Saturday is when we settle the Who Is The Best Football Team questions for like 8 different arguments. We get some cross-state fights.... I can almost guarantee that no one from Shrewsbury or Wachonah has ever spent much time worrying about how life is in Duxbury or Mashpee, and vice versa. Their views will change after they have beaten or been beaten by the other in front of their townmates, parents and cheerleaders.
Life doesn't play fair, and the Man is always trying to get one over on you. There's not much that you can do about it, as the Man is the Man for a reason, and that reason is not gender-exclusive. Sometimes, the best thing that can be done is to lessen the intensity of the beating.
As a man who has both studied military history and who has gone toe-to-toe with a few run-stoppers in my lifetime, I can tell you that many battles are won and lost by Logistics. That's one of those Army words that can mean whatever they need it to, and it has wide-ranging civilian implications. The short definition is getting to the right place at the right time with (or, in today's case, for) the proper supplies.
Logistics broke several of history's fiercest warlords, men such as Napoleon, Hitler, the Crusaders.... America would be British today were it not for the inherent Logistical Flaws involved with running America from England. Russia would be Nazi or French. Japan would be Mongol. All of Korea would be North Korea, even South Korea.
That's what we're here today to help you with. No matter how hard I work today, you're going to pay about double what you were paying for gas at the turn of the century. Sorry about that. However, if you can shave a few shekels off the Damages, it adds up over a year.
We're going town-by-town, giving you the lowest and highest gas prices you can find there. It's pushing noon on Wednesday, July 20th. The prices are whatever has been reported since Monday.
We publish this on Wednesday so that you can stumble across this article and fill your tank before they jack the price up to eff over the tourists on Friday.
You don't want to get treated like a tourist in your own home town, babe... that gets old fast. The best way to avoid that is to know your town. C’est ma raison d’etre......
MARTHA'S VINEYARD
Best: $2.99, Mobil, State Road, West Tisbury
Worst: $3.15, Shell, Main Street, Edgartown
Supporters of the arts on Cape Cod were dealt a low blow recently, as the Mashpee Center For The Performing Arts is going on the market.
Also known as "Zachary's Pub," it has been one of the few business establishments on Cape Cod to feature Dance as an art form. It is also the only place on Cape Cod where the dancers don't wear clothes.
The Mashpee Ballet is up for sale, for a mere $4.3 million. That gets you not only the MCFTPA, but 6.17 acres with 13 buildings that sport 50 single/multi family housing units.
Zachary's should attract national buyer attention, as they have a hard-to-get "floor show permit" that allows them to let their customers appreciate the Leonardonian mechanics of an idealized human body in motion. Those don't just grow on trees, and people who own strip clubs (plural) are constantly looking for such opportunities.
However, the buyer is under no obligation to provide the girls of Cape Cod and the Greater New Bedford area with an opportunity to show off their pole-dancing prowess. The sale of the Mashpee Ballet to a non-believer of a purchaser could be the end of an era on Cape Cod.
We can't let that happen, people!
Due to some frivolous spending (Cranberry County Magazine has long sought to be the only publication in eastern Massachusetts to have a nuclear weapon, and defense industry experts estimate that we are 3-5 years away from producing a fission device), I don't have the $4.3 million handy right now in liquid assets. Happens to the best of us, right?
Given the ribald nature of the business, it may not be feasible to get $1.14 out of every man, woman and child in Massachusetts to buy the MCFTPA and keep it as a municipal resource, sort of like how the Green Bay Packers are operated.
Strip clubs aren't as bad as they used to be. "You could kill a bitch in a strip club in the 80s," as Joey Diaz once noted. You'll be a much-respected and dare I say much-loved figure on Cape Cod if you intervene here.
One thing I can do to help the cause is make a quick list of:
UNDER THE RADAR REASONS TO OWN THE MASHPEE BALLET
1) All dynasties fall. If there's ever going to be a Kennedy offspring reduced to stripping, she's probably going to come knocking on the Ballet's door.
2) Create a new Thanksgiving tradition by having an authentic Wampanoag stripper and a white (hopefully of English descent) stripper from Plymouth share the stage, sort of a less messy version of the WWE's annual Gravy Bowl Match.
3) A budding reality show producer could immediately see the benefits of buying the Mashpee Ballet and the adjoining housing units. Expand the Ballet somewhat, fill each of the housing units with strippers, and Voila! Mashpee Ballet!
Motherf***ers be watching reality shows about tow truck drivers, pawn shops clerks, midget couples, tuna fishermen and God knows what else. Who wouldn't watch a show about a dystopian commune village, populated entirely by strippers? Nobody I know, that's who!
4) It's tough for a girl on Cape Cod to find high-paying night-shift work.
5) How many professions truly honor beauty? Supermodel jobs are few and far between, and I think that you have to have been born with an exotic first name. Strippers may have cool names, but they are more of the nom de guerre variety.
6) "Legs and Eggs" as a breakfast option vanishes from Cape Cod the day the Ballet dies. This will be replaced with the much less desirable "Wrists and Cysts" feature at the local orthopedic surgeon's place.
7) Many strip club patrons are respectable men who just want to see a different set of yabbos after 30 years of marriage, but who lack the testicular fortitude (or, perhaps in many cases, the charisma) to accomplish this feat without a place like the Mashpee Ballet.
8) In the same vein, many patrons are the Cape's bottom-feeders, and they will be left with a choice of "never see a nude woman again" or "take one by force." I'd just drive to a New Bedford gentleman's club, myself... but some people don't like commuting. This is more an exception than a rule, but many 108 pound strippers prevent more sexual assaults than the biggest, meanest cop.
9) If I won the lottery, I'd go to great lengths to establish a Hefneresque lifestyle. I wouldn't mind a white trash version of that, where instead of the Playboy Mansion, I'd have my family of lap-dancin' ladies spread out over 6 acres of ramshackle sharecropper-style housing in Mashpee. I can't be the only one on Cape Cod who thinks this way.
10) Its going to be strange when I go Marylou's or Burger King and get waited on by someone named "Synn."
While Jessica and I are finishing up work on the South Coast Compound of our media empire, we thought that we would take to the countryside and see what we could do for you all...
This article could have had several titles. I've erased several of them myself, and Jessica vetoed one. Among those titles that we considered and discarded for one reason or another were:
"Where To Hide A Body In Eastern Massachusetts" "Where To Have A Sasquatch Run In Front Of Your Car" "Where To Teach Your Clumsy Daughter How To Drive" "Where To Smoke A Joint And Drive 27 MPH With No One Behind You" "Where To Illegally Dump Your Washing Machine" "Where Old People Who Just Now Bought The '57 Chevy That They Always Wanted Go To Drive With Elvis Playing And Not Have Modern Kids Laugh At Them" "Where UFOs Look To Scare Isolated Individuals Whom No One Will Believe" "Where To Stumble Onto A Satanic Ritual" "Where To Bet Your Car's Pink Slip On A Drag Race" "Where To Introduce The 'Put Out Or Get Out' Dating Quandary" "Where To Be Mistaken For A Deer And Shot By A Hunter" "Where To Go If You Feel Like Driving But May Have A Warrant Out For Your Arrest"
Among the contributors to this website... Stacey, who is a soccer mom, came up with "stashing a body," "Satanic ritual" and the date rape joke. Her daughter, who is in her teens, came up with the Elvis joke. Non-hunting Stephen came up with the hunting joke. Abdullah, who has no kids, came up with the Clumsy Teen Driver joke. Stephen had Stacey's "Where To Stash A Body" joke as a working title for this article before Jessica intervened.
A nice, isolated stretch of road is a wonderful thing, and it gets more and more rare every passing day. In other parts of the world and even in other parts of Massachusetts, a lonely run of street isn't a rare thing. Eastern Massachusetts isn't other parts of the world, however.
As my friend Beth once noted after leaving New Jersey, "You forget how accustomed you can be to white trash, overpopulation and air pollution."
As people diffuse throughout America, these empty spaces will become harder and harder to find. Our elderly residents can no doubt recall when somewhere with a busy mall used to be a back road to nowhere.
We all have our own reasons for seeking an isolated road to drive on. We listed some up above, you may have other reasons, and no one is here to judge you. We're just here to guide you to some cool places to drive.
We'll use some of those aborted titles as logic for including certain streets in the list, and we will also try to point out where certain practices might prove impractical. We try to be inclusive to anyone who might stumble onto our humble web page, even chronic litterers and serial killers.
So, without any further ado, we give to you but a small sample of some places you can go in our area to have the road all to yourself.
courtesy of Sara Flynn
Gurnet Road/King Arthur Road, Duxbury
I use the dual designation here because, even after growing up there for 30 years, I'm not 100% sure where Gurnet Road ends and King Arthur Road begins. Google Maps says KAR juts out just a few hundred yards from Saquish. Other people, maybe more for convenience than for authenticity, use the Powder Point Bridge as the dividing line between the two roads.
Gurnet Road implies the residential section of Duxbury Beach, while King Arthur Road would be very handy for describing the road south of the bridge. However, I'm fairly sure that it is Gurnet Road right up until you get to the actual Gurnet, at which point it gets named after the silly English king.
The differences are minimal, however. What you have here is about 5 miles of sand road, as bumpy as a golf ball, and probably the best coastal scenery in non-Cape Massachusetts. 4WD only, at least once you get to the bridge.
You can very easily pull over on this road somewhere and, if you see no approaching headlights, be pretty sure that the closest person to you would have to swim across Duxbury Bay to say "hello."
Bournedale Road, Bourne
There is no truth to the story that "Bournedale" is an Algonquian word for "Shortcut." That may have been made up by a Bournedale-area website content generator guy.
Other than a few dozen houses, Bournedale Road is uninhabited. It's little more than some gorgeous scenery, and a way for Buzzards Bay and Wareham residents to get home from Route 3 without messing around on the Scenic Highway.
This road can be fairly busy at certain times of day, but you can have it to yourself if you pick your spots.
This is a terrible road to train a teen driver on. It winds a lot, has numerous high-angle descending S curves and is lined with sofa-sized boulders right at the road's edge. It isn't a very challenging road, but it is very unforgiving.
Added bonus: The Buzzards Bay end of it has a farm stand and a horse farm.
West Wind Shores, Plymouth
Not a lot of people know about this area, as there is really no reason for anyone to use it. "If you ain't from here, you don't come here" applies to this tiny Plymouth village.
Essentially all of Plymouth 1) west of Cedarville, 2 ) south of The Ponds Of Plymouth, 3) east of Wareham and 4) north of the village of Buzzards Bay, it's a unique spot on a political map. You can fire a gun from certain spots in the area and have it be heard in 4 towns, 3 regions and 2 counties.
West Wind Shores is fed by what is either Bourne or Plymouth Road, depending on what town you're in. There are some side roads which veer off into extreme southern Plymouth's lake region.
Where the mentioned-earlier Bournedale Road is a shortcut which Wareham and Buzzards Bay people use to skip the main road traffic when coming and going from Route 3, West Wind Shores is what they use when traffic is bad enough to snarl up Bournedale Road.
If you're reading this to find a place to illegally dump a sofa, this is a bad spot. The road, perhaps owing to her shortcut status, is busier than it should be.
However, once you got the sofa off the road and into the woods a few dozen yards, even God might have trouble finding you.
Just be careful that the locals don't see you... you can get a smack for that.
Glen Charlie Road/Agawam Road, Wareham
It is somewhat interesting to note that of the first four or five roads we mentioned, only Duxbury's contribution is not in a fairly linear run of roads, separated by mere meters of forest.
West Wind Shores, Bournedale Road, the College Pond Roads and Agawam Road are really only kept apart by there being no real need for a shortcut from an isolated Plymouth lakes village to an isolated Wareham one. They wouldn't be isolated if they cut out a road to them, right?
Some people, myself included, even pay to be isolated.
The Myles Standish State Forest and her adjoining regions provide a great portion of the areas we'll explore in this article. It's the Swamp Yankee hinterlands.
Glen Charlie Road, while sticking out into the middle of nowhere, isn't that isolated. If you really need to pour some lime on a former human, you want to veer off onto Agawam Road.
I have no idea who Glen Charlie is/was. I know the road is named after Glen Charlie Pond, which used to just be called Glen Pond. If you know, hit us up in the comments.
Lower/Upper College Pond Road, Carver/Plymouth
That's actually Barrett Pond, not one of the College Ponds. It's off one of the College Pond Roads, so it's good enough.
These roads punch into the Myles Standish State Forest, and you can pretty much go from Carver to the Pinehills on them.
This one is the #1 seed if we break this down to brackets. It is one of or perhaps the only road that goes through the seasonally uninhabited MSSF region. The MSSF makes neighboring towns like Plympton or Freetown look like the lights of Paris.
There are probably some serial killers in the region who have buried two or three generations of victims in this area.
This is as much road as you can have to yourself in Eastern Massachusetts, to my knowledge. It would be awesome for a very brief and hotly-contested NASCAR race. I might have to make some calls.
Old Indian Trail, Marion
This road isn't that long, but it does have the look that we were seeking. I was creeped out driving down it, and it was 2 in the afternoon. There was definitely a chance of Yeti Attack on this street.
There is no Young Indian Trail in Marion, or anywhere that I'm aware of. That might be in regular India.
This was our bumpiest road, and you wouldn't want to try it with an open beer or mixed drink. It's not the road to try in a Dodge Stratus. There were a few potholes on this road in which, if it rained, you could float a battleship around. If your girl isn't having any nonsense and you both know it, this road will at least bounce her around a bit. You gotta take what you can get sometimes, player.
Fortunately, we only needed to go 20 yards from the last house on the street to get the shot above. We went deeper, but that shot did the trick.
Quanapoag Road, Freetown/ Braley Hill Road, Lakeville
There's actually a road or two between Q Road and Braley Hill Road, but the differences will only matter to locals.
This is actually a very nice drive through some beautiful Lakes country. If you're here looking for nice country drives as opposed to somewhere to get rid of a refrigerator, you can do a lot worse. I intend to return with a camera next October, during foliage season.
After researching this project- which for some time had the title Where To Bury A Body In Eastern Massachusetts- one thought kept hitting me. Whitey Bulger used to dump bodies on the banks of the Neponset River. He was about 100 yards from one of America's main highways. He must have been able sit on his own balls.
I suppose some audacity is a must in his line of work, and nobody knew the dark spots of the town better than Whitey Bulger... but we'd be driving 10 minutes in isolation on some roads without being 100% sure that we could get a (theoretical) body out of the trunk and into the ground without being seen, even in a Nowhere Land like Lakeville.
That's why I got into Journalism, folks. I just murder time. Mine, yours, Jessica's... whatever pays.
Lingan Street, Halifax
The lakes region of the interior South Shore has been used as a dumping ground by numerous killers. The killers that I'm aware of used the Chaffin Reservoir in Pembroke and Bartlett's Pit in Pembroke instead of the wastelands at the end of Lingan Street in Halifax. They also got caught.
This road punches through the swamplands on the south side of West Monponsett Lake. It ends at a former campground, if you are willing to circumvent some gates. It looks exactly like where they should have based the Friday The 13th movie.
I used to teach in the city, and I'd take my little Hood Rats out into this area for field trips. Several of my students, far more used to an urban environment, were nervous about being in such a remote area... even in broad daylight.
"This is the s**t where Michael Myers kills all those white girls," one kid from Roxbury told me. "Black people have more sense than to go to places like this." I really couldn't argue with him.
I used to date a girl from Lingan Street. "Date" may be the wrong term, as I do believe that she could barely stand me. She looked like she could scrap some, too. I'm probably lucky that I'm not pushing up daisies at the end of Lingan Street.
Thompson Street, Middleboro/Halifax
You know that you're in the boondocks when you can host drag races on one of the main roads (Route 105, nonetheless) in this area without getting caught or endangering innocents.
I don't want to say that I have gone out early on Sunday morning and seen crude START/FINISH lines painted a quarter mile apart on a straightaway here... but would you look at that, I just said it!
This road is also full of farms. It's a great place to buy flowers, as well as a great place to go if you have never seen a cow in person.
Much like that Camp Murder from the Lingan Street section of this article, this is another spot that I used to field trip my city students to when I lived in Monponsett. Even a genuinely dangerous thug student becomes a cute 7 year old when he sees farm animals for the first time.
This is a beautiful road for the most part. I just shot the scariest part of it.
Will's Work Road, Mashpee
I fished WWR off of Facebook suggestions, and we here at CCM thank the readers for their help.
We'll use WW Road (which I didn't feel like driving to) and this awful screen cap to illustrate a few things this list is looking for.
It's easier if you highlight "Will's Work Road" and Google up the map, but we can see enough here for the basics.
Isolated area? A beach? A marsh? No houses? Minimum expectation of police interference, perhaps a border area of two towns? Plenty of road? Chance of wildlife? In our coverage area?
Will's Work Road, off of Waquoit Bay meets all of those criteria. She'll hold a nice rank on this list if we decide to get competitive.
Oyster Way/Seapuit River Road/Indian Trail, Osterville
This is another reader submission, much obliged!
Oyster Way has a lot of the same features that Will's Work Road enjoys, such as a tidal bay, some nice road to work with and a lot of forest cover.
Working among the wealthy neighborhoods entails a certain set of risks. For starters, you have to get by a gate. Also, the kind of guy who is disposing of a washing machine illegally might stand out in Osterville. Calls to the police will be investigated promptly. There is the chance of video surveillance.
Added bonus: After burying that body, why not unwind with 18 holes at the neighboring Oyster Harbors Golf Club? Not a member? Hey, you've already buried one body today, why shirk at adding a bothersome golf course employee onto your tab with God? God may even take your side on it, there is little guidance in the Bible concerning golf etiquette.
Big ups for being the second Indian Trail to make the list.
Service Road, Sandwich
You could actually classify this as anything between Sandwich and Shootflying Hill in Centerville.
This one requires a Bulger level of testicular fortitude, as you are 50 feet from Route 6 when doing whatever it is that you're up to. However, with the cover of darkness, some foliage... may as well be the deepest, darkest part of the forest, right?
It can also be highly-used, and that usage can spike unexpectedly if there is an accident on Route 6 and people start seeking alternate routes.
This is a nice, safe road that is fine for teaching the teen to drive on. However, the people you do encounter there may be in a great hurry.
Navigation Road, West Barnstable
The Cape is dotted with fire roads, roads that were abandoned after hurricane flooding, Indian trails and service roads. The minor width of the Cape prevents you from getting too isolated, but it can be done... especially in the off-season.
On this road I visualize a guy with every possible sort of infraction on his driving record who just needs "Deer Strike" to win a sort of Irish Lottery with the insurers.
Don't let the name of the road intimidate you... it's a straight line. "Forward" is all the navigation you'll need.
This was another FB suggestion, many thanks! The comments around the FB suggestion include "I drove down there, and my gas tank fell off the car."
Collins Road, Truro
This was the stomping grounds for the Beast Of Truro, who tore up a bunch of livestock in 1981-82.
The Pamet Puma was neither caught nor identified. There were numerous sightings, including one by a Truro policeman.
Some people said it was a pack of dogs, some thought it was a cougar, some thought it was a monster like The Beast Of Bray Road.
He eventually just went away... or did he?
If a monster, mythical or not, roamed your road... your road is going to be on this list, my friend.
Bonus:
Not Massachusetts, but here's what Stanley Kubrick did with the Isolated Road theme....
We hoped you enjoyed.... here's some more Duxbury, Plymouth and Halifax , below...
via Kerri Yanovitch Smith
Did we leave any roads out that deserve to be on this list? Let us know!
Barry failed to pass the Bush Line for all-time highest gas prices, although Dubya saw lower gas prices under his reign than Obama did. Granted, they came either before 9/11 or after the economy was collapsing... Either way, a confident President Obama was happy to pose in local colors for our photographers in front of a Russian petroleum outlet during one of his recent state visits to Wareham.
We admit to spamming a lot of useless stuff over those Internets at times. You most likely won't be changed permanently by our coverage of 2 foot waves lapping up against Chapin Beach, or our visit to a Plympton pumpkin patch. I won't say we're 100% useless, because we might amuse you, but we're not really utilitarian.
Today, we plan on bein' Mighty Useful to you. We're going to go town-by-town and list the cheapest and most expensive gas prices you can find there. We're using the Massachusetts Gas Prices website for or numbers, and it's like Monday morning or something. These will be the prices reported to that site over the last 36 hours.
There may be some variation to the prices, as the price some station in Chatham is charging tourists on Saturday might not be what he's trying to run by the locals on Monday. We're just doing what we can for you, people.
Here we go:
Provincetown
Best = $2.42, Cumberland Farms, Shank Painter Rd
Worst = $2.45, Gulf, Bradford St.
Wellfleet
Best = $2.35, Wave, State Highway
Worst = $2.39, Mobil, State Highway
Orleans
Best = $2.33, Speedway (South Orleans Rd) and Cumberland Farms (Rte 6A)
No higher prices reported
Harwich
Best = $2.27, Mobil, Whip O Will Lne
Worst = $2.35, Speedway, Main St
Dennis
Best = $2.13, Mobil, Theophilis Smith Rd
Worst = $2.45, Shell, East-West Dennis Rd
Yarmouth
Best = $2.19, Speedway, Iyannough Road
Worst = $2.29, Shell, Station Ave
Brewster
$2.37, Main St, Mobil
Barnstable
Best = multiple at $2.19, on 28 and 132
Worst = $2.39, Mobil, Iyannough Rd
Bourne (Mainland)
Best = $2.12 (cash), Mobil full-serve
Worst = $2.29, Shell, Canal Road
Martha's Vineyard has the 3rd (CITGO) and 4th (Shell) worst gas prices listed on the site, $3.19 at both spots on Vineyard Haven. The worst in the state is $3.49, at a Newburyport Mobil. The cheapest gas listed was $1.93 at both Speedway and Prestige in Brockton.
We have two maps from FEMA to check out today. The map above is a Hurricane Inundation map, and it depicts storm surge from a direct hit hurricane visiting Mashpee at mean high tide. It also shows what sort of storm would be needed to soak certain regions, which we'll get to in a minute.
The map is from the combined efforts of FEMA, MEMA, NOAA and the NHC. They use the funny-weatherman-titled SLOSH model of storm surge estimation. They do not depict freshwater flooding.
The colors relate to the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity, and break down like this:
Light Green = Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Gloria was one of these, and the offshore Halloween Gale was, too. Although not a tropical system, the Blizzard of '78 did Cat. 1-style damage.
Dark Green = Category 2 hurricane. Hurricane Bob was one of these.
Yellow = Category 3 hurricane. We've only had five of these hit New England since the Other Man arrived in 1620, the most recent being Hurricane Carol in 1954.
Pink = Category 4 hurricane. We've had one in recorded New England history, and it struck in 1635.
Flesh = One Hundred Year FEMA Food Zone. This is the "100 year storm" you hear people speak of, but you have to go pre-Colombian to find them ("going pre-Colombian" means using salt marsh soil samples to look for sand layering associated with large hurricanes). New England has had storms in the Category 4+ level in the 1100s, the 1300s, and the 1400s.
Sorry about Flesh, but my knowledge of color names was and continues to be heavily influenced by whoever was in charge at Crayola in the 1970s.
We shall leave the street-by-street analysis to the reader, who can use the links I'll throw in at the end of the article to zoom in on their own house if it suits them.
Note that you don't need to be in a shaded area to get yourself a quick and sudden Ending. You can have a tree fall on you, have your car washed out in street flooding, step on a downed power line, get purged by looters, enjoy the Robespierre treatment from flying shingles, be summarily executed by National Guardsmen, or even stumble into a sharknado. There's no shortage of ways for you to get Left.
With that in mind, we now present to you the down-there-somewhere Evacuation Zone map.
Remember, you don't HAVE to leave when 5-0 tells you to. Also remember that the cop you read the Constitution to before the storm may be the one who has to fish you out of the drink when the ship hits the fan.
The E-map is easier to read, as it is made up of only two colors.
Last weekend brought us the annual Scallop Festival, with all of the prestige and revenue that accompanies it. It really is nice to see our old friend return to... What do you mean, not Bourne???
The people who run the Scallop Festival- the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce- decided that the event needed a larger venue, and shifted it to the Barnstable County Fairgrounds. The move gives the festival more parking, better facilities, and dare I say a more prestigious locale. The event has swollen in popularity, to the point where it draws in 50,000 people every time they throw it. A larger facility means the chance of more money. It makes perfect sense to move the event off the mainland.
Bourne's claim to the Festival had a fingertip grip at best, buffeted by hopes of a new hotel complex, the arrival of the Commuter Rail, and the revival of the Main Street business district. There was also a nostalgia/historic basis, but that isn't worth a few thousand parking spots these days.
The move also gave a stomach punch to a struggling village, a village that has stood by the Festival for her whole existence. The Scallop Festival has been going on for 45 years. Sometimes it was in the Armory, sometimes in the big tent by the old Playland location, sometimes on the military base, and- until now- in Buzzards Bay Park.
It is was a Bourne tradition. Now, the town is losing their Main Event, the annual gift horse that would fill the hotels, buy out the goods from our stores, and put our gas stations on a paying basis.
Who knows? Some of the people who visited Buzzards Bay during the Festival may have liked it enough to maybe return again and spend more money. We'll never know now, will we?
All summer long, people heading to spend money in other Cape Cod towns clutter up Bourne during any time period you can hang "commute" off of. We're asked to deal with it, so that Eastham and Martha's Vineyard can prosper. We get very little in return for it, other than some people who tire of the traffic enough to pull off of the highway in search of food or gasoline.
The Festival has always been a sort of the last hurrah for Cape Cod's summer, especially when the event coincided with the October scallop harvest. It was fitting that Bourne got the final bow with her Scallop Festival. We took the brunt of the hassle all summer long, so it was only right that we got the last bite out of the tourists before the desolation of winter set in.
The festival was kind of like a Thank You from all the people who had been leaning on Bourne during the peak traffic season, and the town was dependent upon it. Now, they take even THAT away from us. Oh, well, there will be another Canaliversary in 98.75 years, I guess we'll be OK.
Others are not so forgiving. Homeland Security has been tracking a group called Al-Mollusk, who were planning to disrupt the Faux Falmouth Festival. They had an elaborate plan to buy junker cars and use them to block the Bourne Bridge during the festival, depriving Falmouth of anyone Inland while seeing how many Cape Codders will travel through a mob to get scallops and fries.
The town considered her own measures. The big idea was to host an Oyster Festival on the same night. Advertising was to focus heavily on the aphrodisiacal properties of the Oyster, while disparaging the scallop scarfer. "You can go to the Scallop Festival, but if you still love your spouse, you'll be in Bourne instead."
Yeah, we were gonna go right for the friggin' jugular, you really have to these days.
Bourne took it on the chin with this Scalloping of our tradition, and we should already be planning our revenge. If this were the old days, we'd be sending guys across the bridge to burn down their salt mill and deflower their virgins. Those people are lucky that I don't run Bourne, I'd drop those two bridges into the water faster than you can say "Jackie Robinson." I'd try to steal their stupid Road Race.
I can tell you this.... you won't be seeing many people from Bourne down at the Fairgrounds this weekend. It's never nice to see your ex with someone else, especially if they are being fed shellfish.
