Early Season Bog-Trotting

With a name like Cranberry County Magazine, you know it's only a mater of time before we head out into the bogs.

One disadvantage we have is that, much like the foliage, the bogs are flooded and harvested from north to south, and we live in the far southern part of that equation. That means that our bogs aren't being harvested like the ones in other regions.

Of course, bogs tend to be large and difficult to manage, and they have to sort of draw a grid and work section-by-section. It takes time to cover all of those acres, so we will be able to get all stages of the cranberry harvest cycle just by stumbling around town.

Today, we'll roll through Carver, Wareham, Plympton, Duxbury and Buzzards Bay. There are bogs all over our reading area, and we'll try to pop in on the more scenic ones as the harvest season progresses.

Our light was sort of rough, as you can see. We get the kid off the bus at quarter to four, and we had to make our way out into Bog Country, aka Carver.

I'm not that into Creationism, but if I was, it wouldn't be hard to rationalize God making Carver right after He figured out that cranberry sauce was tasty... or perhaps even after He realized that you need cranberries to make a Cape Codder. He probably got to it very early in the Earth-making process.

"I'd better allot some space for cranberries... right abouttttt... HERE!" (points at map, about where Carver will one day be)... and it was Good.

I have no intention of digging up this information, but I would guess that there is more acreage devoted to cranberry farming in Carver than there is to housing the whole population of Carver.

Somebody- be it God or John Alden or whoever- really liked cranberries, because southeastern Massachusetts is literally covered in bogs.

That works for us. Gas is cheap, and so is Cranberry County Magazine.

As I said before, the light was less than ideal. I'd do better with a 11 AM start time. Notice here that the trees are lit wonderfully, but the bog was very dark. I was shooting with late-day sun and tall trees behind me. This is what you get.

This is sort of a warm-up for future articles where they are actually harvesting berries via flotation. We dipped all over Carver and her neighbors, and most bogs aren't being flooded yet around here. I know the guy in Buzzards Bay told me "after Halloween."

Only part of one bog on North Carver Road in Wareham was flooded and had floating berries, and that is the one you'll see splattered all over this article. The bog above is still getting ready to drop.

By contrast, this bog below (in Duxbury) was flooded by her reservoir. We'll come back and check her out later.

You need all of that water for the bogs. Most and maybe all bogs are built near a copious supply of water. They sort of pump it in and out of the bogs as they need it, either to feed the cranberries or to protect them from the cold.

I don't know how they did it before the Industrial Revolution, and this may have required the efforts of 100 men and a bucket line for all I know. Now, they just use pumps.

Those little houses that you see on cranberry bogs usually contain the water pumping equipment. One of the structures may be an outhouse, so don't drink any water from them until you talk to someone who works there.

We want you healthy.

Here are the little houses. It's a bit blurry. The shot REALLY sucked before I got into the editing, and I don't edit photos very well.

The reason that you flood bogs, besides doing so to loosen the berries for harvesting, is to protect them from freezing temperatures.

Otherwise, everything gets all icy. This is a bad thing to have happen to fruit which you plan to harvest.

We did have a freeze the other morning, and OF COURSE the team went out to find a frozen bog for some ice pictures. We are up at the dawn and driving for miles and miles to get you shots like the one below.

OK, it's across the road from where I live., and I stared at it for 5 minutes before "taking a picture of it" occurred to me.

They may have already harvested that part of the bog, or else that could be an Epic Fail. I'm not agricultural enough to know for sure. They are always very kind to my photographers and I, so I'm hoping this is No Big Deal.

That bog (Mann Farms, in Buzzards Bay) has some sort of project going on that merits having a giant crane out there. We'll sneak out there for a pictorial when the dice come up that way for the column.

Eventually, they flood the bog and let it freeze. Then, they put a skim coating of sand on it.

I knew at least one kid in my school days who thought that bog owners sanded the ice to keep kids from skating on a Liability Ice Arena. No. They're actually just giving the vines a fresh coat of sand.

The sand goes on the ice, the ice melts, and the sand settles into the bogs all uniform-like. Gravity handles the distribution process well enough. The sand method was invented on Cape Cod by a man who noticed that cranberries grew really well in areas that the ocean had covered with sand after a storm.

Therefore, bogs keep mountains of sand handy for the winter, just like the Highway Department does.

We worked until the sun set, so we'll give you some cranberry bog sunset shots.

Here's the one I took:

Here's the one I edited:

We'll be back with more soon, and I promise to put Jessica and Sara on the camera next time.

Forty Whacks: A Visit To The Lizzie Borden House

Lizzie Borden is Fall River's most famous resident, and let that one sink in for a second.

Marshfield's most famous resident is Daniel Webster. The village of Monponsett has the "Kilroy was here" guy. Ruth Wakefield rules Whiman's history for inventing the Toll House Cookie. Frances Ford Seymour was Henry Fonda's wife, Jane Fonda's mother, and a Fairhaven High School graduate.

Myles Standish (or perhaps Joe Perry) is the most famous person from my hometown of Duxbury. He killed more people than any Borden did, but he also had a job where killing was sort of expected of him.

Lizzie Borden, if you believe the Hype, did her dirt by her lonesome, and pretty much for personal reasons. She didn't use the typical Angel Of Death poisoning motif, no. She got her hands dirty.

Lizzie Borden is famous for the alleged axe murders of her parents. It is a crime that has transcended time, and even has a nursery rhyme attached to it.

Seeing as Fall River became famous as the town with the worst crime rate in Massachusetts, with a pile of different nationalities killing/assaulting/raping each other, it's kind of funny that the tone was set by a blue-blood white girl from that era when everyone walked around all herky-jerky like a Charlie Chaplin film or Babe Ruth highlights.

Fall River has always been a little bit ugly ever since.

Special rates for serial killers and patricide proponents...

It all started on a nice street in Fall River, directly across from a brand-spankin' new St. Anne's church.

Kids will be kids, and Lizzie was just like lots of spoiled rich ones. Lizzie and her sister had a rich father (Andrew) and a new stepmother. There were some money issues with the miser father, and the kids hated the stepmother, Abby. Lizzie referred to her stepmom as "Mrs. Borden."

At 9 AM on 8/4/1892, everyone was all right. By 11 or so, the Borden sisters were orphaned.

Abby got done up first. Her attacker was facing her, and hit her right in the face with an axe. She fell, the attacker pinned her down, and Abby took 18 more axe shots to the back of the head. Andrew, who was sleeping, took 11 shots, including one that split his eye.

The murders were remarkably brutal and bloody, although the "forty whacks" thing is an embellishment. Of course, when you're talking "axe wounds to the dome," the numbers are merely academic and matter only to coroners and nursery rhyme writers. Very few people are going to say "Bah, she only took 19 axe strikes to the head, not 40. What a lightweight!"

S'up?

It looked just like that, except it was more bloody, less blurry, and Chloe Sevigny wasn't there. No, I don't know what Chloe was doing in Fall River. She has been linked romantically to Duxbury philanthropist Stephen Bowden before, but we can find no confirmation of that story and it may be apocryphal.

Lizzie looked shady almost right away. A maid put her upstairs with the stepmom's body at the time of her murder. Lizzie found her father's body, perhaps by looking under her axe. This was 122 years before that crime scene investigator show with LL Cool J, so forensic investigation was piss-poor during this time- despite this being an era when Sherlock Holmes was popular.

Lizzie was too calm, gave the 5-0 many contradictory answers, and she was caught burning a dress on the stove after the murders. She was shown to have been seeking to purchase poison before the murders. The attorney trying her later sat on the US Supreme Court, but Lizzie handled him, too.

About 100 years before the term "OJ jury" was coined to describe a dozen stupid jurors, Lizzie Borden found an OJ jury. As guilty as Lizzie looked, there was little forensic evidence standing against her. She was acquitted of the murders, after the jury had deliberated for only 90 minutes.

"Yeah, I'm a backdoor mannnnnn..."

Fall River wanted nothing to do with her, even after she was Not Guiltied. She bought a new house, changed her name to Lizbeth and set about spending her share of Daddys loot (Andrew Borden was worth whatever 7 million dollars was worth back then). She threw lavish parties that many contemporary celebrities attended.

The Lizzard may have even snagged herself some celebrity skin, as rumors of an affair between her and actress Nance O'Neill still get kicked around. There are some interesting letters between the two, although NON went strictly dickly with her 1916 marriage. Borden lived and died as a spinster, albeit a well-off one.

Lesbian or not, I bet Nance slept with one eye open at the Maplecroft house that Borden moved to after the trial.

Other than a shoplifting incident that didn't result in an arrest, Borden lived the rest of her life quietly. She patronized the arts, left a fortune for the Animal Rescue League, and didn't, say, hack anyone (else) to death with an axe.

A black cat... crossing our path... at Lizzie Borden's House... on October 13th

Lizzie got a nursery rhyme ascribed to her for the rest of History. I was unaware of there being more than one version, but there seem to be three.

From Wikipedia

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

Also

Lizzie Borden took an axe
Gave her mother forty whacks,
Then she hid behind the door,
And gave her father forty more.

Also

Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks,
when the job was finally done
gave her father forty one


Remember, kids... Mom got 18 or 19, Dad got 11. Even combined, no one got 40 whacks... except the lady who runs the B&B there now, of course....

She is very rarely tailgated, even in Rhodey.

Lizzie got pneumonia, and died in like 1921 or something. Plenty of good seats were left at her funeral. She was buried next to her estranged sister.

She was a force of nature, a murderess during a time when women were supposed to be timid. She was a wealthy woman, but ostracized by the local well-to-do. She was a patron of the arts, a lover of animals, and only Paul Bunyan- maybe- is more famous for swinging an axe.

Some of the better theories:

- Fugue State Lizzie, who was Miss Borden operating under a Dissociative Disorder featuring reversible amnesia.

- Lesbian Lizzie, caught in the act by Stepmomma while slappin' hips with Bridget Sullivan. Stepmom was less than understanding, so Lizzie brained her with the first heavy item she found, and then finished her off with an axe. She confessed this crime to Dad, who also reacted in an axe-worthy manner.

- Perfectly Reasonable Lizzie, daughter of a miser millionaire who refused to put indoor plumbing into the house.

- Sullivan, the Borden's maid, confessed to helping Lizzie by changing her testimony. Sullivan is also listed as a suspect. She married a man later, so she was bisexual at best and abused help at worst in this scenario.

- William Borden, an illegitimate son, may have killed him after an extortion bid failed.

- Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, kills for the same cash Lizzie scored. She established an alibi in Fairhaven, snuck back into Fall River at just the time when both parents were napping, killed both parents, and then galloped back to Fairhaven ahead of the telegram man with the bad news. Emma inherited a pile o' money after the deaths, and scrutiny fell upon her more oddball sister.

- John Morse, Lizzie's uncle. An infrequent guest at best, he arrived in town one night before the murders.

- A guy named "Manny."

- OK, I just made Manny up.

Bad Axe, Michigan deserves a franchise, as does the lesser known town of Patricide, Utah.

Lizzie is long gone, but you can still check out her spot. The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast is just the place to take Mom and Dad when you see the nursing home bills. Hell, bring your disaffected goth teen daughter, she might get into History.

They also have tours. As the sign says, they run from 11 AM to 3 PM. I think it was $17 to get in, I may have it confused with nearby Battleship Cove, which I was also too cheap to pay for.

I went to the Cove back when I was teaching, with a bunch of my ghetto landlubber kids. It does rule, but it doesn't fit into this story, so we'll come back to it later.

Battle Cove is part of Free Family Fun Days or whatever that program we wrote about is. We'll check it out then. Two adult admissions to Battleship Cove would be worth more than Cranberry County Magazine is currently worth, although we may rally between now and Thanksgiving.

I don't think that the Lizzie Borden B&B is part of the Free Family Fun Days.

Of course we looked for ghosts. The B&B is rumored to be haunted, and it does have an eerie vibe about it. A lot of blood spilled in that house, and they even have the horror-movie-requisite scary ass daughter.

The Borden website does have Ghost Cams, but I was already on the grounds. Granted, I was too cheap to go in, and I don't work for the newspaper that my only press pass is from anymore.

So, being 6'5" or so, I just walked by the rooms, stretched out my big geek arm, and fired a few shots into whatever windows I could reach. I was hoping to sneak up on the ghosts.

Yeah, it worked about as well as you'd think it would. Don't say that I didn't try. I just didn't try for $34 worth.

Nothing to see here, let's move along...

The scene of a double axe murder is a funny place to put a B&B. I wonder what else is out there? Is there a Jeffrey Dahmer Steak House in Wisconsin? Maybe there's a Lane Staley Apothecary or a Christopher Reeve horse-racing track?

Come to think of it... not too far to the North, there's a city getting a lot of tourist money out of the fact that a bunch of near-primates slaughtered every sketchy person in town in a witch hunt.

I think Salem got 19 bodies, but our Lizzie did her dirt by her lonesome... always impressive. The first two are always the hardest.

We bought a coffee mug. I try not to disappoint people like the Bordens. I don't even like to disappoint the people who own the house now. I'm a bury-the-hatchet type, if you'll pardon the pun.

It may have been done before my time, but why is there not a Lizzie Borden movie?

Chloe Sevigny or however she spells that could play Lizzie. She can at least find the house. If she did play Lizzie, I'd go heavy on the Bridget Sullivan angle.

Hey, it's two murders, pretty much one after the other. We'll get a little Johnny Cochran or maybe Atticus Finch in the court scenes, but we need Action. Chloe and Bridget type action. This isn't 12 Angry Men we're talking about, folks.

For Whom The Bridge Tolls: Thoughts On A New Cape Cod Canal Bridge

Let's start with some numbers:

Bourne Bridge
Year round daily average (2011) = 42,505 vehicles
Summer daily average = 58,467

Sagamore Bridge
Year round daily average = 51,489
Summer daily average = 70,674

Those numbers lead to impassable traffic jams, jams where ten mile drives take 3 hours.

You've all heard the war stories. "25 mile backups during Hurricane Bob," or "90 minutes from the the 6A/130 intersection to the Sagamore Bridge during the Mother's Day Massacre of 2012."

Bourne residents literally can't go anywhere and hope to come back on Friday afternoons, Saturday/Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, during the Monday commute, and/or during any holiday/event.

Emergency evacuation is impossible, property values suffer, the quality of life is lowered, and the last sentence of the previous paragraph is literally saying "as a Bourne resident, you sacrifice a sizable % of your waking life to traffic."

This would be tolerable in Boston, where there are a million people zipping about. It shouldn't be the case in Buzzards Bay, where 3000 souls can be found on any given day. It makes me want to scream at someone more than I care to admit.

Here's how I see it....

* We need a third bridge.

* We need a third road leading up to and away from that bridge.

* If we want it, we'll have to pay for it.

* We'll pay for it with a toll bridge.

* The tolls will be there forever, even after the bridge is paid off.

* Prices will increase as businesses pass the toll costs onto the consumers.

* We shall eventually pay billions for a $300 million bridge.

* Splitting traffic up at the Christmas Tree Shop and then merging it back together 400 yards across the Canal will not resolve our traffic problems. It may in fact make it worse.

* The bridge will not meet the stated goal of easing traffic volume at all, and it serves no other purpose.

* We'll pay for this useless bridge for the rest of our lives and the lives of our descendants.

* If we don't do something, this nightmare is imminent.

* It seems to have fallen to me to brainstorm something.

I'm not picking on MA State Rep. Randy Hunt or Cape Cod Commission CEO Wendy Northcross there. Randy is obviously putting thought and effort into the problem, and Wendy answered almost everything I asked her about the topic. They just don't seem to see the basic problems inherent in this situation, or they feel that the problems are tenable and/or unavoidable.

Pols are sort of bound by what they think they can sell in Washington or the State House. They know they will have to claw through miles of red tape to even get the idea mentioned. They know that there will be many hands reaching into our pockets once the project gets green-lighted, especially with a Massachusetts highway project.

All of that real world stuff gets them used to operating in a way that somehow prohibits Thinking Big.

The intricate solution is beyond my capabilities. If I showed any Urban Planning skill in high school, a series of guidance counselors failed to mention it to me. However, the basic philosophy on what we need to do is well within my skill set. You'll see it, too.

The toll will generate billions in revenue, without reducing traffic at all. It is almost punitive. Only someone with a financial stake in a road-construction industry or highway management can like the idea. Any politician who supports it should be chased through the streets by a mob of angry constituents, and perhaps be kicked in the ribs a bunch of times.

If we and our tourists are going to spend billions over the life of a toll bridge, we should at least get what we pay for.

50,000 cars a day times $5 a pop = $250,000 a day in toll revenue.

Let's lower the toll rate so that I can just say "a million a week" and "maybe $5 a car is a doomsday estimate" without stretching the truth too far.

300 weeks pays off the project. 300 weeks is like, uhm, 6 years or something.

But the toll will last forever.

Heck, we'll even throw in a decade or two to cover any/all maintenance costs, and a third decade to cover the eventual replace-the-old-Sagamore-Bridge costs. Over an assumed 100 year lifespan of the bridge, this still has the Man needlessly in your pocket for 65 years.

The only way for us to get any value out of this is if our project is so massive, it takes a century of tolls to pay for it.

Off the top of my head, I'd drop a third bridge right in the middle of the other two. I would gut Bournedale with roads connecting to Route 25 and Route 3, seizing Bournedale Road and Herring Pond Road by Eminent Domain if need be. I'd make the road into a big Y, with the bottom part of the Y being the third bridge.

I'd do an upside down version on the other side of the bridge, after taking some land from the gub'mint. The forks of the letter can sort of ^ towards Route 28 and Route 6 through the military base.

Shoot, why not build it in such a way that we can line it with Burger Kings, Cumberland Farms and Exxons? I have never met a local economy that couldn't use a rush of jobs. Perhaps even a Bournedale Mall would not be out of the question.

It would actually solve the problem that Main Street in Buzzards Bay has had since the freeway went in. Route 25 cut off our Tourist Flow, so we get back at Route 25 by cutting into it to run those same tourists by our businesses again. Main Street could slowly re-design itself to suit more immediate local needs, which it is sort of doing now anyhow.

There would be some ugliness to They Tore Down The Carter Beal Nature Preserve And Put Up A Gas Station With A Dunkin' Donuts In It, no doubt. We could mute the environmental damage by building an elaborate Arc de Triomphe bridge over the herring run in Bournedale.

I'd also go with a wrap-around fishing pier along the bottom of the bridges, and light all of the bridges up like they do with the Zakim Bridge. I'd celebrate the opening with a party so huge and chaotic, it would make V-J Day look like someone just won a Scrabble game.

It's being paid for... why not?

Hold on, someone did the map better than I did.

In my world of the future, we now have a third bridge. It is fed by roads which break off from highways which are already in place. The roads break off at the exact points (the Ingersoll Bend and Herring Pond Road) where we currently begin our present bumper-to-bumper congestion. We strike at the areas with the lowest population densities, mostly swamp and wasteland. Anyone we displace is compensated handsomely.

Locals can still use Main Street, Sandwich Road, the Cranberry Highway, the Scenic Highway and 6A for local-type stuff, which leads us to the best part. Before I get to that best part, I'd like to add that this plan would probably allow us to get rid of the two Bourne Bridge rotaries, and just have intersections like normal towns do.

The best part? The third bridge would be almost 100% Tourist. The current bridges feed the Bourne villages, while this hypothetical third bridge would empty into a discontinued military base and some Bournedale swampland. It would be of little use to locals, and it would only be used by tourists.

And it is this bridge that would bear the dreaded Toll. Holler if you hear me.

Now we have the burden where it should be. Tourists can pay for their own bridge. Smarter hotels and tourist destinations can comp guests for the toll. Bourne residents have suffered for years to fill Harwich restaurants with tourists, so cry me a river, Mooncussers.

Bourne and perhaps Sandwich residents will be exempt from any tolls, of course. We've been tolled in Traffic Patience for the last 100 years. F*** you.

The toll bridge can also be used by the rich man to skip heavier traffic at the free bridges via a small shedding of excess wealth, as the new bridge would sport a very low traffic volume for most of the week.  A five dollar toll for an empty bridge may also be an acceptable and necessary luxury to a working stiff who is running late for work on an important day.

We may have to somehow divert traffic to the toll bridge on certain Touristy days while preserving the free bridges for local traffic, and perhaps even invest in some of that Urban Warfare stuff that the cops get in larger cities where the people riot a lot. Maybe we can borrow some tanks from the military base.

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, if you'll pardon the pun.

Tummy Porn: Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen

Normally, we'll aim a little higher with Tummy Porn than a B level fast food franchise. We take the sacred responsibilities of being your Tummy Pornographers very seriously, and it makes the whole region look bad if the food critics get all worked up over a chicken shack.

However, since the region is covered with fast food franchise outlets, it starts to creep into our territory when we get a chance to show a reader something that they may have not ever seen before.

We were in Fall River on some other business, so we decided to Tummy Porn our way into the Popeyes (Al Copeland, the original owner, claimed during his Chapter 11 proceedings that he was too poor to afford an apostrophe) Louisiana Kitchen on Pleasant Street in the great US city and port of Fall River.

Popeyes (named not for the famous Sailor Man, but instead for Detective Popeye Doyle from the film The French Connection, and, no, I'm not making that up) was founded in Louisiana in 1972. The original founder was a rags to riches street kid who, when Popeyes made him a millionaire, refused to join the local gentry... kind of a sin down there.

This earned him numerous battles with the local elite. Vampire Diaries author Anne Rice couldn't stand the mention of the man after he bought an iconic locale from the Lestat canon (the "Let me pass now from fiction into legend" building) and put up a garish eatery on the grounds. Other gentry hated Copeland's hyper-extravagant Christmas displays, which the TODAY show listed as #3 in America.

Popeyes expanded in the 1970s and 1980s to the point where there were 1500 franchises in the US by 2010. They slugged though bankruptcy in 1991 and went public in 2001.

Popeyes doesn't stray too far from the KFC motif practiced by rival Col. Harland Sanders.

The same limits that keep us from properly describing fine restaurants will also keep this section of the article from spooling out too far. Their chicken isn't too far from KFC's, although they have a spicy option that is favored by many customers. Jambalya is offered, not something you see at the Burger King. They also serve a sub that Southerners call a Po' Boy, in shrimp, chicken and catfish genres.

Yes, catfish. It's good, trust me.

OK, don't trust me, I got chicken. I've had a profound distaste for Catfish since I saw a monster show featuring catfish in the Mekong River that would eat a Khmer Rouge now and then. They may very well be why Charlie don't surf.

We went simple, which is always wise to do with fast food. It's a simple menu, which helped us in that regard.

I never actually expect to go to a Popeyes, so I never really pay attention to Annie The Chicken Queen, a sort of matriarch spokeswoman who stars in their commercials. This left me a bit unprepared going in, a mistake I won't let happen again.

Depending on where you clock in on spice preference, Popeyes lives on about the same level of Culinary Hell that Colonel Sanders rules. I could flip a coin between the two, personally.

I was going to go for the Wild Pepper Tenderloins, but the kid was with me, and I didn't want him bursting lava on the way home to Buzzards Bay.

Popeyes has cajun fries, potatoes with cajun gravy, macaroni and cheese and about what you'd expect from such a place.

The kids running the place were very nice, always a plus, especially in Fall River.

I should add that Popeyes is no worse cold than it is hot, I wolfed down my leftovers in a minute!

I should add that, at least from what I see on those Internets, you can get beaten up for no reason in Popeyes. We like when the chicken is battered... not us.

They also run out of chicken during special promotions now and then, which is often a point of contention with regular customers.

I go to chicken shack fights only when I have to cover up for my poor chicken pics.

Familiarity with Popeyes Lousiana Kitchen may not be an issue for you. I have no idea whether or even if they would be able to expand into the South Shore and Cape Cod. I'd like to see Duxbury or Sandwich get a franchise.

Thoughts On The Post-Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant Future

The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth will close in 2019, according to multiple sources.

They are citing low energy costs, market pressures and millions of dollars in necessary upgrades as the reasons for the closure.

The power plant was a source of both energy and concern for area residents ever since it was placed in the Manomet scrub coast. It helped keep the houses warm and the drinks cold for a few decades, and- Good Lord willing- we got it opened and closed without a Chernobyl-style disaster.

I took a tour of Pilgrm in 2008 or so, for an old article that I cant find in the archives. It looked very 1970s, with multiple dial labeled controls that made me think of the Batcave from the 1960s version of the Batman show. That's really what it looked like, sans Bat-mobile of course.

A few other things jumped out at me. The plant, while listed at 27 feet or so, seemed to be very, very close to sea level. They had two jetties and a jersey barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and a boiling water nuclear reactor.

The water flowing out of the plant, towards the ocean, was exactly the same color as Mountain Dew. I'm sure this has to do with sunlight and ionized water or something, and that nuclear power doesn't turn you green like the Incredible Hulk, but still...

The plant was also storing spent fuel on the site, hoping to send it to the Yucca Mountains in Nevada or somewhere like that. Amazingly, there aren't many takers when you're shopping Spent Nuclear Fuel storage.

The plant was also heavily, heavily guarded. I won't spill their details or anything, but you'd want to have a very good plan if you wanted to do some Bond Villain stuff. You'd be getting lit up before you even got exposed to the uranium or whatever they were using there.

The security force, which is 101% paramilitary, even wear their assault rifles while eating Chinese food. I kid you not. The guy I saw doing that immediately became my permanent visual definition of Badass Casual. You know he's gonna shoot you more than necessary if your terrorist attack makes him have to dump his General Tso's chicken on the ground and sling up Ol' Painless.

You can read about the shutdown here, or about the plant itself here... I'm not the expert. I'm more of the write-a-thought-provoking-article guy.

Here are some tangents we can explore together, if you like....

- Unless something bad happens quickly, we will never know if Pilgrim would have been able to stand up to a direct-hit monster hurricane. It had a nice bit of elevation, built on top of a sizable sand cliff. It also had Cape Cod blocking anything but a direct-hit storm.

Someone should put a marker about where the Fukushima line of reactor inundation would be, and maybe someday we'll see if the planners made a few crucial planning errors.

- If you wonder what the sudden loss of 14% of Massachusetts' power generation will do to your power bill, you'll find out in July of 2019. Remember, Cape Wind also got the Bozack from just about everyone, so we won't even have nascent wind technology to help things along.

- The plant's closure will cost the town 600 nice-paying jobs and $9.75 million a year in taxes. It also means we will need to import an additional 10 million barrels of oil and run our coal-fired power plant in Sagamore much harder.

- I'm already seeing a lot of "News Flash: Plymouth Economy To Collapse In 2019" things on Facebook. I'm seeing sympathy for the plant workers, too.

- I wonder what the NO ESCAPE FROM THE CAPE people who we used to see on the Sagamore Bridge will do for fun now.

- The closure of the plant means that Monster Hurricane becomes the only way we'll see a massive evacuation of Cape Cod, short of an Atlantic tsunami or the sudden arrival of Godzilla. We were looking at a Road To Basra type scenario of people cooking in their cars with a nuclear accident causing Cape Cod to empty.

- I planned to evacuate by boat, with the fact that I don't own a boat just being a minor obstacle in my world view.

- I'll have to go into the archives, find my Cape Cod Disaster Scenarios article, and revise the list from the top down. Pilgrim had the top spot there, I forget what #2 was, it may have been "series of shark attacks destroys tourist economy" or "asteroid strike" or "Sea AIDS."

- No, I don't know how long it will take to dismantle it, or how long before the area is safe for farming or anything like that. The line starts on the right for the Grown On The Site Of The Former Nuclear Power Plant produce.

- Will the towns keep the nuclear air-raid sirens up, on the off-chance we get a tornado or an air raid or something? We could have town-wide versions of the Morning Announcements we all remember from high school. I'd like Duxbury to use theirs to constantly broadcast reggae instrumental beats.

- Much of the area around Pilgrim, and I mean like Manomet to Bournehurst, is wildly underdeveloped scrub forest. If they start filling that in, we may need to carve a piece off of southern Plymouth and make a new town, maybe merging it with mainland Bourne. We'll do a whole article on that once some of the more serious people straighten me out on it in the comments or on Facebook.

- Will there be reluctance to develop that land around the plant? Will we have a Forbidden Zone?

- Would developing the Forbidden Zone around Pilgrim generate enough property taxes and carpenter jobs to offset the tax hit and plant job loss?

- It'd be funny if the land where Pilgrim presently stands is developed, someone puts a corny seafood restaurant there, Al Qaeda fails to get a series of memos, and a sorely-mistaken terrorist crashes a SEMTEX-loaded Cessna into a Seafood Shanty-type clam shack. Hopefully, it happens off-season.

- Fearless fishermen knew that the fishing was always good off Pilgrim. The water temperature differential plays a role or something, I don't know. It's always an Act Of Luck whenever I catch a fish.

- This pretty much kills the Cape Cod setting for my Nuclear Mutant Shark  movie script. I'm never gonna get that Oscar now...

Finding Foliage: Maine

"Cranberry County" is a purposefully ambiguous term. While it is technically Southeastern Massachusetts, we can (and will) expand when we need to.

Much like Hunter Thompson said about the code of the west, "Cranberry County" can mean "whatever we need it to mean, in a pinch."

Today, it means Maine.

This was very much aimless rambling, so I apologize in advance for not being like "That's Mount So-and-So." I don't go to Maine much, and the names of places tend to escape me.

I'm very good at SE Massachusetts town names, but Ive been banging around this part of the state professionally for a while. Even then, I just got my first visits in to places like Rehoboth and Somerset during last year's foliage articles.

I don't feel bad about that. A lot of Southeastern Masschusetts is on the If You Ain't From Here, You Don't Come here tip. That's not aggressive, just utilitarian.

Ideally, we'd have waited a few weeks and got into that Currier & Ives stuff, but I'm a busy man.

Maine, as you know, turns their foliage over before Massachusetts does. It gets colder up there sooner or something, I'm not that into tree science for a guy who writes about them as often as I do. I just like to look.

I'm assuming that we'll hit New Hamster about when the foliage is right, we sort of made it Maine when circumstances put us there.

To ensure that we get every last drop out of Rolling Stone writers, I've heard P.J. O'Rourke describe Norway as "God got carried away with the winter recipe for Northern Maine."

We will be moving South from Maine with the deepening of Autumn. We'll be in New Hampshire pretty soon, Northern Massachusetts a bit after that, and we're even trying to work Vermont. I'm not above sub-contracting it if need be.

We may even throw Rhode Island in the mix, I'm not sure if they turn over before or after Cape Cod does.

We won't make it to Connecticut, but if we do, you can almost bet that the pictures will be very Foxwoodsian.

Tummy Porn: Mezza Luna

Jessica hooked the kid up for his birthday (it's Tuesday, but I don't mind punctuality) with lunch at Mezza Luna. We brought along my man Hard Core Logo, too.

Mezz Luna dates back to the 1930s, and made their bones serving pasta to servicemen from the military base. If there's a better restaurant in Bourne, I'd like to try it out.

Check out their website, which- don't be alarmed- might play some Sinatra for you.

The place went up in flames (firefighters tell me that even the restaurant fire smelled good) a few years ago, but they rebuilt. The Cubellis family is a good enough employer that they got a nice % of the staff back when they re-opened. Jake, who served us, was superb.

Hardcore Logo is a man of simple tastes, and tends to order off the Kid Menu. I actually have about the same diet, so this restaurant review probably won't move down the evolutionary scale much more than "The salad was yummy."

It never hurts to fortify yourselves with enough Autumn Punch that the pictures start coming out blurry.

Jessica is at work, and I'm a bit of a moron when it comes to all things classy. We dd a food review for Cape Cod TODAY once, and it wasn't pretty. Some quotes from the article..."Fudge Bomb"... "donnez-moi le bag de chienne, monsieur."... "God help me, I'll stab this fork into your stupid forehead.".. "Momma cooked the breakfast with no squid."... "I don't care if it's what I get at Olive Garden, it's what I want."

We don't call it Tummy Porn because someone violates a navel. Heck no, we go Tummy Deep into various restaurants in the area. This is my manicotti, with a diet-busting side of two meatballs. They don't skimp on the sauce, I'm a messy eater, and the table around me looked like a crime scene when I finished.

The food melts in your mouth to the extent that, other than when I stole some of Hard Core Logo's fries, I didn't have to chew anything.



Could be worse....