It has made the cemetery, located roughly 200 yards from the canal, a popular locale for those interested in the paranormal. During his time caring for the grounds and its deceased inhabitants, Mr. Ellis said, he has reported eerie sensations—goose bumps, hair standing on the end of his arms, the smell of pungent cigar smoke and an intense pressure on his chest—that are indicative of a ghostly presence.
A different kind of horror is felt by those who travel across the canal in the summertime. While traffic backups may seem like a modern ordeal, Mr. Ellis said, they are not. “When they were building Camp Edwards in 1939, the bridges were so jammed from Wareham to [the base] they had to create a system of one-way traffic from 5 to 8 am over the bridge and then in evening it was one-way going back,” he said. “The traffic patterns and back-ups are nothing new to anyone. Outsiders get upset with it, but we live with it.”
While ghosts and traffic represent the downsides to the canal, Mr. Ellis still had high praise for the engineering marvel. “It draws a huge amount of tourists which our whole economy on Cape Cod is based on,” he said. “This is probably one of the greatest amenities you can have.”
Fellow Bourne resident Skip Barlow, president of the town’s historical society, agreed. As owner of Barlow’s Clam Shack across from the canal rest area in Bournedale, he sees firsthand the tourists who take advantage of “the biggest free recreation area in Southeastern Massachusetts.”
These are people who take to the canal to walk, rollerblade, bike, fish and sunbathe. “The canal is used year round by tourists and locals alike,” he said. “About three million people use it for recreational purposes annually… It’s kind of a neat place and it’s free and easily accessible.”
Not only is the canal a great place to people watch, he said, it is a prime spot for boating enthusiasts. “You can see almost any kind of boat go through there at any time of year,” Barlow said. “It is pretty cool if you like boats. I’m right out there checking it out because I really enjoy those things.”
Among the more prominent boaters to travel through the canal were Phil Donahue and his wife Marlo Thomas in the 1990’s. “I was shocked by the size of their boat,” Bob King, the co-owner of Café Chew in Sandwich, recalled. “He drove it by himself. It was just him and Marlo. I asked him, ‘You can handle this by yourself?’ and he said, ‘Oh yeah.’ It was huge.”
King and his husband and business partner Tobin Wirt were invited onto the yacht which had been tied up for the evening at the Sandwich Boat Basin, adjacent to the canal. Just a few hours earlier Donahue and Thomas had dined at the Bee-hive Tavern, a Sandwich eatery that King and Wirt owned from 1992 to 2004.
“After they had dinner of course they needed to get back to the boat and they asked if we could call them a taxi,” King said. “There were no taxis at the time so we offered to give them a ride. We gave them a nice tour of Sandwich… They enjoyed that. When we got to the boat they invited us on.”
King’s other vivid memory of the canal was from his childhood when his father, an avid fisherman, would “terrify us about falling into the canal and that it would swallow you up. We couldn’t even put our toe into the water. He was afraid of the current.”
Though illegal now, at one point taking a dip in the canal was commonplace, even after the Army Corps of Engineers took over control of the waterway in 1928. “We used to go swimming in it all the time,” said Wally Alden, who grew up in Sagamore and now lives in Buzzards Bay.
His connection to the canal extends to his father William Alden and his uncle Burton Alden who both worked on the construction of the Sagamore Bridge which opened to traffic in 1935.
As a child, he remembered days when his father would pile his family into his Buick and drive them up to the bank of the canal to watch the boats come by. From a purely practical point of view, he noted that the canal has been beneficial for boats by cutting off the travel time it takes to go around Cape Cod.
But to him, the canal is more than a utilitarian object. It is a place where he used to catch tautog, cod and flounder as a child. Now he passes on these family traditions to his 18 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren who visit from as far away as Florida and Texas. “We take them along the canal and they just love to sit there and watch the railroad bridge go up and down,” he said. “They are really fascinated by it.”
The public’s fascination with the canal extends far beyond Cape Cod. “Whenever we travel and wherever we go, we tell people we live in the town before the canal,” Wareham’s Claire Smith said. “I use it as a reference because people seem to know it wherever you go.”
She too was drawn to the popular landmark at a young age. On an occasional Sunday—when she and her older sister Patricia were supposed to be in church, the pair would drive down to the canal and watch the boats pass through. “We were sworn to secrecy,” Smith laughed. “We never told our mother we actually didn’t go to church.” What the siblings found was a peaceful serenity that is rarer to find now with the amount of traffic and number of visitors to the canal.
Still there is something captivating about this modern marvel. “You drive along it and you have these incredible views and just think about the history of those who had to dig it. It fascinates me,” Smith said. “We don’t see this type of construction today. Just stop and think about what they had to work with and look at what they accomplished. The canal is an incredible piece of history dug by hand.
By Christopher Kazarian
