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!

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...

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!