Friday, November 20, 2015

The Pilgrim Curse: Expanding The Bridgewater Triangle

Are We Living In America's Epicenter Of Evil?

The first Thanksgiving was a positive experience. People from different cultures got together for a celebration. No one killed each other, and English/Wampanoag relations never looked better.

One group of diners were the locals, the people who had roamed Plimoth for thousands of years.The others were the newcomers, who chose to share their first good harvest with the people who helped them survive their first winter. Gods were thanked, bread was broken, and a good time was had by all.

Massasoit Ousamequin was the Man at that dinner. Someone else hosted, but only Massasoit's will kept the first Thanksgiving from being the Plimoth Massacre and maybe Roanoke II. Massasoit not only spared the vulnerable Pilgrims, but he helped them survive their first Starving Time.

Stuff then, as tends to be the case over the years with relations between two groups of people, happened.

55 years after this first Thanksgiving, Massasoit's son returned to Plimoth. He didn't come in peace... he came in pieces. His head went up on a stake for 20 years, and the Plimoth children may have even played soccer with it now and then.

In between these two visits to Plimoth by Wampanoag sachems, a whole bunch of mess went down. That, in itself, is a story for the ages. But the drama went on long after the end of King Phillip's War.

I'm not the man to tell you that Jesus God is better than Wampanoag God. I can't tell you if the Gods favored one side more than the other. All I can tell you is that, ever since the deal went down, the whole region has been a little bit strange. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

It's a long story, with a lot of proof to be given. The short version is that the land we walk on today might be cursed. We'll get back to the curse in a minute, but let's go through some of the results of this curse first.

This story owes a huge debt to a man named Loren Coleman. Mr. Coleman is a folklorist, a television personality, an author and the owner of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

He is also the guy who invented the Bridgewater Triangle. This theory claims that there is heightened paranormal activity in a wedge-shaped area running roughly between Abington, Rehoboth and Freetown.

It's a take-off on the Bermuda Triangle story, but very different in character.

This area has been host to UFO sightings, Bigfoot encounters, reports of giant snakes, travelers mystified by orbs of light, children brought to tears by spotting birds that could carry them off, parents on the watch for evil clowns and scores of other spooky situations.

This terrifying Triangle lays in a dismal, sparsely populated region of Eastern Massachusetts. It is almost entirely rural in nature, based in the Hockomock ("where the spirits dwell") Swamp.

Even in a state with very high population density, people are few and far between in the Bridgewater Triangle.  If you aren't from the Bridgewater Triangle, you don't go into the Bridgewater Triangle.

This is even more true after the sun sets...

Not to differ with the guy who invented the theory and did all of my research for me already, but I think that Loren Coleman made a crucial mistake when he decided on the parameters of his Triangle. Sportswriters shouldn't disagree with guys who own cryptozoological museums on cryptozoological matters unless they feel that they have unbeatable proof, and, well, here I am.

Loren's error came when he drew the borders. He didn't think Big.

New England itself is a strange place. It's as old as anything in the country, and much older than most of it. We had ghost stories that were over 200 years old before anyone even thought about founding Seattle. Dogtown, Massachusetts was founded, lived in, abandoned and haunted before we got around to adding Texas or Michigan to the flag stars.

We have several sorts of spooky. We have the sea monsters and shipwrecks covered, we have the haunted woods thing down, and you don't want to go near our mountains.

Coleman's version of the Triangle covers several towns. It should cover several states.

I say this simply because the stuff outside of the Triangle is worse than the stuff in the Triangle. Once you even start looking over the respective Players, you realize that the current Bridgewater Triangle is actually a safe area that you'd want to seek refuge in once you started tallying up the Spookiness that exists just outside of her borders.

The Bridgwater Triangle's main weakness is that it isn't really known for anything distinct. The biggest name you see on her roster is Bigfoot, who belongs spiritually to a whole other coast. The Triangle isn't really even the scary epicenter of Massachusetts, a title that goes- in a rout- to Salem.

Perhaps the Triangle rules on a per capita basis, as it runs through the sparsely populated backwaters of Plymouth and Bristol Counties. However, even someone bringing straight disrespeck couldn't argue that the Triangle wouldn't hold her own as a part of a larger spooky region.

Let's redefine that region so that the scary parts are actually included in the scary part.


Taking the Triangle to the Southwest immediately solves the Celebrity problem, and I mean taking it ten miles Southwest. That brings us into Fall River, and we all know who the First Lady of Fall River is.

Even if you want to disqualify Lizzie Borden for being non-paranormal, her house still stands today, and people say it's haunted. She's also just the top dog in a crowded pound.

Fall River, and her sister city New Bedford, have the worst crime rates in Massachusetts. New Bedford and her hinterlands had a never-captured serial killer, as well as the tavern that the Jodie Foster movie was about. America's first Giant Monster story began in New Bedford. Fall River, not to be outdone, had a Satanic cult to keep up the evil after Lizzie Borden died.

Fall River would make a nice corner of an expanded Triangle, and you could make a fierce argument to keep the Triangle in Massachusetts, but that would leave out Rhode Island.

Rhodey represents hard. She's a little state, but she has two very spooky incidents in her past.

One of these is ultra-paranormal. In 1892 (yes, 1892), the farm regions of southern Rhode Island succumbed to vampire fever. The Brown family suffered a series of consumption (tuberculosis) deaths, with one of the victims reporting having been visited by her deceased sister Mercy during the night.

Mercy and her sisters were dug up, and- lo and behold- Mercy Brown didn't look that bad. Her nails and teeth seemed to have grown, and was that blood in her mouth? The locals didn't quite process that bodies can be preserved in cold, that nails and teeth will appear to grow as skin decays, and so forth.

Mercy got the full vampire treatment. Her heart was removed, torched on a rock that is still there today (Exeter, RI), and the ashes were fed to her ailing brother, who soon after died of consumption.

Remember, this was about 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials, about 10 years before the Wright Brothers got a plane in the air and less than 20 years before Ronald Reagan was born.

If vampires don't spill enough blood for your liking, Rhodey was also the host for several crucial sections of King Phillip's War, the bloodiest per person war in US history.

The Great Swamp Fight went down in South Kingstown, R.I. in December of 1675. The colonial militia were led to a five acre fort where the Narragansett tribe was based. Attacking across a frozen swamp, they caught the Narragansett tribe slipping, and they burned the fort to the ground.

Women, children and elderly were slaughtered, and the warriors- the only ones to escape the carnage- were forced to fall in with Metacom. Everyone else perished or was sold into slavery, and the battleground is said to be haunted.

AKA "the Great Swamp Massacre," it pretty much finished off the Narragansett as a force in New England. The tribe never gave up their identity, and gained federal recognition in 1983. If they get a casino, they may yet enjoy the last laugh.

Of course, the thesis of the article is that they got the last laugh via a curse, but we'll get to that. We first have a Triangle to redesign.

Rhode Island deserves the corner office, because, if a curse was uttered, it was most likely uttered in Rhode Island.

It may even have been uttered by Metacom, the eponymous King Phillip of the colonial war fame. He met his maker in a Mount Hope marsh known as Misery Swamp. He was drawn and quartered, and his head was displayed on a pike outside Plimoth for 20 years.

Things like state lines mean little to nearly-wiped-out Wampanoags, who would view them as just another lie the Other Man was telling. They also mean little to the Gods, who might be the ones who truly dole out the curses. There is no record of Metacom uttering a curse, but they also didn't have Twitter back then.

While giving Rhodey the corner office, I'd stretch the Triangle out past them into the sea.

The pointy part of our Triangle (I spent most of my last Geometry class staring at legs, and retained little technical vocabulary) would then hook East, towards Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Block Island Sound, Nantucket Sound and Cape Cod have a nautical history, and a nautical history generally includes lots of spooky stuff like ghost ships, buried treasure, false-light mooncussers, town-smashing storms, Nessie-looking sea monsters, bloodthirsty pirates and all-hands-lost shipwrecks.

Cape Cod sort of rules the roost, however. The white man's history here starts with what may have been a grave robbing, and it went downhill afterwards.

While paying respect to the Whydah shipwreck, the numerous British raids, the ship graveyard just offshore, Suicide Alley, the scores of ghosts/haunted houses, Captain Ahab, two leap-to-your-death bridges (ironically, the suicide launching pads that are the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges were both Great Depression projects), the hurricanes/nor'easters/blizzards and the Great White Shark population... the creepiest thing about Cape Cod would involve their most charismatic residents.

Cape Cod's most famous family is only here during the summer, and almost-but-not-all of their spooky stuff happened in places like Dallas and Los Angeles. However, their presence in Hyannis Port, much like the presence of Lizzie Borden in Fall River or Mercy Brown in Rhode Island, pretty much forces Cape Cod into any reasonable discussion of Massachusetts' stranger regions.

The Kennedy family are awash in murder, bootlegging, conspiracy theories and crashing various vehicles into various bodies of water. The family is widely believed to be cursed.

Check the list:

- JFK's murder is still America's greatest conspiracy theory

- RFK's murder is when you first started thinking "Curse."

- Old Man Kennedy was a sort of bootlegger, with ties to the mob.

- An older Kennedy (Joe II, maybe?) was killed in WWII.

- A wild Kennedy daughter was lobotomized and dumped in an institution.

- Ted drove his Presidential hopes off a Martha's Vineyard bridge.

- JFK Jr. and his perfect wife crashed a plane off of Martha's Vineyard.

The only curses that could rival the Kennedy Curse (which may be just a wealthy neighborhood part of the Pilgrim Curse) are the Tecumseh curse, the Von Erich curse, the Billy Goat curse, the Scottish Play curse and the former Curse Of The Bambino.


Cape Cod can also match the Triangle in Stones. The Triangle boasts Dighton Rock, Anawan Rock, and even the Devil's Footprint. They say that Plymouth also has a rock of some reputation.

The town of Bourne has two. One, pictured above, is Sacrifice Rock, aka Chamber Rock. This is where, according to legend, God used lightning to intervene in a pagan sacrifice, splitting the rock in the process.

The other famous rock in Bourne is the Bourne Stone, which has some unidentifiable scribbling on it. It may be Viking, it may be Wampanoag, it may have been a colonial goofing around and it may even be from a guy named Hanno The Navigator. At least one historian thinks that it says "A Proclamation. Of Annexation. Do Not Deface. By This, Hanno Takes Possession."

If that is what it really says, it means that an African (Hanno was from Carthage, and is also the guy who gave gorillas their English name... no mean feat for a guy who predates England) discovered America about 2000 years before Columbus found it, and about 500 years before Jesus drew breath. This interpretation is wildly contested, however.

It is funny to note that a stone which would basically tear the first few chapters out of any American History textbook is barely mentioned when discussing all of the other oddities in the area. It's also funny that the Bourne Stone isn't the most famous Rock in the area, or even the most famous carved-upon rock.

Bourne also has a haunted hotel, the Quality Inn (former Best Western), just off the Bourne Bridge.

At this point, we'd turn another corner on our Triangle and head NW... probably just in time, too.

Where you make the turn is up to some debate. It basically boils down to how much Ship Graveyard you want in the Triangle. I suppose that you could set it out where the Titanic sank if you wanted to, although a run of beach from Wellfleet to Truro alone has seen over a thousand shipwrecks. That should be enough for most folks.

A lot of our folklore is nautical, and this corner of the Triangle would be chock full of benthic beasties. As you round Cape Cod and head north through the sea, you'll encounter reports of sea serpents in Duxbury and Gloucester. The witness in the Duxbury case was no less than Daniel Webster. Hull also has a strong sea serpent history. Henry Hudson claimed to have seen a mermaid in our Triangle's area in 1609. Nantucket had a Globster. Truro had a Beast.

With Massachusetts being more of a nor'easter state than a hurricane state, the South Shore is where you get the more frequent storm damage. Generally, every winter has at least one bad storm, and you get a homewrecker every 20 years or so.... or every other year or so, if that global warming stuff is true.

As we come back onto the mainland after leaving Cape Cod, we get into Plymouth. Plymouth has a major role in this story, and we'll bring them back into the mix at the end.

The South Shore has no shortage of creepy history. A lot of the interior is in the Coleman version of the Triangle, and it would serve you better to let others discuss it. I always favored Kristen Good's work.

Offhand, I'd mention hauntings at the Phillips Mansion in Marshfield, the Sun Tavern in Duxbury, Cemetery Hill in Plymouth, Gurnet Light, the Jerusalem Road child statue in Cohasset, Hanover Town Hotel, Bear Cove Park in Hingham, the Marsh People of Wareham, Fort Warren and the Lady In Black from Hull, vanishing women (sometimes blue) strolling the shores of Onset, Duxbury and Sagamore Beaches, a second Sacrifice Rock in Plymouth near the Pine Hills, the USS Salem in Quincy, the First Cliff ghost ship off Scituate, and the Man In Black of Weymouth.

I would make sure that the revised Triangle avoids Boston, while perhaps cutting the edge close enough to include the Boston Harbor islands. Boston is sort of her own Triangle. I also purposefully avoid Providence.


It is important to touch land twice more. For starters, if your paranormal Triangle doesn't include Salem, your paranormal Triangle is whick-whick-whack. Moving it inland to Danvers gives us a better abandoned hospital than the one (in Hanson) in the picture above.

Salem has witches, witch trials, voodoo, hangings, mass hysteria, insanity, curses, and the Devil himself at times. No respectable Triangle could skip Gallows Hill.

To be honest, and I am guilty of it myself... any Massachusetts paranormal triangle that isn't named after and centered on Salem is sort of like putting Fredo in charge of the Corleone family.

Gloucester would also be an important player in the mix. Not only do they have a history of having their sons swallowed up by the sea, but they also have the strongest claim on a sea monster in New England (and perhaps American) history.

A run from Mattapoisett around Cape Cod and up to Boston would also give you all of Massachusetts' fatal (and, minus Nahant, non-fatal) shark attacks.

Salem, Danvers, Dogtown, Arkham and Gloucester could quite easily secede and form their own Triangle, but we'll keep them in this one as the Anchorman.

I apologize for the awful Triangle. Longtime readers may draw a connection between my inability to draw straight lines and the reason why Jessica takes all of the good pictures.

I run the Triangle up to Portland for a few reasons. For starters, a nice wide turn around Cape Cod covers most of the ship graveyard. Some of the worse ones were way offshore. You probably don't want to stretch it to the Lusitania wreck, but the wreck of the Portland (of Portland Gale fame) off of Gloucester might be a good spot for a border.

Running it up to Portland sort of Xs out New Hampshire, but that's the way the granite crumbles. They sort of lost their spot when the Old Man In The Mountains fell. New Hampshire does have some creepy stuff, but it my be under the thumb of the nearby Bennington Triangle. If I brought NH into it, I'd go with wherever the Hill family got "abducted."

We also sort of cut off western/central Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and New York. This is costly, as it costs us Sleepy Hollow, the Amityville Horror, the house from A Haunting In Connecticut, a lot of King Phillip's War battleground, and the Dover Demon... who "most likely" wandered over from the nearby Bridgewater Triangle anyhow.


Maine is important for celebrity-type reasons. New England, and especially coastal New England, has a sea-lion's share of he horror market down. Movies, books, TV shows... to tie it to a running thesis in this article, we over-represent.

I have no intention of doing a Google search for this, because I'm pretty sure that I can come off the top of my head with a pretty good triangle list.

- Moby Dick starts in New Bedford and moves to Nantucket. Every guy with authority on the Pequod was from the expanded Triangle, and I think Ishmael was, too.

- I need to read me some more Lovecraft, but I'm pretty sure that his mythos has a coastal region around Salem.

- Hawthorne had a few spooky stories set in Salem, another reason Salem sort of carries the title belt here.

- I think the guy on The X Files was from Nantucket or Martha.

- The inclusion of Maine is, uhm, mainly done to include two very important people. One would be Stephen King, who is in enough people's nightmares to force the issue. His stomping ground is Maine. I think he may live in Lewiston, but he likes his privacy, and Portland is easier to use. I do think that Salem's Lot was set in the Falmouth/Cumberland area, so Portland is close enough.

Besides....


If I feel the need to alter some better researcher's Triangle, you sort of have to tip your hat to the man.

Why not end this expanded Triangle to the business of the Triangle Man himself, Loren Coleman? Draw that final corner of this Triangle right through the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

This gives us a Triangle with points in Portland, the waters off Rhode Island and the open ocean off Cape Cod. It has elements of Coleman's inland, rural Triangle, while also adding elements from the more well-known Bermuda Triangle.

It is a large section of country, maybe a bit less than 10% of the New England land mass, with X amount of open ocean.

No other area really matches it. New York, as we mentioned, has a Sleepy Hollow/Amityville Horror mix, and NYC is always frightening. The Jersey Devil lives nearby, as does the Montauk Monster. Maryland holds her own with the Blair Witch and Edgar Allen Poe, but she sort of wears out when New England starts stacking more chips on the table.

Godzilla, King Kong, Rodan, the Cloverfield monster and every asteroid movie ever has attacked NYC. Hollywood shames Stephen King and Lovecraft. Cascadia has Bigfoot, and Vermont has Champ.

Still, my Triangle beats 'em, It might be on a per capita basis, like King Phillip's War, but it wins.

Speaking of which....

It's not fair to put the blame for casting the curse on the Wampanoags.

They were living in relative harmony before the Other Man arrived. I'm pretty sure that the Vikings killed a bunch of natives, and some of the first Euros to check out New England may have kidnapped some locals (this is how Squanto and Samoset learned their English). These explorers also coughed a bunch of European germs onto the locals, who- due to geographic isolation- had no natural resistance. This is why the perfectly useful port of Plimoth was empty when the English arrived.

The Wampanoags fared worse from the exchange than the English did, which makes it unlikely that they were the ones casting the Curse. The Wampanoag plague, which did the most damage to either side, went down probably 20 years before Metacom was even born. That sort of eliminates him from Curser status.

The plague also eliminates the Pilgrims- who arrived after a series of illnesses wiped out 90% of the local population- from contention, but "The Pilgrim Curse" just sounds cool, to be quite frank.

If you take the Vikings out of the equation, you can pretty much trace the source of the Curse- cast by either a tribal dissident opposed to the very first meeting of European and Native American, or by the Gods themselves- to some encounter between explorers/fishermen and the Wampanoags. Gosnold, Smith, Champlain and Hudson all worked the area, and they were followed by the more ballsy of the European fishermen.

Just for laughs, let's set the date to 1605, which is when Squanto, or Tisquantum, was kidnapped by Captain Weymouth. Weymouth, I might add, was an early and miserably failed colonial town that was briefly abandoned.

"Tisquantum" is a Wampanoag word for "divine rage." It was most likely not his real name. When he introduced himself to the English as Tisquantum, he was essentially a kidnapping victim saying "Englishmen, I am the wrath of God."

The English stabbed his people in the back anyhow. Perhaps Squanto, who had been exposed to European culture numerous (he sailed across the Atlantic six times with very superstitious sailors) times and may have had knowledge of curses, tried one out. Perhaps curses can work retroactively. Perhaps the gods saw it coming, and launched a pre-emptive strike on both sides.

The region has been strange ever since. Not many regions are stranger.

Fear the sunset in Cranberry County....


Friday, November 13, 2015

Body Of Missing Malden Teen Washes Up On The Gurnet

Gurnet Head is in the background of this picture, and that stuff in the foreground isn't a body...

A body was discovered on a remote Plymouth Beach yesterday, and it has been identified as a Malden teenager who had gone missing from Quincy in October.

A man loading his truck with rocks discovered the body, which was in a deep state of decay. The man initially thought he had found a mannequin, but that did not prove to be the case.

Josue D. Quispe-Almendro was last seen by his brother in October. A Nissan Pathfinder linked to him was found on Moon Island Road, in the Squantum section of Quincy. A somewhat cryptic Facebook post and a bit of the new friends/coming home late routine added intrigue to the mystery.

A massive land/sea/air search failed to locate the child, who was reported missing on October 18th.

Authorities are mum as to how and in what condition Josue entered the water. They can not yet determine if foul play was involved.

Saquish Head and Gurnet Point are remote headlands at the end of the Duxbury Beach peninsula. They jut out into Cape Cod Bay quite some distance, and this isn't the first time that bodies have washed up there.

Two men missing/presumed dead in the 1982 World Airways Flight 30 crash at Logan Airport were reportedly hauled up- still belted into their seats- by  fisherman off of Saquish a few months after the crash. He lost control of the bodies, and they were never recovered.

Josue's body was taken to the Office Of The Chief Medical Examiner, who will perform an autopsy.

A body floating aound and washing up out there may be proof that the Great White Shark population which Duxbury had in the summer has gone South.



Monday, November 9, 2015

Nor'easter Coming This Wednesday


...WIND ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 1 AM TO 4 PM EST WEDNESDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN TAUNTON HAS ISSUED A WIND
ADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 1 AM TO 4 PM EST WEDNESDAY.

* LOCATIONS...INCLUDE CAPE ANN...THE PLYMOUTH COUNTY SHORELINE...
CAPE COD...AND NANTUCKET.

* WINDS...NORTHEAST 20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS UP TO 50 MPH.

* TIMING...1 AM TO 4 PM WEDNESDAY.

* IMPACTS...STRONG WIND GUSTS WILL DOWN SMALL TREE LIMBS AND
BRANCHES...POSSIBLY CAUSING ISOLATED POWER OUTAGES. DRIVING MAY
BECOME DIFFICULT...ESPECIALLY IN HIGH PROFILE VEHICLES.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WIND ADVISORY IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS ARE FORECAST TO BE
31 TO 39 MPH OR GUSTS WILL RANGE BETWEEN 46 AND 57 MPH. WINDS
THIS STRONG ARE CAPABLE OF DOWNING SMALL TREE LIMBS AND
BRANCHES...POSSIBLY CAUSING ISOLATED POWER OUTAGES. DRIVING CAN
ALSO BE DIFFICULT...ESPECIALLY FOR HIGH PROFILE VEHICLES.


Ten foot tides on Wednesday morning, new moon heights.

Plymouth tide chart

Duxbury Tide Chart

Marshfield (Brant Rock) tide chart

Scituate tide chart

Cape Cod Canal (Sandwich end) tide chart

Barnstable tide chart

Provincetown tide chart

Chatham tide chart

Wellfleet tide chart


The Cape Cod Canal Foliage Project

Quint wasn't talking about Cape Cod when he laid down the facts in Jaws, but he may as well have been. We are a summer community, and we need summer dollars, or we'll be on the welfare all winter... something to that effect.

However, money grows green in all seasons. Why not make some Autumn money? Does money really grow on trees?

Autumn money is sort of up our alley. We're the Thanksgiving ground zero for America. We have quaint little cranberry bogs scattered all about. As long as you don't go swimming, those beaches are fine on a warm autumn day, even in November.

We also have foliage. Now, when you think of foliage, you think of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and even the Berkshires. You don't really think Cape Cod.

Middleboro certainly doesn't think so, and they planted this tree to prove it to you.

That's a shame, because we're the last region of New England to experience peak foliage. Maine trees are bare when we're just getting to the height of our season. Cape Cod, if you look at a foliage map, peaks right around when a Kentucky-Alabama swath is peaking, and those states don't do foliage like New England does.

We should be better known for it. Everyone who saw the beautiful foliage shots from New Hampshire on the news, and who then said "We should drive out in the country and see some foliage," but who then procrastinated... those people should be looking at Cape Cod as a Last Resort.

People aren't stupid, so there must be good reasons as to why we don't get Vermont's autumnal swagger. For starters, we lack the forest cover that northern New England has. We also have the wrong sort of trees.

That second problem can be fixed.

Trees drop acorns and so forth, and those can be harvested. Plant them in the ground, and they'll grow a version of the tree that they fell from. Come autumn, those trees will put off the same color that their parents did.

It's so simple, it pretty much takes care of itself.

I called a few tree farms, and the big difference a tree would see in Massachusetts as opposed to New Hampshire is that they would go into seasonal color changes later. Trees that turn in early October in Falmouth, Maine would have to wait until November in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Let that fact roll around in your head a bit as we figure out how to make money off of this.

Cape Cod is a series of tourist towns, and the weakest link in the chain is Bourne.

Bourne is very nice when compared to Fitchburg or Holyoke, but it's in last place as far as Cape Cod tourism goes. Bourne has nice people living there and has a lot to offer, but we have Bay where everyone else has Ocean, so we sort of lag behind the other Cape towns when it comes to tourism.

There's not much we can do about the Bay, but the Cape Cod Canal is another animal entirely.

The Cape Cod Canal is an ocean river, The canal is 7 miles long, and it is framed on each side by a wonderful bike path. These paths are framed by a thick row of trees.

These trees tend to be pine, Pine is lovely, but it doesn't do much during Autumn beyond dropping pine needles into that gap between your windshield and the car hood. There's nothing wrong with pine, but no one is driving out from New York City to look at it.

So, we have several problems: a weak sister of a Cape Cod town, a poor foliage reputation, a short tourist season and a boring pine Canal.

If we could somehow wipe that slate clean, even if it takes a few generations, we could maybe get this town back on a payin' basis.

That's why we should do whatever it takes to plant ten thousand acorns along the Cape Cod Canal. Not just any acorns, either. We should take acorns from trees that produce spectacular foliage.

I won't make it to the mountain top with you, but once those acorns become trees, we'll have the premier foliage display in Massachusetts and perhaps New England.

It's all there for the taking.

New Hampshire and Vermont have it easy. They didn't plant those trees, and they only still have those trees because not enough people want to move to Vermont to warrant clearing space. They don't deserve that foliage.

Bourne, on the other hand, would aggressively select their trees. We'd be Mother Nature on steroids, ruthlessly saying which tree will grow where. With the tree huggers appeased by the planting of ten thousand trees. we'd be free to play God yet again with the Cape Cod Canal area.

If the right people (and I'm not one of them, I become useless as anything other than a laborer after the Idea Stage) are running this, we could have a ridiculous run of foliage down each side of an underutilized Canal.

Planned by experts, planted in rows fronting the Canal and dropping acorns of their own each year, the Canal Forest would both own and pwn the rest of New England as a foliage destination.

Bourne would then have some nice assets to work with.

We'd have a sweet location, maybe 25% of the drive someone might have to take to get to the Maine foliage. We'd have foliage that would kick in during the run-up to Thanksgiving, which also draws tourists into the region. We'd have hotels, gas stations and all that other stuff that leeches money out of tourists.

Most importantly, we'd have our ridiculous multi-colored Canal. The canal has plenty of parking, would feature easy access, boasts of long-but-not-too-long walks and would look like New Hampshire would look if it were planned.

You could probably sell boat tours of this new foliage run, with the added bonus of three bridges and one power plant. I think they already have Canal foliage boat tours, but this would become a larger venture if our Canal looks like the Mohawk Trail wishes it looked.

 This would merge nicely with our present Tourist Season.

The majority of the tourists leave after Labor Day.

The old people are smart enough to do Cape tourism after Labor Day, and they help push the season into October.

A foliage explosion in the Canal would push that season into maybe mid-November (you can still see foliage driving around Cape Cod today)...

... where it would merge with the Pilgrim/Wampanoag/Thanksgiving connection, which we should also figure out an angle from which we could extract profit from exploiting it.

We just need the ten thousand acorns.

How to get those ten thousand acorns is the question we need to solve. I have no intention of standing up at a town meeting with this idea, as I'm not tree-savvy enough to answer the questions that citizens would rightfully ask if something that smells like Tax is spoken of.

I have no idea how much ten thousand trees would cost. I'll try to find out before we publish, as I tend to work during the Witching Hour. Hopefully, this section between the pictures will be bigger tomorrow.

UPDATE: I bothered a few people, including Stephen Davis and Chuck Teravainen.

Maple saplings go $20-30 or so, live 100 years, grow 6-12 inches a year, and need about 20-25 yards of space. Wisteria is $20, and Dogwood goes $15. Aspen is $18-29. Water and fertilizer would be needed for the first few years.

These prices are awesome if you have a big yard and plan to hold onto the house. If you have a 7 mile Canal to fill 2 sides of at $15-30 every 20 yards, that adds up to... like...uhm... carry the two..... a lot of money.

It's not too hard to grow trees from acorns. It's much cheaper. We can get the kids to do the labor for nada.

One reason that I'm not worried about town meetings and how much trees or acorns cost is that I have no intention of buying acorns.

I was never in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts myself, but I always thought of Scouting as an admirable pursuit. I assume that they spend a lot of their time in the woods, doing woodsy things.

I'd challenge the little SOBs. Give the world an eco-friendly, cash-grabbing project that shows off the beauty of nature, and help along a struggling resort town in the process.

I don't know how many Scouts there are on Cape Cod, but if a hundred of them could be trained to identify acorns from the proper foliage trees, would it merit a few bus trips worth of cash to send them up into the Enemy States to each steal one hundred of their acorns?

One trip to New Hampshire for supplies, another to Bourne for planting. Train the DPW people well enough that they don't cut down saplings. I'm not above using specially-trained prison labor, but residents may disagree.

If the Scouts won't do it, each Cape Cod high school should be coerced into sending their kids up to gather acorns.

Yes, every school or Scout troop on Cape Cod. I sit through a lot of traffic so that Orleans and Yarmouth Port can get their tourists, and we want some payback in the form of acorns. Before those brats get their diplomas, they pay the Gatekeeper fifty acorns.

Some of that cash will bleed into their towns too, as people who walk the Foliage Canal might decide to trek down 6A, or maybe watch the sharks kill the seals in Chatham. Its win/win, unless you're a seal.

Someone should be coordinating this effort. It's a tough sell, because we won't see the payoff in our lifetimes, but the kids will. When those trees sprout, we'll be in business.

For the bother of gathering and planting a few acorns, we'll be the most easily accessible foliage spot for what I'd gather is a large % of the leaf-peeping population.

Would you rather drive 6 hours into the Vermont wilderness and amble down endless East Bufu roads looking for bursts of foliage, or would you rather blast down to Bourne in an hour and take a leisurely stroll through what would essentially be a bursting-with-color foliage theme park set by an ocean river?

Bourne, who lost their end o' summer cash cow when the Scallop Festival skipped town, would slowly evolve into the Autumn anchorman of Cape Cod.

New Hampshire won't know what hit them.


Sunday, November 8, 2015

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!