November is pushing it as far as leaf-peeping goes on the South Coast of Masschusetts. You can only really do it if you haven't had a nor'easter to tear the leaf cover down. Most everything is turning brown by now, but foliage works in strange ways, and differences in sun exposure can set trees in the same area off at different times. We'll seek out the good stuff for you.
We'd like to welcome our new shutterbug, Joeyna. She was all over Marion and Rochester for us, at about the same time that I myself was out rolling South Coast Style. Between us, we got enough shots for a decent article. Mine (Stephen) are the blurrier ones. Joeyna, as you can see, has an affinity for shady lanes.
If you see a car stopped in the middle of the road aiming camera up into the trees, you may have just crossed paths with a Cranberry County Magazine photographer. We walk among you, although we sometimes take the SUV.
If you ever see me in the comments being snarky to someone, understand that Cranberry County Magazine's main office is about three of those farm stand structures put together, and CCM doesn't have those cool orange trees. Never take me seriously, I don't.
I like to think that trees are sentient, and that they view Leaf Drop the same way that a stand-up comic utilizes the Mic Drop. "Hope that you enjoyed the show, people. Come back, same time next year." (leaf drop)
A lot of people consider Buzzards Bay to either be the end of the pre-Cape South Coast, or the Cape's mainland buffer zone. It's the South Coast today, because we have a few shots of the Bourne Bridge, shot from the Trowbridge Tavern deck, aiming towards Buzzards Bay. At least one of the CCM camera clickers started their trip from the Trow, and perhaps both.
Motherf***ers be hatin' on the shutterbugs, putting up stone walls and ADT between us and the pretty trees. If you need a barometer to measure the intelligence of the CCM staff by, know that Abdullah thinks that ADT is what the hyper kid in the high school claass has, while Stacey (who is French, and may somehow hear things with that same zuh zuh zuh accent she speaks with) thinks that it's the drug that they give you when you get the AIDS. Either way, dude shoulda let us in his yard to shoot his trees.
Dammmmmmmn..... stuffed at the goal line! It'd be cool of we jacked this guy's gate, went down his driveway, and- instead of a mansion- there was some shabby single-wide trailer home. Some people throw all their money into the house, other throw it all into the driveway.
My crappy camera in poor light, fired off of the Trowbridge Tavern deck. This is why most of my shots are close-ups, and why I hire the Joeynas of the world.
I need to work on my Level Horizon photography technique, but it's hard to level the camera and steer the car and twist the Game Green and watch out for kids and stuff like that. Also, this guy might, like, uhm, live on a hill or something.
Joeyna is newer to street photography than I am, and doesn't yet know that people just love it when obscure regional website photographers pull the car up onto their lawn so as to cut the power lines out of their Big Yellowsh Tree picture... or she's considerably smarter than me, and is therefore much less likely to get rocked in the lip by some justifiably angry homeowner.
We apologize to this gentleman for not getting to his house before the Leaf Drop, because it looks like he has a pretty cool Fall Foliage setup happening in his yard. We got you marked, player, and we'll be back next October. Bet your bottom dollar.
This is J at work. I went further inland than she did, making it to Halifax and Taunton and New Beddy during my loop. This was a Saturday drive assignment for me, and I was listening to WUMD's 9AM-2PM reggae show on 89.3 FM. The strength of WUMD's broadcast signal sort of guided my vehicle.
I love red trees, even when they grow in yards that are on a brutally sloped hill. You know how it is out in the sticks, dog.
A) Nice farmer's porch, and B) whoever has the upstairs bedroom must be on at least a nodding acquaintance basis with whatever squirrels and birds use that tree. It must be like the old Stephen Wright bit... "Hey, Tweety, how ya doin? I'm just having breakfast... want some eggs? Ooops, my bad."
It's like following the yellow brick road, just upside down.
Either the trip ended back up at the Trowbridge Tavern, or we're throwing a bone to the better photographers reading this article who looked at the first Bourne Bridge shot and said something along the lines of "Zoom in less with that shoddy camera, Stephen!"
Massachusetts voters are being asked whether or not to legalize the recreational use and sale of marijuana. You have no doubt seen the commercials from both sides. We thought that today would be a good time to drop some knowledge on the matter.
- Marijuana is the least harmful drug out there that is used recreationally, incuding legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco.
- Alcohol, which is legal and regulated, is a far greater killer of Americans than marijuana, both suddenly (overdoses and accidents) and long-term. Alcohol kills about 15,000 Americans a year just in OUI accidents.
- Much of the fight against the end of marijuana persecution is being paid for by both Big Al (alcohol suppliers and distributors) and Little Al (bars, retail alcohol stores), in a direct effort to avoid losing market shares for their far more dangerous product to a less harmful alternative like marijuana.
- The same can also be said about Big Pharma, who are to blame for the Oxycontin plague killing our children right now. They want the status quo, with doctors pushing their pills onto people who will get hooked and turn to heroin when their prescriptions run out... while US soldiers are dying in a mountain hell defending Afghan poppy fields.
- You are in far more danger of a drug-related death from visiting a doctor (and his/her hook-you-on-painkillers prescription pad) just once with a broken bone than you are from a lifetime spent making weekly visits to the den of even the most shadowy purveyor of black market marijuana.
- Every instant that a Massachusetts cop spends focusing on marijuana (and even in decriminalized Massachusetts, cops spend countless hours pursuing the black market marijuana trade, and rabidly consider anything more than a sandwich bag full of the stuff to be a crime worthy of a murderer's jail time) is an instant that he/she is not pursuing far more dangerous and harmful criminal activity.
- Police are safer in a world with legalized marijuana. They will be freed from the raids which get them shot by drug dealers. They will lower their number of citizen confrontations, which also gets them (and some citizens) shot.
- While some cops will tell you that maarijuana should stay illegal, you have to remember that they have worked their whole lives as the foot soldiers in the failed War On Drugs, and consider the fact that people are voting to legalize weed as disrespect to their brave (if misdirected) efforts. It ends up as an Us vs Them scenario where it is almost impossible to expect a balanced view.
- Even then, and even with intense inter-profession pressure for law enforcement people to be anti-pot, it is sort of funny to see the main pro-marijuana commercials on TV featuring calm policemen speaking about the benefits of legalized marijuana, while the main anti-marijuana commercial is a ridiculous paranoid fantasy production.
- Note that the commercial that I speak of, the one where the sheltered soccer mom awakes to a world with legalized marijuana, is contemptible. The only scenario shown that doesn't exist already is the daughter grabbing for the edibles (from a window in a shop that she wouldn't be allowed into), and the son buying weed legally from a licensed, regulated purveyor. The increase in crime inference is a lie exposed by states where marijuana is leglized. The man shown in the commercial billowing smokestack-style clouds of smoke would most likely be doing so with weed being either legal or illegal.
- What the commercial doesn't show is Mom drinkng bottle of wine and backing the car over the daughter, hubby drinking a 12 pack and smacking Mom, the son getting post-concussion syndrome from organized sports and becoming hooked on the pain medication that the doctors provide him, the cops- freed from pursuing harmless weed- chasing actual dangerous criminals, and the pot shop paying taxes that pour money into the schools and law enforcement apparatus of the town that they serve.
- Weed shops will take the sale of marijuana out of the hands of a drug dealer who would happily sell it to a child and put the sale of marijuana into the hands of a licensed, regulated businessman who will then diffuse tax money into the community. A child would be persona non grata in a weed shop, a potential business-wrecking failure.
- I can only speak for Buzzards Bay, but if I could take one of those several dozen empty stores on Main Street and replace it with a guaranteed winner of a business sporting a pre-existing and sizable in-town client base... you'd better come up with a better argument than some 1930s Reefer Madness nonsense when telling me why not.
- A vote for Legalization immediately takes about a quarter to a half million of our harmless citizens from Outlaw status to the status of respectable, revenue generating lawful citizens. This vote will also inflict immense damage on the actual harmful drug people, the guys running and selling it.
- If legalized marijuana is not overtaxed, it will indeed slaughter the black market. Overtaxed, it will generate a black market.
- A legalized marijuana society with a mortally wounded black market will make it much more difficult for children to acquire marijuana.
- Home-grown weed, not subject to taxes, will generate income for the state via sales of gardening materials. It's a piddling sum, granted... but it is more than we take in under the status quo, with people potentially facing years in prison for growing marijuana in-home.
- You are in far greater danger of being killed in a mass shooting by someone really into alt-right conspiracy or religion than you are by someone who has been driven to kill by his marijuana use. Marijuana has a mellowing effect, and her users are more likely to kill a box of Pop Tarts than they are to kill everyone in an elementary school.
- States with legalized marijuana yield interesting stats on weed and driving. 66% of road fatalities involving marijuana also involve alcohol, with alcohol being the far more likely culprit for the crash. A lesser % involve other, harder drugs. Of the remainder, Causality becomes an issue. Was the weed responsible for the crash? It's a tough sell in a snowy, mountainous state like Colorado. It's also a tough sell when the stats consider a stoner driver stopped at a red light who is then plowed into and killed by a drunk driver to be a "road death with marijuana present in the bloodstream."
- The fun part about the weed/driving stats is that, once you eliminate the drunks and the blizzard deaths, you have a number of deaths in the teens/single digits, from among a population of 10 million or so. Any insurance agent will tell you what the pro-persecution commercials won't tell you... the driver with weed in his blood is statistically less likely to get into a fatal road accident than a guy without weed is. We're not saying that the stoned driver is safer, as stats can vary year to year and a stoner bus accident could raise the % in a given period. We're just saying that the present information doesn't suggest that persecution is warranted.
- Legalized marijuana will pour millions and eventually billions into the state's coffers, money which can be used for better schools, better roads, better (and, via legalization, more efficient/useful) police... just a better life in general, and that's just for the non-smokers. It will be a considerably better life for the hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts smokers who are currently Outlaws under these Jim Crow-era laws.
- Understand that an anti-legalization vote wont make marijuana go away. It was out there before, and usage is widespread. It will just keep smokers in the black market, untaxed, unregulated, pursued endlessly by costly and mis-utilized police squads.
- If your views on marijuana have evolved past the colored people water fountain-era paranoid fantasies about armies of zombie stoners stumbling down Main Street, and if you accept that millions of people are already smoking it nationwide, you will basically see this ballot question as a vote on whether marijuana should be regulated and taxed.
- If legalization is batted down, don't goof on your local stoner too hard. The general effects he will suffer include "Not being able to buy it in a store" and "Not being able to grow it at home," moves that will feed the black market that awaits the stoner if his legal persecution is voted for. The modus operandi of the stoner will just continue as it was... untaxed, unregulated and persecuted by a costly legal system.
- Just don't complain to the stoner when the information presented in your daughter's aging History books cuts off at the Nancy Reagan era, or when a cop gets shot in a town which couldn't afford to properly armor him. We were offering tax dollars to pay for those things, but you chose to Just Say No.
- The stoners are tired of persecution, and they number in the hundreds of thousands in Massachusetts. They aren't going anywhere, no matter how you vote. The police have better things to do, as do the courts. The towns and state need the tax revenue. You're choosing between legal, regulated, taxed marijuana on one side and our police fighting a losing battle against both the black market and hundreds of thousands of harmless citizens on the other side. Get off of Mary Warner's back.
It's time to evolve, my friends. Stop the persecution of harmless marijuana smokers. We urge you to vote for the legalization of marijuana in Massachusetts.
Cape Cod is pretty much the last in line for autumn foliage in New England. We don't really start peaking until November. I was down there last week, I thought that I missed peak time, but I was actually too early. I went out yesterday, and things were more fall foliage-ish.
Our basic route for today's foliage drive was up Route 6A, from Bourne to Brewster. I was going to run through the whole Cape out to the tip, but I got a call in Brewster that I was supposed to be at a meeting in Hyannis.. so I had to bang a U.
I'll sacrifice some Clarity if the picture has some bright red. I also blocked some traffic for this shot (this blurry, wasted shot), so I was going to use it even if my thumb was over the lens.
Blurry cameras make it look like the tree is on fire, not something that you worry about if you own a house made of stone. The third little pig planted whatever he wanted, an ease of landscaping not afforded to the little pigs who made their houses of sticks and straw.
I probably should have fired off a few of these, maybe got a pic that isn't all blurry. That's a good burst of color, however... especially for Cape Cod.
This is in the Ponds of Plymouth, which made it into a Cape Cod article because we needed some Marylou's for the trip, and we went to the Cedarville one.
All of the basketball games at the University of New Hampshire should be played in this setting.
This looked redder when I was driving by it... but was less so when I got out of the car. I immediately thought that it might be a trick, maybe a Yeti or the Blair Witch, but I got out of the area safely.
The first time that I ever stopped the car in Brewster.... nothing against Brew Town, just how things shook themselves out. I'll be back!
This must have been a tough Ask at the tree-selling store or wherever you go to get trees... "In October, I want a single tree, and I want it to be green, yellow, orange, maybe a touch of red..."
A lot of Cape Cod foliage tripping involves single trees in some dude's yard.
Fear not this November date if you are worried about missing out on Cape Cod's peak foliage season. They don't really peak until after Halloween,. and you can see quite a bit of color if there hasn't been a mean October wind storm to knock the leaves off of the trees. By mid-November, you're lit out of shuck, player.
I'm a trailblazer in the "leaning out of the car window with a shabby Wal-Mart camera" photojournalist motif.
I like when the tree moves past Aquaman-style orange into more of a near-red scenario.
Cape Cod was bangin'... so we may be back. Be sure to check out our leaf-peeping on the South Coast and SouthShore from previous articles.
The Viking Star, a 900 passenger cruise ship, struck the railroad bridge on the Cape Cod Canal yesterday.
No one was injured, and the bridge seems to have just lost some paint. US Army Corps Of Engineers workers heard scraping sounds as the tall cruise ship worked through the Cape's favorite man-made river.
The railroad bridge is 135 feet over the water. I have no idea how tall the Viking Star is, and I looked, too. I'm guessing 135 feet and 6 inches. it either has 9 decks or 14 decks, depending on if you believe the Cape Cod Times or Wikipedia.
I actually watched the Viking Star as she approached the Bourne Bridge, but I was too far away and behind too many trees to see much of it. There were reports on Facebook that she also hit the Bourne Bridge, but nothing is turning up on those there Internets.
We'll keep you updated. You never know if the diagnosis will be worse once they look at it with the daylight.
It was just like that, just with a larger boat and contact.
This was Saturday's fog, but there was a slight release delay as I pondered the "terrible pics of a cool phenomena" question.
I lacked the testicular fortitude to dash across the four lanes and shoot through the bars. This is what I would imagine that prison looks like in Heaven.
The fog was the result of some temperature contrast between "cold morning" and "warm water." I was shooting from the side where the sun had been shining on the Canal longer.... or the people on the Cape side be smokin' up a few bales of that sticky-icky-icky.
I kind of one-two'd these shots quickly, mostly to show how the fog was creeping over Buzzards Bay.
My friends and I would like to welcome Bourne's new cheerleading coach Tara Baker to town!
Coach Tara's mission is to transform Bourne's cheerleading squad into a regional powerhouse. Hey, maybe even national... you don't have to watch many cheerleader movies to understand that a wise man never underestimates cheerleaders.
My contacts at Bourne High School tell me that Bourne once had a championship cheer program, but that cheerleading stalled there over the years.
Cheerleading has traditionally been viewed as more of a hobby than a sport. People tend to ascribe a Queen-style Stomp Stomp CLAP simplicity to cheerleader routines, when the reality is far different.
Girls Sports are vastly underestimated by the general public these days. I do it myself, and a man who actually has looked at numbers all day should know better. A reporter who has evolved past viewing girl's sports as a sort of Pillow Fight is still very capable of answering "Football, wrestling, hockey, maybe lax" when asked to list dangerous high school sports.
In reality, the stats I'm looking at show a top three of Lacrosse, Football and Baseball/Softball. Girls play two of those, and girls even get on the football team now and then. The rest of the top 10 are Gymnastics, Soccer, Hockey, Track/X-country, Swimming/Diving and Basketball. Girls play every one of those sports, and comprise the majority of our gymnasts. If you throw in sports played outside of school, add in bikes, skateboards and trampolines.
It's shocking that Wrestling didn't make the top 10, as the object of Wrestling is to rough somebody up with the Black Widow or whatever they call wrestling moves that aren't on TV. Even more shocking is the fact that Cheerleading ranks 4th on this list.
Depending on the methodology of your stats, Cheerleading ranks higher. If you go by Catastrophic Injury, cheerleading accounts for 65% of injuries to girls in high school sports.
Again, the days of shaking the pom-poms while spelling out the school name are about 35 years in the past up here, maybe further down South where cheerleading is more prominent.
Cheerleaders work in a realm of flips, splits, leaps, catches, throws (you're more likely to get thrown in the air as a cheerleader than as a wrestler) and spins. As near as I can tell, they do their routines on either hardwood, meadow-style grass or- if your school has a football field with the Track lanes circling it- asphalt. The only surface you might survive a fall onto without suffering injury- grass- is pretty much the worst base that you can ask for to do dance/throws on.
Cheerleaders occupy a unique niche in school sports where, while doing their own sport, they can be injured by someone doing a whole other sport nearby. I've seen cheerleaders hit by pucks, run over by linebackers and bonked off the back of the head with a basketball. Only the team that practices near the javelin-throwers are in worse danger from such injury.
So, if you take into account the risk involved, cheerleaders are among the bravest athletes in the school. When you throw in the noble intent of cheering for their school, there is much respect due.
Coach Tara knows all of this. Her girls will know it soon, too.
She will instill a program at Bourne that will make Cheerleaders out of these girls. They will be in great shape. I went to one practice, and they did splits and stretches and more push-ups than I've done in my life. They will drill their moves until they get them right (the best way to lower that injury risk that we led off with), and they will eventually act as One.
The team also has Tara's ex-military husband overseeing the training, so the cheerleaders won't be doing any sloppy push-ups without getting a R. Lee Ermey-style earful. Just kidding, he actually seems very nice.
They are going to need to be in good shape, because Coach Tara plans to have this team at competition level.
She has experience as a national champion cheerleader, and she has been coaching for 20 years. Her teams have won championships with her coaching. Now, she's bringing her talents to Bourne.
The kids deserve a good coach. They formed a cheer squad on their own last year, on a shoestring budget. This year, Bourne High came up with some funds, and the program is off and running. There is talk that the school may ask the girls to cheer for basketball, as well.
The move to bring in Coach Tara is already paying off. For the practice I attended, she brought in a guest speaker. Susan Shannon is the former Director of New England Patriots Cheerleaders from 1979 to 1985. She now works for the New England Professional Cheerleaders Alumni Association, as the President. She spoke to the current Bourne squad about leadership, public speaking, teamwork, confidence, character... basically everything that the Sport of Cheerleading has become.
She spoke of female empowerment and supporting your team, and also about how cheerleaders are athletes with opportunities for college scholarships. Susan spoke to the squad about leading not just your team and each other, but the football team and the crowd, as well. She discussed the importance of getting the crowd behind them. Susan told stories of former cheerleaders who took the skills they learned as a cheerleader and parlayed it into high powered careers.
Susan also discussed the legislative push in the state of Massachusetts to have cheerleading become a recognized sport.... a move that is lonnnnnngggggg overdue.
Bourne is now on the track to have a first-class cheerleading squad. They have a fine teacher and a great bunch of kids. The work of both the coach and the squad will carry on long after they leave Bourne High School, in the form of a solid cheer program that can become the pride of the town.
The fun part about my job is that, while covering other stories, I can stop along the way and take pictures of lighthouses. I grew up near one, and am sort of accustomed to foghorns and circling lights. I never miss a chance to get a picture of one if I am out and about.
This is Nauset Light, one of the Three Sisters. She's essentially a replacement sister and sort of married into the family, but she sure does look nice. She's 48 feet tall, made of cast iron and is encased in brick. She's set back a bit, as Cape beaches were eroding long before the discussion of eroding beaches became fashionable. She was built in 1877. Lovers of snacks should know that this lighthouse is the represented in the logo for Cape Cod Potato Chips.
This is the much-loved Chatham Lighthouse. She's old enough (1808 birth) that Samuel Nye, her first keeper, was appointed by Thomas Jefferson. She went automated in 1982, and is prominent in the film The Finest Hour. The house next to it is an active Coast Guard Station, and even serves as a base for Homeland Security-type stuff. I actually drove by this without a hitch the day before Tropical Storm Hermine came to town, but when I returned during the height of the storm, the traffic was like Boston. While I failed as a photographer in "getting a level horizon," I did manage to catch the light when it was flashing towards me.
Old Scituate Light, the lighthouse that the American Army Of Two defended. She was built in 1811, the Bates sisters did their thing in 1814, and the construction of Minot's Ledge Light pushed her out of service in 1850. This being Scituate, she was brought back into service 2 years later when MLL was destroyed in an 1851 tropical winter/spring storm. I suppose you can imagine the "I told you so" action that was going on among the old salts back then. MLL went back in service in 1860, which sent Old Scituate Light back to the bench. Scituate bought it in 1910 for $4000, and it was in a state of disrepair for most of the last century. They fixed it up well enough that you can tour it these days.
Our photographer appears to be using the rocks to position himself to shoot Old Scituate Light, but I know him well enough to say that he is most likely looking at porn, fantasy football or both. Sharper-eyed readers may get a kick out of knowing that the only picture of his we used is the one that has water drops all over the camera lens... but we did lead off with it, so props to the Big Man.
Just in case you think that went to a shabbier lighthouse and just told you it was Scituate Light, we threw in a pic with the sign. We try to keep it real here at Cranberry County Magazine. This lighthouse is steeped in history. It is where the USS Chesapeake fought and lost to the HMS Shannon in 1813, a battle famous for the "Don't give up the ship" command was uttered by a dying Captain James Lawrence just before his surviving crew, well, gave up the ship.
Here's how you challenged a ship to a fight in 1813... "As the Chesapeake appears now ready for sea, I request you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon with her, ship to ship, to try the fortune of our respective flags. The Shannon mounts twenty-four guns upon her broadside and one light boat-gun; 18 pounders upon her maindeck, and 32-pounder carronades upon her quarterdeck and forecastle; and is manned with a complement of 300 men and boys, beside thirty seamen, boys, and passengers, who were taken out of recaptured vessels lately. I entreat you, sir, not to imagine that I am urged by mere personal vanity to the wish of meeting the Chesapeake, or that I depend only upon your personal ambition for your acceding to this invitation. We have both noble motives. You will feel it as a compliment if I say that the result of our meeting may be the most grateful service I can render to my country; and I doubt not that you, equally confident of success, will feel convinced that it is only by repeated triumphs in even combats that your little navy can now hope to console your country for the loss of that trade it can no longer protect. Favour me with a speedy reply. We are short of provisions and water, and cannot stay long here."... Captain Phillip Broke
A year later, two American girls chased away a boatload of British marines, so we sort of won back the honor of the coast. Eff England!
Not all naval action around Old Scituate Light involves us trying to kill Europeans. This rock represents the grounding of the Italian freighter Etrusco in a 1956 blizzard. The crew was saved by the Coast Guard. The ship, stuck on the rocks of Cedar Point for quite some time, was a local tourist attraction until it was freed by dynamiting most of the ledge.
