As I write this, I am sitting in Provincetown. The sun has just come out after a hellacious 24-hour nor’easter, which dumped more snow here, where two inches is a huge storm, than I have often seen in Vermont, where they measure it in yards instead of inches. My wife just hacked a first-generation iPod so that she could load podcasts and listen to “Serial” while she runs. Tomorrow I will drive back to New London, where I will help dig the office out and start another week of lawyering.
I have occasionally written about the similarities between the men (they are mostly men) of the coastal fishery on Cape Cod and many of the lawyers I know at my landside home. The fishing business here has been in a slow decline for a generation because of the depletion of the ground fish stocks, high costs of equipment and fuel, and intense global competition. Incredibly complex state and federal regulations make it very difficult for a small operator to succeed. New market entrants from China and other countries drive prices down, and old ways of doing business are no longer viable.
