falmouth public library

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Falmouth

Falmouth Public Library is a stately building on sweet little Main Street in Falmouth, the corner of the Cape near Woods Hole, littered with PhDs and farmer’s markets and ferries bound for the islands. There was a nice turnout, and it was great to meet my doppleganger, a woman whose mother had come from India around the same time as mine and also married a fair-skinned American. Good conversations, during the Q&A, and after. A Punjabi man arrived late, straight from his English classes, and he told me about how he once worked for the water department there. “There is no good water in Punjab,” he said to me, shaking his head. “No good water.”

WCAI the Point with Mindy Todd

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I love WCAI, the local NPR affiliate here on the Cape & Islands. I love the way sounds surprise me on it, as it shifts from reporting on Syria to a thirty-second Sonic ID of a boy describing the revving of an engine — vroom! vroom! — or a clammer telling stories from the old days. But I especially love the soothing voice and inquisitiveness of Mindy Todd on her show The Point. So it was with great pleasure that I got to sit with her for an hour in the cool WCAI studio this morning and talk about A River Runs Again.

Listen here.

And then, one can’t pass up the opportunity for a popover from the Pie in the Sky bakery across the street, so I didn’t. What should come lumbering by but a massive load of oceanographic equipment from WHOI, with solar panels and whirligigs and a tremendous aura of mystery and intrigue. #Ifuckinglovescience.

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this is how it happens

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2014.04.09-23

Lean back til you feel like you’ll tip. Take in the sky. Wasn’t it a steely grey just a minute ago, and now, now, blue like the eggs already in the nest, cluttered with clouds that have broken apart. Soon the marsh grass will erupt. An emerald carpet reaching up, breaking through the brackish phragmites, pounded flat in the last storm, but for now, a wash of pale shades.

2014.04.09-14

This is how it happens, falling in love with a place. [Read more…]

thirteen miles

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It took two hours and thirteen minutes to travel the 13 miles from the Barnstable bus stand to Sagamore Bridge, the definitive point between “on Cape” and “off.”  I took a front seat, looking over the bus driver’s shoulder at the road ahead, as we pulled onto Route 6, flying for those first few miles. Then, a long line of brake lights lit up like a Christmas strand. The Sagamore Bridge, where peregrine falcons considered nesting amidst its metalwork last year, is under construction. The pair was spotted only once this year before they fled, surely, from the noise and construction, the men hoisted into the heavens by cranes and lifts, bringing blowtorches and making human thunder. Bridges have always fascinated me, the engineering feat of building such structures that can stand for decades of dedicated use, letting us leap over water, canyons and gullies. [Read more…]

dolphin rescue after mass stranding

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The wind was blowing crazy out here on the Cape on Friday. On Saturday morning, IFAW (the International Fund for Animal Welfare) started getting calls. The Marine Mammal Rescue and Research team kicked into full gear, calling on volunteers and New England Aquarium staff to help with the rescue of common dolphins that were being found from Eastham to Brewster. About 30 dolphins were found altogether, ten dead, making it one of the largest dolphin strandings known on the Cape. IFAW and volunteers loaded some of the rescues into trucks and brought them to Scusset Beach for release, seeking calm and deep waters where both dolphins and human helpers could successfully get the cetaceans back into the water. [Read more…]