Rowing Forward, Looking Back: Shellfish and the Tides of Change at the Elbow of Cape Cod
By Sandy Macfarlane
Published by Friends of Pleasant Bay, PO Box 845, South Orleans, MA, 02662, www.fopb.org.
$22.95
Scallop Season: A Nantucket Chronicle
By Jim Patrick and Rob Benchley
Published by Autopscot Press, PO Box 2177, Nantucket, MA 02584, www.autopscot.com.
These two books chronicle the traditional shellfish sector of the coastal fishery of Cape Cod. From succulent little bay scallops to fat quahogs, to the ever-popular steamers, to an abundance of mussels, these two beautifully written, engagingly locally specific books show the nearshore sea-bottom bivalve harvest in a sort of two-tone light. On the one side, illuminated by a golden tone of long-standing community traditions, a history of vast harvest going back to the earliest inhabitants, and strong local interest raising the catch to almost iconic status, the Cape Cod shellfisheries take on a revered position, protected and valued. One the other hand, this image is filtered through a rapidly clouding lens of increasing Cape populations, a flood of runoff pollution, thousands of boats, and an all-too-common apathy to the environment on the part of recent visitors and transplanted residents, all resulting in documented declines in the abundance of these virtual coastal canaries.
In Rowing Forward, Looking Back, Sandy Macfarlane exposes Cape Cod as not only one of New England’s most beloved vacation and retirement havens, but also a fragile place threatened almost to death by those who love it. As the first municipal Shellfish Biologist in Massachusetts, later Conservation Administrator for Orleans, the author has closely watched shellfish populations as an indicator of the dramatic social changes that have swept over the Cape, altering the old ways forever. She carefully weaves together her story and Cape Cod’s into a sometimes unraveling tapestry of environmental change, one which has not yet reached the end of the loom.
Scallop Season is a big and beautiful hardcover book, rich in an austere way with large format black-and-white photographs of evocative detail, chronicling a pivotal single year of the bay scallop harvest. Bay scallops, much smaller than the more common sea scallops, are highly prized for their sweetness and rarity, and have long been a valued product of inshore waters. The hoary winter fishery of Nantucket, undertaken by local small boats in island bays, is a deep part of the identity of the place, and produces a product renowned around the country one of the true jewels of New England seafood. This harvest went from 117,000 bushels in 1981 to 6,800 bushels in 1999, and the feeling that there might not be another harvest was one of the motivations for this publication. While the pictures are notable, the text pulls no punches, and through intimate detail of the participants, biologists, residents, shuckers, buyers and others, this book paints a picture of a complex social and environmental mechanism that is perhaps failing to operate as it used to.
These two books carry on a legacy of excellent, locally-focused writing coming from the Cape, from such favorites as The Outermost House, by Henry Beston, to The Run, by John Hay, focusing on the declining river herring populations. The changes in these southern regions, and most particularly the populating and development of the Cape and the Nantucket Shoals islands, are in general no news to Mainers, but the level of change, the irreversibility of the environmental alteration, the changes wrought on long-time residents, and most of all the way this effect is charging along the coast in our direction should give us all reason for pause. These books are of interest not only to Cape Cod residents as very readable and compelling case studies of animals that literally cannot swim out of the way of trouble, but may also presage the fortunes of those of us living along the Maine coast and islands – who choose as well not to swim away from the tides of change inevitably coming our way.