma mater Forbes Magazine allegedly deemed one of the most affluent places in America thanks to an average household income of $250,000. He was given permission but the waterfront property owners swung into action, claiming, first and foremost, that the clamming operation would interfere with their view. Let’s keep in mind the waters are public property and aquaculture is a big business in most Cape towns, let alone the fact that clams are a sign of a healthy harbor.

This is extremely ironic since their view is of Cotuit, where, thanks to the philanthropic efforts of one extraordinary old summer family and the Barnstable Land Trust, most of the southern shores of the town is pristine, undeveloped saltmarsh and pine forests.  If you stand in Cotuit on those undeveloped lands — Ryefield Point or Crocker Neck — and look southwest across Popponesett Bay to the proposed site of the aquaculture grant (which is submerged and would be marked by a few buoys) you see Starter Castle after Starter Castle, some ablaze at night in a riot of floodlights, packed together, jetskis tied to the docks. Doing their best to poison the shore.

The Cape Cod Times writes this morning:

“The view from any of the homes on Popponesset Island is nothing less than postcard-perfect.

The picturesque island enclave boasts beautifully constructed homes and even more stunning natural views of the surrounding scenery.

Home prices stretch into the millions, and in January the area was named one of the nation’s most affluent neighborhoods by Forbes magazine.

Reaching the island requires a boat, or a drive over a one-lane bridge.

It’s this off-the-beaten-path charm that attracted its affluent residents — and that has pitted a group of them against the Mashpee Board of Selectmen for approving a shellfish grant homeowners believe will destroy it.

“This impairs their private property rights in a number of respects,” said attorney Brian Wall of Sandwich, who represents a group of 18 residents. “It’s basically going to be a commercial operation 30 feet away from a residential property.”"

The head-shaking news that the Cotuit property of Frank and Jamie McCourt, (the battling divorcing destroyers of the Los Angeles Dodgers) is on the market for $50 million and knowing fate and circumstance, will probably be carved up into a nest of new McMansions by some developer/real-estate-agent-to-the-stars; the tear-down of Cotuit’s historic Hotel Pines; and the ongoing trashing of the harbors by human waste … Thirty years ago the preservationists of the Cape were warning the peninsula was on the road towards becoming the next Long Island. I fear we’ve arrived.