All Voters Eve

Sunday’s Halloween is over, and wind-ripped skeletons, broken pumpkins and toppled tombstones in yards throughout every Rhode Island neighborhood took on a more sober cast this morning in recognition of an even more bizarre festive season, culminating with tomorrow’s Election Day.

It’s been a wild ride so far, with the headless horsemen of the media falling all over themselves trying to explain why “FEAR” is the new “HOPE.” (Although the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations' motto, if not its name, seems safe for now.)

We even had our own Rhody Beast moment, when Democratic candidate for governor Frank Caprio uttered the “Shove it” heard ’round the world, using phraseology better suited to a Mamet play to tell President Obama – de facto leader of the Democratic Party – exactly what he thought of not getting the Dude of D.C.’s endorsement. It’s all very messy, especially given that Linc Chafee, a former Republican Senator from Rhody now running for governor as an Independent, is a favorite son in most Democratic households in the state, where many still remember crossing parties to vote for his father. Proving once again that yesterday’s Greek tragedy is today’s Rhode Island comedy.

If that weren’t enough, Bob Healey’s “Bullwinkle noir,” black-and-white political signs added a faux macabre touch to the predominance of red, white and blue in backyard campaign signage, a blur of names and phrases sharing the yard under tree ghosts, witches-on-broomsticks and – suddenly popular this year – phantom riders on motorcycles. (One nearby house even had a motorcycle dangling from an oak.) Whatever you think of Healey’s position, the candidate for lieutenant governor who is running on the pledge of eliminating the office of lieutenant governor has some of the most creative signage in politics, and it doesn’t hurt that he allows his own cartoonish mug – which looks like Ozzy Osbourne with a beard – to represent his cause.

Weird, wild stuff, as Johnny Carson (may he rest in peace) would have said.

Still, we have an election tomorrow, and, personally, I’m hoping we still have Providence Plantations by the end of the day. The argument for eliminating the phrase is essentially that plantations is a word associated with slavery. It wasn’t, back in the day, when it originally meant a “settlement,” “colony,” “estate or farm.” But even if today most people link the word “plantations” to the slave trade, the move to change the state’s name still rests entirely (albeit emotionally) on connotative grounds. It falls short historically, etymologically and geographically, given that Providence Plantations represented the area of the colony (Warwick and Providence) that wasn’t Aquidneck (or Rhode) Island. Somewhat ironically, as others have pointed out, it was primarily the "Rhode Island" part of Rhode Island that insisted on an economy of slavery, while the "Providence Plantations" part of Rhode Island largely and continually fought to eliminate the practice, establishing many first-in-America steps toward abolition in the process. It’s true that slavery is a significant part of the story of Rhode Island, and that by illuminating our inglorious past, we can begin to develop the conscience and compassion required of a civilized society. So let’s keep doing that. Let’s educate Rhode Islanders about our history without revising it.

Question of the week: What was worst Rhode Island political ad you saw this year?

The Offensive Offensive

This past Columbus Day, Providence residents woke up to see a statue of Christopher Columbus splattered in red paint and wearing a sign around its waist that read “MURDERER.” Similar acts of vandalism occurred on statues of Columbus throughout the country. Many in Rhode Island’s vast Italian American community reacted in outrage, with the Sons of Italy insisting that the state investigate and prosecute the statue desecration as a hate crime.

So maybe we should start arresting pigeons, too.

The incident and its resulting furor illustrate the lack of civility and level of debate in our society today. To many Italian Americans, Columbus is a legendary explorer and a cultural hero. To many Native Americans, he is a bloodthirsty butcher and evil oppressor. Somewhere in between lies a complex truth, but in an age that dismisses context, we will never find it. There are good reasons to debate Columbus’ place in history and the appropriateness of honoring him as a historical figure. But they are lost in a black-and-white world where all issues have distinctly polarized sides with no ability for light to penetrate.

Last year, Brown University eliminated Columbus Day from the calendar and replaced it with the generic Fall Weekend. That was offensive to me, not because it slighted the Italian explorer, but because it so banally shattered the storytelling inherent in the power of names and promoted branding over creative holiday conjuring. For many New Englanders, Columbus Day means getting into the car and meandering along rivers and over mountains to see leaves in their death throes, a metaphoric ritual (plus cider donuts and pumpkin pie) that connects us to all explorers – from the intrepid to the incompetent – and satisfies the human impulse to seek beyond our confines.

But Columbus Day isn’t the only controversial holiday. Practically every holiday offends someone. Consider Thanksgiving. Long a part of the New England and American chowder of history and myth, popularly celebrated by families at feast and high school football games, Thanksgiving is a National Day of Mourning to many indigenous Americans. On that day, members of the Wampanoag Tribe protest outside the grounds of Plimoth Plantation. Animal rights groups condemn the mass turkey slaughter. Hispanic Americans want the history books to reflect that earlier Thanksgivings, involving the Spanish, took place in Florida and Texas (while conveniently ignoring that American Indians have been celebrating Thanksgiving feasts on their own land for millennia).

Or what of Christmas? ‘Tis the season when the late Jerry Falwell’s “Friend or Foe” campaign still has legs. Woe to the unfortunate soul who accidentally slips and wishes the wrong person a “happy holiday” at Christmas. The merry season is a basket case of controversies. The devout protest its consumerism. Pagans blame Christians for co-opting their rituals. People like me bemoan the fact that we have to hear “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” starting in September.

As we approach Halloween – America’s second most popular holiday, even though it’s not very big with the fundamentalists – it would be nice to think you could wear your scary Rush Limbaugh mask without offending anybody. But you can’t. Not anymore. Better to play it safe. Stick with the Spider-Man outfit. Limit conversation to “trick-or-treat.” And keep a few buckets of red paint handy, just in case.

This week’s question: If you could change any holiday, which would it be?

Local Haunts

The ghosts of Rhode Island are a motley lot. They are scattered throughout the state, a collection of mysterious farmers, soldiers, lightkeepers, headmasters, stable hands, monks and nuns haunting swamps, graveyards, churches, schools, carousels, renovated barns, lighthouses, nursing homes, monasteries, fire stations, country clubs, hotels, sororities, fraternities and tourist attractions.

As chronicled on Web sites such as Shadowlands and Ghost Traveller and TV shows like “Ghost Hunters,” Rhode Island is rich in ghost lore, with apparitions that include Colonial settlers, Narragansett and Wampanoag warriors, Revolutionary and Civil War soldiers, Victorian women and spirits animated as recently as the age of disco. Some of them are named Patrick, Barbara, George and Banquo. Edgar Allan Poe is reportedly still strolling down Benefit Street in Providence some nights, pining for his lost love, although he is also spotted in Baltimore, where he was buried, which is difficult to explain, even with the low air fare on Southwest from T.F. Green to Crab City.

They are dressed in red capes and black dresses, wearing military uniforms or war paint, the same wardrobe night after night, year after year, suggesting that fashion is somewhat lacking in the afterlife version of The Gap. Not all of our ghosts manifest themselves in figural form, though. Some are orbs. Some are blue lights. One in Warren floats around as a grayish-blue cloud - not far from seven heads sometimes seen hovering over seven poles near the Kickemuit River.

They can alter the weather, creating cold spots or gusts. Some can shove and grab with invisible force. Most make noise in typical ways - slamming doors, shattering china, rattling silverware and turning on radios. In some parts of Rhode Island, ghosts are still making the sounds of previous centuries, an aural spectrum that includes cannons firing, horses galloping and carousel music.

In addition to our resident spirits, Rhody also hosts phantom ships, trains, horse carriages and horse-and-rider varieties of transportation ghosts, making a kind of RIPTA for the eternally restless.

The ghost at the Roger Williams University Theatre in Bristol has been dubbed the aforementioned Banquo. It is thought that he is a former farm hand who froze to death in the hayloft of one of the barns on site, before they were converted into the theater. The Cumberland Monastery is crowded with ghosts, including a monk who moves books, a phantom horse rider on the trails and a child in the swamp. One punctual spirit appears upon a lake in Foster each year on the opening day of trout season.

Eerie voices have been caught on tape recorders and unexplained objects have been captured on videotape, but so far there are no reports of Rhode Island ghosts Tweeting or posting on Facebook, suggesting two possibilities: 1) Ghosts are creatures of analog, not digital: or 2) The phenomenon of social media is just slow to catch on in the spectral market.

What is your favorite Rhode Island ghost story?

Size Archive
From Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A History of Walking,” published in 2000 by Viking, on page 7 in the chapter “Tracing a Headland: An Introduction”:

I became in the 1980s an antinuclear activist and participated in the spring demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site, a Department of Energy site the size of Rhode Island in southern Nevada where the United States has been detonating nuclear bombs – more than a thousand to date – since 1951.

Loose Leaf

It was a three-hawk drive to work this morning, the roads empty thanks to Christopher Columbus and the holiday some Americans celebrate in his honor (while others, including the population of Brown University, wrap the Italian explorer into a more nebulous celebration called “Fall Weekend”). The barren drive made for an easy commute, a diversion worthy of an Explorers’ Day, with leaves just beginning to turn and red-tails perched like statue idols on street lanterns along Route 4.

Traditionally the weekend most associated with spectacular New England foliage, Columbus Day and its Saturday/Sunday predecessors got clobbered by a stray hot summer or global climate change or whatever else is going on out there. Based on our own experiences, tour buses traveled landscapes alternatively still green-leafed, withered and dried, or dominated by large swaths of deadstick, with trunks and branches in their wind-stripped, rain-ripped forms, more suited for winter. Nothing peaked on the Mass Pike. The gentle slopes of western Massachusetts and Vermont offered their satisfying fare of glistening rivers and buzzing villages, covered bridges and country stores, but were devoid of the Oz-like color we’ve come to expect with colder nights and the thickening coats of goats and dogs.

New Hampshire saved us, especially the stretch between Campton and Canterbury, and the communities along the Pemigewasset River, our old stomping grounds, where the blend of cool green-and-blue evergreens wove seamlessly among crimson-and-orange sugar maples and the brilliant yellows of birches, blaring like bugles. The counterpoint of dramatic mountains, with their purple shadows making still life scenes on a canvas of blue sky, and the spectacular sweep of wooded rainbows along the slopes and riverbanks, satisfied the ritualistic itch that gets under the skin of most New Englanders every fall.

So we can wait a little longer in Rhode Island for whatever color will come this year, appreciating the individual trees and the little groves for providing moments of tranquility in the midst of a noisy and harsh political season, when knee-high cardboard signs in the weedy grass compete with Halloween decorations and the gathering hordes of pundits, press, politicians and PR hacks appear everywhere, shouting through their megaphones like competing carnival barkers, poisoning the air with cackling crow noises.

On the back roads of Rhode Island, as we prepare for autumn’s late arrival, we see dozens of witches, already snared mid-flight, having flown their broomsticks smack-dab into trees and telephone poles – in the same locations, we suspect, where each Christmas we find skeletal Santa Clauses stuck in chimneys. The gourd-happy members of the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Association have weighed their monster vegetables at Frerichs Farm in Warren. The gang at “Ghost Hunters,” a “Scooby-Doo” crew for adults, whose founders work as Roto-Rooter plumbers by day and investigators of the paranormal by night, threw Little Rhody a bone – launching its new season by examining the spectral happenings at Rose Island Lighthouse. (The same episode included an investigation of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The best moment: When Jason and Grant make an appeal to the baseball ghosts by saying “We’re from Rhode Island. We’re Red Sox fans.” You’d think that would get a few Yankee poltergeists stirring.)

We savor new autumn beers like Vermont’s Magic Hat IPA on Tour and Maine’s Peak Organic Fall Summit Ale, watching woodpiles in the neighborhood grow into pyramids against chain-link fences and observing herons hunting in the eelgrass along the cove. We ramble along at Four Town Farm – where horses and harvest scenes occupy the crossroads between Seekonk, Swansea, East Providence and Barrington – pausing to enjoy a murder of crows looting a pumpkin patch, the black birds and the orange gourds mixing the colors of Halloween.

The days shorten. The light lessens. Autumn moves like a cat in the rivergrass – senses heightened, stalking its ghost, seeing what we don’t in the tangle that lies just beyond.

What is your favorite autumn ritual?

One Day in Providence

Providence is a city of potholes and rabbit holes. The former are rarely fixed, the latter are always on the move, making the Providence underground a notoriously elusive scene. Perhaps that’s because so much of it exists above ground, in artist’s lofts and cold warehouses, abandoned stores and condemned buildings. And that’s just the art scene. Sex and crime also have their own thriving undergrounds, but it’s the artists that have made the city a haven for cheap, radical, do-it-yourself creating, and the clues are everywhere.

They’re stapled to telephone poles and street kiosks, chalked on brick and pavement, plastered to Dumpsters and graffitied on bridges and buildings, appearing one day and vanishing the next, leaving only the trace evidence of stapled fragments and faint chalk to suggest their whereabouts, whenabouts and whatabouts.

The patron saint Andre the Giant still stares down from the odd red octagonal stop sign, warning all passersby to OBEY. That word may have evolved nationally into HOPE or CHANGE and a wrestler may have morphed into a President, but Andre’s stoic mug still shows up now and then as a ghost and an echo of a simpler time, in the same way that pagan symbols often find a niche in the carvings, rituals and texts of modern religious iconography.

Artists, like most folks engaged in a trade, communicate in code. In the past you could find their tracks and ciphers, runes and hieroglyphics at the Price Rite Dumpster, Eastern Butcher Block, Sparkle City, Pink Rabbit, Dirt Palace, Gold Mine, Anarchy Mark’s Basement, Castle Cinema, Columbus Theater, Building 16, Old North Cemetery, Cradle of Filth, Church of the Messiah, Firehouse 19 or Candle Factory. Some no longer exist; others retain their roles as urban tableaux rasa.

More than most cities, Providence is a kind of living canvas. Edgy and dodgy in spots, dotted with entrapments and enchantments, snags and escapes. It is a place where the line separating art from trash is finer than anywhere else, given how much sheer creativity is generated from the recycled detritus of the city's crumbling landscape. A place where garbage dumps are treasure troves. And a place where, if you're a visitor, free parking can be either the holy grail or a false idol.

Earlier this year, I parked on Benefit Street and wandered down to the R.I. State Council on the Arts offices across from the State House. One Andre the Giant stared down at me from a traffic light across from the RISD Museum. Another gazed out from a RISD Rides bus stop. A woman got off a bicycle to post a flyer on a street lamp, a notice of a two-night exhibition of paintings and installations titled “Dirty Laundry & Clean Thoughts,” scheduled for a house on Kinsley Ave. later that weekend. Graffiti on the RISD Museum wall, near the lion mosaics, revealed communication by chalk, mostly anonymous love notes, punctuated by hearts and exclamation points. The space between the concrete steps and the shadowy terrace at the second-floor entrance to the Chace Center was filled with odd noises – typewriter tapping, rain, thunder and lightning, church bells. The work of Wakefield storyteller, educator and artist Marc Levitt, “Audio Winds #1,” a multi-channel audio installation, produced sounds that might have been heard at this precise location during previous centuries. The walk continued, past yellow masking tape on brickwork spelling “YO” and pink chalk scribbles and doodles complaining about finals. I meandered down to a sidewalk with a series of stencils – a tire, a dove and a splayed human body. All the while the city was buzzing was jackhammers and beeping construction trucks. Street corners were wrapped in yellow caution tape. Orange cones and red signs barricaded deep holes in the road, where construction workers wearing hardhats popped in and out, chasing their own white rabbits. And when I returned to my car, still sitting under the watchful eye of Andre, the passenger side window was smashed, my iPod and cell phone were gone, and I was left to ponder a maxim I have long believed: Theft is the only true art.

What is your Rhode Island crime story?

Moose on the Run

One of the more fascinating aspects of Rhode Island politics every four years is the race for the lieutenant governor’s office, mainly because perennial independent candidate Robert J. Healey Jr. of the Cool Moose Party has run on the platform of abolishing the job. His contention that $99,000 in salary (along with associated fees of staffing, workspace, supplies and other expenditures placing the total budget at just under $1 million) is too much for Rhode Islanders to stomach for a position whose official duty is to replace the governor if he or she dies or becomes incapacitated, has struck a chord with many residents, especially during an election cycle in which voters seem inclined to shake up the status quo, whatever the consequences.

Healey, a Barrington resident, spent the last few years owning and managing The Cheese Plate in Warren, a delightfully offbeat, European-style dining spot that he recently sold. He has run twice previously, garnering surprising support and increasing name recognition, and in today’s political climate, some pundits believe that this election may represent his best chance to win.

His campaign posters – all of them parodying aspects of culture – add a certain charm to a political season dominated by dull signs and attack ads. One conjures John Lennon with Healey wearing a New York City T-shirt under the words: “Imagine No Lieutenant Governor…It’s Easy If You Try.” In another, he’s The Lone Ranger under the words “The Lone Candidate Rides Again.” A third shows him as what appears to be Napoleon (“Glory is Fleeting But Obscurity is Forever”). My favorite shows side-by-side Healeys spoofing Grant Wood’s iconic painting “American Gothic.”

Even if Healey wins, a constitutional amendment would be required to abolish the lieutenant governor’s office. Healey pledges that, if elected, he would serve but would collect no salary and hire no staff, thereby saving taxpayers $1 million for each year of his term, totaling $4 million for the term’s duration. His opponents, incumbent Democrat Elizabeth H. Roberts and independent Robert P. Venturini (of local cable’s “An Hour with Bob” and “Bob’s Big Adventures” fame), both believe in the merits of the office. In a bizarre and slightly sleazy side note, Heidi Rogers, the winner of the Republican primary (who also wants to eliminate the office) withdrew from the race just days after her victory, leaving Republicans with nobody on the ballot. (Rogers urged Republicans to support Healey.)

Cool Moose has been around a lot longer than the various Mad Hatters comprising America’s Tea Parties, but these days the old expression that “politics makes strange bedfellows” should perhaps be amended with an assist from Shakespeare. In politics today, “All the world’s a mattress,” and a lumpy one at that.

Given that Rhode Island’s lieutenant governor could go the way of the bowyer (maker of bows, arrows, crossbows and bolts) and pardoner (seller of indulgences) during an age that desperately cries out for job creation, Half Shell wants to know: Are there any archaic jobs worth bringing back in the new millennium? Court jester? Town crier? Vestal virgin?

Rhody Five-0

The hand-chalked menu board on the Block Island ferry includes “Advil” and “Dramamine” among the more traditional fare of hot dogs, bagels and potato chips, but there were few takers during the gentle swells of yesterday’s ride, with most passengers favoring the medicinal benefits of Bloody Marys and Narragansetts over their pharmaceutical counterparts. A beautiful late-summer day drew scattered crowds to the docks of Galilee – a motley mix of drinkers, surfers and families – all of us taking an escape day to the island 13 miles from Point Judith.

On the Block, breakers slammed against the jetties, sending giant plumes of sea spray in all directions, forcing the cast-and-reel fishermen closer to shore. Wave-skimmers, paddle boarders, boogie boarders and surfers challenged the unpredictable breaks, occasionally getting dumped into the violent white froth like bits of cork flying off from champagne spilled at a boat christening. One skimmer, staggering to get up after being sucker-punched by a wave, looked out on the horizon to see his board floating away. He gave it up for lost, but a huge ‘comber rolled in, gathered it up like a toothpick, and sent it careening onto the beach. The message was clear: The sea wasn’t done with him yet.

The day’s overall calm was in stark contrast to the surf, which was wild and rough. But Rhode Islanders learned long ago that if you want to know the weather, forget the forecasts. Ask a surfer. The men and women who live for waves are more passionate about meteorology than the average weatherman. And, maybe because they live so closely in tune with nature, something instinctual kicks in, giving them an edge over the broadcasters with their blue screens and Doppler radar.

So it was timely to receive Don Gentile’s “A Meteorological Guide to Predicting Surf on the Rhode Island Coast” (published by Rosedog Books of Pittsburgh) in the mail today. A lifelong Misquamicut resident and self-described “avid waterman and amateur meteorologist,” Gentile has produced yet another one of those Very Rhode Island books that deserves a place on the shelf for readers who enjoy the quirky culture of the Ocean State. A mix of weather data, local color and folksy memoir, the book is a meditation on the “science of swell prediction” and is filled with observations that could only come from a surfer. Consider what went through his mind during the ravages of Hurricane Gloria in 1985:

Is the worst really going to happen? Is a hurricane bigger than the 1938 hurricane about to devastate the Misquamicut Beach? Will my house survive? Will the swell be rideable after work?

One of the most helpful sections is a description of 14 of mainland Rhode Island’s legendary surfing spots (12 of which are located in the waters off South County). They include such colorful locales as “Dicky’s,” named after a hot dog stand in the parking lot of the long-gone Wreck Bar in Misquamicut; “Fenway” and “Point Panic” in Weekapaug; “Deep Hole” in Matunuck; “K-39,” “Monahans” and “Little Rincon” in Narragansett; and “Ruggles” off Ruggles Avenue in Newport.

With Hawaii Five-0’s scheduled reboot tonight, we thought it might be a good time to remind the world the Ocean State has some world-class breaks of its own (especially during the hurricane season of, well, now, and continuing into the coldest months of the year, when nor’easters blast away at our beaches). Rhody may not have the Kahuna culture of Hawaii, but we do have our own surfing Peter Pan. Also, Salve Regina in Newport and the University of Rhode Island (with campuses in Kingston and Narragansett) both rank among America’s top surfing colleges. (Take that, Harvard dudes.)

Leaving us with only one question: What classic TV series would you like to see remade?