Sunday Drive Homework Assignment: Cape Cod Fall Foliage Picture Contest!

We had planned to get our bad selves out on the Cape for the end of the foliage season, but we are having some trouble with the Cranmobile. Unless we commandeer the CCRTA bus, we won't personally be shooting up the Cape with our cameras.

This is a shame, because Cape Cod has a stranglehold on the tail end of New England's fall foliage season. People who have been putting off their leaf-peeping for reasons good or bad have no real options left on the table.

Many people think of Cape Cod as being entirely made of sand, therefore being unaware of the Peep Options down here in Barnstable County.

We'd like to help promote Cape Cod's foliage season, which is where you come in!

Many of you Cape Codders will be out on the roads today. You will be driving through the heart of the local fall foliage. Many of you enjoy the benefits of flash photography.

Why not work towards a Greater Good?

Send us some pictures. If you can leave them in the comments section, feel free. If not, leave them in the comments section of whatever Facebook post you saw this contest advertised at. If worst comes to worst, hit us up at Monponsett@aol.com.

Be sure to tell us what town your picture is from.

Plymouth and Wareham can play, but they have to punch their way in.

We'll choose the best of the bunch, and reward the winner with some useless accumulata swag that we have kicking around. They'll also own Cape Cod bragging rights, which may get you a free beer in the right establishments.

We'll use the picture once. You own it after that. If someone tries to pay us for it after, we'll refer them to you.

The judges are me (Stephen), Jessica, and this guy we know called Cranberry Jones.

We'll take entries for a few days, and then the article will drop like the leaves themselves once the judges are satisfied.

Good luck!

Late-Season South Shore Foliage

We did a few Foliage trips around the South Shore last week.

"South Shore" is sort of an indiscriminate term, as places like Middleboro and Wareham really shouldn't count, but we didn't get Fall Riverish enough to call it a South Coast/South Shore crossover.

That fact doesn't really matter much- especially in an article about leafs on a tree- but it matters a lot to the people who it matters to.

We try to keep moving when we work...

Sometimes we shoot out the window. Worry not, the driver isn't shooting. He drives, the passenger spots and shoots. The driver determines the general direction that we go, while the spotter is in charge of when we stop. 

Maybe you work differently... or maybe I'm too lazy to crop the dashboard out of this pic, and decided to joke around it. 

We let our daily business dictate our photo work a lot, so we sort of ran a Wareham-Carver-Plymouth-Kingston-Duxbury back down to Bourne route.

We've been meaning to do Cape Cod, as we veteran leaf peepers feel that Cape Cod doesn't peak before November. Unfortunately, the Cranberry Chevy has been running poorly recently, it's an expensive fix, and we may have to be Innovative. We may even have a contest.

I'll worry about that later, as it is very late at night and I have pictures to share with you.

I like writing in the middle of the night. The night helps me focus. 

I'm pretty sure that I waltzed out of Duxbury High School in the 1980s just a few years before stuff like Asperger Syndrome and ADHD became the go-to diagnosis model for American school psychologists. If I was a 1970s birth, I'd be full of Ritalin and asleep right now.

I tend to be distracted during the day. Even in the relative isolation that I managed to carve out for myself, stuff- people walking around, approaching vehicles, the discharge of a rife now and then- happens on my street that I have to pay attention to.

That's not the case during the Witching Hour. The darkness obscures all visual distractions, reducing me to Tyrannosaurus Rex-style motion detector status. Anything moving around in my yard at this hour is most likely something that I might have to kill, probably with my hands (I support America's gun rights 101%, but I'm a bit too clutzy/nutty to responsibly own a firearm myself). That sort of tension adds a nice edge to my work.

Hey, you try writing about leaves... 

I've said it before, but Southeastern Massachusetts is tough for shooting Foliage. We lack the elevated spots that you get in places like New Hampshire, where you get those sweeping mountain valley views that you see in the calendars. We sometimes have to leave some dude's truck in the picture.

I'd shoot off of the Bourne or Sagamore Bridge, but that area is cursed with scrub pine. You get a greenish/orangey/semi-brown mix shooting from up there, sort of a bronzed Aquaman.

I have plans for that region, which we will get to in a future article.

Our responsibility runs out at the Rhode Island border. We love Rhodey. We're just a Massachusetts thing.

Even then, we stick to the Eastern part of the state. It simplifies things. 

Shoot, we could give you Colorado pictures if you want, but I don't think that they grow cranberries out there.

It's best if we stay in Massachusetts.

We do have good foliage down here. It's more of a rural driving expedition thing than a hiking thing, although you can see some nice Leaf if you go deep in the forest. You even get Early Peak in the areas of the forest where the sun doesn't shine that brightly.

We'd also recommend using an online map service to plan your trip. You can work a few lakes into your route (we didn't do so on this trip, but you can), and be sure to keep it Rural.

Orange was the hardest color for us to find. Various shades of red are everywhere, with a slow fade to brown taking over as the Fall part of autumn starts to assert herself. Yellow is second easiest, and orange is the hardest.

I see Blue in some Vermont photos, but I'm not a savvy enough Leafpeeper to know what trees do that or why we don't have them here.

We'll try to expand our reach into the northern states next year.  We got to Maine in September, but it was pre-peak. After that, we were lucky to get out of Plymouth County. Busy month,,,

We do perform an important service here. We get it out on the Internet that southeastern Massachusetts, and especially Cape Cod, still has peak foliage.

If you live in or are visiting New England, it is quite simply Too Damn Late for you to see peak foliage unless you get your bad self down to southeastern Massachusetts. You could go to Vermont, but it's brown and desolate up there... and everyone smells like syrup.

We don't want you to have to go through all that, when you can dip an hour or two south of Boston and see perfect late-season fall foliage.

Even with our best efforts, we tend to be more Suburban than Rural. This is why we have to zoom in on tress so closely,when panning back or whatever they call that may be more what the shot calls for.

It also gives us the Flood o' Color that we love so much. It is very colorful down here. I didn't have to edit these shots at all, which wasn't the case with our previous foliage work. 

This is good, because my mouse has no Right Click button now. Not being able to scoot down to Radio Shack is one of the downsides of working the Werewolf Shift, but it is a condition that I tolerate.

I swear that, when I went to the other side of the tree to shoot it without the guy/s house in the background, the color wasn't as satisfying. Therefore, he suffers so that you can zone out on some Reds.

If homeboy objects we'll remove the picture or crop his house out of it or something.

We like our readers to be happy. Sure, we'll fight with them on Facebook now and then, but it's all in good fun.

I tried and failed to frame the Myles Standish Monument between two trees with my cheapo Wal-Mart camera that was last seen being hit directly by a wave during our nor'easter coverage a few weeks ago.

I could have zoomed in more, but it might have made the picture blurry.

I am very much a photographer of the Take Fifty To Use Ten variety.

We have two or three more articles on Foliage coming up

1) A piece where we discuss lining the Cape Cod Canal with foliage-friendly trees in a crazed attempt to make it a 2075 AD tourist attraction.

2) A contest where we troll Facebook for people to take Cape Cod foliage pics which we will publish. A cheapo prize will go to the winner.

3) The article with the results of the contest.

We loved this month, because the nor'easter didn't kill the foliage. It did damage, but it didn't bring about a premature end of the season.

Check this tree below, which lost her leaves directly under her. Raking the yard under this tree is a breeze...

... unless, of course, there's a breeze!

Peep ya later!

Sagamore Bridge Closed After Accident

Quick Note...

The Sagamore Bridge is closed for the time being, due to a head-on collision.

Traffic will be diverted to the Bourne Bridge, which is already backing up. We're also getting reports of jams on 6A, 28, 130, and Sandwich Road.

Police have no estimate yet as to how long the Sagamore Bridge will be closed, but it's a mess.

We'll update when we get more information.

Update: One of the vehicles was a truck filled with cranberries, which are now all over the bridge.... if we wreck a Vodka truck on it, we can have a 100000 gallon Cape Codder..

picture from Bourne PD.

1991 Duxbury Beach Storm Damage From The Halloween Gale

Living on the shore of the sea does have some benefits, but there is what actuaries and lawyers call Inherent Risk.

We're going to explore some of the consequences of that risk in today's article, which heavily leans on pictures given to us by the Bedford Family, formerly of Ocean Road North on Duxbury Beach.

They show damage from the 1991 Halloween Gale, which people from Inland might call The Perfect Storm or the No-Name Storm.

No one who lived through it calls it "the Perfect Storm," as it is sort of cruel to use positive superlatives when talking to victims. "Hey, Jackie O.... sorry about the dead husband and everything, but you gotta admit, that was some splendid shooting."

The only non-Bedford, non-1991 picture is the one above. It is from the Federicci family, and shows an incoming high tide during a nor'easter last year.

Everything else was post-Gale carnage.

The gale arrived around Halloween Eve, Devil's Night. The local forecasters blew it (the better forecasts spoke of a storm at sea), and we had practically no warning.

A hurricane offshore (Grace) met a nor'easter, got absorbed, re-formed into a hurricane, and spun around in a crazy course off of the Massachusetts coast. Mammoth waves with hurricane winds behind them pounded the Massachusetts coastline. Damage was in the hundreds of millions in 1991 dollars.

The storm was never named, even though it was a hurricane. This was officially to avoid confusion, but also most likely because there was a bit of shame involved among the weatherheads. To be fair, the hurricane never made landfall, and the nor'easter (which later became the hurricane) did most of the damage.

This storm gentrified Duxbury Beach faster than a BMW parade of yuppies.

Some people could take no more, and sold out. The people who bought the old propertuies built them up. Other people cashed in insurance checks and built much larger houses. Throw in the stilts under the houses, and this storm changed the whole skyline of the neighborhood.

The houses you remember from the 1960s and 70s were gradually and emphatically phased out by the Halloween Gale, and the Blizzard of '78. Cottages in front of the dunes were gone by 1978. Little cottages on the seawall were leveled in 1991.

Every house you see here was rebuilt into a much more valuable property. This drives up property values, leading other families to sell. A cycle ensues, and the Irish Riviera fades into history.

The storm was a monster, every bit the equal of 1978. You'd rank them 1 and 1A. The Gale far surpassed damage done to Duxbury by Hurricane Bob, who had visited about a month and change before. Bob was a cakewalk in Duxbury, but the Gale was taking no sh*t.

This house washed back into the street. It was not the worst destruction of a house on that street, as a cottage at the other end of Ocean Road North pretty much disintegrated.

Even the houses on Cable Hill lost decks, which is very unusual.

The Gale was a slow mover, and it hit the beach with 8 storm tides. This article is being published on the 24th anniversary of the day when you could finally get back into the neighborhood and stay for a high tide.

Everyone with a brain had fled on the morning of the 30th, when waves were smashing the seawall 4 hours before high tide. Smart people run to get away from stuff like that.

Unless you're me, of course... then you run to Get To the besieged house so you can watch the storm.

A friend of mine and I watched this storm from the 2nd story of 65 ORN. I had to swim to get to my house. I had to wade through my house to get to an upper floor. We had ostensibly gone there to rescue a schnauzer, and decided that we wouldn't survive an escape attempt.

The episode of Beavis & Butthead where they go to the trailer park to watch a tornado hit is a good allegory. It even rivaled the damage ("A tornado can smash a poodle's face with a brick!" "Yeah, it can rip out your heart and show it to you!") the boys were seeking to witness.

The storm was as nasty as they tell you it was. The neighborhood was under about 6-10 feet of water, depending on the wave wash.. The ocean was level with the seawall, meaning that waves could just roll right into your house and smash it. My yard was level with the seawall, so waves would actually break on my house. I watched a few hours of it from inside my house, a few hours more from Cable Hill.

The waves were 8-10 feet high, which is funny because I have read a storm damage potential assessment for Duxbury Beach which said that waves can't get beyond 6 feet.

If they had YouTube back then and if I had a video camera, I'd be as YouTube famous as Jenna Marbles or the Epic Meal Time guys. We were right in the belly of the beast.

Leftovers From Our Foliage, Cranberry And Halloween Travels

I think that the people on the right turn before Edaville Railroad have had just about enough of TomTom's flaws.

The first article Jessica and I did together was us mistakenly thinking that Edaville was closed and abandoned, like the Lakeville Speedway or something.

A phone call from a detective proved that we were incorrect.

It all worked itself out. We were harmless. "Respectable citizens. Multiple felons, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous."

This fellow came up on me while I was shooting a pic of the cool barn he lives in. The barn made the article, but the horse had to wait for us to get to the Leftovers article.

We do a lot of trespassing, although we generally have no reason to trespass on the property of people whom the Ultimate Warrior referred to as "normals."

You kind of have to earn our presence on your property, and 99% of our small trespass violations involve us getting a pic of something that the homeowner was most likely showing off anyhow.

We're generally well-received, and we have a good sense of when Jessica should talk to the person and be sweet/nice, and when I should act crazy and try to crack them up... or, in some cases, scare them away.

We have developed an effective Mojo, and can generally move about now without any bother.

That's Green Harbor, in Marshfield.

I say that because there appears to be a Green Harbor Resort in West Yarmouth, as well.

I'm not sure if the Yarmouth one is named after a Green Harbor out there.

Either way, the Green Harbor in Marshfield is named after William Green, who opened a commercial fishing enterprise there in 1627.

Yarmouth, however is more likely better-known worldwide. A lot of tourists from a lot of different states have trampled through the Resort. Is it enough that more people associate the name "Green Harbor" with Yarmouth than with Marshfield?

I'd love to see a feud, but it probably won't go down that way. My vote is with Marsh Vegas.

Since we're trying to start fights, why not throw a good one up in the mix?

Is Wareham part of Cape Cod?

We'll let both sides speak.

No: Mainland side of the Canal, more thug-life than any Cape town (including Barnstable), and did I mention that they are on the wrong side of the Canal? Bourne's membership in the Cape Cod Club is sometimes questioned, and Wareham is west of Bourne.

Yes: They have that Gateway sign, they have a Cape League team, they have a sizable summer community, they bear the Cape's traffic and they market heavily to sell that Cape vibe.

Many years ago, Wareham was on the team. You got off the highway in Wareham, and crawled through the tourist traps and clam shacks to the Cape. Wareham, with miles of coast and lakefront space, claimed many tourist dollars on their own.

Duxbury and Marion have Summer People population, but they don't weigh as heavily on the affairs of the town as they do in Wareham... and Cape Cod.

I think that, prior to to the highway being extended to the bridge, Wareham was Cape Cod. Now, I'm not so sure.

We've still got some foliage runs left in us

I think that Cape Cod's foliage peaks in November, perhaps even mid-November in some places. We're driving out there either Thursday or Friday to see where the local color is.

We have a larger article coming up about a Foliage Project, but I need to talk to someone who owns a tree farm.

It'll be cool, trust me.

Ironically, the Kingston Water Department is in this building.

Shooting foliage on cloudy days is tough, but if the wind is calm, you can go All In on shooting houses reflecting in water.

Lemons, Lemonde, babe...

I really love the Monponsett Inn's swan benches, but they're bolted down.

Maybe I should make a Turkey Bench...

Good luck this month, Gobbler...

Turkeys that you see around here in December are usually cocky and uppity.

You would be too, if you'd just dodged the cemetery. It catches up to all of us eventually, however.

Leftover spooky graveyard pic... check.

I may have included it in the Halloween article series, I'm not sure.

Speaking of Halloween...

A friend (Jaime Bedford) posted this on FB, I stole it, and I plan to tell her about the publication of it ex post facto. She's a home slice, she should be OK.

This was a house on Duxbury Beach. This picture was taken the day after the Perfect Storm/Halloween Gale stopped beating up the neighborhood in 1991.

It is famous locally for a cool legend. The owner came down before the storm and had a glass of beer. He or she (not sure which Bedford it was, Jaime is a new Bedford) left that glass- unfinished- on the table you can barely see through the door.

Th storm lifted the house up and washed it back about a first down or so from where the photographer was standing. 10 foot storm waves battered it back and forth, hither and yon.

The glass did not spill.

For an added bonus story.... I was standing about where the men in that photo were standing when the Bedfords came down to see how their cottage fared in the Gale. Power and phone lines were down, so they may have not known exactly how bad it was, or even known that the house had been wrecked. Sh*t like that happened before the Internet, kids.

I was perfectly positioned to see their First Impressions. Their expressions were horror meets awe. Iraqis probably had the same look during the WMD War. My house was wrecked, too... I had the same look.

Let's end on a happier note.

Massive Eyesore Wind Farm Being Erected On Bourne Border

A cranberry bog owner wanted some more revenue, as being one of (or) the largest land owner in Buzzards Bay doesn't pay what it used to.

What to do?

Build four wind turbines on the Bourne edge of your Plymouth property!

Each turbine will stand 492 feet tall, just about the size of the Custom House Tower in Boston. They will be the largest structures south of Boston and east of Hartford. 19 states in the USA do not have a building as tall as these incoming monstrosities. Only 25 states have a building 10 stories higher than this proposed project.

In the 1954 version of Godzilla, Raymond Burr's reporter describes the monster as being "as tall as a thirty story building." Godzilla would need to stand on Bunker Breed's Hill to touch the top of this windmill.

Good luck, guys.

They will blight the landscape. Just look at the bloody things. They look like War Of The Worlds.

This will drive your property values down if you live within sight of these things, even before the eternal VUMP VUMP VUMP of the turbine blades spinning gets factored in.

There have been studies conducted that deny any health risks. This stands in contrast to 40+ health complaints from the far smaller Falmouth turbine. Noise estimates are optimistic, as a turbine in Kingston clocks in at twice as noisy as the studies predicted.

Once they're up, they won't be coming down... but if they do, they will rain debris all over several neighborhoods, and maybe even Route 25. They can also throw ice, and they are pretty much a bird shredder... a sad thing to drop on the Buzzards Bay border.

Here's a video of a turbine killing a buzzard, if you like your irony served heavy.

Future Generation Wind lawyers simply put their heads down and steamrolled through any local's complaints. A guy on Morning Mist Lane, who was holding the Falmouth Board Of Health reports in his hand, was told that he could stop the flicker effect by planting a tree.

Keith Mann presently lives near the property. That may not last, as the new income may allow him to move somewhere without a wind farm on the horizon. I notice that he is doing no cranberry farming at all so far this year, although cranberry farmers start late down on the Cape.

The farm will make about 1700 houses worth of electricity. It will be sold back to Eversource for credits, which Mann will sell to several schools and towns. Due to the fickle nature of wind, it's not going to shut down the oil/gas-fired plant down the road, it will just augment the electricity they're already making. It will not create 5 permanent jobs. It will just make rich people richer.

Bourne residents complained, but Ted Kennedy and the Koch Brothers were barely able to defeat a much more massive Cape Wind nightmare. No Kennedys or Koch Brothers live in Bourne, and Bill Keating (our only resident with any weight behind his voice) lives very far from this beast.

I live near this, so I'm sort of anti-farm right now. I may even be unreasonable. If you feel positively about this project and think I am being unfair, I'll happily give you a page of this website to state your views. Just let me know in the comments, leave an email addy.

The same goes if you are really pissed, and think that I'm lobbing softballs here.

I know Keith a bit, and he's a poor choice for a villain. He's actually a pretty good guy. Remember, this plant may save him from selling his less-profitable-every-year acres of land to some developer who would plant a ghetto there.

I just think the project, uhm, blows.

Plymouth, who signed off on this, could give a f*ck. They're losing that nuclear plant money, and will be begging for revenue soon enough. Mann could probably build one in the middle of Plimoth Plantation if he wished to do so.

Only an isolated Bournehurst village will have to stare at this, especially where Mann sited it right on the Bourne border. No one there wields any political power, either.

Bourne loves it, at least the Town of Bourne does. The parts for this monster will need to move through Bourne, and these cops sit there all day, waiting for one of the two daily allotted deliveries. 4 SUVs, 4 cops, and they close the road when the big pieces run through.

We'll do another piece when they start erecting it. We'll have to sneak by Bourne's Finest to get the pics, but we do what we gotta.

Stealing a quote from Patch, but NIMBY now means "Next It May Be You."

Massachusetts Town Names That No One Else Can Pronounce

Scituate

Sort of like "sit chew it," but not really.


Leicester

"Molester" without the first name of the slap-happy Stooge. Remember, the "r" is non-rhotic.


Billerica

Silent "e," and "rica" is pronounced like My Friend Flicka.


Gloucester

The people who make the Gorton's Of Gloucester commercials pronounce it wrong. It's actually sort of like "Gloss Stir"... if you pronounce that last R, that is.


Worcester

I was a security guard at the Worcester Centrum one year, and I saw Kenny Rogers botch this one. "Me and the boys travel across the land, but we always love it when we come back to War Chester." Someone up front shouted the proper word, causing Rogers to make a confused face and say, a bit more properly, something that sounds a bit like Rooster. The town is sometimes pronounced like the steak sauce, and vice-versa.


Somerville

The best way I can explain this without maxing out the syllable-syllable-syllable thing is to say that the Beach Boys or the Heat Miser should live here. Ironically, this is where Winter Hill is.


Leominster

Lemon-stir, quite possibly named so that people with a jar of water and some sugar would never forget how to make lemonade. Bree Sisson, the WBZ newsie from Jacksonville, always stumbles over this one. I forgive her.


Chicopee

Sort of like "chicory," but not really. This mostly just fools foreigners, but it fools them badly.

Sandwich

One thing that I discovered when I moved to Cape Cod is that about 20% of the people I know pronounce this as "Sammich." It goes up to 35% if the town name is dropped mid-sentence.


Tyngsborough

"Ting," not "Tying." Also, note the over-lettering of what should be "boro." Many towns, including Middleboro and Foxboro, refuse to use the ugh ending. No, none of these town names end in a way that rhymes with "cough."


Rehoboth

People who write dictionaries- who may just have one guy who specializes in the little ruh-hoe-buth parts of dictionaries- know how to tell you how to pronounce this. I can't do it, at least not in print.


Cataumet, Waqouit, Weqauquet, etc...

Cape Cod's town names are easy, but they make up for it by having impossible village names.


Woburn

The "o" is pronounced exactly like the "u" is pronounced in "tuba," because... well, f*ck you.


Haverhill

More "shave" than "have." A rare pronounced R sound in a Massachusetts town name.


Cotuit

"O" as "uh," then the last part of "Do it to it." Yes, the "o" is a "u" sound and the "u" is an "o" sound. We may one day be invaded by a foreign power, but they will not sneak up on us if they have to talk at all.


Fairhaven

You'd think that "fair" is in this word, but you'd be wrong. The "ir" was put in that word just to fool the British. The remainder of the prefix is pronounced like a longer way to run... provided that The Sound Of Music is set in Mission Hill.

Duxbury

Childe Stephen made a relatively quick leap from Dorchester to Quincy to Duxbury in the 1970s. Duxbury is about where, after Busing, the Boston accent runs into the more clipped Cape Cod accent. I spent 4th and 5th grade being removed from regular class for Speech Therapy, and all of it was me, over and over, having to say words like "farther" and "carnivore" as they exorcised my Southie accent like I was Regan MacNeil. As for pronouncing Duxbury, some people pronounce the end like Miss Sisson's first name, some say it sort of like "berry," and some say it sort of like the last part of Kitty Purry. The first part is like "Ducks," and not at all like Frank Dux from Bloodsport.


Tyringham

"Tier," not Tie."


Cochituate

Next....


Hyannis

More "Buy Ann this" than "Uranus."


Nahant

Just as confusing backwards as forwards.


Eastham

Looks easy enough. The end can be a deal-breaker. I threw this article up on the Eastham FB page, and there is some debate ongoing. 'Ham or 'Hum, choose your side wisely. It is tied very heavily into how one pronounces "Chatham." I'm an Upper Cape guy, this is Outer Cape stuff, and I can't be the one who makes the call.


Housatonic

Should be in Texas, and used as an adverb.


Wellesley

Also should be used as an adverb.


Mattapoisett

This isn't that hard to pronounce, but you have to stare at it for a second before you do so.

Quincy

Your favorite TV coroner pronounces his own name wrong, there's a Z in this.


Assinnippi

A little bit of Mississippi, in Norwell.


Assonet

Sounds like a crude name for pantyhose.


Cambridge

More "I came, I saw..." rather than Cam Neely's first name.


Padanaram

The nice part of Dartmouth, but it sounds like a level of Hell.


Truro

A rare Massachusetts word that pronounces both "r" sounds. It fools people who try to fake a Boston accent by dropping every "r." The actor who portrayed Cliff Clavin would have Jacksonian seizure if "Truro" came up mid-sentence on the teleprompter.


Amherst

No "H."


Acushnet

"A cushy net," minus the "y." The town seems to be named after a hammock.


Groton

Rhymes with "cotton," I think. I don't get there much.


Athol