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.

The Pride Of Baltimore II In The Cape Cod Canal

A reproduction of the Baltimore Clipper style of topsail schooner, the Pride Of Baltimore II sailed through the Cape Cod Canal on Saturday.

The original Pride Of Baltimore sank in a 1986 gale, all hands lost. Pride II is a memorial ship. She has sailed 200,000 miles and hit 200 ports in 40 countries.

Sagamore Fog

It has been a tough spring on Cape Cod, as we are in the midst of some 40 days and 40 nights stuff.

I am basically reduced to B&W photography, which is all well and good save for the fact that I have a color camera.

Grey is technically a color.

This trip to the sea was supposed to be a whale watch, but this wet weather even makes whales- who live in water, remember- miserable.

That channel marker is almost green.

Improving The Cape Cod Canal

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 very 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.

How? I don't really know how trees work, which is a shameful way to be this far in Suburbia. From what I'd gather, they drop acorns and pine cones and so forth, which lodge in the ground and begin sprouting. Over a century or so, you end up with a big tree that gives us a color show every October.

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.