We are again staying in Harwich, a charming town on Cape Cod Nantucket Sound. While tourism is the main economic driver now, the cranberry played a vital role in its early economy.

The Monomoyick  and Nauset Native American communities used wild cranberries for food, medicine, and as a dye long before European settlers arrived. The Native Americans taught the Pilgrims how to make Pemmican using crushed wild cranberries mixed with dried meat and melted animal fat to create a high-protein winter survival ration (the original power bar), medicinal poultices to draw poison from arrow wounds, and vibrant red dyes for textiles and rugs.

Cranberries do best in bogs, low shallow bowls of acidic peat soil, where plenty of sand and water are available. The composition of a cranberry bog is unique and consists of four layers, clay, gravel, peat and sand in ascending order. Each performs an important function to the overall ability of the bog to thrive. By the turn of the 19th century, residents had staked out their bogs, or “Cranberry Yards,” and families would typically harvest their supplies of the berries from them.

Eventually, Harwich led the way to introducing the cranberry to the world by producing the first crop for commercial sale. n 1846, Captain Alvin Cahoon is credited with producing the first such crop from a bog near Pleasant Lake. The venture spread quickly, with others in other towns, counties and states planting their own bogs and producing their own crops for the growing markets.

At the turn of the 20th century, North Harwich became home to many Cape Verde people who first worked in the cranberry industry, and then became bog owners and prominent members of the Harwich community. Many Cape Verdeans were fishermen and farmers. As the whaling industry declined in the late 1800’s, the cranberry industry meant economic survival on Cape Cod provided a needed source of income to many families during the economically depressed decades following the Civil War.

We were lounging at Nauset Beach, one of my favorite Cape Cod beaches, when I began to wonder whether seagulls had a keen sense of smell. Is this how they just know I have tasty morsels of food in my swimming bag?

It turns out the answer is yes, they do have a nose of sorts. The two slits on their upper beak, called nares, let them breathe and pick up the scents coming from my swimming bag.

I am told you can look into one nare and see right through to the other side of the beak. I tried to witness this but the gulls did not cooperate with my experiment, in spite of how close they like to get to my swimming bag.

Another interesting fact I learned is that gulls drink salt water and it is excreted through their nares. Salt glands located above a gull’s eyes remove excess salt from their bloodstream.. These salty nasal secretions often are channeled down the beak via grooves where they drip off the tip of the beak

That is about all I learned about sea gull noses today. Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for some more interesting Cape Cod discoveries tomorrow!

In New York and Massachusetts we talk about being bitten by sand fleas when sunbathing on beaches. They leave very itchy little bumps around the ankles. It turns out these are insects sand flies or mites, not sand fleas.

Today I learned that sand fleas are not fleas. They are small shrimp-like crustaceans, but without claws- and they don’t bite. They are called fleas because they hop and jump. Fishermen use a basket to dig in the tidal sand and catch them for bate.

They are used for surf fishing to catch pompano, redfish, sheepshead, and striped bass. You can also cook them up and eat them. Cook them in butter with seasoning until they turn orange. They are considered a crunchy, shrimp-like delicacy, best cooked live and seasoned with options like Old Bay, Dano’s, or Cajun spices. 

As we made our way down the East coast of Florida we passed many walls and fences. This is not something I had noticed before, in spite of driving these roads many times. From exclusive gated communities to modest mobile home parks, it seems de rigueur to live behind a wall in this part of the world.

It got me wondering whether I would feel safer living behind a wall. So many of us are looking for safety and security now in this political climate of division and distrust. Presumably, the feeling of safety would come from locking the “others” , the undesirables out. Of course in the past this had everything to do with race, as many housing developments, walls or not, had housing covenants explicitly saying who could and could not live there based on race and religion. I suspect, perhaps more subtlety, this still exists. Since my family is interracial, I think we would not feel safer in this type of community.

As I think more about community safety, my mind wanders to Minneapolis and how the residents are responding to very real threats. I have read about how they have come together, block by block, to support their neighbors. It’s funny how quickly outside threats , such as 3000 masked and armed ICE and Border Patrol agents swarming a city can bring people together.

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, states that memoirs of victims of tyrannical regimes in the 20th century all share a single tender moment. “People living in fear of repression remember how their neighbors treated them. A smile a handshake, or a word of greeting or banal gestures in a normal situation- took on great significance. When friends, colleagues, and aquaintances looked away or crossed the street to avoid contact, fear grew.You might not be sure, today or tomorrow, who feels threatened in the United States. But if you affirm everyone, you can be sure that certain people will feel better.”

I think this is a better solution than building walls.

I asked my grandson, Miles (age 20 months) what he thought lived in this hole on the beach and he informed me that it was an “owl”. He is quite a nature boy and he does know about owls, but this surprised me. Have you ever heard of a sand owl? I believe, in fact, that this hole was made by a nesting turtle.

It is the beginning of sea turtle nesting season on the Space Coast in Florida. There are four kinds of sea turtles that make the annual pilgrimage to nest here: Loggerhead, Leatherback, Green and occasionally Kemps Ridley turtles. The last three are considered endangered. The Loggerhead is now considered threatened in Florida. Hatchlings emerge from their nests and head for the ocean, which causes the little tracks you see.

We once again have made our winter journey South. This time, we are only away for 10 days, so we flew rather than taking our usual meandering five week road trip to explore. Hopefully, we will make a few interesting discoveries to muse about. Stay tuned!

We are now in our secret hideaway in Florida. Soaking up the sunshine after this exceptionally harsh winter in upstate New York.

Did you know that Dearborn Michigan is an Arab majority city? Yesterday we visited the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn. It claims to be the first and only museum of its kind about the Arab American experience.

We learned that “the middle east” is an outdated term that is based on British colonization. The preferred term is “the Arab world”.

We learned about the cradle of civilization and ancient Arab contributions to art, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and architecture.

We learned how to write in Arabic.

A very moving exhibit was called “Waiting for Peace“ by Rajie Cook. I will let the exhibit speak for itself:

As we were driving east on Rt. 90 near Gary, Indiana we noticed a sign we had never noticed before for Indiana Dunes National Park. This piqued our curiosity and we decided we had to have a look.

Gary is about 25 miles east of Chicago. You know you are near Gary by the stench of sulphur dioxide spewing from the US steel plant there. Gary is a decaying post- industrial city. A national park here?

We drove through Gary and came to a back road leading into the countryside. We left Gary and its smell in the rearview mirror and came upon sand dunes and a swampy natural area. We could no longer detect that we were just a few miles from Gary.

Indiana Dunes National Park is one of the newest national parks, established in 2019.

Once on the LakeMichigan beach, it is hard to tell you are not on Cape Cod or some other ocean vacation spot, except for the shoreline view of Gary and Chicago to the west and Michigan City to the east.

I’m glad that the good folks of Gary have a place like this to get away and enjoy.

The park was closed due to the government shutdown, but the bathrooms were open and immaculately maintained. The garbage cans were empty. There was no litter anywhere. All was well (and free).

My heroes of the day are the volunteers who have stepped up to maintain this park. In spite of our initial skepticism, we recommend a visit to the Indiana Dunes National Park.

My heroes of the day are all of the Chicago residents who have decided to fight back to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped by ICE agents. ICE agents are now in multiple Chicago neighborhoods- swooping in and taking street vendors, mothers walking their children to school and harassing pretty much anyone with brown skin who is out in public.

ICE agents have shot at least two people, one fatally; put a man in a chokehold after a traffic crash; threw a smoke bomb into the middle of a busy neighborhood street; accosted protesters and journalists; chased and arrested people outside a Bronzeville homeless shelter; and raided a South Shore apartment building, destroying property and detaining dozens of people and children in the middle of the night. (citybureua.org)

But Chicagoans are fighting back. There are now rapid response and mutual aid efforts organized in multiple neighborhoods. These grassroots efforts are organized into a network. There are crowd sourced maps of where ICE agents are spotted and people with orange whistles verifying ICE sightings. When ICE agents are spotted they blow whistles and others blow their car horns. People come running to help. Neighbors are walking to school in groups and doing shopping for their neighbors so they do not have to venture outside.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has signed an executive order declaring public property, such as parks and city garages, off limits for ICE agents. They may not use public property for staging any more. He has encouraged private businesses to join with them.

This is a terrible moment in U.S history that will go down in infamy, but the upside is that people in communities everywhere are uniting. This is inspiring and cause for hope.