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.
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.
I live in Buzzards Bay, I have a girl who works off Exit 3 in Plymouth, and I spend time hanging with some buddies who live in the White Cliffs. I end up driving down Long Pond Road in Plymouth a lot.
A nine foot Yeti in someone's yard is going to draw some attention. This is especially true once summer comes and the Yeti pours himself a gallon-of-booze cocktail and starts dressing like Hunter S. Thompson.
The journalist part of me wants to stop and knock on the door, ask the homeowner what made him/her put a Yeti in the yard and a dozen other related questions. The storyteller part of me has no intention of ever asking, because anyone who has written five thousand headlines in their career knows that, more often than not, the Question is better than the Answer.
Besides, media attention might make the Yeti owner become self-conscious. That would be a shame, because it could stifle creativity. Why mess up a part of my day that I enjoy?
Besides, stifled creativity would rob us of the chance to see what the Yeti owner might do next. You never know, he may put a toga on it and use it to let people know the current Olympics medals count
Wait, what?
Note that the Yard Yeti is in no way related to the Yard Ape, who is a jacked-up landscaper named Lappa that I used to work with.
I'm curious as to whether the Yard Yeti chooses a side in November's election.
"Cranberry County" is a sweeping term that we use to cover the South Shore, the South Coast, Cape Cod and the Islands. It's a relatively homogeneous area.
While great differences exist from town-to-town (and even from one section of a town to another), they are a degree of Great where the differences might not be so apparent if you aren't from the region.
While people from Duxbury may think of people from Marshfield as a lower species of talking ape, we all look alike to someone from Angola.
However, the differences are often extraordinary when examined by a local.
Some of the differences are socioeconomic, some are racial, some are urban/suburban, some are ageist (not sure if that's a word, but it is now) and some are so subtle that I'm not sure what they are and I am only writing about them because I am aware that some locals feel that differences exist.
We'll see what's up with these differences... this week, in Cranberry County Magazine!
Plymouth and the Pinehills
Plymouth is a huge town. It is the largest municipality in Massachusetts. It has more land area than Boston and Worcester combined, with Everett, Charlestown and Somerville thrown in.
A working understanding of Population Density can explain the population differences between Boston and Plymouth, and that means a lot here. Much of Plymouth is rural or even undeveloped.
It's not as bad Now as it was Then. Much of Southern Plymouth was forest until recently. There were parts of the forest that had higher Wampanoag population totals than White Guy totals. Population booms in towns just north of Plymouth in the 1970s showed that maybe the limits of "tolerable commute from Boston" had not been reached yet. Many developers noticed this.
Soon enough, you had some massive building projects going on down there in the hinterlands. The 12.4 kilometer land area of the Pinehills neighborhood is about the same size as Arlington, Massachusetts (population: 44,000). The Ponds Of Plymouth neighborhood is large enough that it redrew a Congressional district. Both of these areas were literally carved out of the forest.
The Pinehills have 3000 homes, many of which are Luxury homes. They pay $9.5 million in taxes, making them the second largest taxpayer in town after the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant ($9.7 million in 2011, the Pinehills may have passed them).... and the PNPP ain't in town for the long term, Jack. The Pinehills are the proverbial 9.5 million pound gorilla, and that influence will skyrocket soon enough.
The arrival of these heavyweights forever changed the landscape of Southern Plymouth. Formerly a ponds-driven resort community dotted with cottages and cabins (a Boston Globe article said that the Pinehills area was "only good for hunting" before development), the formerly uninhabited areas- consisting of sort of Cedarville, sort of West Wind Shores Shores, sort of Manomet, and really none of the above- bleed over into the Irish Riviera-influenced coastline.
The long-term, pre-Pinehills residents of the area seem pretty cool about the arrival of the luxury housing. The Pinehills are generally self-sufficient, and were dropped down where they aren't in anyone's way. Most recognize that people paying $10 million a year in taxes are worth whatever problems may arise with traffic, population density and water concerns.
The one form of resentment that I saw (and I went trolling for Pinehills hatred on several area-themed Facebook pages) involved the belief that the Pinehills live in their own little world. It is very self-contained, having their own shops, gas stations and even a fire station. Pinehills people have very little reason to mix in among the rabble, and everybody knows it. "It's like a town unto itself" was a prevailing sentiment.
It does make you wonder when the Pinehills people and the Ponds Of Plymouth people will realize that they are carrying a large % of the town's tax burden on their shoulders, and maybe strike out on their own? Annex Cedarville's White Cliffs neighborhood for beach access, swallow up some pond neighborhoods for future gentrification... and then secede. They could probably apply for admission to Cape Cod, if they keep the Median Household Income high enough.
Google Map that ish and tell me that I'm not on to something. Sounds like a good future article.
Duxbury and the Irish Riviera
Duxbury is a tony town of 15,000 souls, and the folks from other local towns call it "Deluxebury."
While the wealth is not ostentatious (if you drive through town expecting to find Versailles on every block, you'll be disappointed), everybody on the South Shore knows what's up. It even drifts out to the Cape. Radio talk-show host Ed Lambert from WXTK, who works in Hyannis and lives further out on the Cape, always says "Deluxebury" when referring to the Plymouth County town.
So, in posh Deluxebury, what's up with that sandy cottage village on the ocean side of the Powder Point Bridge? Why, it's none other than Duxbury's little slice of the Irish Riviera!
The Irish Riviera is a strip of often seasonal coastal housing built more along cottage standards than as a place where you might think about hanging a chandelier. It is a distinct cultural entity which runs mostly unchanged down the Massachusetts coast from Quincy to the edge of Cape Cod.
Access to Boston via Route 3 in the 1950s and especially the Boston Busing Crisis of the 1970s doubled the population of most South Shore towns. This made the Irish Riviera more of a year-round thing.
While Duxbury Beach is mostly uninhabited, what inhabitants there are stand firmly in the camp of the Irish Riviera. Heavily blue collar, overwhelmingly Catholic, generally seasonal and very, very Irish (my friends growing up there included Kerrigans, Branns, McDaniels, Deehans, McLaughlins, Duffys and several spellings of "Reed") the residents differ noticeably from the Pilgrim descendants roaming through Duxbury Proper.
I grew up on Duxbury Beach, and most of my classmates instantly recognized me as a non-native Duxburian. Many of them to this day think that I grew up in Marshfield, either literally or culturally.
The neighborhood is slowly being gentrified, as wealthier people buy up cottages and jam as much lumber as they can into the footprint of the original cottage. Property values soar, and the blue collar Irish Riviera crowd will be squeezed out of the neighborhood by whatever they call Yuppies these days. Many of my old neighbors (I migrated to the Cape a dozen years ago) tell me that it isn't the same neighborhood these days.
For now, however, the Irish Riviera still runs through Duxbury.
Note that Mosquito Village very nearly took the Duxbury section of this article, but I went for my old neighborhood as a sort of professional courtesy.
Brockton and the South Shore
Duxbury Beach is the story of an Irish-American, Boston-to-suburbia exodus. Brockton is an older tale, and it involves putting shoes on people.
Brockton was originally a part of Duxbury, but you wouldn't guess that now. They are completely unalike. It's a lot like the old George Carlin "baseball is pastoral, football is technological" routine. Duxbury is suburban, almost rural. Brockton is urban. Duxbury is very white. Brockton is very black. Duxbury has a small population over a large land area, while Brockton jams a lot of people into a small space. Duxbury is wealthy, Brockton is poor. Duxbury kids are pampered, Brockton kids are among the toughest in the world.
Duxbury is basically like every other town in Plymouth County.... Brockton, uhm, isn't.
How did that come to be?
Brockton's position on the Salisbury Plain River allowed it to operate mills, and these mills expanded steadily throughout the early Industrial era. While the Carvers and Marshfields of the area were primarily farming communities with sparse peopling, Brockton's burgeoning industries (by the time of the Civil War, they were America's leading manufacturer of shoes) produced a high-density, urban entity.
The differences soon became apparent. Wareham is a good-sized Plymouth County town, home to 22,000 people in 2010. Brockton had that reached that population in 1875. By 2010, Brockton (93,000 peope or so) made up about 20% of Plymouth County's nearly half million residents... jammed into 2% of the land area.
As you may have guessed, very few of those people are white millionaires who prefer to live in a triple-decker with two Dominican families. The median income in Brockton is about $21K, well below the Plymouth County's $35K. 14% of Brockton residents are below the poverty line, as opposed to 4-6% in Plymouth County... which, I hate to add, includes the Brockton numbers as 20% of the total.
Brockton kids are as tough as it gets. Two of Brockton's residents have ruled very competitive and prestigious boxing weight classes in the last 50 years or so, no mean feat for a city that is just 1 of the 25,375 cities, towns and incorporated places in the US. If your town's "notable residents" has "Marvin Hagler" listed, and he isn't the immediate undisputed answer for the "toughest guy who ever walked these streets" argument... you live in a pretty tough town, my friend.
This is funny, because if you went to Central Casting and asked for a typical Plymouth County resident, you'd probably get some butter-soft Cohasset trust fund WASP.
Brockton provides almost all of Plymouth County's street credibility, sporting a robust 43.1 black majority. Plymouth County's 7-8% blackness is almost entirely based in Brockton. Duxbury, holding down the other side of the see-saw, is .6% black. Duxbury does rank above Brockton in "drive-by shootings of a prominent rapper."
The Wedge and Hyannis Port
Following the Rich Man, Poor Man theme, let's carve up a region where the Kennedy Compound and a very busy Salvation Army center are 5000 feet apart.
"The Wedge" is a part of Hyannis that has a higher poverty/crime rate than her surrounding neighborhoods. It is the area south of Route 28 around where the Cape Cod Mall is. It forms a sort of Triangle, which draws unfortunate comparisons to the ones in Bermuda and Bridgewater.
It hosts a goodly portion of Cape Cod's poor, and some of them are lacking Camelot levels of cash flow. There is also a lively drug trade at work in the region, and you can get your hat handed to you if you mess with the wrong group of people.
It's not Roxbury. You could put on a shirt made of money and walk through the toughest part of the Wedge yelling threats at midnight, and your chances of survival would be a healthy 46%. It would be about .46% if you did it in certain parts of Dorchester, and it would only get that high because a good portion of Americans believe that the gods speak through the mentally ill.
The Wedge (aka "Captain's Quarters) is not as bad as this article makes it out to be, an article where the author urges Zero Tolerance/Shock And Awe tactics on a neighborhood about the size of a mall, but you have to view things in their proper context.
Not that far down the road, you have a Summer White House, perhaps the most well-known one ever. It's where Jackie O and JFK got in the yacht and had those "How many butlers and maids should we hire this summer" conversations that you and I don't have.
I doubt that, when Jackie O was deciding which one of her hats to wear, she ever said "Oh dear, I'd better not go with blue, it could be mistaken for Crip affiliation five blocks over. Someone might blow my husband's head off."
Note that we almost went with Onset Waterfront/Shangri-La for a Wareham tangent, but the article is getting lengthy. Both towns battle over the "Brockton-by-the-sea" nickname, with "Sea Lowell" and "she's like a baby Lynn" also in the mix in SE Massachusetts conversations about the 'Ham. I personally know a guy in Wareham who has performed more murders in his travels than the entire town of Duxbury has suffered for as far back as my admittedly-shoddy memory goes.
Chatham and Harwich
Here's one of those comparisons that makes no sense to an out-of-towner. I live on Cape Cod, too... albeit the Upper Cape. I consider this to be close to a family-style dispute that anyone with a brain stays out of. So, into the dispute we go...
The differences between these two towns are piddling, if that's the right word. Chatham has a $45K median income, while Harwich is at 41K. That's like, uhm, $80 a week or so, no? Chatham and Harwich are 95-96% white. They are both tourist-dependent, like a junkie and the smack. If you say something stupid at a tavern about fishing or driving a boat or lobstering in either town, there will be no shortage of people willing to correct you.
I list them here because I recall there being some acrimony when they regionalized the schools and created Monomoy High School. I voted for Charwich (which would have given restaurants in both towns the opportunity to create a hyper-local sandwich), but I'm not a resident.
I think that the beef was over how to fund the high school. Harwich is just about twice as large as Chatham, and the financial split may have been less than fair originally.
There may also be questions about the rate of development and the changing face of the Outer Cape. In 1960, Chatham had 3273 residents, and Harwich had 3747 residents. Harwich then almost tripled their population by 1990, while Chatham barely doubled theirs. I should add that these differences vanish quickly when Chatham's summer population skyrockets to 30K and Harwich moves past 40K. Then, they just all hate summer people.
There is an element of two twins fighting over which one is prettier here, but I think that I may have overestimated the acrimony that exists between the two towns. If I missed some point of contention, hit me up in the comments.
Gurnet/Saquish and the Post-Industrial Era
Whatever problems Brockton may have, somebody at least was decent enough to run a power line through town. You don't need an off-road vehicle to get around. A really big wave doesn't cut it off from the rest of the word.
Residents of Gurnet Point and Saquish Head have those problems. The cool part? They like it that way.
Way out on the end of Duxbury Beach (it's actually Plymouth, but that would only confuse you if you were looking for it on a map), there are two tiny villages.
They have no electricity out there, and survive on firewood, propane, solar and wind energy. It is as Cottage as any beach gets around here, or pretty much anywhere.
Many who see it up close think that it may just be the greatest place ever, myself included. If you take away the Jeeps, it's basically 1850 until you look in the cottages and see laptops, portable radios and newspapers writing about a black US President, space shuttles and so forth.
They're aware of the modern world, so it's not like that M. Night Shyamalan (?) village movie out there. It'd never work... not enough trees. They could see modern stuff, including a nuclear reactor, just across the bay in Plymouth proper. You could maybe pull it off with a bunch of fog machines, but a good wind might spoil the ruse.
Dennis-Yarmouth/Yarmouth-Dennis
They're here at the end because I have always admired how they worked out the naming thing. Chatham and Harwich have Monomoy to fall back on when circumstance forces them to team up. D-Y found another way.
Simply put... the high school is known as Dennis-Yarmouth, and the baseball team in the Cape League is known as Yarmouth-Dennis. D-Y is in effect for more months of the year, but Y-D is in effect when the population is at the highest point.
Everything balances, and everyone goes home happy.
Speaking of which, I'm out of towns. Let me know who we forgot!
Thanks to Heidi Woodmansee Sullivan, Kerri Yankovicth-Smith (Marine Mom!), Scott Rodrigues and the Duxbury Beach Resident's Association for help with the pics.
Beaches are closed for swimming in Plymouth after a Great White Shark was spotted by a fisherman yesterday.
Manomet Point, which is the sight of the last shark attack in Massachusetts (remember the kayak-eating shark?), scored another shark yesterday. It's like Monomoy West out there!
A lobsterman (Bob Ward) pulling up his pots had a "Hooper drives the boat, Chief" moment when a large porker followed his pot to the surface, perhaps briefly mistaking the moving pot for a seal. He was about a half-mile off of a packed-with-bathers Manomet Point.
He called the local gendarme, and beaches were closed for swimming soon after.
Beaches are also close for swimming today. I'm presently not sure if the beaches themselves are closed.
The Atlantic Shark Conservancy verified the shark's presence, which may or may not mean that the shark spotted was tagged by Dr. Gregory Skomal.
We'll get back to you if the shark eats someone.
Cranberry County Magazine thanks this shark for showing up just after we did our Summer Shark Spectacular article.
Before we start the discussion, we want you understand a few facts about the likelihood of suffering a shark attack.
You're significantly more likely to win the Powerball than you are to suffer a shark attack.... shoot, like 30-45 people win the Powerball every year, which is about 50 years worth of American shark attack deaths. More people have put Lindsay Lohan on the D Train to Pound Town than have been killed by a shark this century.
If you're worrying about a shark attack, stop. You need to instead prepare for the lightning bolt strike which- however unlikely as it may be- is much more likely to kill you than a shark is.
This "Top Ten Places" list goes to 10 even though we have had less than 10 shark attacks in Massachusetts white-guy history.
If you ignore reputations and just crunch the actual numbers, I would not be at all surprised to find that the shark which has killed the most Americans is the Loan Shark.
That said, being devoured out of nowhere by a station wagon-sized monster with 250 teeth is nothing that you want to experience. If it can happen, and even if the odds are as slight as can be, there must be steps you can take which will lower those odds in your favor.
One step we can give you, beyond obvious ones like "Never swim if you have just been stabbed," "Do nothing at all seal-like" and "Get out of the water if you hear alternating tuba notes start playing" are simple ones that you probably already know. If you don't know those rules already, there isn't much that we can do for you.
What we can do for you is tell you which beaches to avoid, and why.
1) Monomoy Island, Chatham
If you need the Why for this one, just do a Google Map of the area and zoom in. You'll soon see little black marks all along the shoreline, thousands of them. Those are seals.
Seals are shark food, and everywhere the seal went, the shark was shore sure to go.
This is the gold mine if you like Great White Sharks. It's also a rotten place to swim, especially if you have even one seal-like trait.
Chatham in general is very lucky that sharks don't like People Food. It remains the only viable location on Cape Cod for a sharknado to happen.
2) Ballston Beach, Truro
In spite of her fearsome reputation, the only recent shark attack on Cape Cod was a 2012 attack on a boogie boarder off of this Truro sandspot.
The victim was 400 yards offshore, near where the seals hang out, and paddling around in a manner that he had no way of knowing would register as "injured seal" to the monster shark swimming under him.
He managed to kick it away before it killed him. He described kicking it as akin to kicking "an underwater refrigerator, with skin." It maimed his leg.
3) South Beach, Edgarton
One of... no, scratch that... THE most famous shark attack of all time went down here. The victim was Chrissy Watkins. She was torn to pieces by Bruce, who is the world's most famous shark.
The fact that the attack which I'm referencing is the opening scene from Jaws will in no way prevent us from ranking this beach right near the top.
Joseph Sylvia State Beach in Oak Bluffs is where the Alex Kintner attack went down, but that one didn't have a nude 1970's chick.
4) Nauset Light Beach, Eastham
The whole run of the Outer Cape is a high risk area, as the sharks who get bored of Chatham can head up the coast for a little variety.
This is one of those beaches that you see mentioned on the news with "was closed after a 15 foot shark was spotted offshore" following it.
5) Manomet Point, Plymouth
This is where the (current) most recent shark attack went down. A porker rose up out of the water and chomped on a kayak, dumping the two pretty kayakers into the water. Concluding that humans taste like a kayak, the shark swam away and left the girls unharmed.
That's a pretty impressive resume line, which is why beaches in Chatham and Wellfleet are looking up at America's Hometown.
6) South Beach, Chatham
When you get attacked by a shark here, he's usually not pleased. When he got his rooming assignment, he was like "Yeah! South Beach! Miami, here I come!" Some older shark then has to take him aside and tell him "You're thinking of South Beach, Miami. You're actually going to South Beach, Massachusetts."
When he arrives, he's pissed. "Hangry," as the kids say.
7) Marconi Beach, Wellfleet
When a shark gets a taste for People Food, you have to start worrying about extenuating circumstances.
In this case, the two areas of concern are 1) "Marconi" looks like "Macaroni." Sharks are unique in that they can make American Chop Suey with actual Americans if they have access to lots of macaroni.
Also, 2) is that "Marconi" implies Italian food. It is safe to imply that he is a picky eater, as he travels up the entire East Coast via tail propulsion to sup on a particular sort of Seal. Developing a taste for Italian food isn't really much of a stretch compared to that.
8) Hollywood Beach, Mattapoisett
Holly Wood (aka Hollywood) Beach is where the last fatal shark attack in Massachusetts went down, in 1936. A boy swimming out to meet a boat had most of his leg bitten off by a juvenile Great White Shark.
Holly Wood should be #2 or #3, maybe even #1A.... but we're going on 80 years there, and you can't live on your past in my magazine, folks.
No, sharks aren't afraid of New Bedford and Fall River. You can just shush....
9) Duxbury Beach, Duxbury
Duxbury seems to have a very lively and burgeoning shark population. She has an impressive stretch of uninhabited beach for seals to crash out on, and the bleedover of seals (and, following the seals, sharks) from Cape Cod looks to up their numbers.
If you're a shark hanging around at Race Point and you decide to see how the seal action is if you swim west for a while, the first beach you'll come to will be Duxbury Beach.
Added bonus: Duxbury Bay is a breeding ground for Sand Tiger Sharks. They're just the friendliest 8 foot flesh-eating shark (with a look which belies the fact that they are not physically equipped to hunt or eat humans) that you'll ever see.
10) Egypt Beach, Scituate
Scituate had the second most recent fatal shark attack in Massachusetts history. It was about 5 miles offshore, I chose Egypt Beach at random. The attack went down in the 1800s, which is why they are ranked #10 instead of #1.
In a story that really should be a movie, a shark swamped a smaller boat and devoured the occupant. The victim's brother returned the next day and caught what is believed to be the same shark. He then put it on display in Boston, and charged people a dime to see it.
Honorable Mention:
- Boston Harbor (home of the first shark attack in colonized New England history)
- Rockport (a fisherman was bitten by a shark here, but he survived)
- West Island, Fairhaven (beaches were closed after a fisherman spotted a shark 50 yards away from swimmers)
- Fall River (one of the two fatal Rhode Island attacks went down in Bristol Harbor, about a mile from her nearest Massachusetts neighbor)
- Nahant (a fisherman was bitten in 1922)
- Cold Storage Beach, Truro (James Orlowski had his leg mauled by a shark in 1996. No one believed him at the time, saying "Shark attacks don't happen on Cape Cod," and intimating that he might have crossed a really ornery bluefish. He got the last word when his attacker was listed as a shark in the Shark Attack Database.
- Dartmouth (another guy who says a shark bit him, but everyone was telling him it was a seal... notable in that the victim didn't go to the hospital until infection set in... which is why St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, who treated this victim, has had more shark attack experience than more likelier places like Falmouth Hospital or Jordan Hospital)
- Gloucester (sharks follow fishing boats)
- New Bedford (see above, plus they have had shark sightings/beach closings)
- Horse Neck Beach (Westport (has been closed after shark sightings)
- Brant Rock, Marshfield (seal-friendly rockpile offshore)
- Buttermilk/Little Buttermilk Bay, Bourne (a 9 foot shark entered this bay and hung out a while in the 1990s)
"Ahhhhh... nice beach here.... soft sand, warm water, clean air... think I'll take a swim. Oh, look! A seal! What's that shadow swimming next to him?"
Due to the cycle of the sea, seals began hanging out in large numbers off Chatham. After that, it becomes simple algebra.... sharks eat seals, seals hang out at Chatham, so therefore...
A great white shark goes 10-20 feet long and can bite a human being in half. If he's not looking that closely or if he's really hungry, we look kind of like seals in the right (wrong) light.
The last fatal shark attack in the general area was off Mattapoisett in 1936, but sharks are more prevalent now than at any point locals can remember.
To be fair to the sharks, humans are out on their turf. You can't blame one for wanting to try some People Food now and then.
Suicide Alley
A nasty stretch of Route 6 turns to 2 lanes- one East, one West. You're on a divided highway, but then cars start coming at you from the other lane. It's disconcerting. Suicide Alley runs 13 miles, from exit 9A in Dennis all the way to Orleans.
I don't think any other stretch of road has a worse reputation on Cape Cod, and no other ones have such an ominous nickname.
If someone from Cape Cod says "There was this terrible head-on accident..." someone else from Cape Cod will usually finish with "Suicide Alley?"
If other states have a Suicide Alley, they are not respected by Google. I saw no other Alley mentioned.
Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant
It's actually a fairly nice part of the state... coastal, beachfront, in the pines. It's not melting down or anything, and any leaks presently are low-key. They have a lot of spent nuclear waste sitting around (in overloaded storage facilities), and they can't find anyone to take it off their hands.
However... the worst case scenario actually makes this the top risk in the general area. Imagine a massive accident there? With almost all winds imaginable, the radioactivity released could blanket Cape Cod.
At that point, Cape Cod becomes Cape Chernobyl. Farming would be viable in Sandwich in about 20,000 years.
Granted, Pilgrim's time is almost up, but it is still a big radioactive elephant in the room for this discussion.
The Wedge, Hyannis
The low-income area around the Cape Cod mall is notorious for violence.
"The Wedge" aka "The Triangle" aka "Captains Quarters" is a hot spot in Hyannis.
If you wish to buy drugs from someone in a sh*tty house who might be involved in a shooting later, you can do worse than the Hyannis Triangle.
You have a nice mix of poor people, homeless people, hard-drinking people, a lively drug trade and the Cape's only Gangsta scene... albeit one about 3 miles from the Kennedy Compound.
The Wedge is known locally as "Brockton-by-the-sea."
PAVE PAWS, Bourne
PAVE PAWS is a United States Air Force Space Command radar system operated by Space Wing squadrons for missile warning and space surveillance.... and I pasted that right from Wikipedia, so go to them if you disagree.
People tend to bug out when there's a high powered radar installation nearby, as they fear the government pounding high-powered radar into their heads 24/7/365.
A mountain of studies have been conducted on PAVE PAWS. General studies have dismissed the threat of an elevated cancer risk (when they found elevated cancer rates near the Pilgrim Plant when I was a kid, they blamed it on smokers), although there does seem to be an elevated rate of Ewing's Sarcoma among those who live near the P Double.
Ewing's Sarcoma is a form of bone cancer that generally attacks the hips, ribs, arms and legs. It is most commonly found in male teenagers.
I should add that nothing is proven here, and it is nice to have an early-warning missile detection system in place.
Bourne/Sagamore Bridges, Rotaries
This is actually what I personally fear more than anything else on the Cape. I fear heights, and this is as high as it gets.
Off the top of my head (from a previous article), I know it's a 40 meter drop off the Bourne Bridge. You'd make the fall in 1.6 seconds, and smash into the water (or onto the bike path, although at that height there really isn't that much difference) at about 35 mph.
Even if you don't do a goodbye-cruel-world leap off the bridge (this section of either Route 6 or Route 28 is the real Suicide Alley), you can skid on ice, get hit by a drunk, maybe catch some air... the possibilities are limitless.
The bridges were built in 1935 (ironically, both of these suicide launching platforms were Great Depression projects) or so, and they could probably use an overhaul or ten.
Make it over the Bourne Bridge... you hit a rotary. Rotaries are a dying form of Road Intersection that basically dares the driver to force their way into a traffic circle that looks like a mini-Daytona at times. The reason that the Rotary is dying as an art form is that a rotary is fretty pucking dangerous.
Mitt Romney gets unusual praise from this column for ridding Earth of that Sagamore Bridge rotary.
Pollock Rip Channel, off Chatham
The reason they built the Cape Cod Canal was that it shortened the distance one had to sail from New York to Boston. It allowed sailors to not have to sail around Cape Cod.
The reason that people use Pollock Rip Channel is that it saves a sailor from having to sail around Nantucket.
The reason God made Pollock Rip Channel is that God- for reasons known only to him- wanted the Cape Cod Canal built.
Long known as a ship graveyard, Pollock Rip is an area of shifting sand that is always hungry and only eats boats. As recently as 1950, 8 fishermen died within sight of the lightship pictured here during a gale.
Strong tidal currents flowing in and out of Nantucket Sound meet weather from the open ocean to generate conditions that range from merely disorienting to completely treacherous.
Shangri-La/Onset, Wareham
If Hyannis can truly support the dubious claim that she is "Brockton-by-the-sea," then Onset is "a baby New Bedford." I personally stretch this area out to include the run of crack motels on the Cranberry Highway.
Shootings, stabbings, drug-dealing, armed robberies gone wrong, beat-downs, stick-ups... Wareham has all of the benefits of small-town life.
Throw in a ton of Section 8 folks, a genuinely rotten economy, and BOOM goes the dynamite.
Wareham recently tried Operation Safe Streets, a massive episode of enhanced policing. While results have been mixed, at least they're trying.
Horseshoe Shoals
A ship-smasher of a spot that also was a good reason to build the Cape Cod Canal, Horseshoe Shoals is an area of shallow ocean that helps give Nantucket Sound her nasty reputation.
Horseshoe Shoals is too low to sail safely at low and medium tides (half the day, landlubbers). Horseshoe Shoals doesn't look like it's that far from land, but looks is deceiving, man. You don't want to have to swim to Chatham, even during the Great White Shark off-season.
This was also the proposed setting for the doomed Cape Wind project. A forest of turbines would have only added to the difficulty of sailing through that region.
Massachusetts Military Reservation, Bourne
You'd think that, after the thousands of men with machine guns leave, a place wouldn't be dangerous anymore. But the MMR turned out to be the gift that keeps giving.
You don't explode stuff and shoot depleted uranium rounds without screwing up the groundwater, it seems. Explosive constituents leeched through the soil and into the groundwater.
They removed 25,000 tons of soil in hopes of stopping the contamination, but you can have the first (and middle, and last) vegetables grown from that region, thank you.
The general area also holds the distinction of Most Dead Bodies, as they host a military cemetery. I'm working from a shoddy memory, but I think that there may be 40,000 people buried there.
The Irish Riviera
This is sort of a hodge-podge category. Once we truly get over the bridges and out of Barnstable County, the answers quickly become "Taunton," "New Bedford" and "Fall River." We'll try to keep it at least around Cape Cod Bay, and use a sweeping Irish Riviera categorization.
This will be more of an amalgamation of hard-drinking South Shore residents, a growing Great White Shark presence (the last local shark attack on a human wasn't off Cape Cod, it was off of Manomet, in Plymouth), a gaggle of elderly drivers and the teen-slaying, winding, poorly-lit roads.
Certain parts of the South Shore (we're looking at you, Marshfield!) were very bad places to be Loyalist during the Revolution.
Duxbury, not Boston, holds the title of Last Drive-By Shooting Featuring A Prominent Rapper.
The Bridgewater Triangle
We've visited this area for the column a few times. It is also a case where, once we've gone this far inland, we should include places like "Brockton." However, the Bridgewater Triangle is in a class by itself.
For those of you who don't know, the Bridgewater Triangle (a term coined by paramormal poppa Loren Coleman) is a sort of Rankin Cluster of odd and sometimes paranormal happenings. This eerie sandwich is mashed into a lightly-populated section interior southeastern Massachusetts. They represent hard, though.
To my knowledge, they have both of the state's "known" Bigfoot sightings. You know... stuff like that.
The Triangle, which we think should be expanded to Cape Cod anyhow, sneaks onto this list (it is originally from a 2012 Cape Cod TODAY article) over former mainstays Pufferbellies, the Port 'o' Call, and the Woods Hole/Naushon Island current.
The low-income area around the Cape Cod mall is notorious for violence.
PAVE PAWS is a United States Air Force Space Command radar system operated by Space Wing squadrons for missile warning and space surveillance.... and I pasted that right from Wikipedia, so go to them if you disagree.
