Rhody Awards

Meandering among the throngs yesterday during an Indian Summer excursion along the East Bay Bike Path, watching snakes slither sideways to the grassy margins and butterflies hitching rides on colorful backpacks, I paused every now and then to do a little browsing at the Barrington Preservation Society’s historical markers. These story kiosks, spread out through the Barrington stretch of bike path, are a relatively recent addition to the recreational route.

Through text and old photographs, the markers document places of local interest. Like Haines Park, the former property of a physician who bought the land because he believed in the virtue of fresh air and outdoor recreation, who spent one summer living there before dying of asthma. One of the oldest state parks in Rhode Island, Haines became a great escape for East Bay residents, a place for hiking, picnicking, baseball, bocce and horseshoes. A wooden footbridge (destroyed by the 1938 Hurricane) connected it to Crescent Park, the East Bay’s lesser-known cousin to Rocky Point, where a mammoth wooden roller coaster stood until 1961. Some of the stone fireplaces, constructed by masons as part of President Roosevelt’s WPA initiative, remain in use.

A short walk away tells the story of Bay Spring, where my neighborhood is located. It began as a summer tent colony (like the tourist camp on Cronin’s Bathing Beach at Point Judith or the tent community that developed at Roy Carpenter’s Beach in Matunuck) and turned into the town’s industrial center. One factory churned out the country’s largest supply of imitation leather, mostly for the auto industry, while the lace factory, which is now an assisted living facility, supplied the world with veils, curtains and other lace works. My neighborhood also was one of Rhode Island’s most productive oyster harvesting locations – at one time providing enough business for three thriving oyster shacks. The Bay Spring Yacht Club building (also destroyed by the 1938 Hurricane) stood at what is now Lavin’s Marina, hosting summer nights of cards and pool on its second floor, music and dancing on the third.

The walk went on that way, like a slow-moving View-Master. The next stop was Drownville (the original name for West Barrington), home to farms and a train station depot on tracks that once stretched from Providence to Bristol. Once again, the 1938 Hurricane – which did more to change the face of Rhode Island than anything since the Wisconsin Glacier retreated – left its mark, forcing the abandonment of passenger rail service, although freight still traveled the tracks until 1976.

Then onto Little Echo, an ice pond created from a clay pit, where icemen stored their winter haul in a local ice house and served the surrounding neighborhoods until the age of electricity and refrigeration. Residents would put large signs in their windows with the numbers 25, 50, 75 or 100, indicating how many pounds of ice they needed, and the icemen cameth. No questions asked. The pond now hosts bullfrogs and dragonflies, mute swans and snapping turtles the size of flying saucers.

Brickyard Pond, the next stop, now a tranquil place for fishing, kayaking and birding, was once the site of a huge clay works, where Barrington bricks were made. It is estimated that more than 100 buildings in downtown Providence and on the East Side were built with Barrington bricks. (I still have one of the bricks, courtesy of my friend Tom, who gathered it from the rubble of the late, lamented West Barrington Elementary School while I was living in New Hampshire.)

The story kiosks paint a picture of past vibrancy, connecting the dots. Trains came up and down what is now bike path, carrying loads of bricks to Providence, and fabrics from the Bay Spring factories, and ice packed in sawdust keeping oysters alive for delivery to the shore dinner hall at Crescent Park and restaurants in Providence, Boston and beyond. Even amid the Spandex and bicycles carrying GPS navigation systems and little trailers containing Pomeranians, the old ghosts come to life in these historical markers, which on Friday will be honored, most deservedly, at the R.I. Preservation Celebration with their own Rhody Award.

Chosen by Preserve Rhode Island and the R.I. Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission from nominations by the public, the Rhody Awards pay tribute to individuals, organizations and projects for their contributions to the preservation of Rhode Island’s historic places. In doing so, they celebrate our sense of place and the stories that make us who we are today.

The icemen and the oystermen, the station agents and the factory workers of West Barrington may be gone, but the village goes on. And thanks to the happy marriage of history, nature and recreation on the East Bay Bike Path, its legacies won't be forgotten.

What is your favorite example of historic preservation in Rhode Island?

Footloose: Super Sized

A camera crew walked into the woods of West Greenwich a couple of weeks ago, looking for Bigfoot. Readers are welcome to provide their own punch line.

The Animal Planet TV series “Finding Bigfoot” dropped by Little Rhody to investigate a Sasquatch sighting in the Ocean State. The show, now in its second season, has already hunted for Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) in Alaska, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington.

Tall, hairy and elusive, like pretty much every drummer that ever played in a 1980s heavy metal band, Bigfoot walks like a human and is categorized as a cryptid, last seen avoiding the paparazzi from The Weekly World News. At least three members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization believe that there are different Bigfeet – each with slightly distinctive characteristics – roaming the various states. The one in Florida is known as the Ape Skunk, because of its distinctive odor. The one in Rhode Island is called “Big Rhody,” – or Ted, by its friends.

In the spirit of reportorial accuracy, it should be noted that “Big Rhody” is also a 28-inch pizza (with an 87-inch crust circumference) made by the folks at Pier Pizza.

The TV show was inspired to visit Rhode Island based on a video shot from a car of a shadowy figure keeping pace alongside the automobile. [Santa George? Pogo Dave? The ghost of Tarzan Brown?] On the BFRO Web site, the most recent reports of possible Bigfoot evidence include:

Oct. 2006, Washington County – Possible stick formation found by hiker in the Great Swamp.

Oct. 1998, Providence County – Daylight sighting by mountain biker in the Black Hut Management Area outside Glendale.

Summer 1978, Washington County – Mother and son see Sasquatch close-up from road.

If I remember my summer of 1978 correctly, there’s a good chance that mother and son were smoking something close-up from the road before the Sasquatch sighting, but that’s a blog post for another day.

On the other hand, the two most recent sightings occurred in October, making this month a good one for Bigfoot spotting in Rhode Island. Given that the winds and rains and salt-smack of Irene have stripped and dried-out the leaves from most of our trees prior to this year’s foliage season, Rhody leaf-peepers might want to shift their attention to hairy, barefoot giants this year.

This week’s question: If you were a Bigfoot in Rhode Island, where would you live?

Return of Naked Man

From this week’s North East Independent police beat, with an assist from the Independent’s East Greenwich reporter Cassidy Swanson:

NAKED MAN VISITS RESIDENCE

A local woman received a strange visitor around midnight on Sunday claiming that the apocalypse is imminent. According to a police report, the resident stated that she heard a noise coming from her front porch and opened her front door to find a naked white man, approximately 20 years old, 200 pounds and 6 feet to 6 feet, 3 inches tall with blond hair, who was wearing only a pair of white socks, the report states.
The woman called to her son-in-law, who also lives at her home, and when he spoke to the man the visitor said “The world is ending,” and “I’m sorry if I scared you.” The male then proceeded to run from the home, smacking himself on the buttocks with his hand, the report states.

In the interest of accuracy, as our proofreader pointed out, this guy is really Almost Naked Man, given the white socks. But for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll give him the benefit of the Fully Monty.

Creepy though it sounds, Naked Man is a pretty popular character in the police logs and beat reports of weekly newspapers across America. I first realized this more than a decade ago, when a professor at a college I worked at in New Hampshire – who liked to spend summer nights wandering the streets around the campus in the nude – was caught by police one evening hiding in the bushes a few blocks from his home. I was the college’s news director at the time, and the professor begged me to keep his name out of the paper. I told him I had no control over that, but he had control over whether he put his pants on when going out in public. At any rate, I discovered that the professor was merely one of countless numbers of Naked Men out there, roaming the cities and suburbs from sea to shining sea. Some are ideological naturalists. Some are closet risk-takers. Some are curious or chronic streakers. Some are bombed or stoned out of their gourds. Some have a screw loose. Some are no doubt perverts. At the end of the day, it takes all kinds to be a Naked Man.

But outside of any disturbing aspects of Naked Man’s behavior, he may yet have some value beyond providing brief amusement in the police beat sections of weekly papers. I give you the Naked Man News Headline Game. Here’s how it works: Read the headlines of an actual newspaper then replace one of the words with Naked Man. As an example, here are some real headlines from recent editions of The New York Times:

House Republicans Discover a Growing Bond with Netanyahu
Dodd-Frank Act a Favorite Target for Republicans Laying Blame
Qaddafi Calls New Libya Government a Propped-Up ‘Charade’
Greece Nears the Precipice, Raising Fear
Turkey Predicts Alliance with Egypt as Regional Anchors
Strauss-Kahn Concedes ‘Error’ in Sexual Encounter with Maid
Paint Creek, the Town Perry Left Behind
Facebook to Offer Path to Media
Tumult of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington
Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires

Now for the Naked Man versions:

House Republicans Discover a Growing Bond with Naked Man
Naked Man Act a Favorite Target for Republicans Laying Blame
Qaddafi Calls New Libya Government a Propped-Up ‘Naked Man’
Greece Nears the Naked Man, Raising Fear
Turkey Predicts Alliance with Naked Man as Regional Anchors
Strauss-Kahn Concedes ‘Error’ in Naked Man Encounter with Maid (Some of these actually work for real!)
Paint Creek, the Naked Man Perry Left Behind
Facebook to Offer Naked Man to Media
Naked Man of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington
Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Naked Man

As you can see, it really doesn’t matter where you put the Naked Man. He works in nearly every editorial situation.

However, given that I write for a family-friendly newspaper, I’m going to limit this week’s question to: What is your favorite all-time newspaper headline?

(Mine comes courtesy of The Boston Herald, after a man carrying a few tons of timber traveled an overpass he wasn’t supposed to during the morning commute. The road collapsed, his truck overturned, spilling wood all over the highway, causing epic traffic delays and costing millions of dollars in lost productivity and repairs. The Herald’s cover that afternoon featured a photograph of the forlorn driver with an inset of the damage he caused under the headline: LUMBER JERK.)

Rhodywood Cameo

Last week Hollywood came to town to film a car chase. The R.I. Film & Television Office even sent out a press release celebrating the fact, although why you need a couple of Hollywood stuntmen to fabricate what most Rhode Island commuters see on the highways and byways everyday is hard to understand.

The Washington Street shoot in Providence took two days, which is usually how long it takes to find an open parking space on Washington Street. The scene will appear in a Universal Studios moving picture called “R.I.P.D.” Surprisingly, the movie’s not about the Rhode Island Police Department. Instead, it’s an action-adventure film described as a cross between “Men in Black” and “Ghostbusters” in which Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds play “two undead police officers dispatched by the otherworldly Rest In Peace Department to protect the world from an increasingly destructive array of creatures who refuse to move peacefully to the other side.”

It’s a poorly kept secret that the undead have long romanced Providence, mainly because the city makes them feel at home. Lovecraft lived there. Poe pined for a lost love there. It’s a town friendly to ghosts, vampires and zombies, so the idea of partially filming a feature about undead policemen in Rhody’s capital city is, quite literally, a no-brainer.

And given the fact that Rhody has potholes that can send you into other dimensions, the choice of Providence for a pulp movie car chase has merit, too – although unless we’re talking about the scene from “Bullitt,” “The French Connection,” “Ronin,” “Vanishing Point,” “Gone in 60 Seconds,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “The Italian Job,” “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “The Fast and the Furious,” “Cannonball Run” or “Against All Odds,” we’re bound to be disappointed in the careening chrome even as we admire Hollywood’s ability to elongate Washington Street into something closer to the Pacific Coast Highway.

Leading to this week’s question: What Rhode Island road is best suited for a Hollywood car chase?

Size reprise
Great size of Rhode Island reference in The Atlantic magazine, falling in the first paragraph under the headline, “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America.”

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.

Nice to know that more than 60 years of Rhode Island-sized sprawl turned America into what it is today. But how do we measure the sprawl that is actually in Rhode Island? In Quonochontaugs?

Songs for the Rhode

The Clash began “Know Your Rights,” a cut off the “Combat Rock” album, with the words: “This is a public service announcement…with guitar…”

In homage, some of our old blog posts have new life…with guitar…

Last March Blog on the Half Shell dedicated one of its weekly musings to Rhode Island’s characteristic standing as “The Knowaguy State.” The piece prompted West Kingston singer-songwriter Billy Mitchell to e-mail me, requesting permission to pursue the theme in song form. The result, “I Know a Guy,” is a witty, upbeat ditty describing the foibles of Rhody culture and cronyism with a catchy melody and infectious chorus. The song is the sixth track on Mitchell’s latest CD, “Detour,” to be released in October. (It’s one of two Rhody-centric songs on the disc. The other, “Meet Me Under The Shepard’s Clock,” pays homage to a Providence tradition in a simpler, more enchanting time.)

During the recent Wakefield Arts and Entertainment Festival, South County singer-songwriter and artist Jon Campbell mentioned casually (if half-jokingly) that he’d be interested in tweaking a recent column of mine (“The Ballad of Yellow Lobster”) in song form. The column basically re-capped the one-year anniversary of the death of Tyler, a yellow lobster pulled from Narragansett Bay that made headlines around the world before it expired in a research facility at the University of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay Campus – and after providing enough material for all or part of four columns and two blog posts. It’s cruel sport, but that’s the way we lobsterazzi roll.

Still, it got me thinking that if this media thing doesn’t work out, maybe I have a future in pitching song ideas to crooners.

Some possibilities (with apologies to parodied artists in parenthesis):

“Buddy Was His Name-O” (anonymous English songwriter)
“Snail Salad in Paradise” (Jimmy Buffett)
“Termite in a Blue Dress” (Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels)
“Mr. Clam Man” (The Chordettes)
“My Kind of Town (Pawtucket Is)” (Frank Sinatra)
“50 Ways to Lop a Lobster” (Paul Simon)
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa George” (Tommie Connor, Jimmy Boyd)
“(Here’s to You) Mr. Potato Head” (Simon & Garfunkel)
“Ode to G.I. Joe” (B.B. King)
“That’s About the Size of Rhode Island” (Sesame Street)

If you were to write a song about Rhode Island, what would it be called?

Postscript: Irene

A funny thing happened on the evening the power was restored to my cove neighborhood in West Barrington. One neighbor sat on his porch, strumming guitar. My friends across the street, after checking light switches, computers and TVs to make sure they were functioning, turned everything off, went for a dusk bike ride and then lit their outdoor fire ring, inviting people over to talk. My parents, who generally occupy evening hours at their house on the laptop (Mom) or watching television (Dad), were sitting on the porch in the dark, conversing while looking out at the bay and the planes flying to and from Green Airport. Most of the neighborhood, in fact, was out strolling, cycling or sitting in their porches, chatting amiably.

After going more than four days without power, everyone wanted it back, but once they had it, they were happy to ignore it. The power outage caused by Hurricane Irene seemed to spark something significant and universal in people, even despite the challenges of keeping food and drink cold, cooking, cleaning and doing the wash, or finding our way around the house at night. It felt right to go to sleep to the sound of crickets, wake up to the caterwauling of hungry sea gulls and live the day in concert with the rising heat songs of cicadas. The stars were impossibly bright for a Rhode Island sky too often polluted by excessive human light. You could see Cassiopeia’s W and the Archer’s arrow point and both Dippers dipping in vivid relief, looking like giant-sized versions of glow-in-the-dark stickers plastered on the ceiling above a child’s bed. Neighbors who once barely spoke to one another came out of their houses for no apparent reason and resumed their hurricane-prompted conversations, helping each other clean up, exchanging tools or tips, and sharing new stories about damages and crimes occurring in Rhode Island in the storm’s aftermath. Children grudgingly admitted how much fun it was to play Clue by candlelight and Twister by flashlight. People gathered at the shoreline, marveling at the liquid silver of the bay at twilight, the water lapping in waves of melted moonlight.

It was as if we all knew – whatever we lost when the power went out, we gained something, too. And now that the power was back, we didn’t want to sacrifice our newfound embrace of simple pleasures. Who knows how long it will last? But for the first time since I can’t remember when, the place I call home feels like a neighborhood. Without a doubt, the communities that endured the worst of Irene’s miseries deserve our thoughts and prayers, but in West Barrington, and wherever the storm managed only inconveniences of varying degree, we might want to thank her.

Irene follow-up question: How did you occupy your time while the power was out?

[Note: Half Shell is posting early because of Monday’s Labor Day holiday.]

Irene: A Sketch

The first casualty of Hurricane Irene in my cove neighborhood happened three days before the storm arrived when a tree removal crew chopped down a majestic weeping willow, dressed in its lush summer green, from a yard by a house at the point. The willow had been there for several generations, standing as one of the postage stamp trees of West Barrington. But the neighbor had lost a couple of big branches recently – during one of last winter’s nor’easters and, before that, during a heavy wind and rain storm last summer – and given the dire predictions of Irene’s wrath, he was determined not to risk his home for the notoriously weak-rooted willow in our sandy soil.

Most people spent part of Saturday boarding up and removing potential projectiles from their yards, then went to bed as the storm blew in. The power went out in Barrington at 7 a.m. on Sunday and the worst of the surge followed a couple of hours later, as water splashed over the cove’s edge, swamping some roads, spilling over sea walls and creating little lakes in adjacent parks. Despite steady, strong winds for hours afterward and except for one small stretch of street that appeared to endure a mini-twister, causing large trees to topple onto rooftops, sheds and in yards, our neighborhood was mostly spared, and we were once again able to sigh with relief that a hurricane – a.k.a. God’s bowling ball – only delivered a glancing blow.

We were lucky. Watching during the height of the storm from one of the windows in my folks’ place that wasn’t boarded, the Atlantic appeared primal, with breakers crashing in the middle of the bay and surf as high as a one-story house. At one point, between the wind and the rain, the world was just a wild, gray blur, with no way to tell where the water met the land. It felt like being on the smear end of a microscope.

But the worst didn’t last long. Heavy rains eventually subsided and all that was left was to ride out the winds, nap, drink, eat, play board games, and check out the damage when the lull came later in the afternoon. A friend’s boat had been wrenched from its mooring. They discovered it a long way down the channel, with a gash in the hull, in a completely different marina, where someone had lashed it to a dock to spare it further damage. Neighbors and strangers gathered to survey the scene, sharing condolences with people who sat on their porches under houses crowned by downed trees or otherwise enjoying the fresh air, charged with ions that paradoxically made us feel drugged and drowsy. My souvenir from the day was a quahog shell that was tossed onto the small beach at Allin’s Cove, ringed on the inside with a half-inch of the dazzling purple color used to make wampum.

All the world is investing in gold these days, it seems. But its value is merely monetary. Give me a clamshell offered up by a hurricane any day, if only as a reminder of the blessings and fortunes we always take for granted, and in memory of the friends and willows we lose along the way.

How did you pass the time during Hurricane Irene?