I live in Buzzards Bay, I have a girl who works off Exit 3 in Plymouth, and I spend time hanging with some buddies who live in the White Cliffs. I end up driving down Long Pond Road in Plymouth a lot.
A nine foot Yeti in someone's yard is going to draw some attention. This is especially true once summer comes and the Yeti pours himself a gallon-of-booze cocktail and starts dressing like Hunter S. Thompson.
The journalist part of me wants to stop and knock on the door, ask the homeowner what made him/her put a Yeti in the yard and a dozen other related questions. The storyteller part of me has no intention of ever asking, because anyone who has written five thousand headlines in their career knows that, more often than not, the Question is better than the Answer.
Besides, media attention might make the Yeti owner become self-conscious. That would be a shame, because it could stifle creativity. Why mess up a part of my day that I enjoy?
Besides, stifled creativity would rob us of the chance to see what the Yeti owner might do next. You never know, he may put a toga on it and use it to let people know the current Olympics medals count
Wait, what?
Note that the Yard Yeti is in no way related to the Yard Ape, who is a jacked-up landscaper named Lappa that I used to work with.
I'm curious as to whether the Yard Yeti chooses a side in November's election.
"Cranberry County" is a sweeping term that we use to cover the South Shore, the South Coast, Cape Cod and the Islands. It's a relatively homogeneous area.
While great differences exist from town-to-town (and even from one section of a town to another), they are a degree of Great where the differences might not be so apparent if you aren't from the region.
While people from Duxbury may think of people from Marshfield as a lower species of talking ape, we all look alike to someone from Angola.
However, the differences are often extraordinary when examined by a local.
Some of the differences are socioeconomic, some are racial, some are urban/suburban, some are ageist (not sure if that's a word, but it is now) and some are so subtle that I'm not sure what they are and I am only writing about them because I am aware that some locals feel that differences exist.
We'll see what's up with these differences... this week, in Cranberry County Magazine!
Plymouth and the Pinehills
Plymouth is a huge town. It is the largest municipality in Massachusetts. It has more land area than Boston and Worcester combined, with Everett, Charlestown and Somerville thrown in.
A working understanding of Population Density can explain the population differences between Boston and Plymouth, and that means a lot here. Much of Plymouth is rural or even undeveloped.
It's not as bad Now as it was Then. Much of Southern Plymouth was forest until recently. There were parts of the forest that had higher Wampanoag population totals than White Guy totals. Population booms in towns just north of Plymouth in the 1970s showed that maybe the limits of "tolerable commute from Boston" had not been reached yet. Many developers noticed this.
Soon enough, you had some massive building projects going on down there in the hinterlands. The 12.4 kilometer land area of the Pinehills neighborhood is about the same size as Arlington, Massachusetts (population: 44,000). The Ponds Of Plymouth neighborhood is large enough that it redrew a Congressional district. Both of these areas were literally carved out of the forest.
The Pinehills have 3000 homes, many of which are Luxury homes. They pay $9.5 million in taxes, making them the second largest taxpayer in town after the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant ($9.7 million in 2011, the Pinehills may have passed them).... and the PNPP ain't in town for the long term, Jack. The Pinehills are the proverbial 9.5 million pound gorilla, and that influence will skyrocket soon enough.
The arrival of these heavyweights forever changed the landscape of Southern Plymouth. Formerly a ponds-driven resort community dotted with cottages and cabins (a Boston Globe article said that the Pinehills area was "only good for hunting" before development), the formerly uninhabited areas- consisting of sort of Cedarville, sort of West Wind Shores Shores, sort of Manomet, and really none of the above- bleed over into the Irish Riviera-influenced coastline.
The long-term, pre-Pinehills residents of the area seem pretty cool about the arrival of the luxury housing. The Pinehills are generally self-sufficient, and were dropped down where they aren't in anyone's way. Most recognize that people paying $10 million a year in taxes are worth whatever problems may arise with traffic, population density and water concerns.
The one form of resentment that I saw (and I went trolling for Pinehills hatred on several area-themed Facebook pages) involved the belief that the Pinehills live in their own little world. It is very self-contained, having their own shops, gas stations and even a fire station. Pinehills people have very little reason to mix in among the rabble, and everybody knows it. "It's like a town unto itself" was a prevailing sentiment.
It does make you wonder when the Pinehills people and the Ponds Of Plymouth people will realize that they are carrying a large % of the town's tax burden on their shoulders, and maybe strike out on their own? Annex Cedarville's White Cliffs neighborhood for beach access, swallow up some pond neighborhoods for future gentrification... and then secede. They could probably apply for admission to Cape Cod, if they keep the Median Household Income high enough.
Google Map that ish and tell me that I'm not on to something. Sounds like a good future article.
Duxbury and the Irish Riviera
Duxbury is a tony town of 15,000 souls, and the folks from other local towns call it "Deluxebury."
While the wealth is not ostentatious (if you drive through town expecting to find Versailles on every block, you'll be disappointed), everybody on the South Shore knows what's up. It even drifts out to the Cape. Radio talk-show host Ed Lambert from WXTK, who works in Hyannis and lives further out on the Cape, always says "Deluxebury" when referring to the Plymouth County town.
So, in posh Deluxebury, what's up with that sandy cottage village on the ocean side of the Powder Point Bridge? Why, it's none other than Duxbury's little slice of the Irish Riviera!
The Irish Riviera is a strip of often seasonal coastal housing built more along cottage standards than as a place where you might think about hanging a chandelier. It is a distinct cultural entity which runs mostly unchanged down the Massachusetts coast from Quincy to the edge of Cape Cod.
Access to Boston via Route 3 in the 1950s and especially the Boston Busing Crisis of the 1970s doubled the population of most South Shore towns. This made the Irish Riviera more of a year-round thing.
While Duxbury Beach is mostly uninhabited, what inhabitants there are stand firmly in the camp of the Irish Riviera. Heavily blue collar, overwhelmingly Catholic, generally seasonal and very, very Irish (my friends growing up there included Kerrigans, Branns, McDaniels, Deehans, McLaughlins, Duffys and several spellings of "Reed") the residents differ noticeably from the Pilgrim descendants roaming through Duxbury Proper.
I grew up on Duxbury Beach, and most of my classmates instantly recognized me as a non-native Duxburian. Many of them to this day think that I grew up in Marshfield, either literally or culturally.
The neighborhood is slowly being gentrified, as wealthier people buy up cottages and jam as much lumber as they can into the footprint of the original cottage. Property values soar, and the blue collar Irish Riviera crowd will be squeezed out of the neighborhood by whatever they call Yuppies these days. Many of my old neighbors (I migrated to the Cape a dozen years ago) tell me that it isn't the same neighborhood these days.
For now, however, the Irish Riviera still runs through Duxbury.
Note that Mosquito Village very nearly took the Duxbury section of this article, but I went for my old neighborhood as a sort of professional courtesy.
Brockton and the South Shore
Duxbury Beach is the story of an Irish-American, Boston-to-suburbia exodus. Brockton is an older tale, and it involves putting shoes on people.
Brockton was originally a part of Duxbury, but you wouldn't guess that now. They are completely unalike. It's a lot like the old George Carlin "baseball is pastoral, football is technological" routine. Duxbury is suburban, almost rural. Brockton is urban. Duxbury is very white. Brockton is very black. Duxbury has a small population over a large land area, while Brockton jams a lot of people into a small space. Duxbury is wealthy, Brockton is poor. Duxbury kids are pampered, Brockton kids are among the toughest in the world.
Duxbury is basically like every other town in Plymouth County.... Brockton, uhm, isn't.
How did that come to be?
Brockton's position on the Salisbury Plain River allowed it to operate mills, and these mills expanded steadily throughout the early Industrial era. While the Carvers and Marshfields of the area were primarily farming communities with sparse peopling, Brockton's burgeoning industries (by the time of the Civil War, they were America's leading manufacturer of shoes) produced a high-density, urban entity.
The differences soon became apparent. Wareham is a good-sized Plymouth County town, home to 22,000 people in 2010. Brockton had that reached that population in 1875. By 2010, Brockton (93,000 peope or so) made up about 20% of Plymouth County's nearly half million residents... jammed into 2% of the land area.
As you may have guessed, very few of those people are white millionaires who prefer to live in a triple-decker with two Dominican families. The median income in Brockton is about $21K, well below the Plymouth County's $35K. 14% of Brockton residents are below the poverty line, as opposed to 4-6% in Plymouth County... which, I hate to add, includes the Brockton numbers as 20% of the total.
Brockton kids are as tough as it gets. Two of Brockton's residents have ruled very competitive and prestigious boxing weight classes in the last 50 years or so, no mean feat for a city that is just 1 of the 25,375 cities, towns and incorporated places in the US. If your town's "notable residents" has "Marvin Hagler" listed, and he isn't the immediate undisputed answer for the "toughest guy who ever walked these streets" argument... you live in a pretty tough town, my friend.
This is funny, because if you went to Central Casting and asked for a typical Plymouth County resident, you'd probably get some butter-soft Cohasset trust fund WASP.
Brockton provides almost all of Plymouth County's street credibility, sporting a robust 43.1 black majority. Plymouth County's 7-8% blackness is almost entirely based in Brockton. Duxbury, holding down the other side of the see-saw, is .6% black. Duxbury does rank above Brockton in "drive-by shootings of a prominent rapper."
The Wedge and Hyannis Port
Following the Rich Man, Poor Man theme, let's carve up a region where the Kennedy Compound and a very busy Salvation Army center are 5000 feet apart.
"The Wedge" is a part of Hyannis that has a higher poverty/crime rate than her surrounding neighborhoods. It is the area south of Route 28 around where the Cape Cod Mall is. It forms a sort of Triangle, which draws unfortunate comparisons to the ones in Bermuda and Bridgewater.
It hosts a goodly portion of Cape Cod's poor, and some of them are lacking Camelot levels of cash flow. There is also a lively drug trade at work in the region, and you can get your hat handed to you if you mess with the wrong group of people.
It's not Roxbury. You could put on a shirt made of money and walk through the toughest part of the Wedge yelling threats at midnight, and your chances of survival would be a healthy 46%. It would be about .46% if you did it in certain parts of Dorchester, and it would only get that high because a good portion of Americans believe that the gods speak through the mentally ill.
The Wedge (aka "Captain's Quarters) is not as bad as this article makes it out to be, an article where the author urges Zero Tolerance/Shock And Awe tactics on a neighborhood about the size of a mall, but you have to view things in their proper context.
Not that far down the road, you have a Summer White House, perhaps the most well-known one ever. It's where Jackie O and JFK got in the yacht and had those "How many butlers and maids should we hire this summer" conversations that you and I don't have.
I doubt that, when Jackie O was deciding which one of her hats to wear, she ever said "Oh dear, I'd better not go with blue, it could be mistaken for Crip affiliation five blocks over. Someone might blow my husband's head off."
Note that we almost went with Onset Waterfront/Shangri-La for a Wareham tangent, but the article is getting lengthy. Both towns battle over the "Brockton-by-the-sea" nickname, with "Sea Lowell" and "she's like a baby Lynn" also in the mix in SE Massachusetts conversations about the 'Ham. I personally know a guy in Wareham who has performed more murders in his travels than the entire town of Duxbury has suffered for as far back as my admittedly-shoddy memory goes.
Chatham and Harwich
Here's one of those comparisons that makes no sense to an out-of-towner. I live on Cape Cod, too... albeit the Upper Cape. I consider this to be close to a family-style dispute that anyone with a brain stays out of. So, into the dispute we go...
The differences between these two towns are piddling, if that's the right word. Chatham has a $45K median income, while Harwich is at 41K. That's like, uhm, $80 a week or so, no? Chatham and Harwich are 95-96% white. They are both tourist-dependent, like a junkie and the smack. If you say something stupid at a tavern about fishing or driving a boat or lobstering in either town, there will be no shortage of people willing to correct you.
I list them here because I recall there being some acrimony when they regionalized the schools and created Monomoy High School. I voted for Charwich (which would have given restaurants in both towns the opportunity to create a hyper-local sandwich), but I'm not a resident.
I think that the beef was over how to fund the high school. Harwich is just about twice as large as Chatham, and the financial split may have been less than fair originally.
There may also be questions about the rate of development and the changing face of the Outer Cape. In 1960, Chatham had 3273 residents, and Harwich had 3747 residents. Harwich then almost tripled their population by 1990, while Chatham barely doubled theirs. I should add that these differences vanish quickly when Chatham's summer population skyrockets to 30K and Harwich moves past 40K. Then, they just all hate summer people.
There is an element of two twins fighting over which one is prettier here, but I think that I may have overestimated the acrimony that exists between the two towns. If I missed some point of contention, hit me up in the comments.
Gurnet/Saquish and the Post-Industrial Era
Whatever problems Brockton may have, somebody at least was decent enough to run a power line through town. You don't need an off-road vehicle to get around. A really big wave doesn't cut it off from the rest of the word.
Residents of Gurnet Point and Saquish Head have those problems. The cool part? They like it that way.
Way out on the end of Duxbury Beach (it's actually Plymouth, but that would only confuse you if you were looking for it on a map), there are two tiny villages.
They have no electricity out there, and survive on firewood, propane, solar and wind energy. It is as Cottage as any beach gets around here, or pretty much anywhere.
Many who see it up close think that it may just be the greatest place ever, myself included. If you take away the Jeeps, it's basically 1850 until you look in the cottages and see laptops, portable radios and newspapers writing about a black US President, space shuttles and so forth.
They're aware of the modern world, so it's not like that M. Night Shyamalan (?) village movie out there. It'd never work... not enough trees. They could see modern stuff, including a nuclear reactor, just across the bay in Plymouth proper. You could maybe pull it off with a bunch of fog machines, but a good wind might spoil the ruse.
Dennis-Yarmouth/Yarmouth-Dennis
They're here at the end because I have always admired how they worked out the naming thing. Chatham and Harwich have Monomoy to fall back on when circumstance forces them to team up. D-Y found another way.
Simply put... the high school is known as Dennis-Yarmouth, and the baseball team in the Cape League is known as Yarmouth-Dennis. D-Y is in effect for more months of the year, but Y-D is in effect when the population is at the highest point.
Everything balances, and everyone goes home happy.
Speaking of which, I'm out of towns. Let me know who we forgot!
Thanks to Heidi Woodmansee Sullivan, Kerri Yankovicth-Smith (Marine Mom!), Scott Rodrigues and the Duxbury Beach Resident's Association for help with the pics.
Granted, there's a Presidential campaign going on and we're fighting ISIL in the Middle East, but there are other important things that we have to discuss today.
Somewhere in your town, there is a Skill Crane. If your town doesn't have one, the place that you go shopping does. They're ubiquitous.
A skill crane (aka Claw Crane, Giant Claw and Big Grab) looks simple and innocuous, but it is actually steeped in history and has been the subject of some legal debate.
During the construction of the Panama Canal, the public became fascinated with pictures of steam shovels used to dig the vast trench. For a nation that was 45 years removed from having slaves, Irish or coolies doing that sort of work, a steam shovel was a pretty neat thing. This was pre-Internet, kids.
Soon, this fascination inspired some brilliant human to make machines that featured a big claw dropping into a vat of candy and getting a sweet for the person who dropped a coin in it. Someone else threw in a few flashing lights, some bells, some whistles....Voila! The modern Skill Crane was born.
Known as an Erie Crane, a Panama Claw and the Iron Claw (this was pre-Von Erichs, and the Iron Claw crane may have inspired VE patriarch Fritz when naming his family's signature finishing move), the skill crane started working itself into any place with tourists. A version known as the you'd-better-pronounce-that-carefully "Miami Digger" began to appear at carnivals, and soon became the most popular kind of claw crane.
The machines stayed popular through the years. The NFL even took the step of loading machines with little team footballs, just to get the free advertising among a vulnerable demographic.
Skill Cranes then went to that next level in the 1980s, following right on the heels of the arcade video game craze. They had a prominent presence among Pizza Hut restaurants. By the 1990s, they were in K-Marts, Wal-Marts and perhaps every arcade operating.
Skill cranes tend to be stuffed with plush toys/stuffed animals these days, rather than the shelf life-having candy prizes. There are many varieties of both cranes and prizes. Most have a joystick with a drop button, and you have a 30 second timer.
You most likely know this already, unless you're like Amish or something. I can still learn you up, though... I am a skill crane expert. I won the 1986 Maine Crane championships, scooping a Higgs boson particle in the finals to defeat the former champ, Elmer "Glue" Carew.
There are several things that I can tell you to both help you win, and to help you win with honor.
1) If there are children waiting to play, let them go first. It's a kids game, remember... and besides, the little suckers might loosen up some toys for you to win afterwards. Kids have more of a toy-level view of the game, and sometimes miss things that a taller player will notice instantly.
2) If the machine plays some annoying song and is in any setting other than an arcade... don't bother the patrons and staff.
3) Skill matters very little, as you have no way of knowing what tension you need to apply to pry loose a prize. Some attorneys have advised claw machine companies to not use the word Skill when naming their machines, as it could present future legal trouble. Regulations vary from state to state, with many states treating the crane as a form of gambling. Cranes are illegal in Canada unless you A) win every time, or B) get multiple turns for your money.
4) While there is more prestige in snagging a high-profile stuffed animal like Scooby Doo and so forth, they are generally harder to get. A few Scoobies can offset a lot of lesser-known or generic stuffed animals as far as Presentation goes, and the guy stuffing the crane doesn't want to give up high profile characters without a fight. He is also motivated by the fact that a Batman toy costs more than a generic toy.
5) If the character that you're after has feet, make sure you can see them. Otherwise, even if you get the Kung Fu Panda by the head, his feet will pull him back in when they hit another plush toy.
6) While it's tempting to try to grab Alf by the head, it's better to get one hook under his throat and one under his arm. This may tip Alf, making him easier to grab in the event of you needing a second crack at him.
7) Never go for items near the glass. It prevents tipping, which is as important as grabbing in Crane work. For the same reason, never go for items right near the chute that winning prizes are dropped down. You don't want to be fighting any sort of barrier when contesting ownership of Wolverine.
8) Never be afraid to give the machine a little bump before you play. It may loosen up some items, and it may even knock one into the chute if you do it right. Just don't do it after you put your money in, it may have a TILT failsafe seen in pinball machines.
9) Several brands of crane have joysticks that can only be moved towards you once, and to a side once. Avoid these, unless the prizes are irresistible. As you should know by now, the Man plays dirty.
10) If you win the prize and you're an adult, it should play out like catching a foul ball at Fenway... hold up the prize, get some adulation, and then toss it over to the nearest kid. I just yesterday gave up Tom Cat from Tom & Jerry to a sweet-looking little girl at Papa Gino's in Wareham, where I was abusing that Skill Crane like Joan Collins.
It may seem summery now, but some people are already preparing for the school year.
Plymouth Public Schools and the Independence Mall Kingston Collection are doing what they can to get school gear for needy children. They are doing so via a clever program that both gathers supplies and shows off some new technology.
A new propane-powered bus will be parked in the Kingston Collection with the windows open. Anyone interested in donating supplies can just toss those supplies through the open bus windows.
You want to keep your donations to a certain size. While I'm sure that many teachers would love a new desk, I cant see you getting one through those little school bus windows. I also wouldn't toss anything glassy in there, at least until donations pick up and the bus floor acquires a little padding.
Whatever goods are gotten will go to the Superintendent, who will split them up Even Steven among the different schools in town.
We threw a bag of something in there. I'm not sure what it was, as the division of labor in my family is firmly defined. Jessica handles the shopping part, I handle the tossing-bags-into-school-bus-windows part.
OK, it's a misleading headline, and I did it on purpose.
Sometimes we headline-generating types try to assume the viewpoint of the common man who doesn't have a job which requires that he think about sharks for long periods of time. It's easier and more practical than having me try to write from the viewpoint of an actual expert who studied Marine Biology and has hours in the field. It also sets up a straw man for me to knock down.
This is important, because my last paying work as a writer where I wasn't my own boss was as a "Fantasy Football Consultant." You'll notice that, when the shark ate up that kid in Jaws, nobody was clamoring for Chief Brody to call in the Fantasy Football Consultant. Keep that in mind as I flesh out my theories for you.
Sharks are not "all over the South Shore," and it's not a case of them just being around "these days." Only the question mark at the end of the headline saves it from being an outright Lie.
Sharks pre-date humans in Massachusetts. The Wampanoags- who, whatever their faults may have been when dealing with the English, were much more environmentally reasonable than the Palefaces- never really developed Swimming as a mass hobby. There may have been several reasons for that, but a top contender would be "the English hadn't fished Cape Cod Bay to exhaustion yet, and the larger fish stocks drew in both seals and their toothy predators."
Swimming didn't even catch on with Mr. White until a few hundred years ago, and it wasn't feasible to travel from inland to the beaches until the Industrial Revolution brought about trains and so forth. It wasn't long after the English pushed inland from the coast that a majority of people in America bore young who lived and died without even once thinking about a shark. Until the release of Jaws in the 1970s, the only sea-villains in entertainment were Pirates, Leviathans, U-Boats and the mighty White Whale.
Coastal people tended to work the seas, and sharks were just by-catch to them. While they undoubtedly saw and perhaps even feared sharks, it was only something to worry about if the ship sank or if the Captain made you walk the plank. Remember, most of the time that man has taken to the seas was well before radios, distress calls and search planes. If your ship sank, you died, and you didn't make it back to shore to tell everyone how sharks ate the rest of the crew.
Sharks were in Cape Cod Bay long before 2010. If I remember to put it in, you can see a pic of the big Great White that was caught a few miles off of Duxbury in the 1930s. Two of the three fatal shark attacks in Massachusetts history happened off Scituate and in Boston Harbor. They went down in the 1800s and 1700s, respectively.
In between then and now, a few strange things happened. The waters off of Massachusetts, which were the first ones to be overfished by Europeans, had their fish stocks drop to very low levels. This was felt up the food chain, through the seals and right to Great White Sharks.
Cape Cod had a bounty on seals for a while, and this drove their numbers down markedly. Low seal totals meant that sharks brought their game elsewhere.
This happened as many areas of formerly isolated Massachusetts coastline were brought under development. It also coincided with the emergence of Beaching as the go-to summer activity. People began to develop formerly empty sections of Duxbury, Plymouth and what have you.
Fish stocks were plummeting, and reached all-time lows by the 1990s. The government intervened, catch limits and keeper sizes went into effect for both commercial and recreational fishermen, and fish gradually started coming back to our waters. This brought back the seals, who began showing up in notable numbers on Cape Cod around the turn of the century.
That's generally a good thing, nature-wise. However, it only took a few years for the sharks to figure out where the seals went, and they began arriving off the shores of Cape Cod in numbers that couldn't helped but be noticed.
It didn't take long for the sharks and seals to grow in number to where Suburbanization became necessary. You could see a seal sunning himself on Duxbury Beach in the 1970s, but it was an unusual thing. It became much less unusual after the century turned.
Likewise, only so many sharks can cruise a particular area. Monomoy, the primary seal and shark hangout, soon spread her apex predator bounty to Orleans, Wellfleet and Truro. Unlike Monomoy, these are towns with people going to the beach. Truro, not Monomoy, caught the first two shark attacks of the modern era.
We know by shark tagging that the Great Whites summer here, and then head to Dixie for the winter.... regular snowbirds, they are. They sort of follow the Gulf Stream back up here every summer. To a shark moving north along the US coast, Cape Cod is going to be sort of a roadbock. The seals keep them hanging around once they get here. Competition moves them up along the Cape.
Once they hit Provincetown, they have a decision to make. North equals open sea, East equals open sea and West equals the lovely curved shoreline of Cape Cod Bay. For a fish that primarily eats shore-hugging seals, there's really no debate.
Seals and then sharks have rounded the corner and are now occupying Cape Cod Bay. It's ironic, because one of the selling points of South Shore beaches is "no Cape traffic."
It's more of a trickle than a flood, which makes a lie of the "all over the South Shore" part of the headline. You can learn a lot by judging the results found when sharks are tagged. Monomoy, which is sort of the seals' capitol city, had 14000 shark detection buoy pingings last summer. Duxbury and Plymouth combined for about 200.
Granted, Dr. Gregory Skomal (the shark-tagging guy) focuses his efforts out on Monomoy. I don't think he has ever been tagging in Cape Cod Bay. The South Shore does have shark buoys, however, and these buoys show that sharks are coming from Cape Cod to the beaches of the South Shore. Plymouth was the site of the last shark attack in Massachusetts.
Two bad factors ("bad" for people on the South Shore who are afraid of sharks) kick in at this point.
1) There is nothing to stop the sharks and seals from populating Cape Cod Bay
and
2) It's actually a pretty cool place for seals (and the sharks who eat them) to hang out.
Other than carnivore whales and larger Great Whites, the list of creatures willing to f*ck with a Great White Shark is a small one. Not many of these creatures (Orcas and the like) end up in Cape Cod Bay. The only regular inhabitant of Cape Cod Bay who could kill them is a human. They have a free hand in this town, as the former Sheriff of Lago once said.
The South Shore also has long stretches of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited beach. Duxbury Beach is mostly uninhabited. Plymouth has a lot of coastal housing perched on towering sand cliffs, making it hard for those residents to just trot down to the beach. Seals can come ashore on either spot without much concern over human interaction... I mean, it's tough to sun yourself properly when people keep trying to get you to bounce a ball on your nose, yaknowwhati'msayin'?
Both species could easily get to likin' it here... and there's no reason for them to leave.
The South Shore is populated by people who aren't used to sharks being off of their coasts. I am no superhero type at all, but as a child of the 1970s on Duxbury Beach, I would have saw no threat at all in jumping off of a boat where people had been fishing with big bloody mackerel chunks all day and swimming 100 yards to shore. Even in my 30s, I'd have guessed that Smoking would be the one thing that would kill me over a long swim from a boat to shore.
That is no longer the case. If you view summer as 100 days, like Cape Cod does, Plymouth and Duxbury's numbers show that there was a shark off of each beach every day of last summer... and those were only the ones they got tags into off Monomoy. Perhaps only Poseidon, God and Aquaman know how many Great White Sharks are actually in Cape Cod Bay.
While the threat of a shark attack is still minor if not minuscule, the threat is much greater than it was 40 years ago. The risk is little... but little things mean a lot in a game where the loser is Devoured.
Massachusetts has been in quite a drought, and we have a rain deficit of several inches. That's not going to be a problem today, as soaking rains are set to enter the region.
From the National Weather Service:
BARNSTABLE (and PLYMOUTH) COUNTY:
...FLASH FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT THROUGH THIS EVENING...
THE FLASH FLOOD WATCH CONTINUES FOR
* PORTIONS OF SOUTHEASTERN MASSACHUSETTS AND RHODE ISLAND... INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING AREAS...IN SOUTHEASTERN MASSACHUSETTS...BARNSTABLE MA...DUKES MA...EASTERN PLYMOUTH MA...NANTUCKET MA...NORTHERN BRISTOL MA...SOUTHERN BRISTOL MA...SOUTHERN PLYMOUTH MA AND WESTERN PLYMOUTH MA. IN RHODE ISLAND...BLOCK ISLAND RI...BRISTOL RI...EASTERN KENT RI... NEWPORT RI...NORTHWEST PROVIDENCE RI...SOUTHEAST PROVIDENCE RI...WASHINGTON RI AND WESTERN KENT RI.
* THROUGH THIS EVENING
* RAIN MAY BE HEAVY AT TIMES IN RHODE ISLAND AND SOUTHEAST MASSACHUSETTS. RAINFALL TOTALS OF 1 TO 2 INCHES ARE FORECAST...WITH 2 TO 4 INCH AMOUNTS POSSIBLE IN LOCALLY HEAVY DOWNPOURS. LOCATIONS NEAR THE SOUTH COAST...CAPE COD AND THE ISLANDS ARE MOST LIKELY TO RECEIVE THE HIGHEST RAINFALL TOTALS.
* SIGNIFICANT URBAN FLOODING IS POSSIBLE INCLUDING ROADS AND UNDERPASSES THAT ARE PRONE TO FLOODING IN HEAVY RAIN. SOME SMALL STREAMS MAY ALSO RISE OUT OF THEIR BANKS.
PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...
A FLASH FLOOD WATCH MEANS THAT CONDITIONS MAY DEVELOP THAT LEAD TO RAPID AND LIFE THREATENING FLOODING. BE PREPARED. IF YOU LIVE OR WORK IN AN AREA PRONE TO FLOODING...KNOW A SAFE PLACE TO GO IF FLOODING OCCURS OR IF A FLASH FLOOD WARNING IS ISSUED.
DRIVERS SHOULD PLAN TO AVOID FLOODED ROADS AND HAVE AN ALTERNATE ROUTE AVAILABLE.
STAY TUNED TO LATER FORECASTS AND BE PREPARED TO TAKE ACTION SHOULD FLASH FLOOD WARNINGS BE ISSUED
The rain should start this morning, and clear off the Cape by the afternoon. We're looking at anywhere between a half inch and 4 inches of rain. Tropical rainstorms (not a tropical storm) are fickle girls, and you never know where the bounty will be until it falls. This won't erase our rain deficit. In heavy rains, much of the rain is lost to runoff, once the ground becomes saturated. Your lawns, flowers and vegetables are already doing their happy dance. The person paying $3000 a week to rent a Cape cottage? Maybe not so much. Here's the radar shot from 6:45 AM Friday.
