Surf Check: Cape Cod

The Cape's first real snow of the year merits a surf check, even if coastal flooding was not expected. 

This is especially true if you go at low tide, like we did.

I work for a church in December, it lowers my availability, which is why we went to weaker-surf beaches at low tide rather than superheavyweights like Eastham or Duxbury at high tide.

We started at Town Neck Beach in Sandwich. We were also shooting from the Drunken Seal, because reasons.

Since we were in the neighborhood, we also checked out Sagamore Beach.

Nothing catastrophic, but a nice mini road trip.

Note the difference between Sagamore Beach, above, and Kalmus Beach in Hyannis, below.

Cranberry Harvests In Plymouth County

As Thanksgiving draws near, we got down and dirty in the bogs so we could equip you with enough knowledge to dominate cranberry discussion.

Cranberries grow in cooler Northern Hemisphere climates. The Southern Hemisphere also tries. 98% of the world's cranberries are grown the US, Canada and Chile.

Wisconsin has supplanted long-time champ Massachusetts as the leading cranberry grower.

However, I would point out that if your Thanksgiving cranberries aren't from Massachusetts, your table is wiggedy wiggedy whack.

We bear no grudge towards Wisconsin, but Thanksgiving is a Plymouth thing, most Massachusetts cranberries are grown in Plymouth County and this sort of sets Massachusetts atop the cranberry hierarchy.

Ocean Spray, based in Massachusetts, doesn't miss the mark with their commercials. Cranberries are indeed harvested by guys in hip waders, wielding rakes. The big difference between the commercials and reality is that real workers are too busy to stop and talk shop with the cameraman.

Cranberries need all of summer and autumn to grow, and the harvest is usually a race against the killing frost. If the frost beats the harvesting, they have to fly a helicopter about 5 feet over the bogs to keep the water from freezing.

Bogs look like this, but have to be flooded to loosen the berries. More on that below...

Bogs look cool with fog over them.

The lack of ambient lighting sort of dulls the cranberry colors. When judging how bland this picture is, know that it was worse before we edited it.

We were going to do a Fog Bog article, but Facebook spamming is high risk, so it's easier/safer to just have a Fog Bog section of a larger Cranberry article.

750 acres produces literal truckloads of cranberries. They are sent off to an Ocean Spray receiving plant in Carver. 

Cranberries are closely related to the Blueberry and the (I'm your) Huckleberry. The English settlers of Massachusetts originally called them Bearberries, as local bears would fatten on them before hibernating. Cranberry was settled on because the shrubs and berries supposedly resembled a crane to German/Dutch farmers in New England. They called it a Kranberre, and the English translation stuck. This crane thing may be true for people with better cameras.

It takes a truck of equal size enirely filled with sugar to make cranberry sauce. Cranberries are impossibly tart, and they require tons of sweetener. You'd need about a box truck worth of vodka to make a Paul Bunyan-sized Cape Codder.

Native 'Mericans had the first crack at cranberries, which they used for pemmican and dye. They called them sasemineash. The first English reference of them dates back to 1550. The first cranberry sauce recipe dates back to a 1663 Pilgrim cookbook. A 1672 book described them as "excellent against the Scurvy."

Revolutionary War vet Henry Hall of Dennis, Massachusetts started a bog in 1816, and he was shipping them commercially as far as Europe by the 1820s.

In 2017, the world harvested 625,181 tons of cranberries. The US produced 379,745 of those tons. Canada and Chile split most of the remainder about equally between them. Wisconsin produces 65% of the US total, while tiny Massachusetts produces 23%.

95% of cranberries are used to make either sauce or juice. Cranberry sauce is part of the traditional English Christmas dinner, as well as Christmas and Thanksgiving in the US of A.

Ocean Spray, which controls about 65% of the market,  fights against a holiday-only bias regarding cranberries. They have relentlessly developed new recipes and marketing strategies to get people to consume them regularly. A 1959 herbicide scare collapsed the market, forcing companies to try to market them year-round.

This effort brought us cranberry juice and cranapple juice. Cranapple was invented by Ed Gelsthorpe (a remarkable guy who has his fingerprints on the first roll-on deodorant, snack-pack pudding, frozen yogurt and the Manwich). Ocean Spray also developed the Cape Codder and the Cosmopolitan.

A.D. Makepeace, who were nice enough to let me shoot pictures of their operations, is the largest producer of cranberries in the world. They may be the largest property owners in Wareham, Carver and Middleboro, but I have no documentation to back that up. They, along with other local growers, were original members of the Ocean Spray cooperative in 1930.

Beatles fans familiar with the Paul Is Dead conspiracy theory point to the song Strawberry Fields Forever as proof. The end of the song has John Lennilon saying something along the lines of "I buried Paul." Lennon claims he was saying "cranberry sauce." Keeping it musical, cranberries are what the singer(s) of the Waitresses forgot to buy in their song Christmas Wrapping. They go out to the A&P to get some, meet a guy and the song ends happily.

Once the bogs are flooded, a thresher like this one is used to loosen the berries. They are then fed to a truck after being raked up by those Ocean Spray commercial guys.

The European Union is the largest importer of American cranberries, followed by China, Canada, Mexico and South Korea. China, who imported $36 million in cranberry products, is zooming up the list. I am not aware if the Trump/China trade war hurt cranberry growers or made them eligible for the series of farmer bailouts that the trade war produced.

Mann Farms of Buzzards Bay also let me roam around.

Cranberry prices peaked at $65 a barrel in 1996, before plummeting to $18 a barrel in 2001. Production outpaced demand.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Who Invented The Thanksgiving Sandwich?

Cape Cod's Claim To The Day After Thanksgiving Sandwich

I wrote about our local wild turkey population recently. I then spent considerable time and effort trying to find out who invented the Gobbler.

The Gobbler, as you most likely know, is a regional name for a Turkey/Cranberry/Stuffing sandwich. Depending on where you're getting one, it may have a variety of ingredients. It may also have a variety of names, such as the Mayflower Sandwich, the Thanksgiving Sandwich, the Day After Thanksgiving Sandwich, the John Alden, the Myles Standish, the Squanto, the Samoset, the Turkey Bomb, the TCS, the Black Friday Special, the Pilgrim Sandwich, the November Surprise, the Governor Bradford and God knows what others.

It is one of America's most popular sandwiches, and on the day after Thanksgiving, it is THE most popular sandwich. While the Fluffernutter is the Boston's signature sandwich, the Gobbler is probably the signature sandwich of Plymouth County. I'd actually use Bourne as the cutoff point from which the lobster roll asserts her sandwich authority over the lands across the Canal.

With the advent of modern appliances, the immediate post-Edison version of the Gobbler was probably invented on the East Coast by whoever got hungry first before the plates were washed. Just like the Earl of Sandwich centuries before, this god-among-us figured out that thick bread makes for a pretty good plate. Before someone invented the fridge, leftover turkey most likely went into a slow-simmering soup.

We "know" that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich in the 18th Century so he could eat while he gambled, and never-you-mind better historical claims by Europeans and their trencher/open-faced sandwiches, the ancient Jews and their matze Passover culinary explorations, or the Aztecs and their corn tortillas (often filled with turkey to make history's first turkey sandwich, but the Aztecs were nowhere near the cranberries needed for the Gobbler). None of their stories involve needing a hand free to gamble, so I'm going with Earl. If you are patient, we'll tie the Gobbler back to him.

Turkeys, native to America, were introduced to Europe in the 1500s through Turkish markets via the Spanish. Stuffed turkey was popular in Europe by the 1600s, and bread was most likely on those same tables. Those are 3 of the 4 main ingredients in the Gobbler, but the cranberry sauce was a century away.

In spite of the fact that turkey-at-Plimoth was common knowledge, it didn't become the Thanksgiving anchorman in America until about 1800. If you need an English visual, remember that the Cratchit family from A Christmas Carol (1843) was going to eat a goose before Scrooge intervened with a holiday turkey and some Obamacare. Turkey was a popular holiday meal in America long before Abe Lincoln nationalized the holiday, and long before even that in Europe.

I struck out on finding the actual inventor of the Gobbler, and had difficulty even finding speculation on the matter. There were no claims made on it. Since my research yielded nothing, I am forced to rely on my own creativity and logic.

The Pilgrims look like a good bet, as they had turkey, stuffing (stuffing dates back to the Romans, at least), and- most importantly- access to cranberries. Not only access, but they also were essentially getting the first (white people) crack at them. 

They were slow to catch on, as the nation/world's first large cranberry cultivation system was established by American Revolution vet Captain Henry Hall in Dennis in 1816, but we were shipping them to Europe by 1820.

The Pilgrims were neither wealthy nor frivolous, and sugar is needed in large amounts to make cranberry sauce as we know it. 

The Ps might have used lightly sugared cranberries, as straight cranberry is too tart to eat enjoyably- even for someone who considered some nice salted mutton to be good eatin'. Such a thing as sugared berries would have almost certainly been a dessert.

All the necessary ingredients for the Gobbler were in place in some form at the first Thanksgiving. William Bradford's account put turkey, cranberries, and cornbread on the table. Stuffed turkey was a traditional holiday meal in the Europe they had just left. That almost assuredly puts stuffing (of a cornbread variety) on that table as well.

There were creative minds from a variety of cultures sitting at that table, and remember that some of those minds were quite remarkable. In that context, you'd almost be amazed if someone there didn't invent the Gobbler. It'd be like watching Tesla get transported to 2014 and fail to figure out how to turn on the TV.

While that doesn't solve the mystery, it gives us a basis for more speculation. Since we've narrowed it down to the table the Gobbler most likely was first enjoyed at, we have to- for the sake of everybody who got up on the 4th Friday in November and went straight for the hair of the dog- make an effort to name the genius in 1621 who put two and two together and somehow made something tastier than four.

I'll start by looking at the Wampanoags.

They shouldn't be the less obvious choice. They could make their own forms of bread, they had turkey running around, and probably had about 5,000-30,000 years of experience with cranberries before the Europeans arrived.

You can go to Plimoth Plantation tomorrow and see the Wampanoag historical role-players cooking cranberry cornbread (Nasaump) that looks a lot like squishy-style bird stuffing. They even made a cranberry boiled bread, a cranberry syrup called Sassamanesh, and had numerous turkey recipes. They were working with all of the ingredients for centuries.

Any argument against the Wampanoags inventing some form of the Gobbler pretty much hinges on nobody in 5-30000 years putting some meat, cranberries (cranberries were used when making pemmican, making the Wampanoag Gobbler even that much more likely), and some form of stuffing between two pieces of bread.

The reader will note that we mentioned ancient Native Americans using tortillas. Ideas move through different tribes just like they do with different Europeans, and the idea of wrapping food in bread could have quite possibly diffused from Tortilla Land to the Cranberry-Turkey Land. Once that happens, you just need one Algonquin genius.

You can run the Wampanoag-exclusive Gobbler theory right up to the first Thanksgiving. The Wampanoags introduced cranberries to starving English settlers, and they are almost certainly among the berries (although most likely in food prepared by the Wampanoags) described by Bradford in his account of the first Thanksgiving. 

I'd even pick a Wampanoag (not used to knives and forks and so forth) to be more likely to create a Gobbler when presented with turkey, cranberries, stuffing and bread than some scared and rigid European who was used to European table manners.

I'd even throw in the chance that some Pilgrim woman fashioned some sort of bread-cup and filled it with the Gobbler ingredients for a departing Wampanoag, inventing the Gobbler while concurrently serving America's first take-out meal.

The other option at that table to invent the Gobbler relies more on mysticism and legend... which you'd think would favor the Wampanoags, but they actually have too good of a grasp on Common Sense in this discussion to latch onto the abstract stuff. It favors Bourne.

I can make this simple. Even the most ardent supporter of the Wampanoag Gobbler theory would have to admit that the Great Spirit usually gives you a sign. While Plimoth had the more famous Wampanoag interaction and is the most likely Genesis Spot for a white man's Gobbler, the majority of trade between colonists and natives and the New Netherlands in the time following the feast went down at the Aptucxet Trading Post, in Bourne. There was a great deal of cultural and culinary diffusion going on in Bourne until around or before the Great Colonial Hurricane blew America's First Store flat in 1635.

If Plimoth was the Gobbler's Bethlehem, Bourne may have indeed been the Gobbler's Nazareth. From there, much like Jesus, it took over half the world. The ethnicity of the first Gobbler's creator matters less to me than the chance that someone from Bourne may have invented (or at least first ingested) one of America's greatest sandwiches.

The only problem here is that Bourne wasn't Bourne until 1884, when it broke away from the town it used to belong to, the town named for a British aristocrat, the town that wins the Pilgrims and Bourne the right to call the Gobbler their own, the town that grants my theory the approval of the Great Spirit, and the town that ends this discussion.

The name of that town?

"Sandwich. "

The Cape Cod Canal Foliage Project

Quint wasn't talking about Cape Cod when he laid down the facts in Jaws, but he may as well have been. We are a summer community, and we need summer dollars, or we'll be on the welfare all winter... something to that effect.

However, money grows green in all seasons. Why not make some Autumn money? Does money really grow on trees?

Autumn money is sort of up our alley. We're the Thanksgiving ground zero for America. We have quaint little cranberry bogs scattered all about. As long as you don't go swimming, those beaches are fine on a warm autumn day, even in November.

We also have foliage. Now, when you think of foliage, you think of New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and even the Berkshires. You don't really think Cape Cod.

Middleboro certainly doesn't think so, and they planted this tree to prove it to you.

That's a shame, because we're the last region of New England to experience peak foliage. Maine trees are bare when we're just getting to the height of our season. Cape Cod, if you look at a foliage map, peaks right around when a Kentucky-Alabama swath is peaking, and those states don't do foliage like New England does.

We should be better known for it. Everyone who saw the beautiful foliage shots from New Hampshire on the news, and who then said "We should drive out in the country and see some foliage," but who then procrastinated... those people should be looking at Cape Cod as a Last Resort.

People aren't stupid, so there must be good reasons as to why we don't get Vermont's autumnal swagger. For starters, we lack the forest cover that northern New England has. We also have the wrong sort of trees.

That second problem can be fixed.

Trees drop acorns and so forth, and those can be harvested. Plant them in the ground, and they'll grow a version of the tree that they fell from. Come autumn, those trees will put off the same color that their parents did.

It's so simple, it pretty much takes care of itself.

I called a few tree farms, and the big difference a tree would see in Massachusetts as opposed to New Hampshire is that they would go into seasonal color changes later. Trees that turn in early October in Falmouth, Maine would have to wait until November in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Let that fact roll around in your head a bit as we figure out how to make money off of this.

Cape Cod is a series of tourist towns, and the weakest link in the chain is Bourne.

Bourne is very nice when compared to Fitchburg or Holyoke, but it's in last place as far as Cape Cod tourism goes. Bourne has nice people living there and has a lot to offer, but we have Bay where everyone else has Ocean, so we sort of lag behind the other Cape towns when it comes to tourism.

There's not much we can do about the Bay, but the Cape Cod Canal is another animal entirely.

The Cape Cod Canal is an ocean river, The canal is 7 miles long, and it is framed on each side by a wonderful bike path. These paths are framed by a thick row of trees.

These trees tend to be pine, Pine is lovely, but it doesn't do much during Autumn beyond dropping pine needles into that gap between your windshield and the car hood. There's nothing wrong with pine, but no one is driving out from New York City to look at it.

So, we have several problems: a weak sister of a Cape Cod town, a poor foliage reputation, a short tourist season and a boring pine Canal.

If we could somehow wipe that slate clean, even if it takes a few generations, we could maybe get this town back on a payin' basis.

That's why we should do whatever it takes to plant ten thousand acorns along the Cape Cod Canal. Not just any acorns, either. We should take acorns from trees that produce spectacular foliage.

I won't make it to the mountain top with you, but once those acorns become trees, we'll have the premier foliage display in Massachusetts and perhaps New England.

It's all there for the taking.

New Hampshire and Vermont have it easy. They didn't plant those trees, and they only still have those trees because not enough people want to move to Vermont to warrant clearing space. They don't deserve that foliage.

Bourne, on the other hand, would aggressively select their trees. We'd be Mother Nature on steroids, ruthlessly saying which tree will grow where. With the tree huggers appeased by the planting of ten thousand trees. we'd be free to play God yet again with the Cape Cod Canal area.

If the right people (and I'm not one of them, I become useless as anything other than a laborer after the Idea Stage) are running this, we could have a ridiculous run of foliage down each side of an underutilized Canal.

Planned by experts, planted in rows fronting the Canal and dropping acorns of their own each year, the Canal Forest would both own and pwn the rest of New England as a foliage destination.

Bourne would then have some nice assets to work with.

We'd have a sweet location, maybe 25% of the drive someone might have to take to get to the Maine foliage. We'd have foliage that would kick in during the run-up to Thanksgiving, which also draws tourists into the region. We'd have hotels, gas stations and all that other stuff that leeches money out of tourists.

Most importantly, we'd have our ridiculous multi-colored Canal. The canal has plenty of parking, would feature easy access, boasts of long-but-not-too-long walks and would look like New Hampshire would look if it were planned.

You could probably sell boat tours of this new foliage run, with the added bonus of three bridges and one power plant. I think they already have Canal foliage boat tours, but this would become a larger venture if our Canal looks like the Mohawk Trail wishes it looked.

 This would merge nicely with our present Tourist Season.

The majority of the tourists leave after Labor Day.

The old people are smart enough to do Cape tourism after Labor Day, and they help push the season into October.

A foliage explosion in the Canal would push that season into maybe mid-November (you can still see foliage driving around Cape Cod today)...

... where it would merge with the Pilgrim/Wampanoag/Thanksgiving connection, which we should also figure out an angle from which we could extract profit from exploiting it.

We just need the ten thousand acorns.

How to get those ten thousand acorns is the question we need to solve. I have no intention of standing up at a town meeting with this idea, as I'm not tree-savvy enough to answer the questions that citizens would rightfully ask if something that smells like Tax is spoken of.

I have no idea how much ten thousand trees would cost. I'll try to find out before we publish, as I tend to work during the Witching Hour. Hopefully, this section between the pictures will be bigger tomorrow.

UPDATE: I bothered a few people, including Stephen Davis and Chuck Teravainen.

Maple saplings go $20-30 or so, live 100 years, grow 6-12 inches a year, and need about 20-25 yards of space. Wisteria is $20, and Dogwood goes $15. Aspen is $18-29. Water and fertilizer would be needed for the first few years.

These prices are awesome if you have a big yard and plan to hold onto the house. If you have a 7 mile Canal to fill 2 sides of at $15-30 every 20 yards, that adds up to... like...uhm... carry the two..... a lot of money.

It's not too hard to grow trees from acorns. It's much cheaper. We can get the kids to do the labor for nada.

One reason that I'm not worried about town meetings and how much trees or acorns cost is that I have no intention of buying acorns.

I was never in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts myself, but I always thought of Scouting as an admirable pursuit. I assume that they spend a lot of their time in the woods, doing woodsy things.

I'd challenge the little SOBs. Give the world an eco-friendly, cash-grabbing project that shows off the beauty of nature, and help along a struggling resort town in the process.

I don't know how many Scouts there are on Cape Cod, but if a hundred of them could be trained to identify acorns from the proper foliage trees, would it merit a few bus trips worth of cash to send them up into the Enemy States to each steal one hundred of their acorns?

One trip to New Hampshire for supplies, another to Bourne for planting. Train the DPW people well enough that they don't cut down saplings. I'm not above using specially-trained prison labor, but residents may disagree.

If the Scouts won't do it, each Cape Cod high school should be coerced into sending their kids up to gather acorns.

Yes, every school or Scout troop on Cape Cod. I sit through a lot of traffic so that Orleans and Yarmouth Port can get their tourists, and we want some payback in the form of acorns. Before those brats get their diplomas, they pay the Gatekeeper fifty acorns.

Some of that cash will bleed into their towns too, as people who walk the Foliage Canal might decide to trek down 6A, or maybe watch the sharks kill the seals in Chatham. Its win/win, unless you're a seal.

Someone should be coordinating this effort. It's a tough sell, because we won't see the payoff in our lifetimes, but the kids will. When those trees sprout, we'll be in business.

For the bother of gathering and planting a few acorns, we'll be the most easily accessible foliage spot for what I'd gather is a large % of the leaf-peeping population.

Would you rather drive 6 hours into the Vermont wilderness and amble down endless East Bufu roads looking for bursts of foliage, or would you rather blast down to Bourne in an hour and take a leisurely stroll through what would essentially be a bursting-with-color foliage theme park set by an ocean river?

Bourne, who lost their end o' summer cash cow when the Scallop Festival skipped town, would slowly evolve into the Autumn anchorman of Cape Cod.

New Hampshire won't know what hit them.