I know you have a very hard job. You have to drive your big truck with the big plow through the blizzards, trying to see out your windshield in near white-out conditions. No amount of Firecracker Schnapps or DeKuypers Peach Brandy can keep the cold from penetrating into your lonely cab, but at least there aren’t any many civilians out driving that you need to avoid.
Might I suggest an eye exam? That lazy eye can be corrected you know. You just need to bring in the right side of your plow about a foot or two. Then you won’t plow up all the roadsides of Cotuit from CVS to Oregon Beach by slicing off at least a foot of everybody’s front lawn and depositing it in a nice furrow on the sidewalks and lawns.
We so look forward to raking it back and trying to reseed it. Because if we don’t, and if your boss at the DPW decides you need some help staying within the lines of the coloring book known as the roads of Cotuit, then my tax dollars will be spent installing ugly curbstones that will take away the nice grassy soft shoulders that make the village look like Cape Cod and not suburban Waltham.
Maybe you thought you were Richard Burton in “Where Eagles Dare”:
Yes. We stick out little reflective sticks on the side of the road to tell you where the pavement ends and the grass begins, but you managed to pick off most of them this time through the town. I know it has been a nasty winter — this spring blizzard was the last straw and it probably pissed you off as much as the rest of us — but it was the one storm that managed to do the greatest amount of damage to the village because you need an eye exam.
I’m trying to walk off some weight and hit the road on Sunday to take a stroll through Mosswood Cemetery and around Eagle Pond. Winter is the best time for marching around in the woods. No leaves have sprouted to obscure the views and few if any people are out on a grey afternoon. First stop was the hill atop Old Shore Road at the bend on Putnam Avenue. In behind the old Ropes property is this sad barn. The cupola crashed in during Sandy in the fall of 2012. A tarp was hauled over the hole, and you can see some strapping on what remains, so who knows, it may get rebuilt or it may vanish like so many other old sheds and barns around the village.
The Ropes Barn
Onwards to Mosswood Cemetery, to look at the Churbuckian headstone, all covered with lichens, the plot littered with winter’s blown sticks. Always strange to think that my name will get stuck there in the ground some day. Only my grandfather Henry is actually buried there. Grandmother Nellie and my father were cremated, so all that remains of them are the stones. I reminded myself for the umpteenth time to visit the cemetery office and see what the deal is with the family plot. It’s interesting to see the changes to the cemetary and the graves that get extraordinary attention, with little solar powered lights, bunches of plastic flowers, ornate laser inscribed tombstones with pictures and poetry. Nothing like the old Yankee practice of sticking up a name, a birthday and death date and then moving on.
I went up the hill to the old section, where the 19th century family plots are. The Chatfields and Fishers and Fields and Hodges — the old unmet names of great-aunts and uncles gathered together. The oldest stones are pretty beat up, with some interesting information that belies the nautical past. “Died in Rio de Janiero” or “Drowned, Cotuit Bay 1842.” One of the oldest stones is of one of my oldest ancestors, Azubah Handy, wife of Bethuel Handy, mother of Bethuel Handy Jr., the Cotuit whaler who spent a winter stranded in the Siberian ice of the Sea of Okhotsk until my great-great grandfather Tom Chatfield could sail back from San Francisco and rescue his father-in-law.
Azubah was one of the first to be buried in the cemetery (1819) (I don’t know where the colonial graves of Cotuit are). Her inscription is one of the most wordy in Mosswood, a poem that was oft quoted to me as a kid:
“My bosom friend come here and see
Where lays the last remains of me
When I the debt of nature paid
A burying yard for me was made.
Here lays the body of your bride
The loving knot is now untied
A loving husband you have been,
To me the dearest of all men.
Husband and children here I lay
Stamp on your minds my dying day
Come often here and take a view
Where lays the one that loved you.”
Onwards to the gate in the fence between the boneyard and Bell Farm, the old turkey farm that was nearly turned into a subdivision in the 1980s before being saved by the Barnstable Land Trust and preserved as a gorgeous meadow with my favorite tree in all of Cotuit.
Then out of the meadow and into the woods where the box turtles live and risk the walk across busy Putnam, remembering the old Bell Farm barn with the roof that was painted with “GREEN ACRES” in homage to a television series from the 1960s that had something to do with a Hungarian countess (Zsa Zsa Gabor) living on a hillbilly farm. The roof of the barn in the TV show was used in the title, and some vandal wit decided to paint the abandoned barn so everyone driving into Cotuit would catch a glimpse. Every so often the owner of the barn would pay someone to paint the shingles black, which was tantamount to erasing a blackboard for the next vandals to climb up there and do some nocturnal graffiti.
Eventually the place was knocked down and now the village has a great meadow.
Anyway, down the trail into the woods and over the planked bridge over Little River, one of Cotuit two “rivers” as the Cape is fond of calling it’s glacial streams Rivers in lieu of having anything truly big and wide and flowing. (the other river being the Santuit River). Little River runs from Lovell’s Pond in Newtown, the northernmost part of Cotuit adjacent to Santuit. A pretty little pond that is stocked with trout by the state and has one of the town’s fresh water beaches. I’ve never seen any evidence of Little River other than its delta on Handy’s Point into the bay, the glimpse next to Bell Farm, and a pool in back of my cousin’s workshop a little further to the north. I’m sure it was a herring run at one point, probably holding smelt too, but the cranberry industry killed off most of the runs when the bogs dammed up the flow and diverted the water to flood the cranberry vines.
I walked around Eagle Pond at a fast pace, working up enough of a sweat to need to unzip my jacket. I popped back out on Little River Road and followed it to one of Cotuit’s nicest little neighborhoods, home to the Cotuit Oyster Company, and Handy’s Point, the promontory where my oldest Cape Cod ancestors once lived, having come to Cotuit in the late 1600s from Mattapoisett to build ships. I’ll scan some of the old black and white photos eventually, but Little River, also known as the Inner Harbor, was a bit of a separate village within a village in the 18th and 19th centuries, connected to Cotuitport by the Old Post Road, but separated by Little River. According to Chatfield’s reminiscences, he left for a Pacific whaling voyage with his wife and young family living in the Handy home on Handy’s Point, but his wife Florrie, isolated from the village by the river, sold the place and moved the clan into the village center. On his return three years later he rushed home to the old place, only to find the family gone. He hitched a ride into town on a wagon and was pointed to his new home in the center. Shame, it is a pretty piece of waterfront and in the 19th century was the home of Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe, a prominent Boston editor and winner of the Pulitzer prize. That house has been reskinned a few times over the year and now looks like the typical non-Cape wedding cake temple to the gods of plate glass and rococo railings, faux widow’s walks, and brass lanterns with plastic adirondack chairs that no one sits in arranged in a row on the Chem-lawned grass.
One big hurricane and the place will be underwater. There was a reason the oldtimers considered waterfront living to be a questionable thing, and I suspect the Chatfield-Handy exodus from Handy’s Point to the village center was viewed as a climb up the social ladder, just as getting out of town in the 1950s to live in suburban Boston was viewed as a good thing by my grandparents.
I walked down the beach, past the pissed off “PRIVATE BEACH! NO CHAIRS!” signs — one of the “signs of the times” of modern Cotuit and the Hedge Fundification of the waterfront that has brought us evil looking security cameras and warnings to keep moving — and around the peat bank to the terminus of Little River. Some old pilings give proof of an old bridge there, but, alas, I had to ford it Taras Bulba-style, and wound up with a wet leg.
So I cleared the US Customs “Global Entry Program” which means no more lines when I go hither and fro from the UK to the States. One of the customs officers asked if I was a Red Sox fan, a safe question to answer in a National League city, and he waxed poetic about his ambition to see the inside of Olde Fenway. I told him I was a season ticket holder, which is like wearing a pinkie ring and driving a Caddy for the Gambino Family when it comes to being a made man in Boston. I passed the background check which means I get to be that douchebag you hate. That guy who can breeze through the TSA with his belt and shoes on, laptop and liquids safe in his bag. Tis the season of being licensed and ticketed. I feel highly important as a result.
“Boston, MA – March 20, 2014 – International Data Group IDG announced today with great sadness that its Founder and Chairman, Patrick J. McGovern, died March 19, 2014, at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California.”
I worked for Pat McGovern for eight months in 2005 when I was running online at CXO — the branch of IDG publishing that published CIO, CSO, CMO Magazines. I competed against his publications in the early 80s when I worked for PC Week, the arch-rival of IDG’s InfoWorld.
There are going to be a ton of Pat McGovern stories told over the next few days. Here’s mine.
While Pat was a lion in technology publishing he was also one of the first and most influential western businessmen to operate in the People’s Republic of China. His presence in China, his reputation there to this very day, is legendary and made him the most well known and respected Westerner sin the Chinese tech sector. His VC investments in the likes of Baidu were early and massive successes. The man even spoke Mandarin.
During the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics I was surprised to find myself riding in the back of a bus with Pat on our way to a private dinner with Lenovo’s senior executives and some heavy hitting senior execs from Qualcomm, Google, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, etc.. I saw him sitting alone in the back of the bus, so I sat down beside him and started chatting him up, thanking him for the opportunity to briefly work for him before quitting to join Lenovo. He was legendary for his photographic memory and immediately made the connection and started peppering me with questions.
As the bus crawled through traffic it was apparent that most everybody sitting within six rows of us was eaves-dropping on the conversation, most of them unaware of who Pat was. He was a big man but a soft spoken one; not at all brash or loud. So I introduced him around to the people in the adjacent seats as the first Westerner to do business in Communist China, well before Deng’s market reforms that led to “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” and unlocked the Chinese growth we marvel at today. I urged Pat to tell the bus the story of how he infiltrated China in the 1970s. The story went roughly like this: Pat was on a flight from Japan to Russia and figured out he could make a “connection” in Beijing. This is back in the era of Nixon-Mao and PingPong diplomacy. Let’s just say there were no princelings drag racing Ferrari’s around the third ring road back then. Anyway, the plane lands, Pat looks out the window, amazed he’s this close to the mysterious closed country. So he gets off the plane. The plane leaves without him. The Red Guard are confronted with this American standing in their airport essentially saying “Take me to your leader.”
Pat humbly regaled the bus for 30 minutes with the story of how he invaded China, set up the first Chinese tech publications, and earned the trust and respect of the Chinese government. When we arrived at the restaurant it was my Chinese colleagues who really lit up at the sight of him, hustling him away to a place of honor next to the chairman and CEO of Lenovo as befitted the father of Chinese computer journalism.
He was a genuinely great man. Here’s his story of how he entered China as captured in the official IDG oral history:
The Red Sox better mail me my season tickets soon or I’ll begin to panic and start stalking them. I even checked my online bank register the other day to make sure the check I mailed in cleared last December. Season tickets are now my second worst non-renewal nightmare, up there with the falling-off-the-cliff and underwear-in-the-highschool-hallway dreams.. The first nightmare of non-renewal will always be my mooring permits from the Town of Barnstable.
My first game will be April 8 vs. the Rangers. Something tells me after this winter that I will not be wearing my “Thaw Ted” t-shirt and shorts that Tuesday evening but will probably have more layers of wool going on than a Yukon prospector.
So, randomly, here’s the first bright sign of spring: one of my favorite Cotuit Kettleers blew everyone away during a recent Red Sox spring season game down in Jupiter, Florida. I’m talking Deven Marrero, the Arizona State phenomenon my Cotuit baseball buddies and I adopted as most-likely-to-succeed in the 2010 championship season when he hit .306 as a freshman, returning the next year to play 12 games in the 2011 season and hit .346. The guy is an incredible fielder.
Gordon Edes wrote last week that Marrero is the Red Sox rookie to watch this year and a strong candidate for the Sox’s future shortstop:
“The beauty of spring training is that you never know when or where the next coming-out party will be, and who will emerge from the shadows to declare themselves a major leaguer-in-waiting.
Last spring it was outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr., grabbing us with the virtuosity of his all-around play in Fort Myers. In 2005, it was a cocky Class A reliever named Jonathan Papelbon, who responded to a teammate being hit by a pitch in Fort Lauderdale by buzzing slugger Sammy Sosa with a high, hard one.
And Thursday afternoon here in Roger Dean Stadium, with the Red Sox leaving nearly all of their regulars back in Fort Myers, 23-year-old shortstop Deven Marrero, who went to high school about 70 minutes away from here (American Heritage School in Plantation), became the latest Red Sox rookie to seize his moment.
AP Photo/Mike JanesShortstop Devin Marrero (above, coaching first base in a spring training game last year) flashed impressive defensive ability against the Marlins.
Marrero did so with a fielding exhibition worthy of Cirque du Soleil, one in which he displayed spectacular range diving for a ball up the middle, showed off his aerodynamic capacity while completing a double play and handled everything else hit his way with soft hands and a strong arm.
“My gosh, he put on a display defensively,” manager John Farrell said after a scoreless game between the Sox and Miami Marlins that was shortened to 7 2/3 innings by a late-afternoon deluge.
Which brings me to this year’s Kettleer’s roster which is live on the team site. I’ll get off my butt and do the usual OCD Google-Baseball America scouting report but past experience tells me that a good number of these names won’t make it to Cotuit due to the usual Team USA/College World Series conflicts. It is always nice to see returning players and this year’s squad had four alumni from last summer’s championship team.
And being all springlike (since the clock did its thing and make it at least sunny at 6 pm albeit a balmy 20 degrees), I’ll drag the boat to the boat guy next week for a pre-season tuneup and start stalking those wily clams awaiting me. I was in London the past two weeks and they have full daffodils and crocuses (Crocii?) which was nice to see. Otherwise, mud season approacheth and I need a baseball game to get me out of this spleenish winter funk.
Since beginning this blog in 2001 I don’t think I’ve gone as long without writing as I have recently with a case of blogger’s-block. I noticed my last post was January 29 and consisted of a simple notice that I’d finished a historical society paper.
I plead business travel, winter ennui, and general overwork. I’m in the middle of two big projects and haven’t had time to lift my head up from either one of them to attend to my personal writing obligations.
Mea culpa accomplished, now to deliver something half-way interesting.
