We'll be dropping a few ideas onto those Internets over the next few days, all designed to improve our region. We have already done some culinary discussion, and it is now time for some frivolous Suburban Planning.
Today, we'll be looking at the Cape Cod Canal.
The CCC is 7 miles of coastal river, man-made to save everyone the bother of sailing around the ship graveyard that is Cape Cod and the Islands. It runs from Sandwich to Bourne, and connects Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay. It is home to a power plant, a Maritime Academy, several parks, and several visitor centers. It is straddled by hotels, gas stations, and coffee houses. All of Cape Cod's main roads run over it. Very important, our little Canal is.
It pays for itself by shortening the trips our goods have to make between Boston and the rest of the eastern USA, but it can and should be improved. Improvements cost money, so any ideas we have had better make money or lure in tourists.
Otherwise, there is no reason to mess with a perfectly good canal region. The only reason to risk messing with the gift horse is if we can make it bleed dollars. There is almost never anything wrong with maximizing a natural resource, and it would be a shame to leave money laying on the table in this rotten economy.
Let's see what's on the old drawing board, shall we?
Light Up The Bridges
I got this idea out of the blue when I was thinking of questions for an interview we did with Cape Cod Commission CEO Wendy Northcross back at the old rag. She said it was a good idea, which is notable because she told me when my ideas were bad ones.
Think of Boston, in the Big Dig era. What was the aesthetic highlight of the whole thing? Lots of people would tell you that it is the Zakim Bridge and her cool blue lighting. It sort of defines the night skyline in Boston as much as the Prudential and the Hancock rule the daytime horizon.
Why can't we get us some of that here on Cabo Coddo? Shoot, we have not one, not two, but THREE bridges, and we may get a 4th if they decide to expand the Sagamore. We have a lot to work with.
From what I remember reading about the Zakim, making it that blue color wasn't that difficult or expensive. You get a few lights (maybe solar powered?) , put some color filters over them, and aim them up into the upper bridge. It;s basically how Commissioner Gordon summons Batman when he needs him, but we'll just use color and skip the logo.
What colors should we use? Mr. Zakim sort of owns blue, so we'd just be riding jock if we chose blue. It's tempting to go for a tricolor with the current trio of bridges, but a 4th bridge would render it obsolete. This prevents us from going full Uncle Sam and having it be red/white/blue, and it prevents us from going full Malcom X and getting a red/black/green bridge or set of bridges.
Likewise, our three (Bourne, Sagamore, and the railroad) bridges prevent us from doing two part color schemes, so no Boston Celtics green/white or Coca-Cola red/white.
I'm not above accepting corporate sponsorship. If someone like Pepsi were willing to pay big moolah, I'd have no problem with a Pepsi-colored bridge. Likewise, I'd color a bridge for the right cause. Think of all the breast cancer awareness we'd raise if we had a pink bridge. Why not a yellow ribbonish bridge to honor the troops, or even a camo bridge?
Lighting up a bridge won't make us any money directly, but it will become an iconic landmark for Cape Cod. It will impress the tourists, and please the locals. That sort of pays for itself after a while.
Crikey.... I'm looking at the Bourne Bridge right now (12:10 AM). It's a line of dull streetlights, and one red light on the top so planes won't crash into the bridge. It sucks. Who wouldn't rather have a bit of a light show there?
Someone should be working on that, pronto.
Import Cooler Foliage
This might not be possible, and I may actually call the Sandwich Tree Farm guy if I haven't published by morning. If it can be done, we could do it on the cheap if we are willing to wait a generation for the payoff.
Doing what on the cheap? Why, stealing New Hampshire's foliage, of course. Why would we do that? To line the Cape Cod Canal with it, silly.
Fall foliage is big business, and many people consider it to be the only reason to go to upstate New Hampshire. Why shouldn't Cape Cod get a taste of that action? Two reasons... our late foliage season and our wealth of evergreen, non-foliage-making pine trees. We can't do anything about October or autumn windstorms, but we can take steps to balance out the tree populations.
Trees that we need here are beech, birch, baldcypress, red sugar maple, aspen, witchhazel, gingko, smokebush, dogwood, persimmon, sycamore and hickory. No, I don't know which ones will work here, but someone does, and that man/woman can be our leader.
You'd need an army of trucks to haul sapling trees down to the Canal from the White Mountains (and that may be illegal), but a few packs of Boy Scouts could gather enough acorns to drop 10000 new trees along Old Man River. After that, we'd have to wait until the trees were old enough to give impressive foliage.
I'm not sure if a Vermont maple tree would give the same foliage in Burlington that it gives in Bourne. I have read that New Hampshire trees have been transplanted to Georgia before, without the resulting Autumn foliage show. That's Georgia, however, and not 100-miles-away Bourne.
The end result is our planting a line of trees down the Canal that show ridiculous color in foliage season. This gives us a tourist attraction, and perhaps- best case scenario- the best foliage walk in America... down an ocean river, surrounded by all of fall's colors. Why go to Maine when you can go to Cape Cod?
I think- and I could totally possibly be wrong- that it would be the largest purposeful foliage planting in world history. I think all other foliage is located where God put it. If we steal enough acorns, we can maybe bleed New Hampshire dry and take over the market entirely.
I'm like MLK with this, because I may not make it to the mountaintop with my pet project. It will take some time to bear fruit, so to speak.
However, future generations will thank us if it works out, and they won't even notice if it fails to work out. We'd only be out 10000 acorns or so if it fails. If it works, we'd have stumbled onto that rare instance where money DOES grow on trees.
More Fishing Piers
We have a unique recreational opportunity with the Cape Cod Canal. It's an ocean river, and all sorts of creatures swim through it. Whales, dolphins and sharks have been seen in the Canal.
However, the fish we can profit from are stripers and bluefish. These are our big game fish, and they love the Canal. People come from miles around to fish for them, and we should exploit that fact for every penny that it is worth.
There is a fishing pier in Sandwich, and it is almost always full. Fisherman love the pier, because it lets you not have to cast and reel in over the rockpile that lines the Canal.
Maybe, if we build a few more piers and promote them properly, we can become a Fishing Destination. I'd put a pier everywhere that has a parking lot, including Scusset Beach, the Herring Run, Buzzards Bay Park, and wherever else I'm leaving out.
I'd definitely be open to carving up some of Sandwich Road to make some parking for the piers we erect on the Cape side of the Canal. You just have to space out the Cape piers and the Mainland piers so that people aren't casting halfway out and hooking the other side's lines.
Fishing piers would need bait shops, liquor stores, Houses of Pizza, gas stations, hotels, and all sorts of support services. It's not like a few piers will turn us into Disneyland, but we don't NEED to be as big as Disneyland. We have enough traffic already.
We could even use the Boston train to import city fishermen to work our piers and patronize our businesses. I taught in the city for a while, and my school had fishing classes. Dudes are fishing behind the squalid Boston Garden area. They'd kill to work the Canal... especially if we had brightly colored bridges and cool foliage (see above), or whatever I write about below this paragraph.
Even the construction of the piers would create local jobs, although any financial success with this project would be won one fisherman at a time.
Faux Sea Monster
I love this idea, and always have. If I were a better man, I'd have already done it.
Name a lake in Scotland. Name one that isn't Loch Ness. That's my point.
Monster Tourism (or Legend Tripping, which is sort of like Monster Tourism but not really) could fill our coffers with the dollars of the dumb. No one ever went broke aiming for the Dumb. Dumb people pay the same (sometimes more, actually) money we do for the same services, and it all looks green to me when I'm depositing it or using it to fund local high schools and police departments.
All that it would take is one small series of special effects. We'd need to make a monster which is perhaps a bit more realistic than the shark from the first Jaws movie was. We need it to make a very public appearance in the Canal, in front of a gang of tourists and at least one very civic-minded person working a video camera. We would also need it to make enough subsequent Canal appearances to make sure that the public knows that the Beast is exclusively our Baby.
We'd need several people playing along. We'd need someone at the Discovery Channel on our side. We'd need to get someone on Coast To Coast AM. We'd need to get a guy named Loren Coleman on board. We'd need a scientist who is willing to say that we have a legit sea monster on our hands. If Leonard Nimoy is still alive, we may need him on the team. We'd need a chief of police who can spin an impressive yarn, and we'd need a complicit populace.
This could backfire, as Beach Tourism might suffer if people think that a plesiosaur is going to eat them if they go swimming here. It might be very, very important for the public to be led to believe that the Beast only appears in the Cape Cod Canal, where there is no swimming by humans allowed.
I'd go with a Loch Ness-style monster, which the public already has a visual image of. We could also go Giant Alligator, Monster Anaconda, Megalodon, Sea Yeti, Godzilla, the Host, the Mongolian Death Worm, marshland Lizard Men, Colossal Squid, or perhaps even some combo platter of the menu items listed above.
Regardless of what we choose for the visual, we should make sure that the scientific name is Capecoddus Canalosaurus. His nickname should be Saggy, as in the Sagamore Bridge.
If the town should somehow come to foreclose on some property near the Canal, we should use our monster to come ashore and wreck a house. It would be tough to fake fatalities, but we could work around that.
Look, there he is!
Other Ideas
- Waitresses on jet skis, serving food and drinks to ships using the Canal.
- Use chemicals to freeze the Canal, and host the NHL All Star Game on it.
- Use the Canal to steal our bad selves that Head of The Charles Regatta from Boston.
- Race a pair of tall ships down the Canal every July 4th, loser gets sunk. This would be better with celebrity yachts, and we have lots of fringe Kennedys running around.
- Underwater glass pedestrian tunnel.
- Canal Triathalon, with a 7 mile swim against the current.
- A floating mall.
- Host the 4th of July parade on the Canal.
- Build a temporary dam, and threaten to unleash the pent up water as a tsunami onto Buzzards Bay beach towns if they don't pay us ransom.
- Needless but authentic-looking lighthouses and foghorns.
- Become the Mecca for some obscure water sport like sailboarding or water polo.
- Become the Mecca for some obscure water sport like sailboarding or water polo.
- Host an Oyster Festival the same night that Falmouth is hosting their pilfered Scallop Festival.
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