Tispaquin's Revenge

Truck Driver Divorce -- The 1926 Version.

2012-01-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

Here's a radically traditional 1926 version of a song by Frank Zappa that he and his band played quite a bit in their early 1980s tours. At the time, he allegedly described it as "a country song on PCP" that would cause the "death of country music." It did not surface in a recorded version until the 1984 double album, Them or Us.

Truck Driver Divorce -- 1926 Version.

In the late 1970s Zappa couldn't resist poking fun at country music, probably due to the ascendance of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and his waterboy, Ronald Reagan, who piously extolled the genre's celebration of enduring family values ... like ... umm ... cheating on your wife and being a useless drunk.

But Truck Driver Divorce is not a country song. It's really a mid 1920s Al Jolson kind of song ... on PCP. But then again, Al Jolson is like Al Jolson on PCP, so go figure.

And despite some enthusiasts' claims that this song is just Zappa's live band doing a loose, free improvisation behind a similarly free vocal improv, it is built on a standard 1920s-type descending I-IV blues progression using two major chords and their dominant seventh and minor, ie. I-I7-IV-IVm. In each second section, the I-IV resolves to the V. This is a scheme heard in countless ragtime and blues songs of the pre-1930s era and practically begs the singer to do the melody like Al Jolson, which is what Frank does, creating the appropriate level of cloying, obviously fake sentimentality the lyrical subject requires.

In the key of G, the basic chords are:

D7 (intro chord).
G -- G7 -- C -- Cm
G -- G7 -- C -- Cm -- A7 -- D7

While the vocal melody starts on the G, you need the D flatted seventh to set up the flavor of the song's tonality. This type of intro is a standard ragtime device, probably to get people in the room to notice the band is going to start playing a song. Blind Lemon Jefferson uses this kind of an intro in his 1926 song "Beggin' Back."

Note that all the seventh chords are not the major seventh but the dominant, ie. flatted seventh. So in G7, the seventh note is F natural, not F sharp, ie. G-B-D-F, which is what gives the progression a ragtimey feel.

Because this is supposed to be a country song, the G position on bass does not let you alternate down to a low D as the fifth which you really need to get that honky-tonk feel. Instead of detuning the low E bass string to D, I alternated the low G with the open D string. In the back end (4 bars) of each second section the bass really needs to walk through the chords on straight eighth notes instead of the rocking chair squeak kind of quarter notes at the front.

The final verse is different:

Cm - G - D7
Truck Driver divorce, it's very sad.

A7
Bust Your Ass

Cm
To deliver some string beans

A7
To deliver some string beans

D7
To Utah

G
Tonight.

Despite that Zappa's original live recording sort of sounds like a free improv, the composition is tightly structured and Zappa's vocal melody follows the I-IV progression closely, even though he and the bass player perversely flatten or double flatten a bunch of the notes. According to those who zealously research this arcane stuff, the instrumental back end of the recorded version is a spliced-in live performance of the song Zoot Allures from 1981 in New York City:

So anyways, if you have an acoustic guitar and can play open first position chords, you can play the 'real' arrangement of Truck Driver Divorce and exorcise your secret desire to be Al Jolson or Bessie Smith doing a really stupid country song about driving a truckload of string beans to Utah.

About the string beans. Zappa must have written these lyrics at the same time he wrote "No Not Know" from Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, since both songs contain a lot of the same phrases, like "transcontinental hobby horse" and "oh the wife ... oh the waitress ... oh the drive all night long," etc. And, of course, string beans to Utah, which apparently has some weird connection to Donny and Marie Osmond.

What I like about Truck Driver Divorce, aside from its sheer and unrelenting idiocy, is that the melody and chord progression are rooted in the 1900-1910s ragtime changes which by the 1920s became 'citified' by singers like Al Jolson, to the point where it's almost impossible to sing this song without subconsciously wanting to say, "Oh Mammy .... all the way home from Alabammie .... she used to cook me eggs and hammy ... Oh Mammy."

But the biggest challenge in recording the 1926 version of Truck Driver Divorce is that you can't sing the song straight because it's too flat-out stupid and songs in 1926 were never sung 'straight.' This is pre-method acting time. And I also didn't want to imitate Zappa's arrangement, since then what's the effing point?

After a lot of trial and error and messing around at 4 a.m. I started adding in all of the background noises, which consist of me pouring dirty bath water back and forth from a couple of plastic cat litter buckets and then kicking them over on the floor, shaking a bag of styrofoam packing peanuts, mumbling incoherently and imitating the voices of some weird people I know who talk like they have marbles in their mouth about shaving Brenda's crotch.

This fake audio verite approach is itself a direct rip-off of the Mothers' song "America Drinks and Goes Home" from Absolutely Free where Zappa creates a sound collage of a dive cocktail bar at closing time with Ray Collins saying 'last call for alcohol, drink it up folks' and offering them peanut butter and jelly and baloney sandwiches at their next gig while the patrons start throwing chairs and bottles at each other:

One problem with this recording approach is that it requires just the right mix of mayhem vs. music, which has a lot to do with mic placement and panning to enlarge the stereo spectrum so that you can still hear the song but the mayhem is right in your face. The production challenge is to take a completely studio recorded piece but make it sound like a single condenser mic at some weird PCP-laden hillbilly cabin in the woods.

The tail-out is me, Mark Kemezys, Jerry Trevino and Jeff Hursch doing some weird improv at 38-C Northern Ave with those 99 cent plastic slidey whistles.

Enjoy!

You can also do the song in C, which falls well on an open, first position guitar, and nicely on the bass, since you get to hit the C root on the 3rd fret, 2nd string and drop right to the G on the low E string. That progression is C-C7-F-Fm with D7 and G7 replacing A7 and D7 as the adds.

Actually, Lemon Jefferson was one of the only 1920s singers to 'drop' the theatrical pose and do a song straight, meaning sarcastically, in "Beggin' Back," where in the improvised verses he's goofing on the chorus of the song.

When kids used to go down to the Kennebec River to get Atlantic salmon for breakfast.

2011-12-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

Citation: Boardman, Samuel L.: in Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture. 1864. Augusta, Maine. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State. Subsequently published in the Maine Farmer, March 23, 1865.

At page 109:

"An aged woman, who formerly lived on the banks of the Kennebec in Vassalboro, and who, at that time, had a large family of children to support, once told me that, in spring and early summer, the fish from the river were a very essential aid to them -- that many times she has sent one of her boys down to the river early in the morning to catch a salmon for breakfast, with as much certainty that he would bring one home in season, as if she had sent him with the money to a city fish market, where she knew they were kept for sale."

How Maine's Sea-Run Fish were Dammed into Oblivion, 1864.

2011-12-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

Citation: Boardman, Samuel L. 'Aquaeculture': in Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture. 1864. Augusta, Maine. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State. Also pub. in Maine Farmer, March 23, 1865.

At p. 109-110:

"Everyone now knows that salmon, shad and alewives, and indeed all the other kinds of migratory fishes -- those that spend winters in the salt water, and come up out of the sea at certain periods, as if sent by a kind Providence, to spend the spring and summer in fresh water -- are now very scarce indeed, and in some streams totally extinct. Everyone knows, too, that many of the species of fishes which remain permanently in our fresh waters, have very much decreased in numbers, as well as in size and fatness. People say that this is a necessary consequence of the building of dams and mills, and filling the streams with obstructions of various kinds for the industrial pursuits of a civilized community. No doubt it is a consequence of these obstructions, but it not need be a necessary consequence. I hold that dams and mills might be constructed, and continued, and yet by a little concession on the part of dam and mill proprietors, and a more general diffusion of the knowledge of the natural history fishes, more intimate acquaintance with their peculiar habits, instincts, and wants of life, the mills might remain and the fish continue to perform their annual pilgrimage to and from their breeding haunts, if not in so great numbers as in former times, yet in such numbers as to afford a vast amount of provisions and even luxury to the communities which are now wholly deprived of them.

"I am also aware that this subject has been discussed over and over again -- that for years and years past, every session of our Legislature was thronged, and committees were worried and teased by mill owners on the one hand and fishermen on the other -- one demanding the privilege of building dams and mills without let or hindrance as to the fish, and the other pleading for some reserve, some fish-way, or some accommodation to the annual flow of the fish, which had been of such signal service to the support of the people on the banks and vicinity of the waters in question. I am also aware that our Legislators, actuated by a sincere desire to do justice to all parties, and to give equal rights to all, have, in most instance, made provisions in the several charters and private acts pertaining to mill owners, for the passage of fish at certain times and seasons, with a hope that, while it encouraged the establishment of mills and machinery, there would be also at the required times a safe and successful transit for the various species of fishes that required such passes as one of the indispensable requirements for the continuation of their existence. And we are all aware also that, either from ignorance of what habits of the fish demand, these ways have not always been properly constructed, or from selfishness in mill owners in not keeping them open at suitable times, these provisions in most cases failed, and the destruction of the fish is the inevitable result."

How Maine's Sea-Run Fish were Overfished to Oblivion

2011-12-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

A few early to mid 1800s historic references I just came across illustrate how early and quickly the sea-run fish of Maine rivers were wiped out by over-fishing:

Citation: William Durkee Williamson. 1832. The History of the State of Maine. Vol. 1. Glazer, Masters & Co. Hallowell, Maine.

At p. 158, describing striped bass:

"The Bass is a large scale fish, variable in its size from 10 to 60 pounds. They are striped with black, have bright scales and horned backs, and are caught about the coasts. They ascend into the fresh water to cast their spawn, in May or June, being lean afterwards and fat in the autumn. In June 1807, there were taken at the mouth of the Kenduskeag, 7,000 of these fishes, which were of a large size -- a shoal, either pursued up the river by sharks, or ascended in prospect of their prey, or to cast their spawn."

Smelt at p. 160:

"They are caught in abundance, after March, in our rivers; 20 barrels of them have been taken at the mouth of the Kenduskeag at a sweep, and sometimes they are worth no more than half a dollar a bushel."

At footnote 3, same page: "On the 2d of May, 1794, at the mouth of the Kenduskeag (on the Penobscot) were taken at one draft 1,000 shad and 30 barrels of alewives."

----

Citation: Boardman, Samuel L. 'Aquaeculture': in Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture. 1864. Augusta, Maine. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State. Also pub. in Maine Farmer, March 23, 1865.

At p. 117:

"Three years ago, in the month of May, in company with a friend, while passing by the lower lock of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, in the city of Portland, our attention was drawn to the a crowd of men standing by the side of the lock, several of whom had long-handled nets, with which they were fishing, or rather dipping out fish from the water. On coming up, we saw that they were catching alewives in great numbers. It appeared that these fish, in their peregrinations along the coast, had been attracted by the fresh water of the canal, and instinctively entered it in order, as they supposed, to follow up to its source, (Sebago Lake,) but were brought to a standstill by the upper gate of the lock. The men engaged there then shut the lower gate, and commenced catching them. As soon as those of them that were confined in the lock were all caught, the men opened the lower gate again, and admitted a lot more of them, and thus a wholesale destruction of them went on. I supposed that some of them might possibly work their way up, when the several locks should be opened for the passage of boats, and thus Sebago made a breeding place for them, but on inquiry, am told that there are few or none seen there. Now it would be a very easy matter to stock that lake with young herrings (alewives) by proprietors of the canal forbidding any of them to be caught on certain days, and placing men along the route to let them go through the gates into the lake. Indeed, it seems that by renting the privilege of fishing for them on certain days, some considerable revenue might accrue to the company, while the production of the fish would again become a benefit to the section of country through with the canal passes. The same system might be adopted on many streams by having fish-ways or fish-locks, to aid their ascent, with much benefit to the country and no detriment to the mill interests."

_______

Citation: Twelfth Annual Report of the Maine Board of Agriculture, 1867. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State.

At page 90: "In Monmouth they [smelt] run into some very small rills that lead into Cochnewagon Pond, and are dipped out in considerable quantities. In May, 1867, after it was supposed they were all gone, a fresh run occurred, that yielded thirty barrels."

Sensitive Singer Songwriter by Douglas Watts

2011-07-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a song I wrote.

Clay is Rusted Feldspar

2011-07-04T13:29:00.001-07:00

My wife Lori asked me to explain to her pottery class in a fairly simple way what clay is, where it comes from, and how it got here. So here's an attempt at a non-technical explanation.

Clay is feldspar rusting. This is an analogy, but not that far from the actual process. We all know what happens if you buy a nice, shiny piece of cast iron from the hardware store and leave it outside in the sun and rain. It quickly rusts. If you leave it out long enough, it turns to almost all rust. So what is rust?

Rust is primarily the minerals limonite and goethite, created when iron combines with oxygen from the atmosphere and oxygen in water. We all know that iron things tend to rust faster when wet than when dry. Moisture hastens rusting.

Feldspar is not iron. Iron is one element, iron. Feldspar is a large family of minerals made from oxygen, silicon, aluminum, sodium, potassium and calcium. Feldspar does not form on the Earth's surface. It only forms miles beneath the Earth's surface, where solid rock is naturally in a semi-liquid, molasses-like state.

Feldspar is only released from its 'natural' home and to the Earth's surface either when it is forcibly ejected from a volcano as lava or when, after hundreds of millions of years, the 2-3 miles of solid rock above the feldspar is eroded away, leaving the feldspar nakedly exposed on the Earth's surface. This is usually in the form of granite, which is a rock made of feldspar and quartz and some mica.

To add another analogy, just like a piece of fine pottery on the edge of a shelf 'wants' to fall on the floor and smash, feldspar 'wants' to turn to clay when it is exposed to the Earth's surface. The agent for the pot on the shelf wanting to fall down and smash is gravity (in outer space, pottery does not break, it orbits). The agent for feldspar wanting to turn to clay is a bit more complex, but similar in design to iron rusting. In both, the agents are primarily air and water.

In the presence of air and water at the Earth's surface, the most natural and restive state for feldspar is to re-align its molecules into clay molecules. Clay is a mineral, just like quartz or feldspar. It has a very regular and ordered crystalline structure, like a diamond or a cube of salt. The three predominant clay minerals are kaolinite, illite and montmorillonite. With a scanning electron microscope you can get pictures of very nice, well formed, plate-like clay crystals growing right next to a crystal of feldspar.

Feldspar becomes clay by slowly bringing water into its crystal structure, like a sponge left in a puddle of water. This water becomes part of the very fabric of the feldspar; like how iron becomes part of your blood cells. The feldspar wants the water. It likes it. Which brings us back to rust.

What we call rust is the natural state of iron on the Earth's surface. Iron readily combines with oxygen to make rust. It wants to become rust. In fact, we have to do all kinds of crazy things to prevent iron from becoming rust. We coat it with oils, with paint (like Rust-Oleum) or galvanize it with zinc, all to keep the iron from contacting oxygen in the air and oxygen in water, sort of like teacher chaperones at a high school dance. Left to its own device, feldspar becomes clay because it wants to; that is its most stable and natural state on the Earth's surface. Like a thrown ball 'wants' to come back down, feldspar wants to become clay. Clay is rusted feldspar; and the actual chemical reactions are not that different.

In Maine, where I live, from 1880-1930 there was a flourishing industry where large feldspar deposits were quarried and mined for use as ceramic pottery glaze. This was feldspar that had not yet had time to weather into clay. It is still solid enough to make a house foundation. But if you crush into a fine enough powder, it works beautifully as a glaze ingredient. Most of the feldspar mined in Maine was shipped to pottery works in New Jersey as a basic glaze ingredient for everything from fine plateware to toilet bowls. It was an 'industrial mineral,' as the saying goes.

The only reason Maine does not have deposits of natural, 'primary' clay is because for the past million years Maine has been scoured by successive, mile high glaciers every 100,000 years or so, which like a steel plow on a snow-filled driveway, scraped away all the clay and softened rock right down to hard bedrock and dumped the residue in the Atlantic Ocean. In the U.S., you have to go south of the line of glaciers, ie. Kentucky or Tennessee, to find clay deposits still intact and near where they were first formed. What we in Maine call 'marine clay' is actually the finely ground-up residue from the glaciers' scraping and grinding that has partly altered into true clay minerals and is on its way to doing so, give another 10 million years. That said, it is still perfectly usable as a slip or a low-fire earthenware body. Be patient, Maine !!!

Ed Baum 1997 Graph

2011-06-21T13:23:00.001-07:00

Fathers Day, Part I

2011-06-19T19:49:00.000-07:00

Central Nebraska, 35,000 feet, 2 p.m., June 15, 2011.

Fathers Day

We live on stolen land
But what of it.
It was the Indians' land
So we told them to shove it.
Now they exist in our minds
Like little figurines
On the mantel or in
some magazine.

Some folks are surprised
when a fox is in their yard
Forgetting it was first
the foxes' yard.

Things you ignore
Don't go away.
Because you don't care
if they go or stay.

No country cheers
that it's number two.
The sky doesn't cry
because it's blue.
It can't have happened both ways
if we want it to.

A lie becomes true
if enough believe it.
A child stays pure
until you deceive it.

Then the kid starts asking why.
It's okay for you but
not for me to lie.

You'll learn son sometimes
It's what it takes
to get by.

The Great Goddards Ledge Rose Quartz Conspiracy Hoax

2011-05-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

Philip Morrill et al. (1958) described Goddards Ledge near Rumford Center, Maine as a rose quartz locality, found while the pegmatite was worked for ceramic feldspar in the WWII era.

So in 1993 I tried to find it. It's a nasty traverse, pretty steep, up the side of a mountain, unmarked, no trails and 'intermittently' posted. But what the hell. Plus it's raining (keeps the black flies and mosquitoes down). Up and away we go.

Bonanza !!! I found an old feldspar working littered with giant shards of glass quartz way up the mountain, under lots of mud and leaves. This must be it. Light going fast in the rain. It's all rose quartz. Unbelievable! Nobody has been here for decades. It's all mine !!!

Get home at 10 p.m. totally soaked in mud, get up, go to work, next day take out all the 'finds' and cover the kitchen floor of the apartment with them. Yes !!! Sun comes out next day. All the 'rose quartz' is amazingly clear and devoid of any pink coloration.

My landlord, Yvon Doyon, comes by for the rent. The whole house and deck are covered with pieces of non-rosy quartz. We have to step around them as I write him the rent check. He gives me a quizzical look. It's a tenement. Lots of 'not-normal' people live here, and I get the feeling Yvon has officially put me in that category.

I've been hoodwinked. Shamboozled. Schlamottled. Diabolicized. It's all NON rose quartz !!! How could this be?

I think it was becuz I was a wee bit too 'eager,' or as Jim Mann would say, 'rock warped.'

Actually, a dozen or so of the pieces are true rose quartz. The rest are so faintly tinted it would have taken rose quartz tinted glasses to see it. And apparently I was wearing coke bottles of that stuff when I was at Goddards Ledge. Oops.

But it gets worse. Much worse. The next spring I brought my girlfriend to Goddards Ledge as the 'first stop' on a Memorial Day camping vacation; and we both climbed the 800 foot nasty incline up to the 'quarry.' But we didn't find it. I followed the wrong ravine. Since there are no trails, it's a bit complicated. And every mosquito and black fly in Oxford County had our number. So we ran back down the mountain to the car, totally sweaty, hungry, disgusted and bug-bitten.

Except I could not find the car keys. They were somewhere 'up there' on the mountain. I had put them in my backpack (for 'safe keeping') and forgot to zip the pocket shut. So they could be anywhere between us and the non-Goddards Ledge quarry. Under the leaves. In between two rocks. Anywhere. And it was getting dark. Smooth move, Doug.

So back up the mountain and about halfway up I saw a glint. The keys !!! Really? The keys !!!

They had fallen out of my pack when I was skidding up or down a glacial erratic. God must have had mercy on me that day.

So some of the rose quartz at Goddard's Ledge in Rumford is genuine, if you don't get too over enthusiastic. And when fashioned en cabochon it does display 6, 8 and 12-star asterism, as Phil Morrill said in 1958.

But keep an extra set of keys under the car wheel. Just in case.

Getting Lost at North Twin Mountain, Rumford, Maine

2011-05-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

North Twin Mountain is just a few miles to the north of Black Mountain near the Rumford/Andover line in western Maine, south of Maine Route 120.

Swains Notch is a split in the mountain chain, marked by a pond, where Phillip Morrill et al. (1958) described large quartz crystals in the 'dirt.' North and South Twin Mountains are historically documented as having unmined beryl pegmatite deposits on their shoulders.

In 1998 on a very rainy June day I got antsy around the house and drove 50 miles to 'attack' Swains Notch and North Twin Mountains and force them to divulge their secrets. What a mistake.

First, it was pouring out. Intermittently, but still pouring 15 minutes of each hour.

Second, I had not even a good USGS map to direct me; just the old Phillip Morrill quads from the Winthrop Mineral Shop.

Third, I had no idea where I was going, except to the end of 'Swains Notch Road' off the road leading to the Black Mountain quarry.

But what the hey. So I got out, shouldered pack, hammer and went uphill. Uphill seemed a good direction to go.

After about an hour of steep climbing, in intermittent yet pouring rain, I did find some unmined, glacially scoured pegmatite outcrops on the southern shoulder of North Twin Mountain. And rough but large beryl crystals were exposed in the pegmatite, if you ripped giant carpets of moss off them and coated yourself in mud. But hey. Edmund Bailey did it at Black Mountain in 1880. But maybe not in the pouring rain.

So I've climbed 1,000 feet, am totally sweaty and totally soaking wet and it is pouring out, did see some in situ beryl but its getting toward 3 or so, not that I have a watch. It just seems 3 or so. Better get off the mountain. Start following logging roads.

But they seem to be heading in endless zigzags. There is no 'down'; just a down followed by an 'up.' Where am I? I have no clue.

On a clear day I could climb a tree and get my bearings from Black Mountain, or any high spot, I know the terrain and landmarks fairly well. But it's pouring and foggy. Visibility is about 300 feet and no sign of it lifting.

I'm totally soaked now, 4 layers of clothes, it's pouring and I'm watching a ruffed grouse who is not so worried as myself. I know from my mental map (no compass ! idiot) that if I walk off the east side of the mountain I will not hit a road for about 5 miles, the Isthmus Road and it will be long past dusk. But I also know that my car is only about 1.5 miles away at most -- if I walk in the right direction toward it. And I have no idea and the logging roads are all doing curlicues and cul de sacs.

But then, in a birch grove, near a brook, a breeze ... a smell ... coming from downhill ... badly cooked cabbage and clam flat gas! Rumford. The smell is my compass!

There was a while I was a bit scared because I had never been so thoroughly lost before. But like a monkey with a typewriter I randomly moved toward the door and downhill and took a correct turn and saw Swains Pond, which I had never seen before, but I knew it was the right way. And the rain started to let up. It was just kind of misty when I popped out of the road at the end of the pond and after another half hour found the car.

It's quite a beautiful place.

How not to solder a padlock in the woods at midnight

2011-03-11T22:37:00.001-08:00

Since my one attempt at teenage vandalism did not come close to succeeding, I can tell the story.

When I was in eighth grade, the big chunk of woods behind our house was purchased and subdivided for development into what are now called McMansions. Because the land is quite ledgy and rocky with Dedham granodiorite, the first two operations consisted of cutting down most of the trees and then dynamiting the ledges and hauling the boulders off the shattered land.

This did not sit well with me, but as a 15-year-old with $10 in my savings account I was quite helpless to stop it. The developers had all their legal permits.

The dirt road to the development was quite a ways in the woods and blocked by large metal posts driven into the ground and secured with ametal chain and a padlock the size of a softball.

One day after school I decided to solder the keyhole of the padlock that held the chain in place across the dirt road. That way the trucks couldn't get in and cut and dynamite any more trees and ledges down.

This plan would take cunning and stealth and certain pieces of equipment: a Bernzomatic blow torch and a roll of solder from the cellar. It would also require sneaking out of the house at night after my mother went to bed. It would also require a Hogan's Heroes type of disguise, which in this case was all the dark stuff I had in my bureau and a navy blue ski mask, even though it was summer.

Fully equipped at about 11 p.m. I snuck out of the house with ski mask, matches, torch and solder and hiked through the woods to the construction site and tried to find my way down the little, circuitous deer paths I chose so as not to be seen beneath a street light. Once I got to the chain and lock I discovered I knew nothing about how to solder, particularly the part about heating the lock as well as the solder, and I didn't bring any flux. So the solder kept beading up and rolling off the padlock didn't plug up the keyhole, which my plan required.

After a couple minutes I heard voices and leaves rustling in the woods and froze in a cold sweat with visions of the fluorescent lights of the Easton Police Station and the inevitable call home to mom that I had been arrested, was in the pokey and needed bail money to get out. As the voices got closer, I panicked and bolted as fast as I could in the opposite direction: deeper into the woods toward Stoughton. I fell a few times, banged my knees and head on rocks and trees, scraped my face on saplings but just got up and tried to run even faster. I was scared but also astonished. How could I so easily get discovered and caught?

There were yells and screams of "Someone's up there in the woods," and it sounded like half a dozen people were following me. By their footfalls and voices I could tell were spreading out to cut off my routes of escape and trying to flank me from the sides to cut off any alternate routes. So I ran faster, zigzagged like a tailback and tried to throw them off my intended path, which I didn't know.

They were gaining on me. Who were they? Did the developer hire Green Beret squads to camp out and watch over their stuff at night just to catch people like me who didn't know how to solder?

Finally, like a deer in a deer drive, or a rabbit chased by a wolf pack, I zagged when I should have zigged and got cornered and tackled in the leaves and rocks. The man who knocked me down pinned me on the shoulders. He was much bigger than me. I couldn't wriggle away or see him. "I've got him," he yelled and the rest of the group converged. "What's this," one said grabbing my hand, "It's a blowtorch."

I still had the ski mask on. The group converged over me with clenched fists and wild screams about 'let's kill him.' At this point I thought my face would probably not have recognizable features within a few minutes and waited to hear what your own bones sound like when they crack on a warm mosquitoey night. I thought I was going to die.

"Pull his mask off," they yelled. The lead guy ripped the ski mask off my head. Then they all said in a puzzled voice: "Drugless?" It was my schoolmates. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

I told them my story and they told me theirs. I was trying to solder a padlock in the middle of the night. They had all taken LSD and had been running around in the woods high as kites since it got dark.

"We came this close to killing you, you idiot." They said.

So the soldering the padlock idea didn't work out.

The Frates Dairy Milk Bottle, Raynham, Mass.

2011-02-16T14:37:00.000-08:00

This is a fairly recent picture of the Frates Dairy Milk Bottle on Route 138 in Raynham, Mass. The milk bottle was going to be torn down a few years ago but thankfully some folks decided not to.

As a kid, it made perfect sense to stop and get an ice cream cone at a 60 foot high milk bottle.

Thanks, Frates Dairy.

Some Background on our Maine Atlantic Salmon Lawsuit

2011-02-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Kennebec River Atlantic salmon, October 1996.

The following (written in op/ed-ese) for the Waterville, Maine Morning Sentinel quickly scopes the salient issues:
---

Breaking the Law is Different from Obeying the Law

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine

Public documents going back 20 years show that hydroelectric dam owners on the Kennebec River have been aware that fish are sucked into their turbines and are killed and maimed. This happens because the intakes of the turbines are open and unscreened, like a window fan with no protective mesh.

Atlantic salmon are killed at hydroelectric dams by the same mechanism as shown above for American eels.

In June 2009 the few dozen remaining Atlantic salmon in the Kennebec were declared an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. It is a federal crime to kill a Kennebec River Atlantic salmon. If you or I did it, we would go to jail.

Kennebec dam owners continue to leave their turbines open and unscreened and allow Atlantic salmon to swim through them, leading to their death.

Because these dam owners have failed to take prompt action to protect the few Atlantic salmon left in the Kennebec, myself and Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine are suing these dam owners in federal court to stop this killing.

Putting in the turbine screens will cost the dam owners a minuscule fraction of their annual profits. Turbine screening has been done now for half a decade at the Benton Falls Dam in Benton and the American Tissue Dam in Gardiner with no effect on their ability to generate electricity.

The Kennebec River is owned by us; not out-of-state dam owners. Using a public river for private gain is a privilege, not a right, and with it comes a responsibility to not interfere with our rights to the river and our right to expect that all laws will be obeyed and endangered species will not be harmed or killed or go extinct. This is why we pass laws.

News item, Kennebec Journal, July 1880.

Hey !!! A big business law paper covered our Maine Atlantic Salmon lawsuit.

2011-02-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

This piece is by subscription only, but cuz I was sent a copy by a subscriber and it's about me, I am going to let you read it:

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Green Groups Sue Maine Dam Operators Over Salmon

By Bibeka Shrestha

Law360, New York (February 1, 2011) -- Two conservation groups have sued NextEra Energy Resources Inc. and other hydroelectric dam operators on the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers in Maine, accusing them of harming the endangered Atlantic salmon population by allowing the fish to pass through turbines.

Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine filed four complaints on Monday against NextEra, Brookfield Renewable Power Inc., Topsham Hydro Partners Limited Partnership, Miller Hydro Group, Merimil Limited Partnership and several affiliates in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, alleging violations of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.

The lawsuits target the owners and operators of four dams on the Kennebec River and three dams on the Androscoggin River, alleging these dams are killing or injuring migrating salmon that try to pass through spinning turbine blades, and are otherwise impeding the salmon's ability to travel upstream and downstream on the rivers.

The dam operators have violated the Endangered Species Act by preventing Atlantic salmon from reaching a significant amount of spawning and rearing habitats and significantly impairing the salmon population's essential behavior patterns, according to the complaint.

Merimil, NextEra, Brookfield and their affiliates are also violating the Clean Water Act by not conducting a required study to prove that allowing downstream-migrating adult salmon to pass through their dams' turbines is safe, the complaint said.

These companies are allegedly violating water quality certifications, which require them to conduct site-specific quantitative studies in consultation with the the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to show that passage through the turbines does not result in significant injury or death.

Atlantic salmon were officially designated as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in June 2009, the same month the NMFS designated the Kennebec and Androscoggin rivers as critical habitats, according to the complaint.

The rivers, which share a common estuary at Merrymeeting Bay, historically enjoyed the largest Atlantic salmon runs in the country, estimated at more than 100,000 adults annually, according to the groups.

In 2010, however, 10 adult salmon returned to the Androscoggin and five adult salmon returned to the Kennebec, the groups said.

“These dams are pushing an iconic Maine fish to the brink of extinction," said Emily Figdor, director of Environment Maine, in a statement Tuesday. "With the number of Atlantic salmon perilously low, the need for action to protect the fish and their habitat is urgent."

The groups are asking the court to order the dam owners and operators to conduct a biological assessment to determine whether their actions are adversely affecting the salmon population.

They also hope to block the dam owners and operators from allowing salmon to swim through operating turbines unless they receive authorization through an incidental take permit or incidental take statement, which would require them to minimize and mitigate the impacts of harming the endangered fish to the "maximum extent possible," the complaint said.

The groups claim the dam owners can implement simple measures, such as installing effective devices to divert salmon from turbines and stopping the turbines during salmon migration season.

"The salmon population is nearly extinct, and the dam owners and operators need to take immediate steps to implement measures to protect the salmon," said David Nicholas, an attorney representing the conservation groups, on Tuesday. "If they don't, we're facing an extinction possibility."

NextEra declined to comment on the lawsuit on Tuesday.

Attorneys or representatives for Miller, Topsham and Brookfield did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

The environmental groups are represented by Joshua R. Kratka and Charles C. Caldart of the National Environmental Law Center and David A. Nicholas and Bruce M. Merrill of Law Offices of Bruce Merrill PA.

Nancy Skancke of Law Offices of GKRSE is representing Miller and Topsham.

Counsel information for the other defendants was not immediately available Tuesday.

The cases are Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine v. Miller Hydro Group, case number 2:11-cv-00036; Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine v. NextEra Energy Resources Inc. et al., case number 2:11-cv-00038; Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine v. Topsham Hydro Partners Limited Partnership, case number 2:11-cv-00037; and Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine v. Brookfield Renewable Power Inc. et al., case number 1:11-cv-00035, all in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine.

--
Bibeka Shrestha
Reporter

Portfolio Media, Inc.
Publisher of the Law360 Newswire
860 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, New York 10003

Direct: (646)783-7147
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www.law360.com

Maine Public Radio on our Kennebec and Androscoggin River Atlantic Salmon Lawsuit

2011-02-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

From Feb. 1, 2011.

This piece written by Scott Monroe of the Waterville, Maine Morning Sentinel; and this piece by David Sharp of the Associated Press as reprinted by Bloomberg News cover the basics.

Redfin Pickerel in the Brooks of Easton, Mass.

2011-02-03T09:52:00.000-08:00

The redfin pickerel (Esox americanus) is the smallest and least known member of the pickerel and pike family, which contains the more well known and much bigger chain pickerel, northern pike and muskellunge. Chain pickerel (Esox niger) and redfin pickerel are the two species of the family native to Massachusetts.

Redfin pickerel are very small, usually less than 5-6 inches, and only rarely up to 10 inches. Since they are quite similar in appearance to chain pickerel, most people who have seen a redfin pickerel assume it is a very small chain pickerel.

Redfin pickerel occupy a fairly unique niche along the Atlantic seaboard: very small first and second order brooks. In some areas, such as northern New England, this niche would be occupied by the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis). Unlike redfin pickerel, native brook trout are extremely intolerant to water temperatures much above 65 F.

Easton is unusually situated at the very top of the divide between the Neponset and Taunton River watersheds. For this reason, especially in North Easton, most of the brooks are truly first order streams, meaning they rise directly from isolated marshes, bogs, seeps and springs. In contrast, a second order brook is one formed by the joining of two first order brooks. Nearly all of the brooks in Easton are first or second order, meaning they are very small and have a very limited watershed. Brooks of this type have some very unusual attributes, including, unfortunately, that they can periodically dry up during prolonged droughts.

Prior to 1978-1979, an enormous tract of woods existed from Holmes Street and Linden Street in North Easton all the way to Stoughton and the Stoughton Fish and Game club. It was bordered by North Main Street on the west and Washington Street on the east. Around 1979 a large chunk of this land was turned into subdivisions.

Before 1979, however, I used to walk these woods quite a bit. They had all been cleared for pasture in the 1800s as evidenced by stone walls running through the woods this way and that. Just to the west of where Whitman Brook crosses the railroad tracks near the Stoughton line I discovered a tiny brook, barely a foot or two across, that stayed wet all year round, and flowed into Whitman Brook. So one day after school I followed its trace.

At some point a century earlier a farmer had a little cart path that crossed the brook and made a tiny bridge over the brook using some flat pieces of glacial rock nearby. It was quite odd seeing such an old, but obviously handmade little piece of construction way out in the middle of the woods. Leaning on my belly on the piece of granite I looked into the water and was surprised to see a tiny pickerel, no more than 3-4 inches long, hovering in the current like a brook trout, head pointed upstream, waiting for a little insect or other bit of food to float by. I watched him for about a half hour.

Now, in hindsight, I'm quite certain I was watching a redfin pickerel, whose ancestors had probably been living in that little tiny brook for the past 8,000 or so years.

Unfortunately, the little brook was destroyed the next year to build Phase IV of a bunch of McMansions.

Too bad.

Logperch in the Brooks of Easton, Mass.

2011-02-03T09:51:00.001-08:00

The Logperch is a member of the darter family of fish (Percina). This family also includes the yellow perch, so common to Easton's ponds and deeper, slower streams.

The darters are an incredibly varied and diverse group of freshwater fish, even though most are just a few inches long. The logperch is the largest of the darters, reaching a length of up to about six inches. Darters are unusual in that most lack swim bladders, have wildly outsized pectoral fins and the males display extraordinarily bright colors during mating season.

On the Atlantic coast, Massachusetts is just about the northern limit of darters, although there exist historic reports of the swamp darter in several brooks in York County in southernmost Maine. Interestingly, darters are quite common in the mountain brooks of central Vermont. Those I used to observe as a kid in East Corinth, VT were probably the Johnny Darter, one of the most common and best known of the family.

My experience with the logperch in Easton is limited to a single observation back in the late 1970s when I was in junior high school. We lived just up the street from Whitman Brook where it crosses Elm Street and goes into Langwater Pond and we used to muck about in the brook all the way to the Stoughton/Easton line.

One summer, most likely in 1977 or 1978, we had a particularly nasty and prolonged drought in and around Easton. Every thunderstorm missed us and you could almost hear the ground groan and sigh for lack of moisture. As my uncle Gilbert Heino would say, it was tough.

One day I walked down Elm Street to Whitman Brook and was shocked to find it was completely dried up just before it enters Langwater. Walking in the brook bed I found dozens and dozens of dead fish, lightly covered with mud. Most were about 4-5 inches long, very slender and kind of odd-looking. Coming back home I figured out, to the best of the descriptions in our various fish books, that they were logperch. Apparently what happened is that the drought was so severe that the logperch got stranded in isolated pools in the brook and when those pools finally dried up, the fish died in them.

What struck me then, and still today, is that we never knew these logperch lived in Whitman Brook. Even with all the fishing and wading and exploring we did in the brook during our growing up years, we never saw them. Apparently, they are quite reclusive little fish. Part of this might be due to our familiarity with the centrarchid family, ie. bluegills, pumpkinseeds and largemouth bass in the local ponds, as well as the chain pickerel. The bass and sunfish family are curiously non-shy, to the point that it almost seems they are as curious about you as you are to them, especially if you are swimming, where the sunfish will come up and nibble at your leg hairs. And underwater, with a diving mask, largemouth and smallmouth bass will swim right up to your face to check you out.

So absent further sightings since 1978, I can only surmise that for all those years of wandering about in Whitman Brook, there were logperch aplenty but they kept themselves extremely well concealed. This is the only logical way to explain how during that one very bad summer drought when Whitman Brook dried up there were dozens of logperch lying dead in the brookbed.

As a side note about our native Percina in Easton, many people are not aware that yellow perch engage in a very interesting spawning migration during April. I first encountered this at the back end of Picker Pond off Canton Street in North Easton. Picker Pond is fed by two brooks, one coming from Flyaway Pond and the other from Long Pond which both meet in a marsh before the pond actually starts.

Walking the little brook from Long Pond one April I was surprised to see fish in it everywhere -- far more than you would ever expect to see in such a small brook. Upon closer inspection I discovered they were all the yellow perch in Picker Pond. They had swam from the pond into the fast water of the brook to mate and lay their eggs. It was quite a sight.

The Brooks of Easton, Mass.

2011-02-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

This is a short medley of some underwater video I took in 2009 and 2010 in a few of the little headwater brooks in Easton, Massachusetts. Rather than wait for the 'full blown' coverage I'd like to do, this will suffice for now.

The first brook has no formal name. We've always called it, unimaginatively, 'the brook.' It's behind the house where I grew up on Linden Street in North Easton. It actually starts not far from Long Pond and flows east behind Canton Street, then between Linden and Holmes Streets, under the railroad tracks then into the Ames estate where it joins Whitman Brook on Elm Street. All of the video looking up at the trees is actually through the water -- that's how clear the water is.

This brook often dries up in the summer during dry spells, except for isolated pools, so its aquatic population is mostly insects, particularly water striders (Jesus bugs) and the occasional crayfish. This is from July 31, 2010, one of the hottest days of the summer. We had just gotten a big thunderstorm so the brook came up a bit from being almost dry. Since it was so hot I went out back of my mother's house and found this one tiny pool that was about a foot deep and took a dip. The water felt unbelievably good -- it was about 65 degrees probly. And clean !!!

The second brook is actually in East Mansfield. It is a little tributary of the Canoe River that comes into Canoe River campground at the 'tenting site' there. It's really pretty. This is about 200 yards up a red maple kind of swampy thing from the border of the campground. We had gotten a big thunderstorm the night before so the water is a bit turbid. This little brook has native bog iron in its bed.

The third brook is Black Brook at the old railroad grade in the Hockomock Swamp in South Easton. Black Brook is aptly named since unless the water is less than six inches deep it is so colored by tannic acid you can't see the bottom. It's not that the water is muddy or murky -- it's crystal clear -- but it is clear like reddish root beer is clear. The last clip is not underwater, but just looking down at the little pool just above the railroad grade with the reflection of the trees overhead.

The still photo at the end is my brother Tim standing above Queset Brook along Sullivan Ave. where it goes underneath the railroad tracks. This is what William Chaffin called "Trout Hole Brook" in his History of Easton from 1888. It is the one brook in Easton which has good, documented evidence of formerly supporting native brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis). It lost its native brook trout population in the late 1700s when it was dammed up for the Ames Shovel Works, which caused the water to become too warm and polluted to support native brook trout. This section of Queset Brook could support native brook trout again if several of the old dams on it were removed, which they should since they serve no useful purpose except to louse up the brook.

What's interesting is how each brook has a completely different water color. The Linden Street brook is crystal clear; the little Canoe River tributary is cream soda colored and Black Brook is almost ruby red. This is from the varying amounts of tannic acid leaching into the water from decaying leaves.

The music is an excerpt of a little improv song I made up around 1994 on a cheap Casio keyboard. A few months ago I put an electric bass guitar on it which thickens it up a bit. The melody line is a transparent rip-off of the melody line of "Third Stone from the Sun" by Jimi Hendrix with various fake embellishments.

[Note: The compression used by youtube doesn't like underwater video that much; on my computer it looks best at the '360p' setting.]

"No Laughing, No Having Fun" by EZ7.

2011-02-01T05:08:00.000-08:00

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes.

Our song, "No Laughing, No Having Fun," by EZ7. Written by Rick Burns and Greg Hinckley. Recorded live to digital two-track in the Burnsboro Disc Golf pro shop in Vassalboro, Maine, Saturday night, Jan. 15, 2011.

Rick Burns vocals, Mike Fife drums, Pete Burns bongos, Greg Hinckley rhythm guitar, Geoff Hursch wah wah guitar, Mike Southerberg acoustic guitar, Sax Mike on the tenor saxophone, Doug Watts bass and back-up vocals.

Video produced by Doug using footage from the (now demolished) Statler Tissue factory in Augusta, Maine ; the old Cony High School in Augusta; and the Watershed Center for Ceramics in Edgecomb, Maine.

The band's name is a frisbee golf joke for when you throw it into the woods ('that's an easy seven').

The words are about some bitter frisbee golf match between Rick and a guy named Charlie Wilson.

Star Trek: The Big Daddy of Bad Astronomy

2011-01-25T15:44:00.001-08:00

By Doug Watts
with apologies to Dr. Phil Plait,
the original Bad Astronomer.

If the Earth was a foot from the Sun the next nearest stars would be 50 miles away.

Space is aptly named.

Watching old Star Trek re-runs my wife reminds me that in the later versions of the series the producers tried to keep the scripts somewhat close to science.

But if this were truly true, you really couldn't have a show. You'd mostly have this:

This is not to knock Star Trek, which has always been one of my favorite TV shows, but is more about having some fun with science.

Star Trek requires that in 200-400 years people in space ships can travel megazillions of times faster than the speed of light. This is illustrated by stars zipping past the ship's view screen as if they were farm houses zipping past as you drive down a highway. This is done, of course, to show us viewers that the ship is moving really fast.

Except in the dense center of our galaxy, the average distance between stars in the Milky Way is around five light years: 30 trillion miles. So we can estimate the average travelling speed of a ship in a typical Star Trek set-up shot as about 5 light years per second, or 30 trillion miles per second. In contrast, light pokes along at a measly 186,000 miles per second.

5 light years per second is 300 light years per minute; 18,000 light years per hour and 432,000 light years per day. This is problematic for a 'sciencey' show set in the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy about 80-100,000 light years in diameter. Its width (from top to bottom) is about 16,000 light years at the central bulge and gets much thinner as you move out from the center bulge.

This means that at the ship speed shown in a typical Star Trek episode, the Enterprise would travel all the way through the Milky Way in about six hours. If the ship was aimed in any direction except parallel to the disk of the galaxy, the ship would be completely out of the Milky Way Galaxy and into the emptiness of intergalactic space in just a couple of hours. The ship would arrive at the Large Magellanic Cloud, our nearest galactic neighbor (160,000 ly), between breakfast and supper and would reach the Andromeda Galaxy (2.5 million ly), our nearest large galactic neighbor, in a week.

Andromeda on 5 Quatloos A Day

In a favorite early episode of mine, the USS Enterprise is hijacked by the deliciously suave and evil Rojan (Warren Stevens) and his friends from the planet Kelvan in the Andromeda Galaxy so they can use the Enterprise to get back home. Because the journey to Andromeda will be so long, they turn the whole Enterprise crew into little styrofoam icosahedrons and soup up the Enterprise so it can go a zillion times faster than normal, which is already a megazillion times faster than the speed of light.

However, even at normal Enterprise speed, Rojan and the Kelvans could get home to the Andromeda Galaxy in a bit more time than it took for Kirk to beat up Rojan and make out with his hot wife Kelinda (Barbara Bouchet), who like, all Kelvans, is actually a 100 tentacled creature.

The Great Energy Barrier at the Edge of the Milky Way

A Star Trek staple is that a giant 'negative' energy barrier surrounds the Milky Way Galaxy that no normal matter, like a space ship, can pass through. This is a critical plot point in the episode with Rojan, Kelinda, Tomar, Hanar and Drea of the Kelvans, since Kirk has the chance to flood the engines of the Enterprise with this negative energy and blow up the ship as they pass through the Great Energy Barrier. But instead, Kirk decides the best way to save the Enterprise is for Scotty and Tomar to get totally shitfaced:

For Spock to whip Rojan's ass at three dimensional chess and for Kirk to get all Barry White with Kelinda and then beat the crap out of Rojan when he gets jealous.

The Great Energy Barrier? It doesn't exist. Even when Gene Roddenberry was first outlining the series, no scientist ever speculated such a Great Energy Barrier existed. He made it all up. But it's still kool.

Star Trek Voyager: Too Fast and Too Slow?

Star Trek: Voyager is a weird cross between Star Trek and Gilligan's Island and Lost in Space but is more ridiculous and contrived than all combined, if that is possible.

When Voyager begins, we are told the ship has been throttled by a weird alien dude into the "Delta Quadrant" of the Milky Way Galaxy, far from the "Alpha Quadrant" where Earth is located and all the other Star Treks are set. Then we are woefully told that even at 'maximum warp speed' it will take 70 years for Voyager to return home to the "Alpha Quadrant."

A quadrant is one fourth of the galaxy, so this means there is a maximum of about 50,000 light years between the outermost edge of the "Delta Quadrant" to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy and into the inner part of the "Alpha Quadrant." This equates to travelling 50,000 light years during 70 years; or a speed of a bit less than 1,000 light years per year of travel which equates to 1,000 times the speed of light.

But even at 'moderate warp speed,' Voyager is shown in typical 'Star Trek' mode whizzing by stars at the rate of a half dozen stars per second. This speed equates to 432,000 light years per day. At this speed, Voyager would get back to the Alpha Quadrant of the Milky Way not in 70 years, not in 7 years, not in 7 months, not in 7 weeks, not in 7 days, but in about 7 hours.

This ship speed, which is zillions of times faster than the speed of light, raises some troubling functional issues. How do you steer that fast? How do you stop? How do you swerve around all those stars? How do you even see the stars?

Deep Space Nine and the Worm Hole

Aside from that it might be the best series of the series, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, uses the premise that a 'worm hole' exists in the 'Alpha Quadrant' that leads directly to the distant 'Gamma Quadrant' of the Milky Way. All types of fun and death then ensues. The problem, again, is that at the speed the Star Trek ships are shown routinely travelling, they could reach the 'Gamma Quadrant' in a few hours without even using the 'worm hole.' Oh well.

Captain, we've a wee bit of a problem.

In 'Star Trek' terms, the speed of light is really slow, like riding a bike with square tires up a steep hill.

Real science is way weirder than even the weirdest science fiction. And it's also real! One of the weirdest parts of science is Special Relativity, which deals when stuff, like us, goes almost as fast as the speed of light.

Swiss Patent Clerk Albert Einstein published his scientific paper on Special Relativity in 1905. The most important 'take home' message of his paper is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. The only thing that can go as fast as light is light.

Special Relativity is Actually Pretty Simple

Special Relativity does two things to stuff like you and I if we are moving very close to light speed.

1. It makes us more massive.
2. It makes time slow down.

It does other stuff too, like make us shorter in the direction of motion, but we need not deal with that now. These two are plenty weird enough, and have actually been proven in experiments with little tiny itty bitty things like protons and muons, which are the only things we've ever been able to speed up to something approaching the speed of light.

A lot of Special Relativity deals with the weird things that happen to matter as it gets close to the speed of light. And since SR is a set of mathematical equations, we can look at what would happen if a piece of matter actually reached the speed of light.

Well first, it would become infinitely massive, as in it would weigh more than the entire Universe put together. There goes the diet plan !!! [1]

Also, time would stand still, so starting that diet could always wait until tomorrow, since it would never come.

It's a procrastinator's dream come true. With infinite food !

The SR equations dictate that a piece of matter would become infinitely massive if it could reach light speed, and as such, it would take an infinite amount of energy to make it actually reach light speed, so the whole Enterprise would kind of grind to a speedy halt.

But on Star Trek, the entire ship travels not just at the speed of light, but way way way faster than the speed of light. So this is a problem.

The Whole Time Stops Part

Assuming you could get a ship to go at light speed, time would stop. Time wouldn't stop outside the ship, but it would stop inside. At light speed, you would be everywhere at once. You'd be where you were and where you are, all at the same time. Because time stops. The concept is so bizarre that Albert Einstein decided one afternoon that only light can do this or else we would all go insane. [2]

But there's an even bigger problem. To reach the speed of light you first have to reach almost the speed of light, like say .9999999999999 ... the speed of light. At this speed, time seems completely normal inside your ship. However, time everywhere else, including on Earth is moving 99.999999999 ... percent faster than your time. So within a few seconds of travel by your clock, not only is everyone you know on Earth long dead, but the Sun has died out and so have all of the stars you are trying to visit. Long before you get 'there' there is no longer any 'there' to get to.

And this is just at near light speed, never mind zillions of times faster than light speed, like the USS Enterprise.

If a ship could travel faster than light speed, time in your ship would have to move backwards as compared with the rest of the Universe. You would arrive at your destination billions of years before you had left. Captain Kirk would have to give the order to go to warp speed billions of yearsbefore he was born; and before life had evolved on Earth!

Slower is Faster and Faster is Slower ?

One of the weirdest parts of Special Relativity is that a space ship going very close to the speed of light, from Earth's perspective, takes longer to get to its destination than if it goes slower. Say what?

With your ship travelling at 99.999 the speed of light, your ship clock seems perfectly normal. However, based on clocks back on Earth, your clock is running 223 times slower than theirs. So in one year of space travel according to your clock, 223 years have gone by according to clocks on Earth. So by travelling at 99.999 percent of light speed, in one year by your clock you have travelled almost a light year. But according to the clocks on Earth it took you 223 years to go that far.

So while according to your instruments, your speed is almost about 6 trillion miles per year; according to Earth your speed is a measly .026 trillion miles per year. Why, because according to Earth's clocks, your year is 223 times longer than theirs.

Now, on the other hand, if you travelled at only one tenth of light speed, it would take 10 years to travel a light year by your clock. Because of the scaling in the SR equations, according to Earth's clocks, your year is only 1.005 times longer than theirs, which is not bad. So from Earth's perspective, who are waiting for your scientific observations, they will get your information a lot faster if you go a lot slower !!!

How is this so? Basically because nature so abhors massive things going close to the speed light that it penalizes you for doing so. This penalty comes in the form of forcing your friends clocks on Earth to go much faster than yours (or to put it another way, to make your clock go far slower than theirs). At 99.999 percent of light speed, 223 years will pass on Earth in one of your years. If you ever want to see your friends again, you'll need to slow way down.

Light Speed Ate My Homework !!!

Because time dilation increases asymptotically under SR, the penalty for extreme speed so extreme that it is completely destructive to information. Let's say you orbit the perimeter of the Milky Way at really close to light speed. As you look out your window you will see stars burning out every few seconds and within a few weeks or months watch the whole galaxy turn off. Sure, you can write The Definitive History of the Milky Way Galaxy, but who besides you will be around to read it?

You'll Smash Into Exploding Stars All the Time

Once you're going really really really close to light speed, your clock is moving tens of thousands or millions of times faster than the clocks on the stars you approach. At a certain point stars are going to be randomly exploding around you like popcorn. Even worse, nearly all stars have relative velocity: they are moving on their own trajectory and speed within the galaxy. But because your clock is so slow compared to theirs, all your star charts will become obsolete almost as soon as you make them. The stars will be buzzing around you like deer flies and exploding every few minutes or seconds. It'll be like trying to run between the rain drops in a downpour !!!

You'll Get Fried by Gamma Radiation !!!

Because light cannot travel faster than the speed of light, when you approach a luminous body (or it approaches you) the light appears blue shifted, ie. its frequency increases and hence, its energy. If your ship is travelling super close to light speed, the light from any approaching star would be so blue-shifted it would reach the frequency of gamma rays and totally fry you and your ship.

Be Your Own Black Hole !!!

Another problem is that once you accelerate your ship really, really, really close to light speed, the ship's mass becomes so large that your ship becomes a Black Hole. This raises another "time stops" issue since under General Relativity, time runs slower in strong gravitational fields, and goes really slow inside a Black Hole. And of this would happen before you reached light speed.[4]

Captain, we just Phased Ourselves !!!

If your ship is travelling faster than light speed and you shoot a 'phaser' or 'photon torpedo' at something in front of the ship, you're going to hit yourself.

Why is the Enterprise Viewscreen Not Totally Black?

While the Enterprise might be travelling faster than light speed, the light from stars and ships up ahead of it is not. That light is still poking along like a lame donkey up a hill. Even under Star Trek Rules, the Enterprise would have to rely on paper charts to tell them where they are since any real-time information about where they really are cannot reach them until they've gone by it. Talk about an unfair drivers' test! This invokes the Sulu Paradox, ie. light speed is not additive to ship speed. At warp speed, you're flying blind.

Captain, the Sensor Readings Show Nothing.

Like the warp drive, sensors work perfectly except when you need them to work. Then they fall apart. The sensors give Spock something 'sciencey' to do while Kirk signs a space clipboard and checks out Yeoman Rand's gams. At 'warp speed' sensors could not work. This is why Spock always looks into the viewfinder and says, "Fascinating."

But Haven't Prominent Physicists like George Lucas Said Warp Drive is Possible?

Yes, but so are light sabers. The idea of real 'warp drive' uses the concept of 'dark energy,'theorized as being responsible for the continuing expansion of the Universe, ie. of spacetime itself. Dark energy apparently does exist; and as theorized dark energy does violate the speed of light, but only makes itself felt at scales of hundreds of millions and billions of light years. That last part is critical.[5]

We know from examining the light from the most extremely distant galaxies that they and us are moving apart from each other faster than the speed of light. But while this 'dark energy' expansion of the entire Universe is dominant at scales of 5-10 billion light years or more, it is far weaker than other forces, like gravity, at interstellar scales. This is why 'dark energy' does not cause the Milky Way Galaxy to fly apart, for binary stars to fly apart , for the Earth to fly away from the Sun and the Moon to fly away from the Earth.

At planetary, interstellar, galactic and even intergalactic scales, gravity holds the upper hand, in the same sense that at very close distances, a couple of toy magnets on a toothpick can hover over one another and 'defy' gravity.

The idea behind a Star Trek-like warp drive is to create a bubble of "dark energy" directly behind your ship that would radically expand the size of space right behind you, and create a 'wave' in spacetime that you could ride like a surfer, or something, toward your destination.

This concept at least has the attraction of building from actual cosmological constructs. But its application raises more issues than it solves. As in all travel, you want to get from 'here' to 'there' as quickly as you can. Warp drive is sort of like thinking of the U.S. as a big flat carpet and pulling it into enough big wrinkles, or waves, so that Los Angeles is suddenly (and temporarily) just a few miles outside Boston. But what happens to Kansas? Doesn't it all get scrunched up? And what happens when you 'unwrinkle' it? Does everything jerk right back to where it was? Do any dishes get broken?

For example, if we want to wrinkle, fold and crinkle all of the space between us and our destination, say the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, there are millions of stars and planets in between. What happens to them? What happens to them during the scrunching and unscrunching process? What happens if somebody else is scrunching and unscrunching space at the same time we are? Whose scrunching takes precedent? Can you unscrunch somebody else's scrunch? Why aren't we observing all this scrunching going on right now; with stars zipping back and forth across the sky, scrunching and unscrunching everytime a ship goes into warp drive? What happens if you don't scrunch and unscrunch the Galaxy just right? What if Lt. Sulu screws up at the helm because he's checking out Lt. Uruhu's legs?

But what if what if?

Okay Mr. Pessimist McPessimisticky, people thought for millennia that the Sun went around the Earth. Perhaps in 400 years we might discover that our 'laws' of physics are just as wrong as the 'laws' that people believed in the Dark Ages. Fair enough.

The problem is that our contemporary laws of physics are scientifically verified; the 'ideas' of the Dark Ages were not. Our contemporary physics explains natural phenomena very well. To develop a totally new physics we're also going to need a new reality, which is tough.

We now have particle accelerators that can bring tiny bits of matter up to about 99.99999999 percent or so of light speed. In these experiments, the equations Special Relativity are quantitatively and qualitatively confirmed.

When protons are accelerated to very close to light speed, they become more massive, at exactly the amount predicted by the equations of Special Relativity. At near-light speed, highly unstable particles like muons live much longer before decaying, showing that at near light speed, time slows down, by the exact amount predicted by Special Relativity.[3]

So to have Star Trek, we need to get rid around Special Relativity.

Unfair !!!

Lighten Up Yourself

Relativity could also be called "No Free Lunch" or "Something Has to Give." The phrase, "relativity" is wrong; the antonym "invariance" is what Einstein preferred, which is fancy for saying some things can't be changed. That something, is c, the speed of light in a vacuum. By establishing this as a postulate, Einstein had to rejigger a whole bunch of accepted physical laws. Then he challenged the World to prove him wrong, thereby creating the Internet.

What's cool about relativity ... err ... invariance is that time is the variable, which we always assumed was a constant. Light speed always stays the same so something must change. Time is what changes. This is the stuff you think about when you're bored at your job at the Swiss Patent office. Job boredom is good!

If somehow we could be turned into pure light, we could travel at the speed of light. We'd just have to get turned back into non-light. And since, at light speed, time stops, we can be where we were and where we are at exactly the same time. Kool! The problem is that time doesn't work like that for all the people (and stars) who are not going at light speed. So there's kind of a trade-off.

Remember that the real problem with accelerating a piece of stuff to light speed is (a) you can't and (b) getting from the next to last decimal to the last decimal will take a megazillion years. And you'll weigh more than the entire Universe.

Good News and Bad News

The Good News is that we have already reached the next nearest stars, and quite a few beyond that. The Bad News is that most of what has reached these stars from us is bad 1960s music and Threes Company episodes. Why? Because radio and teevee travel at the speed of light!

Right now, we are sending our crappy music to Sirius and they are hearing it. The problem is sending the musicians there so they can do a live gig.

The 'speed of light travel problem' is really about listening to Led Zeppelin on the radio from your planet orbiting around Sirius as opposed to having them come over to your house and playing "Achilles Last Stand" after supper. The more important problem is transporting relativistic amounts of Peruvian blow for 30 trillion miles and having some left for after the gig.

So the problem with interstellar space travel is that we desperately need to send Pat Boone to play live on Alpha Centauri rather than playing "In a Metal Mood" on the radio. Which, come to think of it, is a good way to encourage an interstellar invasion force from Alpha Centauri coming to kill us all off. But then we wouldn't get a Ricky Nelson song about getting dissed at a garden party 4 light years from Earth. So it's a trade-off.

Are we just being selfish? Are we like kids in the back seat screaming that if we don't go to McDonald's on Proxima Centauri we'll hold our breath until we turn into a blue giant? Is that what it will take to get a Star Trek future? Christ, we're already sending our crap there by radio. Do these innocent aliens really want -- or deserve -- the punishment of the real thing? We can't even get a concert on Earth that isn't lip-synched. Why should they get better? These are questions NASA needs to answer.

We Die Too Fast

The real problem with interstellar travel is that human lifespans are too short. If humans could be genetically engineered to be close to immortal, then long space journeys would not be a problem. Many Earth microbes are close to immortal in that they can go into virtual suspended animation and when living conditions are favorable, come back to active life. Unfortunately, it appears that a key to this ability is that these microbes have extremely simple physiologies. However, if the suspended animation skill of these microbes could be 'grafted' by genetic engineering into the various cell types of humans, it would perhaps be possible for a human to sent into space, turn off their cells and turn them on again in response to a specified environmental cue.

Perhaps the most promising path is quantum computing. If every single cell in your brain could be digitized into binary code and stored in a quantum computer, the computer itself could be put in a ship and sent off into space. This means you would be a computer and no longer a human, but if your 'consciousness' was somehow preserved it wouldn't be a bad trade-off if space travel is that important to you.

Note, however, that none of these ideas, even if they could ever be achieved, give you 'warp drive' or 'sub-space' communications or the other faster than speed of light staples that space fiction depends on. A message from "Star Base 12" located 10 light years away will still take 10 years to reach you. Accelerating a space ship to the speed of light, even a ship the size of a single proton, will still take more energy than exists in the entire Universe.

By Special Relativity, we know that light can travel at the speed of light because a photon of light has no mass. So if we could conjure up something that had a property called 'negative mass' then an object made of negative mass might be immune to the light barrier. But what exactly is 'negative mass'? Could the cosmological constant, inferred to be a 'negative energy' (or 'dark energy') that is causing the Universe to expand, have a complementary partner, 'negative matter,' just as energy has the complement of matter? (Note that 'negative matter' is totally different concept from anti-matter, which is bound by the same physical laws as matter).

Aside from the lack of any theoretical or observational evidence that 'negative matter' actually exists, there is the more practical matter of how we would interact with it. But assuming it does exist and we could interact with it and use it to convey meaningful information and this information could be conveyed without regard for the light barrier, there is still the time travel problem.

Remember that in Special Relativity, a photon has no sense of the passage of time. A photon that takes one billion years to travel from a distant galaxy and strike the sensor of the Hubble Telescope is, from its perspective, 'everywhere' along the path at once. It has 'always' been just created in a star, just leaving the star, just leaving the galaxy and just striking the sensor in the Hubble Telescope.

(Technically the only thing that has physically changed about such a photon is that its wavelength has increased due to the expansion of spacetime itself. So you could sort of say that a photon could 'sense' the passage of time if it could 'notice' that it was 'born' as a gamma ray and then 'became' a radio wave when it 'died' by striking the sensor of Hubble. This is analogous to what would happen if we travelled at near light speed to Alpha Centauri. By Special Relativity, a space traveller would feel no change in time on her ship but would notice that time on Earth was moving incredibly fast. Depending on her speed, she would notice that 'daily' updates from Earth were arriving at her ship every few seconds; and that after a few hours on her ship, her grandkids on Earth had died of old age.)

Let's assume for a moment that we invented a way to turn people and their spaceship into 'negative matter' that was immune to the light barrier and set them into space to travel to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. What would be its maximum speed? Let's assume NASA is very impatient and wants the crew to arrive at the target planet as soon as possible to start gathering close-up data. To achieve this, the crew sets its speed to reach Alpha Centauri in one second of their time as judged by their onboard-chronometers. However, the crew still faces the same problem faced by their positive energy counterparts travelling at near light speed, but much worse. In the one second it took the ship to reach Alpha Centauri there would be no Alpha Centauri. It would have burned out within the first micro-second the ship left Earth.

Under Special Relativity, your sense of time is unique to your reference point, or more precisely your acceleration in relation to light speed. So even though our space ship is throttling toward Alpha Centauri at a speed of 5 light years per second, Alpha Centauri is still operating according to its own clock, not the space ship's clock. And according to Alpha Centauri's clock, in the one second that the space ship takes to reach Alpha Centauri, according to Alpha Centauri's clock the star will have exhausted all of its nuclear fuel, turned into a red giant, then a white dwarf and then into a tiny, cool, dark husk of itself. So when the crew reaches Alpha Centauri in one second by its shipboard clock, there is no Alpha Centauri to see.

The key problem here, and the revolutionary concept embodied in Special Relativity, is that time is not constant for all observers. While it might seem to a ship crew at near light speed that only a day has passed, time is moving at a much different rate for those not travelling at near light speed, including the stars they are travelling towards, just as it is at NASA.

The problem of faster than light travel is one of simultaniety. In our Universe, simultaniety cannot exist because if it could, everything would have long ago happened at once. To have 'anything' happen that is less than 'everything' there needs to some manner in which somethings happen before other things and some things happen after other things. Without this basic precept, cause and effect could not exist. Cause and effect would be the same thing because everything and anything happened at once. Physical laws, which depend on cause and effect, could not exist. Everything would be indistinguishable from nothing.

So to have a 'space' between any two events, or to even have the concept of one event and any other, there has to be a temporal separation, ie. time. To have something rather than nothing, to have anything other than total simultaniety, there has to be a barrier to simulataniety. If we can be anywhere instantaneously, then we are always everywhere at once which means there is no 'here' or 'there.' At a practical level this would make fusion impossible, since there has to be two hydrogens which at some moment stop being two hydrogens and become a helium atom, releasing energy as photons. While a photon created in a star 10 billion years ago 'thinks' that no time has passed since its moment of creation and its striking the Hubble Telescope sensor, we know from our frame of reference that time has indeed passed and we can measure it. Without the unique time frames required by Special Relativity for each observer, the Universe itself could not exist. It would be a uniform, theoretical mathematical point. It would be simultaneously everything and nothing.

What I like about Special Relativity is that it states the passage of time observed by each unique observer is 'true' to them. With this axiom, our perception that a photon took 1 billion years to travel from a distant galaxy to us on Earth is as equally true as a photon (or a human space traveller who is travelling a near light speed) saying the trip took "no time at all."

The difference between us and a photon is that our as-fast-as-light-speed trip is basically meaningless unless we can communicate information about our trip to our friends who are poking along on Earth at a tiny fraction of light speed. Photons don't have to be concerned with this minor detail. We do.

One of the most important discoveries of recent astronomy is that we can optically view and study stars and galaxies as they existed hundreds of millions and billions of years ago, up to a few hundred million years from the birth of the Universe. And what we have found is that the same physical laws that govern our life on Earth today hold true in these extremely distant and past worlds, and therefore, in the earliest observable history of the Universe, long before the Earth and Sun were even formed.

So for faster than light travel to exist today, we would have to discard the most basic elements of Special and General Relativity, and by extension, most of all basic physical laws as we know them. We would have to tear everything down we know and start from scratch. This is not like saying that Einstein's laws of relativity replaced Newton's laws of gravity and motion. In contrast, Einstein affirmed and built upon the fundamental premises of these laws but refined them to accommodate special cases never observed on Earth except at extreme microscopic and megascopic levels.

Faster than light travel would require changes in the basic laws of physics on the scale of saying that rocks in your garden can suddenly leap off Earth and start orbiting the Moon, that you can be born after you die and that water can suddenly turn to ice at 100 F and turn to chlorine gas at 110 F and that perpetual motion is a standard part of reality instead of an impossibility.

The ultimate test of 'faster than light travel' is not that 'something' can move faster than light, but that humans can do it, or at minimum, that we can harness it to do useful work. Theoretically, humanity could meet all of its energy needs forever by harnessing the intense heat in the Earth's mantle and core. This could be done by drilling a lot of very deep holes, pouring water down them, turning it into steam and using the steam to turn electric turbines. Nothing stops us from doing this now except we lack the technological ability to do it. No basic physical laws need be broken to do this; in fact such a program is completely consistent with all know physics.

Faster than light travel requires all of our basic physics laws to be completely wrong. Faster than light travel would require the existence of something called 'negative matter' which no physical law even allows to exist; let alone intelligently harnessed so it could interact with us, who are not made of negative matter. Just to accelerate a single proton up to the speed of light requires more energy than exists in the entire Universe, unless all of our physical laws are completely wrong.

Faster than light travel would require us to finish something before we started it. It would require us to discard an invention before we invented it; to perfect it before we designed it; and to design it before we thought of it.

Even if we could cheat the laws of physics to travel 1,000 light years in a day, the result would be that the place we visited would be 1 million or 100 million years older than when we left. While our trip only seemed to us to take a day, for the place we visited, 100 million years would have passed since we set our course and started up our faster than light engines. Answering faraway distress signals, as typical on Star Trek, would be problematic, since their time would not be the same as ours.

The only way we could do a Star Trek styled "warp" without these Special Relativity effects would be to literally shrink the distance between our ship and our destination so that it was just a few hundred miles away. Only by doing this could we eliminate the huge differences in time reference between us and them. To travel to Alpha Centauri in a day, we would literally have to 'pull' Alpha Centauri to within a few million miles of Earth, or Earth to within a few million miles of Alpha Centauri. We would have to make disappear all of that space and matter in the 30 trillion miles of space between us and Alpha Centauri. We would have to shrink the fabric of the Universe itself, just as if we landed on the Moon in 1969 just by pulling the Moon and Earth so close we could travel to the Moon by helicopter.

Even if we could do this, we would destroy the Earth by doing it. By removing all of the distance between us and the Moon to make it easy to get there, the Moon would have to crash into the Earth and destroy it. You can't make an object close to you so it's easy to get there without having to deal with gravity. So now we'd also have to invent a way to make the Moon and Earth's gravity temporarily disappear until we 'pushed them back' to their original orbits. This is all the stuff you would have to do by radically shortening distances while keeping time constant.

It's one thing to shorten the trip from Boston to London from sail boat (a couple months) to 6 hours (a jet airplane) to fractions of a second (radio) because all of these improvements are below light speed. But to travel faster than light we have to do much more. We have to break every law of physics and have to account for every consequence of all the physical laws we need to break. We don't have to break any physical laws by building a faster boat or a faster plane. All of these improvements are allowed and encouraged by the same laws that govern the Earth, Moon, Sun and the planets and the entire Universe.

To make outer space fiction possible, writers had to treat the laws of physics as if inventing a ship to go faster than the speed of light is the same as inventing a jet airplane to replace a sailboat. But it's not. The laws of physics do not prohibit a jet airplane, in fact they encourage it. But they do prohibit any ship, even one as small as a single electron, from travelling at the speed of light or faster. This is a problem.

In a way, wanting to travel to Alpha Centauri in less than many many decades is like saying I want to grow gills and swim the oceans next week. At least the latter doesn't require all physical laws to be invalidated. It just requires a ridiculous, but still theoretically achievable, rate of evolutionary change in our bodies.

Wanting to travel to Alpha Centauri at faster than light speed is far more crazy and violent to physics than saying I want to be able to someday evolve to live in a total vacuum and 'swim' to the Moon naked. There are examples of a very few simple microbes that have survived in the total vacuum of outer space (they basically go into suspended animation) as long as they were shielded from the hard blast of UV radiation from the Sun. This extreme survival is allowed by all known basic physical laws. Travelling at the speed of light, or greater, requires all these laws to all be completely wrong.

This is a difference of type, not degree, like saying that in the future, with additional research, we will find that a triangle is a square.

1. In special relativity, your mass as you approach light speed is m = gamma(m) where gamma is a coefficient that equals 1/(√(1-v²/c²); where v is your speed and c is the speed of light. At half of light speed your mass would increase 1.15 times; at .999 light speed, your mass would increase 223 times. At v=c, your mass becomes infinite: ie., 1/√(1-1/1) = 1/√0.
2. At near light speed, time slows down for the traveller from the viewpoint of an observer at rest by T = gamma(t); with gamma again being 1/(√(1-v²/c²). At v=c, T becomes infinite. Another way to say this is that from the perspective of a traveller at near light speed, the clocks of everyone else move incredibly fast.
3. As David Griffiths notes in Introduction to Elementary Particles, (Wiley & Sons 1987), without the time dilation required by special relativity, cosmic ray muons produced every day in Earth's upper atmosphere would never reach ground level.
4. This is kind of an equational artifact due to special relativity being a subset of general relativity and energy being equivalent to mass, but is still fun to mess around with.
5. A saving grace for physics is that at least we can still wrap our heads around the intuitive idea that different forces operate at different distances. We don't have to worry about a refrigerator magnet sucking all of the iron atoms from the hemoglobin molecules in our red blood cells when we pour a glass of milk. For the same reason, we don't have to worry about 'dark energy' suddenly expanding the space of the Universe between our hand and the refrigerator handle and making the refrigerator 10 billion light years from us. Although this does seem to happen when we're out of milk.

Big, 1980-2011.

2011-01-22T23:54:00.000-08:00

My baby boy Big died Thursday night. He was a turtle. A yellow bellied slider turtle. I have taken care of him for the past 16 years. He was in some troubled straits due to pneumonia this fall but he fought back and recovered. But then he suddenly died overnight this past Thursday evening.

I don't know much book larnin' but I do know that all atoms larger than lithium were made in the furnaces of stars. So Big and I are made of star stuff, welded from supernova billions of years ago and millions of light years away. Our atoms happened to coincide and combine in a tiny corner of the Universe and took on the character we call life, and through an inconceivable numbers of coincidences, we met in 1995 and formed a relationship.

Like all people grieving, I am struggling for answers to the horror and sheer blankness. I have none that are good -- who can -- but a dead guy, Carl Sagan, provides something that is comforting and as irrational as it is rational. As proven as it is unproven. And at least not gin-soaked with lies.

It is the Greek word Cosmos. It means all but it also means every one of us, from the smallest to largest. Nobody knows who will be the tiny shrew who becomes the first mammal or if mammals will evolve at all. Nobody knows who will be the slave who becomes King or the King who disappears into oblivion. Except for random events we could all be highly intelligent yet fascist Trilobites now.

But while I do hope there is still the Soul of Big, the Turtle, and I hope Big is now touring the Cosmos aware and alive mentally, I doubt that just as much as I doubt the same is happening with my Dad, who died in 1996. As much as I'd like to believe my Dad is flying around the Cosmos alert and talking on his CB radio and writing newsletters, I get the feeling that's not the way it goes. Nor for Big either. Or Big in the Big Aether.

Upon Death, we re-enter the Cosmos as primordial atoms and molecules from which we sprung. Like a a very abrasive skin scrub that takes away your whole body. By re-entering the Primordial Stew as non-conscious carbon atoms, we still remain just as much of the stuff as all our ancestors and ancestors and ancestors. In this sense we become one with our mothers the earliest bacteria. It's just that we don't see a violet light and shake their hands and hug and ask what's for dinner. But in a sense we do. To hug your bacterial mother you sort of have to be reduced to simple carbon molecules, or you'd not even recognize her.

All history is oral history since libraries are usually burned down if only for spite when they are preserved well. So just by writing this Epiphany to Big, the Turtle, I am making him in a small way more immortal than he would be otherwise.

It's the only thing the living can do for the dead.

Bye Big. I loved you.

King George by EZ7, Vassalboro, Maine.

2011-01-05T22:13:00.001-08:00

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

2010-12-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

"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.

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:

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.

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.

2010-12-05T21:05:00.000-08:00

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

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.

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?"

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 !!!

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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?

2010-12-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

Section II -- The Hockomock Central Portion

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.

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.

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

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?

2010-11-29T13:26:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2010-11-19T09:00:00.000-08:00

---

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.

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."

2010-11-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

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

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.

A Ray of Hope for Atlantic Sturgeon and a Vindication for Jasper Carlton.

2010-11-07T12:31:00.001-08:00

At last, a ray of hope. In 1997 a man named Jasper Carlton from the Biodiversity Legal Foundation in Colorado filed a scientific petition to protect Atlantic sturgeon from going extinct under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Jasper's ESA petition was denied, illegally, by Bruce Babbitt and the Clinton Administration. Mr. Carlton and I discussed this quite a bit over the phone then. Now, in 2010, NOAA has proposed listing the Atlantic sturgeon as an Endangered Species thanks to Jasper's advocacy and, unfortunately, to the sturgeons' increasing paucity, including right off the WTC site in the Hudson River in NYC where they used to be common in the 1980s. So common that a large kill fishery for them was authorized and encouraged. Oops.

Atlantic sturgeon are native to the Presumpscot River and its estuary.

http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/press_release/2010/News/NR1025/index.html

Greenwashing circa 1932

2010-11-07T10:56:00.001-08:00

This newspaper advertisement from the Kennebec Journal (Augusta, Maine) in 1932 illustrates one of the first uses of mass media to 'greenwash' the effects of a large corporation on publicly owned rivers.

What this advertisement doesn't say is that the large dams on Maine rivers built by Central Maine Power in the 1930s wiped out the last remnants of the native, migratory fish runs of Maine's large rivers.

This is the purpose of 'greenwashing.'

Source: Microfilm of the Kennebec Journal at Maine State Library, State Capitol Complex, Augusta, Maine.

Friends of Sebago Lake was Right !!!

2010-10-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

By Douglas Watts
Friends of Sebago Lake
October 2010

On October 5, 2010, Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife Commissioner Roland 'Danny' Martin made history. He is the first Maine fisheries commissioner since 1875 to use his powers under the State of Maine's fishway law to order a fishway built on a dam on the Presumpscot River, the outlet of Sebago Lake, Maine's deepest and second largest freshwater body.

Martin signed the Department's Final Order requiring S.D. Warren Company to build fishways at their Cumberland Mills Dam on the Presumpscot River in Westbrook, Maine. The passageways must be operational for the spring 2013 run of migrating fish. This Order is under the State of Maine's Fishway Law.

View Larger Map

While the passageways could be ready by spring 2012 (with construction in 2011), the job is indeed complex because, as the photo above shows, the falls at the dam have been extensively altered and steepened by blasting during the past 150 years and the site of the fishway is directly underneath the S.D. Warren mill buildings, making the use of the heavy equipment at the falls a challenge. The falls, by the way, are called Ammoncongin.

For Friends of Sebago Lake, this decision is a vindication for a long, independent advocacy effort we undertook with Friends of Merrymeeting Bay in 2007-2008 when the State of Maine and S.D. Warren and two conservation groups, Friends of the Presumpscot River and American Rivers, secretly negotiated in 2007 a disastrous agreement which would have taken back most of the hard-won fishway requirements at the five Warren dams above the mill in exchange for Warren voluntarily providing fish passage at the Cumberland Mills Dam by 2012-2013.

Upon hearing of this secret agreement in summer 2007, FOSL expressed to State officials its deep concerns about the legality and wisdom of the deal. The State did not respond, so FOSL published an open letter in the Portland Press-Herald on Thankgiving Day, 2007 demanding a public hearing be held. [1]

In Jan. 2008 we and Friends of Merrymeeting Bay met with key state staff in Augusta to discuss our concerns. At this meeting, Maine's assistant Attorney General, Jan McClintock, told Dept. of Marine Resources Commissioner, George Lapointe that the state had to conduct a public meeting under state law about the secret settlement agreement.

The State agreed to hold a public hearing in South Portland in Feb. 2008. While FOSL publicized the meeting, the State did not, and didn't even publish a public notice for the meeting. Nobody in the general public knew about the meeting. Clearly, the State didn't really want to hold the public hearing and didn't really want the general public to even know about the meeting. We informed the State of this by letter on March 7, 2008. To make matters worse, the State provided only a seven day public comment period on their plan, guaranteeing they would receive no public comments. Weirdly, we noted, the same year the State had published a draft plan for restoring the same fish species on the Penobscot River and conducted widely publicized meetings on it, with a generous public comment period. Why the stark difference?

At the public meeting, FOSL and FOMB members told the State the proper course of action was for the State to use its legal rights to require S.D. Warren to build fishways at the dam pursuant to the State's fishway law. By doing this, we argued, there was no reason for the State to give back the key fish passage requirements at the next five dams in order to secure Warren's voluntary agreement to build a fishway at Cumberland Mills. Our message to the State was: your job is to make S. D. Warren obey the law.

At this meeting, the State and FOPR representatives repeatedly warned that if the State enforced the fishway law, Warren would sue and the case would be tied up in court for years. Therefore, the 'compromise' was the only viable solution. FOSL responded by demonstrating through a timeline that even if Warren appealed a fishway ruling to the Maine Supreme Court the fishway would be delayed at most by 2-3 years, meaning the fishway would be in operation by 2012-2013, which is exactly the timeline their own 'compromise' plan hoped for.

FOSL member Ted Tibbals told the State it was sending a terrible message to private, corporate dam owners, and to the people who own Maine's rivers (the public): if the State is afraid to enforce its own laws just because the dam owner might sue, these corporations will lose all respect for the law. Ted Tibbals called it what it was, a backroom shakedown by a multi-billion dollar corporation in the face of a cowering, weak-kneed State government. We asked: where is the spine?

Our concerns were summarized in formal comments submitted to the State in March, 2008.

When it appeared the State was determined to continue with its illegal 'compromise' agreement, FOSL made a formal notice under the Maine Right to Know Law for all public documents regarding the agreement including how it was negotiated. After much balking by the State, it agreed to turn over the documents in the spring of 2008. Simultaneously, FOSL circulated a lawsuit draft to the State in which we threatened to sue the State for violating state law for conducting these secret negotiations and to ask the court to throw out the negotiated settlement as illegally approved by the State Marine Resources Commissioner.

At the same time, FOSL researched the full legal ramifications of the 'compromise' agreement. It called for re-writing all five of the federal licenses and state permits issued to Warren for its five hydro dams on the river which had been issued in 2003. The agreement removed all of the hard and fast requirements at the dams and totally removed any requirements for fish passage ever at the Dundee Falls Dam, thus preventing any fish passage ever to Sebago Lake. As written, the agreement would have made it nearly impossible to ever get fish passage at Warren's dams above Saccarappa, which is only one mile above Cumberland Mills.

FOSL and FOPR had fought hard for these license requirements from 1998-2002, and they were already highly compromised by not including removal of any of the five dams (we both had requested Warren's three lowermost low-power dams be removed to restore critical habitat for native Atlantic salmon).

So now the State and FOPR were 'compromising a compromise' -- with Warren getting all the benefits and the river and public getting nothing. Same old story. Big corporation threatens the State, the State backs down, and the public, whom it works for is left high and dry. Not to mention the fish, who get nothing.

Then we learned we held a potent poison pill. Under the U.S. Clean Water Act, the State must issue "water quality certifications" when hydrodams are relicensed. These certifications were issued by the State for Warren's dams in 2003 and contain good, but not great, fish passage deadlines at Warren's five hydrodams on the Presumpscot. But at least they are well-defined and legally enforceable.

From 2003-2006, Warren challenged these state orders all the way to the Maine Supreme Court and then to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost every time. We even got a 9-0 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court. And now the State wanted to throw all of these winning decisions away. Allowing companies to break one law to cajole them to obey another law is not good public policy. But this was the path the State had embarked upon.

FOSL then realized that for the State's 'compromise' deal with Warren to go through, the State would have to re-write all of these water quality certification orders and we could appeal them to the Maine Board of Environmental Protection and the Maine Superior Court. The original orders were already on shaky legal ground under the Clean Water Act for being far too weak; and the changes the State wanted to make were totally illegal. Who said? The State said in 2003 when it issued the original orders requiring time-specific fish passage deadlines at all five dams. The State was now taking the same position S.D. Warren had in 2003 -- that there was no 'real' legal requirement for fish passage at S.D. Warren's Presumpscot River Dams. The State was forcing itself into a position of arguing with itself: a common occurrence at Sebago Lake.

So FOSL decided to pull the trigger. We told the State that if they continued to pursue their compromise settlement with S.D. Warren we would challenge any revision to the state water quality certifications issued in 2003 and would go to court if necessary. We knew this would kaibosh the State's secret sweetheart deal with Warren because they all knew what they were doing was illegal. [2]

In late spring of 2008, S.D. Warren announced without explanation it was abandoning the negotiated agreement.[3]

This forced the State back to Square One: using its powers under the State fishway law to compel Warren to let fish go past its dam at its expense. Last year the State ruled it had the authority to order Warren to build fishways; and on Oct. 5 of this year the State issued its final Order for Warren to build the fishways. Warren has said they will abide by the ruling.
[4]

So for all that rigamarole, FOSL turned out to be right. By the State doing its job of enforcing the laws on the books, Warren buckled, since it knew all along that it could not succeed in a court challenge. All the time, Warren was bluffing the State and the State, for a while, was willing to buckle until FOSL said no. Now, the Cumberland Mills Dam will have fish passage on the exact same time schedule as would have been provided by the State's plan of giving away to Warren all of the hard-fought gains the State had made in fishway requirements at the next five dams. We saved the State from itself.

So What About the Fish?

The Oct. 5, 2010 State Final Order says a fishway is required to be operational at Cumberland Mills Dam by May 1, 2013. The fishway is slated to be a "Denil" fishway which, according to our research, is a design that may not be easily used by American shad. [5]

Our review of the Commissioner's May 12, 2010 preliminary Order shows some disturbing details. Most important is that the multi-page Order does not contain a single mention of the Presumpscot River's most important native fish species, the Atlantic salmon. This is odd since in 1869, Charles Atkins, Maine's first Fisheries Commissioner, selected the Presumpscot as the first river to be restored in Maine because it was such as outstanding Atlantic salmon river. The 2010 Order's failure to even mention Atlantic salmon highlights and emphasizes a continuing bias and apathy against Atlantic salmon in the Presumpscot by Maine's fisheries agencies.

The truth is that Atlantic salmon have never left the Presumpscot River, even though people have spent the last 200 years doing almost everything imaginable to make them go extinct. There are likely a few Atlantic salmon in the lower Presumpscot and its tributaries below Westbrook right now spawning. In the 1970s, Maine Atlantic salmon biologists were shocked to find spawning salmon and wild baby salmon in the Piscataqua River, a small tributary of the lower Presumpscot in Falmouth several years after the head of tide Smelt Hill Dam had been breached. During this same period, anglers in Westbrook often caught large sea-run Atlantic salmon directly below S.D. Warren's mill in Westbrook at the base of the Cumberland Mills Dam.

Atlantic salmon are highly migratory fish and will often 'stray' from one river to another out of sheer curiosity and a search for suitable spawning habitat. Because the Presumpscot is now fully accessible from Casco Bay to Cumberland Mills it is possible in any year that several or more salmon from other Maine rivers will explore the Presumpscot and, finding it to their liking, decide to stay and spawn in the fall, thus beginning the process of their natural restoration to the river.

The fishway design proposed for Cumberland Mills Dam, a Denil fishway, is well known to be capable of use by Atlantic salmon. However, the Commissioner's Order states the fishway will only be operated from May 1 to July 15 of each year. This schedule is for alewives, blueback herring and American shad. This operation schedule is perfectly suitable for these species, since they all migrate upriver in the spring and early summer and then quickly spawn and go back down to sea. But Atlantic salmon spawn in late October and November.

In Maine, salmon may migrate upriver at any time from late April to October since they do not spawn until Halloween. Under the fishway operation schedule mandated in the 2010 Order, the fishway at Cumberland Mills will be totally shutdown on July 15 of each year. This would make it impossible for Atlantic salmon coming up the Presumpscot after July 15 from getting past Cumberland Mills. They will face, as they have for over a century, a completely impassable dam.

As important, adult Atlantic salmon have a penchant for going up rivers in the spring and then swimming back to tidewater a few weeks or a month later before finally going back upriver later in the season to prepare to spawn. Nobody knows why salmon do this, except they can, and except it might be in part because they do not have to reach their spawning grounds until Halloween. This means an Atlantic salmon that passes the Cumberland Mills Dam fishway in June may swim back down river a week later and upon returning in August or September find a dry fishway and a blank, impassable wall. [6]

This flaw in the Commissioner's Order is important because the Order has the force of law. It spells out in great detail what the dam owner, S.D. Warren, has to do and what it does not have to do. And by the plain language of the Order,Warren can shut down the fishway on July 15th of each year and not re-opened until May 1 of the next. This could all be fixed by the Order simply stating the fishway must be operated until November, which is done on all other Maine salmon rivers including the Androscoggin, Kennebec and Penobscot.

Why this omission? The short answer is that none of the state and federal fisheries agencies, or FOPR and American Rivers, appear to have any interest in ever restoring Atlantic salmon to the Presumpscot River or even allowing those Atlantic salmon who are naturally restoring the river to have a fighting chance at succeeding. Why is this? Myopia and amnesia.

So this is a really big problem.

View Larger Map

Saccarappa dam on left, Cumberland Mills dam in upper right.

The next dam on the Presumpscot is Saccarappa, about 1.25 miles upriver. Its federal license calls for fishways to be built within two years of when passage is built at Cumberland Mills. This two-year delay is stupid, because S.D. Warren owns both dams. All fish passed at Cumberland Mills in Spring 2013 will swim up to the base of Saccarappa in about one hour, not in two years. S.D. Warren should be building fishways at Saccarappa simultaneously with Cumberland Mills. They are a multi-billion dollar company and have known this time was coming since 2003. They fought the law and the law won.

First Presumpscot Fishway Built Since 1879

The Cumberland Mills Dam fishway will be the first built on the Presumpscot River since 1879. That's a long time.

In 1875, Maine's Fisheries Commissioner reported to the Maine Legislature:

"The first fishway on the Presumpscot was built by the Cumberland Mills, and finished this last spring. The plan of the fishway was by Mr. Charles G. Atkins, after a design by Robert G. Pike, Esq. of Middletown, Conn. Of its success, one may judge from the following extract from a letter of our genial friend, Mr. Hammond: 'I had supposed your fishways were intended for fishes in the upper walks of life, such as salmon, trout &c., &c.; but I find our new fishway is used by the mudsills, the suckers, the chubs, the pouts, even the lampreys. What is to be done about?' Our reply was that the 15th Amendment admitted all!

"Our esteemed friend, Hon. George Warren, who is something of what Harriet Martineau defined Daniel Webster, viz., 'a steam engine in breeches,' has given us an admirably built fishway at Saccarappa. Two have been constructed at that village; an excellent one by the "Westbrook Manufacturing Co." A fishway after design and plan of Mr. Atkins, has been promptly built over the dam at their works, by the Oriental Powder Mills, at Windham. Four others on the Presumpscot will be completed by the month of May, by Mr. Lindsey and Messrs. Holland & Law. Messrs. Dennison and Brown are building a factory at Little Falls. These gentlemen have assured us that the fishway ordered for their place will be completed by next spring."

In 1876, the Maine Fisheries Commissioner reported:

"The Presumpscot river may now be pronounced as accessible to salmon and alewives, as far as Mallison Falls dam. Everybody ostensibly connected with that property is bankrupt. To the County Attorney is referred the decision as to what course to pursue. Of the fishways already built on the river, there was more or less departure in all from accurate obedience to the plans furnished, and some alterations will be required before we shall accept them in the name of the State."

In 1879, the Commissioner reported:

"On the Presumpscot river, within the present year the chain of fishways has at last been completed. The old fishway at Mallison Falls, that was not built according to the original design and was utterly inadequate to its purpose, has been torn down and replaced by a new and efficient fishway. Other fishways on the river have been repaired and improved, and a fishway has been constructed over the new dam at Wescott's Falls, at the head of the river .... A large number of sea-salmon were placed in the headwaters of the Presumpscot River in 1876, but from our own observations and experience, there has been no expectance of the matured fish in the river until the spring of 1880 or 1881, at which time they will find fishways provided to them over all the dams between Lake Sebago and the ocean."

In 1880, the Commissioner reported:

"There are now eight fishways upon this [Presumpscot] river, a new one having been completed at 'Wescott's falls.' to allow the fish to pass the dam at the head of the river, the outlet of Sebago Lake. So that every dam upon the Presumpscot is provided with a fishway. Some much needed improvements have been made to the fishway at Cumberland Mills, and some improvements are required at the upper dam at the head of the river."

"On the Presumpscot, at its sources on Crooked River, a very great number of unusually large fish have been taken by poachers for the two or three last years. The exceptional size and number of the fish has given increased incitement to the nefarious practice of spearing on the spawning bed. The very remarkable size of these fish and their unwonted number, warrant the conclusion that they are sea salmon planted by us in the headwaters of the river at Norway and other tributaries of Sebago in past years. The first salmon fry were planted in the Presumpscot in 1875. A large fish of thirteen pounds was taken below the dam at the outlet of Sebago last June with hook and line. A man named Paul is now under arrest for spearing a fish weighing twenty-four pounds on Crooked river the middle of October. Several others have been arrested for spearing fish and there are also many other cases which will be prosecuted in due course. We feel warranted in the conclusion that most of these fish are results of our planting sea salmon, not only from the reasons we have assigned above, but from the added fact that we have now a series of eight good fishways on the Presumpscot river from Cumberland Mills to Sebago."

In 1895 the Commissioner reported:

"During the time covered by this report, fishways have been built, improved or repaired on the following rivers: -- Presumpscot, Georges, Penobscot, Orange and Aroostook."

And here the road ends.

What Happened After 1895?

In less than a decade (1875-1880) the Presumpscot River became the first 'restored' salmon and shad river in Maine and the first large river with functioning fishways all the way to its headwaters. Sea-run Atlantic salmon swam from Casco Bay in downtown Portland to Sebago Lake and the Crooked River for the first time since the 1730s. This was the most ambitious native fish restoration project ever undertaken in the history of the United States. And it was successful.

But by 1910 this restoration project was destroyed -- due to a new fad called hydroelectric power.

During the period 1900-1915, S.D. Warren built the enormous 50 foot high Dundee Dam on the river for hydroelectricity; the North Gorham Dam was raised to a great height, again for hydroelectricity. The Eel Weir Dam was built at the outlet of Sebago Lake for hydroelectricity. The old, low sawmill dams at Saccarappa, Mallison Falls, Little Falls and and Gambo Falls were all raised much higher and reconstructed with massive, concrete power canals to create hydroelectricity.

The wooden fishways which had been meticulously designed and built and repaired at the dams for the past 25 years were all dismantled and removed. The Dundee Dam was built with no fishways at all. In about 20 years, from the last Fisheries Commissioner report in in 1895 to 1915, the Presumpscot River had gone from fully passable to completely impassable.

Worse, the raising of the dams for hydropower flooded out all of the remaining free-flowing sections of the river; the short reaches between the dam spillways and the power canals were dewatered. Not a single record exists of how and why this happened.

The only witness for this destruction we have is from a man named William Converse Kendall, who wrote for the Boston Zoological Society two seminal scientific books on the salmon and trout of Maine. In 1917 Kendall wrote:

"Presumpscot River Jumper (Plate 9)

"Since the Jumper is now extinct and since salmon of similar peculiarities have been described from no other waters, it has seemed desirable to write a separate brief history of the fish.

"In the Presumpscot River, which is the outlet of Sebago Lake, the Sebago salmon used to breed and in the spring of the year, large well conditioned salmon were found in the stream. Later they disappeared. Prior to the erection of the dam at the head of the river, and later while the fishway was effective, most, if not all, of the salmon returned to the lake. In later years, the fishway having become impassible, some the fish continued to disappear, where to, no one knows. If they went to sea they doubtless would have been notice at the dams and mills lower down in the river. However, small salmon resided in the river year around. Until the new dam was built at the head of the river and the water diverted by a canal these small salmon, known as "Jumpers" were found in the upper part of the river below the dam at North Gorham.

"The large salmon were always distinguished from the so-called "Jumper." The local name 'jumper' was given to a small but very active fish of peculiar coloration., which attained a weight of at least three or four pounds, and which were also usually distinguised from the lake salmon of like size occuring in the river at the same time. Adolescent salmon, with their bright silvery scales, more pointed snout, subequal jaws, more forked tail, black crescentic and doubled X spots, and with or without red spots caught in the same locality were regarded as lake salmon.

The 'jumper' was more trout-like in form, had a blunter snout, included lower jaw, scarcely crescentic tail. It usually had no black spots but dark brown, chocolate colored and brick red or brown spots surrounded by brick red on the body, and always red spots along the side. The sides of the abdomen were usually brassy yellow. They were doubtless old fish of long-time residence in the river. They appear now to be extinct, the locality below the North Gorham dam having been more recently ruined by the erection of a dam farther down [Dundee Dam] which backs the still water nearly up to the North Gorham Dam."

Not A Single State Record Exists

Except for William Converse Kendall's description above, not a single state record exists describing what happened on the Presumpscot River when it was destroyed by a slew of new dams in the 1900-1915 era. This was confirmed by extensive historic research that I did in 2004-2005 for FOSL and FOPR at the Maine Archives and Maine Legislative Law Library while gathering legal documents to force S.D. Warren to build a fishway at the Cumberland Mills Dam.

In these archives are every law passed by Maine during this period and every single official report made by the state's Fisheries Commissioners to the Maine Legislature. After 1895 not a single mention is made of the Presumpscot River in these fisheries commissioner reports. It's as if the Presumpscot stopped flowing and fell off the map.

As part of this research, I found and tracked every iteration and revision of the state's fishway laws from 1869 to present. None of these revisions contained any amendments which exempted the Presumpscot River from the state's fishway laws. But there was a clue from 1913. Up until this year, the State of Maine required fishways to be maintained at all dams in the state on rivers native to salmon, shad and alewives. This was a mandatory requirement. In 1913 the Legislature repealed all of these laws, going back to 1869, and replaced them with a generic law stating that the State Commissioner of Fish & Game, at his discretion, could require fishways on dams.

This briefly worded law change was the death knell for the Presumpscot and Sebago and for rivers all over Maine. So long as the Fisheries Commissioner decided not to formally require a fishway to be built or maintained, then dams all across Maine could be impassable to fish. This change in the law allowed any dam owner to rip out the existing fishways at their dams, even if they were working perfectly. The law also 'grandfathered' in perpetuity all dams in Maine that lacked fishways. This is why there is no physical trace left of the large, carefully built timber fishways at the dams on the Presumpscot built and rebuilt between 1875 and 1895. The dam owners ripped out every shred of them once the state gave them legal license to do so in 1913.

1913 stands as the end of Maine's ambitious and highly successful 50-year effort to restore and maintain its native fisheries after the Civil War. After 1913 the State just gave up and the rivers became empty and silent.

Maine's current state fishway law is identical in substance to the 1913 law. My research, by reading every single Maine Fisheries Commissioners report from 1900 to present, found that since 1913 Maine's fisheries commissioners have almost never exercised their authority under the law to require fishways at dams. The last documented use of the state fishway law that I could find in state records was in the 1930s in Washington County, on an Atlantic salmon river, the Machias.

Why Has The Fishway Law Never Been Used?

Julius Caesar said at the Rubicon River, the die is cast. In 1913 the Maine Legislature said the same thing. In passing this 1913 law, Maine's Fish & Game Commissioner was given sole authority to require a fishway at any dam in Maine or to require its maintenance.

Only the dam owner can appeal an adverse decision in court. Maine citizens who want a fishway have no legal right to ask for a fishway or to ask an existing one be maintained. They can only write a letter politely asking the Fisheries Commissioner to exercise his authority to require a fishway or maintain one. And if the Commissioner declines, citizens have no legal recourse. All power is vested in the Fisheries Commissioner.

The fruit of this legal change became obvious in the 20th century. After 1913, the state almost never used its authority to order fishways at dams. Not because no fishways were needed -- the 20th century marked the total extirpation of the last remnant runs of sea-run fish in Maine's rivers due to impassable dams. By any metric, fish passage at dams was far better in the 19th century than in the 20th. Even though the state's Fisheries Commissioners have the legal authority to require fishways they refuse to use it, and refuse to use it today.

In the late 1960s, an Augusta, Maine couple, Gemma and Richard Dumont, wrote a letter asking the Maine's Fish & Game Commissioner, Rodney Speers, to use his powers under the state's fishway law to order the owners of the Edward Dam, at the head of tide on the Kennebec River, to build a fishway for salmon, shad and alewives. Mr. Speers ignored their letter. The Dumonts were not easily cowed. They hired a lawyer and filed a "Writ of Mandamus" in Kennebec County Superior Court asking the court to order Commissioner Speers to answer their letter. The court denied their request. The Dumonts took their complaint to the Maine Supreme Court.

In 1968, the Maine Supreme Court handed down one of the worst decisions it has ever written, Dumont v. Speers. In this ruling the Maine Supreme Court said the Maine Legislature had granted the Fish & Game Commissioner sole authority to decide whether or not to order a fishway at a dam. If the Commissioner decided not to order a fishway for any reason or for no reason at all, citizens like the Dumonts had no legal rights to challenge the decision. This 1968 Maine Supreme Court decision has rendered the state's fishway law non-functional. The evidence for this is that the Commissioner Martin's 2010 Order is the first time the state's fishway law has been used since before World War II.

2010: A Renaissance or Another False Hope?

It is important to closely examine what happened on the Presumpscot River from 1875 to 1900. In this just five years, the Maine Fisheries Commissioner succeeded in legally coercing all of the dam owners on the Presumpscot to build fishways at their dams. These fishways were maintained until at least 1900. Yet, even with full fish passage attained and sea-run Atlantic salmon spawning in the Crooked River for the first time since the 1730s, all of these achievements were wiped away and dashed by 1910 when all the fishways carefully designed by Charles Atkins were ripped down, new dams were built over the old dams and the river was shut off again to all of its sea-run fish.

Why should we believe Commissioner Martin's actions in 2010 will be less ephemeral than Commissioner Atkins' actions in 1875?

We can't. The reason is the Maine fishway law is terribly written. If he wants, Commissioner Martin can forget or refuse to enforce his 2010 Order at any time. This is exactly what happened in 1900. The Maine Commissioner of Fisheries in 1900, for reasons unknown, lost all interest in keeping fishways maintained on the Presumpscot or on any Maine river. So the dam owners ripped the fishways out or let them fall apart. Under the Maine's fishway law and Dumont v. Speers, nobody can sue the Maine Fisheries Commissioner to enforce this new 2010 Order. But the dam owner can sue to stop it at any time. This is how bad a law it is.

With the 2010 gubernatorial election, Commissioner Roland 'Danny' Martin will be out of a job in January 2011. A new Maine IF&W Commissioner will be appointed by a new Governor. In 2011 this new Commissioner can freely ignore Danny Martin's 2010 fishway Order. Nobody can stop her. This is because the state's fishway law is still governed by Dumont v. Speers.

Atlantic salmon can swim 25 miles in one day.

The distance between Casco Bay and Sebago Lake is about 21 miles. Adult Atlantic salmon can, if motivated, swim this distance in one day. This means a Presumpscot/Sebago Lake Atlantic salmon can swim from downtown Portland, Maine to Sebago Lake in one day. Once in Sebago, the salmon can swim into the cool waters of Sebago to feed on native rainbow smelt and prepare for its autumn journey up the Crooked River to spawn in the fall. This is what happened at Sebago for 11,000 years until the 1730s, and then the 1830s, and then the 1930s and now the 2010s.

Atlantic salmon would be spawning in the Crooked River tomorrow if the State of Maine would stop letting them be blocked by artificial dams. But the State of Maine has no interest in restoring Atlantic salmon to the Presumpscot River and Sebago Lake and the Crooked River. In fact, they actively oppose it.

The State of Maine has pretended to forget the entire natural history of the Atlantic salmon in the Presumpscot River and Sebago Lake. This takes an awful lot of pretending to forget. And since the State of Maine has access to all of the historical documentation that FOSL has (we gave it to them), this pretending to forget is not by accident.

Maine Did It In 5 years in 1875 -- Why Can't We Do It In 50 Years?

In just five years, from 1875-1880, fishways were built all the way from Casco Bay to Sebago Lake; and Atlantic salmon swam up these fishway into Sebago Lake and into the Crooked River where they spawned. That was 130 years ago.

Today, the best and most prominent scientific and legal "experts" tell us this is absolutely impossible. There is no way it can be done. To even think of it is ludicrous.

In 1875 the telephone nor electricity nor airplanes nor light bulbs existed. But in 1875, in just five years, the Maine Fisheries Commissioners got fishways built on the Presumpscot dams so as to allow Atlantic salmon swim from Casco Bay to Sebago Lake, a distance of 21 miles.

And now, in 2010, we are told this same feat cannot be done in less than 50 years, and may never be achieved.

How dumb have we become?

1. Our outreach efforts were hampered by the editorial staff of the Portland Press-Herald, who refused for two months to print our op/ed asking the State to hold a public meeting on the plan. The PPH staff told us they didn't believe the subject was 'newsworthy.'
2. We presented a more detailed narrative of these efforts in July 2008 in a story called "Presumpscot Dam Deal is Dead."
3. See the Portland Press-Herald story here.
4. The Portland Press-Herald has not even done a news story on this. But the Westbrook American Journal did on Oct. 13, which is how FOSL learned about it.
5 . See here. And here.
6. See Baum, E.T. 1997. Maine's Atlantic Salmon: A National Treasure at 22: "To complicate this matter further, Maine's salmon do not always migrate in an upstream direction. Returning to tidewater after migrating several miles upriver earlier in the year is common for an Atlantic salmon. They may migrate back into the same (or even a different) river later in the year."

The Hockomock Swamp needs to be made a National Park

2010-10-13T23:47:00.000-07:00

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine
October, 2010

I say this in jest, only because it should not be said in jest, and because there is something perverse about me even feeling a bit reluctant about screaming it from the tree tops.

Despite 250 years of unsightly wounds, the Hockomock Swamp in Easton, Massachusetts is a natural treasure which should long ago have been made a National Park and should be made one today.

The only way the Hockomock Swamp has protected itself from annihilation is by being inaccessible to people. There are few ways to get into it without cursing yourself and getting mucky, filthy, briar scarred, totally soaking wet and eaten alive by mosquitoes. These facts keep us from appreciating the beauty of the Swamp. But sometimes, on certain special days, the Swamp lets us in and lets us soak in its brilliance.

One of the best ways to get into the heart of the Hockomock is through an old, abandoned dirt road which crosses the swamp from Raynham to West Bridgewater. We walked this dirt road on a brilliant warm fall day on Oct. 10, 2010 from Raynham to West Bridgewater and back, with a few side trips into the thickets.

We entered from Wilbur Street in Raynham, a well-marked side street at the Raynham water tank on Route 138. Go to its end, take a left at the T and follow the "dead end" sign to the Raynham water department pump station. The path begins at a couple of large boulders in a scrub of small trees and is only accessible by foot.

Here, as you walk in, you are descending into what had been a deep, wide bay of upper Glacial Lake Taunton, which had covered much of southeastern Mass. not long after the last Ice Age. As the lake slowly drained, it filled with sediment and vegetation, creating a flat forested swamp. The dirt road from Wilbur Street in Raynham crosses one of the widest and flattest parts of it. This dirt road was built, at ridiculous effort and expense in the late 1800s, by hauling in cartloads of gravel to raise it about five feet above the swamp for a mile and half or so.

Although rough granite culverts were installed beneath the road at irregular intervals, the road has always operated as a very shallow, porous earthen dam across the breadth of the Hockomock, from the high ground in Raynham and northeast to an adjoining high ground in West Bridgewater at Route 106. The swamp flows from west to east, perpendicular to the road.

Walking into the Hockomock from Raynham, you can see this because the swamp on the left side of the road berm (the 'upstream' side) is much wetter than the swamp on your right (the 'downstream' side). In fact, except in very dry times, on your left there is a constant pool of water between the trees and shrubs, and the water moves "up" the road alongside you as you walk. If you look closely at little jams of logs on your left, you can see the tiny waverings of current all moving northeast paralleling the road. The right hand side, the "downstream" side" is moist, but has no open patches of water. It's clear the road berm is acting as a shallow dam, and the water in the swamp, looking for the fastest way downhill must follow the berm as it trends northeasterly in the same direction you are walking.

On occasion you will see a pool of water on your right side that flows into the thicket to your right. These are small, now mostly buried and clogged granite culverts that let some water get through the berm and continue heading east. But in general, for the first 1/3rd mile the road berm forces all of the water in the swamp to move along the road and find a way to get through it. Since the berm is very permeable gravel, plenty of water seeps through it, especially when the swamp is swollen with rain, but the difference between the wet and dry sides of it is readily noticeable.

In this walk, keep an eye to your right, on the 'downstream' side. What you see is a virtually endless expanse of evenly spaced deciduous trees, 30-50 feet in height, with an understory of small green, leafy shrubs of about 4-10 feet in height. This is what I call the Hockomock Red Maple-Clethra swamp. The trees are the swamp red maple, Acer rubrum, the shrubs are the bottle brush or sweet pepper bush, Clethra alnifolia. When the conditions are right, these two plants dominate hundreds of acres of the Hockomock and create its most distinctive look. If you drive down Route 138 between Easton and Raynham at the towns' line and look on both sides, virtually every tree and shrub and leaf you see are these two species. [1]

As you walk down the abandoned dirt road, from your privileged, artificial elevation of five feet of the swamp's ground level, the view looks eerily similar to a well maintained town or city park. The well-spaced red maples rise with straight trunks and only branch and leaf out at their very tops, forming a uniform, yet open canopy just below the sky, with a pleasant but dense crowd of dark green plants hugging their lower trunks. Now and then you see high, gangly shrubs with bright red berries. These are native deciduous holly, not like the evergreen holly we are familiar with. Tim taught us this.

But when you walk off the berm onto the swamps level you are now at the height of the Clethra, which are as tall as you and their branches impede your sight and movement. You also notice there is no flat or level place you can step. You are always walking up or down one hump or clump of tree or shub roots off or or another. You realize there is no ground. No soil. No rocks. Everything your foot finds is a tree root. Everything you see is a tree root or one covered by fresh or rotted leaves. The whole place is made of tree roots and leaves, their fallen worker bees. And every tree and shrub to see, every Acer rubrum and Cletha Alnifolia, at least from the sense of direction, all look the same.

This is why it is so easy to get lost in the Hockomock and why it is so hard to get unlost. Once in it, you can't use landmarks to get out of it: there aren't any. You have to use sound and the sun. And sound is only due to the sound of highways, so that's cheating. Using the Sun is okay. Inside the middle of the Red Maple-Clethra part of the Hockomock there are no landmarks.

It all looks the same in every direction as far as you can see, which isn't that far, since you have to shimmy up the red maples for about 30 feet to get any view, and since they have no branches until 30 feet up, if you fall you will break your arm, leg or ankle you won't be able to get out and nobody will ever find you, so you will die. And not to mention mosquitoes. They were waiting for you, or more accurately, your large internal pool of blood that they can suck from to make thousands of babies.

Without trying to sound too sexist, the Hockomock represents the last bastion of manhood in New England. It is a scary and completely impenetrable and unforgiving place. For every show you've seen on the Discovery Channel about the perils of the Amazon or the Congo, the Hockomock is worse. I've watched grown men tear their own heads off rather than run naked through the Hockomock. Which is why I feel there is a need to protect it. Of course, men in Cat D-9 bulldozers could plow grooves through it; and yes an entire Armada of askeert men in air conditioned bulldozer cabs could make those grooves come together, in exchange for a paycheck, but they would not be caught dead walking through it.

What is more interesting, to me, is examining how the trees species differ even if you increase the water level of the Hockomock by just a few inches. As my brother Tim noticed, as soon you make a tiny gravel berm crossing and raise the deep part of the Hockomock by a foot, you see white oak trees and yellow birch trees and swamp white oak trees burst out of nowhere. If that elevation change is not there, you don't see them. If you lower the water elevation an inch you don't see Atlantic white cedars.

By going to and watching and observing and listening to places like the Hockomock Swamp we learn about science. We listen to the trees telling us stories. Very long and complicated stories, and sometimes, very simple stories. The Hockomock is a place where the trees will take time to sit down and talk to us and reveal their secrets. There is no sound in the Hockomock except the wind through the branches and the water through the trunks. Every thing we walk on and step on is made of trees. In the Hockomock we are walking on tree, breathing tree and hearing tree. In the Hockomock we are in the world of tree. Trees made the Hockomock. The Hockomock is made of trees. There is no rock, no soil, no grit, no mineral. Only tree. The water itself is stained root beer red from the tannin from the leaves of trees. All is from tree. Nothing in the swamp is not from tree.

On our walk back out toward Raynham, I espied in a very odd and treeless part of the swamp, an evergreen out a quarter mile in the open, immense slog. It towered over all the other trees. It was either a white pine or an Atlantic white cedar. I took a picture of its crown at maximum zoom. Upon home, and zooming it more, it is a giant Atlantic white cedar. I can tell by the shape of its needles and crown. It is about 60 feet tall and all by its lonesome.

In the red maple-clethra part of the Swamp, you don't see any cedars. Instead you see a uniform canopy of red maples which built raised beds for thousands of clethra beneath them. It seems people building long, narrow, earthen berms cross the swamp in the 1800s has favored the red maple and disfavored the Atlantic white cedar, which are extremely slow growing and very selective about where they grow.

[1] What is odd is that the red maple-clethra swamp where we walked is nearly identical to the swamp a mile 'upriver' west of Route 138 except there are no high bush blueberries, which are common as an understory species along with Clethra alnifolia. This absence is extremely odd and needs more investigation.

Using Aerial Photography to Locate Atlantic White Cedar Stands in the Hockomock Swamp, Easton Massachusetts

2010-10-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine
October, 2010

The Hockomock Swamp in Easton, Raynham, West Bridgewater, Bridgewater and Taunton, Massachusetts is still unexplored and unknown, except by occasional deer hunters. No scientific studies have ever been done to determine how much of the 6,000 acre swamp was logged in the 1700s and 1800s and how much of it was not.

For this reason, there are no published reports which establish the locations of Atlantic White Cedar stands in the Hockomock Swamp. I'm not certain if such maps even exist.

By correlating aerial photo surveys taken at different seasons (summer, fall, early spring) during the past 40 years these white cedar stands can be accurately located by vegetation coloration. These sources include Massachusetts GIS, satellite data from Google Maps and private aerial surveys done in the 1970s. [1]

These map data show three large cedar stands in the Hockomock. By far the largest is west of Route 138 in Taunton and Raynham behind the Raynham dog track, a second smaller stand is east of Maple St. at the extreme southeast corner of Easton, and a third stand is just west of Route 24 in Bridgewater. Smaller, isolated stands undoubtedly exist and can be seen on the maps.

Google Map aerial imagery of the Hockomock was all taken in full summer, making identification of tree stands by species problematic. However, Mass GIS imagery was taken in early spring, before deciduous trees had leafed out. This makes the Mass GIS imagery extremely useful to differentiate swamp red maple stands from Atlantic white cedar stands in the swamp.

Since large stands of white pine (Pinus strobus) are common on islands of higher ground in the swamp, the difference in coloration between known white pine stands and known white cedar stands in the same photographs is easily seen. The white pine stands are distinctly lighter and yellower green than the cedar stands, which are much more dark and bluish green. The white pine stands, which are only found on islands of higher ground in the swamp are easily identified by correlation to USGS topo maps of the swamp, for example, adjacent to the Easton Rod & Gun Club on Howard Street in Easton. Known white pine stands on the margins of the Hockomock Swamp provide additional color correlation between white pine islands and white cedar stands within the swamp in the same photograph.

As anyone familiar with the Hockomock knows, most of it is absolutely inpenetrable by foot or canoe or kayak. The entrance to white cedar stands are particularly well guarded by perpetually wetted puddles and pools and are impossibly obstructed by thickets of downed trees and live and dead shrubs that require you to climb over them repeatedly every few feet. And 100 billion mosquitoes. For these reasons it is not surprising nobody has tried to field map the swamp. Nobody has paid them enough.

The two principal tree species of the truly wetted portion of the Hockomock are the swamp red maple (Acer rubrum) and the Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides). In general, Acer rubrum dominates the swamp, forming uniform stands of thousands of acres. Atlantic white cedar dominates the swamp in only three distinct and disparate locations. In terms of acreage, red maple is by far the dominant of the two in the swamp as a whole.

It further appears that human intervention has favored the red maple at the expense of the Atlantic white cedar. First, Atlantic white cedar were aggressively sought after and logged in the 1700s and 1800s in the swamp, far more than red maple. Second, road and railroad building through the swamp in the late 1800s appears to have altered water levels in ways that favor red maple over Atlantic white cedar.

This can best be seen in aerial imagery of the Swamp just west of Route 138 in Easton, where it is bisected southwest to northeast by the straight, raised berm of the Old Colony Railway Line. Behind the Raynham dog track, Atlantic white cedar are the dominant species to the west of the berm. But on the east of the berm, just 50-100 feet away, red maples are the only species. Cedars are completely absent. As viewed in the Mass GIS aerial images, the rail line appears to create a total boundary. To the west are cedars, to the east, only red maples.

Walking the rail bed it is easy to see why. The rail bed stands on a bed of imported gravel fill which raises it 10 feet above the level of the swamp. Water in the swamp flows from west to east, causing the berm to function as a giant earthen dam. To the east of the berm, "below" the dam, seasonal water levels are much lower. To the west, "above" the dam, they are much higher. Water flowing from the west must pass through a scattered number of old, narrow granite culverts or tunnels to continue moving eastward through the Swamp.

Because these culverts are few and far between (and are often clogged with debris), the water level on the west side of the Swamp is much higher, seasonally, than on the east side of the berm. It is proposed here that the alteration of the swamp's seasonal elevation by the construction of the berm in the late 1800s caused water conditions to the east of the berm to be unsuitable for cedar and favorable for red maple but kept water conditions on the west side of the berm suitable wet enough for cedar.

The best way to understand the Hockomock is to think of it as the Everglades. The Everglades is known as a 'river of grass', the Hockomock, though much smaller, is a 'river of trees.' The Hockomock is a glacial lake bottom, long filled in by vegetation and sediment and utterly flat. Water from the higher ground around its basin, from Lake Nippinicket to the south and all of the brooks and swamps from Easton and Norton and Sharon and Mansfield to the west and north all feed into it. Once all of these small brooks and rivulets hit the 'lake bottom' of the Hockomock, they spread out, creating the swamp and like, Moe of the Three Stooges said, "Spread out."

The spreading of the water from these dozens and dozens of brooks in a vast, flat sheet creates the Hockomock. Only at small pinch points, like at granite culverts put in at old road crossings in Easton and Raynham do the waters of the Hockomock briefly funnel and come together. Without these artificial pinch points, the sheet of water would stay wide. Eventually, all of the water in the Hockomock pours through a tiny indented notch in its soup bowl, called Nunketetest, the Town River, which becomes a 'regular' river that moves quickly down through West Bridgewater and Bridgewater to make the Titicut River (Taunton) until it, with the addition many other rivers, finally meet the ocean at Dighton and Segregansett to make Montaup (Mount Hope) Bay.

You might be wondering why all of this interest in Atlantic white cedar stands in the Hockomock. One small answer is that a very beautiful butterfly, the Hessel's Hairstreak, exists only in stands of Atlantic white cedar. It is a very rare butterfly and seldom seen. It is a species of 'special concern' in Massachusetts, primarily because its home, Atlantic white cedar swamps, have been almost totally destroyed in Easton and the U.S. by logging, draining and other abuses. The caterpillar of the Hessel's Hairstreak only eats the foliage of Atlantic white cedar trees.

The aerial photographs further show there is a large raised peat bog along Black Brook between Route 138 and Maple Streets in one of the most inaccessible parts of the Hockomock Swamp. This bog has never been documented.

View Larger Map

[1] In 1971 my dad, Allan E. Watts, asked a local pilot, Ed Chassis, to take him over Easton to get aerial photos of the town, especially its undeveloped places, in order to generate public support to preserve them. An aerial photo he took in Nov. 1971 from Route 24 in West Bridgewater toward the west and across the Hockomock clearly shows a large cedar swamp near the old Maple Street right of way between Raynham and West Bridgewater. Mass GIS aerial photos from the 1990s confirm the presence of this stand, even though it is almost totally impenetrable to access by foot. Finding this lost cedar swamp found by my dad 40 years ago in an airplane is the impetus for this investigation.

Dream of the Alewife

2010-09-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

An alewife's lot in life's to be eaten.
But this fate quite a few
Are good at defeating.
So they swim way upstream
All to fulfill their dream
To have kids in a cove
Where the sun gently heats them.

-- Douglas Watts, 9/18/2010
Cushnoc, Kennebec River, Augusta, Maine.

Last Song for the Salmon

2010-09-18T11:51:00.001-07:00

The salmon, the leaper
Is now just about gone.
Because the rapids that thundered
Are now still as ponds.
Concrete walls tall as prisons
Called dams keep them out.
Like mall parking lots
Where trees used to sprout.

And we sing our song for the salmon.

No one has an answer
No one has a plan.
We all know who did it
But we can't find the man.
He's hiding out somewhere
We choose not to see.
But he's always been standing
between you and me.

And we sing our song for the salmon.

I once waded a month
To put a hook in your mouth.
You had fought for an hour
When I pulled you out.
You died in my hands
And your eyes quietly closed.
What I felt I won't tell
What you thought no one knows.

And we sing our song for the salmon.

You were the last of your kind
And now I am too.
The last of my kind
To ever know you.
Like a dream disappears
Once you're awake
Like the branch that you bend
Is the one that you break.

And we sing our song for the salmon.

As the memories wash out
The ignorance flows.
In a flood down the river
To the ocean it goes.
If excuses were salmon
We'd have quite a few.
They'd be long as our legs
And wearing our clothes.

And we sing our song for the salmon.

If I was the river
And you were the fish.
I'd let you swim up and down me
And do as you wish.
Because without you
There's not much left of me
Just a long lonely ditch
Falling into the sea.

And we sing our song for the salmon.

We sing our song for the salmon.

So we sing our last song for the salmon.

-- Douglas Watts, 9/18/2010.
Cushnoc, Kennebec River, Augusta, Maine.

Two new Sonny Probe Songs

2010-09-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

One Sonny Probe song recorded yesterday and one recorded in 1990. On both occasions I was listening to Lemon Jefferson a lot. He is very inspiring.

Flying Mister Johnson into Space.

Cuz I Am.

Baby American Shad, Kennebec River, Maine

2010-08-31T11:32:00.000-07:00

Yay !!! I finally finished my shad spawning video, but I only got underwater footage of the babies. They are cutesy little buggers.

Show Them Up by Doug Watts

2010-08-12T16:03:00.001-07:00

North Easton Train Station -- A Midnight Poem

2010-07-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

Stopping the Slaughter of Atlantic Salmon in Dam Turbines

2010-07-26T12:38:00.001-07:00

---

A July 23, 2010 Maine Public Radio story about our never-ending efforts to get Kennebec River dam owners to stop chopping the heads off endangered fish, like Atlantic salmon, in their hydroelectric dam turbines.

"Never Forget" by EZ7

2010-07-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

July 3, 2010 rehearsal for the big shoo at Vassalboro, Maine on Satiddy night.

Rick Burns, vocals. Pete Burns, bongos. Mike Fife, drums. Greg Hinckley, Geoff Hursch, Mike Southerberg, guitars. Doug Watts, bass. Written by Greg and Geoff.

"Give It Some Corn" by EZ7

2010-07-20T17:24:00.000-07:00

A rather disjointed rendition of our band's song, "Give It Some Corn," which frisbee aficionados know means throw it as hard as you @#$%^ can and hope for the best. Recorded at rehearsal for the big shoo in Burnsboro, Vassalboro, Maine, July 3, 2010.

Rick Burns, vocals and harmonica. Pete Burns, bongos. Mike Fife, drums. Greg Hinckley, Geoff Hursch, Mike Southerberg, guitars. Doug Watts, bass. Written by Rick and Greg.

Queset Brook, North Easton, Massachusetts

2010-06-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

This is a movie I made on Thanksgiving Day, 2003, where Queset Brook starts at Lincoln Spring, off Lincoln Street in North Easton behind the Town Pool, and at Flyaway Pond, which has now fully reverted to a natural wild cranberry meadow after the dam there burst in 1968. My brother Tim Watts is the person in the footage. I don't know who wrote "eat me" in the bark of the beech tree.

A discussion of what needs to be done to restore Queset Brook to its healthy condition as a native brook trout stream is here.

The music is "Hani" by Ali Farka Toure from his record "Radio Mali."

This little movie was shot because Tim and I wanted to capture how clear and pure the water is at Queset when it begins as bunch of inchoate and scattered seeps next to Lincoln Street and quickly gathers into a recognizable, permanent brook. A second purpose was to figure out if these tiny brooklets were permanent or if they dried up in the summer. Timmy's find of caddis fly, crane fly and dobson fly larvae (hellgrammites) even in the smallest, uppermost parts of the brooklets told us that they don't dry up, since hellgrammites stay as larvae (nymphs) for several years before they hatch out, meaning the brook where they live has to stay wetted all year.

Queset Brook is at the very top of the Cohtuhticut (Taunton) River drainage, the largest river drainage wholly in Massachusetts. Because the Taunton itself is severely polluted by illegal and poorly regulated public wastewater treatment plants, most notably in Brockton and Taunton, and is too filthy to swim in, we wanted to show how clean the water is which feeds the Taunton, and to document (by ocular evidence, as our dad would say), that it is us alone who take this beautifully clean and pure water and in the span of just a dozen miles turn it into a turgid, foul-smelling broth of human waste. I think our dad had Queset in mind when he wrote the following poem in 1995:

Running Water
By Allan Watts

I saw a little brook
trickling through the woods
Its path was blocked with leaves,
that fell from a nearby tree.
I took a stick and broke the dam
and the water shone up at me,
and said, that is I think it said,
"Thanks for setting me free."

From Silly Verse by Allan Watts.

Leaping Atlantic Sturgeon - Kennebec River, Augusta, Maine

2010-06-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

These are leaping adult Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhynchus) in the Kennebec River at its head of tide in downtown Augusta, Maine. These animals are nearly extinct because of dam building and water pollution. Nobody knows why they jump.

Presumpscot Falls Blueback Herring and American Shad, Portland, Maine.

2010-06-21T17:46:00.001-07:00

This is the second in a two-film series by Douglas Watts providing the first underwater videos of the native migratory fish of the Presumpscot River, Maine. Part one is here. This project is funded by members of Friends of Sebago Lake.

The focus of this second film is Presumpscot Falls, at the river's head of tide in Falmouth and Portland, Maine, and the spring return of native blueback herring and American shad to spawn in the river above the falls. The opening segments show the natural environs just above the falls, including a small spring brook and the wide variety of native wildflowers which dot the mature forest in the valley of the river. The falls is approached from the upstream side as if you were an unlucky canoeist caught in the torrent. Queequeg T. Dog, Ph.D. provides size perspective and aesthetic counsel.

A blueback herring and shad's eye view of Presumpscot Falls.

At the time of filming, in early June, the blueback herring and American shad runs were nearing their peak and the fish congregated at the deep plunge pool at the base of the falls by the thousands as they struggled to swim through the heavy water to their upstream spawning grounds.

The underwater filming was done with a small waterproof video camera attached to a long, metal broom handle with multiple hand straps and duct tape. The camera position was obtained by swimming out to a large mid-river rock, and repeatedly plunging the camera and broom stick deep into the water when a school of fish appeared close by. Because the current is so strong at the base of the falls, it was nearly impossible to keep the camera steady for more than a few seconds. Also, because the fish were quickly spooked by a long broomstick waving in their midst, each filming attempt was limited to a couple quick plunges before the herring and shad dispersed. Then it was a matter of waiting for them to regather and hoping the sun did not duck behind any clouds. It took two afternoons of filming to get the underwater footage here.

Blueback herring leaping the rapids at Ticonic Falls, Kennebec River, Waterville, Maine. Photograph by Tim Watts.
River bottom view of blueback herring getting ready to tackle the ledge drops at Ticonic Falls, Kennebec River, Waterville, Maine. Photograph by Tim Watts.

The dominant species in the footage is the blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis). Bluebacks are closely related to the alewife, which is also native to the Presumpscot, but alewives migrate upstream several weeks earlier in the spring than bluebacks. Like alewives, bluebacks are born in freshwater but live in the ocean. After one summer in freshwater as babies, they migrate to the ocean and live and grow for 3-4 years before returning to their home river to spawn. Unlike alewives, which spawn in freshwater ponds, blueback herring spawn in the river itself. Blueback herring are slightly smaller than alewives, with an average length of about 9-10 inches. Blueback herring are an important food source for fish-eating birds such as great blue heron, osprey and cormorants as well as striped bass. They are an essential food source for osprey nestlings. During the peak of the blueback run, the rapids and bedrock gorge of Presumpscot Falls are a circus of bird and fish life as osprey wheel about diving for herring, great blue heron spear them from streamside rocks and large striped bass attack them from below.

This still image from Presumpscot Falls shows the size difference between American shad and blueback herring. The American shad is the very large fish in the top of the image. It is probably 24-26 inches. The 9-10 inch blueback herring are directly below. A second, smaller shad is visible at right in the background.

The June 2009 filming revealed a much larger population of American shad in the Presumpscot than previously thought. American shad (Alosa sapidissima) are closely related to alewives and bluebacks but can reach nearly 30 inches long and 10 pounds, with an average size of about 24 inches and 3-5 pounds. Shad migrate upriver in June and spawn in deep holes in the river in July. The young migrate to sea in the fall at a length of 3-4 inches. Unlike their smaller cousins, shad spend 5 to 6 years in the ocean before returning to their river of birth to spawn.

During the two afternoons of filming in early June, schools of 30 or more large shad could be sometimes seen rushing to the surface in the center of the channel, always surrounded by much larger groups of blueback herring. Shad are extremely wary and prefer deep water away from shore. They only rose close to the surface when preparing to mount their attack on the nearly vertical drop of the falls. But during these brief, but repeated observation windows, it was obvious that the total number of shad present at the base of the falls was in the hundreds. Filming the shad was very difficult because they tended to stay out of underwater camera range and the camera's view was usually blocked by the bodies of blueback herring. Despite the excellent clarity of the Presumpscot during filming (it hadn't rained for a week), the natural light dispersal of the river water and the turbulence and bubbles of the plunge pool required the fish to be within a couple feet of the camera to be visible.

This little movie and its cousin are but weak tea compared to going to Presumpscot Falls yourself.

Music Credits:

"Monk's Apple": Patrick Malia, solo piano. Written by Patrick Malia.
"Tispaquin's Revenge": Jason Rowland, drums. Ted St. Pierre, bass. Patrick Malia, guitar solo. Douglas Watts, keyboards, guitar, percussion. Written by Douglas Watts.
"Rose Reprise": Conni St. Pierre, keyboards and flutes. Written by Conni St. Pierre.
All selections recorded at the Outlook, Bethel, Maine, engineered by Ted St. Pierre.

Squalid Tenement -- A Movie by Doug Watts

2010-06-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

This is the first movie I ever made, but due to file size limitations at youtube it always looked like pixellated crap. Youtube has now upped their file size limit to 2 gigabytes instead of 100 megabytes so this now looks the way it should. It features William the Cat and Pushy the Cat, my dirty socks, a one legged pigeon and Roger Madden. Pushy and Roger are both now deceased. William is now svelte and quite healthy and happy. The music was recorded (and overdubbed) onto a pocket cassette recorder in my apartment at Squalid Tenement when I got home from work. Whoever developed the condenser mics in early 1970s General Electric pocket cassette recorders should get some type of prize.

Presumpscot River Alewives

2010-06-21T04:48:00.001-07:00

This is an underwater video I made in June 2009 showing native alewives returning to their spawning pond, Duck Pond, also known as Highland Lake, in Westbrook, Maine. It is a tributary of the Presumpscot River via Mill Brook.

Unlike resident freshwater fish, alewives spend most of their lives in the Atlantic Ocean but are born in freshwater ponds. At the age of 3-4 they return to freshwater, to the same pond where they were born, to spawn. The babies spend the summer in the pond growing to a length of 4-5 inches and then migrate to the ocean in the fall. Unlike other migratory fish such as Pacific salmon and sea lamprey, alewives do not die after spawning and often make several return trips from the ocean to spawn during their lifetime. They reach a maximum length of 14 inches.

Prior to the mid 1800s nearly every coastal river and stream in New England supported multiple runs of alewives, one run to each lake and pond in the drainage, except where blocked by natural falls. Dam building on rivers and streams wiped out most of New England's alewife runs by the early 1900s. By the 1970s only a handful of alewife runs were left.

The Highland Lake alewife run was wiped out in the 1730s when a dam was built at Presumpscot Falls, at the river's head of tide, sparking a war with local Indians. Repeated orders by the Massachusetts Legislature in the 1700s to provide fish passage at Presumpscot Falls were ignored by the dam owners. The alewife run was restored in the 1980s when fishways were built at the pond's small outlet dam and at the Smelt Hill Dam at Presumpscot Falls. After being wrecked by a severe flood in 1996, the Smelt Hill Dam was completely removed in 2002 by cooperative agreement with the dam owner, Central Maine Power, and state and federal fisheries agencies and the non-profit Coastal Conservation Association. Here's the full story.

This movie features music by Maine artist Conni St. Pierre of Bethel, Maine and recorded at the Outlook studio in Bethel. This is quite fitting because the headwater of the Presumpscot River drainage is Songo Pond in Bethel. Funding for the filming and production was provided by Friends of Sebago Lake.

Driftwood -- A goofy song by Doug Watts.

2010-06-19T21:21:00.000-07:00

I have no clue what made me write this song. I think a book about New England pirates in the 1700s my brother lent me. [1]

The music is from my $80 radio shack keyboard on the "habanera" drum setting. I made up lyrics into the little mic built into the computer.

[1] Dow, G. and J.H. Edmonds. 1923. The Pirates of the New England Coast, 1630-1730. Marine Research Society, Salem, Massachusetts. Republished by Dover Publications. 1996. Mineola, New York.

Finding Boris the Snapping Turtle

2010-06-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

In 1995, my friend Jerry Trevino rescued a baby snapping turtle from being run over by a car and kept it in his apartment for eight years in a small kiddy swimming pool in the living room. Boris was his name and he was very intelligent. He knew his name and would sometimes come out into the kitchen and clomp around and visit with people.

In spring 2003 Jerry decided to release Boris because Boris was getting too big to stay in a 1 bedroom apartment and it just seemed the right thing to do. So Jerry released him into Bond Brook, behind our apartment building. Just a few hundred yards downstream, Bond Brook enters the Kennebec River. I told Jerry it would be a good release site because there was plenty of food and habitat and the banks of the brook and the river are very steep, which prevents the snappers from crossing any roads and getting run over by cars, which is probably the largest cause of death of adult snapping turtles.

When Jerry released Boris into Bond Brook it was in late April, just as the suckers were spawning in the brook. A couple days later I saw a 3 pound sucker bitten in half in the brook behind our apartment building. I reported to Jerry it appeared Boris had quickly figured out how to feed himself. Then for awhile there were no more sightings.

About six weeks later, while I was filming Atlantic sturgeon in the Kennebec River, Boris popped up under the bridge where I was sitting. I knew this snapper was Boris because he was the exact same size, his shell had only a small growth of algae on it, he looked up at me when I said his name, snapping turtles don't usually do that, snapping turtles are not commonly seen in the Kennebec, when you do see them they don't look up at you when you talk to them, and the place where I saw Boris was just across the river from the mouth of Bond Brook where Jerry had let him go. So the probability that it was Boris are much higher than not.

The moment that Boris took off was when I got up and moved toward him. Up until that point I had just been sitting on a rock under the bridge talking to him. I was glad that he did that, since it showed he had quickly re-learned his normal instinct to stay away from people. While people like Jerry and I think of snappers as very kool animals, a lot of people think of them as dangerous, ugly or only useful to run over with large automobiles and then laugh about it. This is one of the risks when you bring a wild animal into captivity and it becomes accustomed to friendly humans and then you release it into a world filled with humans who aren't so respectful of other life. In Rumford, Maine these people are called a "carcass patrol."

If (hopefully) Boris is still tooling around in the Kennebec, he is now 15 years old and much bigger. Unless run over by cars, snapping turtles can live for 50 or more years. Here's a picture of an older female snapper, from Mill Brook on the Presumpscot River in Westbrook. She was getting ready to lay her eggs when I bumped into her:

The music is some weird thing I made up at about 3 a.m. with a casio keyboard and my friend Kenny's alesis drum machine. The goofy howling sound at the beginning is a giant crane and electromagnet at O'Connor's scrap yard up the river, echoing off the river bank.

Fisher Brook, Augusta Maine -- A Natural Treasure

2010-06-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

This is a movie I made of Fisher Brook in Augusta, Maine in August 2003. With a baby mink and several sand pipers.

Fisher Brook is a tiny seepage fed brook that goes into the Kennebec River about one mile upstream of Augusta. It is hidden in a very deep valley and takes quite a hike to see it. The section which I filmed is where the brook takes a sharp and deep drop off the peneplain and plunges down to the Kennebec.

In 2002, I helped save Fisher Brook from becoming the roadbed of a giant bridge and interstate highway interchange that was slated to be built right on top of it.

It's odd that someone as anonymous and powerless as me can have that power. But then again, it's odd that people no different than me can decide places like Fisher Brook should be buried and destroyed forever under millions of tons of concrete, asphalt and rubble. That was the plan for Fisher Brook in 2002. Nobody even knew it existed. But I did. And so I spoke up and said no.

At Fisher Brook, the good folks won. Fisher Brook won. The baby minks won. The sand pipers won. The water striders won. Our kids won.

Scientific Proof that Stopping Pollution and Removing Dams Fixes Rivers

2010-05-12T14:50:00.001-07:00

By Douglas Watts
Friends of Sebago Lake

Until 1999, the Presumpscot River near Portland, Maine was perhaps the filthiest and most polluted river in New England. Then two things happened. First, in July 1999 the S.D. Warren Paper Company shut down its paper pulp making operation in Westbrook, Maine, removing a giant gob of organic pollution from the river. Then, in 2002, the head of tide Smelt Hill Dam was removed. This dam, built in the early 1900s, created a seven mile long stagnant pond which allowed the paper mill pollution from S.D. Warren to fester and settle in the river and consume most of its dissolved oxygen.
The first underwater photos ever taken of native blueback herring and American shad (the big fish) ascending Presumpscot Falls, Presumpscot River, Portland, Maine. June 6, 2009.

This is the falls they were swimming up through.

In Sept. 2008, the Maine Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted an in-depth study of the Presumpscot River to determine how the river has responded to these two events. The full results of the study, authored by Donald Albert, P.E. of the Maine DEP, have recently been compiled and published. A PDF copy is here.

The report's findings are quite astounding. Prior to 1999, the Presumpscot could barely meet Maine's Class C water quality standards, which require 5 parts per million (ppm) of dissolved oxygen in the water at all times. The 2008 study found that what had been the most polluted reach of the river, below the S.D. Warren paper mill in Westbrook, now easily attains 7 parts per million of dissolved oxygen, even under high temperature, low-flow conditions. This means the lower Presumpscot River is now in full attainment of the dissolved oxygen standard of Maine's highest water quality classification, Class A, which requires 7 ppm of dissolved oxygen at all times. The study report states at 8:

"Early morning dissolved oxygen (DO) readings on the Presumpscot are compared to the minimum class C criteria of 5 ppm. In all cases, criteria are easily met and always exceeded 7.0 ppm."

It might seem at first glance that the difference between 5 ppm and 7 ppm of dissolved oxygen is not a big improvement or a big deal, but it is. Dissolved oxygen standards were created under the Clean Water Act and Maine law because they accurately determine what and how many aquatic organisms, including fish, can inhabit a river. Even in the most clean rivers and streams, the upper limit of dissolved oxygen levels is around 10 ppm, so it's a fairly narrow window, and native critters of Maine rivers have evolved to live in waters with 7-9 ppm. Dissolved oxygen levels above 7 ppm allow all of Maine's aquatic life to happily inhabit a river and reach their fullest potential. It's when dissolved oxygen levels fall below 7 ppm that aquatic life, especially the most oxygen-intensive animals like brook trout:

and Atlantic salmon:

and stoneflies:

... start to suffer and disappear. Any aquatic biologist in Maine will tell you that while Maine's Class C standards require at least 5 ppm of dissolved oxygen, this is far from optimal, sort of like saying that technically a prisoner can live on bread and water and Cheez-its ... for awhile ...

Here is a story from 1999 about the first, fledgling efforts to rescue the Presumpscot River from continued oblivion.

During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, very few people, including scientists, ever believed the Presumpscot River would attain Class A water quality during their lifetimes. During this period and in the decades prior, most people in southern Maine, and those who lived along the Presumpscot, had long given up hope that the Presumpscot River would ever be clean again. The challenge seemed too daunting and the prospect too remote. What then seemed a fantasy is now the reality. It has been done. It can be done.

Until 2002, these waterfalls on the Presumpscot River in Portland, Maine did not exist and this was the dirtiest river in New England.

In the end, it's about what we value.

Why Polling Just Doesn't Work for Some Questions.

2010-05-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

The poll also showed 55% support continued offshore drilling (30% opposed), though more Democrats opposed drilling (48%) than supported it (34%). 43% said the spill makes them less likely to support drilling, compared with 21% who said it makes them more likely and 36% who said it makes no difference.

21 percent of respondents said the largest oil spill in U.S. history makes them more supportive of offshore oil drilling than they were before the largest oil spill in U.S. history?

This is why traditional polling techniques fall apart and become meaningless when applied to certain issues and questions.

Why White People Shouldn't Write for Newspapers For Awhile.

2010-05-10T20:07:00.001-07:00

From the Washington Post:

"The idealized vision of suburbia as a homogenous landscape of prosperity built around the nuclear family took another hit over the past decade, as suburbs became home to more poor people, immigrants, minorities, senior citizens and households with no children, according to a Brookings Institution report to be released Sunday."

So Portugese people are like ... crabgrass?

Severe Nutrient Loading at China Lake Outlet Stream, Winslow, Maine, October 2010.

2010-05-08T12:19:00.001-07:00

The above photos were taken in China Lake Outlet Stream at the Garland Road Bridge in Winslow, Maine in October 2010 showing extremely thick growths of filamentous algae growing in the stream bed.

This area is about 100 yards above the confluence of China Lake Outlet Stream with the Sebasticook River. The stream here is shallow and fast moving, which discounts the Sebasticook River itself as being the source of the nutrients encouraging the algae growth. This algae is growing in stream water solely from China Lake Stream.

This type of algae growth, especially at this density, is not due to naturally occuring conditions. From our understanding and experience, filamentous algae growths like these in a fast-moving stream are indicative of a nutrient surplus of nitrogen or phosphorus or both. These algae growths suggest a possible contribution of the Kennebec Sanitary District (KSD) wastewater discharge, located several miles upstream in East Vassalboro, in addition to non-point source inputs along the stream (cow manure, faulty septic systems, lawn fertilizer, etc.).

As you can see in the photos, the growths are so thick that they are destroying most of the aquatic insect and fish habitat in the stream where the algae is growing. This stream reach should be (and could now be) Atlantic salmon spawning and juvenile rearing habitat. There are now Atlantic salmon documented to be ascending the Sebasticook (4 large adults were passed at Benton Falls Dam in 2009). These salmon and their offspring are protected as endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Earlier in 2009, in September, on a field trip a mile farther upstream to examine a streamside archaeological site, myself (Doug Watts) and Bruce Bourque, chief archaeologist with the Maine State Museum and Bob Doyle, retired Maine State Geologist, observed similarly thick growths of filamentous algae in the streambed.

An open question is whether the manipulation of outflows from China Lake, now regulated well above its natural levels to provide sufficient 'dilution' for the KSD wastewater, is contributing in some way to this stream degradation. We are now looking into this.

Here are two stills from the video, shot in September 2009. The streamers of algae are about 6 feet long. Unpolluted streams do not have algae growths like this.

Is it hard for you to pronounce the word Queequeg?

2010-05-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

This is not meant to be accusatory. Just curious.

Back in 2001, my brother Tim Watts named their dog Queequeg, after the face-tattooed Maori harpooner in Moby Dick. As far as I know, the name is pronounced "Kwee-kwegg." We've had Queequeg living at our house in Maine since fall 2008. He likes it. I think.

But I have noticed, upon introducing Queequeg to various folks around town, that many people have a hard time pronouncing his name, even after I repeat it to them slowly, one syllable at a time. Some of them literally give up.

I've never found this name, Queequeg, a hard name or word to pronounce, at least as we pronounce it. But apparently a lot of people find it very frustrating to vocalize. I wonder why.

I'm not sure where or how Herman Melville came up with the word, or if it is actually the name of a Maori harpooner he might have met or heard of during his whaling days, or even if we are pronouncing it correctly.

But it does get me to thinking about my friend Ralph Keef of Hermon, Maine, outside of Bangor. Ralph was president of the Maine Council of the Atlantic Salmon Federation during the late 1990s when I was the secretary. At that time, I was living where I do now, in Augusta, on the lower Kennebec River, and I had a project I was trying to bring to fruition which involved removing a small, 19th century dam on Cobbosseecontee Stream in downtown Gardiner, Maine. And Ralph, God love him, could not pronounce the word Cobbosseecontee, and he would always ask me at meetings to pronounce the word for him when that item came up on our agenda.

And he didn't even want to touch Passagassawaukeg, the stream running into Belfast Bay in Belfast, Maine. And he definitely didn't want to touch Sedgeunkedunk, the stream running into the Penobscot River in South Brewer, across the river from Bangor.

All these names are Abenaki Indian place names, of course, and the latter two are Penobscot with a bit of Passamaquoddy language thrown in, since the two languages are quite closely related. Once you get the hang of how to let the repeating syllables roll off your tongue, they are very easy to say quickly. Since Abenaki was never a written language, the words Cobbosseecontee, Passagassawaukeag and Sedgeunkedunk are nothing more or less than phonetic depictions of how they were spoken by native speakers, like a paper map with lines and arrows of how to get to someone's house, as in the map is not the territory. Just a map.

This makes me wonder if there are some cultural barriers to pronouncing words, as in if some combinations of syllables are literally harder for some people to pull off than they are for other people. Certainly in French, there is a set of nasal and mid-throat sounds, like in the first names Raoul or Real or Guillaume, which are not easy for English speaking people to master since English has no spoken words that utilize these vocalizations. It's almost like a guitarist used to playing blues in E natural and suddenly has to play a polka song in C# minor. Everything goes haywire and nothing is familiar.

Odd.

When I ran for the Maine Legislature in 2000 I did door to door visits all over Sand Hill in Augusta, which is the old French and Franco-Canadian section of town, where for the older set, French is their first and preferred language. On one nice sunny fall afternoon I stopped at the house of Real Doyon, who was mowing his lawn. I had his name on my voting list so I asked him if he was Real Doyon and introduced myself, and in doing so completely mangled both his first and last name. He was very patient and friendly and taught me how to pronounce his name but I still mangled it and I was very embarrassed.

Suffice to say that there is no way to write in letters or syllables how to properly pronounce Real Doyon, except that it is pronounced nothing like it is spelled. Basically you have to ignore all the consonants and pronounce all the vowels completely differently than they look. I can sort of do it now, but certainly not as well as Real Doyon can. But at least he was nice about it.

UPDATE: There is good authority that Abenaki Indians in Maine during the Contact Period had a very hard time saying English words with the phoneme "r" within them and pronounced them with an "ell" sound. And obviously, as anyone from eastern New England knows, the phoneme "r" in the middle of word is silent, as in pahk the cah, whereas the same speakers freely use the phoneme "r" when it begins a word, as in railroad yahd. My brother Tim uses the typical southeastern Massachusetts dialect, such as pronouncing "effort" as "effitt", here.

My Dead Eel Photo is in the Huffington Post

2010-05-04T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Huffington Post used my photo of an eel killed in the turbines of the Benton Falls Dam in 2004 for a truly icky, but unrelated, story about eels, and apparently, a heavy bout of drinking.

Quabbin and Wachusett Dams need to be removed now.

2010-05-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

It's kind of sad when you know that in the "Hub of the Universe" in Boston, Massachusetts, these educated folks don't even know where their own water comes from and they panic when it's declared unsafe. Boo hoo. Drill a well in Quincy. Oops it's polluted. Drill a well in Chelsea, oops, oh maybe in Somerville, oops, or Malden, oh deear, Eleanor. We've polluted the whole place !!!!

I have to laugh because the only reason Boston destroyed four beautiful towns in the Swift River Valley by eminent domain in the 1930s is because the people of Boston deliberately destroyed all of their own local water supplies by pollution. And they laughed about it. Ha ha ha.

The wheel of progress is moved by the momentum of apathy and inertia and greed. Mostly greed.

It was ghastly wrong to build the Quabbin and Wachusett Dams. They were built for the wrong reasons and today exist for the wrong reasons. These dams destroyed some of the most beautiful places in Massachusetts.

These dams were mistakes. They should now be admitted as the mistakes they were. They were built from hubris and greed.

Boston now has the technology to get all of the water it needs from desalination plants in Boston Harbor. The lowly city of Brockton, my proud place of birth, is now getting much of its drinking water from a desalination plant in Montaup Bay (Mount Hope Bay) in North Dighton, just below Taunton. Boston has absolutely no need of water from the Swift River or the Quinapoxet or Trout Brook in Holden and Princeton and Boylston. If Brockton can do it, Boston certainly can.

Isn't this why Boston has MIT? Can't MIT even figure out how to purify water from the Charles River?

The people of the Swift River and Quinapoxet River valleys deserve to have their towns, their rivers, their landscapes, their heritages, and at least their cemeteries, returned to them. Boston had no right to take these towns and valleys and streams from the people who lived in them and called them home. It was terribly wrong when it was done in the 1930s and to leave it this way is far more wrong today.

Boston needs to climb out of the 1920s. The rest of us are waiting.

UPDATE: My father, Allan Watts, with his friend Albert Titcomb from Charlestown, pruned commercial apple orchards in Bolton, Sterling, Berlin and Hudson in Central Mass. for a living during the winter for Bob Davis, Nathan Chandler and Chedco Farms for three decades. Around 1979 we were at Tight Lines, a fishing and hunting shop in West Bridgewater and found a new book put out by Fran Smith of the Southeastern Mass. chapter of Trout Unlimited that listed 30 of the best trout fishing spots in eastern and central Mass. with detailed maps, directions and what type of approaches worked best at each spot. As a teenage fly fishing junkie, I ate up the book in about an hour and bugged the hell out of my dad to go fishing at all these places. It turned out that the Quinapoxet River (which he called Hoxie Poxie just to bug me) was just a few miles from where he pruned apple trees. So he and I started going fishing at the Quinapoxet, near its junction with Trout Brook in Holden. I had never seen such a beautiful river, and it was full of trout (tho, hard to catch), and the Quinapoxet became a place where my dad and I went fishing whenever we could and we had some of our best times together. Later, as I learned more history and looked at maps, I discovered that we were only fishing in the very small part of the Quinapoxet River that had not been flooded and destroyed by dams long before I was born and most of it was totally lost and forgotten under the Quinapoxet Reservoir and the Wachusett Reservoir. I haven't been to the Quinapoxet since me and my dad last fished it around 1981. I wonder if it is still as beautiful as it was then.

UPDATE WITH STUPID PRANK BY MY DAD: Usually after fishing the Quinapoxet, long after dark we'd go to the McDonald's in Clinton, Mass. to get something to eat before driving back to Easton. This is where I first saw my Dad tormenting innocent McDonald's employees. At this time, McDonald's had just started selling Chicken McNuggets, and you could order 6 or 9 or 12. So my Dad would go up to the counter and ask for 15 McNuggets, and the high school kid would patiently say, you can order 6, 9 or 12. So my Dad would keep asking if he could order 15 McNuggets just to see if they could figure out that 6 + 9 = 15. He said every now and then the kid at McDonald's would smile at him and get it.

Me and Queequeg T. Dog, Ph.D. saw a Pileated Woodpecker in Augusta, Maine

2010-05-03T22:58:00.001-07:00

This winter, in February, me and Queequeg T. Dog, Ph.D. saw some massive holes dug out of white pine trees across the street. They were big enough to put softballs into.

On Friday, we finally saw the sawyer. The photo is blurry but you can see her red cap. It's a Pileated Woodpecker, standing on the ground, out behind Stone Street in Augusta. We tried to get closer, but Queequeg wanted to get even closer, so that was the end of the photo session.

UPDATE: Queequeg and I also saw a big coyote/wolf across the street last week around midnight. Probly 45-50 pounds. Maine "coyotes" are very obviously coyotes with a lot of remnant wolf genes mixed in. As time goes on I think the wolf genes are becoming more dominant and the coyote genes less, thus leading to a larger, more wolf-like coyote with every generation. Which you need to take down moose and deer.

Scientus Pro Publica No. 28

2010-05-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Scientus Pro Publica is a way to disseminate original science writing on a frequent basis. I have joined their merry jamboree and invite you to take a look at their entire menu.

Wild Turkey Egg -- Newly hatched.

2010-05-03T16:58:00.001-07:00

The egg of a wild American Turkey, which I presume was hatched and not dug up and eaten by a raccoon, from the red oak forest across the street, Augusta, Maine, April 30, 2010. The small, circular pecking hole in the left hand shell fragment suggests the baby turkey did hatch successfully. Let's hope so.

The wild Turkey was hunted to total extinction in New England by 1900. These animals were only restored by a miracle: live trapping young turkeys from the Adirondacks in the 1980s and releasing them into the New England states.

This cannot work with Passenger Pigeons, since we killed every one of them. It cannot happen with Great Auks, since we killed every one of them. It cannot happen with Ivory Billed Woodpeckers, since we killed every one of them. It cannot happen with Sea Minks, since we killed every one of them.

And it cannot happen with the American Chestnut, which the wild Turkey used as its principal food, because a fungus on a boat from Europe wiped them all out in the 1930s and no cure has ever since been found.

Oops.

Seems like us Americans are always saying Oops.

Trout Lily -- Erythronium americanum

2010-05-03T16:45:00.001-07:00

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) flowers in late April and early May in central Maine, where I live, at about altitude 100 feet above mean sea level.

The flowers are short-lived, lasting perhaps a week, and are timed to coincide with when the leaves of the maples and oaks are just emerging (size of a mouse's ear) and lots of sunlight is still reaching the forest floor.

Trout lilies are perennials and grow in large colonies and take their name, trout lily, because their oval leaves contain odd tannish spots and blotches and look somewhat like the body of a brook trout and they like to grow along the banks of trout streams.

Trout lilies seem quite fussy about where they live. There is one small rill across the street, which dries up in summer, that holds all of them. They are entirely absent from the other several acres of the same contiguous woodland.

Getting a little beetle sitting there was a big plus.

If you haven't, get a copy of Richard Dawkins' book, "The Extended Phenotype," in which he makes a credible case that flowering plants have evolved to control the minds and bodies of insects and use them as pollinating 'tools' in a relationship which borders somewhere between symbiotic and one-sided in favor of the plants. Quite interesting.

Yay, I'm Not Crippled and I Fixed the Lawn Mower !!!

2010-05-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you have to accept good things in small packages. Yesterday I did something to my lower back and knew, from past experience, it was going to soon feel like someone was sticking a Bowie knife into the muscles around by tailbone, with the blood groove, if I did not lie down and remain completely immobile. So I did and read a book from 1988 about string theory. This morning the muscle spasms stopped. Thank God. Last time this happened I could not move for a week.

And on Saturday, the handle snapped off the lawn mower because the handle is made of cheap, crappy metal alloy. The choice was fix it somehow or buy a new lawn mower for $150. I came up with a trailer trash solution using an old metal mop handle and our Skil saw with a metal cutting blade and $1.50 of nuts and bolts and lock washers from the hardware store down the street. And it actually works. Then the lawn mower ran out of gas.

But at least I can move now and the lawn mower will work if it has gas.

My Brother Tim Watts Kicks Ass.

2010-05-01T22:28:00.001-07:00

My brother Tim Watts, with his new Spock Beard, speaks truth to power on the radio on April 29 in Brockton, Massachusetts about water pollution.

Listen here.

Joyeux de Science Carnival !!!

2010-05-01T21:10:00.001-07:00

Understanding the Hubble Expansion of the Universe with Schlitz Light and Then Running Out of Ketchup

2010-04-30T16:15:00.001-07:00

This is one of the most bizarre photos taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a tiny section of a tiny section of the outermost halo of the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, 2.5 million light years from us. The stars are all in the Andromeda Galaxy's outermost reaches. Behind them are several galaxies, each one far more distant than the other. All are orders of magnitude farther from Andromeda than it is from us. Space is big.

The best way I've found to get a mental picture of the ongoing expansion of the Universe is with the following analogy. [1]

You decide to visit your friend who lives three miles up the road. You walk at three miles per hour so you get there in about an hour and both enjoy a cold, frosty Schlitz Light.

But as you start walking, a weird force begins stretching the distance between your house and your buddy's house at the rate of one inch per hour. So by the time you reach your buddy's house in an hour, his house is an inch farther from your house than when you started walking. No problem. What's an inch among friends and a cool, frosty Schlitz Light? But what if your buddy lives 3,000 miles away? Well, you start walking at 3 mph and it takes you (without sleep) 1,000 hours to get there. During that time, this weird force has made your buddy's house 1,000 inches (83 feet) farther from your house from when you started walking. But so what? Now he's got a bigger yard for you to both enjoy a cool, frosty can of Schlitz Light.

So if you keep doing the math, with your friend's house farther and farther away, you can still always get there, even if this weird force keeps making your buddy's house an inch farther from you every hour you walk. Yes, if your buddy lives 3 million miles away, his house will be 83,000 feet farther away than it was when you started, but so what? You can still make it. It just takes a bit more time and lets him go to the store and get another 12 pack of Schlitz Light, just in case.

Add a twist. Assume this weird expansive force that adds an inch between you and your friend's house each hour is not constant. It actually speeds up a tiny bit each hour. So, after 10 hours, it starts to add 1.001 inch to your distance each hour. And after 20 hours, it adds 1.002 inches to your distance. And after 1,000 hours, it adds 1.01 inches to your distance. This is still no problem if your buddy's house is only 3 miles away.

But it becomes a big problem if your buddy's house is 3 billion light years away. Not only does his house get a bit farther from yours each hour, but the rate at which it gets farther also increases every hour that you walk. If your buddy's house is far enough away from you, and since you can't faster than 3 miles per hour, at a certain distant X, the rate at which your buddy's house gets farther from you every hour will exceed your walking speed. You will never get there. No Schlitz Light for you.

This is exactly what happens to photons emitted by stars in galaxies billions of light years from Earth due to the Hubble expansion of space. Like us, photons can only move so fast. We can walk at about 3 mph. Photons travel at 186,000 miles per second. We and photons have a fixed, upper limit of how fast we can travel. As it turns out, for galaxies billions of light years from us, the expansion of space itself between us and them extends the distance between us and them faster than 186,000 miles per second. Once this threshold is reached, photons from these galaxies can and will never reach us. They are still "out there" but we will never ever have an inkling that they are.

Another way to think of the Hubble expansion is imagine your teenage son gets in the family car to go to the store to get hot dog rolls. Just as he is pulling out of the driveway you realize you're also out of ketchup. So as he starts to drive down the road you run after the car trying to get him to stop. Assuming he doesn't peel out, initially you can run fast enough to catch up with the car and flag him down. But if he's cranking up death metal in the car with the windows rolled up he can't hear you and keeps driving, pushing the accelerator pedal of the car down further. As each second goes by, he keeps going faster but you are already running as fast as you can. If he doesn't hear you or see you and stop, as every second goes by the distance between you and the car increases, even as you are running as fast as you can. After a number of seconds, he has pulled so far away from you that he disappears down the road. But in the case of space, the accelerator pedal has no bottom, and the speedometer has no top. After awhile, your son and your car are going faster than the speed of light. Even if you grabbed your cell phone and called him in the car to pick up ketchup he would not get the call because the radio waves from your phone would be moving too slow to catch up with him. So you order chinese instead.

Light Bubbles Are a Bitch

The movie "Lord of the Rings" has a scene where the message to attack is sent by glymphs or whatever using a sequence of bonfires on mountain tops. As each glymph sees the fire on the adjacent mountaintop, they set alight their bonfire and the message is quickly sent over hundreds of miles. Even though each bonfire lighter can only see the fires just above and below them, the message chain works. They are able to communicate 'over the horizon.'

In the same way, I've pondered if there's a way for distant galaxies to help us "leap frog" past the light bubble that surrounds us like these bonfires on the mountaintops. Is there a way for these galaxies to tell us what's over our horizon?

The "light bubble" is short hand for saying that because light travels at the speed of light, if the Universe is 14 billion years old, then we cannot see any object that is more than 14 billion light years from us. This doesn't mean there are no objects farther out from us than 14 billion light years, there are, it's just that we can't see them yet because the Universe is not yet old enough for their light to reach us.

What complicates the whole thing is that we are not at the center of the Universe. We are only at the center of our 14 billion light year bubble. The Andromeda Galaxy has the same size light bubble as us but it is centered on them, and they are 2.5 million light years from us.[2] So, technically, a species from Andromeda can see things that we can't and we can see things they can't because our bubbles are in different places. But the Andromeda galaxy is really close to us so using it as an example is not very fair.

So let's choose a galaxy way way way way far from us, like one of the most distant and faintest smudges of light in the Hubble Deep Field images. These buggers are somewhere around 10 billion light years from us, getting close to the edge of our light bubble. Now let's imagine if some folks in one of these smudges of galaxies also took their own Hubble Deep Space Field photograph of the farthest galaxies they could see. What would it look like? What would it show? This is where things get very weird.

The first problem is that unless these folks took their Deep Space Field photograph 10 billion years ago and broadcast its digital code into space, we would not be able to receive it now and look at it. But let's say they did. If some very smart, benevolent folks in one of these massively distant galaxies took their own Deep Space Field photographs 10 billion years ago, digitally encoded it in a translatable form, and blasted this code via radio waves for the nearby Universe to read, the latest picture we could get from them was the one they sent out 10 billion years ago. So we would get a nice snapshot of what things looked like from their perspective 10 billion years ago. We wouldn't be in it, of course, since our solar system and sun didn't even exist until 5 billion years after they beamed out the photo that we're just receiving, decoding and seeing today.

The next question is whether these folks in this galaxy 10 billion light years away could tell us about what is "over the horizon" from us: places and galaxies that are outside of our own 14 billion light year radius light bubble. At one level it seems possible. These folks are at the very "edge" of our light bubble and their own light bubble extends much farther than ours in certain directions. They can see in certain directions much farther than we can see. So why can't they just take a picture of this stuff we can't see and beam it out into space so we decode it and see it? Well, cuz the light bubble is a bitch. Here's the problem.

Let's assume these nice folks took very deep, sharp pictures of the farthest objects they could see every hour and broadcast them out into space, and we could read these data feeds, decode them and turn them into photos. Unfortunately, the latest series of photos they sent that we could see were sent out 10 billion years ago, showing the sky as they saw it 10 billion years ago. But 10 billion years ago, the entire Universe was only 4 billion years old, not the 14 billion years old it is today. So the light bubble they had then was only 4 billion light years in radius, not the 14 billion light years we have today. And 10 + 4 = 14. Every photon they could see 10 billion years ago in their 4 billion light year bubble is one that we can see today in our 14 billion light year bubble. Certainly, the resolution and detail of their photos of their local neighborhood would be far better than ours, and would show much richer close-ups of places that to us are just tiny smudges, but every single photon that hit their telescope 10 billion years ago would be a photon that hits ours. And here's the catch. Not a single photon they could record 10 billion years ago would be from a galaxy "over the horizon" from what we can see today. We today, and they 10 billion years ago, would be both taking pictures of the same horizon and seeing the same horizon.

Today, those folks, if their descendants still exist, are definitely seeing stuff that we cannot see. At this moment, they are now seeing way past our horizon. The problem is they cannot communicate to us right now what they are seeing because, if they send us a photo of what they are seeing right now, we will not get the message for 10 billion years and more. It's sort of like having a friend in California and you live in Boston. For both of you to eat lunch at the same moment, he has to eat lunch at 9 a.m. to eat lunch when you eat lunch at your noon, or you have to eat lunch at 3 p.m. for when he eats lunch at his noon. Your noons are three hours apart and there's nothing you can do about it. Now times that a few billion. It's that intractable.

So there's no way you can use a series of galactic friends as interlocking beacons to send each other messages as to what things look like over your respective horizons because the messages cannot travel faster than the light itself. Well, you can do it, but the messages will not come any sooner than the light from the objects reaches you on their own. The photos they send will be better, of course, because your buds are much more closer to these distant objects than you and can take better close-up photos. But none of the photons their photos capture will be photons that would have otherwise been too far away to reach you. They cannot send you any "over the horizon" photos. It would be kool, but it can't happen. The light bubble is a bitch that way. It doesn't allow leap-frogging or cheating.

Notes:
[1] I like to call it the "Hubble expansion" because it was discovered by astronomer Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California in the 1920s.
[2] Here's a fun fact about how much space there is compared to stuff. The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years from the Milky Way. Both galaxies are about 100,000 light years in diameter. So it would take 25 Milky Ways to cover the distance between the two galaxies -- and there is almost literally nothing between them. So even with two large neighboring galaxies the ratio of non-stuff to stuff is still about 25:1. The Universe is mostly non-stuff.

The Pilgrims were Illegal Immigrants.

2010-04-30T00:19:00.000-07:00

All our ancestors crossed the U.S. border illegally. The people on the Mayflower at Plymouth were all illegal immigrants. The freakin' Nausets at Wellfleet took pot shots at them. Myles Standish had no papers granted and stamped by Massasoit or Chickatawbut. It's a non-issue. Let's focus on the real issues that affect real people.

Home Alone in the Local Universe

2010-04-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

Much ado about Stephen Hawking's admonition we Earthlings should not loudly advertise our existence to aliens because they might not be very nice to us.

Given the solar system was formed in roughly the last third of the age of the Universe, 4.5 billion years ago, it would seem that any evidence of past colonization efforts over the last 4 billion years would be observable, say, on Mars, which has a bedrock surface that has not changed much since its early formation, minus a few big, extinct volcanoes.

The question of visitation is a question of archaeology, not listening for signals from space. Planetary archaeology, thus far, shows not a single sign of any habitation or visitation anywhere. Lunar mapping can now show objects on the Moon’s surface as small as the Apollo lunar module. But no signs of any other “craft.” No other “craft” in 4 billion years?

While photo resolution on Mars is not as good as the Moon, still, there are no signs of anything except entirely natural features. Eric von Daniken aside, not a single bit of evidence of visitation on Earth has ever been found, even though our fossil record goes back more than a billion years.

Given the past observable record, it seems ‘visitation’ that leaves permanent, observable marks has been non-existent in our solar system for millions of years. So it seems a very slim chance that now, suddenly, “they” will appear, coincidentally just as “we” are technologically advanced enough to look for “them.”

Problem: Space is 99.9999999998 percent Space

The problem with space is that it's well named. It's almost all blank, empty space. Just space. Lots and lots and lots and lots of empty space. Empty. Space. It's like a one act play where the play writer includes a stage instruction which says, "pause and look expectant toward stage right for 1 million years, then deliver next line."

But that's in part because our little solar system is in a sparse part of the outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy. There are other parts of space that have a lot more stuff than space as compared to where we are.

One example is the middle of a giant globular star cluster like Omega Centauri. As NASA notes at its Hubble Space Telescope site: "The average distance between any two stars in the cluster's crowded core is only about a third of a light-year, roughly 13 times closer than our Sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri."

A third of a light year is "only" 2 trillion miles. For comparison, Pluto is 3.6 billion miles from Earth. That's about one three hundredth of a trillion, or the length of one football on a football field. So even if we were in the center of one of the densest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy, the nearest next star to us would be 650 times farther than from Earth to Pluto. That's the length of one football on two football fields with the space for the band thrown in. Another more stuffy and less spacey spot is smack in the center of our own galaxy, but the dimensional difficulties described above are still there, if not worse.

So if we were in the center of a tight globular star cluster or the center of the Milky Way, there would be a lot more stuff than space compared to where we are now. We're kind of in a galactic Podunk. Or Easter Island. The last place to get strung up for cable. That's us. And there's nothing we can do about it. As the French say, il est teh suxxor.

First Contact: A Rorschach Test for Homo Sapiens

Lacking a scintilla of scientific evidence for any past or present contact or existence of any space aliens evarr, the concept is like eating cotton candy. Or as Detmar Schnitker said, "When you have no data, you can speculate all you want." And so we humans do. I cannot resist.

But precisely because there is no data to weigh, except in the negative, what you get is a Rorschach Test of each person's ideas about themselves and the world as they perceive it, including all their innermost fears, insecurities and ambitions. Asking the question, as Stephen Hawking did, of "how would aliens treat us if they found us" is really an exercise in holding each respondents' concept of themselves and humanity up to a carnival mirror. The only data to weigh is how people think of themselves as filtered through how they predict aliens would think of us. These comment threads give a good statistical cross-section.

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel labels Hawking's statement "cowardly." Bad Astronomer Phil Plait agrees with Ethan, in the sense that he wants to side with his optimistic side, saying in essence that any alien advanced enough to travel light years to Earth would be advanced enough to have overcome any avaricious, rapacious tendencies it once may have had. This is all internal projection, of course, since no data exists to show either side is right or wrong. Without actual aliens, actually expressing their intent, or any evidence they even exist (or ever existed), it's a wide open playing field. It's like a poker game without rules where you can invent your own winning hand just by saying the cards you have is the "best" hand. But the other guy can too. It's like a board game where the rule book is missing so everyone can invent their own rules.

But Let's Play Anyway ...

If we accept the speed of light as a barrier, then "robot probes" to our solar system from other stars would be ineffectual, since they could not report back data for centuries, and most likely could not even do that because the signal strength would be too tiny and would be lost in the background. So, the only rational purpose for any visitation would be colonization, with the colonists having no hope of ever making a return trip home. And for any carbon-based, DNA based life, Earth is the only habitable planet in the solar system, or anywhere near it.

Earth is a pretty unique place in the neighborhood of 10 light years diameter from us. It is the only habitable place for carbon-based life forms. Nothing else even remotely fills the bill.

So colonization and inhabitation would be the only purpose for a visitation. And it would most likely not go well for us, since our visitors would be massively more technologically endowed.

Hawking for the win.

Now we need to stop destroying the one and only inhabitable planet known in the Universe.

Wait ... I'll take Bristle Cone Pines to block !!!

The Bristle Cone Pines of the Panamint Mountains around Death Valley U.S. America are the oldest living creatures in the known Universe. They can live to be 5,000 years or older. [The story of how the Methuselah Tree was cut down by a couple of idiot biologists in the 1960s to see how old it was, and then, after killing it, they found it was the oldest living thing in existence until they killed it, simply proves Stephen Hawking is correct at multiple levels.]

Bristle Cone Pines can live for 5,000 years or more. This is 50 to 100 times older than any Earth mammal. We don't really know how long whales can live, since we killed them all, but we know at least a few survivors of our harpoon insanity can live far longer than humans. But even whales can only live at best 10 percent as long as Bristle Cone Pines.

Now if an intelligent alien could live as long as a Bristle Cone Pine, then a long space journey would not be a big deal. For a creature that lives 5,000 years or more, interstellar space travel at sublight speed is not a long trip. It's only a real long time because us humans have a very short life span compared to trees.

Was Earth First Invaded by Alien Trees?

It's possible. Trees are, by far, the longest living creatures known in the Universe. And longest-living is the key requisite for interstellar space travel. You've got to be alive when you get there. And you can't be impatient during the ride.

The Cormorants say the Alewives are Here

2010-04-12T13:13:00.001-07:00

I was just outside in the yard and saw 10 double crested cormorants flying in formation over the house going up the Kennebec River. Which means the alewives have arrived in the Kennebec River. This is about a week earlier than usual.

Cormorants only eat fish and they only appear on the Kennebec in April when the alewives have come in from the ocean to spawn upriver. I've watched the synchronicity of cormorant arrival vs. alewife arrival for 10 years now at the Kennebec's head of tide in Augusta and the correlation is uncanny. If the cormorants are here the alewives must also be here.

It's funny how you can tell a certain type of fish has entered a giant river just by sitting in the side yard and see a few birds fly over.

Click Beetles Are Up and Clicking About

2010-04-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

Click beetles come out when fiddleheads come out.

Patty cake, patty cake, baker's man.

There is nothing more kooler in the world than Click Beetles. And now, in early spring, just as Jack in the Pulpits start to pop out, is when Click Beetles come out in the open and start clicking around.

Click Beetles get their name because if you see them on the ground and flip them over on their backs, they pull their legs in close to their body, become perfectly motionless and look like a sunflower seed without the stripes:
Photo by Jennifer Schlick at winterwoman.net.

Then they arch their backs and violently spring upward off the ground, creating an audible "click" sound and pop several inches into the air, whereupon they land on their feet and run or fly away. It is a very unique anti-predator device because it combines hiding motionless (like a hognose snake or opossum does) followed by a sudden and very odd burst of movement that, to many predators, must appear to make the click beetle disappear.

The click beetle, like the hognose snake, adopts a two-phase predator avoidance approach, but in reverse. The hognose snake, also called the "puff adder," first adopts a menacing aggressive stance and puffs up its body to make it look much bigger. Then, if that fails, it rolls on its back, goes limp and plays dead. Click beetles first play dead, then aggressively "click" up in the air and pop out of sight.

Here's a click beetle with giant fake eyespots. You can see the real eyes at the end of the click beetle's head, just behind the antennae. Unfortunately, these fake-eyed click beetles are not found in Maine. A number of click beetle species display these out-sized, prominent fake eyespots, but many species do not. This is an interesting question for evolutionists. These giant fake eyespots must convey some survival advantage or they would not have developed, since they make the beetle very easy to see, and presumably easier for predators to see them. But many click beetle species, like those in Maine, have no eye spots and are quite inconspicuous and drab by comparison. Why did the click beetle species native to Maine not evolve these eyespots? Why did those click beetles with giant fake eyespots develop them in the first place? Rather than convergent evolution, this suggests divergent evolution, wherein an ancestral species "splits off" at some point in the past and the two divergent, but closely related species adopt very different, nay almost opposite, survival strategies, except for the click. What say ye?

Discussing the big fake eyespots of some click beetles the other night, my wife Lori noted that it's hard to believe a predator, say a sparrow, would be "scared" by the fake eyespots on a click beetle, since despite its fake eyespots, the beetle is still less than an inch long. To even a small bird, it's still just a little bug. As Lori says, "It's not like the bird suddenly thinks it's an owl." But maybe? [1]

So perhaps the false eyespots are not meant to scare away predators but evolved to act as reverse camouflage in concert with the click. The false eyespots are so loud and bold and easy to see that once the click beetle senses a predator it flips on its back, pulls its legs tight alongside its body and stays perfectly motionless, like a tiny oval stone. If the predator (a sparrow) is tracking the click beetle based on the bright and big eyespots on top of its head, when the click beetle suddenly flips on its back, concealing its eyespots, it might from the bird's perspective look like the click beetle has disappeared. And if that still doesn't work, the click beetle can still use its clicking power to pop up in the air and confuse the bird further. It would sort of be like a tiger swallowtail butterfly having an underside which is completely drab and muted and gray and the swallowtail being able to "switch sides" in a split second and blend in with the gray, muted tones of a tree trunk when a predator approaches.

Here's a click beetle on poison ivy near the Presumpscot River, Westbrook, Maine.

While I'm no expert on Click Beetles, I do know that they are only commonly observed in Maine in the spring, just as the leaves are coming out on the trees, ie. early May. At this time, the click beetles perch themselves in very visible locations, like the tips of leaves, or as below, on the cap of a glue bottle in our side yard. Soon after, they disappear. When they do this "perching" behavior, they are very non-skittish and stationary and you can get quite close to them, which is how I got these photos. I am wondering if this is a mating behavior since it occurs in the spring and only lasts for a week or so.

Our tiny in-town yard (1/8th acre) in Augusta, Maine has an abundance of click beetles every spring. This is probably in part because we don't spray or use any chemical herbicides or pesticides. If you spray stuff that kills insects in the air or in the ground, you can't expect to see many of any species, especially beetles, which live in the ground as larvae for several years or more. I like beetles and insects of all types. They are endlessly fascinating. Click Beetles helped create this song.

UPDATE: I needlessly confused GrrrlScientist by the last sentence, for which I apologize. There are no recordings of click beetle clicks in the above song, which is named "John Kpiaye" in honor of the guitarist in Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Band, whom I always try to copy. What I meant was that I used the click beetle photo above labelled "Ambient Custard" as one of several CD covers for the instrumental CD which includes that song. I can attest that my little buddies the click beetles were certainly an inspirational component when that song and CD were written and recorded.

[1] Of course, this explanation does not explain why click beetles did not just stay drab and inconspicuous and not develop big fake eye spots in the first place. Perhaps big fake eyespots take advantage of a neurological trigger in predators that fools them into thinking the beetle looks "BIG" even though ocular evidence shows it is not. This is not unprecedented. It is well documented that small mother wrens will continue feeding baby cowbirds or cuckoos in their nests even though the babies are twice or three times the size as their foster mothers, and the foster mothers do not notice the obvious and bizarre discrepancy in size.

Sebago Lake's Shoreline Continues to be Destroyed with State of Maine's Support.

2010-04-06T13:32:00.000-07:00

These photos, taken on April 4, 2010 by Roger Wheeler of Friends of Sebago Lake, show the destruction of the natural beaches and shoreline of Sebago Lake, Maine continues unabated.

Friends of Sebago Lake has more details on what you can do to help stop this destruction.

Terraced Gardens, Raised Beds, Peas and Global Warming

2010-04-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

March 2010 was one of the warmest Marches on record in Maine. April began with three of the hottest days in early April on record, with temps. up to 77 degrees in Bangor. With these conditions and the chance of another hard frost nearly non-existent, it seemed a good gamble to plant peas and swiss chard in the terraced garden with raised beds we built in our yard:

The raised bed above has two rows of peas (Sugar Snap), planted 2 inches apart and the rows 8 inches apart. The rest of the bed will be for tomatoes in mid to late May.

This shows the three raised beds we built into the terrace between our house and the house uphill. The front of the farthest bed is planted with Bright Lights Swiss Chard from Fedco Seeds in Waterville, Maine.

This is our garden, taken from the giant silver maple out back in May 2009. The peas and swiss chard are in the beds on the left.

The next few weeks will tell whether I got all rambunctious and planted too early, since this is very early for planting anything outdoors in central Maine. However, this spring is already shaping up as a very mild one, most likely influenced by El Nino along with global warming. And because we are using raised beds, the soil temperatures tend to get higher than the ambient ground temperature and the raised beds keep the soil from getting waterlogged after a hard rain. We shall see.

A Cold Frame from Curio Case Doors and Yard Junk

2010-04-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

Our old cold frame fell apart over the winter so it came time on Easter Sunday to build a new one for the tomato and pepper seedlings we grow in our raised beds:

It so happens in the garage we have a couple of heavy glass doors from a curio cabinet. We only have the doors, not the cabinet. The doors measure 48 x 19 inches each. So first I found some old crap lumber around the yard to build a box to hold them:

The back plate is made from two chunks of high school bleacher seats with braces from a pressure treated 2 x 6. The sides are half inch plywood running from 13 1/2 inches at the back to 5 1/2 inches at the front. The front plate is the rest of the pressure treated 2 x 6. This is all old scrap lumber. Then I put the first door on:

Then I put on front plate with corner braces cut from a small junk piece of 2 x 4, and then attached the lower door. Except for the front plate, which needed 3 1/2 inch galvanized finishing nails, the rest of the cold frame uses 1 inch galvanized sheet metal screws left over from a metal roofing project.

So after a couple hours we have a 48 by 38 inch cold frame with extremely fancy doors for a cost of zero.

Queequeg T. Dog, Ph.D. inspects the finished cold frame with seeds installed inside, planted in cat food cans. Since we have five cats we have a never ending supply of empty cat food cans, which make ideal pots for starting tomato and pepper seeds. This will hold 150 seedlings. At night I put a dirty old sleeping bag over the frame to conserve heat. Total cost = zero.

Women should stop taking sexism so personally.

2010-04-02T00:44:00.000-07:00

Women cannot be objective on the issue of sexism. They get all emotional about it, almost as if it affects them every day. Us men, on the other hand, are like the true compass, unswayed by fickle emotion and hormones. For this reason, we are uniquely capable of taking the larger view.

If you need to know how you should feel as a woman, just ask us. We'll be happy to tell you.

For hours!