Day of the Dolphins

In Celtic mythology, the dolphin was considered “the watcher of the water” or “protector of sacred water.” So the recent sighting of common dolphins cavorting in a pod just off Barrington Beach could be taken as a sign that Narragansett Bay is getting healthy enough to support the kind of baitfish that will bring Flipper back into the fold here in Rhode Island, where the mermaids and giant sea monkeys left along with the horseshoe crabs back during the 1970s, when the bay was a toxic sewer.

I remember two things about combing the shore along the upper part of the bay back in the early 1970s. For the first couple of years, you could find as many horseshoe crab shells as rocks on the shore. Then they just disappeared. The other vivid memory is a nighttime excursion to the Providence waterfront, near where the big tankers dock now. I looked down into the water and saw a steady stream of electric blue goop going out with the current. Never knew what that blue goop was, but if I were a fish I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have wanted to swim through it.

In the years since, Save The Bay has done a remarkable job of cleaning the water, educating the public, lobbying politicians and fighting industrialists to bring the state’s most important resource back to health. I know this because about the time I moved back to Rhode Island, I began to notice the horseshoe crabs again, swimming along the tide line. Eel runs and bluefish runs frequent the channels. Some former oyster beds are recovering. More places are opening for safe quahogging. So there’s hope for the mermaids and sea monkeys.

It’s good news that bear have returned to our forests and dolphins to our bay. Now that environmental regulation, including legislation for clean water and clean air, has proven to work, and creatures like the osprey – on a fast track to extinction during the 1970s – are thriving once again in Rhode Island, many in Congress want to curtail these programs and put the ecosystem back in the hands of the industrialists. I think the dolphins dropped by to remind Rhode Islanders not to let them do that.

While Narragansett Bay has improved, it still has too much pollution from sewage waste, treatment plants, storm water spill-off, over-development and industrial facilities that violate their permits, resulting at times in the creation of dead zones, beach and shell-fishing closures, fish-kills and clam die-offs. It’s nice that the watchers of the water spent a day at play in Narragansett Bay. But vigilance isn’t just the job of marine mammals. If Rhode Islanders want to preserve the bay for future generations, we can’t expect dolphins to do all of the watching.

Which is why the annual Save The Bay Sale & Exhibit, opening this Thursday at the Save The Bay Center at Fields Point in Providence, is worth a detour for anyone who cares about the bay’s revival. More than 70 artists, most from Rhode Island, will showcase over 200 original works of painting, photography, sculpture and jewelry inspired by the Ocean State’s most prominent landscape. The show, which helps to fund the organization’s KEYS campaign (Keep Educating Young Scientists), continues through Dec. 27. If you’re an art-lover or a bay-watcher, drop by and discover more than 200 ways to see an old friend in a new light.

This week’s question: What was your favorite wildlife encounter in Rhode Island?

Blog on the Half Shell Classic
We didn’t exist as a blog back in 2000, when the movie “Chicken Run” came out. But Rhody-philes might like to rent the stop-animation classic, if only to rank the performance of its protagonist – a Rhode Island Red named Rocky Rhodes – against those of other cartoon Rhode Islanders, including the cast of “Family Guy,” Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head from the “Toy Story” trilogy, and “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero.” Just sayin’: The rooster gives the American dysfunctional family, the potatoes and the soldier who takes himself a bit too seriously a real run for their money.

Marquee Marks

Last week, while checking in with Fusionworks Dance Company in Lincoln, I noticed the “P” was missing on the Pharmacy sign at the Lincoln Mall Target. So it read: HARMACY. I made a note of it because I liked the idea of a “harmacy” as a place you go where the drugs do more harm than good.

Earlier today my friend Gavin, during our lunchtime jog, said he saw his favorite sign amid a string of cheap motels near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Trying to set itself apart, one motel advertised free HBO. Except that the “H” had disappeared. Turns out that this particular dive was actually offering: FREE B O.

For a long while a few years back, Junge’s Hotel on Route 16 in North Conway, N.H. had a marquee with a dark letter. So it read: “Jung ‘s Hotel.” I always wanted to stay there, imagining a “Twin Peaks-ian” atmosphere in which rooms would be visited by spirits and angels, Grim Reapers and devils, old wise men and Earth Mothers and the like.

More than once during my bicycle trip up the East Coast a decade ago, I saw signs advertising Sunday events with the S missing that read: UNDAY. The idea appealed to me. Ever since I have tried to schedule one “unday” every month – a day to break routine, explore somewhere new, try something different and tune out the noise of the world. The ritual of the unday as a day devoted to spontaneity and adventure – whether recreational, scholarly or spiritual – is something I’ve cultivated to the point where I can’t imagine a month without one. Amazing to think it was conceived amid a plastic wilderness of pink flamingoes and mailbox manatees.

What was your favorite roadside sign?

Late Potato
Not sure how we missed this, given this blog’s obsession with all things Potato Head. But earlier this year in Time magazine’s “Culture” section, it was reported that Pawtucket-based Hasbro was introducing thinner versions of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. Bowing to a carb-conscious public and recent statistics about obesity, the toy manufacturer apparently decided that the iconic spuds should be a better role model for kids, hence the slimmer figures. For some reason, Hasbro also suddenly decided they needed pants. So that’s the news from Rhody: No more naked potato.

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?