Churbuck.com

Okay, so the Fourth of July water fight was getting a little out of hand but the baseball team started it, or actually the EPAC Grotto’s peeing clam float started it, but that’s my theory. The local landscape company towed a trailer the size of a tennis court behind a big dump truck and loaded it with the best college baseball teams in the country. Young men at the peak of their capabilities, armed with SuperSoakers the size of Iwo Jima flamethrowers and an endless supply of softball-sized water balloons, wreaking havoc down Main Street from the Kettle-Ho to the elementary school.

Someone was sure to get hurt. Some toddler diving for a piece of penny candy was going to get crushed beneath the trailer wheels like a fanatic hurling himself under the wheels of the legendary Juggernaut. Old ladies in lawn chairs were being rudely entered into a bad wet t-shirt contest that no one wanted to judge. We had to defend ourselves, and over the years the sidewalks were lined with garden hoses, pressure washers, water cannons and the war was on, escalating to the point that finally reason had to step in and say enough.

The Cotuit Kettleers sat out the 2010 Cotuit Fourth of July parade and the village was upset.

Would we take out our aggressions on the Mason’s Mariner Lodge, and do away with a dozen old men wearing white shirts and natty little aprons? Would the librarians get it next? What could be done? The omission of the boys of summer was the talk of the counter at the post office. We were mad. A ritual had been taken away from us.

The season had already opened in early June, when snowflakes still could be imagined in the rickety wooden bleachers in the shade along the third base line at Elizabeth Lowell Memorial Park, the gem of all the Cape Cod Baseball League’s ballparks, an oasis carved out of the pines and oaks a few hundred yards away from Cotuit Bay. Was this our year? Had coach Mike Roberts (UNC Chapel Hill’s coach from 1976 to 1998 and father of Oriole second baseman Brian Roberts) recruited a dugout full of superstars? It was impossible to tell. June was a difficult month, of rosters churned by the College World Series, the Super Regionals, Team USA try outs, and even the Major League scouts knew not to come with their radar guns as the college freshmen and sophomores made the wrenching transition from metal to wooden bats. The scouts would come, trying to answer the question we all asked:

Who would be the next major league superstars? They were out there, on the dusty basepaths and achingly green outfield. We knew they were out there, every summer revealed them to us. Chase Utley. Ron Darling. Mo Vaughn. Jason Varitek. Kevin Youkilis. Nomar Garciaparra. All had once stepped up to the plate, dove for liners, fumbled and stumbled for our ticket-free enjoyment on the hallowed grounds of Lowell Park. But who were they? We wouldn’t know for a few years, not realizing that the tanned pitcher who sold us our 50-50 raffle tickets in the stands would soon be standing on the mound at Wrigley or Petco or Fenway heaving heat on national television. What was clear was how blessed we were to be living in the town with the team that had won the most championships in the country’s most prestigious amateur baseball league, the league where the best of the best came to learn how to swing wood and get noticed by the scouts.

As the season progressed one learned to pick one’s place in the bleachers very carefully, to arrive precisely 45 minutes early while the basepaths were being hosed down and the coaches spraypainted new baselines. The musical cliches of the game blared through the PA – a weird playlist of country music, jump-around fist-pumping hip hop, and hair band anthems that we wished would just stop — and we all snickered at the interns behind the microphone who mispronounced “Cotuit” and referred to Cape Cod as “The” Cape Cod. Top row, back corner, brown paper sack of popcorn from the Kettleer’s Kitchen and a bottle of Poland Springs. Layout the scorecard, fill in the teams, the date, the names of the umps, the start time, and wait for the announcer to list the lineups. A few rows down, the founder of the dynasty, Arnold Mycock, for whom the Cape Cod Baseball League championship trophy is named, dean of the scorers, always presented early with the coaches’ lineups by an intern sent from the press box. Avoid sitting near the bozos — cell phone man who loudly calls his friends and always repeats the same silly cliches “…it’s the best wooden bat league in the country …,” anyone with kids under the age of ten, the Fountain of Misinformation who plaintively repeats over and over the obvious plea to the pitcher to “Throw Strikes.”

Rise for the National Anthem, cap over heart, as Nicky Chevalier takes the microphone out to home plate and we all look out to centerfield, the maroon (or is it Cranberry) uniformed Kettleers standing in a long line in front of their dugout, everyone’s eyes on the flag waving flaccid in the summer southwesterly breeze.

Play ball.

The pitcher superstitiously skips over the third baseline on his way to the mound. The umps and coaches swap line ups at home plate. The announcer reads the same script he’ll read at every game. The first pitch it thrown out by some account manager from Wells Fargo Private Wealth Advisors LLC. Their picture is taken with the catcher, they are handed the ball as a souvenir, the only one that will be given out as balls are too precious to give away blithely like they are in the majors. Shag a foul ball and return it to the red tent for a coupon to the Kettleer’s Kitchen.

And so it goes for 22 home games. The same routine, the same script, the same vista, the same rules, the same nine innings. But the players are all new. Few ever return for a second season. Yet instantly they become Our Team, their names gradually memorized through rote and repetition until they are as familiar as nephews at a family reunion.

Would this be the year? Cotuit hadn’t won the champs since 1999 and Coach Roberts didn’t have a title on his mantle yet. Bandy legged from years of hitting of swinging a fungo bat during batting practice, he gamely rises from the dugout and takes his place before us in the third base coach’s box, semaphoring hand signals and truly coaching his new charges in the art of Roberts Small Ball, a game of bunts and steals, and devious tricks like the mythical Hidden Ball Trick. His temper is wonderful to behold, a mixture of ferocious indignation and bewilderment over the genetic stupidity of umpires and the appalling rudeness of the visiting team’s fans, all philistines who should know when to sit down and shut up in the presence of his righteousness.

My scorebook gradually fills with the record of games won and lost. Exclamation points cryptically marking moments of greatness, moments uncaptured on film, lost in a park with no replay, no statisticians, no grotesque mascot dressed like a kettle. Sweat stains mark the heat waves. Mustard the hot dogs. Every page has a dogeared greasiness from the popcorn butter.

The girls in their summer clothes parade back and forth behind the dugout trying to catch a ballplayer’s eye. Vacationing bozos in Yankee caps self-consciously preen. Every foul ball into the parking lot where only a fool would park is greeted with a warning of “Heads Up!” and cheers as yet another windshield gets smashed with a spidery thunk and the line at the snack bar cowers and holds their hands over their heads.

The sailors from the yacht club arrive in the fourth inning, salt stained, barefoot and sunburned. “What’d I miss?” they ask. And I dutifully read back the highlights from the scorecard. “Bushyhead lined to third into a double play. Coach intimidated the visiting Meat into a balk. Yaz hit a dinger to center. And there’s a yellow jacket nest behind the the bathrooms that just attacked a herd of anklebiters and made them cry.”

The lack of a parade concerned us. Would it cast a dark cloud of bad luck on the home team?  Cotuit baseball fans fight all change. “The day they install lights is the day I stop coming.” But no parade? It was wrong. Something would happen and it wouldn’t be good.

It did happen. And it was good. Yesterday the Kettleers won the championship in a beautiful post-season run that saw them sweep their way into the finals against the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox. I missed it, obligated to attend a meeting, but the game played on my phone, a little window of video that suddenly saw a flood of cranberry colored uniforms rush the mound, silent with the audio muted, a clutch of bouncing hopping happy young men surrounding a weathered coach with tears in his eyes.

There won’t be any parade this year. In the 70s, when the Kettleers won a consecutive string of championships, the fans would drive up and down Main Street for an hour blaring their car horns. But last night the village was quiet, chilled with a harbinger of the fall to come, silent except for the emerging crickets.

There won’t be any parade this year. The players have scattered back home or back to college. Soon the Volvos and Range Rovers will file out of town, pink children’s bikes on their racks, back to what seems to be an earlier and earlier start of school every year. The skiffs will be hauled. The yacht club dock dismantled and stacked in the bushes. And the town will go quiet for nine months, waiting for them to return.

I’ve quoted it before, but I must quote it again, Bartlett Giamatti, late President of Yale, former commissioner of baseball, quoted in this summer’s baseball sermon by my friend (who also has sadly moved away) the Reverend Jeremy Nickel, quite possibly the saddest obituary of summer and baseball that I know:

“ [Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Upstairs, disconnected for years, is an old Western Electric wall phone. Dark green, the kind with a bell that woke that dead. Rotary dial. Stick a finger in a number, crank it over to the metal stop, and wait for it to return before doing it again with a different hole. In the center of the dial is the number – the same number this house has had since it first received phone service lord knows when. GA8-6948 a throwback to an era when numbers had names to denote the exchange. Our was “Garden Eight”

As a kid I recall two things about the phone. First was the inviolate rule of the party line. We shared the line with three other houses and our ring was one short and two long. I was banned from ever answering until an adult confirmed the ring was ours. Of course that didn’t stop my brother and me from listening in to George and Millie or Fred and Betty or the nice old lady next door.

The number was simple. Massachusetts had a single area code — 617 — and all we needed to dial were five numbers. 8-6948. The boat yard in Osterville, Crosby’s, was 8-6958, so we got a lot of misdials looking for one of the Crosby uncles.

Five digits went away in the 70s as the switches were upgraded and the population grew. We had to dial all seven digits: 428-6948. Then the 617 area code that covered the state was overloaded and in came the hated 508 area code. And before long we were a touchtone house.

But the old phone still sits upstairs, screwed into the wall above the laundry folding table.

The squirting clam, Milo the drummer, sports cars, kids on bicycles … but no Kettleers due to water fight mayhem in year’s past. A good parade, if a little toned down from years past.

Kettleers beat Falmouth 5-2 at home. Great game. Third in a row for Cotuit.

Three Bays, the non-profit established to improve the water quality in the Cotuit-Marstons Mills-Osterville area has an interesting history of the barrier island at the face of the three bays: Dead Neck/Sampson’s Island. I had seen some interesting development plans for the island dating back to the 1920s that showed an air strip, a polo field, and a bridge over to Oyster Harbors across the Seapuit River. But this article provides some fascinating details about how this important migratory bird nesting area was turned into an island by the people of Osterville (with somewhat negative coastal consequences 100 years later) and then saved from development by local philanthropists.

An interesting fact: my favorite spot on the Cape, a small cove that was once the primary point of entrance and egress for Cotuit Bay into Nantucket Sound is called “Cupid’s Cove” by people in Cotuit and “Pirate’s Cove” by people in Osterville.  Here’s what the article says about the impact of the Wianno Cut on the beach, something I’ve suspected for a long time.

“Again in the late 1980’s, he began another round of sand replenishment. It appeared that the jetty that had been built to create a gateway to Nantucket Sound was causing the island to lose much of its sand every winter.”

via ThreeBays: Dead Neck Island.

I’m a dues paying member

The Cape Cod Times has posted its annual preview of the Cape Cod Baseball League season. Opening Day for the Cotuit Kettleers is at Wareham Sunday afternoon and I will try to be there. This is a strange time of year for the league — lots of players are tied up in the Collegiate Super Regionals, Team USA tryouts and the MLB Draft. Cotuit’s top player — Zack Cox at Arkansas and last year’s All-Star game MVP went in the first round of the draft to St. Louis. So it’s hard to really preview or prognosticate for another few weeks until the rosters settle down. These early weeks are interesting to watch because the players — most of whom are college freshmen and sophmores — haven’t played with wooden bats before, so it’s “small ball” with tons of errors and struggling batters.

“Outlook: The Kettleers hope the third times a charm, having fallen in the Cape League Finals the previous two years. It looks to be an entire new cast in Cotuit with 3B Zack Cox (Arkansas) drafted in the first round in this week's MLB draft. Cox was the All-Star game MVP for the West last year and hit .344 in 23 games for Cotuit before being sidelined before the playoffs with an injury. The Razorbacks sophomore was selected 25th overall by the St. Louis Cardinals, which leaves his status for a return doubtful.”

via Cape League Western Division preview | CapeCodOnline.com.

Fred in the comments of yesterday’s post noted that his wife foraged 24 of these suckers during her perambulations of Cotuit. Today, expecting a minor haul of litter, I set out down the same walk as yesterday and found 47 of the little bottles of fun, most strewn in a single spot near Loop Beach, others scattered randomly around Main Street and Oceanview.

Here’s the scenario behind the evidence in my Sherlock Holmesian mind:

• The perp is an alcoholic.  (Durrr. No way!) As a former bartender I know serious vodka drinkers are the real deal.
• It’s two people. Maybe three, but most of these belong to the vodka man
• The vodka man likes flavored vodka. Primarily cranberry and orange flavors
• The cranberry preference points to a local who wants to be a localvore and drink the native fruit
• The second perp likes Jim Beam
• The third is an occasional schnapps drinker, though I suspect Schnapps Man and Vodka Man are the same
• The perp drinks these at Loop Beach while parked and looking out at Nantucket Sound
• He is a he
• He has a drunk driving arrest on his record which is why he tosses the empties as he drives away, as he doesn’t want to be nailed under the open container law
• He may do this during the day, preferring to drink the more economical version from a bottle at home.
• It wouldn’t make sense for him to do this in the evening, unless he is concealing his drinking from his wife or girlfriend.
• He does not live in Cotuit.
• I bet he buys these at the Coop.
• I bet he drinks two, maybe four at a time.

So feeling extraordinarily eleemosynary this morning, I decided to take a pair of plastic grocery bags along with me for my morning constitutional, figuring I would polish my halo by picking up the litter that has bugged me the past month during my walks down the Main Street of the village to the town beach and back.

I thought I would deliver this partial census of what I found:

• Six empty plastic “nips” of  booze ranging from Jim Beam to some strange orange flavored schnapps
• Three empty cigarette packages, including one Virginia Slims
• Four beer cans
• A torn thong. White. Lace. Victoria’s Secret. Medium.
• One bag of dog feces nearly tied but discarded in hopes someone else would dispose of it
• On the lawn of the parsonage, a “40″ half filled with “High Gravity” malt liquor (I assume it is malt liquor).

This collection was awesome in its pure evil. I immediately washed my hands.

The more I cook the more I realize I have never gone wrong with Marcella Hazan‘s cookbooks, especially my well worn and falling apart copy of  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. On Saturday night I found myself with a lot of quahogs and about four dozen beautiful littlenecks I dug with my son on the falling tide. Littlenecks generally get opened and eaten raw on the half-shell, but I wanted a white clam sauce and some pasta so I turned to Marcella’s bible of Italian and made her version of the classic spaghettini con vongole.

The clams came from a very special spot that I won’t disclose because it’s my go-to spot for littlenecks. Quahogs are graded by size. and the most delicate and tasty are the small ones, about the size of a silver dollar, called littlenecks. A step bigger, the right size for clams casino, are cherrystones, and above them come a sort of neither here nor there middle ground that really doesn’t have a name — save perhaps “clams” — and at the high end, for stuffed quahogs or making chowder are the eponymous “chowder” clams about as big as a big man’s fist.

The smallest clams have to  be run through a steel gauge to make sure they are legal. The basket on my Ribb rake is also allegedly spaced correctly to let juveniles drop through, but I use the gauge just to be sure. Any babies get tossed into deeper water where the gulls can’t forage them and they can grow up to become chowders.

The spot is good because it is a small river — a stream really — that has a lot of water velocity with the rising and falling tide and that means the clams are fresher than the ones in stagnant water. They live in sand, not black mud, and are easy to clean and usually deliver a chewing experience without sand or grit. I also have a respect for funky clams, the kinds that give you 36 hours on the toilet or a permanent case of hepatitis. Let’s just say I don’t eat August littlenecks.

We took all we needed in 10 minutes, coming up a few times with rakes filled with six, seven littlenecks. These are not littlenecks in the picture below, but cherrystones.

We wore waders because it is April after all and waders made a day on the water a lot more enjoyable — no filling of boots, no shivering in the windchill of the speeding motorboat, the air temperature on the water in the early spring feels at least ten degrees colder than it does on land, in the yard, out of the wind. We took our littlenecks, measured them, then set off for another spot to look for bigger clams for an Easter Clams Casino and some chowder base to freeze up for the summer when there is company.

The bigger clams are a little harder to harvest, but in 15 minutes we had our limit, coming up with multiple clams on every pull of the rakes.

We packed it in, climbed back onto the boat and went for a brisk spin around Grand Island to see if Dow Clark the mechanic had success in clearing the clogged carburetor jets on the old Honda. We flew through West Bay, under the drawbridge, and past the boatyard, still in hibernation under a shroud of shrink wrap.

So the recipe? Steam the clams on high heat until the shells pop, then pluck them out and shuck them into a bowl, saving the clam juice. Saute in 6 tbsp. of olive oil about six big garlic cloves sliced very thin and a big shallot. Throw in two diced plum tomatoes, a cup of dry white wine,  two tbsps of red pepper flakes, three tbsps. of chopped parsley and reduce it down. Turn that off, boil a big pot of salted water, cook a box of thin spaghetti until it is almost done — drain, throw in the saute pan with the tomatoes, garlic, oil, etc., toss over high heat until all the liquid is evaporated. Turn off the heat. Throw in the clams and their juice, a dozen torn up basil leaves and eat. One of the better uses of four dozen littlenecks I’ve ever tried. Tomorrow – clams Casino and chowder before the Easter feast.

Add to the storm damage from the past weekend the new wind turbine at Peck’s Boats. This is a novel design where the blades are on the trailing edge of the nacelle, or generator pod, permitting them to flex back and away from the mast in a strong gust.

Well, two blades are gone now. I hope this doesn’t set back the cause as I remain a fan of wind power. From the Cape Cod Times:

“This weekend, the gusting winds, at times measuring over 60 mph, prompted Conrad Geyser to check in on the turbine he owns at Peck’s Boats Inc. on Route 28 in Marstons Mills.

“I was looking and listening, and I didn’t see anything off the chart,” he said yesterday. “The thing was going like crazy and moving around a lot, but nothing any more extreme than we’d seen already.”

Geyser said he believes sometime in the early morning Sunday a big gust may have hit especially hard and knocked the blade tips off. He’s not sure how far they landed from the tower. Wind turbine blades can be subjected to enormous pressures, especially in the Cape’s notoriously stormy weather.

“They’re light,” he said. “But anytime you have something falling from the sky, there is concern.”

via Turbine failures stir up concern | CapeCodOnline.com.

Atlantic white cedar is the perfect wood for boat building and is difficult to find these days with the price to prove it. I have four enourmous planks in the old sail loft behind my bedroom, leftover from the days when my grandfather Chat built Cotuit Skiffs in the boat shop. The wood is all but rot-proof.

On Sunday I took my son and the dogs for a walk around one of the best examples of a cedar swamp on Cape Cod, the Almy Cedar Swamp in Cotuit off of Old Post Road. There aren’t many left and winter is the best time to explore. Here’s a link to a site with some good background information. Interestingly, they aren’t technically “cedar” but cypress swamps.

Cedar swamps are unique biotropes found along the east coast from Maine to Georgia. They are true swamps that support a species of tree that is more related to the cypress than the cedar.  Chamaecyparis thyoides is a pretty tree, a definite break for the eye after the typical scrub oak and pines that carpet Cape Cod. The habitat and growing conditions are so unique that I went most of my life without ever seeing a cedar swamp. A few years ago the Barnstable Land Trust and some local conservationists pulled out the stops to preserve a big tract of open space in Cotuit around Cordwood Landing. Included in the parcel was the Almy Cedar Swamp. This is what it looks like from the air — note the definite difference in the foliage.

The swamp isn’t easy to find. One walks north on a dirt road across from the Cordwood Landing way to water, across Old Post Road, and north towards Eagle Pond. A half mile in, on the right, is a hidden path down to the swamp. Winter is the best time to explore because the swamp is frozen and one can actually poke around among the trees. In the barreness of winter it is is strange to step into such a green and verdant space.  The silence is amazing and the woods are cathedral-like.

Flickr Video

The trees are very tall and seem, gauging from their girth, to be a few hundred years old. According to one scholarly paper, the Cape’s cedar swamps are less than 4,000 years old.

Walking around the swamp is very cool. The ice makes it easy to poke around the frozen peat and see the moss knobs around each trunk.

These were valuable trees back in the day, but some have survived because they are so difficult to extract from the swamps. It goes without saying the swamps are endangered, filled in, converted to cranberry bogs, or just dammed up and drowned. The largest is on the outer Cape near the Marconi station — it is 11.8 acres. I have no idea how big the Almy Cedar Swamp is — but know of at least two other smaller ones hidden around Cotuit.

While it’s tempting to wonder if anyone would care if I dragged a piece of deadfall out of the swamp to turn into a new skiff, I guess I should first check the condition of the planks in the sailloft. Cool to think the boat that defines Cotuit is made from wood logged from Cotuit’s swamps.

Saturday and the sun was beaming down and melting the grey snowdrifts. The boat looked lonely. I put the battery on a charger, emptied last season’s remaining gasoline into a jerry can, and refilled the tank with three gallons of new gas and a shot of ethanol treatment.

Backed up to the trailer, connected the hitch, and 500 yards later was backing down a snow covered ramp into Cotuit Bay. I pushed off with an oar, anchored in deeper water, and for three minutes coaxed the dormant Honda back to life with the choke and throttle. When I was 100 percent sure it wouldn’t fart out when I was in the middle of the harbor I came back into the beach, loaded the two terriers aboard, and took off for Dead Neck, the barrier island at the head of the bay.

As my son said when he declined my offer to accompany me, “You are only doing this so you can say you are the first to do it.”

That was not the motivation. Anyway, there is a simple thrill to doing this in February:

I anchored near Cupid’s Cove, the ancient inlet (now clamming cove) out to Nantucket Sound, careful to keep the boat off the beach so I wouldn’t have to push it off if the tide went out. I offloaded the dogs (who went into immediate mania and starting biting my boots) and satisfied the boat would be there when returned, headed off for a complete circumperambulation of the Island.

I brought a garbage bag and scavenged all the plastic I could find from the wrack line where the moon tides had deposited it.   There was more man-made trash on the inside, bayside of the island, reflective of where the people are in the winter and where the prevailing northerly winds blow from

Around the Point of the island (which received a bit of a trim from the dredge this winter to widen the channel) and down the outside of the beach, flawless and without footprints, just the overwash signs of high tides and winter storms. After a half mile of walking with the wind in the sun I took off my coat. The trash bag was getting full. Halfway down the beach and I popped up on a dune to see if the boat was still where it was supposed to be. It was.

And onwards down to Osterville and the Wianno Cut, where the dredged spoils from the Cotuit end of the island were pumped to shore up the dwindling beach in front of Bunny Mellon’s house.

Without some beachgrass that too will wash away, thanks to the jetties built 100 years ago that now block the natural ebb and flow of the coastal sands.  I sat down for a second, patted the dogs on the head, and then headed back towards the boat.

The dogs and I crossed the island at Cupid’s Cove, where some ice still lingered, and with our bag of trash made it back to the boat. Which was now riding at anchor in much deeper water than I left it. The solutions were:

a. undress , wade out, start boat, return to beach and get dressed again

b. take off boots and socks and attempt to roll jeans up above knees

c. just wade out, flood the boots, and climb aboard and then cruise back home at warp speed before hypothermia set in

I opted for plan C and soaked my self right up to the belt line. flopped into the boat, emptying the seawater out of the boots and onto my face. I was very happy to be the only person on the water at this point as an audience would not have been appreciated.

I phoned home, told my son to meet me at the ramp with the trailer, and fifteen minutes was back home in the shower.

So ended a good beach walk and motorboat ride in February.

By Paul Rifkin

I have a serious jones for a baseball game. How lucky am I to have this in my neighborhood? I knock off work early around 4 pm, walk barefoot or ride my bike to the ball park, buy a Moxie and a bag of peanuts, and for three hours get treated to the best amateur baseball in the world.

My neighbor Paul Rifkin shot this. Click on the picture for a larger version. He is a man of many talents and this is the best shot of the ball park, perhaps the entire town, I’ve seen in a long time.

I have moved out of  my old office in a dark ancient living room — a great winter office due to the cheery little woodstove — but it is a place filled with Civil War sabers, sextants, quadrants, old smelly books and dark oil paintings of long dead ancestors. Given my recent eye surgery and need for some great light, I moved into a sunny room surrounded by windows on three sides — an old summer porch we converted to year round use a decade ago.

I sit in a corner with the windows open, and realize there are two sounds filling the center of the village that I could do without.

• Leaf blowers. These offend me to no end. They burn fossile fuels, they are whiny and loud like a jet ski, and they are horribly inefficient. The days of handymen with bamboo rakes and smoking piles of leaves are long gone — so even the fall doesn’t smell the way it used to. I can remember raking and burning leaves and burying big potatoes in the ashes for a late afternoon reward on the lawn with my grandfather. Now it’s all whining and blowing as the landscape squads move through the waterfront estates and put things to bed for the season.
• Back-up horns: The center of the village is under construction. Once Labor Day arrives the off-season road work begins and since Cape Cod essentially has the same roads it had in 1950, doing road construction or repairs during the summer crush is insane. The  Sagamore Bridge is a good example of the off-season construction phenomenon. A Depression-era steel structure sitting a couple hundred feet above the salty Cape Cod Canal and it needs some serious work. So the traffic on and off the Cape is worse now than it is on a Sunday night in July.  Here in Cotuit the second biggest avenue — Scho0l Street — is under construction and the old gas station at the corner of Main and School is being demolished to provide more parking. All day long — beep, beep, beep. I know it’s good safety: a poor policeman was killed in Centerville a decade ago when a dump truck without a backup horn crushed him. But — between the leaf blowers and the back up horns ….. As the Mission of Burma song said, “That’s when I reach for my revolver …”

Sounds I like?

• Ten feet behind me, in the grape arbor, hangs a ripening crop of purple Concord grapes. Under the white framework, in the dark shadows under the vines, is a collection of bird feeders. I am a big bird feeding person, and because the arbor is in an alcove formed by my porch, the house, and the front porch, it is a very secure place for birds to hide from hawks and cats. Because my wife and I feed the birds year round the feeding tubes are very busy and a flock of at least 100 English sparrows has taken over — moving off of the birdseed and into the rose bushes and morning glories with a huge whooshing exhalation behind my back, like an immense lung. The sound is amazing. The birds will probably eat the grapes before I can harvest them and try to make jelly.
• I miss the cat-like peeping and screeching of the ospreys cruising along the bluff behind the house for snapper bluefish, menhaden and herring. I realize today they have left — on the way south for the winter. I love watching them over the baseball field in the summer, gliding overhead with a fish in their talons.

Can you tell I am procrastinating?

Tropical Storm Danny is futzing around to the south, due to hit the Cape in the form of some windy rain tomorrow.  I headed out to the Osterville Cut at noon for a service in memorial of the son of a friend who tragically died last weekend diving off of the Oyster Harbors Drawbridge. The skies were bruised and ominous — fitting for a sad day — but I wondered how a Wampanoag felt four hundred years ago, standing on the shores of Coatuet and Cotacheset, looking out at Nantucket Sound with a hurricane over the horizon, no idea what was coming, but perhaps tuned into some natural indicators that I’m too technically enabled to see.

Now I can track this stuff on the National Weather Service … or Wunderground … or Accuweather or gazillion weather sites, all loaded with Flash-enabled graphics, and probability cones, and hourly predictions that tell me to expect a 30 mph gust tomorrow at 3 pm.

Whatever. I rather be the one who looks at the sky and says, “Going to be a blow tomorrow.”

So out of the water came the motorboat — more for a powerwashing to get the mid-season slime and barnacles off the hull than fear of some meterological disaster. The big boat sits where it sits. I may pop out there early in the morning and take off the sails so the wind doesn’t unfurl them and cause mayhem in the harbor. The weather service is calling for gale conditions with winds in the high 40s – enough to make a mess, but not a disaster zone.

This incredibly rainy summer has resulted in my Cape Cod lawn actually living and thriving through August like some fescue exhibition test farm owned by a lawn products company. The damn thing is growing despite my best efforts to kill it, replenished by the banks of rain that have ruined baseball games, made children sullen, and horrified poor renters who have dropped $2,000 a week to sit inside and stare at the verdant wet green lawns of Cotuit.

A year ago HBO produced a mini-series on the lif e of President John Quincy Adams based on David McCullough’s wonderful biography. The scenes that struck me the most were of Adams’ homestead in Braintree, south of Boston, and the chaos that was his so-called lawn. A mess of flowers, waist high grass, and a living lawnmower or too that bleated” Baaa.”  Oh to be a colonial and not own a Honda power mover or pay the landscaper $100 every week to keep the weeds at bay.

Reverend Jeremy popped by yesterday to commiserate about the fall of the Kettleers and to ask if one of my kids would mow his lawn while he travels. Seeing as we’re both smack in the center of the village, across from the green and the library, there is a bit of a social contract to keep the place looking nice, so I gladly volunteered Junior for the task.

But what if there were no mowers? I suspect in this summer of foreclosures there are a lot of unmowed lawns in America. I read an article recently about one midwestern city that just shows up and mows a property owner’s turf and then sends them a bill.  So now we can add short grass to taxes and other losses of our libertarian rights ……

Back I go to cut yet more grass, a fine waste of a sunny Sunday before popping over to Beijing for a week.

I am missing the Cape Cod Baseball League finals this week — and was a bit annoyed I had to go to NYC yesterday and on to North Carolina during the last week of the season when the Cotuit Kettleers have a good shot at the championship. I saw three games this past weekend — Friday’s victory over Wareham, Saturday’s away victory over Eastern Division champs Yarmouth-Dennis, and Sunday’s 10-5 home loss to Y-D. Missing the end of the season hurts.

The make or break game was yesterday back at Dennis, series tied at 1-1 with the first pitch at 3 and I was in a meeting overlooking Bryant Park on 42nd Street in a nasty muggy August heatwave.

I got into the back of the cab to LaGuardia and googled on my blackberry for a score. Instead I discovered an 800 number I could dial for a live play-by-play.  So I dialed, and as I rolled along in the back of the cab along the East River I heard the disembodied voice of the broadcast interns, Aaron Pepper and Josh Weinstock, say Cotuit was leading an astonishing 11 to 1.

I started cheering.

At the airport I found a 3G connection and lit up a live video stream, watching the game to its incredibly lopsided 18 to 4 conclusion. Is it me, or do we indeed live in an age of miracles when a little wooden bat college league can transmit itself to a tiny audience like me? The long tail indeed.

Tonight, more of the same at 7 pm in the best of three finals at Bourne. if you are remote, then the miracle of the interwebs will bring you all the game action from the first pitch through the last out.

Mosquito Boats: The First Hundred Years of the Cotuit Skiff

The Association
of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club held a dinner dance recently at the Cotuit Son’s of Italy hall to raise some funds, eat some spaghetti, and conduct a launch party of sorts for a 15-year project, a massive piece of research and writing that spans over a century of one of the oldest American one-design racing boats.

Larry Odence is a stalwart sailor of Cotuit Skiffs — he was a contemporary of my late father — first learning to sail the boats as a summer kid in the 1930s aboard his first skiff, the Watersprite. Today he is still out on the waters of Cotuit Bay, racing his beloved Swamp Fox with his grandchildren. His masterpiece is finally in print and was worth the wait.

Fifteen years ago, when the Skiff fleet was beginning its massive revival, Larry began to research the history of the design by taking an unusual and very intimate approach. He focused on each individual boat, rather than their sailors or builders, creating in effect a detailed genealogy around each and every Mosquito. The task was massive – records were loosely kept, stored in a drawer at the Cotuit Library – memories faded, some builders kept no records (I know, Larry was tireless is asking me if my grandfather, Henry Chatfield Churbuck had kept any records of his short-lived Skiff building activities in the late 1940s) and some owners had hazy memories of who owned what, and what sail numbers went with which hull.

Larry’s efforts have been published and given to the ACMYC as a fund raising tool. But what comes through after a thorough reading is this is a remarkable history on three or four levels.

First, the Odence book is the history of an eccentric, uniquely American boat design that was derived from a simple inshore working boat and adapted to local waters by a very innovative and enigmatic designer, Stanley Butler. Butler refused to standardize, he was an inventor and an innovator, so no two of his boats were alike and his customers – the first summer people in Cotuit – began to get unhappy with the unfair differences between one boat to the next.  The concept of one-design sailing is founded on standards — to remove the advantage of technology and to make the competition about the sailor, not the boat or the sail. Children would come home, doubtlessly unhappy that their boat was slower than their friend’s, and before long the history moves from one of experimentation to standardization, a pattern that would repeat itself over the decades, time and time again. Debate over standards persist to this day.

The Mosquitos were handmade boats, built from oak and white Atlantic cedar, canvas and iron nails. Little 14-foot hulls with impossibly big sails, designed for rounding short courses inside the lake-like harbor of Cotuit Bay. Hurricanes took their toll, as did sloppy maintenance, corroding fasteners, and waves of popularity and decline caused by wars, economies, and other distractions. I majored in American maritime history in college and have read a lot of histories, especially indigenous boat design such as Howard Chappelle and others. Larry’s work is the equal of those academic works and in many regards, superior to them because of the intense amount of detective work he did in gathering profiles of more than 150 boats and the personalities behind every one of them.

Second, the book traces the history of a community formed around a yacht club that for years owned no property, had no clubhouse, and was run by young people with little help from their parents. Not until 1960 was a parent’s association formed to pay for motorboats and sailing lessons – before that it was a club of unmarried juniors under the age of 25 who tolerated older sailors on their own terms. By emphasizing the ownership of each boat, the book brings forth a very interesting story of families than came and went through the town – from townies who have been here forever to vacationers who arrived for a month or two never to return.

Third, this is a history of a village and the entire phenomenon of New England summer resorts. Cotuit was one of the first summer destinations for wealthy Bostonians – the names of the first residents are a roll of Brahmin pedigrees: Lowells, Ropes, Cabot, Coolidge – and the Skiff played an important role as the only recreation in a village with no beach club, country club, golf course, or other typical summer diversion. The Mosquito was it and remains the icon of the village.

Mystic Seaport, the preeminent American maritime museum in Mystic, Connecticut, awarded the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club its William Avery Baker award for its efforts in preserving the Cotuit Skiff over more than a century. The president of the Seaport, Steven White, came to Cotuit to give the award to CMYC Commodore, Michael Dannhauser.

Update: This is a sample of what each boat’s entry looks like:

Click on the picture for a link to the original full-sized scan.

I’m not sure how or if the Odence book will be sold outside of the club. The price is $100. If interested please leave a comment and I’ll find out how to fulfill an order.

What could be better than knocking off work at 5 pm, walking half a mile down Main Street to a little ball field tucked into the pines, and watching the best college baseball players in the country play nine strong innings in the June sunshine?

Welcome to Cape Cod Baseball League baseball, arguably the best summer college baseball league on the planet. Where wooden bats reign, and little girls sing “Take Me Out To the Ball Game” during the seventh inning stretch. Where admission is free, kids run wild, and you can pick up a cup of clam chowder and a couple dogs for dinner. Cute girls in their summer clothes flirting with the boys in the dugouts. Old timers parked by the third base line fence in their lawn chairs. Families tucking into boxes of pizza on picnic tables.

This is the real deal. No lights. No rock music. No mascot running the baselines.

This is where I:

• smoked my first cigarette (in the pit in the woods behind the visitors stand)
• had my first (of several)  fights with a townie (I was and always will be just a summer kid)
• had my bike stolen something like three times

Cotuit is where major leaguers like the Met’s  Ron Darling played.  The Yankee’s GM, Joe Girardi, was a Kettleer. The team was started in 1947 and has won the Cape championship more than 12 times. The current list of Kettleer alumni in the pros is here.

Great aerial of the Cotuit park here.

“Get on the Boat Campaign”: Three Bays Preservation works to raise awareness of fragility of Barnstable’s bays.

Cape Cod Today on Three Bays’ tour of the Cotuit Bays last weekend. I saw them on the water Saturday — there was a little sun and break from the incessant rain. It’s good to see public awareness building about the water quality issues.

My neighbor Frederic Claussen passed away last week. He was 72 years old. A graduate of Nobles & Greenough, Harvard, and Boston University Law School, he was a flinty Yankee and the longest serving elected Republican in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, serving as Registrar of Deeds for Barnstable County for 39 years, only retiring from office last year.

from the Cape Cod Times.

He drove an ancient Buick, used to live in one of the oldest houses in the village, and loved animals. My daughter used to walk his collie Fancy for him while he was at work at the county complex in Barnstable Village. One day while I was working in my home office he came over with a copy of a story he had published about a lost dog he had adopted.

The grandson of US Congressman Charles Gifford (who was the author of the 20^th Amendment to the US Constitution which changed the date of the presidential inauguration), Mr. Claussen lived near his grandfather’s house in the center of the village and will be forever thanked by generations of beachwalkers, shellfishermen and fishermen for granting a right of way to water by the town dock. His profile page on the State website lists his personal interests simply as “swimming and walking the beach.”

He was one of a breed of Massachusetts Republicans that used to personify Cape Cod politics through the 1970s. He was very good at his job – at least the voters thought so — and was helpful to me in 1980 when as a cub reporter I came to interview him about the role of county government on the Cape. My family and I will miss him, it’s sad to see a great presence in the neighborhood pass away.