October 17, 1982 Q&A with Tom West and Tracy Kidder on "The Soul of A New Machine."

Folks who have read Tracy Kidder's book, "The Soul of a New Machine," will get a kick out of this transcription of a one-time event in Massachusetts in 1982 where Kidder and his book's real-life protagonist, Data General computer designer Tom West, reluctantly answer questions posed by an audience of computer enthusiasts. Both are candid, humble and very funny. In the photo Tracy Kidder is on the left and Tom West is on the right.

In 1984, when I was a sophomore at UMaine at Orono, my English professor, Richard Brucher, assigned us Kidder's book and a paper on it. Brucher was a huge fan of the book, though he did not let on how much (he had published a long analysis of it the year before).

I liked the book a lot, turned in my paper and got it back from Brucher covered with strident brackets and the words "So what?" all over the margins. I stopped by his office the next day and asked what he meant with all the "So Whats?" He said they meant my paper was at best hitting on one cylinder and I could do much better.

But what does "So What?" mean? I demanded. He said, "Every time you say something you need to stop and ask 'so what?'"

That was 26 years ago. I still have the copy of "Soul of A New Machine" I bought for Brucher's class. I've read it now about 6,000 times. Brucher's deadly red words of 'So What?' still haunt me every time I write.

Among all the compelling threads in "Soul ... " is the one where Kidder, the reporter and writer, and all of the people he is observing are all forced to ask themselves over and over ... 'So What'? Why am I doing this? Why are we doing this? For whose benefit? To what end? Why this instead of something else? Why even bother? Why not just go home? Why?

The closest antithesis to Kidder's book is Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, wherein Melville describes the day to day life of men dutifully and robotically doing the most boring job in the world -- copying with quill pen over and over lengthy, abstruse legal documents for an equally bored Manhattan real estate lawyer -- except for Bartleby, who decides to 'prefer' not to do the work anymore but 'prefers' to loyally stay at his desk but no longer do any work.

Kidder has said he began writing "Soul ..." as a magazine article upon the suggestion of his editor at Atlantic Monthly, Richard Todd, because Kidder at the time could think of 'nothing to write about.' He said he was shocked when one of the first computer engineers he met at Data General Corporation, Carl Alsing, took him aside in the cafeteria and described in terms more suited to Celtic battle myth what it was like to work at Data General building machines designed to manipulate large numbers at high speed.

Kidder berates his subjects, asking them over and over, 'why do you work so hard for so little'? He gets the computer designers to trust him enough to give him honest and questioning answers. Was Kidder the first journalist who ever took the time and interest to ask these questions of an engineer? Probably.

Kidder seems to have genuinely liked the people he interviewed, although interviewing is a pale word given how much time he spent with them, and they seem to have genuinely liked him. The proof this was not just a show is the discordant note from his sit-down interview with Data General's president, Edson de Castro. Intentional or not, Kidder's description of his interview with de Castro makes you feel like both are getting root canal work and waiting for the dentist to say "spit."

Even though "Soul ..." is meticulously crafted it seems almost created by instinct, as if Kidder had no idea what he was getting into but plunged in anyways, fell in way over his head, and faced a situation not too far from the one faced by the folks he wrote about.

It is easy to think of the millions of ways that "Soul ..." could have been a horribly boring or painfully trite piece of writing. It is exactly the opposite. While it often reads as fiction, it is not. Getting real, live people to open up to you to this depth is unbelievably hard. Writing something out of such an experience that is true but also does not hurt peoples' feelings is virtually impossible.

I am still amazed how Tracy Kidder did it.

Status and Future of Atlantic White Cedar in Hockomock Swamp, southeastern Massachusetts.

"Of these swamps, the most notable is the Great Cedar-Swamp so prized for its timber in the early days of our history. These swampy lands have very little value now; but they contain abundant promise of making the best farming portions of the section. They only need thorough draining in order to utilize their deep, rich, vegetable deposits, and turn them into fertile fields. The day is coming when this will be done." -- W. Chaffin, History of Easton, 1886.

By Chaffin's description of the Hockomock Swamp in 1886, he established that the Hockomock Swamp was originally an Atlantic white cedar swamp and by the time of his generation, the Hockomock had been almost completely logged of its cedar and 'had little value now.'

In this recent overview, I presented aerial photographs from 2001-2008 showing the contemporary extent of Atlantic white cedar stands in the Hockomock Swamp.

The scientific literature on Atlantic white cedar swamps suggests a combination of several forces -- clear cutting of cedar, changes in drainage patterns due to road and rail bed construction, and an asymmetrical dominance relation with swamp red maple -- have conspired to create permanent changes in the balance of cedar and red maple in the Hockomock to the great detriment of cedar.

Based upon these factors, it is unclear if the extant coverage of white cedar in the Hockomock can or will increase in the future on its own; if the remnant cedar stands in the swamp today are in decline and will continue to decline; and if active remedial efforts are necessary to increase the size of the stands or, perhaps are necessary to prevent further loss over time.

Laderman (1989) offers some sobering thoughts with relevance to the Hockomock:

"Hardwood and shrub leaf litter inhibit cedar germination to less than one percent."

"The floor of a wetland previously supporting Atlantic white cedar is the most favorable substrate."

"Cedar swamps have generally higher water levels than nearby red maple swamps and are flooded for longer periods."

"It would be expected that definitive guidelines for management of a tree that has been harvested since the first Europeans settled on the continent would have been developed long ago, yet this is not so. As with many other plentiful resources in the early days of development, the supply of cedar seemed endless. When all the cedar that was easy to remove was gone, the operators moved on. If less desirable cedars remained, they were commonly taken for fence posts, shingles or even firewood. Fast growing hardwoods often replaced cedar, and the nature of the forest changed."

If Laderman's conclusions are true, this offers little hope for natural regeneration and expansion of Atlantic white cedar in vast portions of the Hockomock where it is now completely absent; and little hope for the expansion or even continued maintenance of small, isolated stands.

Atlantic white cedar are now completely absent from the Hockomock in a zone extending east from the old railroad bed, to Route 138 and to the abandoned Maple Street/Hall Street road grade from Raynham to West Bridgewater, except for one small, isolated stand just west of Maple Street. This area comprises a large portion of the Hockomock.

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This aerial shows a complete absence of cedar east of the railroad grade (yellow line) to Route 138 (red line) and beyond. The dark green areas are cedar. The question is: are these green zones of cedar shrinking or growing? If they are shrinking, then we are watching the demise of the last large remnant of the Great Hockomock Cedar Swamp.

If we assume this entire area was heavily logged for cedar in the 18th and 19th centuries (which general information suggests was the case), the aerials suggest that the area west of the railroad grade successfully regenerated in cedar while the swamp east of the railroad grade did not. What is striking is the high density and large expanses of cedar all the way up to the railroad bed and its complete replacement by swamp red maple on the other side of the rail bed. Having walked through this area extensively and field checked the aerials, I can confirm that cedars are completely absent east of the rail bed to Route 138 and the swamp in this area is virtually pure red maple.

The pattern exhibited at the 1880 railroad grade suggests it dammed the swamp enough to 'dry out' the swamp east of the grade, thus making conditions more suitable for colonization by red maple which now totally dominate the Swamp to Route 138 and almost to Route 24. This fits a pattern seen across the swamp, wherein extant cedar stands are invariably found 'above' (ie. upstream) of these roadbed dams (where the water is impounded) and are absent directly below them (where the roadbed has made the swamp slightly drier). This presence/absence pattern is seen at the north/south crossings of the Old Colony railroad bed, at the abandoned roadbed at Maple Street and at Route 24.

It is difficult to look at the aerial image above and not see that the white cedar swamp originally extended well to the east of the railroad grade and was somehow, in the past, truncated by it. But if our model assumption is true that all of this area was logged for cedar in the 19th century, something other than logging alone caused cedar to fail to regenerate east of the railroad grade. The most likely answer is a change in seasonal water table due to the grade itself that favored red maple on the 'dry' side. If we assume the area on both sides of the railroad grade was logged equally, we have to assume conditions were sufficient for cedars to regenerate from seedlings and small trees on the left side of the grade but conditions had changed enough on the right side of the grade to allow red maple to get the upper hand. And according to Alderman, once red maple gains a strong foothold in a logged-out cedar swamp its dominance becomes permanent. This appears to be the case from the railroad grade to Route 138.

The Uniqueness of the Hockomock

As noted by Laderman, most Atlantic white cedar swamps in southeastern Mass. were formed in kettle hole depressions after the Wisconsinan glaciation, wherein large blocks of glacial ice were buried by outwash debris and created isolated, deep depressions in the landscape after deglaciation. The Hockomock is 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than these small cedar swamps and is much more hydrologically complex (it's a lake bottom, not a kettle hole). The large expanse of the Hockomock and its numerous lobes has made it much more susceptible to man-made water level changes (due to large-scale road building, primarily) than much smaller and hydrologically simple kettle-hole shaped cedar swamps. Despite its larger size, I believe this has made it much harder for the Hockomock to regenerate its cedar stands after severe or total cutting because drainage changes have tended to fragment the swamp and cause large scale water table changes that tend to favor regeneration by red maple over cedar at a magnitude not seen in smaller, much more confined cedar swamps.

The area surrounding Nunkets Pond in the Swamp supports this hypothesis since (assuming a 1800s heavy cutting) its cedar have regenerated and its overall drainage pattern has not been altered:

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While I have not extensively investigated this hypothesis, there does seem to be a correlation between the size of a cedar swamp and the degree its drainage patterns have been altered and its ability to regenerate and maintain its original Atlantic white cedar stands after severe cutting. Smaller, more hydrologically simple and isolated cedar swamps tend to be better able to regenerate and not succumb to takeover by more aggressive and generalist swamp red maple.

As a simple matter of area, you could fit a lot of small cedar swamps into the Hockomock. It's just that big. But regeneration of cedar after cutting during the past 150-200 years seems to be much more depauperate in the Hockomock than in smaller cedar swamps. Moreover, wide swaths of the Swamp today have the appearance of a monoculture -- red maple -- and what is known of cedar swamp dynamics suggest a 'tipping point' where a swamp dominated by red maple tends to stay that way permanently due to the highly specific germination and growth needs of cedar.

This suggests a disturbing hypothesis; either the extant wide swaths of pure red maple in the Hockomock were always pure and always there (which means most historical accounts were completely wrong), or the Hock has been radically and permanently altered by severe cutting of its cedar and drainage changes due to road building that favor red maple over cedar.

Why Should We Care?

As much as I like tromping about in the vast, pure red maple stands of the Hockomock, I can't help feeling I'm walking (slogging) through a man-made monoculture. Aerial views of the Hock show actual tree species distribution patterns that are explained better by human intervention than natural distribution of tree species and suggest human intervention in the last 200 years as radically and negatively affected the habitat value of the Hockomock, which after all, was preserved in the 1960s solely for its value has habitat, particularly for rare and endangered species requiring large amounts of undisturbed natural habitat.

Laderman (1989) reports unique and high habitat values for large intact Atlantic white cedar swamps, all the more important in Massachusetts because most of its cedar swamps no longer exist:

"In the Northeast, a preferred winter browse for white tailed deer is white cedar foliage and twigs. Cottontail rabbit and meadow mouse and feed of cedar seedlings ....

"Cedar stands in the Great Dismal National Wildlife Refuge supported the great bird density of coniferous forests censused in the United States in 1981. These stands held nearly twice as many birds per unit area as a surrounding maple-gum forest. Parulid warblers are the most dominant birds in Great Dismal cedar stands; prairie, prothonotory, hooded and worm-eating warblers, oven birds and yellowthroats comprised about 3/4ths of the breeding birds found. Prairie and worm-eating warblers appear to be particularly dependent on the Great Dismal cedars. An "over mature" stand, one with most trees over 100 years old, was particularly well populated."

So as a general rule, the extent to which the Hockomock today has veered away from its natural condition detracts from the very values for which it has been recently preserved. What's missing is an analysis of to what extent and in what fashion the Hockomock no longer resembles itself, as defined by its character prior to being mauled by loggers in the 19th century and road builders in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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References:
Laderman, A.E. 1989. The Ecology of Atlantic White Cedar Wetlands: A Community Profile. U.S. Dept. of Interior. Biological Report 85 (7.21). Washington, D.C.

"Hockomock: Wonder Wetland" is now on-line thanks to Wildlands Trust of Southeastern Massachusetts.

If you walk very deep into the Hockomock Swamp on a fall day and lie down on your back, this is what you see.

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The Wildlands Trust of Southeastern Massachusetts has reproduced and put on-line (mirrored here), the full text and illustrations of the landmark 1968 book: "Hockomock: Wonder Wetland." It is in PDF file format and can be read and downloaded here.

For many years, in a cardboard box up in our attic in Easton, our dad, Allan Watts, kept about 100 copies of this seminal book, and around 2001 my brother Tim Watts grabbed a copy and hunted and pecked on the keyboard of his computer to write much of the book's text onto his website, GlooskapandTheFrog, to preserve it. As Timmy wrote:

"We have shamelessly copied the book here on our website. The only contact we could make about using it was with Ted Williams. Ted wrote the history chapter. He was pleased that we wanted to use his writing on our website and was surprised that copies of the book were still around after thirty years. We were unable to contact the others who contributed, but we used their writing anyway. It's just too good and too important to be out of circulation. This booklet came into my hands only because my dad was part of the small group that recognized the value of the Hock thirty years ago. Although I was quite young thirty years ago, I can still recall seeing bumper stickers around the Town of Easton where I grew up. They said, "Don't Knock The Hock."

Black Brook, Hockomock Swamp, at the southeasternmost corner of Easton. October 10, 2010. This is very good drinking water.

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This site, "Tispaquin's Revenge," and its mirror site, "Lost in Easton," and Tim's site, "Glooskap and the Frog," are no more or less our attempts to build upon the power that "Hockomock: A Wonder Wetland" held within our small, pliable heads when we were 12 and wanted Dad to bring us down the Snake River or the Hockomock River after work in the canoe to fish for perch and pickerel and look for giant snapping turtles in the depths of the Hockomock.

Now that my dad has been gone since 1996, and it is more than 40 years since Betty Anderson, Ted Williams and Henry Moore wrote "Hockomock: A Wonder Wetland", something in me feels a need to take stock of what has been gained and what has been lost in the Hockomock since that pivotal time; and as important what has changed, or has not changed, in peoples' psyches about the Hockomock since that time. In other words, my key concern is where is the Hockomock headed? Who is taking care of it? Who is looking out for it? Who is keeping their finger on its pulse and vital signs? Do we even know if it is healthy or not? And how do we know? What are its vital signs?

Those who wrote and distributed "Hockomock" in 1968 had a more daunting task than we have today. During their time, as the bulk of the text shows, it was a huge task just to explain and defend a wetland's very right to exist. At this time, swamps were considered vile, useless things that needed to be quickly filled or drained and converted to 'useful' land. "Hockomock" was a brave and unrelenting scientific assault on this false paradigm, and shows a young Ted Williams exercising the type of muscle and sinew he has since parlayed into becoming one of America's finest conservation writers. It is not coincidental Ted cut the first notches in his belt defending right of the Hockomock to exist.

But as Ted knows well, the places championed by rising writers need to be continually protected long after the fanfare and hubbub and grant funding has passed them by to newer frontiers. The Hockomock is one of them. Where in the past, engineers with drafting pencils could obliterate the Swamp with one stroke (as they tried in the 1960s), the Hockomock and many places like it now face death by one thousand tiny paper cuts. None of these paper cuts is in isolation enough to raise the ire of alert citizens groups, but collectively, over time, they are enough to make a place not function anymore, except as a shell, a spot on a faded map, a forgotten sign nailed to a dying tree.

This is what I fear for the Hockomock. Today the Hockomock is not healthy. It is not in good condition. It is being pelted by blunderbusses of insult from all directions. These insults are not abating. What is abating is interest and vigor of those who profess a goal of protecting the Hockomock. Which brings us to the key questions:

What is the Hockomock?

What is the baseline to gage its health?

As the Hockomock existed in 1660, 1760, 1860, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 or 2010?

Who gets to choose?

The folks who wrote "The Hockomock" in 1967-68 knew they had started a battle, not finished it. They expected us to finish it.

Do we care enough to finish it?

Are we aware enough to finish it?

It's up to us now, in 2010, to frame the debate in the same way Kathleen Anderson, Henry Moore and Ted Williams did in 1968.

In the fall of 1990, me and my friend Bob LeSieur took a rental plane from Mansfield Airport at night to Buzzards Bay and back. Bob flew, I looked. It was night by the time we got into the air. Once we got up to about 1,000 feet we could clearly see the entire landscape in which we grew up below us, defined by light and lack of light. What I noticed was that from Mansfield south to Cuttyhunk was an almost relentless onslaught of artificial light. Except in the ocean itself, not a single small space, from Plymouth to Providence, was not dotted by a Christmas Tree necklace of bright sodium lights.

Except the Hockomock Swamp. The Swamp stood out as a giant black spot of no light surrounded by endless light. I could discern the Swamp's bounds in the night, at 1,000 feet of altitude, just by seeing where the light stopped and the darkness began, from Taunton to Easton and Norton to West Bridgewater. Bob and I touched down in Mansfield after about an hour.

That same night, John DeVillars, then the Mass. Commissioner of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, had convened a meeting in Bridgewater Town Hall to hear public comments on the state's proposal to declare the Hockomock Swamp and its surrounding environs an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), a new and untested state designation that would subject any new and large development (like a huge shopping mall) to a higher level of regulatory scrutiny than would otherwise be provided. At this time, a developer had just proposed such a shopping mall near Route 104 just south of Nippinicket Pond and the state felt the need to oppose it because of the damage it would do to the Hockomock Swamp.

At that meeting in the very old Bridgewater Town Hall, I had just come off a small plane flying over the Hockomock at night. And I told the 50 or so folks there what I had just seen. What I told them I saw was an island of darkness in a sea of lights, traffic lights and street lights from Boston to Martha's Vineyard. The only dark spot was the Hockomock. And I asked the folks in Bridgewater what could possibly be gained by our kids if that one place, the Hockomock, was slowly, year by year, criss-crossed so much by streets and roads and trains and highways and malls so that it looked exactly like everything else does at night: a giant parking lot.

That was 20 years ago. In 2002, the Massachusetts Legislature illegally pushed through a number of bills which forbade the state's own environmental department to examine the effect of putting a high speed passenger rail line through the last and most remote section of the Hockomock Swamp: in Easton. This was despite the ACEC designation given to the Swamp just 12 years earlier. Every effort by local Easton citizens over the past 30 years and John DeVillars himself in 1990, flew out the window because the MBTA decided to ram-rod a train line through the Hockomock because it was the path of least resistance, ie. who cares about a swamp anyways? Some battles are never truly won.

So here we stand today. Like the Dickey-Lincoln Dam Project proposed from 1955-1970 in northern Maine's Allagash and St. John Rivers, the MBTA's plan to wreck the Hockomock will never be truly dead so long as they cling with their cold dead fingers to the 1880 right of way through the Swamp and pray over chicken heads and feathers for a U.S. Congress dimwitted enough to fork over $5 billion to put it up 6,400 feet of tracks on stilts to satisfy George Carney.

This is not the debate we should be having in 2010. My father fought and won this battle in 1966. We, as a State, decided the Hockomock should be protected and preserved. An entire generation of kids, like myself, have grown up with the safe knowledge that the Hockomock will not be screwed with again and the battles our parents fought to save it will not need to be fought over and over and over again.

My friend Bill Townsend said to me, "we are the water that slowly wears away the stone." But the corollary is, "these bastards have endless supplies of sand to wear the gears smooth." Choose your aphorism; but follow the dollar.

The Hockomock Swamp today is losing. Losing ground. Losing vitality. Losing support. Losing its life.

As any map from 1968 shows, the Hock's trajectory since has been toward retreat, not advance, and like Pometacom and Tispaquin in 1676, it has nowhere to go. Is anyone breaking ground to build new swamps lately?

Looking down at the Hockomock from Bob LeSieur's rented Piper Cub in 1990 and seeing the sea of darkness in the Swamp was like in 2003 when I wandered deep into the swamp and noticed how unbelievably quiet it is. Henry Moore wrote in 1966:

"Why do we value a swamp that cannot be drained, filled, flooded or even "used" or "improved" in the modern sense of those overworked words? Stop reading here if you know the answer. Keep going if you don’t.

The Hockomock Swamp is a 10-square-mile living example of why the best "use" or "improvement" of most wetlands in this or any other state is often to simply leave it alone. Twenty-five thousand years ago the Hockomock was buried under glacial ice. Twelve thousand years ago it was a lake.

Today it is a self-perpetuating 7 1/2 billion-gallon water storage and flood control project that didn’t cost a dime to build or operate – and never will if it is preserved. It is also a treasure house of bird, animal, fish, reptile, insect, plant and forest life that didn’t cost a penny to assemble and house – and never will if it is preserved."

Possibly most important, it is a 6,000 acre oasis of peace and quiet in a world gone mad with speed, noise and strife. It can always remain that way if it isn’t destroyed in the name of "progress."

The next day, in 1990, after the meeting at Bridgewater Town Hall, I told my friend about it at the construction site we were working on at Titicut Street on the Raynham/Taunton town line. He said, "Douglas, if you want wild animals, why not go up to Maine."

While he didn't mean it, my high school friend's casual words stung me so deeply I have never forgotten them. I wanted to scream, "I shouldn't have to go up to Maine to see the outdoors."

I didn't know I was just repeating what an old time muskrat trapper, Harvey Ellis of Bridgewater, told Ted Williams when I was still in diapers. Mr. Ellis told Williams, "They ask me why I don't go North and I don't say too much. Why go North when I've got it all right here?"

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If you lie your head on the trunk of a swamp red maple in the heart of the Hockomock Swamp, look up, and then turn your head gently, this is what you see.

Bigfoot Paw Print Discovered in Bridgewater Triangle !!!

Well, it does look amazingly like a human-type footprint. But it's actually Nunkets Pond, just west of the Nip in the Hockomock in Bridgewater.

They don't grow small BigFoot (feet?) in the Hock, you know.

Reconstructing the Hockomock Swamp: What Used to be There and How Do We Restore It?

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By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine
November, 2010

Commonwealth of Massachusetts aerial photos from 2001-2008 provide a good overall picture of the landscape and vegetation types which exist today in the Hockomock Swamp. These photographs show that today, only 15-20 percent of the Swamp is dominated by Atlantic white cedar and most of the Swamp is bereft of the species. These photographs suggest that road and railroad grades built through the swamp have changed drainage patterns in the Swamp in favor of regeneration of pure stands of swamp red maple and against regeneration of existing and former stands of Atlantic white cedar. This essay proposes that unless active efforts are made to eliminate the negative effects of these man-made drainage changes and to actively re-seed Atlantic white cedar where it once grew and has been eliminated, Atlantic white cedar will eventually disappear from the Hockomock and be replaced by pure stands of swamp red maple. Such an event will eliminate much of the biodiversity of the Swamp and allow it to become a man-made monoculture, rather than a natural place.

In the map above, I have arbitrarily broken the swamp into four sections or "lobes." Section 1 is that portion from Howard Street in Easton east to Route 138, south of Route 106 and north from the Snake River at the outlet of Winneconnet Pond and Route 495.

Section 2, the "Central Section" is south of Route 106, north of Route 495, and east to Route 24, including the Nip and Nunkets Ponds.

Section 3 is the long vertical lobe east of Route 24 where the waters of the Nunketetest (Town River) join with West Meadows Brook south of Prospect Street and Route 106 in West Bridgewater.

Section 4 is Dead Swamp in Raynham, and just to the east, Titicut Swamp, both cut on their northerly sides by Route 495 and its cloverleaves. While I could add Little Cedar Swamp in Easton, just above Route 106 and Pine Swamp in Raynham, this map gives the lay-out of what most people consider the Swamp proper.

Looking at the large scale map, it is easy to see the Hockomock's ultimate origin as a glacial lake bottom, with the swamp now forming the 'shoreline' of the lake. This glacial lake is variously called "Glacial Lake Taunton" or the "Leverett Sea" depending on which geological text and author you look at. The higher grounds, easily seen because they are now the sites of roads and houses, are peninsulas in the original glacial lake where the land was higher. The smaller 'dots' of swamp and lowland on the peninsulas and around the main mass of the Hockomock correspond to 'deep' holes in the glacial lake.

Once you view the Hockomock as a glacial lake you can see how it formed: the lowest spots in the lake bottom, not having an outlet (due to various restrictive bottom conditions), slowly infilled over the past 8-9,000 years with vegetation which kept decaying into peat, creating a flat, level surface of rotted vegetation spanning 6,000 acres and five towns.

Mass GIS imagery from 2001-2008, taken in late fall and/or early spring, gives us a unique tool to gauge the existing vegetation types of the Hockomock because during these times of year, the deciduous trees in the swamp (mostly swamp red maple) have lost their leaves and look greyish purple at high altitude. White pine and Atlantic white cedar retain their evergreen color.

White pine only grow on islands and high ground in and along the swamp. Atlantic white cedar prefer much wetter areas that pine cannot grow in. By comparison to USGS topographic maps, comparative foliage color, and field checking, it is easy to distinguish stands of pine and cedar in the swamp. Through this process we can generate an accurate map of contiguous Atlantic white cedar stands in the swamp. By looking at such a map we can see there are surprisingly few stands of Atlantic white cedar in the Hockomock today.

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The largest Atlantic white cedar stand is in Section 1, between Howard Street in Easton and the Raynham Dog Track on Route 138 in Raynham (click on image to see full size). I've drawn yellow lines to delineate the Swamp boundary from the 'high ground' around it. This helps to see the Swamp as the level remnant of a glacial lake bottom, with 'islands' as well as 'tributaries.' Route 495 and the Snake River, the outlet of Winneconnet Pond are at the bottom of the photo. The red line is the old railroad grade east of Route 138. The Atlantic white cedar stands can be easily seen as the green foliaged area in the middle of the photo. You can tell at least part of this aerial montage was taken in late fall, due to the cranberry bog in the left center being bright red. The Easton Rod and Gun Club and dug trout pond off Howard Street is just above and to the right of the bog.

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In the above photo, I've narrowed down on the Atlantic white cedar stand in Section 1 to show it in greater detail. Here, the coloration difference between cedar and white pine is obvious (the white pine has foliage that is a 'yellower' green than the cedar); and I have been able to field check these differences in the photos by walking this section of the Swamp. The color differences are real. What is immediately obvious is the sharp line between the cedar stands on the left (west) side of the old railroad grade (the yellow line) and their complete absence east (right) of the railroad grade; and how dense cedar stands tend to hug the edge of the Swamp on its west side to the right of the cranberry bogs.

The yellow line is not an arbitrary marker: it is the railroad bed of the Old Colony Rail Line, built through the Swamp c. 1875-1880. It is raised above the Swamp by about 10 feet and is made of imported earthen fill. When it was built, a number of narrow 'box culverts' of roughly cut granite were placed at its base at scattered intervals to allow the water from the Swamp to continue moving from West to East (left to right). As these aerial photos show, the railroad grade has prevented the growth and regeneration of Atlantic white cedar on its east or 'downstream' side. As the photo shows, there are no white cedar stands east of the railroad grade, yet they are are very expansive on its west side right up to the grade. This is because the grade acts as a dam in the Swamp and makes the right side (the downstream side) drier than it used to be and dry enough to keep cedars from effectively competing with swamp red maple, which can tolerate drier conditions than cedar. From the railroad grade east to Route 138 and then to Maple Street/Hall Street, Atlantic white cedar are completely absent.

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In these closer photos of the Swamp next to the old rail grade, you see darker 'lobes' moving left to right. These correspond to slightly wetter areas, which correspond to the location of box culverts on the railroad grade that let water through. In these aerial photos, denser stands of smaller swamp red maple are slightly darker in coloration and correspond to a wetter area.

In the second photo, I've drawn with yellow the 'plumes' of water flowing from the box culverts as they exit the railroad grade and travel due east. Three plumes are clearly seen in the photos. Note how they match well with dense stands of cedar on the left side of the railroad bed, but the cedar does not continue on the opposite side of the bed, which is pure swamp red maple.

To me these photos suggest that prior to construction of the railroad bed, the cedar stands continued to the east of the grade but were logged out and, for some reason, have not regenerated. This is odd if only because if we assume that the cedar stands were logged equally on both sides of the bed, both sides should have equally regenerated during the time it is presumed they were cut (150 years ago). Why the disparity?

Honestly, I don't know. But I think it has something to do with a complicated interaction with the fact that Atlantic white cedar trees propagate by dropping their cones on the floor of the swamp and the water levels of the swamp being changed by the erection of a 'dam' (the railroad grade) that made the east side of the grade not conducive to regeneration by cedar and also, by it being kept physically separate from extant stands of cedar on the west side of the grade.

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Section II -- The Hockomock Central Portion

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In Section 2, cedar are in a small cluster (I) just west of the now-abandoned Maple Street at the extreme southeast corner of Easton; around the shore of Nunkets Pond just west of Nippinicket Pond (II) and in a wide vertical swath just west of Route 24 (III) (click on image to see full size). The red line is Route 138 in South Easton and Raynham. The very high resolution photo below, of Nunkets Pond next to the Nip, shows how easy it is to discern white pine from cedar and high ground from low ground.

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Hockomock Section III -- the Eastern Portion




















Despite its size, Section 3 contains no contiguous stands of cedar, although scattered, isolated clumps appear to be present (click on image to see full size). Route 24 is on the left. The Nunketetest (Town River) is in the upper part of the photo, flowing left to right.

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What Do the Images Tell Us?

Just as a ball park estimate, the Hockomock today appears to be comprised of less than 20 percent Atlantic white cedar; and those trees are in widely separated stands with vast, nearly pure swaths of red maple between them. Was it always this way?

Most likely not. Due to the durability of the wood and their straight trunks, Atlantic white cedar swamps were aggressively logged for their trees in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the Hockomock. Logging was most likely done in the dead of winter when the swamp was frozen and paths the width of oxen or horse team could be made to cut and remove the trees. In all likelihood most of what remains standing in the Hockomock today are the chest-high seedlings Atlantic white cedar left over from those cutting operations, now grown up over the past 100-200 years into mature trees. What is puzzling, and the real point, is why most of the swamp's Atlantic white cedars have never regenerated. I believe this is due to a complex folding of the cutting with the construction of roads and railroad beds; and when these factors conspired to prevent the logged out stands of Atlantic white cedar from regenerating, even after 150 years, and has allowed swamp red maple to become the apex and sole canopy tree species in the 'new' Hockomock Swamp.

Evidence for this is shown in that the wide and broad monotypes of swamp red maple east of the railroad bed and Route 138 show no sign of re-emergence of cedar (ie. no seedlings) and total dominance by swamp red maple. This represents a paradigm change in the forest pattern of the swamp; and one that appears to be permanent. By our understanding of the cedar/red maple interaction, the remaining Atlantic white cedar stands of the Hockomock are most likely headed toward extinction and eventual piecemeal replacement by swamp red maple. Should we care?

You Can't Prove A Negative

Was every pre-colonial Atlantic white cedar in the Hockomock chopped down? To show that you'd have to physically inspect every cedar tree in the Hockomock: a daunting task. Was it possible? Yes, given Yankee 'greed and ingenuity' from the 1800s and 1700s to cut down every tree in sight. Did it actually happen? Nobody knows because nobody today has done the type of exhaustive checking such a conclusion requires to be valid.

But from a landscape restoration and preservation perspective for the Hockomock, this question is secondary. The primary question is what are we going to do today? Because most of the Hockomock is protected as state wildlife management land, any further cutting is basically illegal. That's good.

But that 'steady state' of preservation alone does not provide insight into what used to be, what it could be, what is stopping it, and what can be done now to bring the Hockomock in a direction toward -- rather than exorably away from -- what it was.

The Dams of the Hockomock

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This photo shows perhaps the best evidence of how the dams across the Hockomock Swamp have altered its natural character. Note how the large Atlantic White cedar swamp west of the old railroad bed abruptly ends at the bed and disappears on its 'downstream' side and does not re-emerge. It is hard to envision a scenario where 18th and 19th century loggers would selectively clear-cut only the cedars on the right hand side of the railroad grade and leave the left hand side uncut. This suggests that a change in hydrology due to the railroad bed must be the cause of the complete absence of cedars on the right hand side of the railbed and their continued abundance on the left hand side.

A cursory glimpse at aerial views of the Hockomock shows four long dams crossing its mid-section, three formed by roads and one formed by a railroad grade. These are from west to east, the N-S railroad grade east of Route 138, Route 138 itself, Maple Street from Raynham to West Bridgewater and Route 24 itself. The first three lie 'straight through' the Hockomock, while most of Route 24 follows a peninsula of naturally higher ground except where the Town River itself crosses beneath it. The first three function as low, but potent earthen dams that greatly alter the depth and movement of water in the swamp; and in doing so the habitat for trees and wetland vegetation.

Should we care? I think so. Waterflow in the Hockomock travels from west to east. All three of the first barriers constrain this water movement, forcing it to flow through small culverts, now mostly clogged with debris. Walking on these barriers, their west side is obvious the "wet side" and the opposite side is noticeably drier. Water flowing through the swamp from west to east is forced to pool up against these dams and flow parallel to it until it finds a small box culvert that is still not totally clogged with debris.

A cursory examination of the railroad grade east of Route 138 shows a high density of cedar swamp on the west side of the grade and a total absence of cedars on the east side remarkably coincident with the railroad grade itself. This railroad grade was built c. 1875-1880. The MBTA prizes this overgrown railroad grade because it wants to use it to build a high speed railroad line from Stoughton to New Bedford. But now, because of the enormous, and admitted, negative effects of raising and rebuilding the grade to accommodate 80 mph passenger rail, MBTA has proposed putting the rail line through the Hockomock on stilts, or as they say, a 6,400 foot long 'trestle.'

Well, fine. This means that whether the train ever passes through or not, the existing railbed can be dug up and removed, restoring the swamp's natural flowage pattern. I am not concerned at how this might affect existing ATC and dirt bike use, since this use is being conducted illegally anyways.

The old Maple Street/Hall Street 'grade' from Raynham to West Bridgewater is another story. Except as a conduit for illegal ATV traffic, it serves no purpose except to radically and negatively alter the drainage pattern of the Swamp. As you can tell by walking along it from the Raynham end, it forces Black Brook to flow parallel to it for more than 1,000 feet, making the west side of the berm unnaturally wet and the east side unnaturally dry. In a place like the Hockomock, where just a few inches of difference in standing water and water table changes the entire tree species assemblage, the berm has a decidedly negative effect, heaped upon the fact the grade/berm never should have been built in the first place and will never carry any traffic ever again.

Simple Solutions?

It would take one summer season with a couple excavators and a few dump trucks to remove both of these post 1880 'dams' that cross the width and breadth of the Hockomock, just by digging them down to swamp level and removing and trucking out the artificial fill used to create them. The cost would be less than repaving a similarly long section of Route 24 which is done almost every year. And unlike repaving Route 24, once done it would be done in perpetuity. The natural drainage pattern of the Hockomock would be permanently restored and rescued from a time when people wanted to destroy it but only lacked the capital to do so. Then put in boardwalks so people can walk through.

Time to End the Trope of the Abused Child

Efforts to save what is left of the Hockomock date back to the 1960s. For obvious reasons, which I do not knock, the emphasis was placed on not allowing the rest of the Swamp to be filled and destroyed, as was certainly the tenor of those times. But that was nearly 50 years ago. The available land was bought and a fairly good-sized chunk of the Swamp was placed under state ownership. The path toward the destruction of those purchased lands was averted. The folks involved rightly breathed a sigh of relief. They deserve immense credit for what they did.

But this is 50 years later. During this time the uplands and swamp directly adjacent to the state-owned part of the Swamp have been chewed and ravaged by umpteen subsequent encroachments. All of which trend negatively on those values for which the Hockomock was first preserved: as a wild, clean and unspoiled place amidst a helter-skelter of urban-suburban pavement of ugliness.

I use the "Abused Child" analogy here in the sense that it is good for the police to come and stop your husband or boyfriend from beating your kid to death with a tire iron; but that interdictment alone does little to help the kid figure out how to save her sense of self and make it in the world. There is a difference between a tourniquet and triage and a stable existence. The preservation efforts on the Hockomock in the 1960s were the tourniquet and Medivac triage. But it is foolish to confuse these efforts as commensurate with a stable, normal and healthy post-traumatic existence.

Exploring the Bridgewater Triangle and the Hockomock Swamp: Was Bigfoot a Bull Moose?

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine
November, 2010

Since around 1970 a number of authors, bored newspaper reporters, amateur attention seekers, the easily befuddled, the benignly mentally unstable and the slightly or highly inebriated have combined efforts to weave a rich tapestry which persists today under the name, "The Bridgewater Triangle."[1]

Why a Triangle and not a Trapezoid?

As the character Eb in Neil Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon points out, any three points form a triangle. If you add one more point, you get a trapezoid, or a rhombus, or a rectangle or a square.

Author Loren Coleman takes credit for naming the Bridgewater Triangle around 1970. His choice of polygons was not coincidental, since at the time much hay was made about the presence of the "Bermuda Triangle" aka "The Devil's Triangle" in the mid-Atlantic.

Whether fuelled by sincere belief, hope of fame or a bit of both, Coleman was astute enough at marketing to realize that glomming onto a then-in-vogue phrase associated with the supernatural would give "The Bridgewater Triangle" media traction not available if he had named it "The Taunton Trapezoid" or the "Hockomock Hexagon" or the "Raynham Rhombus."

Once Coleman had selected this admittedly catchy name, he had to explain why he selected the specific vertices of his triangle; why he did not choose others; and why he ignored 'supernatural' events that were reported near but outside the strict perimeter of the triangle he drew in pencil on a AAA road map of Massachusetts.

Coleman's choice of a highly specific shape, the triangle, and a highly defined bounds for that triangle, should have been derived from a scatter plot of reports and sightings that were constrained to within that triangle at a rate greater than would be expected by chance.

But once Coleman published his chosen shape (a triangle) and selected its vertices and bounds, any subsequent reports and memories of weird phenomena would tend to be those occuring within the bounds of the arbitrary lines that Coleman first drew.

This creates a self-reinforcing dynamic, called bootstrapping, wherein people who had 'weird' experiences within the Triangle feel encouraged to report them, while those who had 'weird' experiences outside the bounds of the triangle feel proportionately less encouraged to report them, lest their reports disturb the pre-set bounds of the Triangle. And then, voila, subsequent reportings tend to support the validity of the original, arbitrary bounds and shape of the 'triangle.'

Medical researchers have long been aware of this psychological effect on both subject/informant and researcher, which is why drug evaluations are done "double blind" wherein neither the test subject or the researcher knows who got the drug and who got a placebo. This all derives from the placebo effect, wherein patients given a pill they are told might cure their ailment sometimes respond positively even though they were given a sugar pill. And doctors, with lots of time and effort on the line working to devise a new cure, will often subconsciously interpret study results to show the drug has a productive effect, simply because they know which patients received the 'real' drug and which received a sugar pill. Hence the need for double blind studies.

The research collected by 'paranormal' researchers about the Bridgewater Triangle is a textbook example of all the key flaws of non-double-blind research. The researcher is clearly biased: he wants to find positive evidence to support his pre-determined conclusion.[2] The 'subjects' are entirely self-selected in the sense that they will only make 'reports' if they fit and support the conclusions the researcher has already told them. Not surprisingly, folks like Loren Coleman only get emails and letters from people who basically want to tell Coleman something that supports, rather than detracts from, what he has already said. Nobody takes the time to write to Coleman to say they have never seen UFOs or Bigfoot in the Hockomock. Self-selection bias is deadly and is well known to pollsters, psychologists and medical researchers.

As Kevin Spacey said to Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross about Helen and Bruce Nyborg: "They're insane, Shelley. They just happen to like talking to salesmen."

A Long Tradition of Scary Spooky Stories -- Now Updated !!!

The legend of the Bridgewater Triangle has all the characteristics of a meme: a story or belief that propagates itself regardless of its truth. "Urban myths" form an entire class of this psychological phenomena. We all know this phenomena from parties and jobs, where we tend to agree with somebody we wish to impress even if they say something we don't actually agree with. It's all a risk/benefit calculation.

If you're in a job interview or talking to your boss and they say something kooky, and you want to get the job or keep your job or get promoted, the risk of agreeing with them is minimal and the benefits are tangible. But the risk of disagreeing with them are real, ie. not getting the job, not keeping the job, or not getting promoted. So in a calculation that often occurs at the subconscious level, the risk/benefits are strongly weighted on telling your boss you agree with them, and if you want extra brownie points, providing them with an anecdote or argument that strengthens their position. Thus the origin of the "Yes Man."

This is the departure point between science and pseudoscience. Pseudoscientists seek information that confirms or supports their initial hypothesis. Scientists seek information that disproves their hypothesis; not because they want their hypothesis disproven, but because they know the only way for a scientific hypothesis to have an integrity is if it has been subjected to the most strenuous falsification tests possible. This is why car makers run their cars headlong into cement walls rather than into giant soft pillows to test the durability of their chassis when striking cement walls.

The Good Done by Bridgewater Triangle Enthusiasts

Once you take into account all of the psychological effects described above, the many and various 'reports' supplied by ordinary folk to 'paranormal' researchers about the Hockomock Swamp and the surrounding environs provide a great deal of value. Why do people take time to supply this information?

The first reason is simple: people like to be listened to.

The second is deeper: for many people who grew up around the Hockomock, the place does exert a sense of awe and mystery. I believe this emotional response is a good thing that should be encouraged. It's a child-like awe that, when removed, results in strip-malls, apathy, and obsessive television viewing.

Ultimately, the Bridgewater Triangle boils down to two questions that young kids always ask, "Why?" and "What if?" Our society seems determined to stamp out those questions. It is not a good thing, especially for the advancement of science.

The Hockomock has always been a cipher. This is a good thing. It would be a terrible loss if every square inch of it could be studied and analyzed to squeeze out, capture and contain for analysis every unknown which it holds. It would be a very wet, but very dry husk. Sort of like if a neuroscientist could exactly explain why Pablo Picasso or Louis Armstrong made every brush stroke and every trumpet note they ever made just by putting their preserved brains under a super high power scanning electron microscope.

From this perspective the reports of 'odd' phenomena around the Hockomock are of great value. Many appear to be honest and vivid sightings of wildlife. I do not doubt these folks saw 'something,' I only differ in my assumption of what they saw or thought they saw.

A classic observation, during the last 30 years, is of very large animals crossing small roads near and through the Hockomock. These are all very brief sightings (usually in cars) and in difficult lighting conditions (dusk, dawn).

Assuming these sightings of large animals are not hallucinatory, not highly exaggerated, and not just plain falsified, it is not too hard to come up with a short list of animals that would fit the provided descriptions. The animals are moose, black bear and large (200+) white tailed deer.

The problem with both the eyewitness reporters of these animals and their interpreters ('paranormal' researchers) is they have no clue as to the native historic animal life of the Hockomock and southeastern Mass. in general. This is not their fault. They just haven't done the historical research.

It shocks many people that moose and black bear were very common in southeastern Massachusetts prior to the late 1700s. Moose were common all the way down to the Elizabeth Islands and Cuttyhunk on the southernmost extremity of Cape Cod. There is a "Moose Hill" in Sharon, Mass. a few miles from the "Bridgewater Triangle" that is now a wildlife refuge and education center.

Due to the relentless (I would say insane) obsession of our 18th and 19th century forbears with exterminating every bit of wildlife from New England larger than a chickadee from their sight, virtually every large mammal native to eastern Massachusetts was extirpated by about 1900, except for tiny remnant fragments. Beaver, bobcat, mountain lion, moose, wolves, wild turkey, passenger pigeon and (nearly) white tailed deer were all made extinct in eastern Massachusetts by 1900 and many well before that day. This deliberate extirpation (by directed hunting) was abetted by the relentless, insane obsession of 18th and 19th century settlers to cut down every tree in Massachusetts.

Unlike the claims of 'paranormal' researchers, the above is all thoroughly and exhaustively documented in various laws passed by the Massachusetts Legislature from 1650 to present and is available for the looking in the Massachusetts Archives. But that takes work. And 'paranormal' researchers are not wont to spend much time examining historical archives which might produce 1700s or 1800s documents that provide a more mundane and prosaic explanation for alleged "Bigfoot" sightings near the Hockomock.

And, you can't sell a book or free-lance newspaper story based on evidence which shows a "Bigfoot" or "pterodactyl" sighting in the Hockomock was most likely a great blue heron or a big white-tailed deer. Once the fable has been established, the only money trail is to feed the fable to feed the table. As a freelancer myself, I understand this financial impulse, but the product sold is still fraudulent.

Moose and Bear in the Hockomock?

Moose have been gradually filtering back into Massachusetts for the past 40 years. However because they entered northern and western Massachusetts first, coming down the spine of the Berkshires, southeastern Massachusetts is sort of the station at the very end of the train line.

It is at least possible that a few adventurous moose from time to time have passed into and through the environs of the Hockomock in the past several decades. The Brockton Enterprise carried a story in the late fall several years ago of a deer hunter in Taunton claiming to have seen a moose, albeit briefly, in a dense wooded area near the swamp. To my knowledge there have not been any confirmed or repeated sightings.

Despite their size, moose can be extremely difficult to observe even in places where they are fairly common. Where I live in Augusta, Maine moose tracks are not uncommon along the banks of the Kennebec River. However in 20 years of living in Augusta and roaming the Kennebec River and adjacent woods I have never seen one, even though they are there.

In a woodland as thick and expansive and as lightly travelled as the Hockomock, a small group of moose, or an itinerant migrant passing through, could easily go completely unobserved and undetected.

The same can be said for black bear, although indications are the rate of black bear in-migration to Massachusetts is occurring much more slowly than with moose. However, black bear are notoriously reclusive animals and take great care to stay as far from people as possible. An itinerant bear in the Hockomock would be exceedingly hard to document except by sheer luck on the scale of winning Powerball.

As with moose, the most likely way that one would make 'first contact' with a moose or bear in the Hockomock would be to observe tracks or scat and this requires someone who knows exactly what to look for and to actually be looking for it. Complicating this is that today, most of the people who actually go into the Swamp do so with ATVs and dirtbikes along the powerlines and the old railroad bed behind the Raynham Dog Track. The noise created by these machines practically guarantees that if there were any large mammals around they would be long out of sight before you would have a chance to seem them.

A fairly typical 'sighting' was told to Easton writer Ross Muscato in 2005:

"Joe DeAndrade thinks the swamp may be the habitat of a creature yet to be identified. In 1978, DeAndrade, then 24, was standing on the shore of Clay Banks, a pond in Bridgewater near the swamp. His back was to the water.
''I was standing there, and for some reason I had to turn around," DeAndrade says. ''It was a chill or something inside me. And I turned around, and there, off to the right, maybe 200 yards away, there was this -- well, I don't know what it was. It was a creature that was all brown and hairy, like a big apish-and-man thing. It was making its way for the woods, but I didn't stick around to watch where it was going. I ran for the street."

Mr. DeAndrade's recreation of his 1978 encounter, at the site where it occurred, can be seen here.

This 'sighting' -- if it actually occurred -- has all the hallmarks of a moose sighting. Like most quoted by paranormalists, the anecdote ends just as it gets interesting. Two hundred yards is a long way away -- it's the length of two football fields -- and it's impossible to know how well Mr. DeAndrade is at calculating distances in just a few seconds. Even a bull moose at 200 yards would not be easy to identify to species especially if it was already moving into the woods. That Mr. DeAndrade says he immediately "ran for the street" instead of staying and trying to get a better glimpse of the animal says something.

This anecdote, from an unnamed informant, was given to paranormalist Chris Pittman of Franklin, Mass. in 2008:

"When I went to the building across the street from the Raynham Dog Track it was about 8 and just starting to get dark, we went to the back of the building. There are some trailers there that weren't there about a month ago, and some old cars. We went towards the woods to park our dirtbikes and there was a nasty smell so we looked around and in a trailer that was open there was a tarp down and there were 3 or 4 dead deer- I think that's what they were, couldn't really tell. They were all ripped open, with all the guts all over the place. It was nasty. There was evidence that someone was there, we saw footprints and some soda that wasn't open and we noticed that the building is more closed up that it was before. We also heard some noise coming from the tower part, it sounded like someone was slamming metal around. I have been in the building and walked around but didn't go in some of the back rooms because it was really dark and I didn't have a light... I have also seen dead animals like that before out on the powerlines, there was at least six stacked up, all ripped apart, and I have come across some hanging in trees."

While cited as a 'paranormal' observation, this anecdote has a mundane and grisly explanation. The informant happened upon a deer poaching operation. Deer hunting is common in the Hockomock and deer stands are found all over the swamp, usually on small islands of high ground or along its edges. Deer poaching is unfortunately commonplace in part because the chances of getting caught doing it in the swamp are slim to none. Poaching also helps explain the lack of any recorded kills of moose or bear in the swamp. It is illegal to hunt moose or bear in southeastern Massachusetts so even if someone did see one and take a potshot at one they would have to keep it a secret.

The next anecdote, again from 2008, is also easily explainable:

"My daughter and I were driving down Administration Road in the Bridgewater Correctional Complex... We saw a pine tree bent (not snapped but curved) in half with something standing on the tip of the tree, holding it down to the ground in the middle of the street. This was about 2:15 in the afternoon, on a Saturday. I was fixated on the fact that a tree could bend like that without breaking, but my daughter saw the "thing" right away and she was fixated on that. We had to stop because it was in the middle of the street. We looked at it and we just didn't know what to say. It looked like a tall man, hunched down a bit, in a skin tight black suit with large, almost bat type wings. He was a matte, not shiny black color, head to foot. He was standing, but hunched down, on the pine tree, his weight was holding down the top. he saw us and we looked at each other for just a few minutes then he straightened, leaped and flew over the top of the trees on the other side of the road. The pine tree he had been standing on, bounced back up slowly, and rocked back and forth a few times before stopping in it's normal standing position. That was all we saw. We were both awake, fully rested, lucid, drug and alcohol free and it was during daylight hours: 2:15 in the afternoon."

The description given is very close to a large wild turkey or more likely, a turkey vulture. The problem with a story like this is that we don't know whether the informants have any familiarity with local wildlife. Turkey vultures are enormous, strange-looking birds that are rarely observed up close and near the ground (usually you only see them flying in the air a considerable distance overhead). After a long absence from southeastern Mass., they are now making a comeback.

This anecdote, from 1975 but reported in 2007, is another that, if not completely fabricated, suggests a moose sighting.

"In 1975 I was driving my girlfriend home to Brockton. I don't remeber the name of the street, but traveling there from E.B. you start on Pleasant, take the fork to the left, it goes down a slight slope a few houses on either side, then there's (or was) a clearing where the power lines went through.

Anyhow, it's some time between 11 and midnight, and I'm driving along while my girlfriend was sound asleep. Up ahead I noticed a very large black mass in the middle of the road (just before the power lines). I can't tell what it is and while I'm still 30 -50 feet away I slow way down and put on my brights. I still can't see what it is but it's really large and it's absorbing the light from my headlights so I really have to stare at it. I'm thinking it's some huge trash bag or something and I'll need to pull it out of the road. I'm getting really close, 10 - 20 feet and I'm just rolling the car along, and I can't see what it is. But it's big, I had a 67 Plymouth Fury III 4 door, and this mass was well above my hood line.

So I'm going so slow I'm almost at a stop and I can't be more than 5 - 10 feet away, and it's taking in all of the light, I still can't see what it is. Then really slowly this thing lifts it's head and stares right at me!! It's face was bone white, no hair, mostly apelike, thick brow, wide jaw, no eyebrows. And still no body, but because of the size of the black mass it had to be at least 7 feet tall, maybe even 8.

It actually gave me a heart attack. I felt my heart stop for three full beats. Then I recovered, pulled around it and stepped on the gas. I shook from head to toe for hours, and for years after when I thought about it."

Again, the pattern is the same. Except for people who have travelled to northern Maine and are savvy about wildlife, the chance observation of an adult moose at night would be a truly bizarre occurrence in southeastern Massachusetts. Moose are extremely odd-looking creatures in part because their bodies rest on very long legs and they have, in some ways, very 'human-like' faces. The described height (7-8 feet) is identical to an adult moose.

Like all of these anecdotes, this one ends just as it gets interesting. The informant describes the "animal" as standing 5-10 feet in front of his car and towering over it. At such a close distance, even with high beams on the car headlights would not illuminate much of a 7 foot tall animal. But most telling is the informant fails to note how many legs it has. This would be fairly easy to discern by counting. Does it have arms? Is it standing on two legs? Given the length of time of the observation and the proximity to the animal, it would seem the informant could have at least counted and recollected how many legs it had and if it had arms or not. Lastly, the informant never tells us whether the animal walked past them to the other side of the road. It would seem the animal would have to get out of the middle of the road in order for the driver to continue down the road. But no, the 'story' ends abruptly with the animal in the middle of the road blocking the driver's car.

I like this anecdote because it neatly illustrates a consistent pattern in the type of observations submitted to and collected by 'paranormal' researchers regarding the Hockomock and the Bridgewater Triangle. On one hand you have vivid, up-close sensory descriptions of certain elements; but a complete absence of other sensory descriptions that should have, and could have, been made.

Then there's one of my favorites: "we didn't have a flashcube during the day" anecdote:

“My cousin lives in Raynham along the old Conrail tracks that run behind the Raynham Dog Track. He moved there in about 1988 and we were recently recalling a strange incident that happened about that time. I was around 12 or 13 and it had snowed an inch or two that night before. We were out in his back yard when we noticed some strange footprints in the snow. The footprints were not of an animal, but of a human being or so we believed. The prints were spread out showing very large strides and the prints were not extremely large and could easily pass for an adult size 13 or so. Here is what we found to be very weird at the time: the footprints ran straight through some very thick briars, shrubs and small trees. We attempted to take photos of the prints but were unsuccessful because we did not have a flashcube. Of course our parents all thought we were just kids being stupid and naive… As I remember his next-door neighbor had a chicken coop in his back yard, the direction from which the tracks originated. His neighbor had quite a problem with losing his chickens, as he thought to coyotes, which there are a number of out in that area, but I am becoming more convinced that coyotes were not his problem.”

Aside from all the other problems with this tale, the "tell" is that the photos didn't come out because they didn't have a flashcube. It is hard to understand why you would need a flashcube to take a picture of a large animal track in bright white snow during the day. That said, the usable portion of the description fits well with a moose track.

This anecdote, from 2004, again near the Hockomock, is suggestive of a moose:

"Another odd happening if you are interested, I was on Scotland Street in West Bridgwater which turns into a Bridgewater Street about halfway through and has fields on either side with dirt paths going into them for a large portion of the street. For fun a friend and I drove down one and parked to try and lose another car full of friends. He looked out the window and called my attention to a very large person who stood up in the middle of the field and then moved towards us. Needless to say we drove away very fast. I still have yet to meet anyone that large."

And some anecdotes, when examined textually, just make no sense. This is from 2005.

"I have a alien story that is all true and happened to me and my son. My son won't comment on it, but I was eye to eye with one of these beings. Here goes....One night, or I should say one morning, early in the morning around one or two I guess, my son and I were riding around after work trying to unwind before going home. Now this was in the late 90s that this happened. We were somewhere on Route 24 going toward Brockton, I was near the swamp area near Bridgewater. I'm driving down the road and I see this thing come out of the woods on the other side running right across the road. Thank God, there wasn't any traffic. I yelled to my son and asked what the hell was that, he said he didn't know. By my rate of speed and his rate of speed he was in a route for a collison with my drivers door, if he kept running across the highway. He kept running across, now I was almost up to him, I yelled to my son to hold on this was something big and it was going to crash into the car. I grabbed the wheel tightly, turned and looked out the drivers window and I was eye to eye with this being. He stood like a man, with big big black eyes, no pupils, just solid black, his body looked like it was all one piece. Nothing with joints. Then I closed my eyes for a second to wait for the impact, none came. I opened my eyes and pulled over immediately, hoping someone behind me saw what I saw, and there were no other cars near me, they were too far behind me to see. I was shaking like a leaf. I can't believe it didn't cause an impact. I couldn't believe what I saw. My son was shaking too, I asked him what he saw and he said he saw something but didn't know what it was. I could see he was shaken just like me. To this day he wont admit he saw what I did. I am telling the absolute truth about everything, and I would face God right now and swear in front of him that this actually happened. I never knew what the poor thing was running from. I do consider myself quite lucky though to be priviliged to have seen this being... I also have walked through the swamp area, and it has one of the most awful feelings to it. I just wanted out of there."

The "tell" here is that the driver did not even apply the brakes to avoid hitting the 'man-thing' running across Route 24 right in front of him; and that according to the man's own story he 'hoped' the man-thing would get out of his path before he struck it. Why not apply the brakes, especially if it might be a person? Another 'tell' is that cars on Route 24 travel at a speed of 60-70 mph which would make it impossible to get a 'good look' at a 'man-thing' right next to your driver's side window, unless you actually stopped the vehicle, which according to the driver's own story, he did not. Instead he says did not pull over until after the 'man-thing' apparently passed right through the body of his vehicle. None of this makes any sense.

I put this anecdote in a separate category called "Total Bullshit."

Analyzing the Anecdotes

I do not doubt the honesty of these personal anecdotes. Well, a little bit. Viewing them in succession allows you to discern repeating patterns. The most obvious is that a lot of people are scared stiff of the Hockomock Swamp; and that the mental stability of at least some of these folks is questionable, at least at the time of their observations.

An axiom of science is that you can't prove a negative. So, keeping to this rule, we can never completely dismiss everything these folks reported seeing and hearing since we didn't see and hear it at the same time and place as they. So we have to rely upon a preponderance of evidence approach, ie. why is it only people who are totally befuddled and scared the ones who saw strange things in the Hockomock? And why do these strange creatures hide from people who might approach an anomalous sighting more rationally?

I like these anecdotes because, unlike dry scientific reports and maps, they encapsulate a much broader and richer emotional depth of what it is like to live alongside the Hockomock. They don't tell us much about the swamp itself; but they tell us much about peoples' relation to the Swamp.

And the most common note is fear. Nearly every anecdote ends with the informant running or driving away from the Swamp in total fear and not coming back. The Hock is prickly in this sense; it does not suffer fools gladly but at the right time of year and place it rolls out the welcome mat and lets you in and become part of it, even if just for a few hours. The Hockomock is truly a scary place, in the sense that if you go into it you can die. But you can also just as easily die painting the side of your house, but still people paint the sides of their houses.

I like the mystery and intrigue the Hockomock evokes in people. It is good. We should be challenged by places so near and so full of questions that nobody can answer. It keeps us wondering and not so falsely self-assured.

UPDATE: To offer a partial concurrence with the commenter below, there is no question the Hockomock has long evoked a wide variety of emotional responses in people, especially in those like myself who grew up around it. My break with 'triangle enthusiasts' is whether these emotional responses, which are undoubtedly real, have any causal connection to phenomena outside the realm of science.

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1. As an unwitting confirmation of this essay's theme, the Wikipedia entry for the Bridgewater Triangle is a stale rehash/plagiarism of all of the unattributed and undocumented crazy tales repeated over and over again in newspaper articles dating back to the early 1970s, none of which provide any factual substantiation.

2. To his credit, Chris Pittman of Franklin admits in his website that a piece of scat (ie. poop) he had initially attributed to a "Bigfoot" from the Hockomock is actually coyote poop from the coyote eating a deer carcass, including the skin and fur.

Fun with Odd Musical Meters

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This little demo by Dweezil Zappa reminds me of experiments I have done trying to learn to write in odd musical meters ... like ....

This pleasant ditty, which is the theme to a goofy song I wrote for a growly pirate voice who is supposed to be Satan but also Chuck Woolery, is counted in sevens to confuse Bob Barker, who is a straight 5/8 game show host.

Odd meter has two meanings. Odd in the sense of different or unusual; and in the sense of the count being an odd, rather than an even number.

My little system depends on a belief that people discern rhythm by strong and weak beats and we generally assume that the first beat, like the capital letter at the first word of a sentence, tells us when the sentence starts and the next capital letter tells us the previous sentence has ended and a new one has begun. We mentally accent on the one because it tells us where each new grouping starts and thereby keeps things from dissolving into 1/1 (which means either 'no accents' or 'all accents' which in music means the same thing). Which is why writing

INALLCAPITALLETTERSWITHOUTSPACING

is not very enjoyable.

Or we can use an atomic analogy wherein the electron, proton and neutron of musical meters are the numbers 2, 3 and 4; or for most purposes 2/4, 3/4, 4/4. (1/1 is pretty boring since every note is given the same accent); in the sense that any grouping bigger than 4 can be broken down into some combination of 2, 3 and 4.

For instance, 5/4 is a 2/4 + a 3/4; so it's counted out as 1,2,1,2,3 ... with the accent on the one, or as a 3/4 and a 2/4, counted out as 1,2,3,1,2 ...

A seven beat is just a 4/4 plus a 3/4 so it's counted 1,2,3,4,1,2,3 or 1,2,3,1,2,3,4 ... The verse portions of "Money" by Pink Floyd is in sevens. You can easily follow the bass line and see it's counted as a 4/4 plus a 3/4 (1,2,3,4,1,2,3 ...). In David Gilmour's guitar solos, the beat switches to a straight, driving 4/4 which creates a nice release from the tension knotted up in the 7/8 parts.

I usually think of a nine beat as a 5/4 plus a 4/4: 1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4 or a 4/4 plus a 5/4: 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4,5 ...

Obviously, a 9 beat could be thought of as three 3/4 beats: 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3 but that just dissolves back into a straight 3/4 beat because each 1 is accented the same amount.

An eleven beat could be a 6/8 plus a 5/8: 1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3,4,5 .... remembering that a 6/8 beat is two 3/4s (1,2,3,1,2,3) with the second 1 accented slightly less than the first to keep it from dissolving back into straight 3/4. "House of the Rising Sun" is a well known song in 6/8. I like 6/8 because it has an "old-timey" sound (partly because not many people waltz these days).

In this little live 1978 ditty with Vinnie Colaiuta (drums), Arthur Barrow (bass) and L. Shankar (electric violin), Frank Zappa teaches the crowd how to clap along with a song in 13/8, which here is a group of 5/8 and 4/4 (1,2,1,2,3,1,2,3,4) with the back 4/4 taking the same amount of time to count as the front 5/8:



So how you group your 2s and 3s and 4s into 5s, 7s, 9s and 11s etc. determines where the accents fall; and it's the accents that tell the listener you're playing in something other than 1/1.

One pitfall of Dweezil's method of counting a seven beat in the video is that unlike the words one, two, three, four, five and six, the word seven has two syllables. If you mentally or verbally count out the numbers to play a seven beat that second syllable in the word 'seven' screws you up and pushes you into an eight count, which pushes you right back into 4/4, which is what you're trying to stay away from.

You could count out in French, where the numbers 1-7 all have one syllable, or say "sev..." instead of "seven." This helps keep you on track of one syllable = one beat. But usually I just count 1,2,3,4,1,2,3 which forces me to accent on the ones and preserves the 'atomic structure' of the 7 beat as a 4/4 grouped with a 3/4.

Anyways, this is how I ended up making sense playing and writing stuff in odd meters. I don't use them that often but they are fun to mess around with and make you think of music and rhythm through a different lens. It's useful for guitarists and keyboardists who tend to be obsessed with pitch and harmony and give far less attention to the creative use of rhythm and meter.

To my ear, pieces that stay in an odd meter the whole time tend to get grating, almost because the human mind (well at least my mind), desperately 'wants' the beat to come in at even intervals and odd meters defeat this expectation, either by coming in one beat too early or one beat too late (odd meters suggest a polyrhythm depending how far you want to push them). But they are fun to use as spice in the punch bowl, just as it's fun to play something highly chromatic for a bit, do an odd key modulation, or to slow down and speed up a tempo or get louder and softer. Anything to create tension and release and surprise in a composition is a worthwhile tool to have around so long as you don't let it call attention to itself and make it sound like you're just showing off, which is no fun for anyone.

sOr ToFw RitINGl ike tHIS.

I have to tip my hat to metal, esp. since the mid 1980s, because they have messed more with odd meter composition than any other form of popular music, in part because they know their audience is not intending to dance to the stuff and demand a constant droning 4/4.

One reason odd meters are interesting and understandable to me is from taking a lot of poetry classes in college and having to study and write stuff in all types of rhythmic structures, iambic pentameter, hexameter etc. Thinking and learning and playing in 4/4 is like thinking all poems and songs are supposed to sound like limericks.

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The mp3 song file above, "Happy in 7/8," is mindnumbingly simple in that the drums tell you it is two 3/4 phrases with the last held on the keyboard for one extra beat (1,2,3,1,2,3,4); and for this reason it still has a strong waltz feel to it. A better way to think of it is as 6/8 with one extra beat added at the end of the grouping. The piano solo part is basically 6/8.

If you really want to get weird with odd meters you can get a MIDI sequencer and a keyboard and just type in odd numbered groupings of notes and make your keyboard play them and see what they sound like. This lets you hear the final product quickly without having to drill your hands into not screwing up. As in all musical composition, sometimes the result is worth keeping and sometimes it is best erased.

FERC Consultant Admits to Stealing Tens of Millions of $$$ from U.S. Citizens but is still "On the Job and Shovel-Ready."

Dam at Saccarappa Falls, Presumpscot River, Westbrook, Maine c. 1900.

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And the sun rises in the east. The Louis Berger Group, a New Jersey corporation hired by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to prepare the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the Presumpscot River in 2001 has admitted to 'knowingly and systematically' defrauding the U.S. Government for work in Afghanistan and has agreed to pay a $70 million fine.

According to McClatchy News Service (formerly Knight Ridder), the $70 million fine "may" be the largest fine ever paid by a government contractor for defrauding U.S. citizens.

In 2001-2002, FERC hired the Louis Berger Group to prepare a scientific study of the benefits and impacts of removing the three lowermost dams on the Presumpscot River (Saccarappa, Little Falls and Mallison Falls). The study, which was a key part of FERC's decision to not order the removal of the dams, was so inept that FOSL and Friends of the Presumpscot River had to spend 100s of hours writing extensive comments to FERC trying to correct its factual errors.

Now the Louis Berger Group has admitted to overbilling and defrauding the U.S. Govt. of tens of millions of dollars related to engineering and construction contracts in Afghanistan. But not to worry, the company will still continue doing consulting work for the U.S. government. In Afghanistan. And elsewhere. Hopefully not on a river near you.

After all, being caught stealing tens of million dollars from your employer is not a fireable offense. So if you meet the Louis Berger Group during your travels and travails you might want to Run to the Hills.