The Boston Globe has run a series of articles on the Gloucester quarries, carved-out rock filled with fresh water in the seaside town north of Boston. The article dubs the Gloucester quarries a "local secret" revealed to the world through the internet. It wasn't much of a secret when I was a kid; and I wasn't much of a local; and I had never heard of the internet. When the mercury rose above 85, I would occasionally make the trek north to the quarries. This mainly happened in my junior and senior years of high school, i.e., when I had friends who drove cars. The cliff featured in a picture on the Globe's site is one I have jumped off many times--never head first. I recall one unfortunate girl making the leap with her arms spread. She emerged from the water with bruises from wrist to shoulder. Sometimes more perilous than the 40-foot leap was the barefoot climb back up. The gist of the article is that out-of-towners have ruined the quarries for the locals. Technology, the Globe quoted one man, "gave all the people from out of town a chance to ruin it. The quarries used to be clean and safe. Now parents don't want their kids there because of the chance of violence or legal issues caused by the tourists." And "there is a lot more litter." The quarries I leaped into twenty or so years ago featured an oversized van, presumably helped off the cliff somehow by troubled teenagers, deep underwater that was clearly visable to swimmers. Swimming while drinking was practically obligatory. The place was littered with beer bottles and cans. Occasionally, there were fistfights. These things happen in unpoliced areas deep in the woods. That they happen now is a pleasent throwback to a more anarchic era when teenagers lived rather than lived vicariously through reality television and social networking. Despite protestations that the Gloucester pits have gone to the pits, it is clear that the quarries have not changed much. Society, on the other hand, has changed quite a bit.

I was a member of the Quincy Quarry club in the days when nobody gave a $hite if you did a nosedive into a 57' Chevy that was dumped near the bottom.

Drinking, fighting, the exchange of certain bodily fluids - it all happened there without a parent or cop in sight.

Ah, I long for the days when the nanny state mentality wasn't prevalent and political correctness did not rule.

Pardon me, Dan, but I noticed that the "archives" section of your blog isn't working. Is this a new change for the site?

Computers have minds of their own, Matt. Sorry. I'm not exactly sure how it happened. I will try to fix it. If you know the name of a post, you can Google it. The old posts are still there, it's just that without the "archive" section they're harder to get to.