Cape Cod's Silly Season

"Silly Season" means different things to different people. Most Englishmen and many Americans use it in media to describe slow summer news seasons where frivolous stories come out. The English also call it "Cucumber Season," which is why we always prevail against England when we fight them.

It is also used in the world of sports, especially in NASCAR, to describe a period outside of the traditional season. That's where we're heading today, we're just talking about a regional economy instead of Dale Junior.

Fans of the film  Jaws will recall Mayor Vaughn attempting to talk some "sense" into Hooper and Brody at various times in the movie. "Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars." Without those summer dollars, people in Amity would, as Quint so graciously put it, "be on the welfare all winter."

They are describing Cape Cod to a T in that movie. Cape Cod is very far from any cities or airports or- amazingly- large commercial harbors that stimulate revenue. We have some businesses, but it doesn't make sense logistically to base a national business here. From November to April, we're not far from how PJ O'Rourke described the collapsing Soviet Union's economy... "Everyone selling coffee and cigarettes back and forth to each other."

"15% of our sales are to California, another 25% goes to Asia... let's put the factory as far away from those people as possible!" is a conversation that only happens in movies where evil rich people are shutting down a factory in a poor town for tax breaks." It is also the only conversation that would put a big industrial plant on Cape Cod.

God saw this coming, and saw fit to bless us with amazing beaches, yummy seafood, gorgeous seas and all sorts of stuff that the factory worker in Ohio doesn't have access to and will pay excessively for the chance to experience. It's symbiotic, if I spelled that right... we send a bunch of money to Michigan for cars, and we get a bunch of it back when someone with vacation time says "Stay home in Detroit, or go to Cape Cod for the summer?"

Typically, Cape Cod's tourist season runs through July and August. These are the months when summer weather demands beach activity in America, and Cape Cod offers that without the sugarcane-harvesting oppressive heat/humidity that you get down in the American South. You can stroll through a much emptier Disney World in August than you can during February vacation, almost entirely because of Florida's well known Komodo Dragonesque climate.

July and August are also when the kids are out of school (unless they f*cked up badly, of course), and can be taken along on a vacation. As nice as leaving the kids home sounds, it is better to keep them where you can see them.

"I'm renting us this cottage on a gorgeous beach with boys/girls everywhere and all sorts of exotic beach stuff to do" is a better option to run past the teenager than "We're going to cram the famn damily in the car and go see the Grand Canyon or Colonial Williamsburg." 

If Chevy Chase had just taken the Griswolds to Cape Cod, he'd have had a much less stressful vacation and we'd be down one or two good Family Road Trip movies. Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday The 13th, Godzilla, The Shining, Twister, The Birds, Night Of The Living Dead, Dracula, The Blair Witch Project, Titanic, Halloween, The Godfather, High Plains Drifter, An American Werewolf In London and hundreds of other violent/disaster movies are peopled with unfortunate folks who chose somewhere other than Cape Cod to spend some vacation time.

So, Cape Cod fattens on Tourist  during these summer months. A perfect storm of weather, school vacations, factory slowdowns and everything else that sends people to us dries up with the warm weather. It's a slow process, but it isn't like flicking a switch or anything, even with most schools in America starting up at about the same time.

I have worked a few years at a Cape Cod hotel, and one thing we all notice is that, after Labor Day, the average age of our tenants goes to AARP levels very quickly. There's a reason for this.

If you see things like Intelligence and Wisdom through Dungeons and Dragons prisms as I do, you'll understand that the I and the W are two different animals. A child could have great natural intelligence, and the only thing holding it back from perhaps running a business is the wisdom one gets as they trod through this world of ours.

If you get 100 kids, 100 adults and 100 senior citizens together, you'll probably get the same amount of intelligent people in each group. However, the older groups will have greater wisdom via their life experiences. Your toddler may assemble Legos twice as fast as mine, but he doesn't know that OJ Simpson may have killed a few people, where even a moron of a 50 year old knows this.

Old People look at September, think of Cape Cod... and that wisdom kicks in. They immediately (and perhaps subconsciously in some cases) start working a checklist:

- The weather is perfect. September is a gorgeous month. September is mostly highs in the 70s, lows in the 50s. You get 80s and you even get 40s, but 75/55 is a typical high/low temperature. You get beach weather during the day, and cool, easy-sleepin' nights. The ocean off of Cape Cod is at peak warmth, and we aren't into the October rainy season. Nor'easters are rare in September, and Cape Cod doesn't get full-time hurricane action.

- The children are back in school. This changes the whole nature of the Cape, and the whole nature of the average tourist. Not only are the kids gone, the parents of the kids are gone.

- Beaches are yours for the taking. No kids and no parents erases a huge demographic from the beach population. I grew up on Duxbury Beach, and it wouldn't be unusual to see 3500 people on Duxbury Beach during Labor Day weekend... and then, three days later and with no appreciable change in the weather, Duxbury Beach might have a dozen people on it. Some days, each person on the beach could have had their own Mile of empty sand.

- That legendary Cape Cod traffic eases mightily. Cape Cod's winter population is about 200,000. It doubles in the summer. Take half of the cars from the road, and note that the remainder are locals who know the side roads and the wrong times to try the bridges... that's why they never build another bridge over the Canal, babe. There's no need for it 9 months of the year.

- Restaurants are less crowded. This means faster seating, less harried service, faster food-to-the-table times, and chefs viewing each plate as a work of art rather than just slopping stuff on a plate. Fly-by-night summer businesses close, and any restaurant in business after Labor Day has to be good enough that locals haven't word-o-mouthed it into shutdown.

- Stores are heavily discounting their goods. Cape Cod has a heavy Snowbird (summer on the Cape, winter in Florida) population, and many busineses will barter heavily with you just to get rid of as much inventory as they can before they head south.

- The attractions that are closed were ones you had no interest in anyhow. Grandma may be really cool and say "Let's spend a day at Water Wizz," but a pair of elderly tourists have had 145 combined years to get their fill of that sort of thing, and couldn't care less if Cape Cod Inflatable Park closes or not.

- The attractions that Autumn offers are very elderly-friendly. September is well described here. October brings in fall foliage, cranberry harvests and all that farm stuff. November even gives a surge, as Plymouth fills up during Thanksgiving and spillover follows. "There's only so much to do in Plymouth, and we've always wanted to see Cape Cod, dear..."

When true winter hits, Cape Cod can get sort of desolate. Few travel agents pitch it. A beach is a rough place to be in the winter, it's always windy and the wind is always in your face. "Look! The beach has snow on it!" wears out in five minutes. Many vacation-friendly businesses are closed. We have the kind of climate where, when we get snow, we get a lot of it.

That scenario is also a few months away, and the old people know that. This leads to Cape Cod getting a Silly Season of elderly-driven tourism during September and through Columbus Day. Cape Cod businesses adapt to this, making it so that a non-grey tourist will find stuff to do if they opt for a day trip.

The September/October period bookends the June/July/August peak season with a corresponding April/May period, but Spring can be sort of funny on Cape Cod. We get an extra month or so of Summer, but we pay for it with chilly Springs. It is not unusual to see a May weather broadcast say "Highs near 70 in Boston, 50s on the Cape."

That also is something that we don't have to worry about at the moment. Instead, Cape Cod is shifting into her Silly Season, fattening before the cold winter.

Mostly, old people use their hard-earned knowledge to dominate the tourist trade here in September... but now, after reading this article, you have the wisdom that some blue-hairs took 60 years to gain. Get down here and spend those dollars!

Will A Shark Culling Work? Do We Need It?

"Civilization ends at the waterline... after that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top."

Barnstable County Commissioner Ron Beaty has put a "shark hazard mitigation strategy" on the table after a series of shark interactions on the Outer Cape. These how-d-you-do's between sharks and humans ran the gamut from "A Fisherman Saw One" to "One Ate A Seal 20 Yards Off Of A Busy Beach" to "One Attacked A Surfboard With A Surfer Still On It."

Beaty has proposed lining the more popular Cape beaches with baited drum lines. These lines will have a big ol' shark-catching hook in them, the shark will either drown or have to be gun-shot and the desired end result will be the death of the offending shark.

This plan is soaked in controversy, and will require Ally Raisman levels of Moral Gymnastics.

Cape Cod, as we often mention here, has her pros and cons. As is often the case in life, the good comes with the bad at times. You can adopt an entirely beachnik lifestyle if you wish, but you're going to lose years of your life stuck in traffic. You will have the best view of the sunrise in Massachusetts, but you may also end up in the tummy of a Volvo-sized apex predator.

Can't win 'em all, right?

Wychmere

Becoming the lunch of some greater being is a bad thing to be thinking about, and doing so will definitely dampen your enjoyment of Cape Cod's many fine beaches. The best defense is to go with the numbers. Chew on this, if you will...

-Sharks have killed three people in Massachusetts since the Other Man arrived in 1620. The last one was in the 1930s.

- None of these attacks were on Cape Cod. Only one (Mattapoisett) happened near the shore, and the Scituate and Swampscott/Boston fatalities happened rather far offshore. You are more likely to have your boat attacked and be devoured than you are to suffer a Samuel L. style direct snatching from the shallow water.

- Cape Cod has only had 3 attacks in her recent history, and one of them was weak enough that the victim was originally thought to have tangled with a bluefish or a particularly capable lobster. Another of these attacks harmed only a surfboard.

- Cape Cod's population goes up to 400,000 every summer, and 200,000 of that number are people who came for the direct purpose of swimming. Surfcasting is our national sport, if a Cape can have a national sport. We've had great periods of time where "fisherman" was the main job in town. We've never had anyone get sharked to death on Cape Cod, and nothing I read speaks of indigenous, Wampanoag/Algonquian shark attacks.

- If you count non-lethal attacks in Massachusetts, you get about a dozen. Some of these attacks were spurious, such as "a hammerhead bumped into my boat while I was reeling in a tuna."

- You are 132 times more likely to drown at a beach than to be killed by a shark. You are 75 times more likely to be killed by lightning. You are 290 times more likely to be killed by a boat. You are 45 times more likely to be killed by a riptide. You are 1.6 times more likely to be swallowed up by a sand sinkhole- which, to be fair, may be a worse way to go.

- If you're female, you're more likely to be killed by a Kennedy crashing a vehicle into a Martha's Vineyard body of water. No women have been killed by a shark in Massachusetts' recorded history. Two, to my knowledge, were in a kayak a shark sampled a few years back in Manomet.

- Depending on the year studied, you are more likely to be bitten by a lab rat, a blue jay, a ferret, a gerbil, a parrot, a skunk, a raccoon... Shoot, you are 100 times more likely to be bitten by a human than a shark.

- Most sharks, Great Whites included, feed on a single item, Our sharks like seals, which is why the arrival of the sharks closely followed the arrival of the seals. Humans, even chubby ones, aren't fatty enough (in other words, we're too crunchy) for a shark's tastes. We are most likely also not salty enough to be shark food. An attack on a human is almost always a shark mistaking the human for a seal or a squid.

- We'd need 394 fatal shark attacks this summer to average one a year since the Mayflower arrived.

Duxbury Beach

So, it isn't like this is a pressing issue or anything. Why the shark cull, then?

Cape Cod is a beach, a big long one with water on both sides of it. Beach life draws in the tourists. Cape Cod depends on those tourists for her economic well-being. If sharks start gobbling swimmers, no one will come here.

It's basically the arguments posed by Quint and Mayor Vaughn in Jaws. We're a summer town. We need summer dollars, or we'll be on the welfare all winter. If someone says "Barracuda," no one will care. If we turn up on CNN or YouTube in the form of a shark attack video, we may as well be Iowa for all the beach tourism we'll get afterwards.

Farewell and adieu, to you fair Spanish ladies...

Don't get me wrong. It's very sad and tragic when someone dies in a car wreck or if they get the Die Slow or whatever... but a slip-n-fall in the tub isn't going to scare away 200,000 tourists every summer, and a shark attack will.

Chatham Harbor

Will the Beaty plan work?

There's a lot to hate about it. For starters, it is incomplete. It won't kill every shark. You only need one shark to slip by, and we get all that Amity Island negativity. So, right off the bat, the plan blows like the mighty North wind.

Anyone who has shark-fished for sport or profit will tell you that sharks- and fish in general- can be finicky. They may have no interest at all in whatever bait is being offered. As they are sort of up here to eat seals, offering them mackerel would be akin to going to the Chinese restaurant looking for a pizza.

You could bait the hooks with seals, but seals- like Great White Sharks- are a protected species. You already have to deal with the tree huggers to kill Great White Sharks... imagine the reaction when you say "We also have to kill a protected species to bait the hooks to kill another protected species." Remember, they shut beaches down here when a Piping Plover lays eggs in a dune.

Seals, which I again point out are protected, exist in far greater numbers than sharks do here. They eat the same diet as sharks do... minus, of course, seal meat. A seal is more likely to end up hooked than a shark is if you bait the hook with mackerel or haddock or whatever. You might slaughter 500 seals for each Great White Shark you manage to snare. An Australian hook program, which we''ll get to soon enough, reported bycatch of whales, sea turtles and dolphins.

Speaking of seals, they are the favorite meal of the sharks. If you drive the sharks away, you have an unchecked seal population. They rut like sea bunnies, too. Cape Cod fishermen don't mind sharks, but they hate seals. With no sharks, the Cape Cod fisherman will suddenly become the seal's apex predator.

That said... when we had a seal bounty (up until the 1960s on Cape Cod), it drove off all of the seals, and no one even saw a non-Basking shark near the shore in these parts. Sharks weren't very prominent here before the bounty, so remember to balance all the numbers properly.

West Island, Fairhaven

We aren't the first people to consider hooking sharks, and we won't be the first ones to do it if it ever comes to that. Australia, South Africa and Brazil have all taken a crack at it, with South Africa having done so for 50 years.

Western Australia, after a series of attacks on surfers, enacted a shark cull. They used the same baited drumline approach Beaty is proposing. They did so from 2012 through 2016, when a new government discontinued the policy.

Queensland has been using drumlines since 1962, and has had one shark attack death since. They had 27 between 1919 and 1961. South Africa had 3 non-fatal shark attacks at controlled beaches, and

The Aussies anchored a floating barrel to the sea bed, and set a big baited hook in the middle. Fishermen would check the hooks, kill any large (3 meters and above) sharks and try to save any bycatch.

They paid X number of fishermen $610,000 (US) for 107 days of setting hooks and removing the catch. They spent an additional $20 million on mitigation and education measures.

During the first 3 weeks of the program, 65 sharks were caught. 75% of them were under 3 meters, and 20% of those were dead on the hook. The remainder were released with often grievous injury.

Media reaction was intense. The video of the shooting of a Tiger Shark unleashed a storm of protest. Rumors arose later that the drumline had also killed a dolphin, and the fishing boat in question had a large sea creature under a tarp.

Amid large protests, the program was not kept alive for 2017.

Orleans

Brazil has also enacted the drumline strategy. Here's the bycatch, in both numbers and percentage of survival:

Spotted eagle ray - 4 - 100%
Marine catfish - 244 - 75%
Blacknose shark - 26 - 12%
Marine turtles - 4 - 100%
Barred grunt - 3 - 67%
Sting rays - 14 - 93%
Goliath grouper - 13- 100%
Nurse shark - 130 - 99%
Moray eels - 11 - 19%
Snappers - 6 -67%
Devil rays - 6 - 50%
Brazilian sharpnose shark - 1 - 0%

During the same period 38 potentially aggressive sharks were also hooked, including tiger sharks (34) and bull sharks (4). The overall survival rate of potentially aggressive sharks was 70% (relocated and released).

Shark attacks went down by 97% after the drumlines were set, although shark attack numbers vary wildly year-to-year. Many critics cite that people will avoid shark-infested waters once they are made known to the public, and that's what drove the numbers down.

Hyannis Port

Beaty, one should know, appears to be somewhat out of his mind.

He is often mentioned as an example when people discuss voters just checking whatever name is next to the "R" or the "D" on a ballot. He has been referred to as a "lunatic" by another local pol. He has served time in a federal prison for threatening President Bush, which is unusual for a Republican.

There's a real chance that his proposal will be laughed out of court, as the lawyers say.

Will people still be laughing when some child gets Mack The Knifed in the surf, taking our tourist economy with him?

People's reactions tend to be ugly with shark attack deaths, especially if their economy can be destroyed by them. Judging by things like King Phillip's War, Massachusetts has an ethic of Abject Slaughter when confronted by a deadly threat, even if the threat is minimal. We've slaughtered seals before, to the extent of driving them away for decades. Sharks are like seals, in that they can annihilate an area of our economy, and they aren't like seals, in that they can devour human beings.

Cape Cod's mood could turn very sour if a shark attack happened. They would be ripe for a brutal plan like the one offered by Beaty. This column hopes that a less cruel solution can be worked out.

Thumpertown Beach