January 2017 Nor'easter Pictures, Videos

A powerful nor'easter hit Massachusetts this week. We missed last night's tide, but we got all up in this morning's offerings.

We mostly worked Duxbury Beach, but we did manage to snap-shot Green Harbor. The tide, normally a 9 foot nothing, got big ups from the storm surge.

I was using a thirty dollar Wal-Mart phone camera and a badly battered laptop, while shooting in the teeth of a nor'easter. The laptop served as the video host, and you will probably be able to tell that I usually have someone else do the filming.

This wasn't a bad storm, maybe a B minus. No structural damage that I could see, although some beach erosion surely went down by the dunes.

I grew up on this beach, and watched a lot of gulls in my time. The smarter ones hunker down somewhere leeward, but sometimes one of them gets bored enough or hungry enough and works the surf. Joe Deady II on the camera for this one.

My old front yard, just after the porch there. It was great fun and easy work repairing that law every spring. We used to have a cobblestone patio, too... cobblestones that my father either bought or "acquired" from some road in Boston. They were very fun to re-arrange every time the ocean did something like this, and I'm a masochist.

The main problem residents here will have is that the ocean splashed a few million gallons of salt water over the wall and onto a great many lawns. You can see it happening between the stairs.

My 35 mph photography is improving, but it is a slow process.

The legendary public stairs of Duxbury Beach, home to much 1980s teen debauchery.

I had to get off of Ocean Road North before it lived up to the name. That took me through this puddle of seawater. I was pretty much that U-Boat Commander joke from the Tom Cruise pimp movie.

Joe Deady made it outside before I did, but I made up for it later with intensity.

Libby Carr gets into the mix with a bit of second story work over some Hummock Lane flooding. Hummock Lane is named after "Rouse's Hummock," which is what Cable Hill was called either A) before they put the trans-Atlantic cable in, B) when Rouse lived there, C) both, or D) neither.

The guy who owns the house with the flooded lawn worked at a golf course when I lived there. No matter what sort of maelstrom befell Duxbury Beach that winter, you could drop a 30 foot putt on it by summer. My yard, by contrast, looked like what grows over a shallow grave after a while if the killer is particularly good at choosing spots that the cops don't look in.

This is what Duxbury's Great Salt Marsh looks like with a spring full moon tide. Unfortunately, this was a mid-cycle 9 foot tide. Any water you can see in this picture is storm surge. I'm at the beach, shooting towards Duxbury Proper.

This is when I decided that moving my car from the driveway of the house I was shooting at would be a good idea.

As bad as this may look, A) it didn't get any, uhm, badder, and B) this is getting off very, very easily. as a full moon tide when this storm hit would have probably wrecked some homes.

You never ever let Ol' Glory get slapped around by a nor'easter. A wind sock would have made my job easier, but that's not this guy's problem.

They say that a waves don't get  more than 5 feet off this beach in all but extreme conditions, and we were in that neighborhood today. They had a rough tide the night before, and were very lucky that those waves weren't rolling into houses on a full moon tide.

You can tell that I shot this one instead of Joe... because it's blurry as heck. The surf covers up for a lot of my errors.

"I'z unda yoor howz.... shootin' at yer ocean."

I got up on the seawall for a few, but it was camera suicide until the tide eased back some.

Even the porch was a rough go.

I got in where I fit in.

Hummock Lane, with Cable Hill/Rouse's Hummock in the background. A newly located Cape Cod Bay, now a street pool, is in the foreground.

RAIN TOTALS AT NOON

North Weymouth, 3.5"
Sandwich 3.24"
East Mashpee 2.75"
Falmouth 2.52"
Duxbury 2.0"

...'been raining since, too.

Rain is actually what washes the salt water out of the lawns, if you're lucky. It's all sand once you go down far enough, and sand drains well.

You can almost see Green Harbor in the background. Green Hahbahhhh... obscured by the mists of the storm.

WIND GUSTS

Wellfleet 59 mph
Minot 40 mph
Cuttyhunk 44 mph
Plum Island 62 mph

Duxbury Beach, summer 1978, after the Blizzard. The house I was doing most of my shooting from is a much larger version of the 4th house from the right. I grew up in #2 from the right.

We made our way south for the tail end of the storm, and got some Sagamore work in.

We got to Saggy well after high tide, so don't think that we don't represent hard down this way.

Sagamore benefits greatly from the presence of Cape Cod, which keeps it from the heaviest of the storm surf.

You could still get knocked off a rock two hours after high tide. Bourne representin'...

We went to the White Cliffs in Cedarville (Plymouth), but the party was pretty much over by then.

Southeastern Massachusetts Nature Blitz

S'up?

We encounter a lot of nature in our travels, and that's no bull. Well, technically, that IS a bull, but you know what I mean...

All of the livestock in this article came from some farm on Old Sandwich Road in Plymouth.

"Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves."

That is either a buffalo, a bison or a shaggy cow... Old McDonald, I am not.

If you catch the cow as it walks in front of the bull, the cow looks like it has a big curved Unicorn horn on her snout.

Alpacas are pretty friendly, as it turns out. I swear that the alpaca in the top shot of this article was way across the field from me, beyond the range of my shoddy phone. I simply had to go "Hey, you, a little closer, please," and he came running over just like this and posed for the top shot.

"You don't work here, and I'm going to greatly resent it if you grab my udders."

Hey! Back in the turkey article with you!

There are several foxes in my neighborhood, to the point where I have named them. This is Samantha Fox, her sisters and brothers are named Alicia, Vivica, Meghan, 20th Century and Redd. Redd is the patriarch, his wife Elizabeth has passed on.

Every coyote in my neighborhood, regardless of gender, is named "Wild E."

And So It Begins... Christmas Decorations Before Veterans Day

Anyone else have that family in the neighborhood who have the Christmas decorations up already?

Plymouth may win the title this year, as this Bourne Road house had the gear in effect well before Veterans Day.

Sorry, it doesn't count if the Christmas-lovin' family in your neighborhood leaves the decorations up all year. I want the guy who said "Halloween was a week ago... where's my faux diamond flying reindeer?"

My guess is that the homeowner has to stake those decorations into the ground, and that it becomes difficult closer to the holiday when the ground is frozen.

I'm not making fun of this guy, and actually admire his intensity, Christmas spirit and "I'll do the job now, while it is easier" Swamp Yankee pragmatism.  We all know that Christmas is a commercial racket, run by a big Eastern syndicate... so it's nice to see some true Love.

If someone in your town has this house beaten, let us know in the comments.

Plymouth Yeti Gets Political

A lot of people know who they are going to vote for to be President right when that person declares, others know at some point in the primaries, others decide during the debates and some even make up their mind while staring at the ballot.

Not me.

I make up my mother-loving mind only when I know how the Lawn Yeti is voting.

Granted, you should cast your vote for who you like best. However, if the Yeti doesn't like the R or the D... it's time to go Third Party, folks. Yeti (I'm assuming that the singular is the plural here, I've never seen two together in any Bigfoot stories) have been around for an eternity, and may have been America's first residents. They have a sort of Fey wisdom that regular, non-hairy primates lose once we start building cities and losing touch with Mother Nature.

That's not a problem the Lawn Yeti has. He's as American as a bald eagle landing on Mount Rushmore. When I saw that he had gone political, I immediately pulled the Cranberry County Magazine Mobile News Car over to see WTF was up with all this.

I don't speak Yeti and he is a reticent Sasquatch, but he was able to communicate his basic platform to me.

He's very pro-Bigfoot, as you can imagine. Much of his platform included Yeti-related planks, especially relating to fur, deer poaching, urban sprawl and privacy issues (his life was Hell after the Patterson tape went public). As you can see, Fur figures heavily into his advertising.

For someone with fur, he sure spent a lot of money on that suit. I checked... Armani. He's still waiting for his hairpiece to come in. He's not wearing pants, but he's shaggy enough that your kids won't be ruined for life if he visits their school for a photo op.

His suit is in no way an endorsement of Trump, and it is no dig at Bill Clinton's wife. "They don't make pantsuits in my size, he intimated.

Yeti are frightening creatures just by their stature and appearance, and sometimes Yeti Method involves scaring off someone who wanders into his stalking-about territory. Other than that, he's not bothering you unless you bother him.

Humans have a low bone-to-meat ratio, and are too large and unwieldy for even a Sasquatch to eat in a manner that a human might eat chicken wings or baby back ribs. We also tend to be high-sodium. It's the same reason that most shark attacks are mistakes on the part of the shark.

Either way, he's happy to see you. He prefers that you just drive by and wave, as things like honking or stopping the vehicle in his yard are frowned upon... unless you're a heavy hitter media type like a Cranberry County Magazine sandwich artist.

Otherwise, it sort of screws up the peace and quiet of the neighborhood. That makes the Lawn Yeti angry, and you don't want him angry with you. He can tear off your arm and beat your momma with it. Remember that people and Bigfoots (feet?) move into deep southern Plymouth for the peace and quiet, and resent intrusive outsiders.

His extreme pro-Yeti stance means that only he can represent himself. He runs his campaign with some human help from his Long Pond Road complex. He has no First Yeti as of yet(i), but he's single and ready to mingle.

In the small print of those Wikileak articles, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was very intent on there being no Lawn Yeti presence in the debates."He'd rip off Trump's head in the first round of questioning. After that... well, he's been in the forest a while, and Hillary would be the first female he could reach..... He may be where discarded Feel The Bern people go..... He'd make a great Mr. Palin upgrade."

I'm pretty much All In as far as it goes with Team Yeti. Sure, there are flaws with electing a Missing Link to lead the Free World. However, there are advantages as well. A leader with an exclusive fur and primate platform is never going to launch an oil war, pick a fight with Indochine, insure 15 million slackers, dump a Pontiac into the Chappaquiddick River... You can do worse than electing a Lawn Yeti.