Cotuit author Christopher White has published a beautiful essay on the state of the Cape’s bays and harbors in the April 2024 issue of Cape Cod Life magazine. He uses the Association to Preserve Cape Cod’s annual “state of the waters” report as a news hook, and then weaves in the story of Dr. Stanley Cobb’s famous letter to the editor of the Barnstable Patriot after a helicopter from the Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project sprayed DDT over the beach of his house on Cotuit’s Narrows to put some now-and-then context into the pernicious problem of overdevelopment and the slow motion natural disaster happening before our lives over the course of a single life-time.
I’m honored he quoted some of my past thoughts about what has been lost in our waters over the course of my life. I need to correct myself, of making the prediction back in 2012 that I would never see a pufferfish in Cotuit again.
Once I caught a puffer fish (the only one I’ve ever seen on the Cape and which I doubt I’ll ever see again) which my grandfather tickled to puff up before unhooking and tossing it back overboard.”
Last summer I took my grandson Thomas fishing on a boat in Cotuit Harbor for the first time.
Leave it to a fish to teach me to stop being such a dour doubting Thomas when it comes believing another pufferfish won’t come along ever again. Fishermen are hopelessly hopeful that just one more cast will prove to be the one.
