Harboring: Sandwich

Sandwich is the focus of today's Harboring entry...

Sandwich has a nice little harbor tucked in along the east end of the Cape Cod Canal.

The power plant is a bit of an eyesore, although it just looks like a really big boat to the guy writing the captions if he doesn't have glasses.

I don't know if bias exists in the US boater world over Japanese-made engines.

No animals were harmed while writing this column... those are technically fishes.

POW-MIA flag, always noted and appreciated on these pages.

Quick shot-out to the Harbormaster, who didn't kick me out while I was prowling around on his turf.

Sometimes we shoot out of the car window, sometimes we chop off the top of the Coast Guard tower.

I was very tempted to take out a pen and add a bunch-of-drunks-in-a-Boston-Whaler pic.

About 20% of the people I run into pronounce the town name as "Sammich." I have no idea why they do it, and I even do it myself now.

Sandwich isn't named for the Earl of Sandwich, and is indeed named for Sandwich, Kent, England. However, that Sandwich was represented by the 4th Earl Of Sandwich, and he is said to have essentially invented the sandwich. As the story goes, the Earl liked to gamble, and didn't want to stop to eat. He therefore had his servants create a meal that could be eaten with one hand.

Not all of the cool boats are huge ones.

This harbor has a sort of Secret Annex look when the Cape Cod Canal is viewed from above.

Cape Cod has working boats, just in case you didn't know.

Cutest boat in the harbor.

Post tot Naufracia Portus ("After so many shipwrecks, a haven").

Cold, Hard GPS Reality Hits Cape Cod

Cape Cod in general and Bourne in particular are somewhat used to Los Angeles-style traffic plodding through a 2500 person village on a 55 degree rainy/raw day. Memorial Day Weekend 2017 did not disappoint.

If you go back an article or two and dig up our "much like how an Eskimo has 200 words for snow, Bourne residents recognize 200 forms of traffic"tangent, you'd want to score tonight's entertainment at the rotaries as "people coming down to ready their rental properties for the 11 AM arrival of the first Summer People of 2017."

Facebook began to fill up with horror stories by 1 PM, and they were getting very ugly by 3 PM. "I can't get out of my driveway on Cypress Street" was one that got my notice. "45 minutes to clear Main Street" also was worrisome. Pictures from Duxbury, Wareham, Marion and Plymouth showed that it was jamming up everywhere.

"So it begins," as they say during the first Cape Cod traffic jam of every year. It's the high cost of doing business. The business benefits all, but the brunt of the burden is borne by Bourne. Bourne is the home of the two Canal bridges, also known as "the only ways to drive off of the Cape."

But the highways were not the only jammed roads. Normally safe side roads like Bournedale and Puritan began to fill up. Soon enough, bumper-to-bumper traffic was dominating side streets that normally get village traffic.

How did it come to this?

For much of the post-bridges history in Bourne, the only way to Cape Cod from due west was to crawl through Wareham and Buzzards Bay to the bridges. The locals knew this, and lined the roads with clam shacks, mini-golf and antique stores designed to feed off the tourists. It's why Wareham, which in Plymouth County and exists miles from the Canal, is known as the Gateway to Cape Cod.

This changed in 1987, when Route 25 picked up an extra 7 miles east of Wareham. You could take the highway right to the bridge, and the banshee screamed for the Buzzards Bay tourist industry.

Wareham got a reprieve when Wal-Mart dropped a store there (which has since moved west),and survives now via fast food and a very tenuous Stop & Shop anchor.

"Well," they said back in 1988, "business will suffer, and we will have to transform ourselves into a bedroom suburb. At least the traffic in town will ease up."

Nope.

In 1960, the US Navy put up a global positioning satellite to track their warships. It was improved upon and eventually made available for civilian use by Ronald Reagan. Navigation devices became available for phones.

Route 25 didn't make the Cape traffic go away, it just made it go away from Buzzards Bay. People were getting into gridlock on an empty highway with no Bourne businesses to feed off them. Wareham and Buzzards Bay then became the shortcut of choice for people used to the old route.

Things start getting odd when the GPS came about. It put local side streets into the game plans of people who aren't locals. That's another bad omen to see popping up on Facebook, the "tourists jamming roads they shouldn't know" event.

"Bournedale Road" isn't a townie secret anymore. People of the Griswold archetype from somewhere like Utah might be aware of it.

It wasn't like that in 1968, but they didn't have GPS technology on the streets then, either.

Not everything was negative yesterday. I did see a new business model emerging, the prey-on-passing-traffic gig revisited.

Granted, one must adjust to the new realities, and put their businesses where the people are. That's how they did it in 1987, and it's how they're doing it 30 years later.

It's the same basic business strategy as old Bourne, and not far at all (just 75 years or so) from a kid opening a lemonade stand. I shouldn't have been shocked, as it made perfect sense.

As I rode down Head Of The Bay Road in Bourne yesterday, I saw an odd sign...

I should add that it took about 45 minutes to go from Hideaway Village to the Belmont Circle rotary. Most of that was spent in bumper-to-bumper traffic, crawling 10 yards a minute.

I still took awful pictures... lol.

I expected to see kids at the bottom of this signage, which ran three signs or so as we inched down Head Of The Bay Road.

I didn't see kids, and instead saw someone who might have grandkids.

Some old guy (with a circular driveway, nonetheless) set up a table and umbrerlla, got out a hot dog steamer and a cooler, and went into the hot dog stand business.

Sorry for the rotten shot, but "Look... dude has a hot dog stand!" isn't a good enough rubbernecking excuse to avoid an asskicking by whoever was behind me.

It's not like you can call the cops on the guy for running a shadowy roadside stand business in a non-zoned area, because by the time that the cops get through the traffic, this guy may have gone to his Reward and the business will be in the hands of his grandkids. The kids can just flee into the forest, as kids do.

Opening a beer stand on Head Of The Bay Road may have been prescient. "BONG HITS... $5" might have turned a profit as well.

In 1977, they set up on Main Street to get at the road-trippers. In the GPS era, that shifted the onus onto the side streets.

I made it to the rotary eventually.

The Cape Cod Times recently ran an article that gave away the shortcuts locals use in several Cape Cod towns.

Dude must have been a washashore, because I can tell you from experience that locals frown on that. Skipping Route 28 by using County Road is something that a Cape Codder earns, and it makes them angry to see someone from Ohio with the same shortcut in mind.

You don't want to be doing 45 minutes in the traffic on Head Of The Bay Road before you get to the 30 minute rotary-negotiating nightmare in Belmont Circle. Someone will get killed, eventually.

I spent some time at the Trowbridge Tavern after the grueling commute, and I can tell you that the bridge (and the roads leading up to it) still had bumper-to-bumper traffic at 10 PM. You were still doing bumper to bumper briefly at 1 AM just off the Sagamore Bridge.

And so it begins...

You Know You're From Bourne If (Traffic Edition)...

1) You have names for traffic. 
This is much like a true version of the "Eskimoes-have-200-words-for-snow" myth. Bourne residents are fully aware of at least 200 different styles of traffic, maybe more... I'm a washashore, and I learn a new one every day.
Why, just in the last few dozen months, I have been stuck in:
- Morning commute traffic
- Afternoon drive traffic
- Bridge traffic
- Bridge work traffic
- Rotary traffic
- Trying to even get to the rotary traffic pre-traffic
- Between bridges traffic, which occurs on the Scenic Highway and Sandwich Road
- Holiday lane-closure traffic (the Mother's Day Massacre was one of these)
- Labor Day traffic
- Memorial Day traffic
- Fireworks traffic
- Parade traffic
- Canaliversary traffic
- First snow of winter traffic
- Bicycle race traffic
- Road race traffic
- Scallop Festival traffic
- Cottage-turnover traffic
- Slowly weaving around fallen tree traffic
- Blizzard traffic
- Accident-up-ahead traffic
- First time a tourist ever saw a rotary traffic
- Funeral traffic
- School bus traffic
- School bus fire accidents

Well, you get the point.

2) Each of those styles of traffic mean different things to you.
Cottage-turnover traffic lasts from 11-3 PM, Saturday only. Fireworks traffic will clear up in a half-an-hour, first-snow traffic will clear up with the onset of the second snow event. Parade traffic closes Buzzards Bay. Sunday evening summer traffic closes Sagamore. Rotary Virgin traffic often leads directly into Accident Up Ahead traffic. Bicycle race traffic isn't that bad, but you can kill 4 athletes in the time it takes you to look down to light a Newport.
I'm just listing those in case you thought I was kidding with #2. An old-timer could probably expand my list fifty-fold.

3) You understand that time is different in Bourne.
If you ask a guy from Bourne and a guy from Bridgewater to meet you at some point that is equidistant from each town, the Bridgewater guy will be able to offer a good ETA immediately, while a seasoned observer will notice that the Bourne resident will pause, look away, and do a brief calculation before answering.
This is a brief day of week/time of day/time of year/force of traffic calculation that Bourne residents perform for even simple trips to the store. Like light with the black holes in space, no trip outside of the house can escape the force exerted by that rubric.
Everyone in Bourne is aware of what sort of traffic is happening, and how it will impact their commutes. No decision, however minor, is made by the Bourne resident without rolling through the rubric.
There even exists a Bourne Paradox.
It goes like this. Somehow, in 2012 (exactly at the time that the poles were supposed to shift), the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges passed a point where the combined time lost in traffic by everyone who ever crossed the Bourne Bridge and the Sagamore Bridge became numerically greater than the time that man as a species has existed.
The fact that multiple people travel in cars is how the numbers end up working out. They say it's what Einstein killed himself over, and I think it proves or disproves either God, math, time, or both.

4) You have lost a job because of traffic.
You may not have that one in particular on your list, but you have some outrageous equivalent example in your quiver.
Your list of examples may have "Been offered sex, but have turned it down because it would take too long to get there," or "Blew off my own Mom on Mother's Day nine miles from her house," "Mended a broken bone at home by myself because the MapQuest said 640 minutes to Tobey Hospital," or "Walked across the bridge to pick up a pizza that I had originally called to have delivered" or something of that nature.
Bourne people rarely marry residents of other towns. When they do, it is almost always with someone from an adjacent border region. No one else understands them, and especially no one else understands their perpetual traffic-caused lateness.
It leads to some inbreeding on the Cape side of Bourne, but the mainland Bourne bought itself 50 years of genetic purity with the nearby Ponds of Plymouth development.

5) You're one of the people who keep the Cape Cod Tunnel myth alive.
It's bad karma to mess with tourists. We need their money, and we ourselves may be the lost tourist in some other far-away town where it is natural to resent tourist traffic some day.
However, Bourne is also the community which suffers the most for the rest of Cape Cod to fatten itself on Tourist, and we must be obliged an instance or two of weakness.
I usually do it once, early in the summer, and I'm good for July-through-Halloween.
"Yup, you'll see the tunnel entrance, just before the Sagamore Bridge. It takes you straight to Ripton."

6) You believe that Bournedale could be renamed "Shortcut" with no loss of effective description.
As near as I can tell- and I think I live in Bournedale- the whole village is Bournedale Road's three or four side streets, Weldon Park, Canalside Apartments, a few rich-famiy Canal houses and a whole lot of forest.
Other than two clam shacks, a horse farm and what I believe is a Butterfly store, there is no commerce there. It exists, to me anyhow, 100% as a means of getting to Wareham or Plymouth without using the rotaries.
Even the Wampanoags used Bournedale primarily as a shortcut, although- with the exception of Aptucxet- that's actually true for the whole town.

7) You nod in agreement with at least two of these local culinary observations:
- You send people to a shack when they ask where to get good seafood
- You just got a supermarket like 2 years ago, and it's already laying people off.
- The pizza parlors actually laugh in your face (over the phone) if you ask them to deliver across the bridges on Friday night, Saturday afternoon, or Sunday evening.
- Burger King failed on your central business district, and the two McDonald's in town rely on captive audiences.
- 500 yards from where BK failed, the guy selling Thai food out of a shack does well enough that he has now expanded the franchise into Wareham.
- You can eat out of a lighthouse 50 feet off the Bourne rotary.
- Need a 3 AM omelette in a village of 2500? We have that covered.
- You can buy t-shirts, post cards, key chains, bumper stickers, fried clams and a banana split in one trip to one cash register, and it's in a shack.
- Five miles of Cranberry Highway (with nearby Bourne Village, Plymouth and Wareham ones thrown in to keep it honest) supports seven Dunkin' Donuts franchises, including two within 70 yards of each other.
- Bourne and her immediate neighbors also support three Marylou's, a Starbucks, a Honey Dew, and incidental coffee giants like IHOP, McDonald's, Cumberland Farms, and Leo's. Even I don't want to know how many D+D's are in Monument Beach, Pocasset, Cataumet and so forth.
- About 100 square yards of the Belmont Circle Rotary supports a Starbuck's, a Honey Dew, and two Dunkin's.

8) Despite living here, you may be 100% ignorant of at least two of these should-be-simple town facts:
-What the Monument that Monument Beach is named after is.
- How we got the Bourne name.
- That we used to be Sandwich.
- That we have had a President living in town before, and he wasn't a Kennedy or an Obama.
- The current President was in town last week. He'll be in and out a few more times this summer.
- You mistake at least one village as being part of another town, or part of another town as being yours. Usual suspects are Sagamore Beach, Onset, Scusset Beach, Forestdale, and Cataumet.
- That we have a college/academy type thing.
- That a Buzzards Bay (village) and a Buzzards Bay (body of water) exist concurrently.
- That Bourne is the only town to touch both Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay.
- That the Cape Cod Canal is man-made.
- Bourne is the place where we detect and first respond to the launch of a SLBM against the northeastern United States.
- That the Canal doesn't empty completely at low tide.
- That big loop Route 25 does before the bridge? Somebody's farm.
- That the idea of removing the Sagamore Rotary really got momentum only after Mitt Romney got caught in traffic.
- That almost 50,000 veterans are buried just off of Route 28.
- That there is a marked stone in town that may disprove the Columbus-discovered-America theory.

9) You believe that you are the state's rotary experts.
To borrow a Biggie Smalls lyric, "Number nine should have been number one to me."
Where other people take a left, you do a 270 degree near-circle in and out of two lanes through a maze of drivers with a bevy of different driving styles who don't want to let you in and really don't want to let you out.
There probably are rules to driving in a rotary, but- since no one uses rotaries but us- no one knows them. The people who should know them- we residents of Bourne- know that "Rule One" is actually "Disregard Rule One," and that rotaries are best handled by the same methods that goal-line offenses are run with in the NFL.
The actual key to understanding rotary difficulties is to know that rotaries are where Massachusetts drivers and New York drivers- the two worst in the USA, for entirely different reasons- figuratively and literally collide, while going in a circular maze. All other knowledge can be reverse-engineered from that fact.
A certain aggression is necessary when driving anywhere in the Northeast, especially in New England, extra-especially on Cape Cod, extra-double-secret-especially in Bourne, and especially-infinity in a rotary. I have an axe handle under my front seat, and I'm a soccer mom.

10) You tell me. Use the COMMENTS feature.

Salt Water Lures Show In Bourne

Bourne is sort of Cape Cod's flyover territory for a lot of tourists, but not for the fishermen. Bourne is Fisherman Nirvana.

Bourne is the only town touching both Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay... although to be quite honest, we're not 100% sure that Plymouth doesn't make contact with the upper reaches of the body of water that is Buzzards Bay. That's something for a future article.

You can also cut between those two bays via the Cape Cod Canal, another fishy factor favoring Bourne. This canal, which runs for 5 miles or so, is a fisherman's destination in itself.

Bourne is the home of legendary fisherman Stan Gibbs. He was the uberfisher who designed many of the basic lures that every fishing supplier copies today. His reputation among scholars of salt water fishing lures is similar to the reputation Karl Marx has among Communists. He has his own statue in town, and his legend is everywhere. If you heard the story about someone fishing a cap off of a yachtsmen's head, that was Gibbs. If you hear about a guy who can cast all the way across the Cape Cod Canal, that was also Gibbs.

No matter how you slice it, Bourne is a fisherman's paradise. You can cast from anywhere in town and stand a chance of catching some sort of fish.

It is the repeatedly stated opinion of this column that Bourne should attempt to cash in on all of these factors and exploit the Angler Potential of their numerous and potentially lucrative fishing hot spots.

This could be accomplished via simple things (advertising in the right places, better access, and so forth) and complicated things (construction of fishing piers, etc...) that might pay off if done properly.

I'm not the Answer Man when it comes to how this should be done. There's a reason I am not running Bourne, and instead seemed to have peaked at writing articles about how the town can profit from things like fisherman conventions.

Speaking of which...

The Salt Water Lures Collectors Club is having their annual convention in Bourne this week. Friday is a members-only affair, but they will be open to the public from 8 AM to 3 PM on Saturday.

You can come in and see the top of the line in salt water fishing lures. You can buy, sell or trade. You can also Gawk, which isn't a bad thing to do whenever you are in a room full of experts. If you live on Cape Cod, you should probably try to have some working knowledge of angler-type stuff. If you fish here, you may as well fish with excellent gear.

I mean, you can go down to the ol' fishing hole with some shoddy rubber lure that you got at Wal-Mart if you're not serious about catching fish. There's a reason that they put sandwich shops on the way home from fishing holes.

Orrrrr, you can ante up and get the good ish. These guys (and girls, fish are tasty and fun to catch for both genders) don't mess around. While I am not a member of the Salt Water Lures Collectors Club, it stands to reason that you don't join up to hock junk to people who will know better/be able to spot junk.

The show is happening at the Trowbridge Tavern and Canal Club. The Trow is an excellent place to have dinner, and is a fine spot to fortify yourself with some Fisherman Fuel before heading downstairs to gawk at the goods.

See you there!