Goodbye to This Odd Winter, the 100th Anniversary of PTown's Worst on Record

This was quite an odd winter, with mostly mild weather, peppered with occasional back-to-back nights of bitter cold, interspersed with temperatures in the 40s. That's not to mention four nor'easters in the space of a couple of weeks, though the fourth one was barely more than a drenching, blustering inconvenience. The first three each knocked out the power throughout the town, then teased us with just enough electricity to put on a pot of coffee, followed by several more dreary hours without light or heat, another moment or hour of power, another day without heat, and so on.
I've got to say, the eleventh time my electricity went off, I began to get discouraged. We were lucky the temperatures stayed above freezing for most of that. Even so, I was sleeping in a stocking cap, a jacket with a hood, and gloves, all tucked under a stack of thermal blankets and down quilts, barely able to move. Every few minutes the windows rattled under the force of the wind, and a few times the whole building actually shook a little.

This 1918 photo of Robert Lewis was taken by his father, Captain William Lewis,
on the tidal flats at the foot of Cook Street. The ice stood 10 feet, two inches high.

Without community radio station WOMR, and the distant, scratchy NPR broadcasts from Boston on my little pocket radio keeping me company, I'd have lost it.
Still, it could have been worse...
A few years back I wrote about an extended, bitter cold snap that occurred 100 years ago.
This was perhaps the most trying stretch of winter weather PTown residents have ever endured. Here's a recap:
Around this time in 1918 Provincetown residents were bearing up under cruel winds in subfreezing temperatures, and most were truly struggling to keep warm. In an article written about this extended cold snap, The Advocate, a weekly Provincetown newspaper at the time, reported “With the exception of a mere handful of days, ice has continued to form in day or night almost constantly on the shore of Cape Cod Bay since early in January."
The extraordinary cold had formed chunks of ice more than ten feet tall, drifting and bobbing out beyond Long Point on Cape Cod Bay, and along the shoreline of Provincetown and Truro. As strong, steady winds developed, they pushed those massive chunks of ice past the Long Point Light and into Provincetown Harbor. Each low tide left giant ice floes resting on the tidal flats along the waterfront.
In an eight-day stretch of extreme cold the town had exhausted its entire supply of coal, the main fuel used for heating in those days. The paper said “Taken all together it was the most disagreeable eight days endured by the community within recollection.” The coal barges attempting to make deliveries were unable to steer through the thousands of tons of huge, treacherous chunks of ice that we're choking the harbor. It had become impossible for the ships to deliver the coal that the town so desperately needed.
Ice of this sort is also dangerous. On Valentine's Day, a large ice floe drifting near the mouth of the harbor had been driven by prevailing winds toward the shoreline at 571 Commercial Street, where the old fish shack at the end of Lewis Wharf had been converted to a theater for the Provincetown Players a couple of years earlier. The force of tons of ice pushing against the pilings of the old wharf threatened to destroy the magical spot where the career of unknown playwright Eugene O'Neill had been launched in the summer of 1916. Although the structure was sturdy enough to survive this onslaught, it was indeed ice in the harbor that demolished the wharf in the winter of 1921.
In the photo above we see some of the enormous chunks of ice that smothered the harbor in that dreadful winter of 1918, resting on the flats at low tide. Those solidly frozen, ten-foot, two-inch thick slabs behind young Robert Lewis created tremendous physical hardships for townsfolk, and wreaked havoc on their economy. Not only were fuel barges turned away by the ice, but the fishing fleet was kept ashore for more than 30 days as well. The harbor was simply unnavigable. Even though the weather eventually began to turn a tiny bit warmer, massive chunks of ice like these would take a long time to melt, and in the meantime, no ships were able to sail in or out of Provincetown.
When a northeast wind finally breached the ice and began pushing it, little by little, toward Truro, the harbor once again became passable, but the exceptional cold and a frozen harbor had made January, February, and a good bit of March of 1918, the most brutal winter in Provincetown's memory.

Harbor Ice Lingers After Storm as Flooded Provincetowners Shovel Out

The Truro shoreline, and My Yot in the ice, seen from the beach at St Mary's Church.

Former fishing vessel My Yot was seen in Provincetown Harbor surrounded by sea ice last Saturday. From Saint Mary's beach, looking toward the Truro shoreline, the anchored boat appeared to float gently amidst the gradually melting floes of ice left behind after the so-called "bomb cyclone" storm that had ripped its way up the East Coast the week before.
A weather condition known as bombogenesis occurs when a very big drop in air pressure happens in a very short period of time, creating a storm of explosive strength. The sudden drop in pressure causes air to be drawn spiraling into the center of the growing storm, only to be rapidly pushed out through the top of the system.
If the amount of air being sucked into the storm can't keep up with the amount being blown out of the top, the pressure drops even farther and the system grows that much bigger, sucking in more air from farther, and still farther away. Our storm was so strong that it drew in moist air from as far away as the Caribbean.

Folks, and pets, are happy to walk on the beach again, as ice shifts with the tides.

Bombogenesis is achieved when the air pressure drops at least 24 millibars over a period of 24 hours. In this storm, there was a pressure drop of 59 millibars in those 24 hours, which set us up for a storm so strong that it may actually have broken previous records.
PTown saw storm surge and flooding, window-rattling winds and some very cold temperatures, yet we came out pretty well, since the heart of the storm was very far out to sea, where scientists estimated possible 50-foot waves. A blizzard warning had been issued from Virginia to eastern Maine. Even parts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina got six inches of snow, which is a huge struggle for them.
JFK airport had to be closed for a bit due to 55 mph winds, Islip airport on Long Island got snow at the rate of about three inches per hour, the shoreline and islands of Massachusetts recorded winds over 70 mph, and as the storm was strengthening in New England, Boston was nearing tides at an all-time record high.

Harbor colors are actually enhanced with all the white spots to play on at sunset.

Communities farther inland got their share of extreme weather out of this event, too. Immense temperature drops were felt from the East Coast to the Midwest as this epic storm jostled the polar vortex.
It pulled in masses of frigid air from Siberia, the North Pole and Greenland all at once, causing a rapid drop in normal, regional winter temperatures by as much as 40 degrees in some spots.

So PTown really was quite lucky, despite flooding in many Commercial Street businesses, homes, restaurants, and the UU Meetinghouse. We live in a town where the electricity goes out when someone sneezes in Wellfleet, yet we escaped the serious, lengthy outages that are so dangerous in extremely cold weather.
All in all, we did alright. And as temperatures warmed up a bit, folks could get back to strolling along the harbor, stepping around the ice floes that settle on the flats when the tide rolls out, and enjoying these spectacular, unusual sights.

If the beach becomes impassable, take the stairway up to Fanizzi's, reopening today.

As we were reaching low tide on this day, the sun was getting ready to set as well, making for some lovely scenes of sea ice glistening as it came to rest on the tidal flats circling around Provincetown Harbor.
The beach in front of Fanizzi's had slowly begun taking on its usual late-afternoon pinkish, golden glow, but with a lot of extra sparkles and colors appearing in that rare, temporary art form that Mother Earth had floated on the water for us.
After closing while they worked to recover from heavy flooding and storm damage, today sees Fanizzi's Restaurant once again opening its doors, resuming their usual schedule, complete with early bird specials, Friday Night Fish Fry, Sunday Brunch, that stunning view, and all the things that make this resilient little spot a favorite neighborhood hangout. Stop in and warm up a bit if you get a little chilled on your beach walk.

Another Day, Another Blizzard in PTown

Commercial Street snow heaps grow by layers upon layers.

Considering the kind of storms we've been having, with snow several times each week, and an actual blizzard thrown in here and there, we seem to be doing alright.
Thankfully, yesterday's storm wasn't as  brutal as predicted, which is often the case here. And the power outage in Provincetown this time was of a fairly short duration, with most homes getting their electricity back on in fairly quick order, considering the stiff winds and brutal temperatures the repair crews faced. We thank them, truly, for their dedication to keeping us warm and safe in this formidable, often dangerous weather.
Folks still seem to have a sense of humor about this very challenging winter, too, and that helps. Most people I've talked to on the street have been fairly upbeat as they're shoveling their walks for the second time that day, or digging their cars out again, before the next storm makes all that snow too heavy to lift.
As the snow drifts and the piles left behind by the plows grow by a few inches with every new inch of snow that falls in Provincetown, streets are getting just a bit narrower day by day. Make sure you're extra cautious, whether you're walking or driving, especially near driveways and intersections where it's more difficult daily to see around these mounds.

Once again, a neighbor shovels the "path" from Pearl Street to his house.

A neighbor on Pearl Street was up very early the other morning, shoveling out the path to his house one more time, "…trying to stay ahead of the storm." The snow piles were already as tall as he was, with much more piled on since then, and the forecast for tomorrow is calling for yet another three to five inches.
I don't know how long our fairly cheery dispositions can last, but for now, at least, we are still hardy New Englanders, carrying on, and helping out our neighbors in the face of the next storm.

Provincetown Digs Out After Historic Blizzard of 2015

Cape Cod took a real pounding by the tremendous "winter hurricane" that swept the New England
shoreline. This Wellfleet photo by Eric Williams, Cape Cod Times, depicts a "mother-in-law rescue."
It tells the story of towns all over the cape, dealing with extreme drifts, and mounds of plowed snow.

With the tremendous drifts of four and five feet and more around town, it's pretty hard to say how much snow we really got. The Ice House condos, on the edge of the harbor, at Howland Street, had no snow at all in their parking lot, with the crushed shell surface clearly visible. That's because all the snow blew up onto the patios and formed chest-high drifts, while the same thing inexplicably happened on the street side of the building as well, leaving residents unable to open the front or back doors to the building. They had to wait for someone to come and shovel them out, as did thousands cape wide.
In the meantime, they were waiting for the power to come back on, along with about 97% of Provincetown residents whose electricity had gone out during the storm. Nantucket also lost power all across the island, and outages were reported in other towns as well. Provincetown's power began coming back on within about 11 hours, and most of the town's electricity seemed to have been restored relatively quickly, given the severe winds of this very powerful storm, which may turn out to be one for the books.
I've been all over the internet trying to find an exact snow total for Provincetown in the "Blizzard of 2015," but "total unavailable" is all I can find. We do know that snowfall from this fierce storm broke a record or two in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with Worcester reaching its all-time deepest at 34.5 inches, although Auburn beat them with a depth of 36 inches, which was less than a record for them.
Blowing and drifting snows in the coastal areas are much harder to measure than depths in towns farther inland. Most people in Provincetown seem to be estimating up to two feet or so, which was the official overall total registered on most of Cape Cod. The devil is in the tremendous drifts whipped up by winds that officially gusted to 69 miles per hour here at the Cape's tip. I spoke to a dispatcher at the Provincetown Police Department who gave the opinion of a foot-and-a-half, but even at that, many of us are still digging out through several feet of drifted snow.

Elsewhere around the state…
• The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth ceased operations when their main transmission lines went out, with no damage to the facility, so safety wasn't an issue.
• At least two "blizzard babies" were born during the storm. One was in Loeminster, where State Police rescued a woman whose car had become disabled just as she went into labor. The other was a baby born under lights powered by generators when power went out at Nantucket Cottage Hospital, as it did all over the island.
• Scituate, on the shoreline between Plymouth and Boston, suffered severe flooding, as evidenced by an 80 foot section of seawall that washed away during the storm, and photos of countless cars under water there.

Please be careful, and pace yourself if you're shoveling out, which is a very strenuous activity. If you are not able to do your own shoveling, don't be afraid to call a neighbor for help. And if you've shoveled your own walk, you might continue a bit farther, and help out someone not as hardy. That's what life in Provincetown is all about.
Be sure to shovel snow away from your tail pipe if you are digging out your car, to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning when you fire it up. Exhaust vents from your home heating system may need to be dug out as well, for the same reason. And if you live near a fire hydrant, and are able, please shovel out the hydrant.
It will likely take a few days to plow all the streets, and police are asking folks who don't need to be outside to stay indoors, so town crews and others can plow streets and lots more easily and safely. If you are still without power or have another serious situation, you can call the Provincetown Police Department for help or advice.
If you have a story to tell about your blizzard experience, click the comments link at the bottom of this article to share your tale, or e-mail theyearrounder@wildglobe.com with stories and photos from the storm, and I'll happily post them.

A Beautiful Provincetown Night Gives Way to Arthur, Flooding PTown Streets

The humidity in the air on this lovely Provincetown night made a glowing ellipse around the crescent moon as it slowly descended behind the trees.
The following day was July 4th, which brought a series of torrential downpours throughout the afternoon and evening and on into the night as Hurricane Arthur, by then reduced to tropical storm status, walloped PTown on its way north along the eastern seaboard.
As the storm blew out of town on great gusts of wind early on the following morning, every last trace of humidity had been removed from the air. It had all been deposited in the Court Street Lake.

I got here ten minutes too late to get a photo of someone who was navigating their way down Court Street in a yellow rubber raft. Did anyone else get that picture?

Overnight, Arthur converted John Fay's garage into waterfront property.

Cars driving through 14 inches of water created a tide that washed fallen tree branches, twigs and other storm debris onto the "shoreline" along the sides of Court Street.

The lake lasted for two days as the overwhelmed storm drain system struggled with all that rainwater, along with more water being pumped toward the drain by neighbors on Winthrop Street, contending with several inches of water in their yards and basements.

Once again, Provincetown got lucky. As the strength of Arthur weakened we were spared from major damage or loss of life, and merely had to put up with a bit of inconvenience.

Provincetown History - Cookie's Tap

Cookie's Bar, 18" X 24" oil on panel, 1948, by Provincetown artist Charles Kaeselau.

I was having lunch at Provincetown's marvelous Soup Kitchen one blustery day last winter, enjoying a great meal and the splendid company of artists, historians, writers, actors, and other assorted Townies at my table. Each of us had been in Provincetown at least 25 years, many of us much longer, and stories of all sorts would pour out as various topics came up. One of those topics on that particular day was Cookie's Tap, a venerable Provincetown institution that got its start in 1927 as a neighborhood bar for Fishermen in the West End, at 133 Commercial Street.
In 1941 owner Frank "Friday" Cook tore down the aging structure and had Joseph Morris construct a new building with upscale touches like maple floors, leading local newspaper The Advocate to publish an article about this swanky new bar in their March 13th issue of that year. In the 1990s this neighborhood landmark housed David Gallerani's much-loved Italian restaurant. Most recently, Lorraine's restaurant had served a very popular menu of upscale Mexican recipes in this spot, and had held a weekly Trivia Night during the winter months, hearkening back to the days when this little joint was a real gathering place. We're hoping Lorraine Najar will cook for us again one day, somewhere in town, having sold the property last summer. We're eager, too, to see what the new owners will come up with for the next incarnation of this building.
As Cookie's Tap evolved into Cookie's Restaurant over the years, they became known for their Portuguese specialties, of course. A favorite meal there was the Vovo Cabral, made with cheese layered over flounder baked in tomatoes and wine. Friday's wife, Clara Cabral Cook, became known for her wonderful kale soup, as well, and worked in the place she loved into the 1980s, well into her own 80s, according to David W. Dunlap on his terrific website/blog/history archive Building Provincetown. Visit his site and read more about 133 Commercial Street and its occupants over the years, and enjoy photographs and other historic tidbits there as well.

Friday and Clara's sons began working at Cookie's in the middle 1940s, with Wilbur joining his folks in 1944, followed by Joe in 1946, after Friday had passed away. Various children of the two brothers also worked at Cookie's over the years, including Tina Cook Wheeler, who assembled a book of Cookie's recipes a couple of years ago. A nephew, Ralph Cook, Jr., recalls earning the tidy sum of $5 washing dishes there as a boy, when he was twelve years old.

This ad appeared in The Advocate in 1948,
the same year the painting above was done.

That afternoon at the Soup Kitchen the topic of hurricanes, nor'easters and other brutal storms that roll through Provincetown came up, and my tablemates talked about all the fishermen and others who gathered at Cookie's Tap to ride out these storms together, since no one would be going to work that day. No one, except, of course, the Cooks, who would always open up the bar when there was a big storm brewing, and put a pot of something or other on the stove to feed the souls who would inevitably turn up over the course of the day. Folks passed the time playing cards or checkers, telling stories, eating a little something, and, of course, having a few drinks, along with a few laughs, as the storms raged outside. Many a terrible gale was softened a bit by the pleasant camaraderie of friends who gathered to bolster their spirits and pass the time, waiting out the treacheries of Mother Nature together.

Provincetown native Mary-Jo Avellar worked at Cookie's Tap, and in her Provincetown Portuguese Cookbook, she tells of rabbits or other game the Cook brothers would bring in after an occasional early morning hunt, and a big pot of stew or a fricassee would be made for customers to enjoy "on the house" while having a drink or two.
The painting at the top of this page seems to have captured the natures of some of the "characters" who were frequent customers of this storied Provincetown hangout. It was painted in 1948 by Kare (Charles) Anton Kaeselau (say Kay-slo,) born in 1889, in Stockholm, Sweden. Kaeselau was a painter, lithographer and teacher who had studied in Chicago, Paris, London, and with Charles W. Hawthorne in Provincetown.
He worked here a good bit in the 20s and 30s, and apparently later on as well. He was a member of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and an exhibitor there, working in oils, watercolors and wood block prints, and is among the artists whose work is found in PAAM's permanent collection, though even his family doesn't know much about him or his work. But it's evident that he spent some time himself enjoying the hospitality at Cookie's.

PTown Rainbow Seen 'Round the World

A dark sky rolls in behind the Provincetown Public Library, sending folks scrambling for cover.
Ten minutes earlier there was blue sky beyond these buildings.

Where were you on June 23rd, when that otherwise quiet Saturday evening's dark skies suddenly emerged from the northwest, pushing misty wisps of impeccably white clouds across the town and out over the harbor with great, gusting winds, turning blue sky to near-darkness except for the erratic streaks of lightening ushering in thundering buckets of rain, all in under ten minutes...?

I was sitting on the bench at Pepe's Wharf waiting for a friend to join me for dinner when I heard people at the edge of the Johnson Street parking lot exclaiming over the clouds rising above the rooftops along Commercial Street. I pulled out my camera as I walked toward them to take a look, just in case it was something interesting, and was astonished to see enormous, perfectly white clouds drifting upward, morphing into other shapes so quickly it looked a bit like a time-lapsed film of clouds rolling up and over the town. As the sky turned that deep, dark blue-black color of twilight (nearly two hours early) and the sudden, cool wind  blew loose items up Commercial Street, shopkeepers rushed out to pull in displays from their front stoops, visitors scrambled toward the safety of their guesthouses, and Helen and Napi Van Dereck stood out in the middle of Freeman Street, cheering on the  storm.

From Johnson Street parking lot these remarkable, pure white, misty clouds
seemed to be rising from the ground somewhere beyond Bradford Street.

As the clouds rose over the rooftops they began shredding into delicate wisps,
so low above the buildings that I could imagine touching them from the rooftops.

In a moment, the last wisps were blown apart and the sky really began to darken.

Seconds later an enormous storm cloud emerged from the ever-darker sky,
being pushed over the town, toward the harbor, by a cold northwest wind. 

All of these photos were taken within moments. I thought about fishermen and whalers who sailed these waters 150 years ago, during the Golden Age of Sail in Provincetown, before there were any modern weather predicting devices. Many miles from the sight of land, with the ship's hold full of Codfish, a serious storm developing as quickly as this could easily have sent the ship and its crew to the bottom of he sea.

When I ducked up Freeman Street to shave a few steps off of my dash from Johnson Street to Alden Street, I found Napi and Helen there, standing arm in arm at the dogleg in the road and looking to the north, watching the gathering storm rolling down Standish Street toward them. They were unperturbed at the prospect of a drenching rain, rather rooting for the storm. Within a few more moments a torrent of rain began pounding down onto Provincetown and everyone who had been unable, or who had chosen not to, get out of the way.

A bit of lightening here and there seemed oddly out of proportion to the tremendous thunder claps that sounded as the storm rolled through, while the roar of the rain battering the town's rooftops gradually surpassed the fading sound of the thunder as the gusting wind blew the storm out over the harbor.

As quickly as it had materialized, the storm departed, leaving behind the most memorable rainbow many of us had ever seen, a double rainbow arching from one end of the harbor to the other. This would be a topic in most of the conversations taking place in town over the next several days. Cell phones and pocket cameras had snapped shots of this amazing sight and people were sharing them on the Internet within minutes. John Ventilato sent me the one below.

John Ventilato took this photo of the rainbow that followed the storm.

When the storm hit, Bobby Miller had been having dinner near enough to his studio above the Post Office that he could dash upstairs to grab his camera in time to run back down to shoot the rainbow from the beach behind the Post Office. He had a wide enough lens to capture the whole rainbow, from end to end. The photo he sent me is below, and has now been seen around the world on his Facebook page. I think that most of us experiencing the sudden darkening of the sky that evening, the abrupt change of temperature, the amazing sight of the clouds doing things that I'll wager none of us had ever seen before, gave us all a collective shiver of anticipation, as well as a bit of trepidation, as it donned on us that Mother Nature was about to do whatever she pleased, with absolutely no regard for our feelings about it. Bobby said that riding through that approaching darkness and then into the beauty and the light of that rainbow had been a transformative experience for him.

Bobby Miller's photo of the rainbow 

As the storm had begun to roll in, It turns out Tom Johnson was watching it just a few feet from me. He was sitting on the upper deck at Pepe's. His higher vantage point gave him some really dramatic shots of the storm rolling in over the rooftops. Go by the Tom Johnson Photo Gallery on the first floor of the Whaler's Wharf, at 237 Commercial Street, and ask if you can see them. At this writing he hadn't yet gotten them all printed up and framed. It's worth a special trip there just see his amazing shot of the rainbow, and when you see it, you'll want to put it on your wall at home, and send it to friends, too.
Tom's rainbow photo captured the most vibrant, gorgeous colors of any of the photos I've seen. It's phenomenal, and It's been selling like hotcakes since the moment he put it on the wall in his shop. Well done, Tom.
If anyone else has photos to share, let me know and I'll show them here.