The jewel of Marsh Vegas is the 149th running of the legendary agricultural fair. The first one went down 2 years after the US Civil War ended, and nothing could stop it since.
It serves up an awesome combo platter of rides, fried food, games, animals, freak shows, demolition derbies, music, wrestling... you're not going to be bored at the Marshfield Fair.
The only way that you can be more Americana than the Marshfield Fair is if you travel back in time and get a thang goin' on with George Washington and/or Betsy Ross. Carnivals and agricultural fairs have been around in some form since before America was America. I wouldn't be surprised to know that a 5 year old Thomas Jefferson was running around happy/wild at some sort of travelling fair.
"Carnival" is a term that basically means "merrymaking before Lent." The modern travelling carnival has strayed from her religious base to be more of a seasonal thing. The Marshfield Fair, while definitely holding 100% legit agricultural fair status, is in the Travelling Carnival subgroup.
The modern carnival has many parents. The travelling circus is a direct ancestor, but Vaudeville, burlesque, and gypsies also get into the mix. The 1893 Chicago World's Fair was very influential, They had a whole section of the grounds devoted to rides, games of chance, freak shows, Wild West shows and even the first Ferris Wheel.
The public ate it up, and people began to develop similar events that could be taken on the road. There were 17 travelling fairs (I think Marshfield is included in this number) in the US during 1902, and there were 300 by 1937.
The difference between megaparks like Disneyland or Six Flags and a travelling carnival is that the carny rides are smaller, and can be broken down for quick transport. Disneyworld is rooted to the spot they're in, while I'm pretty sure that the same carny stuff that is in Marsh Vegas today was in Barnstable last month and will be in Topsfield by October or so. Many carnivals cover a lot of territory, being a spring/autumn event in the South before/after moving North in the summer months.
Marshfield has been running their Fair in August for as long as I can remember. This lengthy Fair history page that I have no intention of reading all the way through says that it was a September event before Marshfield became a seasonal resort area. This owes to the agricultural roots of the fair.
It is the big shin-dig every summer if you're a South Shore kid. July 3rd owns July, and the Marshfield Fair owns August. I'm sure that a parent from 1868 would sympathize with a time-travelling 2016 parent as their kids ran wild around the same fairgrounds. Some things never change.
It's a useful calibration tool for locals, and it gives Marshfield instant name recognition in the region. Someone from Weymouth or Brockton may never have been to Duxbury or Middleboro, and I managed to live 10 miles from Monponsett without ever having heard Monponsett mentioned until a realtor showed me a house there... but every kid on the South Shore has been to Marshfield, usually during mid-August.
It is a popular event. I have the numbers for 2006's Fair, and they come up at around 180,000 paying customers. The town profits from the influx of visitors, less in a hotel sense than in a gas/supper/smokes/passing-through sense. I know someone who makes about $5000 a year by letting people park on his lawn.
It's a people-watcher's paradise. You get a fine cross-section of the South Shore population base. Also be sure to check out the carnies.
Carnies are the people who work the fairs. They're a strange migrant horde who speak their own language. Much of it is from back when the carnivals were more of a gilded theft. The language is secretive, and it evolves enough that if you know the term, it's already out of date.
"Mark," which I first heard ascribed to wrestling fans, is from the carnival. If a game operator found a sucker ("rube"), he'd pat his back with a chalked hand, leaving a "mark" that other game operators could identify the man by.
Fairs are known for their rides, which are today's main attraction. Marshfield has all sorts of them. We'll try to get some pictures later, but the better ones are the Ferris Wheel, the Funhouse (Vegas usually has it more as a haunted house), the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Round-up, the Vomit Spewer, the Child Decapitator and a dozen other rides that i have no intention of getting on.
I took this girl Julie to the Marshfield Fair once, after dinner at the Ming Dynasty. I didn't hurl on the Sno-Bobs or whatever that ride is called, but I also did nothing more daring than slink through the petting zoo afterwards. I had to go back with her (and her sister Ashley) a few days later, so she could go on rides with someone who had courage. I did hurl at Rocky Point once, but we're not going there.
We do plan on doing a Game Of Chance article where we share tips on how to beat Carny Games, but we're running a bit behind. I still have to learn how to beat these games, I'm pretty much that Mark you read about. A marginally-bright Carny will outfox me 8 days a week.
Avoiding the rides gives me more time to focus on food. I rarely eat Fried Dough outside of Carnival context these days. I might rip a chunk off the kid's cotton candy if I can do so with stealth. I'm all in on caramel apples, funnel cake and vinegar fries. If someone's serving Fried Twinkies, I'm eating Fried Twinkies. I'm not opposed to a fried chicken stand attack, although I have never and will never eat a Corn Dog. Gotta draw the line somewhere.
The sad part, as you saw from my date with Julie, is that I try to go out to dinner before the Fair, so I don't go crazy and overeat.
Here are some events that will be running.at the Marshfield Fair this week:
Friday, August 19
1, 3, 5 pm - Ox Pulling
6-10 pm - Family Music Festival
7 pm - Demolition Derby
sponsored by Rockland Trust
The Marshfield Farmer Market is still on at the Town Hall Green. Friday 2-6
Saturday, August 20
1 - 8 pm -New England Country Music Day
2 pm - Truck Pulling
sponsored by Tiny & Sons
2 pm - Team Penning
7 pm - Truck Pulling
sponsored by Tiny & Sons
(For Truck Pulling information contact
Eric Burgess at 508-456-4316)
Sunday, August 21
1 - 9 pm - 20th Green Harbor Roots Festival
2 pm - Truck Pulling
sponsored by Tiny & Sons
2 pm - Team Penning
7 pm - Truck Pulling
sponsored by Tiny & Sons
(For Truck Pulling information contact
Eric Burgess at 508-456-4316)
Monday, August 22
5:30 pm - N.E. Indie Rock Competition (click here for application)
7 pm - Demolition Derby Figure 8
sponsored by Rockland Trust
Tuesday, August 23
Senior Day
sponsored by Sullivan Tire
2 pm - Music by Reminisce
5:30 pm - Masters of the Mini Motocross
7 pm - Music by Reminisce
Wednesday, August 24
4-H & Agricultural Awareness Day
12 pm - Motocross Time Trials
2, 4, 6 pm - Horse Pulling
5:30 pm - N.E. Indie Rock Competition (click here for application)
6 pm - Supercross Competition (Motocross)
Thursday, August 25
Children's Day
sponsored by AFC Urgent Care
7 pm - Kristen Merlin
7 pm - Demolition Derby
sponsored by Rockland Trust
Friday, August 26
5:30 pm -N.E. Indie Rock Competition - Finals
7 pm - 7th Annual 4-H Benefit Auction
7 pm - Demolition Derby - Finals
sponsored by Rockland Trust
Saturday, August 27
12 - 8 pm -21st Annual North River Blues Festival
12 pm - Marshfield Fair Versatility on Horseback
7 pm - Demolition Derby Figure 8 Finals
sponsored by Rockland Trust
Sunday, August 28
12 - 6 pm - Antique Truck & Tractor Show
11:30 - 5 pm - Tractor Pull
12 - 8 pm -21st Annual North River Blues Festival
1, 2:30 pm - Pony Pull
6 pm - Lawn Mower Racing
FAIR
ADMISSION:
$10.00
Children 6 & Under
FREE
GATES OPEN:
Noon - 10 pm
Everyday
No Pets Allowed
Except Guide Dogs
Marshfield Fair
140 Main Street
Marshfield, MA
02050
(781) 834-6629
(781) 834-6620
FAX
(781) 834-6750
"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.
Eastern Massachusetts has a substantial coyote presence. Every town and even every city has them. If you drive at night enough, you'll see them around.
Coyote are not native to Massachusetts, at least as recently as when White People started coming. The canid feared by Myles Standish was the Wolf. You could kill a wolf for a bounty in Plymouth by 1630, and Cape Cod actually considered putting up a wall to keep wolves away.
Trapping, poisoning and habitat destruction drove the Wolf out of Massachusetts and even New England. The wolf was extinct in New England by 1840. We then had a Pax Lycan of wolf-free living. Meanwhile, east-to-west settlement of America drove the wolves west, where they began to breed with the smaller and more adaptable western coyote.
This newly-created hybrid- the coywolf- then began to push east as former farmland reverted back into forest. Before long, they started making appearances in in northern New York and northern New England in the 1930s-1940s. From there, they began to bleed into southern and then southeastern New England. They were all over SE Massachusetts and even Cape Cod by the time the century turned over.
As of 2016, anyone living in any town who might be reading this most likely has a coyote in their neighborhood. What does that mean for them?
Again, the "coyote" we have are actually coywolves. To be fair, "coyote" sampled around here (specimens were taken from Barnstable and closer to Boston) turned up an odd mix... they were about 25% wolf and 10% domestic dog. A four-way mix, a menage a quatre, exists, and differing levels of Coyote, Eastern Wolf, Western Wolf and Domestic Dog is what is walking around in our neighborhoods.
A coywolf is larger and more suited to suburban/urban life, perhaps because or perhaps not because of the dog DNA. It may weigh 50 pounds more than a classic coyote.
A coywolf is bad enough to kill a human if enough of them get in on it. A gang of them killed a Canadian folk singer a few years ago. It most likely won't go down that way if you see coyote around, but that's the worst-case scenario.
What you can do to lower your chances of a coyote fight is to follow a few guidelines. These guidelines are from the Massachusetts Divison of Fisheries and Wildlife, just in case you thought that the guy making the MILF jokes last month in this column has now decided to offer his own untested thoughts on protecting yourself from a predator.
To Avoid A Coyote...
- Secure your garbage.
A coyote is a fine hunter, able to bring down a deer with the right numbers. However, like most everything, they'll take an easy meal if they can get at it. If you have your leftovers from the week in a thin Hefty bag on the side of our house, that's like a Golden Corral to a coyote.
While a coyote can eventually knock over a trash can and force off the lid, animals are cunning, and a great part of cunning involves choosing the path of least resistance for your task accomplishment. Once the coyote moves along from your house to the point where the house is out of his range, he's an SEP... Someone Else's Problem.
- Don't feed a coyote.
Take this as 1A with "secure your garbage," or take the garbage one as "don't indirectly feed the coyote."
Feeding a coyote does triple damage. It keeps him coming back to Freemealistan, it takes away his fear of humans, who he will then associate with food.
I knew a guy in Duxbury who lived on a meadow. He began to see a fox around his house. He soon was able to throw hot dogs to it and have the fox eat them. One night, he made a trail of hot dogs that led right onto his porch, where he was watching the Red Sox. About around inning 7, the fox came up on the porch and ate the stash he had left there. He stuck around for a few innings, not quite begging but still with a 100% food-focus. We were able to pull this stunt at will for a whole summer, enough that, if you added up the innings, the fox probably watched two or three full Red Sox games.
We named him "Redd," and he really wasn't a problem until he got a credit card and started ordering out of the ACME catalog. We were fools to do as we did, but it does go to show you how food association works.
- Be smart with those pets!
A coyote will view a small dog or cat as prey. It will view a large dog as competition. They have unfortunately aggressive reactions to both stimuli.
Your pet is far more likely to be killed by a car than by a wild animal. The threat all across the board is raised, however, if your pet is free-roaming. That's a free-range chicken to a coyote.
Feeding pets indoors is also important, as something which eats carrion and roadkill like a coyote does is going to view a big bowl of Gravy Train on your porch (or even a pile of spilled bird seed in your yard) as you or I might view an ice cream sundae giveaway.
I did find a stat that said "the most common food items were small rodents (42%), fruit (23%), deer (22%), and rabbit (18%)." Only about 2 percent of the (coyote) scats had human garbage and just 1.3 percent showed evidence of cats. "
I my be wrong, but the totals they listed (42+23+22+18) add up to 105%. Either way, cats and rubbish are a minor part of the coyote diet. - Close off potential dens or areas that provide cover.
If you have an open crawl space under your house, you also have a coyote Holiday Inn. There's shelter, ambient heat, nearby food, and a perfect place to issue forth and nurse a litter of the furry fuc*ers.
If you have a bunch of thick brush in your yard, you also are providing a perfect place for the coyote to hide in and strike from. His main targets will be your pets and your trash.
You want to sort of seal your property off from a coyote, rather than make him want to hang around.
- Avoid going into areas that a coyote might favor.
This is especially true during spring and summer, when they are bearing and raising pups.
Of course a coyote can be anywhere. However, you can avoid areas where sightings are frequent, and you can use social media to pick up on sightings.
Ooops, there's a coyote! Now what?
- Remember who runs the f*cking planet.
You, as a human, are more dangerous than a coyote is. Both of you know it. That's why he hasn't attacked yet. He's alive because we have not yet decided to exterminate him.
If you remember that, it will add to your confidence. That will show in your body language, and that could deter an attack.
Like the author said, “Walk tall, kick ass.... and never forget that you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.” - Try a domestic dog command on it.
Who knows? It may work.
If it does, you have a circus act. Try to teach him hockey next, I saw some gypsies in eastern Europe do that with bears once
OK... it probably won't work, but if you do it with some authority, the tone of your voice may deter the beast.
- Try to scare it off.
None of us are Hitchcock, but you can make an attempt to scare off an approaching coyote.
Maintain eye contact, don't show it your back, and don't run. Running will activate the chase instinct.
Screaming, performing mock charges, spreading out your coat to make yourself look 7 feet tall or 4 feet wide, throwing rocks, playing some NWA aloud... make sure ol' Wild E. knows that he'll be in for a squabble if he goes down Messing With You Boulevard.
- Bear arms and fight like Iron Mike.
If you live in an open-carry state, congratz! Shooting an aggressive coyote is one of those good reasons for having a gun.
If you can't or don't walk the b-lock with the G-lock c-ocked, there are other means by which to drive off or even kill a coyote. A good walking stick can deter a nosy coyote. Pepper spray or some sort of bear repellent spray will make them think twice about having themselves some people food. An air horn will both scare them away and summon attention from people who can help you. If the coyote gets in close on you, a good knife will go a long way.
Either way, fight to the death. It probably won't come to that, and the coyote will probably run off before sustaining crippling injuries, but don't let your own Lack Of Intensity be the reason for that.
You may feel badly about beating down a coyote with a lead pipe, but you're actually doing him a favor. A coyote who doesn't fear humans is a coyote who will eventually have to be euthanized.
Be The Dominant Primordial Beast.
If a pack of them come up on you and if you can't avoid it, fu*k up the meanest looking one first.
Dogs of any sort live by a dominance hierarchy, and it's easier to have one brutal fight with the top dog than it is to have a half dozen fights where the opponent keeps getting better.
Look at it this way... if a pack of celebrity dogs rushes you and you smack Cujo in the face hard enough to make him run away, you're probably not going to get much of an argument from Lassie afterwards.
Notify Authorities When A Coyote Becomes Aggressive.
An aggressive coyote is just the reason to have an Animal Control Officer on the payroll.
"Coyotes are naturally afraid of people and their presence alone is not a cause for concern, though depending on human-related sources of food, coyotes can become habituated. A habituated coyote may exhibit an escalation in bold behavior around people. The coyote has lost its fear of people when it exhibits one or more of the following behaviors. The coyote: * Does not run off when harassed or chased * Approaches pets on a leash * Approaches and follows people When wildlife exhibit these behaviors, corrective measures can be taken. If an immediate threat exists to human life and limb, public safety officials including ACOs, police departments, and the Massachusetts Environmental Police, have the authority to respond to and dispatch the animal as stipulated in the Code of Massachusetts Regulations (CMR) 2.14 that pertain to handling problem animals . This includes animals exhibiting clear signs of rabies. If possible, MassWildlife should first be contacted to authorize the lethal taking of a coyote. Coyotes taking pets are not considered an immediate threat to human safety, therefore ACO's and municipal police departments are not authorized to remove these wild animals."
We wish you the best on this Memorial Day weekend. Many plans, both solemn and joyous, will be influenced by the weather. We'll try to get you prepped for this.
Today should be nice. Aside for an isolated-but-powerful thunderstorm pushing ESE off of Nantucket at 8 AM, sunny skies should rule the early part of the day. Cloudiness will increase in the afternoon, and we'll have the chance for some sweet late-night thunderstorms.
High temperatures will push 80 on Cape Cod (a SW wind will help cool us off), and aim for the 90s inland. Here are some record high temperatures for the day that I stumbled across:
Boston -- 92 set in 1931
Providence -- 91 set in 1931
Hartford -- 93 set in 1977
Worcester -- 88 set in both 1911 and 1929
Milton/Blue Hill -- 90 set in 1929
HHH, friends... Hazy, Hot and Humid.
Sunday looks to be a mix of clouds and sun, and it will be a bit cooler (60s-70s). Some rain may arrive on Sunday night, which is where we get to that spaghetti chart with the tropical storm in it from at the top of the page up yonder.
Don't worry about a tropical storm hitting us Monday. Our water isn't warm enough to support it, even if it raced up at us. Although the season has begun, New England's tropical storm threat runs more August-October. Tropical storms are heat engines, and the waters south of us (water temperatures are in the 50s) presently have no fuel for her.
However a tropical storm does look like she will sample a bit of South Carolina cooking. Presently known as Tropical Depression Two, she is forecast to become Tropical Storm Bonnie by tonight.
Bonnie should be no big deal, sort of a nor'easter with an attitude. After striking the Carolinas, she looks to take a run up the coastline at New England, guided by an area of high pressure offshore and with an eastern-moving frontal boundary throwing her precipitation at us. That's where we get our taste of Bonnie.
She'll be a soaking rainstorm if we get a direct or even indirect hit out of her. The worst for SE Massachusetts looks to be in the late afternoon, but the threat of rain will be on us all day. If you have some shindig planned for Monday, you should have a strong indoor backup contingency plan.
She doesn't look to do much for the surf, as she won't be that strong when she's near us. There could be some rough surf on the South Coast and the Cape once she's been churning South of us for long enough. Don't board up the house or anything.
June tropical systems are rare in New England, and May ones are pretty much unheard of. This is a pretty concise list of New England hurricanes, and you don't see much/any early season activity vis a vis the Tropics. Even July is pretty weak historically up here.
Tropical Storm Agnes, which was a hurricane south of us, came ashore near New York City in June of 1972, but the effects on New England were minimal. Remnants of tropical storms like Alison (2001), Arlene (2005), Alberto (2006) and Barry (2007) also tapped New England in June. Barry dropped 3 inches of rain on Taunton. The dominant feature with these storms for New England, and especially eastern New England, were rain. Expect more of the same with Bonnie.
Ominous Storm Notes.... I used to roll with a girl named Bonnie when I was a younger man, and with God as my witness, and she once rendered me unconscious.
I may have run these before, not sure if I did it on this site or not. I lifted the pics from this site.
This is the Trans-Atlantic Cable coming ashore on Duxbury Beach on July 23rd, 1869. It's what Cable Hill is named for.
At the time, it was a big event. The cable stretched 3500 miles, from Brest, France. It cost a then-ridiculous $1.5 million. Everyone in town came out to watch it come ashore (there aren't many on the beach, but there was a 600 person tent on Abram's Hill across the bay), as did dignitaries from around the state. One of the first messages was sent to Napoleon III.
It came ashore at what is now Cable Hill. Since the cable hadn't landed at the time, locals called the area "Rouse's Hummock," after a farmer who was the sole inhabitant of the area for a while. Rouse's Hummock is what Hummock Lane is named for. Ironically, a "hummock" is a hill, while Hummock Lane is the lowest-lying inhabited land in the Gurnet Road area.
Nothing in the Gurnet Road area of Duxbury bears Rouse's name, and it is lost to history.... save for here, of course.
This is the area where the first opening in the seawall is now. The guy standing alone on the dune is about where my(Steve) house would be 100 years later.
Duxbury had a very impressive dune in place. It seems much larger than the dunes down on the uninhabited parts of Duxbury Beach are presently. There was no jetty in Green Harbor at the time. The jetty there went up after the Portland Gale in 1899, limiting the flow of sand down to Duxbury Beach.
Notice that there are no houses around the dunes. A storm in 1806 (my source says 1806, but a Category 3 hurricane hit Massachusetts in 1804) closed the outlet to the sea for the Green Harbor River, Her mouth was further South than it is now, with "now" meaning where the Green Harbor Marina is. The water in the area became stagnant, and was a mosquito factory for 150 years or so. The Cut River was dug out after the GHR mouth closure, but Duxbury Beach was just sand and dunes for a while.
They did subdivide 300 cottage lots in 1888 further down the beach (they're why the Powder Point Bridge was built... prior to the bridge, if Duxbury residents wanted to go to the beach they just took a boat across the bay), but the Portland Gale tore Duxbury Beach to shreds and nixed those plans with the quickness 10 years later.
I'm not sure when the cottages on the north end of Duxbury Beach went up. Duxbury historians have generally been very interested in the Beach Reservation part,of Duxbury Beach while concurrently having no interest at all in the Irish Riviera part further North on the beach. Many people from Duxbury Proper think that this neighborhood is in Marshfield.
Back to the cable....
They (the workers, who may be French, are the ones in the light-colored work shirts, and were the only barefoot ones in the pictures when they are on the actual beach) dragged the cable into what most residents of the area refer to as Bradford's Parking Lot. You can see Bradford's in the bottom picture.
It went into the wooded area at the foot of Cable Hill. If you stalk into the scrub pines on the south end of the hill, you can still find some of the wreckage from the relay station.
From Cable Hill, it went across the marsh into Duxbury Proper, ending at the Cable Office house on the banks of the Bluefish River.
The cable was very busy for a while, and 40 francs would buy you 10 transmitted words.
It was used heavily until a 1929 Grand Banks earthquake/tsunami created an undersea avalanche that destroyed several cables. The Duxbury/France cable was among the casualties.
My dad, in a good example of making busy work, used to pay me $5 per foot for hack-sawing pieces of the cable. It was already snapped by this point, and the sharp edges were sticking up from the beach, so it was more of a public service than it sounds like.
One of the common local myths circulating around any town in Massachusetts comes to life every time someone says "No town in Massachusetts has more liquor stores than (insert his town here)." I have heard the term ascribed to Provincetown, Worcester, Amherst, Winthrop, Scituate, Clinton, Bridgewater, Marshfield and a dozen other towns. The easier to swallow version of this myth is the same quote, but on a per-person basis.
Opinions vary wildly, and this is probably one of those articles where I'll get told to eff off in the comments section. I'm good with that. I will say that there are different lists with different criteria.
Boston generally wins Drunkest City In America. That title is shouldered by a heavily Irish population base, an unmatched pile of college kids, a nice flow of business travel, long suffering Red Sox fans, a solid nightlife industry and did I mention the Irish?
Roadsnacks, in an influential 2015 study using much of the same criteria as me (but using other factors like Package Stores, Divorce Rates and Twitter references), came up with a Top Ten of:
Plymouth
Scituate
Salem
Walpole
Adams
West Yarmouth
West Bridgewater
Andover
Hudson
Newburyport
WCVB, using a self-reporting technique of "Has More Than Five Drinks Per Session" and going by counties, had:
Hampshire County
Nantucket County
Sufflok County
Plymouth County
Barnstable County
Dukes County
Bristol County
Essex County
Franklin County
Middlesex County
Norfolk County
Worcester County
Berkshire County
Hampden County
They had Hampshire standing alone, Nantucket and Suffolk taking Place and Show, a glut with the same ranking (on that list, it runs from Barnstable to Norfolk Counties with each holding the same score) and the non-UMass western regions being a bit drier.
There are dry towns in the state where no Licka gets sold. Those towns remind me of the Civil War story of the Irish soldier slipping off the march into a dry-town inn and asking the innkeeper for "a glass of water, with a wee bit of the Creature added, unbeknownst to you or myself."
I was going to try to find out Liquor Stores Per Town, but that seemed like too much work. There exists no easily-Googled database. I'd have to Google up which towns have how many liquor stores, then divide or something by how many people live in each town. A good method, granted, but very work-intensive for a sunny Saturday morning in May. There would also be a large Margin Of Error.
What I shall instead do is use this map of 2011 liquor licenses per town from the Boston Business Journal. Old numbers, obsolete, but providing insight. I can then cross-reference my numbers with the population figures of the town in question, and... Voila! We have a new stat, one which I will name once I think of something catchy.
(Editor's Note: Or he can save 12 hours of math by just using this chart)
This map is just for places you can drink IN. Take-out drinking from packie stores isn't accounted for on this list.
I may as well make a few guesses here before I start looking at the numbers, thus becoming like more enlightened than you. Once I have had a look, I'm disqualified from guessing. You'll catch up to my enlightenment once you read the article, but by that time, I'll be looking up some other new ish, and the cycle will begin anew.
I'm thinking that "the Irish Riviera" will miss out on her rightful title, mostly because "Cape Cod" is a touristy place and will have her numbers padded by people on vacation. I have no doubt that New Beige and Fall-down River carry the "South Coast" on their backs, but if places like Acushnet and Mattapoisett represent hard, the region may be able to take down a contender.
Anyhow, here are the towns from our region and their ranking on the list. The criteria is residets-per-liquor license. If I had package store numbers, these rankings might be radically different.
Rank.... Town.... Residents... Licenses... Residents per License
1PROVINCETOWN3,3906255
Provincetown takes the title. At least one publication that I saw summed it up as well as I can... "Tourist haven in the summer... desolate, isolated winters."
"55 residents per license" means that, if every single man, woman, child and baby in Provincetown went out for a drink to a local bar, each bar would only have 55 people in it... less, once you factor out bar employees who live in Provincetown,
By contrast.... if a similar event happened in Duxbury, there would be 1444 people in each bar. If it happened in Boxford (ranked #318 and last in the state), there would be 8600 people in each bar.
The Cape represents hard, although runner-up towns like Great Barrington could complain about tourists and summer people swelling the numbers. If you assume that summer people double the population of Chatham, and that there are also a disproportionate amount of hotels filling up with families, you might have to triple or even quadruple the licenses-per-town rankings. All of a sudden, these supposedly hard-drinking Cape towns start tumbling to 150th in the state.
Provincetown is immune to that. Tripling their RPL only moves them to 3rd in the state.
Monroe- ranked second in the state, just above Wellfleet- has 1 license in a town with 96 residents. By contrast, the Mayberry hometown (may have been County, or both town and county) of Andy Griffith fame had 5600 residents... in 1968.
Let's pause right here to tip our glasses to the western part of the state. While I'm only showing EMass towns, rest assured that about 90% of the towns that I'm leaving out are in the Berkshires.
Both of the islands assert themselves mightily. Island people are sort of kin to mountain people. Both are a bit strange. It's a different sort of strangeness, but it shares a common intensity. They're both about equally lost in a city.
Rankings 50-75 have a few trends jumping out at me.
1) The South Coast is beginning to assert herself. Props to Seekonk for sliding into the top 50. Mattapoisett, Fairhaven and Wareham also step up to the bar by the time that #75 is called.
2) The South Shore and especially the Irish Riviera took awhile to show themselves. Scituate is nowhere to be seen.
3) I wonder if (and how much) Foxboro's numbers are pushed up by the Patriots being in town. I don't get out to Foxy Bro as much as I used to, and am not sure what sort of effect 8 home games (and X playoff games any year) has on the town's drinking establishments. They say that businesses on Cape Cod are made/broken by 8-12 weekends a year. I wonder how much 8-12 weekend days a year is worth in Hooch Sold?
Cape Cod is starting to fade out... not because we don't drink hard enough, but because we've exhausted most of our towns earlier in the rankings.
Bourne does drink harder than Boston, something I'm a bit shocked to see. If Boston had better beaches, they might be able fight their way up the list a bit.
Note that many of Boston's Irish fled Boston in the 1970s, driving up the numbers in the otherwise sleepy Irish Riviera.
New Beddy closes out our presence in the top 100. 30% of the top 100 are towns in our coverage area.
Fall River is pretty much right in the middle of the rankings. New Bedford and Fall River, which I thought would carry the South Coast, ranked a modest 87 and 158 respectively. Seekonk (44), Mattapoisett (60 something) and the Wareham/Fairhaven team (74 and 75) all represented harder.
At least 10% of the liquor licenses in Wareham are held by places that only serve breakfast. (Your Hometown Here) may have more or less, I just wanted to float that stat out there.
Sandwich finishes off the Cape.
Fall River trails Quincy, which is the same size but more Irish-heavy. The Squantum neighborhood of Quincy is about as Irish as it gets.
If a bar gets their license revoked in Scituate, this thought-she'd-be-ranked-higher Irish Riviera superheavyweight would fall out of the Top 200. She'd rank below hard-living Oakham (pop. 953, 2 licenses) in the state
If the Gurnet Inn was still open, sleepy Duxbury would be ahead of Brockton and Lynn.
Rochester and Dighton hold down the South Coast, and Lakeville is the more "Let's go out" of the Freetown-Lakeville conglomerate.
Duxbury and Sandwich ranked similarly, something our staff predicted. Both towns are sort of the Rich People Conscience of either Cape Cod or the South Shore (I'm told by our Fairhaven editor that Dartmouth fills a similar role on the South Coast). Granted, Sandwich is about twice as pubby as Duxbury, but the Cape is sort of off the scale due to summer tourism.
