What Are Those Lines On The Duxbury Marshes? Theory 2: Mosquito Control

The Great Salt Marsh, east of the Cut River, Duxbury MA

We did a whole article yesterday about the man-made lines in the Duxbury marshes, an article where we thought we had figured out a mystery. Then, a guy on Facebook steered me towards the possibility that I was 10000% wrong, and I became convinced that he and not I was correct as I did additional research.

Now, I'm torn between a mea culpa tone, and just making the old article be about about salt marsh hay. Either way, my man (I'll leave his name out, unless he wants to claim credit) gave me a hella tip, and I got in another few hours of fun research.

Historians have a different definition of fun than most people operate with, I just thought I'd work that in somewhere.

We were blaming those lines in the Duxbury marshes on salt marsh hay harvesting, but then some Old School guy pointed out that he watched canal work being dug in the marshes in the 1950s. He put the focus on mosquito control efforts. The more I read about Massachusetts mosquito control history, the more I knew that he was right and that I had just needlessly wasted 7500 words.

Let's straighten out the mess I caused yesterday with the mess I will create today.

Massachusetts, and Duxbury in particular, have a lot of salt marsh. These marshes fill and empty to some extent with sea water. During a full moon tide, Duxbury's marshes overflow their water into the surrounding neighborhoods. Daniel Webster has writings about the full moon tide encroaching upon his garden.

The marshes fill and empty with the tides, but it is not a 100% complete expulsion of water with the outgoing tide. A lot of water remains pooled in the marsh after the tide recedes, and that standing water is the breeding ground for mosquitos.

"Marshfield Meadows," Martin Johnson Heade

Several things went down around the same time, some involving Duxbury directly and some more national or worldly in scope... and they led up to the marsh getting lined out in this theory which I'm exploring.

First, a series of construction projects made the beaches inhabitable. Chief among them were the construction of a dyke in Green Harbor, the installation of a series of jetties in Green Harbor, and eventually the seawall that lines the beaches.

The dyke changed the course of the Green Harbor River, which used to empty either closer to Duxbury or in Duxbury. Not long after the dyke (1872, I think) and the jetties (1898) went up, cottages began to spring up on the northern end of Duxbury Beach.

The cottages were indicative of a change in American social behavior, as oceanfront recreation became popular. While the aristocracy had been at the beaches for centuries (I doubt that The Great Gatsby bought his oceanfront mansion from a clamdigger), regular folks didn't or couldn't go to the beach for laughs. They didn't even invent swimsuits until society wasn't so afraid of a women's shin being displayed in public.

Bourne, MA

Even after they invented cars and trains, they didn't get around to running highways or tracks down the South Shore until as late as the 1950s. The highways, and the newfound desire to flee the teeming cities, pretty much wrote the check that paid for the Irish Riviera. They also turned Duxbury from a farming community to a bedroom community of Boston commuters.

At the same time, they were building a Canal in Panama. The French had tried, and were losing 200 people a month to malaria. The US took over, and they eventually were able to identify the skeeter vector and nearly eliminate it... granted, with some ugly environmental effects.

The US had their own mosquito problems. Yellow Fever outbreaks happened in New Orleans and Florida, Dengue Fever was going on in the hundreds of thousands from Florida to Texas, forms of encephalitis ranged from California to Cape Cod (Massachusetts lost 38 humans and 200+ horses to something spelled sort of like Eastern Equine Encephalitis in 1938), and it also itches really badly when they bite you.

Mosquito control methods that worked in the former Colombia were imported into the USA, and implemented all across the nation. Some things were simple, like putting screens on your window or using a topical repellent. Others, like the removal of standing water in which skeeters breed, ranges from simple to arduous.

"Simple" means "kicking over buckets that collect rainwater." "Arduous" means "draining 1000 acre salt marshes."

The marshes were formerly very important to local commerce, allowing for settlement to be built. No hay, no cows, no Duxbury. However, the industrial age and the automobile era ended the importance of salt marsh hay. The deathblow was the transition of Duxbury from a farming region to a bedroom community.

So, you have throngs of people moving out of the cities, even just for the summer, and they are moving into Mosquito Village. Fortunately, they were doing so when means to combat mosquito-based illnesses became prevalent. Let's even throw in the added bonus of Great Depression WPA busy work.

Marshfield Meadows (redux), Martin Johnson Heade

Prior to DDT ( I mean the insecticide, not Jake The Snake's infamous finishing move, which was actually named for the poison), the best way they had to fight mosquito infestation was to drain the bogs and swamps and marshes.

This is where we get to the lines in the marsh.

By 1930, 90% of the marshes on the Eastern Seaboard had been drained to some extent. Duxbury, if this current theory is correct, used a method where small channels were dug, all running into tidal rivers and tributaries. In theory, they drain the standing water from the marsh and eliminate the mosquito breeding grounds.

Looking at the picture above, that does seem to be the case. Each line cut in the marsh runs to one of the tidal creeks. It looks like a clear win for the mosquito control theory, as Duxbury hosts one of the largest tidal marshes in the area and would have merited immediate attention from the skeeter control people.

Whether or not they dug out channels that were already in the marsh from the salt hay days, I can not say. The channels may have been cut to irrigate the meadows in the salt hay days (salt hay harvesting also needs the channels for the marsh to drain with the tide, as well as to float the product to the other side of the bay), and then re-dug to drain the standing water that breeds skeeters.

I hope there's not an Option C on the menu, because I've wasted a lot of keystrokes on this topic.

The Great Salt Marsh, Duxbury MA

There were some bad side effects. This was a brutal assault on a natural resource, and all of the Liberal superpowers were used up getting the government to pay for the avoid-starvation busy work.

The mosquito population was blunted. You can still see a mosquito here and there, just not in the numbers you'd expect living next to a thousand acre salt marsh. We should be swarmed. The fact that we aren't tells you a lot about how well it worked.

The drainage did nothing to blunt the greenhead population, nor that of the midgies. Greenheads lay their eggs on land, not in water, and the drainage was like a baby boom to them. The traps you can still see out on the Duxbury marshes are designed to capture the greenheads who flourished after the removal of the competitor skeeters.

The meadow was devastated. God and Mother Nature had sort of agreed on a water/land balance, and the drainage project blew that out of the water. A formerly abundant meadow was now a relatively barren wasteland... still ecologically important, but with far less impact.

Plants accustomed to a certain water level died out. Birds accustomed to mosquito dinners died off. Fish who would feed on the skeeter larvae starved, and the fish who ate those fish starved, and the effects were felt up the food chain to my many fruitless childhood fishing trips in the 1970s.

Duxbury, MA, from Bill M

By in my childhood, other than a few heron and a solitary owl, most of the marsh life was made up of greenheads and horseshoe crabs.

At least one study found that waterfowl, formerly abundant on the Duxbury marshes, had fled the region. It stated that the same area was now "dry, and devoid of birds." While sucking the Marsh out of Marshfield, the project also drove the Dux out of Duxbury.

I did, during my travels, get to West Island in Fairhaven. I saw a similar marsh with a similar to-the-creek channel pattern. The marsh was way too small to work commercially, as it would have fed maybe one horse. It would, however, have bred a lot of skeeters.

As much as I like the salt marsh hay theory, I have to go with the mosquito control theories in the end. I can hack yesterday's article into a salt marsh hay piece.

So, unless someone from the salt marsh hay lobby has a higher bid, I'm going to blame those lines on mosquito control programs from the first half of the 20th Century. 

I'd also blame the out-of-context mud flats which dot Duxbury Beach on the mud-dumping from these insect control programs. The engineers dumped the mud they dug out for the channels over the dunes and onto the beach, where it wouldn't seep back into the freshly-dug channels with the next flood tide.

The mud flats could also be the result of the Green Harbor channel dredging, that's a mystery for another day. For all I know, the whole of Duxbury Beach is a marshy mud covered by centuries of washed-down sand. Our mud flats may just be those trying to assert themselves.

We still love the Salt Marsh Hay people, however. We'll end with a pic of them in their faithful gundalow, bringing home the bacon rakin'......courtesy of the Duxbury Rural And Historical Society.

What Are Those Lines on The Duxbury Marshes? Theory #1: Salt Marsh Hay Harvest

The Great Salt Marsh, east of the Cut River, Duxbury MA

At some point, even the anti-geekiest of us is going to get on those Internets and Google Map their neighborhood. God's view of anything is fun to have, or even that of a high-flying bird or low-flying airplane. You get to view humans as you normally view bugs, making sense of terms like Alien Ant Farm and so forth. Taking a funny view of atheism for a tangent, views like this would be given as proof if God and Allah were arguing over whether humans exist.

We all geek it up for different reasons. My sister has seen this picture, which actually has a lot more ocean in it if you zoom back some. She owns property there, and her first thoughts on seeing the picture were of how vulnerable the coastline is against the sea. It's really only a thin strip of land, and it goes totally underwater every few storms.

A military-minded friend of mine named the Colonel was shown the same pic, and commented on how Cable Hill would be the key to defending the region against an amphibious assault. A nightclub owning friend of mine marvels over the ease of which The Coolest Bar In Massachusetts could be constructed there. A realtor I know said that she "could get $750k for a single-hole outhouse" in that region, which made me feel badly because my current house in/on Buzzards Bay isn't much more than a single-hole outhouse. I only dropped $135K on it.

My own thoughts, upon zooming in enough, were that there is no name for the little river that breaks off the Cut River and runs alongside Marginal Road, and that I should look into having it named "the Steve River" if I ever wield enough influence. I have a tendency to Think Big, which my shrink tells me is proof of my delusions of grandeur and why I should take those pills she gives me. F*ck her.

Another friend of mine- who is a bit crazier than me, to the point where she sold her house and moved into the woods prior to the didn't-happen 2012 Planet X pole shift- put her focus on a different aspect of the photograph, and that is what we'll discuss today.

There are a series of grid-like cuts made in the marsh, all over it, visible from space if Space zoomed in a lot. They are obviously man-made... or maybe not so obviously.

She thought it was Alien Writing, a big caption on this part of the planet that spoke an unknowable message. It was a fun conversation, trying to guess what they'd be marking off here.... "Mostly Harmless," "Irish Riviera," "Take Off Wrapper Before Cooking," "This Space For Rent" or "My god invented this stupid universe and all I got was this lousy knoll."

The big difference between us is that she went home convinced that she was right, while I just felt a little guilty about sleeping with crazy people. Hey, the son also rises, right?

I did take an interest in those lines. You know when you get just interested enough in something to wonder about it, but not interested enough in it to ask an authority? I was that interested.

It's more fun to think up solutions without scientists and historians messing up the fun. I came up with:

- Fish Trapping Device, where they block off the channels at high tide and sweep towards the shore.

- Pilgrim or Wampanoag drainage projects.

- Duxbury Beach as Venice, maybe for cooler Wampanoags.

- Aliens with huge sticks playing Tic Tac Toe on the Earth with city-sized markings.

- Notes from God to himself for an unfinished earth-construction project, a la "Remember to put Mount Gurnet about right here."

- Great Depression busy work swamp-drainage project.

- A totally natural explanation, like burrowing horseshoe crabs or something.

- 1950s mosquito control standing-water drainage, which is actually as good an explanation as anything I have. I have people on Facebook saying they saw some of those canals being dug for skeeter control in their childhoods.

Discussing mosquito control will be tomorrow's work. They are the most likely source of the grid lines, but I actually had more fun reading about the salt hay industry.

I stumbled into Salt Marsh Hay in this article..

The marsh that stands between Duxbury Beach and Duxbury Proper is full of salt marsh hay, which I shall no longer capitalize. It is of note because salt marsh hay is much more nutritious than regular hay is. I suppose that it is because the salt marshes get all the soil runoff from rivers emptying into the estuary, which superpowers our soil there like when Barry Bonds gets into the steroids.

Basically, if you were trying to grow hay in Oklahoma or some inland state, and you brought in an army of workers and scientists to help the process along, you MIGHT grow hay as well as it pops up naturally, unaided and untended, in some Swamp Yankee salt marsh. Even then, unless you diverted the course of a few rivers and imported tons of ocean marsh mud, you wouldn't get the nutrition content of salt marsh hay.

This fact is of very little importance in 2015, as we don't take horses everywhere. It was very important in 1815, when we still did. Horses need hay, and high-powered hay makes for high-performance horses. It probably also helps cows and sheep, I have no idea. I was born in Dorchester, and Farmer Brown I am not.

Duxbury was a big shipbuilding town, and- other than the wood, of course- those shipbuilding supplies don't grow on trees. You have to ship them in, or drag them in via horse/oxen/mule. Those livestock gotta eat, and they favor hay.

Duxbury Beach was as backwater as it gets before people took up oceanfront recreation in the late 1800s. Pictures of the trans-Atlantic cable coming ashore in the 1860s show a deserted beach. Cottages didn't spring up there in any great number until the highways going South from Boston were built. Duxbury itself faded into backwater status after the shipbuilding era and before becoming a bedroom community, and Duxbury Beach was even less cosmopolitan.

Cable Hill (and perhaps the whole Duxbury Beach region, maybe or effectively) was originally known as "Rouse's Hummock," because some guy named Rouse put a farm out there. If you're the only guy who lives in an area, the locals tend to name it after you. That's how isolated it was on Duxbury Beach back in the proverbial Day.

However, the marshes provided economic activity, with reverberations that were felt throughout the whole South Shore. People got paid to harvest that hay, the hay went to horses that made money for other people, and the ships built during that era touched every corner of the globe map.

A gundalow, in action... (pic courtesy of the Duxbury Rural And Historical Society)

It looked like pretty hard work, running the hay harvest. The marsh has no trees, so you're working in direct summer sun. The light colored hay and the water around it reflect sunlight, thus increasing the heat on the workers. The horseflies are ridiculous out there, even worse than on the beaches today. You had to be out there early, as the hay had to be harvested "before the dew was dry." You were stomping through clamdigging marsh mud. You were swinging a scythe in a scene that must have looked very much like Soviet farm propaganda videos. If you sit down, the seat of your pants will be soaked in foul-smelling mud... quite literally soiled. You also had to get everything done before high tide.

They would scythe the hay down, bale it up, and then load it onto a gundalow, which is a little flat bottomed boat that is run out to larger vessels (or across the bay to the shore) for shipping. The gundalow part of the shipping was later replaced by horses and oxen. The livestock had to wear wooden shoes to keep from sinking into the marsh mud.

As for the mud flats on the beach, I have a pretty good theory. When they were digging the channels, the mud they removed would just seep back into them with the next high tide if they didn't put some sort of barrier between the salt marsh and the dumped mud. They took it over the dunes and dumped it on a then-unused and uninhabited Duxbury Beach. Out of sight, out of mind.

I'm guessing that the density of the mud held it in place, even when hurricane waves were washing over it. Other than some flattening, the mud lays where they dumped it. The little mud flats run out south of around where the bath house is today, as that is where Duxbury Bay takes over from the Great Salt Marsh.

A law passed in 1965 made it illegal to mess around even a little bit with these salt marshes. That law, designed to prevent developers from filling in marshes and making Duxbury into a Division 1 sports town, officially ended the salt marsh hay harvesting era that effectively ended in the early 1900s when cars moved horses off of the roads. The gas station became the new haystack. I'm pretty sure that the law covers the kind of activity that is necessary to harvest salt marsh hay. I'd bet that dumping mud on the beach and forming a 200 year old perma-mudpuddle there is also illegal now.

However, you can trot out on the Great Salt Marsh and still get a pretty good idea of how things used to be, getting down and dirty in the boggggggggggggggs.

Heck, you may even see some beauty in it.

Matin Johnson Heade was a famous painter, and he specialized in Salt Marshes. While he never sketched up Duxbury, he does have one hanging in the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester NH entitled "Marshfield Meadows." Someone who isn't from Duxbury- like Heade- might not recognize that most of that marsh is Duxbury. Heade did paint a few Marshfield shots, so maybe he was more local than I'm giving him credit for.

The one showing a thunderstorm heading for the marsh sure looks a lot like the view from the marsh about where I think the Steve River should be, and that's Duxbury, not Marshfield. Pretty close to exactly, actually.

Either way, our little marshes did make it on to some museum walls, always a good thing.

The Centre Does Not Hold: Rotaries In Massachusetts

Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts

What is a rotary? What is a roundabout? What's the difference between them?

Basically, all of them are intersections that direct both turning and through traffic onto a circular, one-way road. Yes, I pasted that from Wikipedia.

The basic ideas behind rotaries are:
- simplifying the driver's visual environment
- allowing visual engagement
- encouraging deference to pedestrians
- reducing driver confusion
- allowing U-turns within the normal flow of traffic
- lowering idling and braking episodes, leading to less pollution and lower engine/brake wear
- lessening the need to brake, thus lessening the need to accelerate, thus saving fuel and lowering emissions
- lowering traffic noise associated with other intersections where cars have to stop fully
- eliminating perpendicular, T-bone crashes
- lessening gridlock associated with stoplight-style intersections.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Rotaries have been around longer than cars have, and had their start in Europe. At least one was operational in England in 1786, presumably for horses. Why, that there Arc de Triomphe in France is built with a roundabout. Older roundabouts have different entry and operational methods than modern ones... but since they're in Europe, we can just skip right over that, right?

Half of the world's roundabouts are in France, while the UK has the most as a proportion to roads. France, which is about the size of Texas, has 30,000 roundabouts. If the Nazis believed in yielding to rotary traffic, WWII might still be ongoing. Rotaries became popular in America, and many were built as Great Depression busy work.

I'm not sure what we have on Cape Cod. The definitions get sort of touchy. For starters, "rotary," "roundabout," "traffic circle" and "road circle" are all listed as synonyms in American dictionaries.  Massachusetts people all use the wrong term, as our "rotaries" require people to yield to the traffic in the circle, thus making them, technically, "roundabouts."

However, our roundabouts often have an interior lane, which makes them rotaries.

A rotary by any other name still acts like a roundabout. It's like most things in life.... what is SUPPOSED to happen isn't always what DOES happen.

Buzzards Bay, MA

Rotaries and roundabouts were adopted fom the European model into the United States in large numbers in the early-mid 20th Century. By the mid 20th, they were also being removed in large numbers. Those presentations where they tell you that rotaries are safer and more efficient often match up poorly with the reality of wild collisions and LA-style traffic jams in small towns.

Pretty soon, only Massachusetts had roundabouts remaining in any great number. Wikipedia has two lists of notable American rotaries... one for America, and one for Massachusetts.

Sullivan Square in Charlestown? That's a roundabout. Same goes with Neponset Circle in Dorchester, Old Colony Rotary in Southie, the 18/28/44 rotary with the Friendly's in Middleboro... you get the picture.

Harvard Square, which you think would be square, has a roundabout. Hall's Corner in Duxbury is a roundabout, even though I'm pretty sure that circles don't have corners. I smoked a lot of dat cheeaba in high school, and there's a chance that I was staring at leg when someone was teaching me the geology or whatever it was that you need to know  when thinking about stuff like that.

Maybe all of those stories about crazy Boston drivers are wrong, and we are the only drivers in America skilled enough to handle rotaries.

Yeah, I don't believe that either.

Duxbury, MA

Maybe we're too overcrowded and/or cheap to replace rotaries. It can be done, but said rotary has to offend a powerful man like Mitt Romney. Mitt had or has a Cape place, and wasted a lot of time that he could have been using to vulture-capitalize some poor business stuck in the traffic that preceded the Sagamore Rotary going onto Cape Cod.

Rotaries almost always laugh last in these situations, unless the Mitt Romney in question became Governor of Massachusetts. Buh-bye Sagamore Rotary, hello Sagamore Flyover, total cost = $50 million.

But worry you not... the Bourne Bridge has TWO rotaries, so everything balances.

Sagamore was jammed before the Flyover, and Sagamore is jammed after the Flyover. Bourne, which carries half of the traffic Sagamore does, suffers less. In 1991, when Hurricane Bob stormed at Cape Cod, there were 20 mile backups at the Sagamore Rotary. I've also seen traffic backed up from Sagamore to at least Exit 6 on Route 6 at 11 PM during typical Sunday night summer fleeing.

Rotaries were a great idea on Cape Cod back when we were 20,000 farmers and fishermen. Our population is 200,000 now, and it doubles on summer weekends. Buzzards Bay, which has 3000 souls or so on any given day, has megalopolis-level traffic twice a weekend for June, July, August and parts of September. People who live in Boston or Brooklyn dread driving through here.

Buzzards Bay, MA

There are Rules to the roundabout, which are on the books somewhere and can be accessed online. These come from government agencies, and work just fine.... in theory.

There are also Methods to a roundabout. These are taught to you by motorheads, well-sited gas station attendants and other locals. We'll get to those in a moment.

Here are the official rules, from the Massachusetts RMV:

Rotary Traffic Rules

Traffic travels counter-clockwise in a rotary. Always yield the right-of-way to vehicles already
in the rotary (unless told differently by signs or police officers) and to pedestrians. Use your
turn signals in the same way as any other intersection. Travel through the rotary and, when
you are ready to exit, use your right turn signal.

Choosing a Lane
If the rotary has a single lane, you must enter from the right lane of the road you are
coming from. You must exit onto the right lane of the road you intend to travel on.
If the rotary has multiple lanes, look for signs to help you choose the proper lane. If there
are no signs, you should do the following:

• For a quarter-turn, or to continue straight ahead, enter the rotary from the right lane.
Stay in that lane, and exit onto the right lane.

• For a three-quarter-turn, or a U-turn, enter the rotary from the left lane. Travel through
the middle or inner lane. Exit onto the right lane. If coming from a road with a single
lane, you should stay in the right lane for the entire turn.

In a multiple-lane rotary, there may be traffic on both sides of your vehicle. Do not attempt
to move out of your lane until it is safe to do so. If you miss your exit, don’t get upset.
Check the traffic around you. If it is safe to do so, go around again and position your vehicle
to properly and safely exit the rotary.

Do not stop in the rotary.

Bourne/Wareham line, MA

In reality... well, let's talk to a few experts, shall we?

Our experts in this case are:

1) A desk clerk at a rotary hotel. He is here because he, more than perhaps anyone on Cape Cod, must explain rotaries to people from out of state.

2) A police officer from Duxbury, a town full of old people which has (relatively) recently put a roundabout up at an intersection that had been a normal cross intersection since Myles Standish rode over it.

3) A guy who has been pumping gas at a Cape Cod rotary for 20 years, with a clear view of all the mayhem and a clear mind with which to remember crash stories.

4) A math teacher who is good with numbers and formulae.

5) A few expert drivers in niche fields, i.e. trucker, biker, chronic speeder, guy who drives in a demolition derby now and then...

Rather than to attempt to impose any order on this, I feel it would be best to hit you in a sort of stream-of-consciousness manner. I'm going to end the article with this, as little I can say will top the wisdom you can gain from these quotes from the experts.

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Hyannis, MA

"The problem is layered, but simple. Massachusetts is the only state with extensive rotary use. Cape Cod is a tourist area, and attracts out-of-state people. They all meet in the rotary.

People are pulling into that rotary who have no idea what a rotary is, or even what a ROUNDABOUT AHEAD sign means. They are meeting up there with the only people in America who truly understand how to drive in rotaries... the locals.

The locals know that the only rule in the rotary is Make Your Own Law. Yes, the people who know rotaries the best have a tendency to work them aggressively, which goes poorly with the more tentative approach used by the tourists."

***************************************
"The best way to work a rotary is by viewing it like stealing second in a baseball game. Take a slight lead, pick your spot, and explode into the gap. Drive THROUGH the target, just like sliding into the base. Never stop once you commit.

 If you are driving a big rig, you want to work more along the lines of how goal-line offenses are run in the NFL. Lower your head, power straight through, and count on Physics. "

***************************************
"Once you are in the rotary... never surrender the outer lane. If someone crashes into you trying to get to Rte 28 from an inner lane, it's their fault."

***************************************
"Drivers will always yield to things that can crush them."

**************************************
"Massachusetts drivers blast into the rotary without stopping. New Yorkers do the same, but they do so without looking. Connecticut drivers are sort of an amalgamation of the worst traits of both. Everyone else in the country is worse, save for people from NASCAR states, who sort of get the idea... unless it snows."

**************************************************
"We had an old guy from Nebraska who coudn't get into the rotary, abandoned his car at the merge, sought me out and asked me, in a Nebraska/old guy manner, 'WTF?' I ended up pulling out into the rotary length-wise, blocking traffic so that he could get onto 28 South. I don't know what happened to him after that."

*****************************************************
"I saw a guy drive around the rotary 4 times, pull into my station, and ask which exit the f***ing tunnel was off."

*******************************************************

"We had a lady turn left into one, but I managed to block the lane and get her to stop before she killed someone."

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"Don't set out to wreck somebody, but don't be afraid to."

******************************************
"It is better to Cause the impact than to be impacted upon. Ideally, your rear end will be hitting his driver-side door.
**************************************

"If you cause an accident and have to flee for some reason, you can do a U-turn off the Bourne Bridge by taking one of the non-28 exits and looping under the Bourne Bridge. People will be pointing the cops west while you're appearing (and then disappearing) on the east."

******************************************************
"Yóu can stomp the gas pedal to the floor for about 4 seconds and not be technically speeding in most non-modified cars, as long as you use the 28 exit off the rotary instead of the Trowbridge Road one."

*******************************************************
"Using turn signals in a rotary is akin to aiding the enemy in times of war."

***********************************************************
"People entering a rotary are vulnerable to being T-boned on the driver-side door. You should remember this, plan for it, and take advantage of it whenever possible."

********************************************************************
"If you have a large set, you can skip the rotary by cutting through the State Police barracks. They love it, especially when you do wheelies."

*************************************************
"If you really have to throw your coffee at another car in the rotary, make note of what lane you are in. If you're in the outer lane throwing at a car in the inner lane, you have to lead him a bit or you'll soak someone innocent driving behind the targeted vehicle. If you're in the inner lane, you have to actually throw across your own windshield."

************************************************
"Never complain to a Massachusetts cop that they don't have rotaries where you live. It encourages contempt."

********************************

"Old people who don't get to this side of town much tend to just plow right through the roundabout when coming up Rte 14. Some are even aware that they are refusing to yield at a roundabout, and say that they can do so because they were here before the roundabout was. It's nice to see someone putting the 'grandfather' back into 'grandfather clause.'" 

Bourne, MA

*************************************

"Europeans, who you'd think would be better at roundabouts, instead are shocked to see one in America, especially if they have visited a few states and assume no that America has no roundabouts. Instinct takes over, and the English ones are very prone to taking a left into it. I see it happen about once a summer."

************************************

"If you think the police are going to pull you over for something, get into the rotary and refuse to exit. The cop will think you're a tourist, and may even run interference for you just to get you out of his territory."

**********************************************************
"Only drive over the island as a last resort. Re-entry will be hazardous and you'll be operating from a disadvantage."

*******************************************************
"The guy with the Missouri plates is going to drive broadside across the 28 South rotary exit without leaving the rotary, as sure as the sun will set tonight."

********************************************************
"Rotary clubs tend to meet in square rooms."

********************************************************
"I just want it on the Internet somewhere that they should have put the tugboat in Buzzards Bay into the middle of the Belmont Circle rotary. Since they already screwed up that, they should seek to acquire another tugboat.

If your rotary doesn't have something cool and distinctive in the middle of it, your rotary sucks."

*********************************************************
"A large truck is perfectly within the law using both lanes of the rotary, and they are also allowed to use the shoulder with impunity."

********************************************************
"Very few fistfights break out at rotaries, as it is difficult to pull over in one. You can also be edged out of the rotary by a near-miss. You might have to turn around in Pocasset to catch and fight someone who pissed you off at the Buzzards Bay rotary."

**************************************************************
"Almost all skidding in rotaries during snow events involve the back end sliping out and veering to the right. This can be capitalized upon to make fast exits. Remember to turn into the skid, it will align you properly."

***************************************************************
"If you cause an accident, never stop in the rotary. Direct the other driver into a safe area, allow him to enter first... then once he commits, stay in the rotary and flee at high speeds. Even if he gets back out fast, he'll never catch you."

********************************************************
"If you have the outer lane, you can give the other driver the finger more efficiently. If you throw the bird out the window from the inner lane, the other guy won't see it, and the only ones who will be impressed are those CAPE COD bushes."

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"If they ever run a NASCAR race across Cape Cod, the rotaries would be the best part. We might need a 3rd and 4th generation of Earnhardts, especially if it snows"

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"If you are going really, really fast (slightly above 761 mph), you can stay in the rotary, honk your horn, and catch up to the sound. If you want to give yourself the finger and see yourself doing it, you have to go into the rotary at like 671 million mph."

Bourne, MA

Movies with rotaries include:

European Vacation,

The Great Escape,

The Dukes Of Hazzard,

Ronin,

and just about anything with James Bond, Bridget Jones or that Transporter dude.

Nauset Regional High School Hires Former NFL Coach

So, you've lost 12 of 12 Thanksgiving football games to your hated rival, Dennis-Yarmouth. You've had a field goal attempt knocked down by a seagull before... sure, it was just during practice, but c'mon.

You're pretty much the last football team in America before the Big Puddle... and after you cross that puddle, when they talk about football, they mean soccer. Your coach just quit to be the assistant principal. Due to your remote location, a 2 hour bus drive to some games isn't out of the question.

You play so far away from the city that your black players listen to The Cure and stuff. Maybe only Gloucester High has a better chance of having an important player miss a game because of a fishing injury. Actual actuaries actually have calculated that there is a .000000019% chance that one of your players will be eaten by a shark.

Your arch-rival D-Y is generally a very solid program. Nearby, you have Barnstable High, a perennial state powerhouse. You aren't too far from football factories like Duxbury, Brockton and Mansfield. Itty-bitty Upper Cape Tech has a Super Bowl championship. You don't.

What do you do to reverse that?

You hire a former NFL coach to run your high school team, of course.

Nauset Regional High School just hired Mike Sherman to coach the football team. Mike is the former coach of the Green Bay Packers, and of Texas A&M. Two of Mike's QBs were Brett Favre and Johnny Manziel (who he recruited, but never coached). He also brought us Von Miller, Ryan Tannehill, Johnathan Ogden and several other pros. He coached with UCLA, Pitt, Tulane, the Houston Texans and the Miami Dolphins.

His last game as head coach was in front of 90,000 people. That's everyone in Eastham, times 25. As opposed to playing at iconic Lambeau Field, Sherman will now work at Nauset, which is the only team in America located in a national park. It's also one of the few schools where the teachers all pause mid-lecture because a lighthouse foghorn is going off.

The Green Bay Packers have as many Super Bowls as any franchise. Sherman has their second best winning % ever, trailing only... oh, Vince Lombardi. Pro and college teams can't hire him quickly enough.

How does Nauset get him?

Simple. Cape Cod and the Islands are where football coaches go to get away from it all. Patriots coaching legend Bill Belichick has a place on Nantucket. Cleveland/Jets coach Eric Mangini had and might still have a place in Brewster. Mike Sherman has a place in Dennis. John Hannah and Mosi Tatupu coached high schools in the EMass area. While he doesn't coach, Bob Kraft has a house in Mashpee that no one is allowed by law to harvest oysters around. He might get bored in retirement some day, and decide to tinker with the local high school team.

I think that, after a season or even a career cooped up in film rooms and practice bubbles, coaches only feel free at the beach... so they head off to Cape Cod. All that open space, the limitless sea spreading out before them... yeah, I can see how it works.

In this particular case, Sherman and Mrs. Sherman had tired of moving constantly after new jobs, and wished to retire. They had been vacationing on the Cape for decades (he's a Northboro/Northborough native), so they settled in Dennis. Coaches tend to be Type A, so a few months of striper fishing soon wasn't enough action for MS. He had that itch to get back on the sidelines, working.

There may also be a bit of charm to the prospect of not coaching millionaires. There will be no mistake at all made about knowing who the Boss is at NRHS. Brett Favre is 1000 miles away. As a former small-school high school coach, I can tell you that he may even end up having to buy the team Burger King out of his own pocket if they get a big win.

Nauset Regional High School had been taking a football beating for many moons. They brought in a new coach- Keith "Grand" Kenyon- who installed a single-wing offense similar to what Knute Rockne used to run. They made the playoffs a couple of times, but they did nothing that would let them laugh off the chance to hire a legitimate NFL head coach. Sherman plans to run a modern, pro-style spread offense, btw.

A good coach can make all the difference at the high school level. Duxbury was a soccer town before they hired a prominent assistant from the dynastic Everett High School program. They have enjoyed great success ever since. As nice as Everett and Duxbury are, they can't hold a candle to the Green Bay Packers.

So, as well as Duxbury's coach has done, I think the Green Dragons may need an upgrade. Duxbury is a rich town with a couple of Aerosmith offspring in the high school, they should be able to scratch up enough paper to hire Coach Saban away from Alabama. While we're at it, we should get Werner Herzog to direct our school plays... if he's not dead, of course.

Of course, I live in Bourne these days. We lack Duxbury's bank power, and I have no idea how we'd attract a pro coach to our little high school. Maybe we have to make it like High Plains Drifter, where the coach gets "a free hand in this town." Shoot, we might have to give him a virgin a month.

We'll see how Sherman does against local coaching. Sure, he has that fancy NFL pedigree, but I'm pretty sure that the local Pop Warner system isn't going to hand him the next Brett Favre. In the end, once you shake off all the bells and whistles, you're basically handing a ball to some kid, pointing him towards the goal line and daring the 11 guys on the other team to stop him.

We've suggested having a Cape school hire a pro coach living here as a snowbird before, when Eric Mangini became available. We just didn't think anyone would take us seriously.

Now, Nauset is changing the game. How will the other towns adjust?

Hotcakes! Fire At The IHOP!

from "You Know You're From Bourne..." Facebook  page

Traffic was snarled at the Bourne Bridge as a fire of unknown origin did a number on the building.

As of 8 PM, the fire department was still at the scene in force, and had a ladder up against the hole in the second floor window you see the fire shooting out of from the picture above.

It is an odd scene, as the word around town is that Dunkin' Donuts closed on the property today. They won't get a drive-thru, and may put a conference room in the restaurant somehow.

This reporter can neither confirm nor deny the rumors that a Honey Dew Donuts guy, or even one of the more shiftier Marylou's girls, was seen fleeing from the scene.

Now, I realize that I just wrote a rather angry article about this potential Dunkin's and the effect it would have on the rotary.... but I wasn't really shooting for Inspiration of Arson. I just wanted a Cracker Barrel, to be honest.

I drove through the rotary rather easily at 8 PM, but there is a lot of rubbernecking going on. Expect minor delays through the rest of the evening.

I'm not sure if the building is a total loss, but it doesn't look good. I have no idea how the fire started, but I'm well-located and will try to keep an ear to the ground.

Someone Has To Stop The Bourne Rotary Dunkin' Donuts!

It's not often that I write an article with zero (0) certainty that what I'm actually writing about is true, but today is one of those days.

Bourne locals were saddened to see the iconic IHOP restaurant closing at the rotary on the Cape side of the Bourne Bridge. You have to drive to Plymouth to get a Rooty Tooty Big And Fruity now. You lose an easy place for tourists to find, eliminating the "Park at the IHOP, and I'll meet you there" directions-giving option.

But the smarter locals also looked at the closing of IHOP and wondered what sort of Traffic Nightmare would be going in place of the IHOP. These concerns spiked recently, as it appears that some work is being performed on the property.

Once you think on it a bit, only a few businesses would even WANT that spot. I'm sure that "everyone coming or going to Cape Cod drives by this spot" makes for an expensive rent, and "hope that potential customers can negotiate the death-weave they would need to perform to get out of the rotary and into your business" makes for a poor business model when combined with the price of that high visibility.

Only the heavy hitters can afford to laugh off those concerns, with "heavy hitters" meaning "businesses that never fail, no matter what."

In Canada, that equals "hockey gear manufacturer." In Texas, that means "gun dealer." In somewhere like Yemen, it might be where you put the Qu'a'a'ran store or something. In Massachusetts, it means either "package store" or "Dunkin' Donuts."

Massachusetts people, Massholes that we are, go sort of crazy for Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Some people will drink no other coffee. A popular internet meme during our blizzardy winter showed someone walking through a Jack London-style whiteout, with the caption saying "Wonder if Dunkin' is open?" Opening a franchise in California put lines of transplanted Easterners around the corner.

It is one of the few businesses in this rotten economy where demand exceeds supply. Allow me a moment to illustrate. It's about 5 miles as the crow flies from the Sagamore to the middle of the Cranberry Highway in East Wareham. This stretch runs through the edges of Sagamore Beach (population 2977), desolate Bournedale (I don't know B-dale's population, but it is much less than 3500), Bourne village (pop. 1800), a tiny edge of Wareham ( use Onset's 1500 population figure for part of Onset/part of East Wareham) and Buzzards Bay (nearly 4000). I'm including southern Cedarville, and excluding Cape-side Sandwich and Pocasset-area Bourne.

It is a useful way to go from the 25 East area to the 3 North area, but it stopped being a major route to Cape Cod with certain highway alterations in recent decades. The population doubles in the summer, or it gets cut in half in the winter, depending on how you view the glass of water. Aside from commuting and canal-walking, there is no reason at all from anyone who isn't from Bournedale or Buzzards Bay to go to Bournedale or Buzzards Bay. We're a backwater, sharing a "we're a nowhere that the roads to everywhere go through" status with places like Afghanistan and Gettysburg.

It is a strip where a Burger King failed, and which hasn't been able to support a supermarket for 20-30 pre-Market Basket years. We're a college town that can't support a nightclub. IHOP just died there. Main Street in Buzzards Bay is really not that far away from being a ghost town.

This is amazing, because the area suffers from Los Angeles-style gridlock.

This stretch I mentioned still supports 6 and as many as 7 Dunkin' Donuts, depending on how you score MacArthur, Sandwich, Cedarville and East Wareham. The lines of traffic pouring in and out of these places snarl the roads around them, and even kills someone in Wareham now and then. This area also supports a Starbuck's, a Honey Dew, and 2-3 Marylou's. Whatever fault you may ascribe to Yankees, Swamp Yankees, Massholes, Hoodsies or Cape Coddas, even a hater would have to admit that we are a hard-working lot who essentially need to swim in coffee.

There is a huge Dunkin void in the Cape-side Bourne Bridge area. Whoever fills it will become a millionaire, pretty much with a snap of the fingers. This hypothetical franchisee will also create a few baker's dozens of low-wage, go-nowhere jobs. You'll be able to get coffee more quickly... maybe. The town will get some guaranteed tax income.

Those are all the good points.

The bad point, and it's a big point, is that a Dunkin's would snarl up traffic. Not only would it jam up a road, it would jam up an already busy road. What's worse, Dunkin's prime business hours would fall during the prime traffic hours at the rotary.

Here are a few scenarios I envision:

- People turning out of the rotary and heading up the bridge will be slamming into people exiting the Dunkin'.

- Many people, including (to some extent) Randy Hunt and Wendy Northcross, feel that the big problem with the Sagamore traffic is that god-awful on-ramp just before the Christmas Tree Shop. It kills any chance of traffic fluidity on Route 6, Route 6A, Route 130, and any/all side roads during peak traffic periods. A Dunkin, sited closer to the Bourne Bridge and with not one but two curb-cutting exits, would be worse.

- Given the right ratio of big car/little car and sited properly, you could have a big diesel semi truck knock one of those little smart cars into the Canal, maybe rolling it through a house first. You can put some nuns and/or orphans into the smaller car if you need more gravitas with your worst-case scenarios.

- I spy superhero state troopers and EMT types being T-boned as they respond to emergency situations by some guy who is shoving a Gronk Sandwich into his face as he blindly force-merges into bridge traffic.

- Wampanoag babies suddenly experience an uptick in gridlock-related names, and schools start signing up kids named "Waits In Traffic" and "Curses At Fords."

- I'm recycling some old material here, but Bourne residents have a different perception of ETA than other residents of the same basic part of the state have. If you ask someone from Carver and someone from Bourne to go to some equidistant point between the two towns, the Carver man can immediately give an ETA, while the Bourne guy will have to pause, factor in traffic, and then give his answer. This DD scenario would make that worse.

- Some old woman at this time next year will die and go to her eternal reward just after her kids blow her off on Mother's Day from 9 miles away because of rotary traffic.

- Depending on who you believe, a flyover will eventually go in here. Some people say that's why the IHOP declined on renewing their lease. A massive construction project with a bustling coffee shop jammed in there wouldn't get complicated or anything.

- Along the lines of the myth that Eskimoes have over 200 words for snow, Bourne residents would have to learn yet another traffic term... "Winter-morning coffee run rotary traffic" is what I am working with now. I don't think anyone else in the USA would have that particular problem.

- Bourne town officials have suggested that the state buy the site and tear it down.

- Wicked Local Bourne alleges that at least one "well-known coffee franchise" has put out feelers on the site.

- While I think they lost in the end, the Sorrenti Brothers (or something like that) lost out on a settlement when a flyover cut their gas station off from the former Sagamore rotary. However, they were very close to getting a multi-million dollar payout. Would a decade of Dunkin be worth that financial risk?

- If you are going to wedge a business in there, does it really have to be a high-volume, quick-hitter? At least each customer at the IHOP sat there for 45 minutes. People are in and out of Dunkin Donuts, and thus in and out of bridge and rotary traffic, every 30 seconds or so.

- How many people would make money off this? The town makes some tax money, maybe gets another teacher or a firefighter. The franchisee will make money hand over fist. The coffee jockeys will make a starvation wage, and may have to be imported from New Bedford. Does that scratch cancel out the lost revenue we'd get from a major uptick in traffic gridlock at one of the only two ways off of the Cape?

- Road rage incidents before people get their coffee are worse than their opposite numbers. Road rage incidents where someone actually got their coffee, but had it spill into their lap after an accident before they could drink any of it... those, my friend, always turn bloody, even if the two people in the accident are Jesus and Martin Luther King.

- Would a needless DD in the Bourne Rotary be the end of the DD in the struggling Buzzards Bay rotary? Will some millionaire getting an extra million be worth landing yet another deathblow on the Buzz?

- Would the State Police be forced to close the rotary Dunkin Donuts during evacuation situations like hurricanes or Pilgrim nuclear incidents?

- Just imagine the average driver exiting that DD at the foot of the bridge. Think of the delays, the nudging-the-nose-outs, the skidding stops, the oblivious or aggressive driver interaction. Disregard the good drivers for a moment, and focus on the average driver. Then, as George Carlin said, remember that half of the drivers are even stupider than he or she is.

- Remember... right now, the Bourne Bridge is the faster bridge, although's Sagamore's problem is more volume (Sagamore does a 67/33 share of the traffic with the Bourne Bridge) than design.

- At least one person on my Facebook has intimated that calling it "IHOP" instead of "Big Boy's" is sort of like wearing a YOUNGBLOOD t-shirt. Older folks still call it "Howard Johnson's" now and then.

- I plan to get a good viewing spot and wait for someone to do a sudden, high-speed, blind cross over two rotary lanes where they then cut off the two IHOP exits as a sort of Fool's Coda. Just offhand, sitting at my desk, I get the sense that either a near-miss or a fatality may strengthen my faith in God, Evolution, Either, Neither, or Both.

- As we have said before, people who study Higher Math speak of a strange phenomena called the Bourne Paradox. It essentially, if you'll forgive my difficulty with the details, means that a point occurred in history where the amount of travel-time lost in Bourne traffic surpassed the amount of time Man has existed as a species. It pretty much disproves Math, and maybe God. The math works when you consider that multiple people commute in many cars, but the working math also dispels Math. It's what Einstein killed himself over.

Now, whoever owns this property has the right to rent it to whoever the heck they want to rent it to, even the Taliban or the KKK. Who are we to tell him otherwise?

It's tough to fault a guy who will give us a patrolman-sized tax payoff every year, who will employ a few dozen low-skill workers in a fairly secure job with 24/7/365 shifts, who will feed our hungry commuters, and who will hand us our morning coffee every day.

I suppose that my own political philosophy forces me to be willing to suffer a bit rather than have the government telling businesses who they can rent to. However, you can almost paint it as a public safety issue. I'm torn on it, to an extent.

If I can sneak in and out of there during off hours and get one of those little croissants with the bacon and cheese... at that exact moment, this reporter would be For this project.

However, the rest of the time, it will be a traffic nightmare of the highest order, imposed upon an area that was pretty close to already being a traffic nightmare of the highest order. Bourne has been begging for help with traffic for decades, and we instead get nothing but Mo Traffic.

We're about to take a traffic gut-punch, there's nothing we can do about it, and it will hit us all day, every day, as long as it stands. I think maybe 30 people benefit from it.

I suppose the area needs a high end business that maybe one person goes to now and then and spends a bunch of money. Maybe something with a high-end window-shopping appeal, like a Ferrari dealership. Everything else is a bad idea... and that also goes for you, Ronald McDonald.

Mainland Bourne should strongly consider that they may have to secede, name themselves "Gridlock," start suing somebody over the traffic, and blow those bridges down like the Big Bad Bourne Wolf. You know in your red, white and blue heart that George Washington wouldn't have taken this sh*t.

Minor, Regular-Type Snow Tonight, And How The Rest Of The Winter Should Go

Ocean Bluff, MA

The blizzard's moving in
Looks like you're wrong again
When cabin fever hits
It sends us into fits
Of innkeeper's disease
And screaming in the trees
The blizzard never ends
The blizzard buries them...

People who aren't as into the weather as I am often ask me the same series of questions. "Will there be school?" "Is it going to rain on my race/parade/party/wedding/graduation?" "Is the hurricane going to hit us?" You know the deal, or can at least imagine a good % of it.

Lately, I get another question, one I usually only get during sex and conversations.

Sagamore, MA

"When is it going to end?"

They're referring to Winter, or at least this perpetual state of snowfall and Siberian cold that we seem to be in. I don't have the actual numbers, but I think we had 9000 inches of snow this last month. We had our coldest month on record, and our snowiest.

My little area of Cape Cod, which isn't known for excessive snowfall, had 12+" of snow three Mondays in a row, with two storms over 2 feet and one storm pushing 3 feet. We broke the streak not by a cessation in snowfall, but by the next snowstorm hitting on a Saturday.

Here are some odd things I've done, heard or said in the last month:

- "I felt good, really good. I had no idea why. Then I realized that I head been working out almost 8 hours daily with the shovel, and had been doing so for 3 weeks."

- "We'll be happy to shovel your car out, Ma'am, we just have to find it.".... sweeps arm in a manner that shows I am searching an area roughly 50'x50'....... "I think it's over here somewhere."

- Walked 150 yards and back to get some medicine for a lady... took me 25 minutes.

- "I can't tell where the snowbank ends and the 43 room hotel wall begins."

- "You can come down to the cottage whenever you want.... just if you come at high tide, you'll be killed."

Sandwich, MA

- Bought not one but two iced coffees from Marylou's when the temperature outside was -8.

- "No, not that Monday blizzard, the other one.... no, not the Groundhog one."

- (guy from Miami, seeing snow in person for the first time, and he got a blizzard)..... "On TV, it looks more fun. Do people actually go out and skate in this?" I eventually gave this man a sled, and he gleefully threw himself around a tavern parking lot. He was in his 20s, and was up North for a military funeral.

- "Does the Army come and take all the snow away?" OK, that's an old one, from the April Fool's blizzard.

- I knew an Indian woman would start jabbering at me if I used the main entrance and got rock salt everywhere, so I walked up a snowbank and entered my room through a 2nd floor porch. I had to shovel my way in, but the accent of a Calcutta woman raised in England and living in America and who now has to mop up after you for the tenth time is pretty much a high-pitched yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip. I had been outside smoking after 18 hours of shovel work, so the extra effort was worthwhile.

Bourne, MA

We're getting some more snow tonight, but a mere 2-5 inches is nothing at all by this point. I actually look forward to the snowbanks getting a fresh coat of powder

The snow will start at 10 PM or so, and should be done around when you start the morning commute. It will be more of a coastal affair, and they are looking at 2-5". Inland locations (central and western MA) will get a coating to 2".

Merely a flurry.

Then, we get a streak of highs in the 20s and lows around 10. You'll be frigid for the rest of the week, but at least the heavens won't be pouring powder on your head.

We then have one more round of bad weather (March 3rd looks to have accumulating snowfall, and the period bookending it looks to have minor and nuisance snowfall), and then things get drastically better. 

Duxbury, MA

I use the resources I have to keep a month and a half ahead of the weather. Anything beyond a week is guess work, but it is educated guess work. It's not 100%, as no 45 day forecast saw any of our blizzards- or even a period of frequent snowfall- until they were a short time away. Even the TV stations missed the first blizzard until about 30 hours before.

However, Accuweather is a voice of authority, and they see some promise for us in this next 45 day period. 

The best part? After tomorrow, you may not see temperatures below 10 degrees for 9-10 months. That's not enough for you? We should see temperatures in the mid 50s a week from a day after tomorrow. Granted, it will snow that morning, but the afternoon should rule.

March 6th is that special day, and dare I say a very New England day. We'll start with a mere coating of snow, winds will go past 65 mph, and we'll hit the mid 50s. After that day, only 4 days of the next 40 will see high temperatures not reach the 40s. We'll have 10 days in the 50s. There is no snow at all forecast in this period.

Duxbury, MA

After that, it will be:

April.

Spring.

Highs in the 40s and 50s.

There's some minor snow called for on April 7th, and that may be this winter's last slap at us. The latest I've seen heavy snow was April 28th, but that was in Worcester.

You can handle that, right?