The brick measures roughly two inches by seven inches by threeand- a-half inches. Typical red, well-weathered and with a couple chunks taken out around it. It bears the stains of having been submerged in the sea at times, which is only right because of the location where I picked it up.

The flight from Port Stanley Airport was in a two-engine, eight-seater puddle jumper. From the capital of the Falklands, we skimmed around the eastern edge of the islands in the far South Atlantic and west across the treeless open country and rocky outcroppings from field and water.

Ever since arriving here a few days prior, our crew of Hit and Run History kept remarking how cinematic the landscape was. But that was from ground-level. Now, from a couple hundred feet up, we could grasp the immensity of the place. West Falkland is about the size of Rhode Island and has maybe 90 people. Fewer trees. More cattle. And tens of thousands of sheep, at least.

The journey to Saunders Island in the remote west of the Falklands took less than an hour, giving us the time to separate from the coziness of our experience back in Port Stanley.

We were able to witness the sort of treacherous waters that our subject had encountered two centuries hence.

Never having sailed these waters, John Kendrick led the Columbia Expedition - the first American voyage ‘round the world - here in February 1788. Having left Cape Verde a couple of months before, the ship Columbia and sloop Washingtonsought a respite before the treacherous round of Cape Horn. Port Egmont, on the eastern edge of Saunders Island, offered one of the finest harbors in the world according to British explorers.

Touching down on the grass strip on Saunders, we were met by two Land Rover Defenders. The Pole-Evans family owns the entirety of Saunders, which comprises about the same land mass as the city of Boston. They told us the regular population is six. With the addition of our crew of five, we nearly doubled the population.

Soon after getting settled into our cabin, David Pole-Evans, who has lived on the island all his life, showed up to offer a ride to Port Egmont. It was just over the hill from their settlement near Sealers Cove.

Within a couple hours of boarding our flight from Port Stanley, we were standing amidst the tumbledown ruins of Port Egmont. Although the Brits had established a settlement here - their first in the islands - in 1765, the Spanish had forced them to evacuate within a decade, and eventually demolished the place. But due to the natural protection of the topography and abundant fresh water, game birds and anti-scurvy greens, Port Egmont remained for decades a popular place for sealers and whalers from both England the U.S. to use on a seasonal basis.

In the early months of 1788, Kendrick, who grew up on the shores of Pleasant Bay, felt his way toward Port Egmont. Unfamiliar with the area, he overshot the entrance and instead ended up in Brett Harbor, on the backside of Saunders. No one was here.

Making the best of it, they took on the supplies from the countryside they desperately needed. Several of his officers took the chance to make the short trek overland to Port Egmont. We were walking literally in their footsteps.

Having thoroughly documented our time all over Saunders, ranging across to Brett Harbor and down to the natural dry dock where they would have landed their water casks, we were doing what historians need to do. Getting out in direct contact with our topic. If Kendrick was the first American here, we were the first to follow him here to tell his story.

In the Age of Information, one can easily view documents from libraries across the world, or sample photos of an area. But the smell and touch of the place, and the chance to talk with a man like David Pole-Evans right on the shores of Port Egmont, is of a completely higher order. We could see where the warehouse was right on the waterfront, the dock nearby where boats would have landed, and the spot where the tripots were set up for the grisly work of boiling down seal carcasses for oil. The shore, in fact, was littered with cobblestones and the remnants of bricks.

Surveying the area together, David mentioned the bricks here were not of the same dimension as British bricks. Those are flatter than those made in the U.S. It had been determined these bricks were from American ships. Knowing that the American whale and sealing fleet had originated mostly from New England ports like Nantucket and New Bedford, we realized yet again that our path had circled back to home.

This is just the kind of discovery that we feel honored to share with our series on WGBH. This kind of natural storytelling is in the blood of Cape Codders who for centuries, like John Kendrick, ranged across the world. We are happy that we have inspired a new generation as well in the China: Through My Eyes series which premiered a couple weeks back to great public acclaim.

Bringing back stories is one thing, however. Filming our discoveries brings the story of Columbia to a global audience. But before we left Port Egmont, I asked David if I could have one of the bricks. He owns the whole island, after all, and he agreed. The most intact example traveled back 8,000, via Santiago, Chile, and JFK, home to my bookshelf on Cape Cod.

It is possible we could find out where this brick was made, and we’re looking forward to sharing it with the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and the United States Merchant Marine Academy. This simple amalgam of mud, stones and sand has gone more places than most people have. It has an amazing story to share, and we’re looking forward to finding it out.

Read this and Andy’s other columns online at The Cape Cod Chronicle.

* * * * *

Hit and Run History is the centerpiece of WGBH’s History page.  Their forthcoming Falklands Ho! series is the third installment following the voyage following John Kendrick and the Columbia Expedition around  the world. Hit and Run History thanks LAN Airlines, Turismo Chile and Ocean State Job Lotfor helping make this possible.

Local Adventure-Travel Show leads on Kickstarter

Heading into this long weekend, we here at Hit and Run History thought we’d challenge our fans — especially those on the Cape — to help raise our profile on the online fundraising site Kickstarter.

After all, if you are working to follow the first American voyage ’round the world and you’re looking to head down to Cape Horn, you don’t turn down the offer of a South American cruise lineCruceros Australis to take you through the Straits of Magellan.  So we’re just looking to raise the funds to bring our crew down there.

It’s no accident that we received the first-ever Social Media Outreach Grant from the Massachusetts Humanities Foundation recently.  On Thursday, we went to work using Facebook and Twitter especially.

Now, thanks to the help of dozens and dozens of our fans, in just 48 hours we have doubled the amount of money pledged and tripled our number of backers.

And having just checked on Kickstarter’s “Boston Projects” page, you can see Hit and Run History is THE TOP FILM PROJECT IN BOSTON.

That’s right — your scrappy band of New Englanders is taking on the world and making a name for itself.

But like Captain John Kendrick and the rest of the crew of the Columbia Expedition, we still have a long way ahead of us.  So please, take a moment and pledge a buck.  Yes, just $1.00.

Help us keep the number of backers growing and push us to the top film project in the country.  That will take grassroots support.  We’ve proven this works, and we’re looking to get the attention of the larger underwriters.

Give us a look…

On Tuesday night, I was at the New York Yacht Club when the Argentine Consul made sure to say goodbye to me on his way out.

That’s a hell of a revelation. How did a simple clammdigger from the Common Flat off Monomoy Island get here?

It was a 5:15 AM wakeup, a two-hour drive to Providence, the 4-hour express bus ride into Manhattan, and a short walk over. That’s literally how I did it. And it would be followed by the 10 PM ride out of the city, getting home at 3 AM.

That’s the sort of determination it has taken over the past three years to get Hit and Run History noticed. To get us to in the door at WGBH. To get over 1,500 fans worldwide. To get me invited to a reception for Cruceros Australis, the South American cruise line that is offering to take us from Patagonia to Cape Horn.

And to end up talking with the Argentine Consul for New York about what the American sailors of the Columbia found in the Falklands. “Malvinas” he corrected me, most diplomatically. But he wanted to know more about these tough Yankee sailors like John Kendrick who attempted the near suicidal rounding of Cape Horn.

It’s our third chapter of our story. In following the Columbia Expedition around the world, every other location will be relatively easy: Vancouver, Hawaii, China and Japan. But just try to find a flight to the Falklands. Once a week, and pretty expensive at that.

Then throw in the End of the Earth - Cape Horn - and Robinson Crusoe Island off Chile. Now multiply by the number of crew we need to do this. 3, 4 or best at 5.

We can do this. We can get to all these places. We can get on the ship before season ends and the offer is gone.

We can show the world, and the networks, what a scrappy band from the coast of New England can do. Just like our story.

But we’ve just got to get your help. And we need it right away.

As a fan, you’ve probably noticed our posts about our Kickstarter campaign. For travel and production, we only need $19,500. That’s peanuts compared to most hour-long episodes of a travel, history or reality show.

But my experience as a commercial fisherman has taught me that you can make up for a lot with hard work, tenacity and creativity. And the tides wait for no one. Get out, get what you need, and move on.

Now we have a chance to show the angel investors and talent scouts who pay attention to Kickstarter that we have real support. Sure, it would be great if every one of our fans went to our page and pledged $25 (which also gets you a digital download of the film when complete).

If that happened we’d surpass our goal easily. Even $10 by every fan would put us within striking distance.

But instead, I am writing to ask you today to go to our site and pledge $1. Just one dollar.

It’ll get us nowhere near our goal. But if we get 500 pledges over this weekend - from just one out of every three of our FB fans — we will zoom up into the list of most popular projects on Kickstarter.

And then the right people will notice.

So please, go to http://kck.st/hbmoKk, click on “Back this project” and pledge a buck.

If you get the chance, please, forward this to your friends ask them to do the same.

I have been very blessed to have so many talented and hardworking people to work with on Hit and Run History. We’ll be stopped dead in our tracks if we can’t tell this part of the story - the most dramatic and challenging chapter.

Asking for this doesn’t come easy. We’d rather just share our stories with you. All we’re asking for here is the equivalent of a cold drink on this long, tough road. You’d do that, right?

Many thanks,

Andy Buckley

“It’s OK to look.” That was the slogan of Match.com, the online dating site. A little creepy, I thought when I first saw their ads on TV. You know, it’s not OK for some people to look. Like if you’re married. Or in prison. But the ad didn’t discriminate. Clearly, the idea was if they could get people to look, they might find someone attractive enough to prompt an initial membership – paid by credit card set on auto-renew.

Last summer, when Hurricane Bill was approaching on through, Matt Griffin and I headed out to see if we could cover the upcoming story. The story in this case being the pre-storm hype. That and all the news trucks camped out in the half-hour parking spaces in front of the lighthouse and none sporting a single orange ticket on their windshield of a violation for overstaying the half-hour limit. Never mind the network camera equipment set up on the same beach that the local yoga class has to pay hundreds of dollars for a permit to use.

The lesson being, we supposed, that you can do whatever you want in the New Chatham as long as you are a) from out of town, and b) famous.

Poor locals are expected to follow the rules and pay. A perverse reverse logic.

Fittingly, the media machine that seems to have become much too familiar with Chatham during the summer, and the non-stories that can be inflated in order to rationalize a long weekend here (sharks, storms, a house painted green), was duly skewered in our film on the pre-storm frenzy. Likewise, when Bill failed to materialize as any real threat because, as predicted, it was 300 miles offshore, we went out again the next morning. Assessing “storm damage” for this installment, we were able to interview CNN personnel from New York about, well, the whole bunch of nothing they came here to cover.

Then they were back the next weekend for Tropical Depression Danny. That turned out to be just a whole lot of rain. From what I could tell, the worst it did was to deposit in my skiff a couple inches of rain and, somehow, a large rotting horseshoe crab. For the media, I’m sure the breakfast brunch at Chatham Bars Inn was impeccable as always. That’s a commitment to the news.

But with such a low opinion of the media and those who believe them, I felt it was only a matter of time before they would be, at long last, proven correct. This broken clock had to be right at least twice a day. And so I came to wonder if that would be Earl.

This wasn’t because of anything I saw on television or observed locally. Rather, it was far from the coast, at over 6,000 feet above sea level in northern New England. For our end of the summer trek, like last summer, Sofie and I drove to the top of Mount Washington. We timed it just right, as the highs in the surrounding area were forecast for the mid-90s. The day before the observatory at the summit was reporting 54 degrees and gusts of 76 mph. I was wondering if the narrow, windy road, free of guard rails or shoulders with drops down sheer cliffs, would be closed. No.

It was a brilliant day, with temperatures in the 60s. Gusts were up to 50 mph. We took a hike 1,200 feet down to the Lake of the Clouds. The whole time we remained above the tree line.

Following our way back down, we made the necessary stop at Dairy Queen, then continued our cross-country journey to the coast, ending up in Freeport for some lastminute back-to-school shopping. Passing through Naples, Maine, I saw an LED sign out front of the fire station with “101 F” in glowing red. I assume it did not mean one hundred and one feet.

Record high temperatures down belowand with hurricane-force winds combined with sunny, mild temps at the nexus of four weather systems high above gave me pause. Perhaps, yes, this time this might just be the storm we’ve been looking for.

The next day, following our day at Water Country, I stopped at the Wal-Mart in Portsmouth, N.H. to pick up several packs of D batteries. Not so much because I thought I would need them, but because I had been informed that they were now non-existent in Chatham. I imagined myself in a bulky sweatshirt, hood up and skulking darkened street corners while people slowed down their cars and ask, “Hey man, you know where we can get some D?”

After all, those fall dresses from LL Bean and Peanut Buster Parfaits weren’t going to pay for themselves.

Once home, we moved furniture off the deck and waited for the rain to start. It was forecast for noon. I felt lucky that I was able to squeeze in a run up to Sofie’s pediatrician in Wellfleet. On the way back, the rain began, and followed us down to Orleans. Once in Harwich, it stopped. Back in Chatham, it was almost sunny. But oppressively humid. I considered for a moment that my last column about a rain shadow surrounding Chatham might not be as far off as I had thought. But I saw the radar. Something big coming.

Yeah. The rain here finally hit at 8 p.m. Yes, it was heavy. But we still didn’t get as much as Yarmouth. And the wind was barely more than a breeze for most of the afternoon. Although I read in the Boston Globe of “a deafening wind” down at the Chatham Lighthouse, I can report that a mile away on the Oyster Pond the wind was not audible from inside our home. That is pretty unusual for any windy day.

So, having partially succumbed to the belief that this could be a real hurricane, I looked back at the real weather indicators. We were on the weak side of the storm. It was a Category 3 off North Carolina, and as it moved north it was likely to be a Category 1 by the time it got here. The barometer (remember that, National Weather Service?) was not dropping precipitously.

The “Better Safe Than Sorry” crowd really needs to take it on the chin this time. Are we to go on alert for any level of risk? Well, crying “storm” one too many times undercuts credibility. We want the public to listen when the threat truly is serious and credible. And saying it is hard to predict these sorts of things when we can send probes to Mars and stuff powerful handheld computers into tiny little phones strains credulity. It seems that as the ability to accurately predict weather increases, so does the need to be frighten Americans with the greatest extremes of it. So it would be refreshing to use our best intelligence in making smart choices next time a hurricane or snowstorm heads our way. Perhaps weather forecasters and public officials could set an example by noting the words of Edward R. Murrow: “We are not descended from fearful men.”

In the mean time, if your flashlight’s batteries are dead I’ve got a nice supply of high-grade Copper Top.

This summer, as we’ve done for the past couple years, we’ll take the small boat with the flaking paint job and semi-reliable outboard motor out the Oyster Pond, down the river, around the corner of Stage Harbor and into Nantucket Sound. Hugging the coast of Morris Island, we’ll head east along the tight channel and eventually cross over toward the northwest corner of North Monomoy Island.

Approaching the shallows - the flooded expanse that is the Common Flat running well west from Monomoy into the Sound — we’ll cut the engine (assuming it is still running) far from the sand bars that expose themselves for hours during low tide. The clear, clean water around us will be maybe two feet deep. We will be far from any land that is reliably dry, yet the depth of the water for hundreds of yards will be nothing more than up to my knees.

The anchor dropped, we’ll settle into a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chips, washed down with pink lemonade, and juicy red plums for dessert. Then it will be into the water, donning the masks and flippers, and armed with dip nets for some serious snorkeling.

This discovery was made when I beached the boat on the edge of the flats, and had gone to test the area with my clam hoe. Sofie had never been clamming before, so it seemed this hot and sunny July day was a prime opportunity. What I didn’t expect to find was nothing. There were just no siphon holes at all in an area where I had always been able to find some clams. We walked up and down the edge of the beach, expanded immensely by the dropping tide, and found no clams, no holes, and of course, no clam diggers.

Pushing the boat off the shore, wading back towards the channel, I was reassessing our plans when something very strong and sharp clamped on my toe. I nearly jumped straight up into the boat. It was a sand crab, just below the surface, unhappy with my intrusion. I donned my pair of black neoprene scuba boots, and maneuvered the boat along the south edge of the channel and into the acres of water that is never quite exposed, nor never quite deep enough to take a boat. We tethered our inner tubes to the boat and floated on the surface, face down with our new masks and snorkels.

Every once in a while, we would see a crab skitter by, and I’d grab my basket rake and pull it up into a bucket. With a little water to rest it, the crab would receive a name and probably a serenade from Sofie while back on the boat. (They are too small to eat, really.) Then it would be returned to the sea, and we’d set off on search of some other prize.

It would be easy to conclude the bounty of clams that were once here have been decimated by sand crabs. It is probably no more their fault than any clammer using a simple wooden-handled rake. But clams are cyclical. Here today, gone tomorrow…here again. Currents change, which affects the flow of nutrients. With South Beach connected to Monomoy, the Atlantic doesn’t wash in here as it once did. Depths of this soft sand change.

The area just north of here, between the east coast of Morris Island and the west shore of South Beach, is becoming more sheltered, and has an environment more conducive to scallops and quahogs. So this is not exactly bad news.

This all brings to mind, however, the ongoing struggle with the federal government regarding the continuing right of Chatham commercial shellfishermen to harvest clams from the flats surrounding Monomoy Island. So much effort and money has been spent on making a case to the policy makers in Washington, and yet the same issues face us, as unresolved as ever. The feds feel restrained by federal law, the politicians are afraid of national environmental groups, and those groups oppose based on principle.

As a selectman, I suggested perhaps, as the town of Chatham builds it case based upon the science and the unique history of shellfishing on Monomoy, that we initiate dialogue with the individual members of the organizations that were reportedly threatening all sort of actions should commercial shellfishing be allowed to continue here. We had heard from our elected representatives and legal counsel that this was a bad idea. No explanation, but this was the “let the process work itself out” argument.

Of course, these same people giving this advice were the one who stood to benefit from acting as intermediaries with, as they put it, “the bird people.” As if they were a bogeyman. Not enough grains of salt were taken with their counsel, then. Politicians will tend to do the thing that gets them the most attention with the least amount of courage. Lawyers will tend to use up every dollar of a retainer that is advanced.

To be honest, I can no more fault them for their nature any more than a crab pinching my toe in the sand as I walk by. The crabs are neither the problem nor the solution. They have become a distraction. If we are serious about fixing this ongoing concern, then we need to start talking to the people with whom we differ, and find how wide the distance really is between our positions on this one area we care for.

“They keep feeling like long weekends,” Sofie said this Monday morning as she picked up her backpack and headed out the door.  “Why?”

I remember the first time she uttered the dreaded three-letter word.  It was my birthday a few years back, and she was just getting into her evening bubble bath.  It started off  as several different questions, “Wha-who-howwwwwwwWHY?”  This truly was the death knell for the last shreds of my parental sanity.

On the other hand, Monday morning’s WHY was definitely worth examining.  The previous weekend we had started off with baseball practice, a bike ride, then heading to Hyannis for our long-delayed digital television purchase, some indulgent investigation of our new HD channels, then the next day’s riding for the Pan Mass Challenge in the Brewster in Bloom Parade, a late lunch at Friendly’s, some helping in her neighbor’s garden, and finally watching a movie on that new HDTV.

Her assessment the next morning was that it felt like a five-day weekend.  And this morning, her aforesaid observation, and wondering about that.

I replied, “Well, maybe with the nicer weather, we can do so much more.”  Might be that with my seven-year-old Barbie Tomboy now passing four feet in height, her world of possible activities is growing as fast as our well-watered yard.

Last week I introduced the concept of “Time flies when you’re having fun.”  I’ll hold off for now on the related idea, “Summer is why we suffer through nine months of winter here.”

When I returned from Germany with my baby girl, alone, in 2004, it was with the desire to have her grow up much as I had.  In a safe small town near the water, surrounded by a large extended family.   And while she’s had a fairly active childhood, with summer rec programs, soccer, skating, tennis, South Beach campouts, and all the rest, I think there’s a certain shift in consciousness that comes about this age following first grade.

Now proficient in reading and math, she not only understands the concept of putting money into her savings account – she can make a sign for the much-anticipated cash cow of a lemonade stand.  She’s started writing her own stories, which leads to a desire to explore.  And unlike when she was younger, she has a greater physical ability to explore in relative safely.  I don’t have to keep an eye on her 100 percent of the time, although I am definitely the preferred playtime companion.  Still.

In February, when we had to take three different flights to get to Munich, I got a preview of this new level of confidence.  She was frequently ahead of me with her carry-on, as we navigated from one side of a large airport to another.  She could read the signs for the terminal or gates, and in reading the clocks be able to tell how much time we had to get there.  The concept of currency exchange still was tough, but then again I’ve traveled with a few adults who after a week were still struggling.

So if this is how we are heading into summer, I can only imagine what I will have on my hands by the end. By Labor Day, I am probably going to be looking back at countless skinned knees, bug bites, bruises, cuts from stepping on shells or sea glass, burns from getting too close to the grill or campfire even though I said stay well away, near-misses with oblivious drivers, sugar high crashes, episodes of getting separated in large crowds, jellyfish stings, waterlogging, stepping in God-knows-what and tracking it in the house, ice-cold garden hose rinse-offs after the beach, slips over the side of the boat or canoe, grumpy days from “sleeping” out in the tent the night before and not getting any rest, bugs eaten while berry picking, rashes from experimentation with poison ivy resistance, a few cat scratches, two bee stings, and at least one random dog bite.

That is, if we are lucky.  Given that she will likely survive intact, the greatest challenge she may face is remembering to regularly write at least some of it down.  This may be the year of the summer journal — to remember why we’re here.