When you think of Vermont--white church on the tidy green--you're not actually thinking of Hardwick, which in its days as the "Building Granite Center of the World" used to boast a dirty-movie theater and a lot of bars. And those were the good times; in November 2005 an enormous fire wrecked the historic Bemis Block in the middle of town. (It has since been reconstructed.)
Likewise, when you think of "compost," you may imagine a healthy-looking gardener spreading the loamy remains of his erstwhile vegetable soup on the raised beds where he'll grow next year's carrots. That's not Tom Gilbert.
He's healthy-looking enough, but he's standing in a dusty parking lot high on West Hill Road, overlooking town. "You're surrounded now by three decomposing carcasses," he says, pointing proudly to a trio of brown mounds. Tom Gilbert runs the Highfields Center for Composting, which introduced "livestock mortality composting" to Vermont. On a dairy farm, 5 percent of the herd is likely to die each year, so knowing what to do with the remains is important.
"You don't want to just haul it out to the field," Gilbert explains. "That's a lot of blood and bone that will go to waste," when it could be improving the soil. So here's one recipe: an 18-inch base of woodchips, a 6-inch layer of sawdust, a thin layer of fresh corn silage (or haylage, or horse manure), the animal, and then a cap of silage--24 inches of material on all sides of the carcass. Done correctly, with proper siting (away from surface and ground water) and air flow, the process inactivates pathogens and produces a rich compost.
"There's a full-grown Holstein in there--I put him in two weeks ago," says Gilbert, who sticks a 2-foot-long thermometer into the pile. "One hundred forty-five degrees. If you go in with a shovel, you'll find nice clean bone. We'll leave it a while, and the skull and the pelvis will still be there, but now they'll be brittle enough that you're not going to pop a tire if you drive the tractor over it."
Gilbert composts more than cows; in fact, he's pioneered a rural composting system that gathers up much of the food waste from the surrounding area, including schools, farms, and restaurants. The collection truck drives a 76-mile route; some of the stops are 15 miles apart, which reduces the economies of scale. Even so, once the workers have the garbage up on the piles, where they can roll it with a backhoe every few days, it doesn't take long before it turns into fertilizer. "If you assume that every cubic yard of compost offsets an equivalent amount of synthetic nitrogen (chemical fertilizer), and accounting for mitigated landfill emissions," Gilbert calculates, "our little operation here is offsetting greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to not burning some 26,000 gallons of gasoline a year."
If you want to change the world, or even a corner of it, compost helps a lot. If Vermont as a whole recycled all of its food waste, it could compost 20,000 acres of vegetable fields. Together with good cover crop practices, that could be enough to grow most of the produce its citizens consume. And Vermont is a little place. Imagine New York City composting; it's comparatively easy to collect food waste when there are more households in Manhattan alone than individuals in all of Vermont. The resulting fertilizer would be enough to make New Jersey the Garden State once more. "Soil is the frontier of where we need to be going," Gilbert declares.
But forget New York--Hardwick is interesting enough on its own. And compost is just, literally, the beginning. Almost everything here is conspiring to produce a produce renaissance, a (soy) milky way toward the future. In fact, it may be the single most interesting agricultural experiment on the continent. In a lovely new book, The Town That Food Saved, journalist Ben Hewitt declares that its residents "are more able to sustain themselves on food grown by their neighbors than perhaps any other community in the U.S." To understand why, follow the local food chain.
Some of Tom Gilbert's compost gets trucked about a mile down the road to Wolcott, to the gardens where High Mowing Organic Seeds grows its product. High Mowing is one of the country's biggest organic seed companies, which means it isn't all that big--a couple of million dollars a year in revenue. But it sure is beautiful.
"People say it's hard to grow organic broccoli and cauliflower," says Tom Stearns, the ebullient proprietor. "We try to find the ones that really crank--like these," he says, pointing to specimens approximately the size of beach balls. "Organics need to be really vigorous to out-compete weeds. And they tend to need more root hairs, because their fertility is widely distributed instead of being intravenously injected. These guys here are perfect if you like radishes; I don't much like radishes. This is spicy 'Golden Frill' mustard greens, a new variety we added in 2009. Here's an Asian green, hon tsai tai--just eat, eat. We have two fields up here, and we keep them a mile apart to prevent crossing. We have zucchini in one and pumpkins in the other. Or else you get pumpkinis. Or maybe zuckins."
The High Mowing warehouse is down the hill--metal shelves are filled with the beginnings of a million meals. Quinoa ... spelt ... a big bag of 'Tom Thumb' popcorn ... Italian flat-leaf parsley. But not just flat-leaf: double-curl, triple-curl. Two young women are hunched over a cutting board, examining onions. "We have a new favorite," one reports. " 'Rossa di Milano.' It really stood out. It beat 'Red Baron.' High, blocky shoulders."
Stearns is gushing on about his business--the fast growth, the network of small growers, the sterling germination rates--but I'm dizzy from the sheer fertility. "That bag over there has 30 pounds of cuke seed," he says. "That's 60 acres." Orders come in by the hour: "People who used to get five or ten packets are suddenly getting 20 or 30. The 10-by-10 garden is becoming 20-by-30. People are trying to put food up. I love high oil prices."
Lots of Stearns's seed goes a few miles north, to Craftsbury, where Pete Johnson of Pete's Greens has been pioneering year-round organic farming in northern New England. Johnson built a solar greenhouse as his senior project at Middlebury College, and then started thinking bigger. By now he's figured out how to move his greenhouses on tracks, so that he can cover and uncover different fields, and as a result grow greens 12 months of the year without any extra heat. And that lets him run his CSA (community-supported agriculture) operation, dubbed "Good Eats," year-round.
Say your family wants the spring share. You'd pay $748 for a weekly basket from February to June; in mid-April--a tough time of year for local farming--you'd be getting maybe a half-pound of mesclun, a bunch of parsley and some scallions, three pounds of carrots, some early radishes, two pounds of beets, two pounds of fingerling potatoes, a half-pound of oyster mushrooms, a loaf of local bread, a half-gallon of local cider, and a half-pound of local feta cheese. You can add a meat share if you like ($199 for monthly delivery): a five-pound chicken, some pasture-raised hamburger, a couple of locally farmed trout, and a pound of bacon cured without nitrates. By Johnson's calculation, it all comes to 20 percent less than buying the same stuff at a supermarket.
But we're used to thinking of local food as more expensive. "Compared with what?" Johnson asks, when a reporter from The Christian Science Monitor raises the price question. "Compared with the absolute junkiest food you can buy in a supermarket? It's too bad we think we can't afford the most important thing in the world, when we're so wealthy."
Other seed from High Mowing is dispatched a couple of miles in the other direction, to the headquarters of Vermont Soy, in Hardwick. They hand it out to four or five Vermont farmers, who in turn produce the beans that become tofu and soy milk in the small factory here. (Only half the space is used for tofu; the other half somehow turns cow's-milk whey into varnish for furniture.) The owner, Andrew Meyer, grew up on a local dairy farm, the kind of farm that's been going under for decades as the milk industry turns into a commodity business dominated by huge Western dairies. So he understands the need for a more regional food economy. "I think Vermont hasn't even tapped its capacity for growing food," Meyer says. "Someday the train will come back, and we'll be sending a refrigerated car once a week right to Chelsea Market. We've got two of the biggest markets in the world right nearby: Boston and New York."
But for now, forget about Boston and New York. A fair amount of the food from Hardwick is going to ... downtown Hardwick. To, for instance, a lovely new restaurant, Claire's, which in its first year of operation won a spot on Condé Nast Traveler's "Hot Tables" list. Fifty local investors put up a thousand bucks apiece to help get it started, and they're taking their money back out in the form of dinners.
And what dinners they are: Some weeks, local garlic, tomatoes, eggplant, and basil might combine for a Northeast Kingdom ratatouille; other nights an area apiary might pour its newest mead. Linda Ramsdell, a partner in Claire's and owner of the uniquely delightful Galaxy Bookshop across the street, often brings in cookbook authors for special dine-and-read evenings; needless to say, the regular live music is as local as the food.
And, needless to say, the evening often ends with a plate of cheese. One of the real foodie highlights of the Hardwick area is the newly opened cheese cave in Greensboro, where many of Vermont's best-loved artisanal products spend their final few months aging in the climate-controlled rooms.
Proprietors Andy and Mateo Kehler were already making award-winning cheeses at their Jasper Hill Farm, but they knew that many of their small-scale colleagues around the region had trouble storing and shipping their products. So when they were building a facility for their own stuff, they just kept building; it's now 22,000 square feet, with seven underground vaults: different climates for everything from blues to clothbound cheddars. It can store 2 million pounds at a time, from 39 degrees to 55 degrees; it's a pungent paradise.
But it's also part of an economy. It's a way to take fluid milk, which is currently a drag on the market--selling for less than it costs to produce--and turning it into something that goes for $20 a pound. That means jobs, and everyone on the Hardwick food scene is at least as serious about jobs as they are about flavor. This year, the Vermont Food Venture Center is moving into Hardwick's industrial park. It's a place where new "agrepreneurs," to use a term coined by Ben Hewitt, can figure out how to make that new cheese, that new salsa, that new tempeh, all on a scale that will also let them make money.
"We need businesses that can feed off each other," says Andrew Meyer. "The waste stream of one would be the feedstock of the next." And all of it would provide real resilience for a rural economy that would like to depend neither on the boom-and-bust of quarrying nor on the quaint unreality of providing scenic vistas for summer homes.
Over lunch at the headquarters of The Center for an Agricultural Economy, which sits next to Claire's and serves as the organizing hub for this food experiment, Tom Stearns points out that he's had 40 job applications in the past week at his seed farm. No wonder: Some of the slots pay $40,000 a year, they come with benefits, and there's all the produce you can carry away from the test gardens. "We still have to convince the local kids, though," he says. "They've all grown up believing that there's no future in farming. But now there is."
To read more about Hardwick, we recommend Yankee contributor Ben Hewitt's new book, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (Rodale, 2010).
From the Atlantic Ocean to New England's lakes and rivers, we've found terrific meals served up with stunning water vistas in every New England state.
More restaurants with water views: 10 Places to Dine by the Water
VIDEO: Annie's Windjammer Cruise
I can't help myself. In the summer they're everywhere I like to be: along the beach path from my parents' summer rental in Cotuit, Massachusetts ... surrounding my friend's Nantucket "shack" ... along the harbor walk from Charlestown to South Boston ... hugging the length of the Province Lands bike path on the tip of the Outer Cape ... and up in Camden, Maine, they separate Noma's stony beach from her grassy backyard. I'm talking about Rosa rugosa--a.k.a. the wild rose, or the beach rose--the backdrop to summer at the seashore. I love gathering the delicately scented petals--pale pink, fuchsia, and white--the way some folks collect seashells.
I can't leave the house in summer without a plastic bag. The walk to the beach takes me twice as long, because I pluck as I go. (I don't gather from private gardens or state beaches, and I avoid stripping bare the lovely barrier these low shrubs provide. I also like knowing the source of my petals, because I love to cook with them, and a pesticide-protected garden isn't going to help my end game.) As soon as I have a full bag I toss a few into the evening's salad and freeze the rest. When I've accumulated enough, I get busy making preserves--a treat anytime, but smack in the middle of a winter snowstorm, as you spread this fragrant jam on your morning toast, you may just feel the hint of a warm summer breeze.
For information on processing preserves, go to: uga.edu/nchfp
RECIPES:
The first onlookers? Locals mainly. Chatham, Massachusetts, residents who'd heard something from someone about something in the water. It was Labor Day weekend 2009, a beautiful late-summer day. They went to the sea, staking out a spot on the town's wide, sandy beaches in hopes of catching a glimpse, maybe something better. Then the larger crowds came--eager masses of out-of-towners who claimed their own perches--twelve hundred steady regulars keeping watch at Lighthouse Beach alone. They snapped pictures, then headed into town to snap up the T-shirts and other tchotchkes that had suddenly appeared in local gift shops.
The media? They arrived in force, too, rumbling satellite trucks and roving reporters--36 news outlets in all, including the BBC--who gave this thing the whiff of Brad and Angelina. They jammed the phone lines and tracked down key officials; one enterprising journalist even showed up at the home of the town's harbormaster at 10 one night for an impromptu interview. In this frenzied, all-too-familiar scenario--holiday weekend, prime sunny weather--everyone wanted a piece of the action.
Great white sharks can do that.
A little context. The file on unprovoked shark attacks is actually quite slim: worldwide, just 59 documented strikes in 2008. In United States waters there have been only 1,033 confirmed attacks since 1900, a scant six of them coming off the New England coast. In all, just 51 people have been killed by sharks in U.S. waters in the last 110 years, most recently a Florida kite surfer last February.
But that doesn't diminish how much of a force of nature sharks--whites in particular--really are. The big ones are a showcase of almost mythical heft (up to 5,000 pounds) and ferociousness (a single bite can extract up to 50 pounds of meat). Written accounts of attacks go back as early as the mid-fifth century b.c., to the time of Herodotus, the Greek historian who wrote about Persian sailors who'd been eaten by sea monsters a generation earlier, in 492 b.c. It's been 2,500 years of wonder and fear ever since.
"When I was kid growing up in Dorchester, [Massachusetts], we'd go swimming and everyone would always say, 'Be careful--remember what happened to Troy,'" says Captain Tom King, creator of NewEnglandSharks.com, a Web site brimming with historical information about the region's sharks and man's interaction with them. "Troy" was Joseph C. Troy Jr., a 16-year-old Dorchester kid whose death in July 1936 is the most recent shark-related fatality in New England. He was swimming with a family friend in the late afternoon, about 150 yards off Hollywood Beach in Mattapoisett, on Buzzards Bay, when an eight-foot white shark suddenly latched on to the boy's left leg, temporarily bringing him under. Just as quickly as it had appeared, however, the fish swam off, but not before striking a devastating blow. Troy's leg, according to one newspaper report, had been "stripped of flesh from ankle to thigh by the razor teeth of the sea tiger." He'd eventually made it to a hospital but had died several hours later as doctors were amputating the limb.
Before Troy, there was Joseph Blaney, a 52-year-old Swampscott, Massachusetts, fisherman who lost his life in July 1830 when a shark attacked his boat. As witnessed by nearby fishermen, Blaney's vessel was pulled under, reappearing moments later without its captain, who was never seen again. "The sensation created at Swampscut [sic] by this melancholy event ... is unprecedented," reported the Essex Register.
Other stories endure, too: like the 12 days of terror inflicted on New Jersey beachgoers in July 1916, when a great white killed four swimmers and injured a fifth. That real-life tale later inspired Nantucket writer Peter Benchley, whose story of carnage on a small East Coast island in turn inspired film director Steven Spielberg, who then inspired a whole generation of Jaws fans. And on the small Massachusetts island of Cuttyhunk, west of Martha's Vineyard, people still talk about the day in August 1954 when Charles Tilton and his son harpooned a great white and brought the giant dead fish to the docks for islanders to gawk at.
And on it goes: encounters and legends, awe and fear. The frontier may be gone, but sharks serve as a reminder that out at sea, an untamed wild of giants and death still looms. And so the masses descend on places like Chatham, for a glimpse of this mystery--to get a better look at something that's not entirely understood.
One man whose job it is to understand is Greg Skomal, Ph.D., a 48-year-old marine biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and head of its Shark Research Program, one of the few state-funded programs like it in the country. Skomal, who lives and works on Martha's Vineyard, matches a toothy, infectious smile with an inviting energy when the subject turns to fish. When the media need to know about sharks, he's their man.
He first heard of the great whites off Chatham on a Thursday, an early-September day that found him in a windowless hotel conference room in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he'd been waiting to lead a discussion on the state's shark regulations, when his cell phone buzzed. On the line was Bill Chaprales, a longtime Cape Cod fisherman who'd worked with Skomal since 1992 tagging sharks throughout Massachusetts waters. Skomal had barely said hello when his friend, who was on his boat in Cape Cod Bay hauling lobster traps, cut him off.
"Two white sharks!" Chaprales burst out. "Two white sharks off Monomoy Island. George [Breen, a spotter pilot] just saw them."
Skomal asked his friend to slow down. "When George lands," Chaprales yelled over the roar of his boat's engine, "just call him!" Then he hung up.
Skomal is no stranger to such calls. Part of his work involves sifting through the information that comes to him, and it's not that uncommon for a report of a great white to make its way to his Oak Bluffs office from excited charter-boat captains, kayakers, lifeguards, and town officials. Most of such sightings can be chalked up to mistaken identity: basking sharks mainly, whose size, color, and shape resemble a white's. But with Chaprales and Breen, Skomal knew he was dealing with solid information; both men have been instrumental in the success of his office's research, which has amassed data on more than 24,000 sharks.
This is a field shaped by what isn't known; data as basic as population estimates for many shark species are still a mystery. Little is known about where Atlantic whites winter, for example, or the routes they follow after they leave northern waters in mid-autumn. As of early September 2009, not a single Atlantic white had ever been successfully satellite-tagged--something Skomal, by his own admission, was more than a little obsessed to rectify. "I feel like Ahab," he'd sometimes say. "My great white whale is the great white shark."
Skomal knew he needed to get up in the air to verify the sharks himself, of course--preferably that afternoon. And if they were indeed great whites, he'd need to gather his tagging equipment, pull his team together, and get out on the water on the next good day.
Just before the meeting broke for lunch, Skomal spoke with Breen. "Yeah, they were whites," the pilot said. "They were right up in the shallows off Monomoy Beach, in the same area you guys have figured they've been."
For some time now, Skomal had been pushing the idea not only that a small number of Atlantic whites had made it as far north as New England but that these deep-water fish may have a reason to come close to shore. More than a decade of rapid expansion of the grey-seal population on Muskeget and Monomoy islands had introduced an easy and accessible food source, and with it, in recent years, a ratcheting-up of credible info from around Massachusetts: a small dead white washing up on Nantucket in 2008; two gutted seals found on a beach in Chatham in 2007; the sighting by a couple of Chatham beachgoers of a shark cutting a seal in half with a single bite in 2006. And, most revealing, a great white trapped in a saltwater pond and caught live on Naushon Island, off Woods Hole, in 2004.
By 2:30 Skomal was up in the air, crammed into a small single-engine plane, tucked behind Breen, the pilot, and clutching a point-and-shoot camera. Breen angled east, a cloudless sky overhead, the visibility nearly perfect as pilot and biologist approached Monomoy, south of Chatham. They stayed low, about 900 feet from the ground, so that Skomal could scan the water for shapes and shadows. In the distance he saw seals languishing on the rocks and in the dark-blue sea. Then, about a minute later, Skomal saw a long, wide body just a few feet under the water, its white underbelly apparent. Skomal yelled and leaned out the plane's small door as he snapped away with his camera. Breen then buzzed up to Chatham and turned around to take another pass. On this second run, Skomal caught sight of an even more incredible scene: a loose cluster of five whites patrolling the water, most of them 15 feet or so long, none more than a couple of hundred feet from land. "There was no doubt what they were," says Skomal. "I'm beaming. I'm slapping George on the back. I'm having the time of my life. What else could they be? It's New England. Few fish ever get that big."
No, they don't. In the ever-changing environment that is the North Atlantic, where the clashing of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current creates a swirling mix of temperatures even in summer, the hospitality extends to only a small migratory number--blues, sand tigers, porbeagles, makos, threshers, baskers, and dogfish, predominantly--of the more than 450 species of sharks that rule the world's oceans.
But that doesn't diminish the importance of learning about these fish. And the most crucial research tool a marine biologist like Greg Skomal has at his disposal is the pop-up satellite tag, a $3,500 piece of technology that can help scientists piece together the story of a particular shark and its migratory habits over a period of several months. But its utilization requires a confluence of perfection.
The device itself isn't all that impressive looking. The researcher sticks the tag--about six inches long, with a mushroomed head and a short antenna--at the back of the dorsal fin with a small dart. Then a miniature computer inside the tag harvests three main pieces of information: light levels, water temperatures, and ocean depths. At a preprogrammed time, the tag sends out a burst of electricity, which quickly corrodes the aluminum pin that keeps it tethered to the dart. When it's released, the tag floats to the water's surface and begins winging packets of info to the nearest satellite, which then transmits them back to computers on earth to be interpreted and analyzed.
But to collect all that information, there can't be any hiccups. Not only does a shark have to be close to shore; it has to be within three feet of the water's surface for the researcher to even have a chance of tagging it-- a precision-driven process that involves the deft touch of an experienced harpooner standing at the end of a narrow, shaky pulpit extending 20 feet out from the boat's bow. Get all that right, and things can still get screwed up by a faulty tag, which is what happened to Skomal in 2004 when one device popped off the Naushon shark just a few days after he'd attached it. "I was heartbroken," recalls Skomal. "I went from the highest highs in life to the lowest lows."
Then there's the weather. If it's too windy or too cloudy, plane spotters can't find sharks. Friday, for example--the day after Breen's initial spotting--had been cut short after thick clouds rolled in over the Cape. Saturday, however, proved perfect. Deep-blue skies, limited wind, calm water; by 8 a.m. Skomal and his small crew--his assistant John Chisholm and Bill Chaprales and his son Nick--were circling the Chatham waters in Chaprales's boat, guided by spotter pilots George Breen and Wayne Davis, a few hundred feet off Monomoy Beach.
The sharks were there, too, easy enough to locate, and three times Nick motored the boat up to a fish only to find that it was too deep to be tagged. Finally, at a little past 8:30, the crew rolled up on a small shark, maybe eight feet long, swimming in the shallows. With Skomal standing just behind him, Chaprales staked out his position at the end of the pulpit and waited. The 12-foot aluminum pole dangled from his right hand over the water, positioned not for throwing but for dropping onto the unsuspecting shark. After a few tense moments, he let it go, the small dart landing perfectly on the fish. "Yeah!" he yelled. Skomal and the others whooped it up, all of them taken aback by the sheer ease of it all. "We'd been out there an hour," Skomal says. "I'd been waiting 30 years for this, but then ..." He pauses and smiles: "... Greed kicks in. We're here. Let's not screw around. Let's get more."
Over the next week, in between bouts of stormy weather, the team tagged four more of the estimated 12 sharks that had come near Chatham. Reporters jumped on the news. All those tourists arrived. And the whole Chatham frenzy began its two-week run. "There were people coming down to the beach thinking literally that they could pet a shark," says Chatham's harbormaster, Stuart Smith. "They figured there were that many of them. 'I'm here to see sharks. Where are they?'"
"How am I supposed to know?" Smith would tell them. He'd point to the water, where they could see Skomal and his crew in the distance searching for the fish. "There," he'd say. "They're somewhere out there."
They are out there. But aside from people like Skomal and those who still manage to carve out a living catching fish, the chance to see a shark, to get close to the mystery, is rare. In part, that explains what happened in Chatham. It also explains the late-July circus that happens every year in downtown Oak Bluffs: the Boston Big Game Fishing Club's "Monster Shark Tournament," the longest-running such event in New England and perhaps the largest of its kind in the world. It's a unique, if controversial, setting, where man and shark aren't walled off by aquarium glass or a movie screen. Nowhere do the fascination with and fear of these fish converge as they do here.
It's July 2009, and this year, 130 captains have forked over the $1,500 entry fee and steamed their boats--everything from swanky 80-foot luxury crafts from Florida to smaller 30-footers from nearby Plymouth and Nantucket--here for a chance to win some cash and perhaps get a shot at a record or two. Right now, though, none of those boats is in sight. They're all en route, returning after a full day of trolling and chumming in faraway fishing hotspots with names like "the Fingers," "the Dump," and "the Banana."
And so we wait, a few thousand eager spectators, congregating at the southwest side of the harbor in anticipation of the first boat and a look at the tournament's first shark. Teenage boys dangle their legs over the water on the sea wall, while their bikini-clad girlfriends stretch out next to them. Slightly inebriated, swaying to the music blaring from nearby speakers, an older crowd in dinghies mingles over in the harbor. The largest contingent stand and sweat under the beating sun around a metal fence marking off the weigh station.
That's where I am when a bowling ball of man standing next to me pointedly asks, "You wanna see what a shark can do?"
And really, that's the question we're all asking: What can a shark do? What's it capable of doing? By seeing a real one, maybe we'll get a few answers. This guy, though, already has a good idea, and he's more than eager to show me. With a deep, loud laugh he places his hand on my left shoulder and pulls up his right pant leg, revealing a long scar that wraps around his shin. It's a lasting imprint from a nasty shark bite he received a couple of years ago while trying to haul in a fish on a small boat somewhere between Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. "One hundred and seventy stitches," he says nonchalantly. "Lost a lot of blood." He laughs. "No more shark fishing."
But he's not ready to give up at least seeing what others have battled for, and for that he can thank Steve James. James, whose background is in marketing and industrial design, is the man behind the tournament. He's a one-man show, a powerful energy force who demands a lot from his volunteers and from the fishing captains who have an eye on the prizes, which total well into six figures in cash and equipment. There are strict weight limits, and boats are allowed to place only three species: mako, porbeagle, and thresher. It's why at the end of the weekend the contestants will have killed only 13 sharks.
The tournament goes back to the mid-1980s, when the Boston Big Game Fishing Club, the outfit that oversees the event, was created by a small collection of Boston athletes and sports personalities--Bobby Orr, John Havlicek, and Curt Gowdy among them. But it was a sleepy little event, one that for the first decade of its existence couldn't compare with the likes of the more-celebrated shark hunts in places like Montauk and Florida. By the mid-1990s Orr and the rest of the gang had relinquished their connection to Boston Big Game, and the tournament was running on fumes.
Steve James had taken second prize in 1996 when he'd hauled in a 454-pound blue shark. Sensing that the competition needed a more enterprising mind behind it, he approached the club's owner about taking it over. In 1998, James organized and ran his first Monster Shark Tournament. The event grew quickly. A little press coverage didn't hurt, either, and in 2001, when a 1,221-pound mako was caught off Chatham, the Boston Big Game brand made national headlines. ESPN signed on to broadcast the tournament, and by 2005, with the economy still roaring, James's event was regularly attracting more than 200 boats a year and pumping up the local economy to boot, by funneling dollars into the Wesley Hotel, bars like The Lampost, and eateries like Nancy's, where the jaws from that record-setting mako now hang.
But here on this shark-charged island, where Jaws-themed souvenirs always sell, James--who is unafraid to make statements like "Steve James defined big game fishing in New England"--is both revered and reviled. "I won't even go downtown when it's going on," says one longtime shop owner. "It's not a Vineyard event. I don't like my home being known for this. I hope it stops altogether."
She's not alone. In 2007, voting on a nonbinding ballot question that asked whether the community should continue to allow public property to be used for events like the shark tournament, Oak Bluffs Town Meeting attendees almost ended it right there. A year later, the board of selectmen voted 3 to 2 to deny one-day liquor licenses to any shark tournament, putting an end to James's pre-event banquet at a local park. Then in 2008 the Humane Society of the United States flew in Wendy Benchley, widow of Jaws author Peter Benchley, to speak out against the tournament and the detriment to the world's shark populations that it posed. But James has been defiant. If anything, the controversy and the attacks have fueled him. In the press, he blasted Benchley as a contradiction.
"She's inherited the fortune of the person most responsible for tainting the public perception of what sharks are about," he said. "You couldn't find anybody more ill-prepared to discuss this topic." And in the wake of the liquor-license ban, he told reporters he had no plans to shut things down. "I will continue to hold this event until I'm 70 years old," he said. "I might start holding three of these tournaments each summer. Who's going to stop me?"
The weather, for one thing. On this weekend, James's tournament has been cut short by a nasty storm that has pretty much wiped out the first day of fishing. Two nights ago winds and swells blasted boats, blowing out the windows on one 45-footer. The few that did try to fish the next morning fared even worse. One 29-footer went under about five miles south of the island--which only amplifies the crowd's excitement and the stakes for today's weigh-in, an all-or-nothing affair that can be won by a single catch. And James, who patrols the weigh-station area with a microphone, is both lobbyist and entertainer, pushing the importance of tournaments like his, where biologists stand ready to dissect the hauled catches for future research, all while the Jaws theme music blares from a pair of large speakers.
Around 3 p.m., the first boat steams in to the crowd's cheers as it backs up to a pair of posts where its catch, a 299-pound thresher, is winched high in the air. The bloody stump of a fake hand hangs from the side of the boat. "I hope it's got a fat belly," yells one unimpressed spectator. As the fish is laid out and later chopped up into beefy steaks, James peppers the onlookers with more questions. "Who knows what kind of fish this is?" he asks. "Thresher!" they respond enthusiastically.
And on it goes. A 259-pound mako and a 320-pound thresher follow. The winner is a 361-pound porbeagle, a thick-bodied deepwater fish of the same family as the mako and great white. The contented (and richer by $25,000) captain of the boat, the Karen Jean II out of Marshfield, Massachusetts, sips from a can of Budweiser as James announces its weight and length ("Seven feet!").
When it's over and the evening takes shape, music blasts from several docked boats as crews drink and dance. On land, the spectacle of the day's catch is on full display, as the head of one shark sits atop a cooler for passers-by to admire. Two high-school girls are particularly engrossed. "Oh, my gosh," says one, a pretty blonde in pink pants and a multicolored top. "I gotta take a picture of this!" She leans in close with her camera phone, putting herself just a few inches from the severed head. She snaps and squeals in delight at her find. In a matter of seconds it's winged out into the ether, to her sister, who's horrified by sharks. "But she really wanted to be here!"
On an island that's still a year-round home to a number of longtime fishing families whose roots here reach back generations, when it comes to sharks there's one fisherman in particular whose name pops up again and again: Stanley Larsen. In the late 1950s his father and uncles were among the first longliners in Atlantic waters, ushering in a new era in a tuna and swordfishing industry still dominated by harpooners. Larsen grew up on the Vineyard and began fishing as a boy, going out with his dad's crew on trips that took them 150 miles out, lasting several weeks at a time, "till the boat was filled up."
Today Larsens live all over the Vineyard--many, including Stanley, in Menemsha, an active fishing village on the island's southwest side, marked by fabulous water views and steep home prices, even by Vineyard standards. It's on Menemsha that Steven Spielberg and his crew descended for part of the filming of Jaws in 1974, building Quint's shack down at the marina and recruiting local talent as extras and support personnel. Not far from the mayhem of Spielberg's project--the unanticipated five months of filming, the technical difficulties, the constant budgeting issues that pushed islanders to refer to the movie as Flaws--Stanley Larsen owns and operates the Menemsha Fish Market on Dutcher Dock.
On a warm mid-November day I visit Larsen at his store. A steel-gray sky hangs overhead, high winds whip around the island, and save for one fisherman who's shelling scallops, the marina is still. Larsen, a fast talker with a medium build and busy eyes, doesn't fish anymore. Stiffer regulations and steeper expenses pushed him out of the business. But for a time in the 1980s he was one of the few guys to hunt sharks exclusively. He'd come to it by default: The large swordfish stocks his father and uncles had known had been almost wiped out. He'd made up for it with shark fins, a controversial delicacy in demand in Asia for shark-fin soup. The practice of finning--it essentially entails cutting off just a small section of the shark and dumping the rest of the fish--was made illegal in U.S. waters in 2000, but for a period Larsen was fetching $20 a pound.
It's dangerous work. When a bull shark latched onto his cousin's leg, Larsen had to pry open the fish's mouth with crowbars. Another time, just seconds after his crew had hauled in a 150-pound mako, the fish started thrashing on the deck, pushing the crew toward the bow before flopping its way down the staircase toward the engine room. "I grabbed it by the tail and just started holding it," Larsen recalls. "Another guy grabbed a rope and wrapped it around the tail, and we just pulled it back up. It was pure adrenaline that got that shark back on the boat."
But the story he tells most often is the one he's advertised the most. Larsen's main business is fish, but he's carved out some shelf space for items like T-shirts that say Amity (the island's name in Jaws) and colorful wooden signs in the shape of a great white. But the stopper is a large faded print of Larsen and his crew with a great white, taken in 1983--and, of course, there are the jaws from that fish.
Larsen was combing the waters for swordfish on his big 52-foot shrimper southeast of Georges Bank. He'd harpooned his first fish when the white showed up, going underwater to take a bite of the catch before coming back up. So it went for three days; nearly the entire catch was ruined. Finally, Larsen went for the shark himself. He circled the area where he'd anchored. Around and around he went for two hours, hoping the white would pop up again. When it did, Larsen went after it.
"I harpooned him, but as soon as I did, he swung right around and swam toward the boat, coming toward it like he was going to attack it," Larsen says. By his own estimate, the shark ran about 20 feet in length and weighed some 3,000 pounds. "Just before he got to the boat, he went straight down." The shark was mortally wounded; the fight was over. Larsen's crew eventually got the great white onto the boat's deck, where they cut out the jaws and discarded the body.
Thanks to Larsen's pilot, word of the encounter made it back to the island before the crew did. "The docks were lined with people," Larsen says, "maybe a thousand of them. They thought we had the shark on the boat." Larsen's picture made it into the local paper, and the jaws became the stuff of legend around the marina. Even today, shark tournament entrants come into his shop and ask his advice. "I tell them to take a big old hunk of farmed salmon and put it at the end of the line," he says.
It's pushing late morning now, and Larsen has other business to attend to. A French couple struggles with their English to order a few lobsters from the tanks that line the front of his shop. Before I leave, I ask Larsen if I can take a picture of him with his shark jaws. We head outside, where he stands right in front of the shop's door. "Make sure you get my sign in the photograph," he says, raising the jaws triumphantly.
For now at least, the great white isn't the perceived monster it once was. With depleted stocks, it's now officially endangered, and the public's reverence for the fish has spiked dramatically in recent decades. Just 50 years after Charles Tilton and his son received a hero's welcome for their harpooning of that shark off Cuttyhunk, in September 2004 Greg Skomal found himself a target of Cape Cod residents who were concerned about the safety of a 14-foot female great white trapped in a saltwater pond on Naushon Island. "I was getting threats if I didn't save the shark," Skomal says.
But does that reverence have its limits? Where will public sentiment fall if what happened in Chatham in September 2009 occurs regularly? And what if the arrival of the whites comes in the middle of the season, not at the end of it? Will fear outweigh wonder?
All pertinent questions, because it's possible that what happened in Chatham is a harbinger of things to come. Skomal believes that. In fact, he's of a mind that along with the southern tip of Seal Island in South Africa and certain areas of the California coast, Massachusetts waters, with their ever-expanding population of seals, could become another shark hot spot.
That of course could be a boon to marine biologists like Skomal, who in mid-January received the first packets of info from a pair of great-white tags that popped up less than 50 miles off the Jacksonville, Florida, coast. But it could also be a threat to a jittery tourist industry, so dependent on human dominance of the waters. Recreation and nature may be headed for a collision.
"White sharks have been predominantly offshore, but with their incursion into shallow waters that may be changing," cautions Skomal. "It could play out similarly to other hotspots. Predictable number of seals, predictable number of white sharks--potential human safety consideration. I can't tell you how that's going to play out. We know off the coast of California there are white-shark attacks on human beings. That happens. Not in big numbers. But all it takes is one."
Then, just maybe, another kind of feeding frenzy might begin. Great white sharks can do that.
For more information on shark species, check out The Shark Handbook by Greg Skomal (Cider Mill Press, 2008) or visit: NewEnglandSharks.com
My plan on the first day of August 1989 was to paddle a fiberglass kayak some 325 miles northeastward along the Maine coast to Machias, camping on islands along the way, living a sort of Robinson Crusoe existence for a month.
The problem: Prior to that moment, I'd never actually paddled a loaded kayak, never paddled through breaking surf, never paddled in fog.
Some of the biggest adventures are born of small ideas. The small idea behind this journey--to live really cheaply for a month--involved more of a push than a pull. The agreement with my landlord was that I'd relinquish the house on Peaks Island for all of August. I was reasonably young, had little money and fewer obligations, and I'd heard about the recently created Maine Island Trail, a network of three dozen or so islands no more than a day's paddle apart, where anyone could camp for free. Why not paddle the whole thing?
So I bought a used kayak and paddled around Peaks twice to gain expertise; then a friend taught me to identify edible island plants. Most of them, as I recall, tasted like iodine. Immediately afterward, I bought a boatload, quite literally, of pasta. Over the course of the next month I discovered that rotini boiled in seawater with freshly gathered mussels and tossed with a little wild mustard and a lot of black pepper was actually pretty good.
My route to the first night's campsite was neither the most efficient nor the most direct. At least, I don't believe it was; I'm not sure exactly how I got there. But I landed some hours later on a foggy gravel beach at an island a few miles offshore, then immediately dug out a book I'd recently bought (and hadn't read) on kayak navigation. I began what would be the first of many hands-on lessons that month.
The fledgling Maine Island Trail itself, as it happened, was also born of a simple idea that quickly grew more sophisticated. In 1987, the nonprofit Island Institute undertook a survey of Maine's state-owned islands with an eye toward their potential for recreation. There were about 1,300 of them in all--many just uninteresting bits of surf-washed ledge. "But in the course of the survey we came across 30-odd that had tremendous recreational potential," recalls Dave Getchell Sr., then an editor with the institute's Island Journal. "And it occurred to me that if we set up a water trail instead of a land trail, people could cruise along the coast and have a place to stay at night."
Getchell wrote an article outlining the idea of a water trail. He was soon awash in enthusiastic responses. The following year the Maine Island Trail Association was established as a program of the Island Institute.
The trail would be open to both paddlers and motorboaters--anyone adept at pulling up on a rocky shore or mooring in tricky conditions. The idea was embraced not only by these recreational boaters--all of whom seemed to have an inordinate love of islands--but also, perhaps surprisingly, by individuals who owned private islands. Many were happy to open their properties to camping, in exchange for which they'd get free stewardship services; volunteers would keep an eye on the islands through the summer, clean up trash, and keep pathways clear.
So a handful of private islands were added to the public islands in the network. The first guidebook--a few dozen photocopied pages stuck in a looseleaf notebook--served as both passport and guide and was mailed to the first round of members. I still have my well-used copy.
My month-long journey involved not only honing camping and kayaking skills but getting an advanced education about the Maine coast as well. Among my first lessons: The Maine coast wasn't the wilderness I'd thought it was. No matter how remote an island, come dawn I'd be awakened by the throaty growl of a lobster boat hauling traps, sometimes just a few dozen yards from my tent. Also, I learned that lobstermen like country music, played loud--in particular, Ricky Skaggs. Some mornings, awakening from a deep sleep, I was convinced I'd accidentally pitched my tent at a Midwestern truck stop. I grew to like the social aspect of the trip. The lobstermen were cordial if not garrulous, happy to exchange waves as I sipped my morning tea on a rock. (I learned later that they privately refer to kayaks as "speed bumps.") What's more, I was rarely more than a couple of hours from a lively harbor, and so every few days I'd veer landward for a lobster roll and a cold beer, then fill up a slew of empty quart bottles with fresh water. (Only one island on the trail had drinkable water.) Then after lunch, I'd set off back out into the archipelago as the lowering sun turned the world around me into a vast Eric Hopkins painting.
Afternoons on the islands were my favorite times; most of the working boats had returned to their home harbors, and peace and quiet had settled offshore. Often a woolly cloak of gray fog would roll in, making an island two miles out feel instantly like 200 miles away. Evenings were monkish and solitary. Sea kayaking was still pretty much in its infancy two decades ago--during the entire month of August, I crossed paths with only three other kayakers--and I spent many nights engaged in a favorite pastime: lying in the grass, looking at the stars, and thinking how stupid people were not to all be camping on Maine's islands.
Well, it turned out people weren't all that stupid. Many did start to come out to the islands in subsequent years, and in droves, causing some worries and aggravation. Sea kayaking took off as a sport nationally in the early 1990s, and suddenly every third car on the Maine Turnpike looked like a mobile missile launcher. The Maine Island Trail Association--which had become an independent nonprofit after a split from the Island Institute--took the brunt of the blame, with some lovers of the coast blaming the group for promoting the islands and encouraging overuse.
"Over time there's been a lot of hand wringing, in part because people thought there was a correlation" between the national surge in sea kayaking and MITA's founding, says Doug Welch, MITA's current executive director. He notes that island overuse is a legitimate concern, but adds that the group's goal has always been to get ahead of the curve, not only by channeling visitors to islands that could best handle recreational traffic, but also by instilling a strong conservation ethic among visitors.
Membership in the organization has held pretty steady in recent years: about 3,600 dues-paying members. And although, according to Welch, day use is up, particularly in the more populated areas such as Casco Bay, island camping seems to be on the decline--again mirroring a national trend, this time away from backcountry camping.
Spreading a low-impact ethic, Welch says, is among MITA's chief accomplishments over the past 20 years. MITA is now really more of a conservation group with a recreational element, rather than the other way around. Most of the islands were once littered with plastic debris that had washed ashore and had been blown into the interior by winter winds. From the beginning, MITA has sent out volunteers in empty skiffs, which return hours later mounded with polystyrene rope and plastic bottles. Although new harvests of plastic arrive on the tides every day, the islands are cleaner now than they have been in decades.
"The leave-no-trace ethic has sunk in for the average visitor," Welch says. "It's the 'broken window' theory: If you come upon a place that's trashed, you won't think twice about littering. But if you come upon a place that's totally pristine, it takes a pretty self-centered person to leave something behind."
The Maine Island Trail is today recognized as the first of the modern water trails--although water routes have, of course, existed on this continent since shortly after the Bering land bridge was crossed--and dozens of others have cropped up around the nation since. But MITA remains a singular organization. Welch says that people aspiring to launch water trails in their own regions often ask to see the contracts spelling out terms between private-island owners and the group. But there isn't one: "We've managed to do this all along without anything more than a handshake. Other trails find it hard to believe that there's no paperwork or legal agreement. It's uniquely Maine, and I can't see it working in other states."
Late last summer I set out for a few days of paddling along the eastern end of the trail, heading out from near Machias to Halifax Island, the last island I'd camped on in 1989. The region is largely overlooked by paddlers: It's too far from any town, too foggy, too swept by intimidating tides.
Halifax was as lovely as I remembered it: a mostly treeless knob of about 60 acres, with high, rocky bluffs on the southwest corner. It had been hammered a couple of weeks earlier by waves from Hurricane Bill passing miles offshore: the grasses flattened, and bright-red rose hips clinging to bushes turned brown from saltwater. Halifax was privately owned when I camped here two decades ago. It's now owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has posted it with signs banning access to the delicate bogs of the interior, where I'd once filled empty water bottles with blueberries and raspberries. (Camping on Halifax requires both MITA membership and prior permission from the USFWS.) Other than that, the place hasn't changed.
The context has altered somewhat, though. Halifax is no longer the last island in the network, which now spans the whole of Maine's coastline. In 2009, Smuttynose, on the New Hampshire border, was added to the trail, and islands well into Canada in Passamaquoddy Bay form a side trip. (The unforgiving cliffs of the Bold Coast, east of Machias, limit through-paddling to all but the most experienced sea kayakers.) Also joining the network this year or next will be a cluster of islands in Cobscook Bay on Maine's easternmost edge, home to powerful tides--a challenging, hazardous destination for boaters.
Technology has also intruded. In 1989, I had no GPS, no cell phone, no iPod--no electronics save for a small weather radio. But last year, my dry box was crammed: Out on Halifax Island I read that day's New York Times on a Kindle, checked e-mail, even made a call to Ireland. Convenient, but somehow it felt wrong and unclean. Technology has made the islands smaller and less remote, as if the world has suddenly constricted around them. I vowed to leave anything with a battery behind next time.
That afternoon I stowed away my electronics in the beached kayak, then set off to spend a few hours poking around, scrambling up ledges, marveling at smooth granite cobbles, basking in the lambent light of the Maine coast. I found a dead lobster, prehistorically large and with claws as big and powerful as a forklift, and I gathered some cranberries and scraggly blueberries from bogs and bushes edging the shore. For a moment, it seemed that 20 years had been instantly erased.
"There hasn't been much change," noted Dave Getchell, when I asked him what he thought had changed over the past two decades. "And that's good news. The islands I've seen have been very much the way they always were."
I'm looking forward to filing a similar report 20 years hence.
READ MORE: More kayaking articles
My cousin George Odell moved to Jamaica in 1973 to teach math and came home four years later with his bride, Hazel, a tiny girl with a big smile, skin the color of coffee beans, and a melodic laugh. Her Jamaican accent was hard to decode--but her food wasn't.
Since Hazel's arrival, our family has been treated to many Jamaican specialties without names. They're just "Hazel's food," always delicious, always healthful. On this day in July, Hazel comes home from the market, her string bag full of coconut milk, ginger, limes, and cassava. She's preparing to cook some of her favorite dishes.
George and Hazel live in Newburyport, Massachusetts, near the sea, which feels right to both of them. George grew up by the water in Manchester, Massachusetts, and Hazel grew up in the Jamaican mountain town of Richmond, in St. Mary Parish. Hazel's father, a contractor and carpenter, kept a large garden and a few chickens, and the family netted fish right from the sea. "Everything was always fresh," she recalls. "We'd butcher the chicken just before we cooked it; we'd bring the fish right in from the ocean and cook it. The vegetables came out of the garden all year round. We'd just get it and eat it. Never refrigerate."
Hazel talks about the many fruits of Jamaica the way someone might talk about the stars in the sky: "Banana, papaya, naseberry, guava, guinep, star apple, mango ..." She recites them all, on and on, and in the garden, or "cultivation," as it was called there, were tomatoes, peas, beans, and everything else under the sun--even cacao and coffee. "Like paradise," George says in fond recollection.
Inside their small house in Newburyport, they've re-created the kitchen of Hazel's youth, where her mother cooked constantly for her six brothers and sisters. Hazel learned to cook from her mother; George learned to cook from Hazel. Hazel and George have been vegetarians most of their married life. Over the years they've learned where they can get things like cassava and yams and callaloo, the staples of Hazel's early life. On our July visit, they're cooking chicken for us, so we can see how it's done, but for themselves, they use tofu or a soy-based meat substitute in recipes calling for chicken or fish. The flavor is much the same. When the burners are on, the spicy air of Jamaica drifts down Neptune Street, even in the dead of winter.
But it's summer now. Working at one counter, George is juicing limes and grating ginger to make his signature ginger beer, a recipe he's perfected over the years. Hazel doesn't like ginger beer. "That's his," she says. "But, mon, this guy can cook!" At another counter, Hazel is cutting up chicken legs with a huge knife. She hasn't forgotten the knack of cutting through the bone: one blow and it's done. She flashes her radiant smile. "This is how we did it," she says. And then she laughs, that happy sound of Jamaica.
For more tropical recipes, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/10Things
Wild or cultivated, blueberries hold a seasonal joy all their own. Whether you pick them yourself or buy them from a local farm stand, fresh blueberries are a rite of summer in New England.
For a special treat, look for wild, or lowbush, berries from Maine. Maine produces 98 percent of the U.S. lowbush crop. And do indulge -- these local favorites are proving to be an excellent source of phenolic compounds and other antioxidants, which are showing some success in preventing cardiovascular diseases and some cancers.
The best way to enjoy blueberries' sweet, tart flavor, of course, is right out of your hand. But when you tire of purple fingers and find yourself with more than you can eat in one day, this recipe will bring the essence of summer into your kitchen.
Still have plenty of leftovers? Blueberries freeze well. Simply spread them on a baking sheet in a single layer and freeze. Once frozen, pop them into a plastic bag. Now you can hold summer any day of the year (although we're willing to bet they won't make it too far past Labor Day weekend).
VIDEO: Maine's Blueberry Barrens
READ MORE: Raking Maine's Blueberry Barrens Pick blueberries in Maine More blueberry recipes
RECIPE
We romanticize lighthouses, but what makes them quintessential New England icons is their simple, sturdy practicality. They weren't built to be the stuff of tourist brochures, postcards, and collectibles. They were built to mark the rocky shore for ships.
At the end of the road on the tiny burr of the prickly Maine coast where my relatives live is a lighthouse. It's square and squat and has long been automated, augmented by an ugly modern beacon on a concrete pylon just offshore.
But its light still sweeps the bay, and its lonely foghorn sounds a plaintive, hypnotic wail. Once, while we were walking down the long road to our stubby little lighthouse, my sister and I pondered what made it so special to us. She said it was like knowing that someone's always waiting up for you, no matter when you come home. Which, of course, is what it's there for.
I confess that I, like marketers and souvenir-shop owners, have profited from the allure of the New England lighthouse. A daily journalist who only halfheartedly accepted an assignment from a publisher to write a book about the lights, I quickly found myself sucked in by stories vastly more dramatic than the ones I was covering in my day-to-day job: stories of terror and tragedy and hardship, heroism and mystery and death.
When it came time to take an author photo for the book's jacket, however, I chose the humblest of backdrops: I walked to the end of our road in Maine and posed beside our lighthouse. What follows is a tour of some of the most stunning, most romantic, most unusual, even some of the most haunted beacons found anywhere in the world.
MOST SCENIC VIEW At Gay Head Light, on the western end of Martha's Vineyard, visitors are allowed into the red-brick lantern tower, where they can watch the two lights rotate--and take in extraordinary sunsets over the Aquinnah Cliffs and surf below.
MOST PAINTERLY Maine's Cape Elizabeth and Portland Head lights were immortalized by the artist Edward Hopper, and Ten Pound Island Light, off Cape Ann, by both Fitz Henry Lane and Winslow Homer.
For me, though, the region's quintessential lighthouse is Cape Cod's Nobska Point Light--especially when thousands of runners sweep past it during summer's annual Falmouth Road Race (August 9 this year). Portland Head also serves as the picturesque finish for a road race: the annual Beach to Beacon (August 1 this year), founded by Olympian and local resident Joan Benoit Samuelson.
In an ironic reversal of artistic tradition, Hopper's depiction of Maine's Monhegan Island Light was used as a guide to rebuild the assistant keeper's cottage, which now houses the Monhegan Museum's art gallery--perhaps the only museum that not only exhibits works of art but was inspired by one.
KID-FRIENDLY ADVENTURE What kid wouldn't like tramping up all 69 winding steps to the lantern room at the top of Highland Light in North Truro, 183 feet above the sea off Cape Cod? And checking out the shipwreck room in the neighboring Highland House museum?
RUSTIC OVERNIGHT Provincetown's Race Point Light is separated from the nearest paved road by two and a half miles of sand dunes--so distant that it's a Race Point lighthouse keeper who's credited with inventing the dune buggy. Want to sleep in the keeper's house? The lantern-light charm has been replaced by solar and wind power, but you'll still get a sense of the seclusion in which early keepers lived.
LUXURY ACCOMMODATIONS After being deactivated in 1914, Bass River Light in West Dennis, Massachusetts, was converted by a Boston mogul into a summer home. Now it's a Cape Cod hotel called The Lighthouse Inn, with a private beach, pool, tennis courts, restaurant, ocean views, and working fireplaces--and the only private-family-maintained working lighthouse beacon in the country. Three of the guestrooms are in the original keeper's house.
Want to own your own keeper's house? There's one for sale on Maine's Isle au Haut. And for a deluxe dinner atop a lighthouse, check out Newburyport's Rear Range Light.
DESIGNER LIGHTS Some lighthouses carry unexpected architectural pedigrees. Alexander Parris, who designed Boston's Quincy Market, also designed at least seven lighthouses in Maine, including Mount Desert Rock and Monhegan Island. Castle Hill Light in Newport, Rhode Island, is attributed to H. H. Richardson, famous for Trinity Church in Boston.
The offshore Cleveland East Ledge Light in Buzzards Bay is New England's only Art Moderne lighthouse, and the last built here (1943). But the oddest? South Portland, Maine's 13-foot-tall Breakwater ("Bug") Light is modeled on the fourth-century b.c. Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, complete with fluted columns.
OFF THE BEATEN PATH Lighthouses were of little use for navigation unless a ship could tell one from another. To set them apart, some were made to blink, others had red lights instead of white, and some had two beams instead of one. There was also one triple light: the original Nauset Light, also called Three Sisters, on Cape Cod. These three identical shingled lighthouses were ultimately deactivated--and moved away. Where are they now? In the last place you'd expect: tucked into a clearing in the Eastham woods, along a marked path called Cable Road, about a third of a mile from the water.
FEEL THE CHILL The keepers of York, Maine's Boon Island Light often saw the ghost of a sad-faced young woman in white, said to have been either the mistress of the captain of the Nottingham Galley, wrecked in 1710, or the widow of a keeper who died at the lighthouse.
Keepers assigned to Sankaty Head Light on Nantucket's east coast reported strange events, too, including pots and pans that flew around the kitchen. At Minot's Ledge Light, located on the storm- and shipwreck-prone Cohasset Rocks of Massachusetts Bay, off Scituate, keepers saw doors open and close by themselves, and heard a tapping on the walls: a signal system once used by Joseph Antoine and Joseph Wilson, assistant keepers killed when the first lighthouse, a spider-like cast-iron tower on piles, was demolished in a storm in 1851. (It was replaced by a sturdy granite-block tower, which took five years to build atop the submerged ledge, but has endured since 1860. )
Keepers at New London Ledge Light in Connecticut swore that the steel door of the tower, which was bolted from the inside, used to open by itself. That's the door from which keeper John "Ernie" Randolph, in 1936, is said to have jumped to his death after cutting his own throat when he learned his wife had run off with a Block Island ferry captain.
But the most haunted? Seguin Island Light, off the coast of Georgetown and Popham in Maine. In the mid-1800s, one keeper's wife couldn't stand living at this desolate station. To appease her, he arranged to buy a player piano. When it arrived, however, there was only one piece of music, and she played it over and over for hours at a time. Driven mad, the keeper strangled his wife and took an axe to the piano. Now witnesses say that at night they can hear a phantom piano playing from the lighthouse.
SAILORS' SALVATION Some of the villagers of old Provincetown--then called Helltown--would have preferred that no lighthouses had been built there. They made their living salvaging the many shipwrecks, even using false lights on nights with no moon to lure ships to their doom. Since 1872, though, Wood End Light, the third lighthouse built here--with a distinctive 38-foot square brick tower, foghorn, and, perhaps appropriate to its history, a beacon that flashes not white, but red--has guided mariners safely around Provincetown's southernmost spit of land toward Long Point and the harbor entrance.
IN LONGFELLOW'S TRACKS Henry Wadsworth Longfellow took what he called his weekly "walking constitutionals" to Maine's Portland Head Light, and it was at this favorite spot that he was inspired to write the foremost lighthouse poem in American literature, called (of course) "The Lighthouse," published in 1850:
And as the evening darkens, lo! how bright, Through the deep purple of the twilight air, Beams forth the sudden radiance of its light, With strange, unearthly splendor in the glare!
And the great ships sail outward and return Bending and bowing o'er the billowy swells, And ever joyful, as they see it burn, They wave their silent welcomes and farewells.
HOLLYWOOD LIGHTS The Graves Light in Massachusetts Bay, off the coast of Winthrop, served as one location for David O. Selznick's 1948 film Portrait of Jennie. Edgartown Light on Martha's Vineyard was featured in 1975's Jaws, and Nantucket's Brant Point Light in the 1996 film To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday. But when Hollywood wanted the archetypal lighthouse to punctuate Tom Hanks's cross-country run in 1994's Forrest Gump, they made an Oscar-winning casting choice: Marshall Point Light, Port Clyde, Maine.
SERVICE, WITH AN EARPIECE Look closely: Goat Island Light, which marks dangerous rocks off Cape Porpoise Harbor, east of Kennebunkport, Maine, sometimes serves as an outpost for Secret Service agents guarding the Bush estate at Walker's Point. It also was the next-to-last full-time-manned lighthouse in the country, before it was finally automated in 1990. Boston Light, though now automated as well, is currently the sole professionally manned lighthouse in the United States.
YES, SHE DID Well before most other occupations opened to them, many women served as lighthouse keepers. The most famous was Idawalley Zorada Lewis, keeper of Lime Rock (now Ida Lewis) Light in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island. When her father had a stroke in 1857, Lewis not only tended the light (and her father) but also rowed her three siblings to school every day. She is credited with rescuing at least 18 people from Newport Harbor during her career, including four boys whose sailboat capsized and three men and the wayward sheep they'd been trying to fish out of the harbor. One of her visitors was President Ulysses S. Grant, in 1869, who landed in ankle-deep water when he got out of his boat. "To see [Ida Lewis], I'd get wet up to my armpits," he said.
When Lewis died on October 24, 1911, all the vessels anchored in Newport Harbor tolled their bells in her memory; in 1924, the name of the craggy island where she'd lived was changed to Ida Lewis Rock, the only such honor ever paid a lighthouse keeper. The light station itself, since deactivated, is now the Ida Lewis Yacht Club.
HISTORY PLUS A VIEW In the darkest days of the War of 1812, five British warships lined up off the coast of Stonington, Connecticut, and attacked the town. The bombardment is commemorated at the site's Old Lighthouse Museum inside Stonington Harbor Light.
The vista here is a bonus: From the octagonal tower of this granite lighthouse are views of three states: New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
NATURALLY ICONIC Some lighthouses are now incorporated into parks and nature areas. Wood Island, for example, site of Wood Island Light off Biddeford, Maine, is an Audubon bird sanctuary.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service oversees the area around Monomoy Point Light, on an island south of Chatham on Cape Cod. It's used by the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History as a nature center, and the land around it is home to more than 300 species of birds.
But the most extraordinary natural lighthouse setting is the 3,335-acre Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, including Two Bush Island Light, outside Penobscot Bay, and Petit Manan Light, farther east in the Gulf of Maine and famous for its colony of puffins and its nesting birds, including Arctic terns.
MOST WIDELY TRAVELED So archetypal is Cape Neddick ("the Nubble") Light off York Beach, Maine, that a photo of it was launched, along with other artifacts, aboard the Voyager II spacecraft in 1977. But space scientists weren't the first to recognize the value of its appeal. One entrepreneurial keeper in the early 20th century ferried as many as 300 visitors a day to the lighthouse for 10 cents apiece. For a nickel more, his wife would give them tours. They were fired for neglecting the light.
PIRATE LORE New Hampshire may have only two coastal lighthouses, but one of them is second to none for intrigue. White Island Light, on the approach to Rye and Portsmouth, marks the Isles of Shoals, a forbidding chain of islands where Captain Kidd is thought to have buried some of his treasure. So desolate is this place that one keeper's son didn't see a tree till he was 10 years old. When the family visited the mainland, they called it "going to America."
READ MORE: Lighthouse Tours SLIDE SHOW: Lighthouses All About Lighthouses Newburyport Lighthouse Dinner
When Virginia Small isn't gardening at her home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, she's writing about gardening. A former senior editor at Fine Gardening magazine, she's the author of Great Gardens of the Berkshires (Down East Books, 2008). Here she prunes her list of favorite public gardens to five.
1. BERKSHIRE BOTANICAL GARDEN Inspiring and intimate displays include vegetable, herb, daylily, and rock gardens; perennial and mixed borders; and seasonal installations. The region's hub for gardening info since 1934. 5 West Stockbridge Road (jct. Routes 102 & 183), Stockbridge, MA. 413-298-3926; berkshirebotanical.org
2. BLITHEWOLD MANSION, GARDENS & ARBORETUM This stunning seaside setting merges historic and modern gardening. Rose, rock, and water gardens, specimen trees, and a woodland ("the Bosquet"). A popular site for weddings. 101 Ferry Road (Route 114), Bristol, RI. 401-253-2707; blithewold.org
3. COASTAL MAINE BOTANICAL GARDENS Largest public garden site in New England (248 acres), this newbie features exceptional rhododendron, native-plant, and children's displays, plus a "Garden of the Five Senses." Pristine woodlands and waterfront (on the tidal Back River) afford views of unspoiled nature. Barters Island Road, Boothbay, ME. 207-633-4333; mainegardens.org
4. GARDEN IN THE WOODS Home of the venerable New England Wild Flower Society, this intimate strolling garden features more than 1,000 native plants in their habitats. It's best viewed in spring and early summer. The meadow shines in late summer. 180 Hemenway Road, Framingham, MA. 508-877-7630; newenglandwild.org
5. TOWER HILL BOTANIC GARDEN A horticultural feast with cutting-edge plantings, fragrant secret garden, heirloom apple trees, hardwoods, woodland "folly," plant evolution display, wildlife garden (a birder's paradise), and three miles of woodland trails. The "Orangerie" hosts winter displays. 11 French Drive, Boylston, MA. 508-869-6111; towerhillbg.org
For additional gardening stories, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/10Things
I love poking through antiques shops and flea markets in search of old postcards, fabrics, and lamps--they're great materials for home-décor projects. Old lamp bases have loads more character than new ones. I try to hang on to a lamp socket's outer brass or nickel shell, too, and replace just the cord and inner socket. To create a clean new shade for an antique lamp--but one that's still in keeping with its character--I just dip into my vintage-postcard collection. I look for graphic images and cards that have some wear and tear, a postmark, or even personal writing on the front. It's a great way to remember a special summer vacation or favorite destination.
1. Tape 2 postcards to a sheet of paper, making sure there's no space between top and bottom card. Continue with the rest of the cards, for a total of 6 panels, 2 cards per panel. Photocopy each set of cards. (Paper copies let more light through and save your postcards, too.)
2. Make a template for your postcards: Using clothespins, clip a piece of styrene onto one of the lampshade panels and trace around the outside of the wire with a marker. Cut out the styrene panel.
3. Lay the styrene panel atop one of your postcard copies and trace around it; do this for all 6 copies and cut them out.
4. To laminate postcard copies onto styrene, peel the paper backing off the styrene and affix each postcard copy to the sticky side. Trim postcard paper if necessary.
5. Clip postcard panels onto each of the 6 frame sides with clothespins. Mark any excess styrene and trim with scissors.
6. To affix panel to frame, run a bead of glue around all 4 segments of one of the wire sides. Set one panel in place and clip with clothespins. Repeat with other 5 panels.
7. When all panels are adhered to the frame, wrap a long piece of ribbon around the shade, clipping under clothespins to hold panels in place while they dry (about 20 minutes).
8. When it's dry, remove ribbon very gently; careful not to rip the paper.
9. For trim: Cut 6 6-inch pieces of 3/8-inch grosgrain (for the vertical sides), 1 17-inch piece of 5/8-inch grosgrain (for the top of the shade), and 1 26-inch piece of 5/8-inch grosgrain (for the bottom).
10. Run a bead of glue along one 3/8-inch grosgrain piece and set onto a vertical rib. Continue with remaining strips.
11. Glue 5/8-inch grosgrain around top and bottom of shade: Run glue along bottom edge, set the ribbon on the glue, wrap the rest of the ribbon around the wire, and glue it to the inside of the shade; then add grosgrain to the top of the shade.
12. For a finishing touch, add braided or decorative trim: Apply glue to the back of the trim a few inches at a time and set onto the edge of the bottom grosgrain.
Materials and kit are available at The Lamp Shop, Concord, NH. 603-224-1603; lampshop.com. For another project from Judy Lake, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/10Things
For additional ideas, see Judy Lake's new book, with directions for 50 custom lampshades: The Lampshade Lady's Guide to Lighting Up Your Life (Potter Craft/Crown Publishing Group, 2009; $27.50; lakeslampshades.com)