The Battle Of Marshfield

As we approach April 19th, it is easy to view the American Revolution as a US vs. England thing... even if most of the Americans still thought of themselves as English (Paul Revere never shouted "The British are coming!" during his ride, entirely because of this phenomena. Paul actually was shouting the less poetic "The regulars are out!") when the fighting started.

The US/England thing is easy to understand now, a few hundred years after the fact. What is less-known is that there existed considerable static between towns during the pre-revolt period.

The basic cause of this discord was the issue that would launch the Revolution. Some people thought that the colonies should break free from the crown, while others thought that we should remain in the kingdom.

As that famous American we know as Mel Gibson once said, "an elected legislature can trample your rights just as easily as a king can."

Others disagreed with Mel, and there was thick tension in the air throughout the 1760s and 1770s. If you voiced the wrong political opinion at the wrong tavern, you might be chased from the town by a mob.

... and maybe hung from this tree.

Here are a few examples of what would happen to you if you failed to say "Screw The Crown" quickly enough in pre-war New England. Its a lot of reading, but it should prove entertaining.

- "At Taunton also, about 40 Miles from Boston, the Mob attacked the House of Daniel Leonard, Esqr.,3 one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace; & a Barrister at Law. They fired Bullets into the House & obliged him to fly from it to save his Life."

- "Peter Oliver Esqr., a Justice of the Peace at Middleborough, was obliged by the Mob to sign an Obligation not to execute his Office under the new Acts. At the same Place, a Mr. Silas Wood... was dragged by a Mob of 2 or 300 Men about a Mile to a River in Order to drown him, but, one of his Children hanging around him with Cries & Tears, he was induced to recant, though, even then, very reluctantly."

- "The Mob at Concord, about 20 Miles from Boston, abused a Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex, they making him pass through a Lane of them, sometimes walking backwards & sometimes forward, Cap in Hand, & they beating him."

- "All the Plymouth Protestors against Riots, as also all the military Officers, were compelled by a Mob of 2000 Men collected from that County & the County of Barnstable to recant & resign their military Commissions. Although the Justices of the Peace were then sitting in the Town of Plymouth, yet the Mob ransacked the House of a Mr. Foster, a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, a Man of 70 Years of Age, which obliged him to fly into the Woods to secrete himself, where he was lost for some Time and was very near to the losing of his Life."

- "A Jesse Dunbar, of Halifax in the County of Plymouth, (was) ordered it into a Cart, & then put ... into the Belly of the (slaughtered) Ox and carted him 4 Miles, with a Mob around him, when they made him pay a Dollar after taking three other Cattle & a Horse from him. They then delivered him to another Mob, who carted him 4 Miles further & forced another Dollar from him. The second Mob delivered him to a third Mob, who abused him by throwing Dirt at him, as also throwing the Offals [innards] in his Face & endeavoring to cover him with it, to the endangering his Life, & after other Abuses, & carrying him 4 Miles further, made him pay another Sum of Money. They urged the Councilor’s Lady, at whose House they stopped, to take the Ox; but she being a Lady of a firm Mind refused; upon which they tipped the Cart up & the Ox down into the Highway, & left it to take Care of it self. And in the Month of February following, this same Dunbar was selling Provisions at Plymouth when the Mob seized him, tied him to his Horse’s Tail, & in that Manner drove him through Dirt & mire out of the Town."

- "In November 1774, David Dunbar of Halifax aforesaid, being an Ensign in the Militia, a Mob headed by some of the Select Men of the Town, demand[ed] his Colors [flags] of him. He refused, saying, that if his commanding Officer demanded them he should obey, otherwise he would not part with them: upon which they broke into his House by Force & dragged him out. They had prepared a sharp Rail to set him upon;12 & in resisting them they seized him (by his private parts) & fixed him upon the Rail, & was held on it by his Legs & Arms, & tossed up with Violence & greatly bruised so that he did not recover for some Time. They beat him, & after abusing him about two Hours he was obliged, in Order to save his Life, to give up his Colors."

- "A Parish Clerk was taken out of his Bed in a Cold Night & beat against his Hearth by Men who held him by his Arms & Legs. He was then laid across his Horse without his Clothes & drove to a considerable Distance in that naked Condition. His Nephew Dr. Abner Beebe, a Physician, complained of the bad Usage of his Uncle & spoke very freely in Favor of [the royal] Government, for which he was assaulted by a Mob, stripped naked, & hot Pitch was poured upon him, which blistered his Skin. He was then carried to an Hog Sty & rubbed over with Hog’s Dung. They threw the Hog’s Dung in his Face & rammed some of it down his Throat;"

- In Freetown, they used to paint Loyalists yellow, as "the Mob found that paint is cheaper than Tar and Feathers."

- "Patriots from Duxbury did kidnap Marshfield Loyalists Paul White, Dr. Stockbridge and Elisha Ford, and carted them to the "Liberty Pole" in Duxbury. There they were "forced to sign recantations" of their Tory sentiments, likely in response to mob violence."

By 1768, the crown deemed it necessary to send 4000 troops to pacify Boston, which was also getting ugly. Other than the potential for a Lexington-style suburban incursion by British troops, the countryside was (mostly) left on her own.

You know how it went from there. In 1770, the redcoats fired on the colonists, in what is known as the Boston Massacre. In 1773, the Boston Tea Party went down. In 1775, on April 19th, warfare broke out at Lexington/Concord.

As you can still see in modern occupational wars like Iraq or Afghanistan, the occupiers tend to stick to the cities. You have airports and docks to move supplies in, and cities usually sit astride rivers and highways that other trade flows through. The countryside tends to belong to the rebels.

This was the case in Massachusetts. Remember, the Revolution didn't start until the redcoats marched far enough out into the countryside to find farmers crazy enough to pick a fight with the world's best light infantry. While they may not use exactly those terms, every schoolkid in America can tell you the basics of Lexington/Concord.

What they can't tell you about (unless they read this column, of course) is the Battle of Marshfield. There's a good reason for this... there was no Battle Of Marshfield.

The non-battleground from this non-battle.

However, history is often drawn by tricks of fate, coincidence, miscalculations and itchy trigger fingers. An itchy trigger finger set off the Boston Massacre, started the Revolution, and was still happening when the National Guard went hippy-hunting at Kent State almost 200 years after the redcoats landed in Boston Harbor. If Marshfield in 1775 had been visited by ol' Mr. Finger, our history lessons would have been very different.

While an apt high school kid could tell you that Boston was occupied by the redcoats before the Revolution, they might not know that Marshfield also bore this status. Marsh Vegas, as it was then not known as, was a Loyalist hotbed. People in Vegas had no problem at all with the crown, at least the ones with the money and influence. They preferred change through diplomacy over revolt.

Even noting the fact that Marshfield patriots in 1773 had their own Marshfield Tea Party (on Tea Rock Hill), Marshfield was the most Loyalist town in New England.

This put them at odds with the neighboring towns. Duxbury and Plymouth were hotbeds of Patriot activity, and you saw with the Dunbar brothers how Halifax handled Loyalists. Not wishing to be mashed in Hog Dung, the loyalists in Marshfield sent a letter to General Gage, who was in charge of Boston. They demanded protection, and Gage complied, sending 100 men and 300 muskets on two schooners (the Dianna and the Britannia) down to Marsh Vegas in 1775. They were under the command of future Parliament member Captain Nesbit Balfour.

These redcoats disembarked at the mouth of the North River and marched 6 miles to the Nathaniel Ray Thomas estate. He was only the second most famous occupant, which is why you know it today as the Daniel Webster House. It looked a bit like a smaller version of the mansion from Django Unchained.

The redcoats set up their barracks on the grounds of the estate, and proceeded to piss off the locals. They would go to taverns or private homes in Duxbury and Plymouth. They behaved well enough, but they would have been hated in Duxbury even if they walked across water to get there. There is at least one story of a mob chasing a British officer into a Plymouth store, and not letting him out until he surrendered (and they broke) his sword.

Naturally, the entertainment in Boston served to get the locals' moxie up. Duxbury had already hosted Stamp Act protests, burned a dozen Englishmen in effigy and kidnapped loyalists for Liberty Pole parties. The presence of 100 redcoats a town over was, as they liked to say then, intolerable.

You didn't see a lot of South Shore people at Lexington. Paul Revere went west, not south. By the time that word of Lexington/Concord got to Duxbury, they would not have had time to get up to Boston for the battle. We did send some men up to Lexington/Concord, but most of the South Shore got off no shots at the redcoats fleeing Concord.

They didn't need to march up into the Metro West area to get at the regulars... they had 100 of them right there on the South Shore, sleeping on the lawn of a Marshfield mansion.

The South Shore towns had militia, and they had been training for this moment. They dropped everything on April 19th and gathered at what is now known as the John Alden House in Duxbury, under the command of  Colonel Theophilus Cotton.

No one knows what went on in the John Alden house that night, nor on the day of the 20th, when a council of war was held. What we do know is that Cotton, of Plymouth, failed to attack. He may have hoped that the British would leave on their own, or he may have feared a rabble-vs-regulars fight, or he may have been waiting for more people.

He got more people quickly enough. Companies arrived from Rochester, Middleboro,  Carver and Plympton to join the Duxbury, Plymouth and Kingston patriots. Fishermen from various local harbors, always fixin' for a fight, threw themselves into the mix. Colonel Cotton soon had five hundred men, five times the number of the British that they wished to oust from Marshfield. Other estimates give him 1000 men.

They marched to within a mile of the British regiment, not without some argument.  The cautious Cotton still refused to attack. A company from Kingston (led by Capt. Peleg Wadsworth), perhaps seeking to atone for their now-unfortunate town name, advanced without orders to within firing range of the British camp. Ish was about to get hectic.

However, there were no British to kill. The British garrison, who would have surrendered if fired upon, had instead run like a scalded dog.

The schooner Hope, along with two smaller sloops (the sloops had been "prest" into service, and were two of the first AmRev prizes taken by the Brisih Navy) arrived at the mouth of the Cut River in Green Harbor. They gathered up the soldiers and whatever Loyalists they could find and fled for Boston. The citizens of Marshfield alerted the British to the arrival of the ships by firing guns from Signal Hill. These were the only shots fired in the Battle Of Marshfield.

Then, the ass-kicking began. The South Shore is interesting, if not unique, in that our violence goes down after the troops leave.

Escape route...

Marshfield had 1200 people at the time, and only a few of them could get on those ships. Everyone else was left to fend for themselves, as the British Army and Navy were busy up in Boston.

Marshfield, a Tory town without the necessary Tory army to keep it safe, exploded in an orgy of assaults, tar-n-featherings, jailings, property confiscation, business boycotts and exile. Whoever could afford a boat ride to Nova Scotia fled. Everyone else stayed, and suffered abuse for it.

"Our fate now decreed, and we are left to mourn out our days in wretchedness. No other resources but to submit to the tyranny of exulting enemies or settle a new country," said Sarah Winslow of Marshfield not too long after the British surrender at Yorktown. Her father said, "I was the butt of the licentious, and had received every species of insult and abuse, which the utmost rancour and malice."

Those who did get away weren't always welcomed back. A ship from Nova Scotia, loaded with returning Marshfield Tories, was refused permission to disembark in the Neponset River by the town of Milton. The Tories eventually were let off at the North River, where they were promptly arrested.

Marshfield, much like someone tied to the Liberty Pole or being made to run a Gauntlet, finally caved in. Three months after the British Army was chased from Brant Rock, a town meeting resulted in Marshfield agreeing to support the Revolution. They sent their men off to fight, just like other towns.

Marshfield, for a long time, had more subdued celebrations of July 4th than neighboring towns did. Some years, they didn't celebrate the holiday at all. This sort of got played out in the 1950s and especially 1970s, as the demographics of the town were wildly altered by urban immigration. The incoming Bostonians loved July 4th, and by the time of my childhood, the Vegas coastline represented as hard as anyone.

Duxbury and the surrounding towns contributed mightily to the cause. Taking the 300 British muskets they found at the Thomas estate, they marched to Boston and joined up with George Washington. Duxbury men were involved in fortifying Dorchester Heights, which forced the British out of Boston. Unlike just about everyone involved in the Siege of Boston, the Duxbury men had already seen the British Navy flee before them once by the time the Limey Poofters sailed away from Boston.

Duxbury men served with George Washington at Valley Forge, and fought with him at Germantown and Monmouth. Washington was known to favor the fishermen of coastal Massachusetts as rowers. Duxbury men also manned a fort built out on the Gurnet. It saw no action in the Revolution, but they got to let off a few shots during the War of 1812.

It is interesting to ponder how the Brits would have reacted if Capt. Wadsworth had decided to charge the overmatched regulars. We know how the immediate battle would have worked, as Captain Balfour told us himself. The Brits would have surrendered with the first Rebel shot.

There's a difference between 100 soldiers and the entire Royal Navy, however. As we saw during the Battle of Wareham in 1812. the British would sail a squadron into town and burn every ship in the harbor for piracy. How wold they react after the loss of a whole garrison, especially if the battle which lost them turned into a massacre? Probably not well.

Duxbury did not embrace shipbuilding until after the Revolution, but they did need their harbor, and had nothing beyond a crude fort to keep the British from sailing in to set the whole town ablaze. Duxbury was a backwater, perhaps not meriting an invasion, but Plymouth was a high-profile revenge target.

Taking Plymouth would effectively cut off Cape Cod and the South Shore from contributing to the war effort, and would have the Brits very well positioned for a march on Rhode Island. The South Shore would have almost certainly got some Grey's Raid kind of action.. Never drink Earl Grey Tea, it's associated with the son of the Grey's Raid captain who attacked Fairhaven, New Bedford and Martha's Vineyard.

The Battle of Marshfield may have indeed proved to be a Phyrric Phirryc Pyrrhic costly victory, and the whole war effort may have been jeopardized by the desire of some Plymouth County farmers to seize a contested Marsh Vegas front yard.

However, all of that never happened. Colonel Cotton, viewed by many as a wussy, was actually a fine leader. He went all Sun-Tzu on the English, not moving to attack until victory was assured. He cleared out one of the two English-occupied towns in Massachusetts, and he did so without wasting an ounce of gunpowder.

Colonel Cotton is actually twice-famous, as he led a group of patriots in 1774 who tried to move Plymouth Rock to a better viewing area. He split the Rock while doing so, and you can still see the split today. That's a story or another day.

So, as you do something 'Murica today to commemorate the Patriot actions in Boston, Lexington and Concord, lay back and twist one in honor of the 500 South Shore bad-asses who chased the British away.

Even the house is crooked... or the photographer.

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Aggressive Turkeys Rampaging Across Massachusetts

You may or may not have noticed the Turkey Aggression going on around you.

Turkeys are not a creature that you should fear, and that headline up there is more me not knowing what else to write than an attempt to start a Mercury Theater-style panic. A turkey can injure you, make no mistake, but we'll get to that later in the article.

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, and half or so of the turkeys are male. Love is in the air if you're a turkey, as it is mating season. I'd like to meet the person who scientifically named the turkey's mating season "the Gobbling."

Gobbling starts in mid-March, the peak runs mid-April through May, and broods start appearing in June. Turkeys get a bit aggressive during mating season, and can also be touchy when the Bay Bays are around.

Take that, tie it into our headline, and you'll see where we're headed today.

I know that broods aren't supposed to appear until June, but this guy started early and had his Bay-Bay payoff before Tax Day... unless those are hens, at which point I apologize to the turkeys in question.

Turkeys are native to America, and the nation of Turkey has no native, primordial population of them. Turkey/country lent her name to Turkey/bird via the European poultry trade with the Ottoman Empire. Opinions vary on the specifics (colonists may have mistaken American turkeys for Turkish guineafowl, which was imported all over the Mediterranean from Constantinople/Istanbul), but that's the basic etymology.

Massachusetts was crawling with turkeys by the time the Pilgrims arrived, and the Native Americans were eating them by 1100 AD or so. European explorers introduced the turkey to England in 1550.

As the Other White Meat expanded across Massachusetts, they cut down the forests and used the leftovers for farmland. Turkeys, being both a forest-dwelling bird and a tasty bird, did not fare well following the arrival of Mr. White and his family. Turkeys did not survive the 19th Century in Massachusetts, with the last native one being killed (on Mount Tom of all places, wokka wokka wokka) in the 1850s.

Farmland began to revert to forest in Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution, as farm goods were imported into the state by the new railroads. This presented an opportunity for turkeys to return, although resettlement efforts in the first 70 years of the 20th Century failed in Massachusetts. Part of the problem is that these efforts involved farm-bred, Butterball style turkeys, and they fared poorly upon their release in the wild.

1972 saw the importation of wild turkeys from New York, and these 37 birds (and overflow from neighboring states) prospered into the 15,000 or so thought to exist in Massachusetts today. They were fully situated in SE Massachusetts by the time of a 1996 study.

Remember, kids... you can run down and have one of them, or you can walk down and have EACH one of them.

This talk of turkey resettlement means little to you if you stay out of the forest, at least for most of the year. However, just like humans, turkeys get a bit sloppy during their mating season. This leads them out into your neighborhood, and potentially into your lives.

First of all, they are promiscuous. They are not monogamous... when business is concluded, Tom Turkey is raisin' up off the cot. Toms may mate with every hen in the area. Hens will mate several times a season, and egg incubation takes a bit less than a month.

Early batches of eggs only have a bout a 40% survival rate, primarily due to weather and egg/hen predation.  25-50% of hatchlings survive, with foxes, hawks and chilling spring rains offing the other offspring. Like many rural families, they have large families in hopes of having offspring succeed them.

This is why Tom Turkey is so busy about gettin' busy, folks. He has offspring odds to offset. Pimpin' ain't easy, as the rappers say.

This means that from March through May, the party is on in Turkeytown. Much like high school kids, they care little if business takes them into your yard. This leads to increased human-turkey interaction.

Turkeys got a bit cocky around Easter, as they aren't a major menu item for this holiday. He wouldn't be Doin' The Butt at my photographers in November, I can tell you that.

Turkeys live by a code known as the Pecking Order. Turkeys assign everyone in their lives a role in their pecking order, and this role usually involves attempts to assert dominance. Humans fit into this pecking order, and the turkey assigns a sex to a human based on his/her perception of the human's behavior. A "male" human may be challenged (or deferred to) by a tom and followed by a hen.

Being followed by hens is flattering in a way, but being challenged by a Tom is a bad thing. Turkeys can give out a painful peck, and one turkey attack victim described it leaping into the air and doing a dropkick-style move with the talons.

An adult human should be able to beat down even the angriest turkey, but it won't be a pretty fight and you're probably going to come out of it with some scars. A child or an old person may be less equipped to fight a large turkey.

Don't be afraid to stomp an aggressive turkey. It ends the immediate threat, and it teaches the other turkeys who the dominant primordial beast is. Turkeys are dumb enough to attack their own reflections (they are not thought to be self-aware), and one good smackdown is worth a hundred good arguments with that crowd. The sooner they learn it, the sooner they will regard humans as the turkey-sandwich-eating dominant species.

This might save them from a scenario where they would have to be "removed" from a neighborhood. They don't do trap-n-release with nuisance turkeys. Trapping methods used by hunters in the forest don't work on Elm Street in Suburbia, USA. Suburban turkeys who become a nuisance get the ol' Smith & Wesson haircut.

It takes a village of people beating down turkeys to make a positive change. Everyone has to do it, and they have to be consistent. If you get the neighborhood bully to go beat down the baddest bird, the turkeys will learn to fear just the bully, rather than humans in general. If the next human they see looks like a sucker, the turkey aggression begins anew. If they are chased from neighborhoods, it lowers the risk of human/turkey interaction.

S'up?

Two of my own photographers have suffered turkey attacks this April.

Jessica shot the bottom picture in the article when a flock of turkeys marched right through urban traffic and attacked her car. She informs me that it was very Hitchcockian, but they turkey fled in a minute when she pulled out some Stove Top.

In the picture just above, a turkey attacks the home of Cranberry County Magazine photographer Justin Thyme- who, in spite of her name, is actually a pretty girl. One can understand the turkey's motivation.

Unfortunately for this turkey, Justin has two Rottweilers named Fury and Wrath, they roam the yard from time to time, and they enjoy fresh poultry.

Nature is a cruel mistress, and one man's mommy might be another man's sandwich meat. Ideally, we'd each have our own realm to roam. However, as we noted earlier, the nation of Turkey is full of people...

Fireball Explosion Above Kingston/Plymouth/Duxbury Area

This isn't the Plymouth Meteor, but it was close as we had to a picture of it.

Kingston is a quiet town, but- if the dice rolled a little differently- it could have been a Tunguska style disaster zone.

Chris Gloninger of NECN has reported that a meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere above the Kingston/Plymouth area. There was a fireball visible, and an explosion was audible. There were some social media complaints about an explosion at around 10 PM, although CCM is unaware of any pictures or video existing of it.

Reports of it came to me from Plymouth, Kingston, Plympton, Duxbury and- in one case involving a fisherman I know- Cape Cod Bay. People heard it as far away as Rockland. I have no idea of the path or where it exploded, although "just offshore' is my official wild guess. We are hearing reports that the explosion shook houses slightly.

Meteors enter the atmosphere all of the time. Several thousand enter our atmosphere every day. Many are the size of pebbles, but the friction entering the atmosphere causes great heat and a cool fireball effect. It may have been moving at 25,000 mph when it got over Kingston.

A 20 meter superbolide meteor made world news when it exploded over Russia and injured thousands in the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor impact. A kilometer-sized impact flattened 2000 square km of Russian wilderness in the 1908 Tunguska event. Last night's explosion was nothing near that.

I have no official confirmation, I am asking the NWS about it as I write this. There are no reports of damage and definitely no reports of any impact zone. This meteor may have been no bigger than a schnauzer, a far cry from the sort of Texas sized asteroid that we'd have to send Bruce Willis up to deal with.

We'll be back with an update if the need arises.

Right Whales Moving Into Cape Cod Bay

Massachusetts has rites of Spring, just like Iowa, Arkansas and Colorado do. Some of our rites involve whales coming for a visit at a certain time of year, just like they don't in Iowa.

North Atlantic Right Whales are entering our waters as we speak. They come in after plankton, using some primordial algorithm to know when the water temperature is just right to chow down on the microscopic organisms.

Right Whales are as rare as it gets, and are especially rare for both large whales and marine mammals in particular. There are only 500 left in the world. At the moment, 71 of those have been recorded as being in Cape Cod Bay as of Wednesday.

A mother and her calf were spotted in the Cape Cod Canal Tuesday, and another mom/baby were seen in Cape Cod Bay about halfway between Provincetown and Marshfield. Experts expect many more in the upcoming weeks.

 The whales cruise the surface, filtering tons of plankton into their tummies. They often work very close to shore, and are visible to beachwalkers. Set up on a cliff (Manomet, Cedarville, Scituate, Saquish) if you can, height always helps when spotting. It involves more "getting lucky" than me getting laid, but even a bad day staring at the ocean is better than most good days.

It goes without saying that you shouldn't hassle these whales. They are very rare. Boats are required by law to keep a few hundred yards between them and any righty. A collision between a whale and a boat could take an endangered species off of the charts.

It's also good sense for the mariner. Look at how things ended for Captain Ahab, Quint, Joshua, Samuel L. Jackson... you don't want to mess with anything that can fit you in their mouth.

Vampire Panic In New England

New England is home to Harvard, Hawthorne and a lot of US Presidents. We have intellectual stripes that few states can match.

We also would blame tuberculosis deaths on vampires and desecrate corpses to kill them now and then.

New England had a period running from 1784 through 1949 where 80 bodies were exhumed from graves to be treated as vampires. Various folk-remedy methods of vampire extermination were utilized.

This wasn't medieval stuff... a vampire was exhumed in Rhode Island about 20 years before Ronald Reagan was born, not too long before the Wright Brothers got an airplane off the ground. This was 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials. People were living during that exhumation who, in the same life, watched a moon landing on TV.

What's up with these people? What's the dilly? As you might imagine, several factors were at work.

Understand that the Internet sucked in 1892, with "sucked" meaning "didn't exist." Literacy, while on the upswing from near-zero in feudal times, was still a rare thing, especially in rural communities. The newest medical journals were slow to get to western Rhode Island farms. Doctors were rare, many were quacks, and even President McKinley had a doctor check a bullet wound by sticking a finger in his abdomen and poking around... in 1901.

If educated city-folk were that dangerous, you can imagine how much damage a farmer could do when faced with a disease or infection that he had no idea about.

Tuberculosis was only really figured out recently, and doctors would just throw up their hands when they saw it in 1892.  Their cures were often worse than the illness- Doc Holliday was sent to a sulfur spring to treat his tuberculosis in 1887.

Rhode Island farmers had even less understanding of tuberculosis, which they referred to as "consumption." The name was fitting. A person with tuberculosis would lose weight, become pallid, refuse to eat, fear light, labor to breathe... they wasted away before your eyes. It would also tear through families, many of whom were piled 8 deep in a house and sharing one bed.

While a doctor might recognize this as tuberculosis, a farmer would have a different diagnosis set. It might include the spirit of a deceased relative leaving the grave and feeding on the life energy of their surviving family.

Belief in vampirism goes back to Mesopotamia, and was still in effect in many parts of the world by 1892. This was before Bela Lugosi and Twilight, so no one thought of a vampire resembling a Hungarian count or a pouting teenage boy. When it wasn't being described as a sort of energy force, a vampire was viewed as more corpse-like than a Brad Pitt-looking fellow.

While a diagnosis of vampirism might get you laughed out of Tufts, an illiterate farmer might think that it sounds as good as whatever the city slicker was telling them. You have a definite cause-and-effect thing working, always valuable to a man playing doctor who can't read. A diagnosis of tuberculosis requires medical knowledge and intense examination. All you need for a Vampirism diagnosis is for the TB to run through the rest of your family.

Consumption happened a lot in rural communities. It was the leading cause of death in the northeast in the 1800s. To their credit, most farmers recognized it as a natural illness without paranormal overtones. That's why farm families crank out so many kids. Children are Labor, and even Dowry. They are also vulnerable, which is why many farmers banged out 12 kids in hope that 5 would survive to run the farm.

However, historians have uncovered at least 80 instances where corpses were exhumed and desecrated because someone thought that they were vampires.

Cases run from Maine to Minnesota , but New England holds the title. We do have places like Yale and enlightened cities like Boston, but we also had many areas chock full of susperstitious farmers.

We are also heavy-handed with the punishment. We performed the first legal execution of a juvenile in America... for Bestiality, I believe.

That tendency towards draconian superstition, much of it brought over from Europe, gave New England the title belt with both Witchcraft and Vampirism.

There's a good reason why Shirley Jackson didn't set The Lottery in Manhattan, and why Stephen King set Salem's Lot in Maine. The stories work here.

A relatively isolated area in Rhode Island and Connecticut could do a pretty good Salem's Lot impression, as a great % of the recorded Vampire exhumations went down there.

You can't blame them totally- there was a prominent exhumation in Vermont in 1817, Thoreau wrote about one in 1859  and even America's Hometown of Plymouth has someone buried face down to prevent them from being able to dig their way out of a grave- but they were into it the most.

A newspaper from Connecticut in 1784 denounced exhumations. The Tillinghast family of Exeter, which saw consumption run through it after the father's 1790s dream of a blight killing half of his orchard, lost half of their children even though they exhumed 17 year old Sarah and did a ritual. Jewett City, Connecticut, Saco, Maine (15 miles from where Salem's Lot was based), Loudon, New Hampshire, Belchertown, Massachusetts, Woodstock, Vermont, Cumberland, Rhode Island, Manchester, Vermont and Griswold, Connecticut- among dozens of other New England communities- went all Buffy on someone in the course of their histories.

Exeter, if not the epicenter of the vampire craze, serves as the main neighborhood. They acted like Serbian gypsies. They also are notable for their brutal exhumation techniques, their near Reagan era survival of vampire superstition and for being the home of America's vampire queen.

Mercy Brown, pictured below, is the most famous of the 80 recorded cases where a vampire-themed exhumation went on.

Mercy was one of an unfortunate group of children that George and Mary Brown bore. George was a farmer living a hard life working a rocky Rhodey homestead. The consumption came for his family, taking Ma Brown in 1893 and a daughter the next year. The mother and daughter were Mary and Mary Olive. There was also a sister named Mercy Lena.

Mercy fell sick and died in 1892. Then her brother Edwin fell sick. This set off a superstition algorithm involving multiple consumption deaths in the same family equaling undead predation.

That was enough for the villagers. Perhaps fearing that Mercy would move on to their own families after polishing off the Brown blood bank, several locals- after a vote- approached George with a folk remedy. It may have been the last conversation of the Dark Ages.

Although he gave his permission, George was not in attendance when a Frankenstein-style mob moved on the crypt that held the remains of Mercy Brown. Distinct among the group, which was most likely smaller than a mob, were a wildly protesting doctor and a Providence Journal reporter.

Mercy was a winter death, and she was stored in the above-ground crypt that we have a picture of somewhere in this article. She was kept this way until the ground thawed enough for a burial. You should note that her crypt was very much similar to how they stored ice back then.

They checked the coffins of all the Brown women. Two of them were Corpsing along as they should have been. Mercy was a whole other story.

Mercy didn't look that bad for a corpse. The cold had preserved her well. They cracked open her chest and cut out her heart. It still had blood in it. Bingo! We got us a vampire!

Since this was 5 years before Dracula was written (Bram Stoker had an article about the Brown exhumation among his papers, and may have based Lucy Westerna on Mercy Brown), the people- who only acted like Serbians, and didn't actually use Serbian words like vampyr- probably just called her Mercy or Lena... especially around George, who most likely had to be handled diplomatically.

Vampire slaying methodology varied from region to region. Both Plymouth and Maine, connected by maritime trade, favored burying the corpse face down. Vermont was more brutal, and their methods spread down the Connecticut River into eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island.

Mercy's heart was placed on a nearby stone and cooked to a cinder. The ashes were then fed to her ailing brother, most likely in a tea. It worked so well, he was dead in two months, and is buried next to the sister that he consumed.

Opinions vary as to whether it was effective. The doctor pointed out that Mercy's lungs showed tuberculosis. He no doubt spoke up when the remedy failed to cure Edwin. The locals pointed out that no Browns got sick after Edwin.

Michael Bell, the authority on such matters, says that exhumations occurred in America until the mid 20th Century. The last one Bell is aware of went down in the Pennsylvania mountains in 1949. A construction crew in Griswold, CT dug up an ancient cemetery in 1990. One of the graves had been broken into. The corpse was beheaded, the heart was torn out and the legs were broken off. The damage was done 5 years after death.

Mercy wasn't the last one, but is the most famous one. Her desecration got national publicity, all negative, and western Rhode Islanders were known as superstitious and "vicious" by neighboring communities, with the Boston Globe suggesting inbreeding as a cause for the vampire panic.

We checked out her grave recently, as one of our road trips took us into that Rhodey/CT midst. Route 95 goes through there now, and Exeter is a charming bedroom suburb of Providence. You can still see the Old Days if you poke around some.

Should Route 3A Have A Nickname?

Granted, there are more important issues on the table. Syria and Iraq look messy. The Trumpcare rollout has been slightly less than smooth. North Korea is advancing their nuclear technology. There are many problems in the world more important than naming Route 3A something cool.

However, those problems require complex solutions, ones that will most likely not be figured out by a wandering stoner journalist lining up his next road trip. However, I'm just the man to bring this issue to your attention and maybe float a few names out there to sort of jump-start the process. I'm not smart enough for a brainstorm, but I do generate an impressive squall line now and then. That's good enough to name a highway.

One thing that Bourne, Wareham and Sandwich do well is name highways. Sandwich has the Old King's Highway (Route 6A), Bourne has the Scenic Highway (mainland Route 6, between the bridges) and ?ham has the Cranberry Highway. You could also throw in the Mid-Cape Highway and the Grand Old Army of The Republic Highway, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Running a road along the Canal and giving it a catchy name didn't get the Muslims and the Jews to stop bickering or anything, but it adds some character to the area, makes it easier for traffic reports and helps the tourists along.

Meanwhile, the 50 mile stretch of road between Bourne and Quincy- Route 3A- has no nickname at all. Wikipedia says it is known as the "Cape Way" highway, but that sort of doesn't really work either functionally (these days), as no one goes to the Cape that way anymore, and stylistically (ever). "Cape Way" blows like the mighty north wind.

Every year at around St. Patrick's Day time, we run whatever Irish-themed articles we have kicking in the archives. "Check Your Irish" is a good one, as is "The Irish Riviera."

One thing you'll learn if you read either article (or read both, I need the money) is that the area between Quincy and Bourne is stuffed with Irish-Americans. That, and the seasonal/coastal nature of the area, garnered the "Irish Riviera" nickname for the area.

Many inland towns have high Irish populations, but the big unbroken run of 33+% Irish goes from Weymouth to Plymouth.

If you stare at a map long enough, you'll also notice that Route 3A runs right through the same area. While 3A itself is inland some and doesn't host the actual Riviera, it connects to every piece of it through a sort of river/tributary system.

If you weigh the factors of 1) no effective Route 3A nickname and 2) the green wave of Irish-Americans in that Plymouth-Weymouth stretch, a solution comes to mind. Give it an Irish-themed nickname.

There are many sorts of nicknames, some official, some not. At least one pol who I asked said I'd have to go to MassDOT. That's if we want to go official. If we just want to introduce a nickname or three into the public domain and see if one of them catches on, all we have to do is write an article and post it a bit.

Let's kick a few around, shall we?

- "St. Patrick's Highway" has a nice ring to it, but it may violate the concept of keeping the church and state apart. That's probably my only official-sounding one.

- "Paddy Road" sounds like an Irish Mob movie, but it is also very catchy.

- "Mick Street" and the Happy Meal-sounding "McStreet" might offend someone, but it won't be someone Irish. The Irish, who were compared with dogs for a lot of US history, are incapable of taking offense. Don't believe me? Approach any college and say "You should be more like the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. How about the Bridgewater State University Crafty Jews?" You're not going to get a callback, player. Meanwhile, Irish-Americans who have never been near Indiana root for Notre Dame. If you think Christianity has anything to do with that, suggest that the bartender at your local sports bar stop what he is doing and hunt through the channels for the Oral Roberts University game.

- I am reluctant to put quote marks around O'Boulevard, because it already has a half of one in it.

- "The Green Mile" has ominous connotations from the movie that will be gone in a generation or two. It will also fit perfectly into those "Massachusetts Roads Make No Sense" memes, along the lines of "The Green Mile is 50 miles long." This nickname also lets us experiment with painting those yellow lines in the road green, which is just the thing to do in resort areas with a hard-drinking population base.

- "Shamrock Lane" sounds like a stripper, but it is also very catchy and relatively inoffensive to people who aren't a bit too familiar with Stripper Naming. The movie with the giant monster (Cloverfield or John Goodman, take your pick) sort of ruined any "Clover Road" possibilities.

- "The Guinness Bypass" would be ugly the first time someone de-barked a Route 3A tree.

- "The Capital Highway" would be a simple power grab. Ireland stopped being the place with the most Irish one potato famine ago. America now has the most people of Irish descent, by a large margin. In America, Massachusetts is known as the most Irish state.  In Massachusetts, the South Shore is recognized as the most Irish part of the most Irish state. Why shouldn't the South Shore thus have Capital status? Ireland can put the Capitol wherever they wish, but we can make a great claim to the Capital status. We should make a reality of that claim by naming Route 3A in such a mindset.

- "The Leprebahn" is a mishmash spelling of the little Irish pixie and the Autobahn in Germany where you can drive 200 mph if your car (and skills) will support it. We could paint the stripes between the lanes Gold, like the pot o' gold that the leprechaun guards. To save money, we can just declare that we painted them gold, leave them as the present yellow that they are, and hope that it either A) fools the tourists or B) amuses the locals. Stacey, an editor here, is arguing strenuously for a spelling of "Leprechahn."

- "The Edge" is not only a cool name for a road, but it is U2 related. U2 is an Irish rock band that the kids are listening to these days, or 1986 or whatever. That in itself doesn't merit a road, but could the actual real Edge guy be persuaded to record a quick ditty in exchange for having a highway named after him? I float this possibility only because Route 3A doesn't have her own song, like Route 128 does with that Roadrunner song by the Modern Lovers... although someone once told me that Roadrunner somehow references Cohasset (Editor's Note: Christine Frka, a former Frank Zappa groupie, lived and died at the Cohasset house of Modern Lovers founder Johnathan Richman,,, h/t to Nathaniel Palmer) . The Edge could hand us that title with ten minutes work.

- "Beating A Dead Horse Street" comes to mind when it's time to end this article.

The Rise, Fall and Rebirth Of The Hanover Mall

A local icon is about to get a major face lift in an attempt to Get Modern.

The Hanover Mall was sold recently (to PECO Real Estate Partners, for $39.5 million), and the new owners came out this week and debuted their plans for the Route 3 landmark.

The plans are radical. it involves the Hanover Mall becoming a sort of outdoor mall, along the lines of Shops At The 5 in Plymouth or even- keeping it Plymouth- the Colony Place mall with the Wal-Mart. Rather than enter one big building with all the shop entrances inside the mall, you can pull up to whatever store you want to go to.

Malls, aka large scale public shopping centers, have been around at least as long as Rome, and actually predate Rome if you're willing to break out the dictionary and argue Semantics for a while. Trajan's Market in Rome is the first one with a name I can find, but Istanbul, Damascus, Tehran, Oxford, Paris and St. Petersburg have malls that are older than America. Timbuktu, technically a city, was essentially a mall that was fortunate enough to have culture spring up around it.

America mastered the mall, and we were/are the catalyst behind the advent of the modern mall. America is big, and we spread ourselves further out than European or Middle Eastern people do. This led to us getting into cars and highways and- most importantly- Suburbia.

Notice that all of the old malls that I named are based in cities. For much of history, people would take their goods into the cities, where the large numbers of people gave them the largest market possible for those goods. Cars, trains and highways allowed Americans to flee the teeming industrial cities, and they didn't want to have to trek back into the Metropolis every time they needed a vacuum cleaner or a manicure.

In the same vein, the low population density of a suburb means that you can't set up a vacuum store in town and sell enough of them to earn a living. Americans also need a great variety of stuff, and there is only so much room on Main Street. You can't fit every sort of store that someone needs in one town.

Keep in mind, this is pre-Internet. If you need a part for your wood stove and it's 1972, you can't just order it online. You can't even Google up a location for the Wood Stove Parts store a few towns over from you. That's just how it was back then. "The Internet must have sucked in the 1920s," as one of my students once said.

The solution? Build an airport-sized building, and fill it with every sort of shop that a person could want. Space these buildings out, maybe one or three per county. Soon enough, rather than trekking town to town in search of an obscure product that you need, you can walk through a mall full of more stuff than you could possibly even take a crack at buying in an average life span. Walk through your local mall today, and you'll probably see several dozen stores that you will never set foot in. "This place has got everything," as Joliet Jake once said.

Laws opening up land for development and tax dodges where real estate investment trusts could avoid corporate income taxes spurred mall growth. Retail Stores dominated America. The enclosed suburban mall style (like Hanover) came about in the 1950s. By 2015, there was 48 square feet of retail space for every American.

Malls are deeply ingrained in American culture. While I lack the fashion knowledge, several girls in Duxbury that I knew in high school could tell where someone was from by a formula of A (what they're wearing) = B (which mall had an Old Navy or whatever), which = C (the kid must be from the region which had that mall), so A = C.

Every kid in every 1980s movie who wasn't babysitting or selling drugs  worked in a mall. I think that all of the non-Spicoli kids from Fast Times At Ridgemont High worked in a mall. The best car chase in The Blues Brothers went through a mall.

The Hanover Mall has stood in place since 1971, and was the only mall in the region until they put the Independence Mall (now known by the newly redesigned and ridiculous Kingston Collection moniker). If you commute to Boston up Route 3 from anywhere south of Exit 13, you look at the Hanover Mall twice a day.

Any kid from the 1980s Irish Riviera who was too far from the South Shore Plaza didn't have many mall choices. Hanover was your mall. It's where you did your school shopping, where the cinema was, where to try to get girls before you figured out Beer... it was where you could buy jeans and have a pretzel while someone was fixing your brakes. If you couldn't knock off your Christmas shopping in one trip there, you weren't trying hard.

Still, as the child of the 80s grew up, he saw the Decline setting in. I can recall being very angry when the York Steak House left (one YSH remains in America, and it's in Ohio), I still miss Friendly's and Brigham's, I disagreed with the closing of Zayre's and a big part of me thinks that the mall people deserved what they got when they uprooted the fountain.

The Hanover Mall never really died, and the tail still wags. They just became marginalized. It's funny, because it is straddled by wealthy towns like Duxbury and Cohasset, but here's what did in the Hanover Mall that you know and love. Keep in mind,the guy doing all this urban planning talk peaked in life as a Sportswriter, and has very little experience planning malls and analyzing market trends.

1) They were slow to adapt to the Food Court idea. When the Independence Mall opened and you could get Taco Bell in these parts, it was very bad for Hanover when the best non-Brigham's meal you could get in their mall was an Orange Julius. Much like a house with shag carpeting, the Hanover Mall had a very 1970s look during an era of rapid Mall Change.

2) The Independence Mall came when the Hanover Mall was getting complacent. Hanover was the only dog in town for a while, and when the Kingston mall opened, people had shopped themselves out at Hanover's long-term offerings. "Let's go to Hobbytown again!"

3) Hanover had a highway project going right off Route 3's exit that took 35 years or so to complete, and the left turn towards the mall for someone coming up from Plymouth was a death wish.

4) We're getting into Square Footage talk that I'm not really smooth enough to discuss, but Hanover was very poorly equipped to accommodate the big Box Stores that came into vogue after Hanover was constructed.

5) Wal-Mart kills everything else, why not the Hanover Mall? You can carry a dozen shopping bags full of goods through 40 stores like a homeless person at a mall, or you can get all of that stuff in shoddy, Made-in-Chine mode and run it through the register all at once in a Wally.

6) The Hanover Mall eventually went into business with the devil and gave Wal-Mart a corner office, but it's one of those weak Wallys without the supermarket. More modern malls are built to accommodate free-standing Super Wal-Marts.

7) Hanover finally went for a food court, but they did so when Kingston was kicking their ass. The food court was never profitable, and they ended up putting an Old Navy there instead.

8) We had a backbreaking recession kick in by 2008, and there was trouble with gas inflation long before that. Those things bring about the Want/Need question among belt-tightening people.

9) The Internet slit a lot of Mall throats. Why wander through gangs of teenagers when you could instead just order stuff online? While a mall has great variety, the Internet has more stuff.

10) Hanover is set in a wealthy area of the South Shore, and those towns tend to trend Elderly. Old people buy less stuff, and towns with lots of elderly are bad places to open up a Hot Topic in.

11) The growth of Southern Plymouth (and the explosion of shopping options south of the Independence Mall) both drew away customers and illustrated the new open-mall game plan that Hanover would either adopt or perish before.

12) Malls in general went into decline. Malls were still being built in the 1990s, but a marked decline was present by the turn of the century. The fight-or-flight period for many struggling malls went down during the Great Recession.

13) Store owners balked at the high cost of heating the common areas in an indoor mall.

Hanover is now rolling the dice on the outdoor mall approach. This will be a sort of retail cul-de-sac formation, based around several box stores.

They'll pour millions of dollars into it, snarl up the traffic some, and a whole new entity will emerge in the following years. It will be a major economic base in the central South Shore, and it will employ or supply many of her residents.

We'll miss the old Hanover Mall, but progress is inexorable, Several "dead" malls (Hanover, which is still somewhat vibrant, qualifies as a "dead" mall among mall-labeling people because it is seen to be underperforming) have been restored to their former glory through just this sort of bulldozing, and Hanover is in a prime commercial region.

Even the guy who paid $39 million for the Hanover mall described it as a "B+" 1970s mall that "started to diminish." I doubt that's what he has in mind as an end goal, so we should end up with a pretty cool mall sitting in a prime location just off the highway.

Only time will tell us what ends up in there. He could change his mind and fill it with low-income housing, for all that I know. For now, we're looking at a bulldozing and rebuilding project, and a brand new, redesigned Hanover Mall that will confuse elderly people for a generation.

Construction is set to kick off at the end of 2017, so prepare yourselves. We'll be back with an update as they get closer to Bulldozer Time.

Sunday Drive Gas Prices For South Shore, Plymouth County

The life experiences of staff motivate much of what turns up in this column. That is the case today, as the void left by the end of Football Season has fully asserted itself and it is not unusual for your author to take to the streets.

That costs money, because to get gasoline you must have dead organisms (mostly plant life, but yes, dinosaurs too) get buried under layers of stone and dirt, have it heated and pressurized by the functions of the Earth, wait 10 million years, have a bunch of PLO looking dudes move in over it, have someone figure out that you can burn this stuff in a manner that heats homes and powers machinery, subjugate the PLO guys, extract, refine, ship and distribute it.

It takes a lot of time and money to do all of that, so don't be too unhappy if gas costs $2 and change a gallon. It beats walking to Boston. That said, a reasonable person doesn't want to pay more than necessary to drive the beater around.

We're here to help you with that. We check with the Massachusetts Gas Prices website, set the search engine there for "last 36 hours," and tell you the best and worst listed prices in town. After that, it's on you to decide if it is worth driving to Whitman from where you live to save 25 cents a gallon.

A few notes on our methodology:

Gas prices can change at the drop of a hat. I pumped gas for a few years (I was never happier at a job, to be honest), and we usually changed over on Friday, before the weekend commute. There was a great deal of gouge-the-tourist behind this, but it is also when most people are getting their paychecks and filling their tanks.

We'd write this column on Friday night, but these gas price websites are user-driven, and it takes a while for the info to trickle in. Sunday is a good driving day (see intro), and with no tourists at this time of year, many/most stations don't lower the prices on Monday to favor the locals.

Note that, in this political climate, gas prices could suddenly spike. An oil company executive is our Secretary of State, and a simple "Those damned Iranians need to die 100,000 at a time. Pathetic!" social media message from the wrong orange-tinted president could double gas prices overnight.

If you see a lower/higher price in town that we didn't list, use our comments feature below to correct us. If there is more than one Shell in your town, it's on you to drive enough to find the cheap one.

Mobil has the worst price in 10 of 20 towns that had both a high and low price reported. They also had the worst price on the South Shore, a Gimme The Loot price of $2.69 at the Norwell Mobil.

National Average Gas Price: $2.228

Massachusetts Average Gas Price; $2.259

Price per barrel, crude oil: $53.57

Best Price in this article: $2.05, Prime Energy and Diamond Fuel in Whitman

Worst Price: $2.69, Mobil in Norwell.

GAS PRICES BY TOWN

Plymouth
Best: $2.11, BJs
Worst: $2.49, Gulf

Carver
Best: $2.13, at both Eagle Gas and Geko
Worst: $2.15, Mobil

Middleboro
Best: $2.06, Petro Max
Worst: $2.23, Mobil

Lakeville
Best: $2.13, Shell
Worst: $2.15, Mobil

Bridgewater (East, West and Everything Else)
Best: $2.10, Tri Town
Worst: $2.46, Mobil

Halifax
Best: $2.16 Cumby's
Worst: $2.27, Mobil

Plympton
Best: $2.15, Plympton Gas and Convenience

Kingston
Best: $2.15, Super Petroleum
Worst: $2.25, Gulf

Duxbury
Best: $2.29, Bennet's
Worst: $2.35, Gulf

Marshfield
Best: $2.14, Public Petroleum
Worst: $2.27, Shell

Scituate
No Prices Reported

Pembroke
Best: $2.18, Cumby's
Worst: $2.39, Mobil(s)

Hanson
Best: $2.13, at both Cumby's and Speedway
Worst: $2.35. Main Street Auto

Brockton
Best: $2.06, Montello's Express gas
Worst: $2.29, Sunny's Auto Care

Whitman
Best: $2.05, at both Prime Energy and Diamond Fuel
Worst: $2.09, at both Whitman Gas and Stop & Shop

Abington
Best: $2.07 Route 18 Superstore
Worst: $2.19, Abington Gas and Auto Repair

Rockland
Best: $2.15, at both Mutual and Steve's Auto Service
Worst: $2.25, BP

Hanover
Best: $2.13, Super Petroleum
Worst: $2.29, Sunoco

Norwell
Best: $2.47, 7-11
Worst: $2.69, Mobil

Cohasset
Best: $2.29, Stop & Shop
Worst: $2.31, Mobil

Hingham
Best: $2.17, Mobil
Worst: $2.39, Gulf

Hull
No prices reported

Weymouth
Best: $2.17, at both the Towne Pump (hey nowwwww) and Super Petroleum
Worst: $2.49, Mobil

Quincy
Best: $2.15, Super Petroleum
Worst: $2.47, Mobil

Be sure to check our Cape Cod and South Coast versions of this very same article.

Blizzard Watch For Coastal Massachusetts, Winter Storm Warning Inland

Cranberry County Magazine is actually part of a secret government experiment where we see if you can bankrupt a website by running the same headline every 5 days. OK, maybe the government isn't involved, but here we go again with another Blizzard!

Let's just hand this to the pros, shall we?

BLIZZARD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM LATE TONIGHT THROUGH
MONDAY EVENING...

* LOCATIONS...Cape Cod and Nantucket.

* ACCUMULATIONS...4 to 6 inches of snow.

* HAZARD TYPES...include moderate to heavy snow, as well as
blowing snow.

* TIMING...spotty light rain this morning becomes steadier and
heavier this afternoon, then transitioning to snow overnight
along with increasing winds by early Monday morning. It is
during these peak winds, that blizzard conditions are possible.

* WINDS...Northwest 35 to 45 mph with gusts up to 65 mph.

* VISIBILITIES...One quarter mile or less at times.

* IMPACTS...The combination of brief heavy snow and strong winds
may lead to dangerous driving conditions as well as scattered
power outages.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A Blizzard Watch means there is a potential for considerable
falling and/or blowing snow with sustained winds or frequent
gusts over 35 mph...with visibilities below one quarter mile...
for at least 3 hours. Whiteout conditions will be possible...
making travel very dangerous. Be prepared to alter any travel
plans.
**************************************************

Remember, folks.... a Blizzard doesn't necessarily mean that you re getting the Blizzard of '78 with 25 inches of snow. All you need is three hours of heavy snow and some high winds. Buffalo once had a blizzard where it didn't snow at all... the high winds just picked up all the fluffy snow sitting on frozen Lake Erie and blew it into Buffalo.

The coast has more NWS stuff to deal with... and you know they're serious, because they're going CAPS LOCK:

COASTAL FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM MONDAY MORNING THROUGH MONDAY
AFTERNOON...

* LOCATION...SALISBURY TO ROCKPORT, NORTH SIDE OF CAPE COD FROM SANDWICH TO
EASTHAM, AND NANTUCKET.

* TIDAL DEPARTURE...1 TO 2 FEET ABOVE NORMAL TIDE IS POSSIBLE SALISBURY TO
ROCKPORT, AND 2 TO 3 FEET ABOVE NORMAL TIDE IS POSSIBLE ALONG THE NORTH SIDE
OF CAPE COD AND THE NANTUCKET HARBOR AREA.

* TIMING...WITHIN A COUPLE OF HOURS OF THE MONDAY EARLY AFTERNOON HIGH TIDE.

* COASTAL FLOOD IMPACTS...MINOR TO MODERATE COASTAL FLOODING IS POSSIBLE
SALISBURY TO ROCKPORT INCLUDING THE PLUM ISLAND AREA AS WELL AS NANTUCKET
HARBOR. MODERATE WITH POCKETS OF MODERATE TO MAJOR COASTAL FLOODING IS
POSSIBLE FROM SANDWICH TO EASTHAM WHERE DAMAGE TO THE MOST VULNERABLE
STRUCTURES ALONG THE IMMEDIATE SHORE AS WELL AS SHORELINE ROAD WASHOUTS ARE
POSSIBLE DUE TO THE COMBINATION OF STORM SURGE AND LARGE BREAKING WAVES.
INUNDATION OF 1 TO 3 FEET IN LOW SPOTS IS POSSIBLE.

* SHORELINE IMPACTS...LARGE WAVES OF 15 TO 20 FEET JUST OFFSHORE WILL LIKELY
CAUSE SIGNIFICANT EROSION OF OCEAN EXPOSED SHORELINES ALONG EASTERN
MASSACHUSETTS. THE EROSION ALONG THE NORTH SIDE OF CAPE COD FROM SANDWICH TO
EASTHAM, THE OCEAN SIDE OF CAPE COD FROM TRURO TO CHATHAM, AND THE EAST SIDE
OF NANTUCKET MAY BE SEVERE IN PLACES.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A COASTAL FLOOD WATCH MEANS THAT POTENTIAL EXISTS FOR MODERATE OR MAJOR COASTAL
FLOODING. MODERATE COASTAL FLOODING PRODUCES WIDESPREAD FLOODING OF VULNERABLE
SHORE ROADS AND/OR BASEMENTS DUE TO THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM TIDE AND/OR WAVE
ACTION. NUMEROUS ROAD CLOSURES ARE NEEDED. LIVES MAY BE AT RISK FOR PEOPLE WHO
PUT THEMSELVES IN HARMS WAY. ISOLATED STRUCTURAL DAMAGE MAY BE POSSIBLE.

MAJOR COASTAL FLOODING IS CONSIDERED SEVERE ENOUGH TO CAUSE AT LEAST SCATTERED
STRUCTURAL DAMAGE ALONG WITH WIDESPREAD FLOODING OF VULNERABLE SHORE ROADS
AND/OR BASEMENTS. SOME VULNERABLE HOMES WILL BE SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.
NUMEROUS ROADS ARE IMPASSABLE...SOME WITH WASHOUTS SEVERE ENOUGH TO BE LIFE-
THREATENING IF ONE ATTEMPTED TO CROSS ON FOOT OR BY VEHICLE. SOME NEIGHBORHOODS
WILL BE ISOLATED. EVACUATION OF SOME NEIGHBORHOODS MAY BE NECESSARY.
********************************************************
Please note and know that the greatest danger here is for people on north-facing coastlines. This means you:

Hull

Scituate Neck

Fourth Cilff

Brant Rock

Gurnet Point

Manomet

Sandwich

Barnstable Harbor

Dennis

Brewster

Provincetown

Here is a list of Tide Charts that you probably want to have a look at before tomorrow's entertainment.
***************************************************

The rest of you (meaning the inland and South Coast parts of our reading area, you get:

WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM EST MONDAY...

* LOCATIONS...include Northern Connecticut, Northern Rhode
Island, and Southeast Massachusetts.

* ACCUMULATIONS...4 to 8 inches of snow.

* HAZARD TYPES...include moderate to heavy snow, as well as
blowing snow.

* TIMING...spotty light snow early this morning will give way to
steady snow later this morning and then heavy at times this
afternoon. Snow may mix with sleet at times later this afternoon
and possibly mixed with freezing drizzle tonight before turning
back to snow Monday morning.

* WINDS...North 15 to 25 mph with gusts up to 40 mph.

* VISIBILITIES...One quarter mile or less at times.

* IMPACTS...The combination of sleet and snow will lead to
hazardous driving conditions at times. There is also the low
risk for isolated power outages.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A Winter Storm Warning is issued when an average snowfall of
6 inches or more is expected within a 12 hour period...or for
8 inches or more in a 24 hour period. Travel will be slow at best
on well treated surfaces...and quite difficult on untreated
surfaces. Only travel in an emergency. If you must travel...keep
an extra flashlight...food...and water in your vehicle in case of
an emergency.
********************************

There's even a HIGH WIND WATCH for the next few days, and a SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT about this morning's snow.

*****************************************************
This NWS chart shows a lot of stuff,but the first three numbers after the town name equal 1) Best Case Scenario, 2) Most Likely Scenario, and 3) Worst Case Scenario

Location At least Likely Potential for >=0.1" >=1" >=2" >=4" >=6" >=8" >=12" >=18"
Boston, MA 6 14 16 100% 100% 100% 100% 93% 79% 35% 0%
Edgartown, MA <1 3 4 92% 77% 43% 10% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Greenfield, MA 10 12 15 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 46% 0%
Hartford, CT 3 4 10 100% 100% 99% 83% 48% 27% 0% 0%
Hyannis, MA <1 4 6 93% 83% 67% 34% 12% 0% 0% 0%
Nantucket, MA 2 4 5 100% 100% 88% 23% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Newport, RI 0 1 5 77% 56% 42% 21% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Plympton, MA 1 6 11 95% 89% 83% 60% 41% 27% 1% 0%
Providence, RI 2 6 11 100% 98% 93% 78% 48% 33% 4% 0%
Springfield, MA 5 8 12 100% 100% 100% 99% 83% 49% 10% 0%
Taunton, MA 2 7 11 99% 96% 89% 75% 46% 31% 3% 0%
Westerly, RI 0 2 5 81% 63% 43% 18% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Worcester, MA 8 12 16 100% 100% 100% 100% 99% 88% 42% 0%

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This is a dangerous storm, and it looks like fun for both commutes Monday.
It may start of as rain, but don't fall for that. It'll switch over soon enough, and the roads will be treacherous.

I'm considering going in to work 24 hours early and just hanging around. I barely made it over the Bourne Bridge in my junker Dodge during the blizzard last week. I had to resort to Tacking, a sailing method that involves repeatedly aiming your bow in different directions to do the seemingly-impossible move of sailing into the wind. I don't know Why it worked, only That it worked.

This feat was more impressive because:

1) I wasn't in a sailboat.

2) Tacking isn't designed to move Uphill.

3) Even if it was, I wasn't on water. Well, technically I was, but you know what I mean.

4) Cars, which aren't designed to cut through the surface of an ocean, don't have bows.

5) I don't know how to sail.

6) "I was on a 25 yard wide suspended plank looking at a 200 foot fall into a coastal river in February" was my worst case scenario.

7) My second worst case scenario was to just roll back down the bridge, in the wrong lane, then try to do an Elwood Blues-style sudden spin where I ended up in the heading-onto-the-mainland lane instead of my original heading-on-Cape lane. The fact that my rear window was completely snowed over was very far down on the list of things I was worried about with this move.

8) I was going to instantly shift my focus onto move #7 once I started sliding backwards down the bridge, without a second thought.

It didn't come to that, as Tacking worked. It still took me 5 minutes at 6000 RPMs to get to the top of the Bourne Bridge.

We'll be in the Bourne and Plymouth for this storm. I'm very tempted to hide myself in my sister's house on Duxbury Beach for the high tides, but I have a graveyard shift back in Bourne on Monday night. I'm not trying to repeat 1-8.

In about two days, look for some variation of "You know you're from Massachusetts when someone says 'I wrecked my car in the blizzard,' you say 'Yesterday?" and they say "No, last Thursday" meme to start showing up.