My Blah Blah Blog

It started as an innocent canoeing trip, in the final days of our family vacation, in a quiet bay in Cape Cod. Then it turned into a Steven Spielberg movie.

When I first saw the photo, I thought it was a hoax, that my niece Lily had strapped on a creative bathing cap for the purpose of scaring the bejeezus out of her father and her boyfriend.

But Lily was safely off-camera and that fin was attached to a shark that was a good deal larger than my niece. Even my brother-in-law John, with all his skill as a character actor, could not have summoned that facial expression for a phony fish.

The Cape this summer has been especially sharky. At the beaches there are warning signs, something I’ve never seen in all the years we’ve been there. The lifeguards answer our shark questions in the bored monotone that comes from repetition. “No, the great white doesn’t like the taste of humans. Yes, they will spit you out after sampling a limb.”

And when my daughter thought she saw the fin of a great white, they yawned at what must have been the twentieth “sighting” that day.

But should you find yourself in Wellfleet or Brewster or Chatham in the near future, make a note-to-self. If you see a grey fin in the water, it might not be your pesky, fun-loving cousin, pranking it up. It’s entirely possible that you’re gonna need a bigger boat.