Leaf blog

The swamps and woods of Rhode Island are already blushing here in the early part of autumn. Shades of red in maple, tupelo and sumac join with yellow birch to create fiery contrasts with the cool or neutral tones of gray, brown and paper-white trunks, stands of evergreens and pools of pastel blues and murky purples. It’s early, but you can see the color changing every day, especially along the swampy William C. O’Neill (South County) Bike Path, where deer and hawks and great blue herons are commonly spotted in the wooded rainbow.

Perhaps this is not breaking news – “Autumn arrives in New England.” But I felt compelled to point out to the rest of the world that just because the leaf-tracking Web site The Foliage Network has decided to drop Rhode Island from its deciduous tour, doesn’t mean the color is lacking in the Ocean State. According to the site:

Due to a lack of foliage spotters, we regret that we will no longer be covering Delaware, Minnesota and Rhode Island.

So that leaves it to Rhode Islanders to cover our own state. With help from my dog-eared copy of Neil Jorgensen’s “A Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide” to southern New England, here’s a brief description of the showstoppers in our autumn landscape:

The first to turn are the red maples – the Rhode Island state tree – in the swamps, glowing bright red and occasionally orange. Also early are the white ash found on uplands and stream banks, making a variety of distinctive colors from maroon to rust to a dark greenish red.

As the season moves on the bright orange of poison sumac adds to the warm look of swamps and bogs while twiggy tupelo turns an intense dark red on the edges of swamps and ponds. On the slopes of upland forest, red maples turn vivid orange, yellow and red, often hanging on until Halloween. The intense yellow of hickories, lacy in appearance, and the slightly duller canary of black birch will also come out during the middle fall period. Beech can be found in moist, shady sites, leafing light green to yellow to brown.

Sugar maples, the postage stamp tree of the New England autumn, pose for desk calendars on roadsides, in cemeteries and churchyards in their brilliant peach color. Alternating shades of yellow in old fields and waste grounds are often painted by quaking aspen alongside the pinkish-orange and yellowing sassafras (which also like the wood’s edge and dry spots). They are joined by Staghorn sumac, featuring vibrant orange turning to vivid red leaves, growing in large clumps suggesting a frozen fire. The middle season also features the purplish maroon maple-leaved viburnum, traditionally spotted in upland woods, especially among oaks.

Speaking of oaks, it is a species that sometimes gets short shrift when discussing New England’s fall foliage, but some autumns the oaks can be quite lustrous. Both red oak and black oak present variable colors, with the former generally reddish-brown and the latter mostly yellowish-brown, in canopy that has been known to last well into December in Rhode Island. Norway maple, the last of the maples to turn, goes out in a bright yellow flash while the last flush of fall is usually played by the wild cherry, gradually progressing from green to yellow. Even past peak, in their copper, rust and russet skins, the raw umber and burnt sienna remains of failed Crayola colors, the local leafscape is worth exploring, no matter what the Foliage Network says.

Because it’s not just the act of looking at a leaf that defines the season. It's the quest for color, an adventure of fresh-air encounters and surprising discoveries on rambling back roads that makes foliage seeking such a pleasure in New England. It’s all part of the region’s carnival of fall – days of fermented cider tasting, wood smoke ghosts writhing like dryads from chimney stacks, mutant pumpkins in the patch, obscene gourd shapes spilling out from handmade baskets, the scent and crunch of pine needles in the frosty forest. Leading to this week’s question: What is your favorite spot in Rhode Island for fall foliage?

Hope, the motto

Given the average Rhode Islander’s chronic and pervasive cynicism, it is more than a little ironic that the state motto is “Hope.” One of the three great Christian virtues (along with faith and love), hope has not always been considered a positive force in human culture. To the ancient Greeks, hope was as deadly as all the world’s evils – it was the only one that didn’t initially escape Pandora’s Box.

Roger Williams and the early Rhode Islanders, however, had no such qualms. Having named their first settlement Providence, they took a Pilgrim’s progressive view of the world, finding metaphors everywhere, especially in the landscape. To them, hope was a spiritual gift from God. In the marketing of the times, given the “lively experiment” that this eclectic colony was undertaking, it made perfect sense for “Hope” to be the original Rhode Island brand – or “motto,” in ye olde jargon. Most believe that the motto (along with the state’s symbol, an anchor) was taken from a Biblical passage in Hebrews 6:19:

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which entereth into that within the veil;

Rhode Island’s state motto was adopted as an element of the “arms of the state.” It is found on the state’s coat of arms, seal and flag. (The seal of Rhode Island is the sole image to illustrate the concept of “Hope” on Wikipedia.) As excerpted from Rhode Island Statutes, Title 42, Chapter 4, Section 1:

Arms of state. The arms of the state are a golden anchor on a blue field, and the motto thereof is the word “Hope.”

So Rhode Island takes its hope seriously. The state has a Hope village and a Hope Valley. Shepard Fairey, the former Rhode Island School of Design student whose street art became a local sensation, borrowed the motto, added a little Andy Warhol and provided the lasting image of President Obama’s successful campaign. And now a University of Rhode Island professor has co-written a book with a professor from Keene State College in New Hampshire titled “Hope in the Age of Anxiety.” To gauge your own level of hopefulness, take the Hope Test.

So this week, in the spirit of our state motto, we ask: What does Rhode Island get right?

House cleaning
It’s a crossover Monday here at the Independent. In last week’s Arts & Living section, I previewed the 10 finalists for the Manhattan Short Film Festival. The movies were screened at the Courthouse Center for the Arts in West Kingston last Thursday – one of 173 locations on five continents to show them last week. The global tally concludes tomorrow, when the winner will be announced in New York City. My choice? “Mozambique,” a powerful documentary in which AIDS orphans are empowered to tell their stories using donated cameras and videocameras. Runner-up in my book was “Skhizein,” a darkly comic animated film from France. It was a difficult choice between two very different films. Ultimately I went with the film that emphasized hope over the one that succumbed to despair.

Rhody Universe: The Moon

Belated thanks to Rick Spilman, host of The Old Salt Blog, (a must-read for all who love the sea and a good yarn), for taking note of Half Shell’s theory that the two Russian subs reportedly lurking off the East Coast might have been auditioning to be the next Rhode Island museum.

But if you thought lamenting for a Russian Sub Museum that sank and was turned into scrap metal was as odd as it gets when it comes to the marriage of Rhode Island and museums, consider the recent news from Rijksmuseum in Holland. According to an Associated Press report a few weeks ago, the Dutch national museum confirmed that its celebrated moon rock, a popular tourist attraction, is really just a hunk of petrified wood. Naturally, when museum officials traced the rock to its source, it led back to a Rhode Island man.

Apparently, the museum was bequeathed the rock after the death of Prime Minister Willem Drees in the late 1980s. Drees had received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts as part of their “Giant Leap” goodwill tour after the moon landing.

Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn’t recall the exact details.

Talk about lending ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who believe the first moon landing was staged. Moon rocks may be passe now, but three months after the first manned mission, they probably weren’t the kind of things you’d hand out willy-nilly – like, say, engraved dinnerware – to every dignitary on the planet. Did the State Department pawn off petrified wood as moon rocks as a matter of practice? Was it a one-time practical joke? Or perhaps someone in the department pocketed the rock and substituted the wood he’d picked up in a gift shop at Yellowstone earlier that summer. Middendorf says he doesn’t remember, but then, since all diplomats do is give gifts and go to parties, it’s not hard to imagine forgetting the time you handed over a nondescript gray lump to the Dutch PM in exchange for a wheel of Gouda.

Anyway, all this talk about museums reminded me that a few years back on the paper side of things, I called for Rhode Island to be more innovative and experimental in its museum culture. Among the suggestions:

The Bayquarium: An aquarium built on the waterfront focusing on the natural history, biodiversity and sea lore of Narragansett Bay (plus a raw bar).

The Museum of Horror: Emphasizing Rhode Island’s gothic culture, including stories of local vampires, ghosts, witches, phantom ships and associations with horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. A separate ghost wing, featuring holograms of commonly sighted Rhody apparitions, could include a new office for Rhode Island’s TV team of Ghost Hunters.

The Museum of Scandal: Telling stories about everything gone tabloid in Rhode Island, from the Claus von Bulow trial to Plunder Dome, lottery abuses to blizzard snafus, through collected news footage, memorabilia and ephemera.

The Museum of Religion: Celebrating Rhode Island’s central role in establishing freedom of religion as a basic tenet of American life, the museum would explore all forms of religious belief and ritual practiced in the state, from its indigenous cultures to present-day storefront churches.

Companion buildings, The Narragansett Museum and The Wampanoag Museum, could detail the contributions of Rhode Island’s most prominent native communities, from their interactions with early settlers to stories of art, commerce and language that continue to influence our culture.

This week’s question: What kind of museum would you like to see in Rhode Island?

Toy stories

Gritty, working-class Pawtucket is world headquarters for some of the most famous toys and games on the planet. It’s an all-star roster that includes Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe and Clue, the murder-mystery game with weapons, rooms, suspects and a detective’s notebook that plays as a cross between Monopoly and an Agatha Christie novel. But fans of the original game may be surprised to discover that it is now out of print. In its place, last year Hasbro launched its new Clue, a game that seems more like a cross between “CSI” and the National Enquirer.

The number of weapons has gone up from six to nine, although missing are the lead pipe, revolver and wrench. In their place are a pistol, dumbbell, trophy, poison, bat and axe (the candlestick, knife and rope made the cut). The nine rooms have changed as well. There is no longer a ballroom, library or conservatory. Now clues can be searched in the hall, guest house, dining room, kitchen, patio, spa, theater, living room and observatory.

But the biggest changes occurred with the characters. Their last names stayed the same, but they’ve added first names and updated their bios. Miss Scarlet, for example, is now Cassandra Scarlet, a starlet who is always appearing in the tabloids. Mr. Green is now Jacob Green, an African-American “with all the ins,” whatever that means. Professor Plum, the character I generally picked because of his obvious intelligence, scholarship and book-loving nature, is now Victor Plum, a billionaire video game designer who I now consider the anti-Plum. Each character also has a special power that can be used to influence the game. In other words, this is Clue for mutants.

It’s a sad world when armchair detectives are no longer allowed to guess Mrs. Peacock in the library with the lead pipe. Eleanor in the spa with an axe sounds more like a scene from “Scream” than Clue.

G.I. Joe, another Hasbro giant, is now starring in a big-budget Hollywood movie, “G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” although the reviews suggest he should stick to plastics. The words of Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers are typical:

I don’t know what to say about the acting, writing and directing in “G.I. Joe” because I couldn’t find any.

Pawtucket-born G.I. Joe was created in 1964 as a boy alternative to the girl Barbie doll craze. But calling G.I. Joe a military doll didn’t sit well with Joe Q. Public, so he became the first “action figure” and the icon for every moveable man sealed in cardboard to come. Standing just shy of 12 inches and known as “America’s Moveable Fighting Man,” Joe was a hit in the mid-Sixties, but suffered a slump in the late Sixties and early Seventies in part because of the increasing unpopularity of the Vietnam War. So he left the military to lead an “Adventure Team,” and during the Me Decade he evolved both Kung-Fu Grip and Eagle Eye vision. Over the years, G.I. Joe shrank to about 3 ¾ inches. He is now more popular than ever, starring in movies, graphic novels and toy stores worldwide, and in the ultimate sign of global success, finding himself in bizarre headlines across the continents. They include:

Austrian G.I. Joe Turns Into G.I. Jane

For those who aren’t going to read the link, apparently a soldier stationed in Gratkorn, Austria had a sex change operation, much to the confusion of his unit. One of the other soldiers in the barracks summed it up:

He left the building a man and returned as a woman. We find it rather strange.

Sienna Miller Burned Cleavage During G.I. Joe Film Shoot

In her words:

Luckily it wasn’t my breasts, it was the bit in-between…you know, ‘G.I. Joe,’ it’s not going to be the best acting work we’ve ever done.

Before he was a doll man, G.I. Joe earned fame as an American homing pigeon that carried a message to a European village during World War II in advance of a German attack and is credited with saving more than 1000 troops. G.I. Joe was one of 32 pigeons to receive the Dickin Medal for gallantry and bravery in saving human lives. He retired to the Detroit Zoo. After his death, he was mounted and is now on display at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

A recent British study revealed that most Barbie dolls end up dismembered. No similar study has been commissioned to determine the percentage of G.I. Joes that get blown up in firecracker explosions, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming.

This week’s question: What is your favorite board game or childhood toy?

And now for something completely different

In a world a-Twitter with texting and sound bites, the epic poet has given way to the sloganeering pitchman. Writers are distilling works to their fortune-cookie essence, from memoirs to novels, sermons to plays. While this is a new-school phenomenon, the practice goes back at least as far as Hemingway, who once declared his greatest story to be the untitled six-word fiction: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Today there are Web sites dedicated to producing six-word literature and poetry. Many are quite good, especially Smith Magazine’s memoirs (life stories in six words), a collection of which was published under the title “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” There are advantages to hearing a six-word sermon – as anyone who has sat on hard pews enduring 60,000 words on one of the "Thou Shalt Nots" might attest. Although such a restriction would have forced Jonathan Edwards to alter the title of perhaps the most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” (an exhausting eight words), to something pithier – “Sinners: Be Good or Be Smote.”

Consider how much more time the old Anglo-Saxon storytellers would have had for building mead halls if they didn’t have to spend days memorizing kennings and inventing alliteration to recite epics such as “Beowulf.” They could’ve just blurted, “Kill the monster. Make momma mad,” and moved onto the next flagon.

Shakespeare, who might’ve actually made something of his life if he didn’t have to write so many sonnets and soliloquies, could have summed up “Hamlet” with “I guess it’s not to be.”

One day all writers will jump on the six-word bandwagon. We’ll have six-word travels (“Stonehenge: Giant rocks and gift shop.”), six-word news (“Cheney leaves bunker, now on Fox.”), even six-word obituaries, although it’s hard to imagine topping Saturday Night Live’s first-season catchphrase: “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

Criticism also has six-word potential. My six-word review of the six-word phenomenon? “Less is more, more or less.”

And can a six-word blog be far behind? I’ve already got the first post: “Everything is measured in Rhode Islands.”

This week’s question takes its cue from those old back-to-school assignments of yore: In six words, what did you do on your summer vacation?

Wishing everyone reading this earlier-than-usual post a cheery Labor Day weekend, even those of you who do not labor…

Vacation blog

Just a skipping stone across Nantucket Sound from Hyannis Port, where Senator Edward Kennedy spent his final hours at the family compound, lies Martha’s Vineyard. The island is one link in the chain of a geological feature that shares a natural history with Cape Cod (as well as Nantucket, Block Island and Long Island), forming “The Outer Lands” of the eastern United States. It also shares a cultural history with all of southern New England, where Ted was more than a headline-maker, sea-lover and Red Sox fan. He was a neighbor.

Last Wednesday I was on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Ted Kennedy died. I had arrived between storms, enduring the drip of Bill while escaping the drench of Danny. Here, the harbormasters, watching mariners from other climes scramble to leave their moorings, cynically derided Bill as a “television hurricane” – in other words, a storm that is more hype and hot air than hurricane – even before it arrived. Bill finally showed up sloppily on a Saturday night while friends and I attended a Martin Sexton concert at Nectar’s (the long-ago Hot Tin Roof).

The rest of the week was mostly sunny and breezy and perfect, and the communal feeling took on a Before Ted/After Ted quality, as giddy exuberance gave way to reflective appreciation. We beached and swam at Lambert’s Cove (despite the pink jellyfish warnings) and Long Point (despite seals in the breakers, acting as shark-bait). We biked to Menemsha and Chappaquiddick (despite broken spokes, narrow shoulders and not enough grease on the chains). We took the On Time ferry, which is always on time, because it runs on island time, contingent on tides and moon phases, rendering clocks useless. We pub-crawled in Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, sampling local beers, sushi, crab cakes and calamari. We jogged in a road race along East Chop one morning and watched fireworks and wandered through the gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs another night. We shopped for souvenirs at Alley’s General Store in Chilmark and books for the beach at Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven. We happened upon the presidential motorcade twice, once just after the First Family landed while we were coming off a 3-mile dirt road that winds to wild surf and another time on the way back from a road trip to the clay cliffs and clothing-optional beaches of Aquinnah. We feasted on mussels, oysters and lobsters at the Home Port on a misty Menemsha evening, watching state troopers on motorbikes return to their dockside quarters, still on Obama patrol. Most nights we listened to cicadas, slapped mosquitoes, watched lightning bugs and streaking stars, smelled both the ocean and skunks in the pines and ate farmstand corn and tomatoes with our grilled meals.

Later in the week, there were other scenes:
One day after Kennedy’s death, in the harbor at Vineyard Haven, along the beach next to the ferry dock where rows of wooden dinghies are roped together, someone had scratched words out of driftwood in the wet sand: “BYE, TED.”
Buoys painted red, white and blue bobbed in Nantucket Sound, bearing the message: “R.I.P. TED.”
And along Route 195 West just beyond Fall River and the Braga Bridge (and throughout the highways of Massachusetts), LED monitors deleted their road construction warnings to announce: “THANKS TED. FROM THE PEOPLE OF MASS.”

To some, especially outside of New England, Senator Kennedy was a lightning rod for liberalism, cronyism and scandal. Once when I was at a gym in the Florida Keys, I began talking with a Chicago fireman, who said, “You’re from Ted Kennedy country? How can you stand it?” I barked something back about the Daley family, but there’s no sense in arguing without context, so eventually we dropped the politics and picked up the barbells. Last week’s retrospective gave people a fuller understanding of Ted’s whole story, from the flaws, failures and foibles to his countless triumphs. In the end, Ted was many things, but most of all he was a Boston guy. A Cape Cod guy. A New Englander who cared about this place as much as we do.

While leaving the parking lot at the New Bedford ferry, I spoke to the toll-taker. “It’s a shame about Ted,” she said, “but you knew it was coming when he didn’t make it to Eunice’s funeral. At least he had one last good sail, and he’s with Eunice and his brothers now.”

This week’s question: How will you remember Ted Kennedy?

The Kitsch List

The Russian Sub Museum in Providence was always an odd detour, and now that its star attraction, a Soviet-era K-77 submarine, is destined for an afterlife as recycled scrap metal, the state’s best Boris and Natasha road trip is just another Cold War memory. Too bad, since reports of two modern Russian subs skulking about off the East Coast have been all over the papers and blogs in recent weeks. Maybe one of them wants to be the next Rhode Island museum.

The sub that sank is also a significant blow to the local kitsch list. Before it bottomed out, it fit perfectly into Rhody’s Land of Misfit Toys, a collection that includes:

The Big Blue Bug, a giant cobalt-colored termite hanging over I-95 in Providence, the mascot of New England Pest Control and a party animal typically decorated during holidays;
The Quonset Seabee, wearing a white Navy hat and holding a wrench and a Tommy gun, the mascot of the famed Fighting Seabees, who were stationed in Davisville;
The abandoned Milk Bottle Building in Manville, which may or may not even be there anymore, since I can’t remember the last time I found myself in Manville;
Assorted human-sized, artistically rendered Mr. Potato Heads that sprouted up around the state a few years back. Invented by Hasbro of Pawtucket, Mr. Potato Head earned sidekick star status in the “Toy Story” movies, but jumped the shark as a goofy Rhode Island tourism campaign in 2000.

Some kitsch seems to stick around forever, like the Roof Dragon on the Providence Children’s Museum. Others drop by for a few weeks of bad taste then disappear, like the giant inflatable purple gorilla in a bathing suit I saw hanging from a car dealership while I drove down Route 2 earlier this summer. Cling Kong was somehow supposed to entice me to drop in and buy a car, I guess, but it seems to me they might have done better with a giant, inflatable Fay Wray.

In any case, it’s never a good thing to lose a Russian nuclear sub, whether it belonged here or not. More importantly, Rhode Islanders have to step up and preserve what’s left of our kitsch, lest we be considered a place defined entirely by good taste and a sense of style and aesthetic. Please. Who wants that?

This week’s question: What belongs on the Rhode Island kitsch list?

Also, Half Shell will be on holiday next week, testing the waters off Martha’s Vineyard and bottom feeding for blog fodder. Until next time, keep it raw...