On Christmas Day, two presents had been left unopened until 1 p.m. Sofie brought it out for all her extended family to see. She already had quite a haul. Skates from Santa. A Zhu-Zhu pet from her grandmother. A bracelet from her cousin. And lots of clothes.

The note on the smaller one said “Open me first!” She deserves a lot of credit for remembering exactly at the appointed time to get both presents and then thoughtfully proceed as per instructions. Inside the small box was something fairly familiar: her passport.

Now, for background, you have to know my daughter was born in Germany, and lived her first year there. She’s visited her Austrian grandparents many times over there. Subsequently, Sofie has had two passports – her first issued under the auspices of the US Department of Defense, and her second from the State Department, like most of us.

Her more recent one has stamps all over it. Belgium. Germany. Canada. The Netherlands. She’s crossed the Atlantic more than most people ever will in their whole lives. Getting on a plane for her is like getting on a bus for other kids.

“Open me Second!” read the other present, being a little flatter and larger. It also had some math clues: “What is 6 times 7? Now add one. After you find that, what is 2 times 3?”

Unwrapping the package, she found a child’s picture atlas of the world. That made her happy enough, to be sure. One of her favorite place mats at the dinner table is a map of the world, and it prompts all sorts of questions. Where have you been? What do they speak in India? What do they eat in Uruguay?

Times like that, I am glad I can pull out my laptop so we can go about finding the answers.

Six times seven, plus one, after a little figuring, was 43, and that was definitely a page number. And she opened to the spread on China. “Two times three is easy, Papa!” she said, and scanned the page for the number six. The entry on the page was for Hong Kong.

For the last two years, Sofie has been asking me when she could go to China. Or Hawaii. I told her it was probably one or the other. The questions started before we went to Disney World, but kicked into high gear when she learned that, having hit Orlando for five days, upon completion it had now fallen down to the bottom of the list. There were other places to see in the world.

“Like China,” she noted. Right, I said. But, I added, she’d have to be a little older, a little more mature. Eight was the age I picked. That also gave me time to save up the money.

The first and only time I was in China was in 1998. It was the last few days of a 27-day odyssey through Southeast Asia, looking for the wreck of Captain John Kendrick’s Lady Washington. I had flown from Manila into Guangzhou with a 48-hour visa. After a night at the Sun-Yat Sen University, I was squired around in the by grad student Zhou Xiang, hopping sampans to visit a 200-year-old cemetery for Westerners located on an island controlled by the Chinese military.Then it was into a taxi for a breakneck 90-minute taxi ride to an industrial park on the far outskirts of the city where the new catamaran would whisk me in a few hours down to Hong Kong. Coupled with a few nights in nearby Macao, the place left quite an impression.

Since then I’ve been able to remain in touch with Zhou Xiang. While she was studying in Sweden, she brought her husband through Wiesbaden when I was living there. Two years later, while doing post-doctoral work at Harvard, she once looked after our prized corgi, and became friends with a one year-old Sofie.

So in December, having won a grant from Mass. Humanities to promote our documentary series following the Columbia Expedition, I received an e-mail notification. The Hong Kong International Film Festival deadline for submissions was fast approaching. It would be held the end of March and early April. Sofie’s eighth birthday falls within that timeframe. And application fees for film festivals falls within the purview of the grant (if not the travel itself).

Fingers crossed, we applied online within hours of the deadline. While it is a roll of the dice, there are definitely business reasons to go regardless of being selected or not. Our story took place partly in China, so it certainly should be of interest there.

But if I were to go, it would have to be in the company of this four-foot-high seasoned world traveler. She loves potstickers, wants the next language she learns to be Chinese, and still has empty pages in her passport.

This is quite a time to return to China. There is a steady drumbeat of news stories contrasting their surging economy with our own. Their move from a manufacturer of cheap toys toward a 21st century model of next-generation green technology, and their ability to jumpstart their economy through staggering investments in infrastructure, really makes us look like we’re squabbling over the placement of deck chairs on the Titanic.

I’m curious to see the changes that have occurred there during a time marked roughly since Sofie’s birth. Such as that out-of-the-way ferry terminal which now stands at the heart of a new Guangzhou. It would be as if downtown Boston moved to Foxboro.

This sort of thing nags at me, and makes me wonder if as Americans, we’ve forgotten how to build things. Or simply lost the will.Besides, there’s a Disney World in Hong Kong, a day trip to which will make a great birthday present. And I happily get to see that immediately fall to the bottom of a very long list again.

It had almost become a habit. The October rush. For two years running, we would rush to get application materials in to various local cultural councils. These were for grants to support production and screenings of another episode of our documentary series, “Hit and Run History: The Columbia Expedition.”

But this year was different.

This year, your local band of historians and filmmakers decided to let someone else get a turn. I cannot say enough about this program.

Every year, local cultural councils, supported in large part by disbursements by the Commonwealth’s Massachusetts Cultural Council, receive applications from local individuals and institutions for community based arts and humanities projects. In my many discussions with MCC staff, I learned that there are two key components.

One is there must be an opportunity for the public in the granting community to access the project. This is not to commission a painting that will then hang on the wall of someone’s private library. The other part is, naturally, that the money is to cultivate the grassroots. It is to nurture and encourage people within their community to pursue their talents.

Two years ago, in this very column, I discussed our own efforts to take an obscure chapter of local history and bring it to the world. Armed with only a MacBook Pro, video equipment borrowed from the Cape Cod Community Media Center (with the barest idea of how to use it), and my decade and a half of research and writing on John Kendrick and the Columbia Expedition, Matt Griffin and I probably didn’t look like the most promising candidates.

On that first day of production on a warm, sunny September day, our audio with Mary Malloy, PhD of the Sea Education Association was coming in much too strong. Next, with Thornton Gibbs of Wareham who had led countless tours of Captain Kendrick’s house, the sound was just right. Wrapping the day up with Ben Dunham, former chair of the Wareham Historical Society, the playback volume was so low that we had trouble making out what he was saying.

No wonder that of the 10 local cultural councils we applied to in the first year, only three funded us. This despite our filming in their towns, talking with local historians and commitments to not only hold screenings, but to broadcast to tens of thousands on the local access channel. More often than not, the rejection cited our lack of experience in filmmaking. We realized however, that these were paper rejections. They were based on resumes, not on the importance of the story, work samples, or an understanding of what filmmaking has become. So we set out to prove those three towns right, and the other seven wrong.

The following spring, as promised, we began screening our first installment. Not only in the towns that funded us (Marshfield, Wareham and Chatham) but in the ones that didn’t (Orleans, Harwich, Edgartown, to name a few). We did so because we felt this was an important local piece of local history, and the people of that town shouldn’t miss out just because their local cultural council didn’t believe we could pull this off. And thank God we did.

The original uncut interview with Thornton Gibbs, in his 90s, ran over 40 minutes. He passed away a couple months after we spoke. Captured on tape was his complete account of a tour through the last home John Kendrick knew on this side of the continent.

With our second episode, we were able to fulfill the promise of the first, take that seed money and actually follow Kendrick across the Atlantic to Cape Verde. And using that same Yankee ingenuity, when adversity struck in the form of an epidemic of dengue fever there, we were able to turn the situation around by bringing an aid worker with several boxes of relief supplies to a hospital there. In so doing, we added a new element of journalism when our editor Alex Schwantner shot, edited and uploaded a video of our visit to the overcrowded hospital. Not only were we making a good film, we were doing good. That just would not have happened without that grant money to start us off.

And following on the heels of that, with 10 more cultural council grants the second year, we held the screenings and made the broadcasts to hundreds of thousands in Eastern Massachusetts that led us to our current web series on WGBH today. We can now use the platform of this PBS-powerhouse to fundraise for Hit and Run History’s continuing journey on Kendrick’s seven-year track — as well as plenty of more information on all the supporting players.

This is a local cultural council success story. We hope you show the same foresight for the round of promising, untested applicants whose requests are currently before you. You gave us a hand up to the next level, which exactly how the process is supposed to work. And we Gumshoe Historians, we scrappy band of intrepid Cape Codders, thank you.

Hit and Run History is now the centerpiece of WGBH’s history site, wgbh.org/history.

“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.

I’ve already written about the scheme of the regional school with Harwich, and how simply bigger is only, well, bigger. Not better. Still, money has been spent on this because the state is pushing all districts to try regionalization, and Harwich needs a new high school. At this upcoming annual town meeting, Chatham voters will be asked to fund yet another $10,000 study to evaluate the benefits and costs of regionalization.

Really?

That amount sticks in my head because it is the same that the Women of Fishing Families were shorted this year for running the Chatham Maritime Festival.

It especially sticks in my head because I don’t think anyone has any doubt but that said “study” on regionalization will be anything but favorable. After all, Harwich (who wants to regionalize with Chatham) is paying half the cost, and the report is mandated by the state (who wants the same). Under the circumstances, it is highly unlikely that the conclusions will be little more than tired old “glass is half-full” assumptions and one-size-fits-all arguments that have been employed in one suburb after the other.

And still, when completed, this study will be used as a gong by pro-regionalization supporters. Before they have even begun, they are citing Peter “I-Never-Met-A-Town-That-Wouldn’t-Be-Better-Off-Regionalized” Francese. Of course, Mr. Francese is a demographer, not an educator. Just last week in a New Hampshire newspaper he predicted Americans would be so angry at the federal government that they would throw out their census forms. Francese had no data to back this up. Instead, he relied upon listening to talk radio.

So this is the guy we’re relying on to make decisions about the future of education.

Really?

In our case, however, Francese looks at the entire Cape and predicts a dwindling school population, coupled with older voter unwillingness to fund the schools. What he doesn’t factor in, specifically for Chatham, is that we steal students from other systems through school choice. We do that because we are small. There’s a cachet to Chatham, too, no doubt. But if we regionalize, we lose that.

In return we’re supposed to get state-of-the-art computer labs.

Really?

We’re supposed to get AP courses.

For all students? No. Just those who qualify. For the classes we can afford to hire a teacher for.

And more sports. Like hockey? The game that we already play with Harwich and the school committee tried to cut funding for recently?

Or maybe football. But hockey and football seasons overlap, and you might be talking some of the same kids then, so you’ll end up with, what, an opportunity for a handful of players from Chatham.

OK, but there is a downside. I can think of several. The first, as I’ve written before, is the way a regional school system’s budget would be presented to Chatham Town Meeting for an up or down vote. If it is amended, there will be a great wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth as it must then be approved by the voters of Harwich.

That shouldn’t be a problem. I can hear that familiar argument trotted out at Chatham Town Meeting: “We have to pass this or else we’ll have to start from scratch.” Democracy in action.

But here’s an even more concrete argument: I have a daughter. Sofie. She’s seven. She’s in first grade. The bus doesn’t come down our road. When she goes to middle school in a few years, she’ll ride her bike a mile and a half. It will take 10 minutes. Or she could walk. Or, in a pinch, I could drive her. That will take less than five minutes.

Same with picking her up.

In Chatham, even the house furthest from the middle school and high school is only five miles away. On the other hand, if the schools were regionalized, with either the middle or high school in Harwich, Sofie is looking at a seven-mile drive. Walking is out. Biking, for most of the year, is out. Other students in Chatham will be looking at up to a 10-mile bus ride. And that’s a straight line - which no bus does. How early are they going to have to get up?

Worse, with so many kids having after school activities, how many times a week am I going to have to go drive all the way into Harwich Center to pick her up? And if she forgets something at home, that’s me having to lose the better part of an hour during a workday on that roundtrip.

And we all know how much kids with drivers licenses love to continue to take the bus. So we’re looking at a convoy, twice a day, of carloads of Chatham teenagers on the roads between Chatham and Harwich.

We cancelled school this winter because of a threat of snow that never materialized. How about real ice- and snow-covered streets? Are they suddenly going to be safer for our kids to drive to school on just because they lead to a regional high school?

Not really. No.

Chatham has a good school system, with good test scores, small class sizes and strong local control. Yet we are being asked to throw good money at a study that says it can get even better if we get hitched with Harwich.

Really?