Happy Thanksgiving From Cranberry County Magazine

Crossin' my supper dish!

Up until tomorrow (AFTER dinner time), turkeys will be very nervous. By Friday, they will be downright uppity.

Photographers, even bad ones, operate like apex predators do when stalking herds. Isolate one away from the pack and get him when you can.

You vegetarians out there might enjoy yesterday's article about cranberries. We may do a second version of that, we have a veritable pile of cranberry bog pics.

S'up?

If the water used to flood the bog was instead vodka, this would actually be a pretty good Cape Codder drink for Godzilla.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

The Trillion Cran March

You know that a publication named Cranberry County Magazine is going to bombard you with burgundy as Thanksgiving nears. Our photographers were all over eastern Massachusetts, seeing who had the goods. 

We focused heavily on Plymouth, Carver and Wareham. You could also draw a triangle running from Duxbury to Freetown to Yarmouth Port, and assume that we stumbled through every bog in it.

Cranberry County University mathematicians estimate that our photographers captured 1,000,000,000,000 cranberries on film. That's a trillion, babe....

Even a rotten photographer like Stephen can do OK if he works with acres of berries directly in front of him where he can't miss them.

The urge to push him in from behind while he was taking this shot was almost overwhelming.

I totally want to wade two strippers into that and have them wrestle for three rounds while drunks throw money at them.

Let's roll through the cranberry harvest process. First, you get a cranberry bog.

Then you flood it, and hire this dude to roll through it with his cranberry-loosening tractor which probably has some technical name that I'm unaware of.

Once he's done, you have acres of floating berries.

Enter the workers...

Cool man, rotten shot...

Sorry for the blurry, but this is the tube which sucks up all the berries that the Cape Verdean guys pulled into a pile.

I think this is where the water goes after the berries are sorted out of it, or it's where they're getting the water. I don't know this farm stuff that well, I was raised in f*cking Dorchester until it was too late to make a farm boy out of me.

The cranberries then get pumped up into a big truck, where they get sent off to Ocean Spray.

The big truck in question.... you would need a corresponding truck full of sugar to create a 15000 sq foot serving of cranberry sauce.

Sometimes, the truck spills some cranberries, people run over them, and you get roads that look like this. This is in Carver... and, no, it's not the Cranberry Highway. That's in the 'Ham.

Cranberry Jones got his nickname at Yale, where he spent his freshman year eating nothing but cranberry products in an attempt to turn his skin burgundy. It didn't work, he had the runs for 7 months and he's now our organized crime contact.

We've got the boys working hard, and we'll be back over the weekend with some more shots.

First Snow!

Some snow moved into our region from the west last night. I got nada in Bourne, but my friend Jenny D's Bees got these pics for us from Kingston.

Hardly a blizzard, but there is more coming. Mostly flurries, but even flurries are fun at the start of winter.....

... unless there are 40 mph winds, and you're doing this today. I plan to use that firewood, trust me.

Duxbury Beach, November King Tide

Stephen and Jessica got stuck at work yesterday, but have no fear... Duggan was here! By sheer fate, he happened to be just where I was supposed to be for the high tide. Or, since I was working for a church, maybe it wasn't fate....

Yesterday was a Supermoon King Tide, as you can see on this here chart. That's Boston, but same diff, player. The moon was as close to the Earth as it has been since the 1940s, and that made for huge tides.

Why I hire photographers.... here's me shooting the Supermoon.

Fortunately for coastal residents, the wind hadn't kicked in by the time (11 AM) that the tide was high. This meant "no surf," and took the specter of serious coastal flood damage off of the table. When the wind did perk up, it was between tides.

It never hurts to check the Bluefish River during King Tides. It's a shame that the kids were in school (and that it's November), because this was a prime Jumping Off The Bluefish River Bridge tide. I bet that somebody blew off school in 1943 to jump off that bridge during the last King Tide. A kid wouldn't waste a sick day on a bridge jump these days, what with the Internet and Drugs and Girls and Netflix and all.

I'm not joking when I say that I'd trade my Bourne cottage for this boathouse like thisquick.

If they never invented golf courses and peope just golfed through town (which is how I taught a generation of my students to play bocce in Charlestown, much to the amusement of the old guys who hung around the Navy Yard on sunny days), this would make a tremendous 18th hole..... OK, it would make a tremendous 18th hole if a tavern was within walking distance.

No weathered wood was spared in this shot. That's a mighty long dock, most likely a relic of Duxburys shipbuilding era. There is about 10% of me that imagines that it was built by a fisherman to be just 10-20 feet out of his wife's shouting-out-the-window range. 

It's unusual for the tide to get this close to the road in Duxbury. That's why they put the road there.

Thanks to Debbie D, we get this 3 shot panorama of Bradford Lake in Duxbury. Oh wait, that's not Bradford Lake, it's Bradford's Parking Lot. It;s normally a meadow, until the tide water in the marsh rises above the level of the road between it and Bradford's. If you're considering the purchase of that large house on the left, know that this is what the meadow fills up like without a storm

And So It Begins... Christmas Decorations Before Veterans Day

Anyone else have that family in the neighborhood who have the Christmas decorations up already?

Plymouth may win the title this year, as this Bourne Road house had the gear in effect well before Veterans Day.

Sorry, it doesn't count if the Christmas-lovin' family in your neighborhood leaves the decorations up all year. I want the guy who said "Halloween was a week ago... where's my faux diamond flying reindeer?"

My guess is that the homeowner has to stake those decorations into the ground, and that it becomes difficult closer to the holiday when the ground is frozen.

I'm not making fun of this guy, and actually admire his intensity, Christmas spirit and "I'll do the job now, while it is easier" Swamp Yankee pragmatism.  We all know that Christmas is a commercial racket, run by a big Eastern syndicate... so it's nice to see some true Love.

If someone in your town has this house beaten, let us know in the comments.

Supermoon King Tide Brings Coastal Flooding Concerns

by Tristan Umeda, owner of Family Pet & Supply.

We are witnessing a unique lunar event, as the moon is getting as close to us as it has been since the 1940s. You no doubt saw her in the sky last night, and perhaps will see it tonight. They call it a Perigree Moon, and it is the opposite of an Apogee (furthest distance) Moon.

The original inhabitants of the area called it a Beaver Moon, and the weather man calls it a Supermoon. We're in a run of them, having had one in October, and awaiting the one in December. This, however, is what Fred G. Sanford would call "the Big One."

The moon exerts influence on many things. Aboriginals, as we saw, use the moons to know when to check the beaver traps for fur. Werewolves and Witches favor the full moon. Smugglers hate the full moon, with the Outer Cape term "mooncusser" stemming from this professional dislike.

Coastal Residents also are wary of Supermoons. Supermoons produce King Tides, also known locally as Flood Tides.  Flood Tides are the kind of tides where the road or the basement flood without the usual nor'easter storm catalyst.

Well, at least we won't have a storm to worry about, right? Wait... what?

A storm will move up the East Coast at us Tuesday, and this will get that Supermoon/King Tide amped up even more. This won't be a crusher of a storm, with winds more along the 15-30 MPH range than the 35-74 MPH range. Those winds will be sufficient to work up some surf, and the wves will arrive at the worst possible astrological time or astronomical time or whichever one doesn't mean your horoscope.

This isn't a storm that will tear your house down and beat you with it, but it may flood the road or give you a brand new indoor basement pool.

Brant Rock is looking at a 12 foot high tide at 11:13 AM Tuesday. zthe Sandwich end of the Cape Cod Canal gets an 11.3 foot high tide. Scituate gets an 11.8 foot high tide. Barnstable Harbor gets a 12.5 foot tide. Plymouth Harbor gets a 12.8 foot tide. Duxbury Harbor gets a 13 foot tide. Check your high tide here.

We'll be at Duxbury Beach tomorrow to see what's what. We were at Plymouth for high tide today, as you see below. We'll be back with an update tomorrow.

I stole Tristan's pic because this is what my skillz do to a Supermoon, below:

Mutant Three Claw Lobster Taken In Maine

Look at the set on this Bad Larry that was fished out of the sea off of Maine yesterday....

The lucky boat was the FV What's Next out of Stonington, Maine. Captain Eric Ray owns the boat, and the pics are from former Duxbury Beach resident (and FV What's Next's sternwoman) Michelle Fowler-Eaton.

He sold on the docks, $4.05/lb

November South Coast Fall Foliage

November is pushing it as far as leaf-peeping goes on the South Coast of Masschusetts. You can only really do it if you haven't had a nor'easter to tear the leaf cover down. Most everything is turning brown by now, but foliage works in strange ways, and differences in sun exposure can set trees in the same area off at different times. We'll seek out the good stuff for you.

We'd like to welcome our new shutterbug, Joeyna. She was all over Marion and Rochester for us, at about the same time that I myself was out rolling South Coast Style. Between us, we got enough shots for a decent article. Mine (Stephen) are the blurrier ones. Joeyna, as you can see, has an affinity for shady lanes.

If you see a car stopped in the middle of the road aiming  camera up into the trees, you may have just crossed paths with a Cranberry County Magazine photographer. We walk among you, although we sometimes take the SUV.

If you ever see me in the comments being snarky to someone, understand that Cranberry County Magazine's main office is about three of those farm stand structures put together, and CCM doesn't have those cool orange trees. Never take me seriously, I don't.

I like to think that trees are sentient, and that they view Leaf Drop the same way that a stand-up comic utilizes the Mic Drop. "Hope that you enjoyed the show, people. Come back, same time next year." (leaf drop)

Since I have brain-lock for this pretty cool shot, I'll drop some links to remind you that we have done leaf-peeping articles on mid-October South Shore, late-October South Shore, late October South Coast, early November Cape Cod, an odd plea to line the Cape Cod Canal with fall foliage color trees, and- now, right here- early November South Coast. We may take one more crack at the Cape, it depends on how effectively I will be able to celebrate the passing of the Ballot Question 4 thingy.

A lot of people consider Buzzards Bay to either be the end of the pre-Cape South Coast, or the Cape's mainland buffer zone. It's the South Coast today, because we have a few shots of the Bourne Bridge, shot from the Trowbridge Tavern deck, aiming towards Buzzards Bay. At least one of the CCM camera clickers started their trip from the Trow, and perhaps both.

Motherf***ers be hatin' on the shutterbugs, putting up stone walls and ADT between us and the pretty trees. If you need a barometer to measure the intelligence of the CCM staff by, know that Abdullah thinks that ADT is what the hyper kid in the high school claass has, while Stacey (who is French, and may somehow hear things with that same zuh zuh zuh accent she speaks with) thinks that it's the drug that they give you when you get the AIDS. Either way, dude shoulda let us in his yard to shoot his trees.

Dammmmmmmn..... stuffed at the goal line! It'd be cool of we jacked this guy's gate, went down his driveway, and- instead of a mansion- there was some shabby single-wide trailer home.  Some people throw all their money into the house, other throw it all into the driveway.

My crappy camera in poor light, fired off of the Trowbridge Tavern deck. This is why most of my shots are close-ups, and why I hire the Joeynas of the world.

I need to work on my Level Horizon photography technique, but it's hard to level the camera and steer the car and twist the Game Green and watch out for kids and stuff like that. Also, this guy might, like, uhm, live on a hill or something.

Joeyna is newer to street photography than I am, and doesn't yet know that people just love it when obscure regional website photographers pull the car up onto their lawn so as to cut the power lines out of their Big Yellowsh Tree picture... or she's considerably smarter than me, and is therefore much less likely to get rocked in the lip by some justifiably angry homeowner.

We apologize to this gentleman for not getting to his house before the Leaf Drop, because it looks like he has a pretty cool Fall Foliage setup happening in his yard. We got you marked, player, and we'll be back next October. Bet your bottom dollar.

This is J at work. I went further inland than she did, making it to Halifax and Taunton and New Beddy during my loop. This was a Saturday drive assignment for me, and I was listening to WUMD's 9AM-2PM reggae show on 89.3 FM. The strength of WUMD's broadcast signal sort of guided my vehicle.

I love red trees, even when they grow in yards that are on a brutally sloped hill. You know how it is out in the sticks, dog.

A) Nice farmer's porch, and B) whoever has the upstairs bedroom must be on at least a nodding acquaintance basis with whatever squirrels and birds use that tree. It must be like the old Stephen Wright bit... "Hey, Tweety, how ya doin? I'm just having breakfast... want some eggs? Ooops, my bad."

It's like following the yellow brick road, just upside down.

Either the trip ended back up at the Trowbridge Tavern, or we're throwing a bone to the better photographers reading this article who looked at the first Bourne Bridge shot and said something along the lines of "Zoom in less with that shoddy camera, Stephen!"