Winter Slush

A miscellany of holiday remnants…

Except for the freak pre-Halloween snowstorm that added a chilling grace note to the weekend of molten iron pours and trick-or-treating zombie brides, late autumn and early winter were unseasonably warm this year, as the southern New England landscape never got out of its bleak brown-gray bathrobe day after day. So even the most hardened cynic might be forgiven for believing in a little Christmas magic on the morning of Dec. 25, when a few fat snowflakes tumbled down and the neighborhood cove cascaded in flurries for an hour or so, giving us a taste of a white Christmas, if not the feast that many had hoped for.

There was less poetry in the real world, but no shortage of holiday weirdness, at least in the news pages. The following item comes from the South Kingstown police beat in yesterday’s South County Independent:

A LITTLE HO-HO-HO
A North Kingstown woman is under arrest after she allegedly tried to give the Wakefield Mall Santa a lap dance and then stole DVDs from one of the stores.

The item goes on to describe the woman’s bizarre behavior. According to the photographer on the scene, Santa handled the situation with the dignity one would expect from a centuries-old elf. Before allegedly stealing five DVDs, the woman managed to get the photo of herself on Santa’s lap from the photographer, telling him and St. Nick to “come watch her dance at Cheater’s [a Providence strip club].”

Another item, this time from the North Kingstown police beat in yesterday’s North East Independent, falls under the Grinch category:

LARCENY
Greg Pignolet, of 91 King Phillip Drive, reported on Friday that his decorative winged pig was stolen from his front yard overnight.

While we certainly don’t condone the theft, it does strike us as odd that a winged pig would go missing around the holidays. We have heard that animals can speak on Christmas Day. Perhaps pigs can fly, too.

Finally, we also noticed in our papers that one local senior center plans to hold its New Year’s Eve celebration on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. “with the ball to drop at noon.” We like this idea. Beats having to spend another midnight watching Z-List celebrities complain about the cold in New York and Fergie introducing lame musical acts from Los Angeles.

Having said that, perhaps it’s appropriate that, in households across America, “dropping the ball” is the signature moment of New Year’s Eve. Isn’t that the year in a nutshell? We begin with hope and promise and resolutions of change; we end worn-out, beaten down, glad it’s over. Year after year, fumbling through, mostly dropping the ball. And yet there it is again, lying in front of us, waiting to be picked up and carried across the goal line.

What’s your New Year’s resolution?

Making Soupy

Most families and cultures have their own Christmas customs, honed over the years to the perfection of a jeweled ornament. This year I had a chance to celebrate someone else’s tradition. On Wednesday, thanks to the Garafola family of Bradford – and Bill Lucey, our publisher, for inviting me along – I was allowed to participate in a winter ritual native to Rhode Island, or more particularly, the town of Westerly: Making soupy.

Which is how I ended up with my hands buried in pork butts and carrying raw sausage from closet to cooler and sausage casings from kitchen to basement. Short for soppressata, soupy is a cured sausage mixed with secret herbs and spices – every family has their own you-die-if-you-discover-it recipe – that hangs over winter and is ready to eat by the following Easter. The Garafolas, a friendly bunch, put up with my intrusion and inexperience, allowing me to work the drill that fed the meat into a synthetic casing managed by the family’s patriarch, Lou, whose touch is amazing to watch. If I had any say in such matters at all, I’d bestow upon him the title of soupy maestro.

The tradition dates back to a town in Calabria, the birthplace of many Italian immigrants who settled in Westerly around 1900 to work the granite quarries as stonemasons. Now Westerly is the soupy capital of the world, while just across the river, in neighboring Pawcatuck, Conn., settled by Sicilians, hardly anyone makes it. In fact, it is a food so identified with the families and villages of Westerly that many lifelong Rhode Islanders have never heard of it, much less tasted it. (Although Pat Garafola, the family matriarch, said that you can get a white soupy in Providence. The Westerly version is red.)

Every family thinks they make the best soupy, of course, which is how it should be. The sausages are passed on at Easter to family (at least family that is still on speaking terms) and close friends. Our own family Christmas tradition includes a South African Mixed Grill, made by my father, who usually combines a bit of steak, back bacon and sausage to eggs over easy, fried potatoes, tomatoes and banana, with baked beans and toast. This year the sausage will be soupy, before the curing.

What are your family traditions for Christmas, New Year or any of the winter holidays?

[Note: Publishing a bit earlier than usually since Monday is the official holiday. Same next week. Expect a pre-New Year’s Day post on Friday. Merry Christmas!]

On the Civil War Trail

War is the scribe of history, and its imprint smudges the news of the day in every generation. Last week the Iraq war was declared over, but our country’s military engagement continues around the world, a reminder of the shadow that always accompanies the season of peace and light.

The story of Rhode Island in wartime has been sporadically documented. A couple of weeks ago this blog focused on Christian M. McBurney’s “The Rhode Island Campaign: The First French and American Operation in the Revolutionary War,” a book that contributes significantly to the Ocean State’s historical narrative. The Revolutionary War, at least in New England, has always been a primary concern. There are trails with landmarks and burial grounds telling the Patriot story scattered throughout the six states, and all New England schoolchildren grow up with a fundamental understanding of the region’s importance to the emerging nation’s aspirations and sense of identity – even though Massachusetts gets most of the ink.

Recent scholarly excursions into King Philip’s War have expanded our understanding of Colonial-era Rhode Island and the surrounding Puritan New England colonies as well. From June 1675 to August 1676, the war was fought between the growing population of New Englanders (aided by some local tribes) against Native American tribes comprising the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Nipmuck and others.

The World Wars are commemorated in monuments. All Rhode Islanders know the World War I monument, a towering shaft of Westerly granite that used to occupy the crazed DownCity roundabout known as “suicide circle” until it was relocated to its current position in front of the Superior Court building in the 1980s when Providence moved its rivers. World War II left a legacy in V-J Day, now known as Victory Day, denoting the date when the Japanese surrendered. Rhode Island remains the only state in the U.S. to mark the date with a holiday. A Rhode Islander is also purportedly the young sailor depicted in the world’s most famous photograph of a kiss. Alfred Einsentaedt’s signature image of World War II, of the sailor kissing a nurse in a white dress, taken on V-J Day in Times Square, is one of the iconic American scenes, even though in recent years other veterans have laid claim to putting their lips on the moment.

Given the level of fascination with all things historical in these parts, it’s surprising that Rhode Island shows such scant interest in a war that much of the rest of the country can’t get enough of – the Civil War. Especially since by the time of the War Between the States, Rhode Island was a hub of manufacturing, with many of the mills generating fabrics for Southern plantations then switching over to produce material for the Union cause. Rhode Island regiments served with distinction in the Civil War, and yet even this year’s 150th anniversary of the war’s beginning didn’t generate much play in a state that saw its capital celebrate its 375th anniversary.

A new organization in Massachusetts is trying to bring more attention to New England’s role in the Civil War. The New England Civil War Foundation is seeking to create a New England Civil War Discovery Trail that will spotlight houses of historical significance (such as the residence of Gen. Ambrose Burnside – whom we have to thank for “sideburns” – on Benefit Street in Providence), places of maritime activity (such as Newport), and factories that made products for Union soldiers, including uniforms and guns. The only Rhode Island location mentioned to date on the Web site is the Mill at Shady Lea in North Kingstown. According to the site, blankets were made there for Union soldiers. Also, several POWs from the South, who were stationed at Fort Adams in Newport, ended up working there, with many of them staying on and settling in the area.

The South County Museum in Narragansett and the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society in Kingston are just two of the local historical landmarks that contain objects and ephemera detailing Rhode Island’s involvement with the Civil War. Anyone who wants to nominate historic spots for the New England Civil War Discovery Trail should e-mail editor@battlefieldjournal.com.

What was Rhode Island’s most significant contribution to the Civil War?

Sea-struck

The watery side of Rhode Island gets the gallery treatment in a couple of exhibitions hereabouts. The Artists for Save The Bay Sale & Exhibit, featuring hundreds of artworks in a variety of media made by more than 70 Rhode Island artists – all focusing in some way on the state’s most precious resource, Narragansett Bay – will be on display through Dec. 27 in Providence. I’ll have more this Thursday in the paper and online.

While the Save The Bay show emphasizes the bay’s scenery, biodiversity and variety of moods (in all seasons, types of weather and times of day and night), an exhibition at the Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery at Salve Regina University in Newport goes for something deeper. Titled “Ocean States,” and curated by Ernest Jolicoeur, the gallery’s new director, the exhibition showcases five Rhode Island-based artists responding to the sea.

Two installations stand out. The first, at the entrance, is a companion to the exhibit – Bert Emerson’s “A Day at the Beach,” a large-scale construction of found objects, glass, wood, plastic and aquarium filters transformed into something that on first glance appears culled from the mad scientist’s laboratory in “Young Frankenstein.” (The one where Igor, played by Marty Feldman, dropped the first brain, so he took the one belonging to “Abby someone…Abby Normal.”)

Emerson’s inventive installation contains 75 items, representing a fraction of nearly 1,000 pounds of trash, everything from those ubiquitous crushed Styrofoam Dunkin’ Donuts cups to fishing lures and SpongeBob SquarePants novelties, collected during a local beach cleanup in September. The piece is a collaboration with Clean Ocean Access, an organization whose mission focuses attention on the cleanliness and safety of the water at the Rhode Island coast and issues of public access. COA provides a weekly program that tests levels of unseen contaminated water in our shore areas. While people are sometimes warned about contamination, the sea life of Narragansett Bay doesn’t have the option of closing the beach. COA’s idea, according to the artist, is to make “the invisible visible,” which is what Emerson has done here with his provocative and labor-intensive artwork.

The other eye-grabber is “Waveform 1,” a kinetic sculpture by Mikhail Mansion and Will Reeves, made of steel, wood, aluminum and stainless steel, that mimics the undulating quality of ocean water. The contrast between the construction’s hard materials and its fluid action is disorienting and visually engaging, all the more so since the rhythmic accompanying sound here is not sloshing water but the mechanized noise associated with engineering (echoing the age of steam). Positioned in the center of the gallery, the installation is 100-by-128-by-120 inches in size, and demands attention throughout the visit. The mechanical wave rises and falls from a battery of overhead controls that include pulleys and wires, gears and cams, turning metal and wood into the shape and motion of a jellyfish. Thus the wave, as the primal act of the sea, is ingeniously reconsidered here.

Other artists present multiple works. All have their highlights. As a series, Allison Eleanor Bianco’s screen prints featuring grounded and sinking ships in highly saturated colors is a successful blend of the comic and tragic. A staggered fleet of tall ships, tugs, trawlers, tankers, ferries and cruise ships are depicted in their beached or submerging vessel forms at their voyage’s unexpected end. Dramatic color choices and the specificity of each vessel’s design add to the poignancy of works, which resonate with evocations of loss, memory and the ultimate inevitability of all journeys, human and otherwise.

Buck Hastings cultivates surreal scenes using old magazines and oceanographic textbooks, creating dream-like photo-collages inspired by the adventure of deep-sea exploration, while Todd Moore presents large India Ink drawings on paper, immersing viewers in topographic detail along the rocky New England coast. Both artists add to the collective of the re-imagined ocean that cradles Rhode Island (and, by extension, the world beyond). And, with Narragansett Bay pounding the rocks below the Cliff Walk just a few hundred yards away, the Hamilton Gallery is ideally situated to offer the tantalizing bit of sea-smack found in “Ocean States.”

The show ends Wednesday. Hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

This week’s question: What is your favorite artwork depicting Rhode Island?

Revolutionary Rhody

Flashback, August 1778. With American patriots and their allies primed to capture the British garrison at Newport, and French forces poised for an epic sea battle against the British in and around Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island found itself at the epicenter of the Revolutionary War. Victory here, and the war might have ended sooner, with place names like Portsmouth and Quaker Hill becoming as much of the nation’s consciousness as Yorktown and Bunker Hill.

We can only speculate what might have happened had the sea battle not begun at the cusp of a hurricane, or “the Great Storm,” as it was known. The weather, coupled with evasive strategy by Britain’s Admiral Howe, eventually forced the French fleet to depart Rhode Island for repairs in Boston – a major factor in dooming prospects for absolute American victory in the Rhode Island theater.

I’ll have more on Christian M. McBurney’s “The Rhode Island Campaign,” a scholarly account of the first joint French and American operation of the Revolutionary War, in this Thursday’s paper and online edition. Today’s blog is devoted to a few marks made in yellow highlighter, an accumulation of oddities and details that didn’t make it into the review.

One only-in-Rhode-Island moment: On Major General John Sullivan, commander-in-chief of the American Army, requesting provisions from Continental depots in Boston:

Sullivan refused only one item because Rhode Island had plenty of it – rum.

Speaking of rum, the demon drink was one of the few advantages that Providence held over Newport, which bested our state capital in population, wealth and culture:

…in one area, at least, Providence outdid its flashier sister city: in 1769, its thirty-one rum distilleries surpassed Newport’s twenty-six.

Some of the British turned out to be scarecrows. Or scarepatriots, as Colonel John Topham’s 1st Rhode Island State Regiment discovered when it inspected British fortifications on the island at Butts (Windmill) Hill:

Marching inland, he discovered amid the earthen walls and wooden barracks atop Butts Hill only dummy soldiers – red-coated uniforms stuffed with straw.

Straw soldiers weren’t the only trick the British had up their sleeves. The Navy had a ploy of its own:

Howe had brought with him three fire ships, which could be set ablaze and adrift when the tides and winds were right to crash into the huge, anchored French ships. [The names of the British fire ships were Strombolo, Sulphur and Volcano.]

The Aug. 10, 1778 edition of The Boston Independent Ledger, reporting on the war, declared “All eyes are now turned to Rhode Island.” (What a difference a couple of centuries make, give or take three or four decades. Now when all eyes turn to Rhode Island, they’re watching “Family Guy.”)

Some things never change: Colonel Laurens, riding on horseback from New York to Providence, reported that he had journeyed “in 48 hours over the worst and in some parts the most obscure roads that I ever traveled.” Welcome to Rhody, where some of our potholes are on the National Historic Register.

Rock stars are famous for not going on stage unless their demands for, say, a bowl of green-only M&Ms are met. With the baguette-mad French, apparently, the deal-breaker was bread, which was lacking in Rhode Island: According to Sullivan, French Admiral D’Estaing asked for 6,000 bricks “necessary for the construction of ovens to bake flour and make bread. Our existence depends on it.” And Laurens wrote, “The French squadron will want a great quantity of provisions whether they winter here or return to France. No biscuit is to be had here. Pennsylvania must furnish flour, and bakers should be employed [there] immediately.” Apparently, the French never got the hang of jonnycakes.

What is your favorite Rhode Island historical oddity?

Winterizing

Although the weather outside is hardly frightful, I'm making the call now: If you live in New England, get ready for a cold and snowy winter. My reasoning is based solely on recent observations while walking or jogging through neighborhoods suddenly exploding in fat squirrels with bushy tails. I'm talking Santa girth. These aren't woodsy rodents. They're sumo wrestlers. I've got three in my backyard that don't even bother moving anymore when I walk by. They live in a cedar tree on the property and have to take turns scrambling up the bark (although the word "scrambling" is generous; imagine three sumo wrestlers rock climbing behind one another and you have pretty good idea of the pace). So this can't be a good sign for anyone hoping for a mild winter.

But if you don’t trust my forecasting skills, weather lore is abundant in foolproof methods to gauge the severity of winter. Here are a few:

1) Find a dead, local goose. (In other words, no Canada geese. And nothing store-bought. You don't know where they've been.) Locate the breastbone. Its length will indicate the length of the upcoming winter while its color will determine the season’s severity. A plain white breastbone foretells a mild winter. The more mottled, the more severe.

2) Check for moss growing on a tree in your neighborhood. Locate the south side of the tree. The more moss growing on that side of the tree, the harder the winter ahead.

3) Watch those fat squirrels with bushy tails bury their nuts. The deeper they dig, the colder the winter to come.

4) Think back to July. Were the anthills high? If so, it means a snowy winter.

5) Peel an onion grown locally. The general rule of thumb is: “Onion skins very thin/Mild winter coming in; Onion skins thick and tough/Coming winter cold and rough.”

6) Go to the riverbank. Locate a muskrat hole. The higher the burrow, the higher the snow will be this winter.

7) Cut open a persimmon seed. Look inside. If it has a knife shape that means winter will be cold and icy, with winds that cut like a knife.

8) Check the thickness of cornhusks, raccoon tails and the hair on the nape of a crow’s neck. If thicker than usual, expect a rough winter.

9) Watch pigs. Are they gathering sticks? Watch ants. Are they marching in a line? Watch woodpeckers. Are they sharing trees? Watch spiders. Are they spinning bigger-than-average webs or showing up in your house in greater numbers? All of these animal behaviors predict a severe winter.

10) Find a woolly bear caterpillar. Is it fatter and fuzzier than the last time you looked at a woolly bear caterpillar? Is the orange band in the middle narrower than normal? Both are portents of a hard winter.

There’s more. Did the monarch butterflies, snowy owls, geese and ducks migrate early? Are the hornet’s nests higher than normal? Have the bees hibernated in their hives prematurely? Are squirrels gathering nuts even earlier and more frantically than usual, and hiding them in odd places? Are you suddenly noticing crickets and mice in your house?

If so, bundle up and make sure your shovel and scraper are handy. Based on the Fat Squirrel Theory, Old Man Winter looks like he’s building an igloo in Rhode Island this year.

This week’s question: What winter weather lore do you trust the most?

Thanksgiving Story

A few years back I welcomed new neighbors with a harvest basket filled with a cornucopia of gifts and a card that read, “You’ve been turkeyed.” On the heels of a previously anonymous Halloween candy-and-art-supply “You’ve been ghosted” delivery to the doorstep, the secret grab bag of Thanksgiving kitsch became part of a new tradition, with variants (“You’ve been shamrocked” on Saint Patrick’s Day; “You’ve been egged” at Easter) keeping the mystery going all year long.

(Not all of the skulking was successful. A late-night egg planting one Easter went horribly wrong once when children opened their plastic eggs the next morning in the living room, only to see grubby, slimy, early-rising insects crawl out. They had been attracted by the jellybeans inside. On the plus side, according to their parents, the negative reinforcement seemed to curb the kids’ appetite for candy that year.)

The gist of the Thanksgiving ritual involved a visit from the great gobbler, Tom Booghalamoon.* Inspired by my own childhood readings of the Great Pumpkin, whom Linus waits for unfailingly to visit every year in “Peanuts,” Tom Booghalamoon – also known as Tom B. Turkey – is a giant flying Narragansett turkey that wears a pilgrim’s hat and rides a broom. Just as Santa Claus brings gifts to children everywhere on Christmas Eve, Tom Turkey welcomes anyone who has moved into a new neighborhood since the previous Thanksgiving with gifts of hearth and harvest. With his faithful Turkey Boys and Turkey Girls, urchins that have a home in a corn maze the size of Rhode Island, at a latitude and longitude that doesn’t appear to exist on any known map, Tom brings good cheer to those who are leaving something behind but are also looking forward to whatever might be ahead.

What is your favorite Thanksgiving Day ritual?

· Linguists may recognize Booghalamoon as Persian for “wild turkey.” Other foreign names include: “Chilmyeonjo,” Korean for “seven-faced bird”; “dik rumi,” Arabic for “Roman rooster” or “Ethiopian bird”; “huoji,” a Chinese word meaning “fire chicken” (other Chinese words include “tujinji” or “cough up a brocade chicken” or “tushouji” or “cough up a ribbon chicken”); “la dinde” in France, which is derived from “(poulet) d’Inde” or “(chicken) from India”; “(der) Truthahn” in German; “gallopoula” in Greek, meaning “French chicken”; “Peru,” in Portuguese, which is also their name for the country “Peru”; “bata mzinga” in Swahili, meaning “the great duck”; and “feel murgh” in Urdu, meaning “elephant chicken.” (Source: Wikipedia.)