Right Whales In Cape Cod Bay, Warning Issued

Cape Cod Bay has a group of Right Whales operating by her western shores this week.

It's sort of a rite of spring. The ocean waters get to the right temperature and the zooplankton prospers or gathers or whatever zooplankton does to attract feeding whales. The presence of this plankton draws in the whales, who feed to their content and eventually follow the plankton to the next hot spot.

The whales being drawn in are Right Whales, which are among the most endangered creatures on the planet.

Because of this, the Massachusetts Division Of Marine Fisheries is issuing a cautionary notice to boaters in western Cape Cod Bay.

There are five mother/calf pairs within two miles of shore between Duxbury and Sandwich.

Did we mention that Right Whales are very rare? Right Whales get categorized into three, uhm, categories: North Atlantic, Pacific and Southern. All are very rare, with the eastern version of the NARW numbering in the functionally-extinct teens. Our own population of Right Whales number about 400.

Cape Cod Bay (and the nearby-in-whale-terms Bay Of Fundy) are major feeding grounds for Right Whales, and they usually put in work here right around this time of year. You stand a good chance of seeing one if you prowl along any beach between Duxbury and Sandwich. If you can get some elevation, at like, say, the White Cliffs Country Club, your odds of seeing one increase substantially.

They tend to hug the coast, staying within 2 miles of shoreline. They are surface feeders, although they will dive for meals if need be. Look for their distinctive V-shaped spout, which produces corresponding V-shaped spout spray.

If one is nearby, they shouldn't be hard to see. They go about 60 feet long, about the size of a New York City subway train. The whale is considerably fatter, weighing about 100 tons.

INTERACTIVE WHALE TRACKING MAP FOR CAPE COD BAY

Win a bar bet or ten by knowing that, at about 9 feet, they win the Largest Testicles On The Planet contest. Said testicles weigh 1100 pounds, about what the entire Wyatt Family (including Brau Strowman) in the WWE weighs. This is probably why the female Right Whales only mate about every 3-5 years or so.

A contributing factor with the once-every-Presidential-Election-year lovemaking desire cycle on the part of the female may also be due to the fact that Right Whale calves are 20 feet long and weigh as much as the New England Patriots' front seven does... at birth.

She has plenty of time. While no one knows how long Right Whales live, a human-sized life span seems to be about the norm. A baby Right Whale photographed in 1935 was still kicking in the 1995, before being killed by a ship strike.

Speaking of which, you want to keep your boat far, far away from any Right Whales you see. You could injure the whale, and you could get your boat sunk.   For the safety of both mariners and whales, vessel operators in this area are strongly urged to proceed with caution, reduce speed (less than 10 knots), and post lookouts to avoid colliding with these highly endangered whales.

Right Whales get their name because they were the "right" whale to harvest during the Whaler days. Surface-skimming, lots of oil, weak fighters =  "Right."

On a sad note, a whale washed up dead on Duxbury Beach yesterday. I don't believe it was a Right Whale, it was about 15-20 feet long. I believe that the town is going to bury it.

Best Whale Songs

1) Moby Dick,Led Zeppelin

2) Nantucket Sleighride, Mountain

3) The Whale, ELO

4) To The Last Whale, Crosby/Nash

5) The Mariner's Revenge Song, The Decemberists

6) Home Of The Whale, Massive Attack

7) Shanty Of The Whale, K.T. Tunstall

8) Save The Whales, Country Joe McDonald

9) Moving, Kate Bush

10) Don't Kill The Whale, Yes

11) The Last Great American Whale, Lou Reed

12) Stove By A Whale, Scissorfight

April Storm Tide, Final Snow Of Season?

Fans of the stormy weather will enjoy this weekend's entertainment, if they are situated well enough and don't mind staying up all night.

A storm will slide south of New England tonight, and her northern fringe may give the South Coast and Cape Cod a bit of snow. An inch would be the high end figure, and the snow would be more notable for being a strong candidate for the last snow of the year.

April snow isn't that crazy. We've had a blizzard on April Fool's Day, I saw nearly two feet in Worcester on April 28th once, and the Boston record is May 10th.

However, April snow falls at a time when we are tired of winter and looking forward to spring. The last thing a New Englander who doesn't write about weather for a living wants in April is snow.

Again, this storm will mostly precipitate on the fishes, with only the Cape and the extreme South Coast getting any Siberian Marching Powder. Nantucket and the Outer Cape look like the best bet to get enough to make a snowball with.

The South Shore may get left out of the snowfall, but they'll have a shot at some coastal flooding overnight. The storm will produce heavy winds (gusts well over tropical storm force), and they will be coming N/NE at the time of high tide.

Those tides will be very high. Seriously, look:

Duxbury Beach, 1:43 AM, 12.2 feet

Scituate Harbor, 1:52 AM, 11.5 feet

Brant Rock, 1:56 AM, 11.7 feet

Hull Bay, 1:55 AM, 12.2 feet

Manomet Point, 1:40 AM, 12.2 feet

Scusset Beach, 1:44 M, 12.2 feet

Sandwich Town Beach, 1:43 AM, 12.2 feet

Cold Storage Beach (Dennis), 1:46 AM, 12.2 feet

Provincetown, 1:56 AM, 11.8 feet

The storm won't be on us long enough or hard enough (some winds will be more N than the more feared NE) to really tear up the coastline, but splashover tides are bad news in low-lying coastal neighborhoods. When I lived on Duxbury Beach, we used to run the sump pumps 24 hours in a row for a few days during the April high tides, and that was without a storm piling up water onto the shore.

 A 12.2 foot high tide means that, if you stood stock still with your toes at the edge of the water exactly at low tide, you'd be under 12.2 feet of water in the same spot at high tide. The average tide is about 8 or 9 feet, and this waning new moon tide of 12.2 is trouble.

The winds will make a 1-2 foot storm surge on top of all that moon tide stuff, and the worst of it will be along a Hull-to-Bourne-to Orleans run. Let's guess at a Scituate-to-Duxbury epicenter.

Again, never clean up coastal yards until late April at the earliest, Landlubber.

If you live on the coast and are up at that hour, feel free to send us a pic at our Facebook page, we'll maybe do an article Sunday morning if I get out at that wicked time of the night.

We'll also be getting what is presently believed to be the last freezing weather in SE Massachusetts.

This little cold snap has been the result of a polar vortex sending Canada air down to us. As that vortex breaks down, we start getting Oregon air... which doesn't sound that great until you recall the Santa stuff we've been getting every time it snows in April.

From what I see on the Accuweather month-long forecast for Buzzards Bay, there will be no more days where the temperature falls below freezing. When that skim coating of snow on your lawn melts, winter will be over by every conceivable measure.

Look a this way... Opening Day at Fenway is Monday. The Boston Marathon is a week after that. Memorial Day is six weeks after that. Summer is about 3 weeks after that.

You can handle this.

Where Exactly Do Our Sharks Hang Out?

The coast of Massachusetts has been home to a burgeoning Great White Shark population for a number of years. If you're just finding this out now, I apologize for being the bearer of bad news.

Anyone who even wades into the ocean should want to know how many finned nightmares are swimming around offshore. People who love sharks or who just have a general interest in how nature moves along may also ponder the question now and then.

Are you alive right now because thousands of sharks off of every beach ignored you? Is seeing a shark akin to winning the Powerball while being struck by lightning as you read the Qur'an? Is the answer in the middle somewhere?

While it's impossible to tell how many sharks we have overall with our present technology, you can use certain tricks to get an idea of at least Relative Activity between beaches.

Dr. Gregory Skomal is in this column as much as I am, but he does very important work. He's that guy who you see on the Discovery channel, jabbing harpoons into sharks. He's not hunting, though, just putting tags on them. He has various sorts of tags for Great White Sharks. Some can be tracked from space as the shark moves around. Others pop off the shark, float to the surface, and are gathered by fishermen/returned to scientists for data collection.

The harder Dr. Skomal works, the larger the data pool gets. The payoff favors the scientists at first, but it soon grows large enough that we regular people can almost score it like baseball standings or the presidential primaries.

I can do it right now. Chatham wins the Outer Cape in a rout. Wellfleet and Truro have a nailbiter going on the Bayside Cape, with the winner being dependent on how you score the game. Plymouth has a slight lead over Duxbury for the South Shore championship, while Martha's Vineyard owns a run from Buzzards Bay through Vineyard Sound.

They have a fun way of scoring these totals. One of those tags they use on sharks can be read by various receivers that are floating around various spots off of the Massachusetts coast. Over time, they can get a good idea of which sharks go where. They don't get all of the sharks, but they do gain valuable insight.

They (and we) use two numbers. One of them = "How many tagged sharks does a particular beach see every year? The other one is "How many total readings of tagged sharks does each beach get?" You end up with "We had X amount of visits by Y amount of sharks."

I'm going to try to make my own graphic for this, as it could be problematic if I steal the one from the Cape Cod Times. However, I can give you the numbers I have right now:

Boston: 22 appearances by 1 Great White Shark

Cape Ann: 26 appearances by 3 sharks

Massachusetts Bay: 7/1

Scituate: 37/3

Duxbury: 74/2

Plymouth: 104/4

Buzzards Bay (body of water): 3/1

Vineyard Sound: 18:2 (You'd think that Amity would own this contest, but No)

Provincetown: 902/8

Truro: 4748/20

Wellfleet: 6564/5

Orleans: 4367/23

Chatham: 14,124/28

Here are the locations of 11 of the 13 buoys, locations based on me rough-guessing by town:

A Few Things To Know (Or To Try To Find Out):

- I do not know if the sharks on the South Shore or in Boston are ones that were tagged off of Cape Cod. I'll try to get Dr. Skomal on the phone before I publish (never overestimate the pull with important people that this column has), but for now I'd say they were all tagged off of Cape Cod. I'm not aware of Dr. Skomal operating on the South Shore.

- I don't know if 2 of the 4 sharks off of Plymouth are 2 of the 2 sharks off of Duxbury. It is fun to ascribe people scenarios to fish, a la "the two sharks who make it up to Duxbury have a second home" or "two of the four Plymouth sharks are Jewish, and, well, Duxbury Beach is sort of like a sandy little country club" and so forth.

- If the Boston/Scituate/Duxbury/Mass Bay sharks are all the same ones, it implies both a low number (one shark is bad news, don't get me wrong, but if only 4 sharks round the tip of Provincetown and  get to the South Shore, I'm fairly safe when compared to 2 dozen or more making 14,000 appearances off of Chatham) and more of a wide range per shark.

- I have rather extensive archives via my time with different publications on Cape Cod, and have no intention of digging up the maps (I already have to make a phone call, c'mon!), but I'm thinking that, once you imagine these 4 sharks working western Cape Cod Bay, it looks a lot like the route taken by the tagged seals who are released off of Scusset Beach now and then.

- Places where I'd like to see Receiver Buoys that don't have them now... Sandwich, Marshfield, Hull, Hyannis, Dennis, Falmouth and Nantucket.

- I don't know how many RBs are in Buzzards Bay, or where in Buzzards Bay they may be. A good spread running from Wareham to New Bedford to Westport would be proper-like. Our last fatal shark attack was off of  Mattapoisett, in the 1930s.

- I don't know how much receiver buoys and transmitter tags cost, but it might behoove towns with large beach-tourist populations to spend the paper, follow Dr. Skomal's lead, hire some fishermen and try to tag any shark that comes across a sort of mid-Cape-Cod-Bay version of the Rubicon.

- If there are people who watch fishermen catch wicked tunas on TV, it's safe to say that I could sell my Taggin' Porkers show. I'd just need a few colorful fishermen (which, at last count, was all of them) and a bit of grease money to get the process moving.

- I'm not sure how long a shark has to hang around a buoy for it to count as an Appearance. Chatham has 14,000 appearances, but maybe half could be the same 3 or 4 sharks hanging around the edge of the range of the same buoy.

- At least one South Shore town should build a 70 story Quint statue right on the water facing the sea, to scare away any sharks who have seen Jaws (Jaws is viewed as a tragedy in both the human and shark worlds). "The Colossus Of Quint." I'd put it right where the trailer park is in Brant Rock.

- It'd be cool if one really bad-ass shark worked the whole coastline, sort of like how boxers or wrestlers used to barnstorm back in the proverbial Day.

- I still think that, once the sharks eat someone, lifeguarding will shift from beach chairs to boats with fish-finders, sirens, and cell phones. I'd also bet on drones getting in the mix somehow. The Hasselhoff/Pam Anderson/Beach Patrol style of lifeguard may be as much of a relic as a redcoat British soldier with a musket.

- Someone should invent a 50 foot, 50 knot-swimmin' killer whale Orca robot and have it patrol the South Shore. While killing sharks is frowned upon and most likely is illegal, if my robot did up one GWS in front of his buddies, they might all go to the Outer Banks or somewhere.

- If Donald Trump were a Duxbury selectman instead of the GOP front-runner, there would be a 5% chance that we'd at least study the possibility of running an underwater wall from the tip of Provincetown to, say, the tip of Hull. I doubt that the Mexicans would pay for it, but the short-fingered vulgarian would think of something.

Admission Of Fault In Sandwich Beach Erosion Dispute

The good people of Sandwich got some welcome news recently, as a recently released US Army Corps of Engineers report determined that the Corps was at fault in a Sandwich coastal erosion matter.

The issue at hand is beach sand erosion at Town Neck Beach. The cause is said to be the jetty at the east end of the Canal, on Scusset Beach.

Erosion along Cape Cod Bay is generally a give and take thing. Every wave carries off a bit of your beach, but those waves also steal sand from further up the current from you and dump it on your beach. Nobody wins, but nobody loses that badly... well, for the most part, generally.

Responding to one problem (shipwrecks happening as shipping rounded the treacherous waters off of Cape Cod), the Man created another one. The US Army Corps of Engineers now manage the Canal that was cut through Bourne and Sandwich to circumvent that nastier voyage. That management responsibility includes accessories like lighthouses and jetties.

These accessories, like the jetty off of Scusset Beach, have several functions. Some, like slowing down waves before they mess up Canal shipping, were intentional. Others, like the traffic jams on the bridges spanning the Canal, were matters more of the OOOPS! variety.

"OOOPS!" isn't so bad when you stub your toe or pour too much tequila into a drink, but it becomes Very Bad Indeed when it starts washing your yard away.

The jetty off Scusset stops the flow of sand down from the South Shore beaches as Mother Nature intended it. This fills in Scusset Beach with a nice, fresh layer of sand every X amount of years. By doing so, it deprives anything east of the jetty of the sand that they normally would gain via the motion of the ocean.

For 'bout a third of a mile immediately east of the Canal, it's a fair bargain. You lose out on new sand, but you get the protection of a big, federally-funded-and-maintained rockpile against the storm surf. Every beach gets hammered if the wind hits it, but the jetty blocks the worst of the surf from the dreaded north wind that always beats up Sandwich as a storm pulls away.

Storms aside, the real killer is the Western Maine Coastal Current, which flows southeast along the South Shore before hooking east around where the Canal is. The jetty protects that first area against the current, but the beach beyond it has no such protection.

Look at it from a satellite, zoom in close (Go ahead... look), and you'll see right where that protection runs out.

Beaches like Brewster and Dennis also lack the protection of a jetty of that magnitude, but they at least get the sand that is flowing away from Sandwich and Barnstable. Sandwich, and Town Neck Beach in particular, get hit by the current, they hit by the storm waves.... but they miss out on the replenishing beach sand washing down from Scituate and Manomet. It's lose/lose.

Even things that seem logical and symbiotic, like filling in Town Neck Beach with sand dredged out of the Canal, instead become illogical and parasitic when our friend D. Next Storm comes to town and that new sand washes down to Barnstable and Beyond. "Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear."

Sandwich has been losing 2.5 feet of beach a year since the flow of sand was cut off, and that jumped up to over 6 feet a year during the recent rash of coastal storms.

Generally, that's between Sandwich and God. God can't be sued. However, if someone plays God with the coastline, you can take your best James Sokolove at them

.
The admission of fault in the USACOE report (an honorable result, as giving the defendant the right of determining fault often ends up like when the wolf, the coyote and the chicken vote on what to have for dinner) opens up some doors as far as How To Fix This Problem goes.

Section 111 of 1968's River And Harbor Act authorizes up to ten million smackeroos in compensation for damage resulting directly from federal navigation projects.

According to the USACOE's own report, they are directly at fault. That saves Sandwich a lot of money, never a bad thing these days.

If the repairs cost less than ten million dollars, they are Uncle Sam's treat. Anything after that, the town and the feds split it 50/50.

That could also cost Sandwich millions, but they get millions in property taxes from houses along a tourist-drawing beach that pays for itself all over the friggin' town. Even if it's a fortune, it's money well-spent.

The decision should perk up ears in any town along the coast that may, say, have a USACOE seawall or something like that. One must be vigilant. Duxbury Beach residents barely dodged a similar bullet on seawall repairs, with the town about to lay all the costs on the residents before the people spoke up.

Sandwich hasn't won the war yet, but they did just take the Dub in a major battle.

Cape Cod Folks: Book Review

One of the odd things bout the Bible is that it pretty much jumps from Jesus as a toddler to Jesus on His world tour. There's no Teen Jesus part, which would have actually been pretty cool to read about. Maybe not that much happened to Teen Jesus, hence the focus on the birth story and the ending.

Plymouth is sort of the same way. We all have a basic visual of how 1621 Plimoth looked, and we can drive into Plymouth right damned now if we wanted to know the modern version personally. However, Plimoth was a backwater fairly soon in her history, especially in what is now Southern Plymouth.

Luckily, we have a book set in postbellum Plymouth. Beyond that, you're on your own.

Before we start, a bit of geography.

"Cape Cod" today means "all of the land east of the Cape Cod Canal." If you want to get technical, Sandwich and Bourne own a bit of the mainland, with places like Sagamore Beach and Bournedale serving as a buffer zone... sort of like a salty Estonia.

Before they dug the Canal, defining the borders of the Cape was a more dodgy proposition. Your best answer was "east of the Scusset and Manomet Rivers." Some people might point to a line running from the Wareham River to Great Herring Pond in Pymouth. Others would define Cape Cod's border as the Manomet River (bungle "Manomet" as you say it, and you now know why Monument Beach in Bourne is named what it is) as it runs to Great Herring Pond in the Plymouth/Bournedale area, and from Great Herring Pond over coastal streams to just about Ellisville.

These distinctions prove two things. One, "Cape Cod" used to include the southeastern hinterlands of Plymouth. Two, ol' Sarah Pratt McLean Greene wasn't wrong when she wrote "Cape Cod Folks" about Plymouth residents.

I don't read as many books as I used to. The NFL takes up a lot of my time, as does marketing, pornography, reggae, local politics, stuff with the family.... I'm more likely to be up in a website than in a book these days. Some people might look down on that, but hey... I'm reading.

I did feel the need to blast through Cape Cod Folks, as it is set in Cedarville. Our Plymouth road office is in the White Cliffs, in Cedarville. Not much goes on there, and I was curious as to how someone would crank a book out about a post-bellum version of it.

SPOILERS!

The year was 1881, and a woman (Sarah Platt McLean Greene) of both privilege and higher education leaves New York on, as she says, "a mission." I get sort of lost when people speak Olde American, but I think she wanted to minister to some wretches. A classmate of hers was working as a schoolmarm out in the sticks, could no longer keep the job, and offered it to Sarah. It turns out to be an isolated (meaning "the train doesn't go near there") coastal village in Plymouth.

The author uses fake names. She herself is either "Miss Hungerford" or "Teacher." Cedarville is both Kedarville and (colloquially) Wallencamp. Plymouth is Wallen or West Wallen. Falmouth is Farmouth. Sandwich, Bourne, New Bedford, Braintree, Fall River and Taunton all appear as themselves.

The story is a fish out of water tale, sort of an earlier, less funny version of The Egg And I. The author takes a job in a one-room schoolhouse (a building which still stands today, right on the corner of Long Pond Road and Herring Pond Road) for $8 a week, settles into a boarding house and falls in love with the town.

Her ride in a carriage from Plymouth's train depot to Cedarville may be the foundation of the old Cape Cod "sass" story. A socialite took a carriage to Cape Cod. The driver started talking, the socialite shushed him gracelessly, and the rest of the ride went down in silence. When settling the bill, the socialite saw a $1 charge that she couldn't identify, and she asked the driver what it was for. " Sass," said the driver. "I don't take it much, ma'am, and when I do, I charge."

The residents of Cedarville are as hick as it gets. As Dennis Miller once joked, "there were people there who were their own fathers." Most of the people in town have been no further away from Cedarville than Sandwich. The author's first conversation is with a man who explains where her house is by pointing out that "there's miles,and there's Cape Cod  miles, child." It goes downhill from there.

The only visitor comes to cull the town's virgins from the schoolhouse, you don't even get near seeing a black guy, and the Beverly Hillbillies would snicker at the folksy manners of the Cedarville residents. Several of the people mentioned in the story were able to win a Libel suit against the author.

She moves into a boarding house run by a retired sea captain and his wife. There is a son at sea with the scorned-wife name of Philander Keeler. The grandparents can be called nothing but Grandma and Grandpa by anyone who interacts with them, and they live in a one-story house of many rooms known as "The Ark." Most of the business in the comes-to-charm-you village conducts itself through the Ark at some point.

She meets the kids, all of whom- ages 3 through 20- are taught in the same class. If you squint sideways at the class descriptions in To Kill A Mockingbird, you'd have about the right idea of what her lot looks like. There's one kid who goes to class barefoot ("In January. On Cape Cod."), another who has to be dragged in by his father, a third who eventually gets scarlet fever and pretty much dies at her desk, and a rough-but-charming 19 year old named Becky.

Becky gets involved later, although not in a HLA manner. Not that kind of book, player. Becky and the teacher get hung up on the same guy, a lady-killing yacht owner. The author has other shadowy student issues, as she later promises her hand in marriage to a student who is taking to sea.

Cedarville food takes some getting used to. They eat whatever food (beans, pumpkins) is up for harvest for weeks at a time. At one point, every kid in her class raised their hand when asked "Who had split herring for breakfast today?" Popcorn is the big party food, coated with milk and sugar. If you get sick, Grandma boils up some onions and molasses. I don't recall seeing them get any sort of meat other than fish.

It goes without saying that the arrival of the fetching young schoolmarm tunes up every bachelor in town. They visit her constantly, both alone and en masse, hoping to go five-hole on the blue-blood babe. They all want her as a wife, and she eventually narrows it down to the fisherman with money and one of her students. The winner gets killed, of course.

It's a charming little book, and makes a great guide for anyone who wondered how things were around here 135 years ago. Pretty much all of the book is conducted in an isolated area running from about Manomet through Sagamore.

I'll save you some Qs by telling you that there are no car chases, sex scenes, dinosaurs, snipers, rappers-turned-actors, karate fights, CGI, elves, aliens and so forth... so it's already down one star.

I was able to read this book for Nathan, thanks to the good people at Project Gutenberg.

Added Bonus: Quotes!

"The Wallencampers were quick to note the estrangement between us, and affirmed that "Beck was mad, and wouldn't speak to teacher, along o' teacher's goin' with Beck's beau.'"

"Investigating the place where she had been sitting, I found a wild confusion of claws and shells, as carefully denuded of meat as though they had been turned inside out for that purpose.

What was my surprise and mortification to find a like collection at nearly every seat in the school-room, and all the while my flock had seemed unusually silent and attentive; such proficiency had those children acquired in the art of dissecting lobsters.

I saw how many they devoured day by day, and how much water they drank, and I fancied that they themselves grew to partake more and more of the form and character of marine animals. I believed that they could have existed equally well crawling at the bottom of the deep or swimming on its surface."


"And yet, notwithstanding this, they had grown used to a wild ruggedness of nature and condition, a terrible, sublime uncertainty about life and things in general when the wind blew, missing which, in this earthly state, they would have pined most sadly. And I do not believe that they would have exchanged their rugged, storm-swept, wind-beleaguered little section of Cape Cod for a realm in sunny Italy itself; no."

"I knew what it meant—mild winter on the Cape! There's the devil in the old Cape weather, teacher, and he never skipped four seasons yit! If it ain't one time, it must be another. Yis, yis! mild winter on the Cape, and no March to speak on, and a hurricane in summer! "


"A little more than a year after I left Wallencamp, I heard of Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's death. "Very quiet and peaceful," they said concerning Grandma, but I had known what sort of a death-bed hers would be. Scarcely a week after she had passed away, Grandpa Keeler followed her. I had it from good authority that he kept about the house till the last. There was a "rainy spell," and he stood often gazing out of the window "with a lost look on his face," and once he said with a wistful, broken utterance and a pathetic longing in his eyes that did away forever with any opprobrium there might have been in connection with the term, that "it was gittin' to be very lonely about the house without ma pesterin' on him."


"Since then, I have not heard from Wallencamp. It is doubtful whether I ever get another letter from that source. Though singularly gifted in the epistolary art, it is but a dull and faint means of expression to the souls of the Wallencampers—and they will not forget. From the storms that shake their earthly habitations, they pass to their sweet, wild rest beside the sea; and by and by, when I meet them, I shall hear them sing."

Marsh Madness: The South Shore Coastal Flooding Championship

Our aim today is to rank the beaches of Southeastern Massachusetts for Coastal Flooding Vulnerability.

There are several things that you should know before you dive into this pool. For starters, this is the second time that I have written this article. The first time I wrote it, just explaining the rubric I'll be using took about 15000 words, and that was before I even started ranking the towns. Jessica had the fine idea of working the rubric into the town descriptions as I rank them, and that seems like a pretty good space-saver.

Secondlyish, remember that our major flood risk on the South Shore comes from nor'easters. If you add hurricanes to the list, it suddenly becomes Cape Cod and South Coast-dominated.

Also, know that there is no clear winner for this. Duxbury, Scituate and Marshfield can all make a legitimate claim on the top spot. Duxbury Beach, parts of which are severed from the rest of Massachusetts now and then, has the worst conditions (we'll explain in a minute), but the other two towns have heavily populated shorelines.

Because of that, we're going to sort of group towns of varying threat levels. More on that in a sec...

We're not claiming the title for the state. The North Shore is also a stormy place. We're just gonna leave those beaches for some North Shore blogger. While we plan to annex Bourne and Sandwich for this discussion, they'll go back to the Cape for the Barnstable County version of this article.

Finally, know that we are using town-by-town rankings. There are many good reasons to break things up neighborhood-by-neighborhood. Great and potentially dangerous differences exist between how Duxbury Beach suffers in a storm and how Duxbury's Powder Point neighborhood fares.

However, going by neighborhood would give us a boring Top 10 of Duxbury Beach, 4 Marshfield neighborhoods and 5 Scituate ones. Also, if you think this article is long, imagine one where I have to differentiate between maybe 35 different beaches in a dozen towns.

Ranking-by-town takes the onus off of your author, who grew up on one beach and is an expert on that one beach, and instead will let residents of various neighborhoods fight it out in the comments section about whether Peggotty Beach gets it worse than Minot does.

RANKINGS

Again, the rubric I use would take all day to explain.

Highlights include beach length/width, population, past damage, loss of life, barrier beaches, behind-the-beach wetlands, orientation, development, wind direction, storm strength, latitude, longitude, offshore rock formations, jetties, groynes, currents, dual frontage, property values, media coverage, breaching, erosion, sand dunes... you know, the whole nine.

I've put as much thought into this as anyone has, and it seems like you can break the beaches up along three threat levels. Major, Moderate and Minor.

They go a little something like this:

- If your waterfront house doesn't need a seawall, you're Minor.

- If your waterfront house has some flooding issues, you're Moderate.

- If you stand a chance of being killed in your waterfront house (during a storm, of course)... Major.

I'm resisting the urge to try some Foxworthian "If a live fish has ever washed into your house, you might be in a Major coastal flooding community" jokes. You're welcome.

We realize that Minor, Moderate and Major are boring, so feel free to use some other more amusing trinity if it pleases you. Parish/Bird/McHale, Original/Extra Crispy/Grilled, Stink/Stank/Stunk... whatever you're into, people.

MINOR

KINGSTON

Kingston enjoys a cushy spot on the South Shore, tucked into a cove and sheltered by three barrier beaches. Two of these barrier beaches- Duxbury Beach and Long Beach- are small. The other one- Cape Cod- is not.

Kingston can suffer storm damage, but it will always be exponentially smaller than damage suffered by her barrier beaches.

Kingston is by far the southernmost town on the Mild list. Almost all of the other Mild towns are sheltered by Hull. Kingston stands alone here.

To be fair to Kingston, part of the decision to have her be last in the rankings is that she is the Mild town for which I have the coolest picture.


WEYMOUTH

Weymouth has an itty-bitty shoreline, hidden behind the blind side protector that is Hull.

She may even hold the very bottom ranking, except that she has the Fore River,and that can amplify flooding a bit.

One wonders if the Fore River was named by a golfer. If the Blues Brothers movie was set in Massachusetts, Elwood would have almost certainly jumped the Fore River drawbridge while Jake was throwing the cigarette lighter out the window.

Via the Fore River, she exemplifies the vibe you'll see several times on the Mild list... she doesn't have much trouble, but when she has trouble, it's Big trouble.

HINGHAM

Weymouth stands behind Hull. Hingham, on the other hand, is literally hiding in Hull's skirt. Aliens viewing Massachusetts from space would think that Hull was built to protect Hingham.

Hingham is on a bay, so there is some flood risk, but it is minor when compared to what would happen to a Brant Rock or Town Neck Beach during the same storm. She's far enough north that some storms miss her entirely.

Hingham looks very much like a t-shirt when viewed on a roughly-drawn political map. I just wanted that on the Internet somewhere.

Hingham's flood risk is low enough that, as you can tell, I shot my Hingham photograph while zipping through Hingham at 45 MPH on my way to Nantasket or somethin'.

QUINCY

Not Quincy (it's Green Harbor), but Quincy has shoreline, trust me)

Quincy is a unique fish, in that if you draw straight line X from Weymouth's coastal border with Quincy to Boston's coastal border with Quincy, you'd use about one third of the ink that you'd need to use to draw the actual X-times-three twisted shoreline that Quincy claims between Boston and Weymouth

Quincy has a pincer-shaped coastline that funnels water towards the middle, a much milder version of Bangladesh. The pincers are made of heavily-populated areas.

Why aren't they in the Moderate group?

Quincy is a sheltered bay town. She has Hull and, to a lesser extent, Winthrop blocking for her. She also has Boston Harbor islands which break up the surf somewhat. She's the northernmost town on this list, which means that storms which clip the South Shore with their northern fringe may not touch Quincy.

Quincy also came up on the losing end of the "Should densely-populated Quincy be scored more for moderate storm damage than southern Duxbury Beach (population: zero) is for worse damage?" argument that the authors had while constructing our rubric.


COHASSET

Cohasset is the least likely town to be on the Mild list when you're looking at a map. She has plenty of shoreline, has no barrier beach in front of it, and claims coastal-flooding heavyweight Scituate as her next-door neighbor.

Cohasset "loses" on intangibles. She has a rocky shoreline ("Cohasset" is bad Algonquian for "long rocky place"), Ledges and rocks/rockpiles lay offshore, breaking up waves. Although she's considered South Shore, her northern border lays about on the same longitude as Boston. That keeps her off the fringes of a lot of storms.

Cohasset even sits higher than her neighbors do, usually on a bunch of rocks. She has a more Northerly bearing than Scituate does, which means that she is most vulnerable to the lesser storm winds.

Cohasset comes up with the short straw when arguing about "Should a town where some 5th generation slacker who is barely holding on to his damaged Humarock cottage be scored worse than a wealthier town where homeowners who suffer damage just go to one of their other houses?"

MODERATE

BOURNE

Bourne and Sandwich are being borrowed from Cape Cod for this article, because they each have unique coastal flooding characteristics that will come in handy when describing Massachusetts coastal flooding scenarios.

For starters, Bourne is the only town which has Canal Flooding as a factor in her own personal rubric. Canal flooding seems silly, until you talk to people who were alive in 1938 and recall houses washing down the Cape Cod Canal with families inside trying to claw their way out of the attic ceiling.

Bourne, which doesn't suffer major nor'easter damage when compared to a place like Duxbury Beach, does have the unique distinction of being the only town in Massachusetts which touches both Cape Cod Bay and (the body of water) Buzzards Bay. That exposes them to both nor'easter damage and hurricane damage.

Remember, a two-front war is what did Hitler in. Bourne has been Poseidon's punching bag many times before. Heavyweights on this list like Duxbury and Scituate were barely touched by Hurricane Bob, while Bourne was torn to shreds.

When we start mixing hurricane damage vulnerability into the rubric, Bourne jumps up from Moderate to Major and shoves aside Duxbury and Scituate to claim the top ranking. In that regard, they may even be in a class by themselves.

However, the mojo of these rankings is more Nor'easter, and this drops Bourne down a weight class.

SANDWICH

Sammich also has a problem with coastal flooding that could, eventually, push her into the top part of the rankings.

The Cape Cod Canal, which helps everyone out, requires a huge jetty at the Cape Cod Bay end to keep sand from washing into the Canal and beaching ships. The idea works so well that Sandwich beaches are suffering Sand Depletion. This occurs when sand that would normally wash down the South Shore and replenish Sandwich beaches instead fails to get around the jetty and subsequently makes Scusset Beach very nice.

The problem is compounded when ol' Mr. Storm comes along and washes the Sand out of Sandwich. I don't even know where it ends up, but it's never good when your Sandwich gets smaller every high tide.

The process works in such a manner that even simple logic- use the sand that you dig out of the Canal when you dredge it to replenish Sandwich beaches- is foiled when the storms wash all of the new (to them, anyhow) sand away.

The Scusset jetty also takes away the ability to build jetties in Sandwich... you can't trap sand that isn't coming, even if you have Sand in your name. I'm told that this is why the Sandman lives inland.

This is a Major list sort of problem, but Sandwich is also has Cape Cod blocking her NE wind waves. She does get pounded by nor'easters, but generally it is the latter, north-wind sections of them. Much like Bourne, this knocks them down a letter grade.

To be fair to Sammich, note that they fit my listed condition (no seawall) for Minor status, but their unique problem with shifting sands moves them up a tax bracket. It is tough to keep them out of Major, but Moderate is where they stand.


HULL

H-U-Double-Hockeysticks has it all on paper. They are the barrier beach for Hingham, Weymouth, Quincy and even Boston. They are thrust out into the sea like some strange and sandy phallus. They take big hits from the ocean, and are close enough to Boston to possibly enjoy a bigger storm reputation.

I give them extra points for having one road out of town, and even more points for the ability of that road out to be flooded over in spots.

Hull appears very much like God wanted this section of the Massachusetts coast to have bookends, as Hull looks sort of like an inverted version of coastal flooding heavyweight Duxbury Beach.

Hull has three factors keeping them in Moderate status.

First, they are very rocky.

Second, they enjoy relatively high elevation above sea level in some of the more vulnerable spots.

Third, they are far enough north that they miss some of the fringe coastal storm action.

They do have, to my knowledge, the best football field in Massachusetts (and, therefore, probably the world) to watch a game at during a nor'easter.


PLYMOUTH

America's Hometown is huge, and has a shipload of coastline. It was large enough in 1620 that the Pilgrims managed to hit it sailing from Europe.

They have Cape Cod blocking for it, and that saves them a lot of storm damage. That's why they're in the Moderate category, player. If you want to know how much wind and wave damage you gain or lose by having Cape Cod between you and an ocean storm, the difference is about Scituate vs. Plymouth.

A good section of town (and a major business district) is protected by a lengthy barrier beach and an intricately designed jetty. The rest of the town is guarded by more jetties, groynes and so forth.

They do have some problems.  I spent most of my Physics class in high school looking at legs, but I did face the chalkboard enough to pick up that Potential vs Kinetic energy stuff. Cedarville has a few dozen houses perched on sand cliffs 100 feet above the ocean. The ocean, even with a Hawaii 5-0-style tsunami wave that would kill 100000 Indonesians, can't touch these houses... yet.

Storms only damage sand and beach grass right now on Cedarville, but I would be very, very remiss if I failed to gauge the "sand cliffs slowly erode, and houses set on them will some day plunge 100 feet straight down into the ocean" factor into my judgement.

Plymouth is also the only town in the region with a "I wonder if the coastal flooding will reach our oceanfront nuclear reactor?" problem.

Note that Gurnet Point/Saquish are part of Plymouth politically, but they are geographically part of Duxbury Beach. This classification by the editor (Hi!) lowers Plymouth's rating while not raising Duxbury's.

MAJOR

MARSHFIELD

Marsh Vegas, Deluxbury and Skitchate are sort of 1A 1B and 1C in our rankings. You can make an argument about top rank for any of them, and against any of them. If you demand a numerical ranking, I'd give Marshfield #3. The gap between #3 and #4 is substantial, however. The gap between #3 and #1? Not so huge.

You may have seen Marshfield in action on the TV set during last year's blizzard(s), which tore through the seawall and wrecked a few houses. That's the kind of action that breaks apart the Moderates and the Majors.

Marshfield has 5 miles of coastline, some of which (Rexhame) serves as a barrier beach for other parts of the town. Sexy Rexy is also one of two Moraines (glacial deposits of sand and stone laid out in a straight line or something) on the East Coast that serve as a barrier beach. Marshfield, which deserves it, has the most Jetty action on the South Shore, to my knowledge... although I think that Plymouth has the biggest individual jetty down by Issac's.

Marshfield has it all, a perfect town with which to lead off the Major part of the rankings. Direct northeast frontage? Check. Far enough north that Cape Cod doesn't block for it, but far enough south that storms hit it? Check. Heavily populated immediate shoreline? Marsh Vegas is jammed along the coast.

Every beach in town (Rexhame, Fieldston, Sunrise, Ocean Bluff, Brant Rock, Blackman's Point, Blue Fish Cove, Burke's and Green Harbor... if Wikipedia missed one, let me know in the comments) has been smashed by surf. They are even drawing TV news crews away from Scituate, which is important because Media Swagger matters to me when I do the rankings.

What keeps them from owning the top spot outright? For one, the worst flooding you see in Vegas (the Esplanade area, home to the former Arthur & Pat's) is splashover. Up until last winter, I had 40+ years of living in that area where seeing a house get wrecked was a rare event.

The shifting of the sands (Marshfield beaches are fed by the erosion of Scituate's sand cliffs, and replenishment has been blocked somewhat by the storm-breaking jetty system Marsh Vegas employs) has left Marshfield with higher-than-average seawalls. This helps, in that it takes larger waves to get over it, and hurts, in that the base of the seawall can be exposed. This leads to- as we saw last winter- catastrophic seawall failure.

Still, Vegas is nothing but Major. Don't you worry... anyone who says otherwise has to fight me first. Unfortunately, the "don't you worry" part also is intended for whoever has to fight me. I'm a big softy.


SCITUATE

"Scituate" would be almost everyone's immediate answer for the "Who gets the worst coastal flooding conditions?" question.

Scituate owns the news coverage for nor'easters. I bet that Shelby Scott still has nightmares based in Scituate. The sea screams out of every picture you take along the coastline. The town name even looks nautical, dog. To the seasoned observer, however, this coverage is why the Scitty By The Sea doesn't have the top spot... the news crews can get to Scituate in a storm.

More than one person (or maybe it was just me doing it more than once) has noted that only the Irish and Italians have the Catholic tendency for self-punishment necessary to build their Irish Riviera right smack in the middle of Nor'easter Alley. I'm as Mick as a Sinn Fein holiday party, and I actually look forward to these storms.

Scituate (and Marshfield to a lesser extent) was never even considered for anything but Major status. People have- allow me the use of the double adverb relatively recently- died in Scituate during coastal storms. If you buy a house in Scituate, and if a storm wrecks it, people will look at you like you're a damned fool if you complain about it. "Seriously, guy... what did you think was gonna happen?"

I actually went to Scituate's Facebook page to try to get the residents fighting each other over which beach in town gets beaten up the worst in storms, but I posted at a bad news time and got little action on the matter.

Scituate has a lot of coastline, and much of it precarious. Humarock, which  lot of people think is part of Marshfield, is actually a part of Scituate that was split off from Scin Scity by the Portland Gale of 1898, a storm which actually shifted the mouth of the North River.

Other parts of town (Minot, Peggotty Beach, etc...) may ring a bell with you, mostly from local news nor'easter coverage. They all get punished during even minor nor'easters like they were kids from an Adrian Peterson/Joan Crawford tryst.

Either way, if you make your own list and have Scituate at the top, I really wouldn't argue that much with you. She has earned every one of her stripes.


DUXBURY

Photo from the girl who used to own The Fairview, I forget her name...

Duxbury owns the #1 spot. The short answer as to "Why?" would be "Look at it on Google Maps."

However, if a Scituate or even Marshfield supporter came to me and said "I think that the rankings should be more biased towards towns with heavily populated shorelines," I'd tell them that "You would then need to put Scituate or Marshfield at #1 and maybe drop Duxbury down to Moderate."

Duxbury has several factors that otherwise make her the worst spot in Massachusetts for coastal flooding.

- Duxbury Beach gets torn from the mainland a lot. She is presently attached to the mainland only because a convoy of about 100 trucks a day for 6 months dumped sand to fill in the beach breach that went down during the Halloween Gale.

- Duxbury has a 6 mile barrier beach which suffers ridiculous damage, but much of the remainder of the town is also exposed to coastal flooding... albeit of a far lesser ferocity. Duxbury's coastline after/inside of the barrier beach suffers Hingham-style storm damage. Shes the only town on the South Shore to get interior coastal flooding a mile or more back from the barrier beach.

- There is about one (1) patch of trees on Duxbury Beach with which to moderate storm winds.

- Duxbury has a very short seawall when compared to Marshfield. Duxbury gets all the sand that washes out from under Green Harbor's seawall. You can step off of Duxbury's seawall without breaking stride now and then, and even the highest height that the seawall gets from the beach is about half of the lowest height that you'll see in Marsh Vegas.

- Duxbury Beach has a giant marsh behind it. Since many storms hit during a full or new moon tide, this means that Duxbury Beach lays between a mile of flooded marsh and the fury of the angry Atlantic. Duxbury Beach neighborhoods often flood during full moon tides even without storms.

- Because of that marsh, Duxbury Beach becomes an island with a height of about 3-5 feet above sea level before the storms hit it during full moon tides. Water pushes in on the narrow beach from both front and back. This island, again because of the marsh flooding, is about a mile out to sea.

- The roads in and out of Duxbury Beach wash over from the marsh well before high tide, with or without storms. If you're not out of Duxbury Beach by an hour before high tide, you're pretty much there for the day.

- Waves break on houses during storms, something you don't see (those shots of Scituate on the news are spray) a lot in non-hurricane communities.

- Duxbury is the first town on the South Shore (as well as the first town of the Big Three) to not enjoy protection from Cape Cod as a barrier beach. The wind seems to both sense and resent this status, and it hits Duxbury with monster truck force. This status is such that, if the wind is more southeast than east, the title shifts to Marshfield.

- Duxbury Beach has 6 miles of shoreline (plus, since she's a peninsula, 6 more of almost open-ocean bayside coast). About a third of a mile of that oceanfront has any sort of seawall in front of it. As we said, that seawall is about as low as they get on the South Shore, at least of the Army Corps Of Engineers variety. Even the section of the beach with the seawall gets catastrophic damage during storms. When you go beyond the seawall, it gets worse.

- Because of this tendency towards damage, they stopped trying to build any sort of cottages out there a long time ago. Duxbury Beach is prone to Galveston-style overwash in strong storms. Only a fool would build beyond the seawall.

- Because of that, Duxbury Beach has a limbo-under-a-schnauzer low population. I was one of four (4) kids in a 5 mile stretch of land when I was growing up there.

- That Peggotty Beach cottage (the one on stilts) picture I used for the Scituate section of this article? That house wouldn't be standing on Duxbury Beach. Duxbury lost their last no-seawall-in-front-of-them cottages in the Blizzard of '78, and they were already husks for decades by that point. Scituate, if you drive through it, is full of that 1950s cottage style that has long since been destroyed and rebuilt differently in Duxbury.

- This author puts Gurnet Point and Saquish into the Duxbury category, even though they are part of Plymouth. If you ever get a chance to view Gurnet Point, know that this terribly exposed area is actually the high ground on Duxbury Beach... and by a large margin. Saquish was most likely an island when the Pilgrims arrived.

- The reason you don't see Duxbury on the news during storms is because it is impossible to get a news van in and out of Duxbury Beach for a half dozen hours or so during a storm events. You almost have to wait for low tide to leave in some instances. A morning news crew sent to Duxbury Beach for a storm wouldn't get back to Boston until the evening news broadcast was happening.

- My brother used to manage Avalon, and we had a piece of Avalon's old dance floor in my Ocean Road North cellar prior to the Halloween Gale. It actually washed out of the house during the Gale, and we later found it 5 miles across Duxbury Bay, by Sweetser's.

- No one less than the National Guard will prevent you from entering Duxbury Beach during bad storms. They will also intercept, buy and eat any pizzas you try to get delivered into Duxbury Beach during a storm, as we found out during the Halloween Gale.

Anyhow, those are the rankings. Questions? Appreciation? Hate? Differing opinions? That's what the Comments feature is for. Use it.

Body Of Missing Malden Teen Washes Up On The Gurnet

Gurnet Head is in the background of this picture, and that stuff in the foreground isn't a body...

A body was discovered on a remote Plymouth Beach yesterday, and it has been identified as a Malden teenager who had gone missing from Quincy in October.

A man loading his truck with rocks discovered the body, which was in a deep state of decay. The man initially thought he had found a mannequin, but that did not prove to be the case.

Josue D. Quispe-Almendro was last seen by his brother in October. A Nissan Pathfinder linked to him was found on Moon Island Road, in the Squantum section of Quincy. A somewhat cryptic Facebook post and a bit of the new friends/coming home late routine added intrigue to the mystery.

A massive land/sea/air search failed to locate the child, who was reported missing on October 18th.

Authorities are mum as to how and in what condition Josue entered the water. They can not yet determine if foul play was involved.

Saquish Head and Gurnet Point are remote headlands at the end of the Duxbury Beach peninsula. They jut out into Cape Cod Bay quite some distance, and this isn't the first time that bodies have washed up there.

Two men missing/presumed dead in the 1982 World Airways Flight 30 crash at Logan Airport were reportedly hauled up- still belted into their seats- by  fisherman off of Saquish a few months after the crash. He lost control of the bodies, and they were never recovered.

Josue's body was taken to the Office Of The Chief Medical Examiner, who will perform an autopsy.

A body floating aound and washing up out there may be proof that the Great White Shark population which Duxbury had in the summer has gone South.

1991 Duxbury Beach Storm Damage From The Halloween Gale

Living on the shore of the sea does have some benefits, but there is what actuaries and lawyers call Inherent Risk.

We're going to explore some of the consequences of that risk in today's article, which heavily leans on pictures given to us by the Bedford Family, formerly of Ocean Road North on Duxbury Beach.

They show damage from the 1991 Halloween Gale, which people from Inland might call The Perfect Storm or the No-Name Storm.

No one who lived through it calls it "the Perfect Storm," as it is sort of cruel to use positive superlatives when talking to victims. "Hey, Jackie O.... sorry about the dead husband and everything, but you gotta admit, that was some splendid shooting."

The only non-Bedford, non-1991 picture is the one above. It is from the Federicci family, and shows an incoming high tide during a nor'easter last year.

Everything else was post-Gale carnage.

The gale arrived around Halloween Eve, Devil's Night. The local forecasters blew it (the better forecasts spoke of a storm at sea), and we had practically no warning.

A hurricane offshore (Grace) met a nor'easter, got absorbed, re-formed into a hurricane, and spun around in a crazy course off of the Massachusetts coast. Mammoth waves with hurricane winds behind them pounded the Massachusetts coastline. Damage was in the hundreds of millions in 1991 dollars.

The storm was never named, even though it was a hurricane. This was officially to avoid confusion, but also most likely because there was a bit of shame involved among the weatherheads. To be fair, the hurricane never made landfall, and the nor'easter (which later became the hurricane) did most of the damage.

This storm gentrified Duxbury Beach faster than a BMW parade of yuppies.

Some people could take no more, and sold out. The people who bought the old propertuies built them up. Other people cashed in insurance checks and built much larger houses. Throw in the stilts under the houses, and this storm changed the whole skyline of the neighborhood.

The houses you remember from the 1960s and 70s were gradually and emphatically phased out by the Halloween Gale, and the Blizzard of '78. Cottages in front of the dunes were gone by 1978. Little cottages on the seawall were leveled in 1991.

Every house you see here was rebuilt into a much more valuable property. This drives up property values, leading other families to sell. A cycle ensues, and the Irish Riviera fades into history.

The storm was a monster, every bit the equal of 1978. You'd rank them 1 and 1A. The Gale far surpassed damage done to Duxbury by Hurricane Bob, who had visited about a month and change before. Bob was a cakewalk in Duxbury, but the Gale was taking no sh*t.

This house washed back into the street. It was not the worst destruction of a house on that street, as a cottage at the other end of Ocean Road North pretty much disintegrated.

Even the houses on Cable Hill lost decks, which is very unusual.

The Gale was a slow mover, and it hit the beach with 8 storm tides. This article is being published on the 24th anniversary of the day when you could finally get back into the neighborhood and stay for a high tide.

Everyone with a brain had fled on the morning of the 30th, when waves were smashing the seawall 4 hours before high tide. Smart people run to get away from stuff like that.

Unless you're me, of course... then you run to Get To the besieged house so you can watch the storm.

A friend of mine and I watched this storm from the 2nd story of 65 ORN. I had to swim to get to my house. I had to wade through my house to get to an upper floor. We had ostensibly gone there to rescue a schnauzer, and decided that we wouldn't survive an escape attempt.

The episode of Beavis & Butthead where they go to the trailer park to watch a tornado hit is a good allegory. It even rivaled the damage ("A tornado can smash a poodle's face with a brick!" "Yeah, it can rip out your heart and show it to you!") the boys were seeking to witness.

The storm was as nasty as they tell you it was. The neighborhood was under about 6-10 feet of water, depending on the wave wash.. The ocean was level with the seawall, meaning that waves could just roll right into your house and smash it. My yard was level with the seawall, so waves would actually break on my house. I watched a few hours of it from inside my house, a few hours more from Cable Hill.

The waves were 8-10 feet high, which is funny because I have read a storm damage potential assessment for Duxbury Beach which said that waves can't get beyond 6 feet.

If they had YouTube back then and if I had a video camera, I'd be as YouTube famous as Jenna Marbles or the Epic Meal Time guys. We were right in the belly of the beast.

Coastal Storm Clean-Up Notes

Sara Flynn on the camera, Sara Flynn's dog on the stick.

This last storm was fun to take pictures of, but it was a D+ grade storm historically, maybe a generous C if you value Staying Power. The dog enjoyed it heartily.

No one, except the guy I photographed jumping the Sandwich boardwalk on a parasail, is going to look back on this storm in 20 years with anyone who will remember what he was talking about. It doesn't merit historical consideration, other than the tragedy down in the Bahamas with the MMA kid.

However, even minor storms can mess up the neighborhood pretty nasty, and things will be a bit ugly until Toil and Tide smooths everything over.

We'll try to give you an idea of how the coastal people deal with storms.

This is an old picture, from a 2006 Duxbury nor'easter, To my knowledge, there were no houses torn apart in this last storm.

If the storm is bad enough to take houses, it goes without saying that the cleanup will be lengthier and more complicated.

Some storms can even alter the look of the neighborhood forever. To keep it Duxbury, I can recall the Blizzard of '78 being the end of the road for cottages in front of the dunes. The 1991 Halloween Gale knocked over the last of the 1950s-style cottages, and future gales will put the rest of the neighborhood up on stilts.

Again, this storm wasn't a home-killer. We're just establishing one end of the spectrum for the discussion.

The next level of storm is where the houses are up, but the road is ruined. This is the Ocean Bluff/Brant Rock area, after one of last winter's blizzards. That's not a dirt road, that's heavily-used and trust-me-it's-paved Route 139.

The ocean, when it moves from shoreline to street, isn't just water. It is moving large piles of sand and stone with it, as well as anything that might be in the yard of whoever owns the land the ocean is washing through.

When I was trapped in my house for the Halloween Gale, you couldn't stand in front of a window, even on the second floor, when waves were breaking on the house. Each wave would slam a Shirley Jackson story worth of stones off of the house. That's why you board the windows up, player.

Those stones also wash past the house, and that usually puts them in the street.

Sand also shifts, remember...

This was the most damage I saw working the Sandwich-Barnstable-Yarmouth-Dennis run during the storm last weekend. Some DPW guy can sweep that ish back up onto the dune or whatever happens to it in this town.

Duxbury usually has the other sort of problem, with the ocean slicing through from ocean to bay. That makes parts of Duxbury Beach- as well as Saquish, where people live- into islands. Most of the town's effort after the 1991 storm involved making the beach whole again.

Otherwise, people get cut off, supplies get low, panic ensues, and the people from the Gurnet rise up and slaughter the people of Saquish for food and goodies.

Even tony Sandwich takes her lumps now and then.

Sammich is located on the wrong side of the Cape Cod Canal jetty, and it gets very little replenishment sand from more northern towns.

Prior to the construction of the jetty, this was the sole benefit that Sandwich gained from nor'easters. Once the jetty was up, Sammich was having sand washed down the beach from them without getting any sand washed down to them.

This eventually leads to large chunks of Sandwich being claimed by the sea. The sea then starts touching things that she isn't supposed to be touching, like highways.

It's probably not going to come to that on Route 6A, at least from what I saw this weekend. There were some houses taking shots, and I'd bet that they lost a lot of sand.

If the street an the beach got messed up, you can bet that the wall that was supposed to be protecting the street has been compromised.

Seawall repairs are ugly business, for several reasons. One, if you need them, you most likely just had a damage-doin' storm. Two, seawall repairs are costly, with coastal towns sitting on potential seawall repair bills running into the millions. Three, there will almost always be a fight between homeowners, the town, the state and the US of g*d-damned A over who will be footing the bills for the seawall repair.

I am related to at least one guy who had to run down to Town Hall and wave deeds and contracts in their face before getting off the hook for thousands of dollars worth of seawall repairs that the town was supposed to pay for.

You have to watch the towns, as they try to get off "cheap" on the repairs now and then. Duxbury, which can hardly plead poverty, had a wooden seawall until the mid-1950s.

This is more of the Brant Rock/Ocean Bluff damage from last winter. If the elements and the budget won't let you build a fancy seawall, a bunch of boulders will have to do.

You just want something tall enough to slap down even huge waves, and you want it heavy enough to not be washed away when the Atlantic Ocean leans on it. If a little bit of water gets by it... well, hey, you live at a beach, right?

If you don't build a seawall, the ocean gets to tee off on you for 5-12 waves a minute for 3 hours of nor'easter tide, twice a day, any time the pressure drops. You want to try to avoid having that happen.

Seawalls are like divorces.... they cost so much because they're worth it. The town and state will complain, but it will get fixed in the end. The alternative- again, like the divorce- is too ugly to countenance.

The seawall houses in Duxbury are known for their beautifully maintained lawns and just-like-God-planned-it soft sand yards. Oh, wait... this is a post-blizzard shot of Duxbury Beach.

I swear to God that one of those houses in this picture above (the foreground, with the ice) is owned by a golf course groundskeeper, and his lawn is kept at putting-green-trim levels all summer.

In order for that to happen, you have to shovel (or hire someone to shovel) the beach back on to the beach. My yard on Ocean Road North would pick up what I would conservatively estimate to be 1000000000 rocks every nor'easter.

Rocks are handy to have around if you, say, need to fill large holes in your lawn.

Once the yard is cleared, it must be repaired.

Even after you fill the large holes (snow doesn't count, lazybones!), you still have problems. All of your grass has been washed and soaked on salt water.

The Romans, after razing Carthage, covered the ground with salt and sea salt. They salted it down because, as Sam Kinison said, "Nothing grows in sand, nothing's gonna grow in sand!"

Grass is no exception, which is why beaches tend to be sandy. If you want the grass back after a storm ruins it, you have to skim the top layer of soil and replace it with unspoiled topsoil. Then you plant the grass, and then you see if you removed enough salty soil.

This is why some people say "Screw lawns," and just go with natural sand yards. It turns out that these also require tireless maintenance. I did that with the patio near the seawall, as we would lose the front 10-20 feet of lawn with every storm.

This wonderful beach scene, as we noted in a previous article, would be perfect sand-water-dunes-lifeguard chair Cape Cod if this were not the parking lot of Sandy Neck Beach.

It'll all wash away at some point. It's marshy over there, and the DPW can sweep up and re-deposit that sand where it belongs. A parking lot is less of a touchy maintenance job than that of a million-dollar Hyannis Port beach house. You can't just let the Kennedy Compound drain, and then hire some townie to sweep it up whenever.

This can be touchy with October storms, as no coastal resident with any brains makes yard repairs on the nor'easter damage until late April. June through October is hurricane season, but October through the Ides of April is noreaster season, and we get several storms a year.

The beach suffers during those storms. People like the natural aspect of a soft-sand beach, in theory. In reality, "natural" beaches look a lot more like the picture with the dog at the beginning of the article.

The tide will take care of the lower beach, but the upper beach can get a little bit ugly.

Anyone who lives on a seawall knows this scene, represented perfectly by Duxbury Beach.

Several somebodies let the storm sneak up on them, and didn't take their stairs up (in the local patois, stairs are taken "up" onto the seawall, as opposed to being taken "down" from the seawall) in time. The stairs bang around in the surf until there isn't a seawall to prevent them from being tossed up past the wave-wash.

Eventually, you sneak on the beach with a Jeep (the "Duxbury Cadillac" of legend, in case you heard the term and never knew the reference), tow the stairs back to your house and hopefully store them a little more securely.

Duxbury Beach gets lots of odd stuff washing up. Every now and then, a barge loses a cargo container over the side, whch busts open and disgorges her contents into the sea. They eventually wash up on the beach somewhere. One winter, it was oil filters. Another winter, it was Nikes. If they had EBay in 1980, I would have sold more sneakers than that Air Jordan motherf***er.

Lobstermen get caught slippin', too.

For reasons I don't know but that some salty dude (or dudette, the only lobsterman among my Facebook friends is a girl known to me as Tornado) could tell us, wire pots don't wash ashore as much as wooden pots do.

When I was a kid, we'd go out after every nor'easter and snag lobsters out of the wooden traaps that washed ashore. We'd get several dozen this way, as pots, buoys and so forth were all over the beach.

You never steal the pots, however, and even the buoys were a rough proposition. I don't know if lobstermen can shoot you for touching their gear, but I know that many think they can... and that's all that will matter if the heat comes out on you, friend.

This is the Mystic River, courtesy of Paul Walker... no, not THAT one.

While this isn't ocean damage, what you see here are leaves. Those leaves, still green, should be up in a tree, getting ready to be in my fall foliage shots.

If those are lily pads or something, just try to work with me here.

Massachusetts, and especially Eastern Massachusetts, doesn't really get around to fall-foliaging until late October. Some places on Cape Cod (I noticed this while bell-ringing at the Sagamore Christmas Tree Shoppe) don't even go over until mid-November.

That overlaps with the October-April nor'easter season, and is one of the many reasons why coastal Massachusetts isn't really top-notch foliage country. We rock pretty hard compared to, say, New Mexico, but New Hampshire people laugh at our foliage... they LAUGH at it.

Of course, they don't have ocean storms up there, so they can just shush now.