All Hallows

In the spirit of today’s Halloween, we present an Eastern screech owl, denizen of the Rhode Island woods, courtesy of an e-mail from the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, which is sponsoring owl prowls, full moon hikes and wildlife walks throughout the state in November. It’s just one of the bits of whimsy and mischief I’ve noticed today, from the elaborate rogues’ gallery and horror menagerie that annually takes over a house on High Street in Wakefield to the barista in a bumblebee outfit who served me coffee and a bagel at Sweet Cakes Bakery and Café in Peace Dale.

Work gets in the way today, so my Doctuh Funkmeistuh – “Zombies like funk. We are the funky dead.” – persona will have to wait a few moons to unleash itself upon an unsuspecting public, but that doesn’t mean we’ve gone cold turkey on the holiday. Last Friday some friends and I met at the Steel Yard in Providence for the 6th annual Iron Pour. This year’s theme was “Molten Masquerade” and the whole experience was, in owl terms, a hoot. Members of the Iron Guild poured about 500 pounds of liquid, gold-colored iron into various molds, metal skulls, jack-o-lanterns and giant sculptures, while the yard smoldered and blazed, producing billowing white smoke, shimmering steam and exploding stars out of the iron that splattered against the cold ground or expired in the raw autumn night. Equally impressive was the furnace containing the oozing orange metal, sending plumes of wild yellow and blue fire sky high and disgorging streams of the amber liquid when called upon. The ironmaster (or ironmistress in this case) asked the crowd to vote on naming the furnace from such possibilities as El Jefe, Hoss the Boss, Psiclops (not Cyclops, for reasons I can’t remember) and Banshee (inspired by the incessantly noisy but necessary furnace fan) – although I was partial to the suggestion by one guy in the audience who said we should name it Dave…Dave the Furnace.

Some of the molds became spears that were used to attack a monstrous witch, which caught flame and disintegrated into its skeletal pose. Another large mold, once it cooled and was lifted off the ground with a winch and a steel chain, was revealed as a giant, glowing skull. The Iron Guild members, in their best village mob impersonation, moved in loose choreography, attacking various masquerade figures, including a giant goat and a tree-like creature that reminded me of one of the characters on the old “H.R. Pufnstuf” kid show. They lit a massive metal jack-o-lantern and sent it rolling down a hill. They ignited skulls around the perimeter (although the skull directly in front of us seemed to have enough life in it to keep snuffing out the fire, eventually treating us to a brief but spectacular interlude of flaming eyeballs and a torch-like tongue before going dark again). Masked mythical creatures cavorted along with one ironmonger twirling a flaming lasso of sorts, sending colorful sparks into the night. Another character – a crowd favorite – revved a flaming chainsaw and ran around a lot. Every time the molten iron splattered on the ground or collided with other surfaces the oxide produced dazzling fireworks of mostly silver and blue. Pumpkins in the dark jolted to life with each pour, instantly flashing their sinister jack-o-lantern grins. The evening was a theatrical mix of controlled volcanic eruption, magma flow, the rites of destruction and creation, and sparklers on steroids.

At one level the night was about the pure joy of burning things. At another it was modern mythmaking, a blend of art, science and ritual weirdness harking back to the Halloweens of yore and the fire festivals of ancient tribes. Luminous and fanciful, the Halloween Iron Pour is one of those quirky experiments in living alchemy that Providence does so well. Prometheus and Vulcan should be proud.

This week’s question: What was your most memorable Halloween?

Throwaway Size
During last week’s game 5 of the World Series between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals, Fox broadcasting announcer Joe Buck dropped a Rhody size reference between at-bats, noting that “220 Rhode Islands” could fit into Texas. Of course, while the geographic math may be true, on a cultural level it’s doubtful you could find 220 Rhode Islanders who could fit into Texas.

Pulp and Cow

While trolling for blog fodder this morning I stumbled onto a blog that had previously trolled my newspaper to comment on and link to a story I’d forgotten I’d written. Welcome to the vortex, where information spins endlessly, cycling forever, outliving the minds that thought it, dreamed it and bothered to write it down.

Turns out that last year the blog Grim Reviews scattered a few kind words about a pre-Halloween feature I wrote three years ago about Rhode Island native C.M. Eddy Jr., a pulp writer for “Weird Tales” and a close friend to H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini. Eddy’s grandson, Jim Dyer of Narragansett, had compiled a partial collection of his work – 13 stories titled “The Loved Dead and Other Tales,” published by his homegrown company, Fenham Publishing. Previously, Dyer had published Eddy’s work in “Exit Into Eternity, Tales of the Bizarre and Supernatural.”

Given that Halloween is just around the corner, it seemed like a good time to resurrect a couple of quotes from the piece that serve to illuminate Lovecraft and Houdini, two artists in different disciplines whose influence on modern horror writers (in Lovecraft’s case) and illusionists (in Houdini’s) is unquestioned, from Stephen King to David Copperfield.

Lovecraft, of course, was a Providence native and Rhode Island lifer, while Houdini was a frequent visitor to our humble state. The words are Dyer’s:

On Eddy’s relationship to Lovecraft:

My grandparents became friends with Lovecraft in the early 1920s. He used to walk to their house in Fox Point and stay late into the night. My grandfather and he would take late-night walks in the streets of Providence, looking for interesting places or just talking about ideas for stories. My grandmother typed some of his manuscripts…He wasn’t competitive at all. Lovecraft had a hand in a lot of stories that he never got any credit for. He had a circle of friends, who would mail each other different stories and make comments.

On Eddy’s relationship to Houdini:

He worked as a ghostwriter and an investigator for Houdini. Houdini paid writers to write stories that had his name on them in popular magazines. He also used to go around the country breaking up séances and exposing mediums as fakes. My grandfather would travel to a town ahead of him and find out everything he could. He’d figure out how the voices were coming from the walls, how the table might be moving. Then he’d type up a report for Houdini, who would show up with all of the newspapers and expose the act as if he was doing it on the spot.

Odd Cow
The runaway cow that fell out of a truck last Tuesday on the Jamestown Bridge while on its way to the slaughterhouse captured the attention and imagination of locals. The bovine avoided capture for two hours before being shot by police and state environmental officials at the request of its owner. We’ll have more on the paper side in “Flotsam & Jetsam” this Thursday, but for now we’d like to know where Jamestown Bridge Cow ranks in Rhode Island’s cow pantheon. Here’s my take:

1) Golden Cow. (Newport Creamery logo.)
2) Jamestown Bridge Cow. (RIP)
3) Diva Cows. (Two of the seven Cows on Parade owned by Imagine, a boutique store in Warren. The colorful cow-sized sculptures graze eternally outside the second story of the store along Route 114. Warren has embraced the kitschy cattle, unlike denizens of Imagine’s previous home in Barrington, who raised a hue and cry to ban the cows from their town.)
4) Colt Park Bulls. (Two Jersey bulls owned by Colonel Colt that now stand as sculptures on marble pedestals at the entrance to Colt State Park in Bristol. Colt raised the finest Jersey herd in the world. On the right is a Grand Champion. On the left is a bull that killed a farm worker.)
5) The Purple Cow. (A boutique store in Wakefield.)
6) Rhody Fresh. (The logo for Rhody Fresh, local milk from local farms.)

Years ago, after someone shot an elephant in Chepachet, the town’s residents honored its memory with a statue and an annual holiday. This week’s question: How should we honor the late, lamented Jamestown Bridge Cow?

Grab Bag

Piecing together a few random finds from recent reading, with a Rhody twist. First, from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s unauthorized autobiography as excerpted in the British newsmagazine, The Week. In the extract, Assange recalls spending much of his childhood on the run from his mother’s abusive ex-lover, a member of a cult called The Family, based in the mountains north of Melbourne, Australia:

It was so tiring. Just moving all the time. Being on the run. The very last time, we got some intelligence that Leif was drawing close: they told us he was near us in the hills outside Melbourne. My brother and I showed a lot of resistance that final time – we just couldn’t bear the idea of grabbing our things again and dashing for the door. As a bribe, my mother and I told my little brother he could take his prized rooster, a Rhode Island Red, a very tall, proud, strong-looking bird, who was also extremely loud.

And two more for the size of Rhode Island archives:

From Sloane Crosley’s collection of essays, “How Did You Get This Number,” in a paragraph on an essay about a trip to Alaska titled “Light Pollution”:

The state of Alaska itself is like one big whale. Chunks of ice the size of Rhode Island exist like barnacles. They could detach from a glacier up north and no one would notice.

From the archives of the Economic Collapse blog:

Did you know that a new desert the size of Rhode Island is created in China because of drought every single year?

This week’s question: What is your favorite use of Rhode Island in a printed sentence?

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?