Blueways blues

Once upon a time in Rhode Island, everything was a Greenway or a Blueway. This was a place of wild seas and wilderness, providing a home for people who fished or farmed –or most likely, both. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which turned Rhode Island into America’s first booming mill and factory community, the state rapidly lost ground to the ravages of modern living, requiring some visionaries of the day to insist on building public parks, riverside cemeteries and protected lands just to keep a little green alive in all that soot. Then in the baby boom following World War II, Rhody became suburbanized. We got mall-crazy and lost our wicked feng shui in a sea of asphalt, dead end streets and cul-de-sacs. From 1964 to 1997, Rhode Island’s farmland was cut in half. Not long after that, Smart Growth Rhode Island estimated that one of the consequences of unchecked sprawl would be a $1.5-billion tax bill for Rhode Islanders over the next 20 years. Just another reason why we should preserve what’s left of our Greenways and Blueways, before they all turn into Sprawlways.

We already mentioned the Greenways folks a couple of weeks ago, so this week we’ll give a nod to the R.I. Blueways Alliance, which is organizing a dozen unique paddling excursions down rivers, in lakes and ponds and along the coast of Narragansett Bay beginning in June. Collectively titled, “Paddle 2011: River, Pond and Bay Stories,” the trips are a joint effort between the alliance and several of the state’s watershed and historic groups.

The Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Exeter and the Wood-Pawcatuck River Watershed Council in Hope Valley are teaming up for a talk-and-tour, with the first part inviting paddlers to the museum to learn about the way Narragansett, Wampanoag and Niantic Indians used kayaks to fish and forage, followed by a trip down the Wood River, among the spring anglers and wildlife found in abundance along the banks. The Ten Mile River Watershed Council will lead paddlers on a trip that follows the route Roger Williams took when he fled Massachusetts and landed in what would become Providence. Paddlers can explore a gorge, a fjord-like estuary, a pristine river or a salt pond. They can celebrate the summer solstice, the state’s historic mill culture or the natural world. Or they can learn the technique of stand-up paddle boarding.

Eric Wertheimer, who submits a pictorial column to the Arts & Living section of Independent Newspapers titled “Only in South County,” said that only when he began taking photographs in his “second life” did he become aware of how much water you find in Rhode Island. The more Rhode Islanders notice and engage with our waterways, the greater the possibility of keeping them blueways, instead of sludgeways. The more Rhode Islanders experience the woods and trails and pocket wildernesses of the state, the greater the odds of keeping them greenways, instead of trashways.

We may have lost the battle of sprawlways forever – I’m talking to you Bald Hill Road in Warwick and West Main Road in Middletown. Our main highway (Route 95) is mostly eyesore from the Route 4 split north to the Massachusetts border (despite the tidy skyline of Providence and whatever cheer the Big Blue Bug brings to the kitsch-minded among us). The concrete arteries spewing through Providence, Cranston and Warwick are so lacking in aesthetic that drivers apparently have no qualms about opening their windows en route and tossing out their trash in the scrub along the medians. The contrast with our greenways and blueways could not be more striking – which is why we should fight for their continued evergreen, everblue health. It's the kind of local color we can be proud of.

Where is the worst sprawl in Rhode Island?

[Blogger’s note: Half Shell will be testing the waters of Maine next Monday. Check back on Tuesday to see how the world is living la vida Rhody.]

Rhody Size Reprise

Followers of this blog know that I am a sporadic collector and sharer of size of Rhode Island references, but recently while trolling for fodder I stumbled onto Lexacat, posting down the road in Kingston, who has raised the genre to high art. Among Lexacat’s blog oeuvre is one called, “The Size of Rhode Island.”

While adding to the litany of SORI references, Lexacat goes a step further, analyzing and assessing each item for accuracy. In a recent post, for example, Luxembourg was definitively determined to be NOT the size of Rhode Island. One important note: Lexacat appropriately uses the standard 1,545 square-mile figure, which includes such watery acreage as Narragansett Bay – the Ocean State’s most distinctive feature – and not the 1,045 square-mile number, which measures land mass only.

The entertaining blog examines such SORI of lore as the BP Gulf oil spill (bigger than Rhody), the Yellowstone caldera (within the acceptable plus-minus range to be considered a viable SORI), Iceland (no), ammonia refrigeration units (no), Fort Benning in Georgia (no), Alex Rodriguez’ elbow pad (no), the area of timberlands purchased by Weyerhauser in 1900 (maybe), some guy’s father’s oil stain (no), the Copper River Watershed Area in Alaska (no), Basque Country in Spain (no), North Cascades National Park in Washington (almost), Aiken County in South Carolina (almost), Nancy Pelosi’s heart or airplane (both no), Alonzo Mourning’s basketball jersey (no), the scoreboard at Yankee Stadium (no), Antarctica’s ice chunk (maybe), disappearing wetlands at the mouth of the Colorado River (maybe), Chevron’s “worst oil catastrophe on the planet” (maybe), destroyed rain forest (maybe) and pregnant with sextuplets lady (no).

What Lexacat and the good folks at Quahog and the staff here at Half Shell are perhaps most curious about is why anyone outside of Rhody even cares about measuring its calamities, communities, extremities and other oddities in Rhode Islands? Whatever the reasons, so many reporters now reflexively use the phrase in their descriptions that it won't be long before "size of Rhode Island" has a spot in the AP Stylebook between "sister" ("capitalize in all references before the names of nuns") and "skeptic."

This week’s question: What remains in the universe to be measured in Rhode Islands?

Moonrise Musings

This week in the wilds of Matunuck, actor Ed Norton is performing scenes as a camp counselor for the next Wes Anderson movie, “Moonrise Kingdom,” which is filming in Rhode Island this spring. Early word from the advance team is that the ticks, no-see-ums and mosquitoes have been brutal – no surprise since they’ve chosen to film some scenes in the Swamp Yankee part of Rhode Island.

In recent weeks, the good folks at Orbie’s Café in Wakefield have been loaning me Anderson flicks along with my daily coffee, starting with “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “The Darjeeling Express” and “Bottle Rocket,” Anderson’s directorial debut, starring the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke. I had already seen “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” and I just picked up “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Anderson’s films polarize people, but I’m an unabashed fan. Especially of “The Life Aquatic,” which received his harshest reviews of any film to date.

Mini-review alert: I love the playfulness of its multi-layered, film-within-a-film storytelling. Spectacular visuals and odd details evoke the comparable dreamlike worlds of moviemaking and the aquatic environment, as we watch Team Zissou making a documentary of whatever they encounter (raising the metaphorical questions about truth and illusion, reality and artificiality). The movie works as both a parody and homage of the Jacques Cousteau milieu, with its stories of “jaguar sharks” and “crayon pony fish,” but it resonates more deeply as a story about explorers as heroes, when every 12-year-old boy, if he couldn’t play shortstop for the Red Sox, dreamed of diving the oceans, digging for treasure or blasting off into space in search of adventure. There’s satire in the steady hawking and marketing of Zissou paraphernalia and his constant need for more funding, contrasted with the heavily endowed enterprise of his oceanographer rival (played by Jeff Goldlbum), whose high-tech resources would be at home in a Bond movie. Some of it is surreal, including a couple of modern pirate scenes (no Jack Sparrow romance here…when his college interns fail to join Zissou on a rescue mission, the explorer threatens to give them an incomplete). There are several wonderful touches of wit and aesthetic, such as the Portuguese crewmember that plays his guitar and sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese; those exotic, extra-colorful, “Finding Nemo”-esque marine creatures; and a great cast, including a deadpan, water-weary Bill Murray playing the lead role.

Those who watch a lot of Anderson’s films will note some commonalities, especially in themes and motifs of abandonment, arrested adolescence, the father-son relationship, and portraits of a world in which many of the characters come from money. These are broken people; everyone, at some level, carries a weighted personality that has buried grief or pain. But wrapped around these characters are wonderful scenes that linger visually and emotionally, achieving a quality that feels both literary and cinematic.

So what can we expect from “Moonrise Kingdom?” More of the same, I’d imagine, only with an distinctly Ocean State atmosphere, circa the 1960s. The setting for the film is an island off the coast of New England. A young boy and girl fall and love and run away together. Various factions of the town go out to search for them. From that premise, a movie will bloom.

According to colleague Liz Boardman, the film will be shot entirely in Rhode Island over 44 days this spring, with locations already secured in Jamestown, Portsmouth and Hopkinton. Norton’s scenes will be filmed on part of Bayfield Farm, a South Kingstown Land Trust property off Camp Fuller Road in Matunuck, where a temporary Boy Scout camp of stick-and-canvas tents will be set up amid the pasture land, the juniper trees, rocks and cows.

I still think the turf farms along Slocum Road and Sodco’s massive mechanical irrigator (that looks like a water sprinkler from “The Land of the Giants”) would make a great location for a movie, along with the strange Cold War remnants of lonely buildings and roads at Quonset Point.

Your turn: What Rhode Island setting would make a good movie location?

Greenway Lament

Amid the new perfumes, sounds and colors that arrived daily last week as spring popped in the landscape, the joys of the season in South County were tempered by one little-known off-note. On Friday, the offices of the East Coast Greenway Alliance – an organization dedicated to creating a continuous recreational route from Key West to the top of Maine – closed their doors, shut the windows and turned off the phones at Lily Pads Professional Center in Peace Dale. Greenway headquarters have departed to Durham, N.C., and while the move makes sense on a number of levels, it’s still a loss for the local culture of “fresh air fiends,” to use an expression from author Paul Theroux.

The Greenway will still have a presence in Rhode Island, as Eric Weis, the organization’s trail program coordinator, lives in Providence and maintains a small office on Dorrance Street. But having the headquarters here gave legitimacy to all of the efforts to build public paths, whether on the spine of the Greenway or popular spurs – like the East Bay Bike Path, the Blackstone River Bikeway or the William C. O’Neill (South County) Bike Path, throughout the state. As a consequence, Rhody has become one of the more bike-friendly states on the Eastern Seaboard, with 50 miles of paved paths completed, another 40 miles at various stages of development, and bike routes and lanes integrated into its largest cities. A recent trip down Blackstone Boulevard in Providence revealed the kind of urban bike lane that would be the envy of any city cyclist. Despite its steep hills, potholes and long winters, Providence has emerged as a cycling town, thanks in large part to its steady influx of green-minded college students.

Not all Rhode Islanders are fans of public paths. In some places, such as the Canonchet section of Narragansett, NIMBY has reared its ugly head, as some residents have stonewalled the planned process for extending the South County Bike Path from South Kingstown to Narragansett Town Beach for years. Their arguments ring hollow, particularly since public access already exists in the neighborhood, which serves as the gateway to the South County Museum. Among their most recent rhetorical strategies is to express concern about the surrounding wetlands. It’s a great point. Makes you wonder why they didn’t consider it when they built their houses there.

NIMBY is a popular figure in Rhode Island, and I can even understand the angst when it comes to wind turbines, container ports, nuclear power plants, prisons and airports. But a bike path? As someone who lives two blocks from the most traveled bike path in the state, I can assure you that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who lives on or near the route that doesn’t appreciate having it there. In an age when we’re combating obesity, inactivity and our dependency on expensive energy, bike paths are no-brainers for communities. They promote health and fellowship, provide opportunities to see nature in the raw and the progression of the seasons, and become a unifying source of pride for neighborhoods. Just this spring, jogging the path along White Horn Brook and Genessee Swamp in South Kingstown, I’ve encountered a deafening chorus of peepers screeching like banshees, hunting hawks and herons, deer and fawns bounding through the adjoining woods, beaver lodges, bugling geese and concerts of songbirds in the swamp and surrounding forest. At the path in Barrington, the town’s historic society has installed storyboard kiosks, documenting the region’s heritage as a place of oyster houses, lace factories and Wampanoag territory.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but apparently it was built quicker than the town of Narragansett can build a bike path. So until that day happens, here’s this week’s question: What is your favorite bike path in Rhode Island?

Jolly Roger and Out

The romance of pirates never seems to fade, despite the grim details emerging weekly from modern pirates mistreating or killing yachters and sailors in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. The violence associated with corsairs of legend – clashing swords, walking planks, firing cannon – is the stuff of adventure, somehow different from the gruesome news accounts of brutal, bloody shootouts and kidnappings. With old-school pirates, it’s the rogue spirit people seem to respond to, the sense of freedom on the high seas, the lure of buried treasure, the cult of personality and the classless ideal of sharing the common spoils.

And nowhere in the United States is piracy more revered than in Rhode Island, where re-enactors like the Rhode Island Pirate Players and the Free Men of the Sea (based in Connecticut) spread the gospel of buccaneer life at festivals throughout the year, including this weekend’s “Bridge to the Past” at Smith’s Castle in Wickford. Along the banks of the Cocumscussoc, the Free Men will launch an exhibition “PIRATES! Against all flags,” that will give visitors a glimpse into the fact and folklore of long-ago pirates on the New England coast, allowing them to view period weapons, pirate flags, coins and other treasure, types of punishments and other paraphernalia. The event coincides with Sunday’s May Fair in East Greenwich, called “Pirate Palooza.” Earlier this month, the R.I. Pirate Players, who entertain visitors to Newport every summer with their walking tour “Dead Men’s Tales,” became the first Rhode Island pirates to receive a letter of marque – also known as a privateering commission – from the governor (Lincoln Chafee in this case) since Gov. William Jones issued letters of marque during the War of 1812.

(Side note: It's common to see Rhody vessels and even some houses still flying versions of the Jolly Roger - or skull-and-crossbones flags. Rebel flags in general remain popular here in The Independent State. You can spot a Confederate flag now and then in rural Rhody. Even more common is the "Don't Tread on Me" flag...although I saw more of them around before it was usurped by the Tea Party. There are still a few traditionalists, but even then, many residents flying national flags haven't gotten around to changing from the original circle of 13 stars yet.)

During the Golden Age of Piracy, from the late 17th through the early 18th century, piracy was – like slavery – an industry of its own in Rhode Island. Although most went under the legal “privateer” label, pirates commonly fitted out in Rhode Island while residents answered the equivalent of “Pirate Needed” Help Wanted ads to serve as crew members. And Rhody, especially Newport, was a refuge for many of the most notorious swashbucklers, including William Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Every and Thomas Tew, most of whom supposedly buried booty in and around Block Island or Aquidneck Island – as yet undiscovered (or unreported).

Every, considered “The King of Pirates” since he acquired more plunder than any other freebooter, captured the biggest treasure ever on a ship belonging to the Great Mogul of India, then supposedly came to Providence in 1696 on his ship Charles (alias Fancy) after leaving his home port of Madagascar to outfit himself with a new ship that would take him to retirement on the west coast Ireland. In 1698, the London Board of Trade reported “pieces of Arabian gold are common in New York and Rhode Island, after the arrival there of pirate Captain Coats from the Red Sea.” In 1702, maritime historian William Clark wrote “every man in Newport is either a pirate or privateerman.” In 1716, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, is known to have enjoyed an extended stay in Providence. Long after piracy died out in most of the Colonies, Rhode Islanders were still going on raids, claiming prizes and pocketing sterling, gold and jewels. It took the merchants to change things. As merchant ships began crowding Rhode Island harbors, their owners didn’t want their vessels to become pirate prizes, so they forced local politicians to enforce and strengthen the laws against piracy. In 1723 at Gravelly Point near Newport, 26 men were hanged for piracy, putting an exclamation point on how seriously Rhode Island law officials were taking the new rules.

Thomas Tew, often called “The Rhode Island Pirate,” lives on in a rum named after him, produced by the Newport Distilling Co. Made with blackstrap molasses, pot stills and local water, and aged in French and American oak barrels, the rum harks back to when Newport was the rum capital of the world. By 1769, 22 distilleries were operating in Newport. During this time, according to a Web site featuring “A Condensed History of Rum,” “New England rum was considered to be better than that of the Caribbean. Rhode Island rum for a short period was so popular that it was actually used as currency in Europe alongside of gold.” But the drink fell out of favor during the next century. By 1817, only two distilleries remained in town. The John Dyer Distillery in Providence, the last standing in the state, shut down in 1872. So Thomas Tew, which produced its first bottle in 2007, was the first Rhode Island-made rum in 135 years.

Aside from wampum and rum, what would be an appropriate alternative form of currency for Rhode Island today?

Fossils R Us

One of the side notes from Jamestown filmmaker Patti Cassidy’s documentary project, “Elephants in Rhode Island,” was that to date there have been no wooly mammoth or mastodon bones discovered in the Ocean State, despite significant findings in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine. This doesn’t mean that the primeval elephants weren’t here. Trawlers have scooped up mammoth and mastodon teeth during their hauls in Narragansett Bay, suggesting that the Pleistocene mega-fauna were hanging out when the bay was a basin, as yet unfilled by glacial melt.

Quite likely they were happily camped out in pre-sprawl, Ice Age Rhode Island, blissfully unaware of the mass extinction to come – a condition they shared with short-faced bears, dire wolves, stag-moose, giant beaver and saber-toothed cats.

As Gary Haynes writes in his “American megafaunal extinctions at the end of the Pleistocene”:

The great vanishing act took place in California and Rhode Island and Texas, in the center of Brazil and along the Pacific coast of Chile, in the inland steppes and pampas and plains of both Americas, in the cold southern cone of Argentina, in the lowlands and plains, mountains and foothills, everywhere in both continents and at nearly the same time. It’s a mystery we cannot solve – a true cold case.

Not one we’re likely to solve today, but in the universe that is Rhode Island, there’s a bigger mystery afoot. Why don’t we have a state fossil? Most every other state does, including four of our New England neighbors: Vermont (white whale); Massachusetts (dinosaur tracks – theropod footprints); Connecticut (dinosaur tracks – Eubrontes giganteus); and Maine (Devonian plant).

Rhody, along with both Carolinas, Kansas, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee and Hawaii, is just a blank space on the official state fossils list.

Marilyn Massaro, curator of collections at the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium at Roger Williams Park in Providence, which houses thousands of state fossils, thinks it’s high time that changed.

“The official state fossil should come from one the plant families of the Carboniferous period,” she said in a phone conversation this morning. “That really is sort of the Rhode Island fossil. In fact, I can’t believe that Calamites aren’t already the state fossil.”

The Carboniferous period, also known as the coal age, occurred between 354 million to 290 million years ago. Calamites were medium-sized trees that grew up to 100 feet or more, located in the understories of coal swamps. Their only living relatives are horsetails. Their fossils are still evident in parts of Rhode Island.

Any other suggestions? What should be the state fossil of Rhode Island? (Note: Assorted media personalities, weather forecasters and ex-governors are not eligible.)

Right-of-way, Wrong-of-way

There was a time when Rhode Islanders could get to every inch of their shoreline. That isn’t true anymore, even though Rhody probably does a better job than the other 22 coastal states of promoting its public rights of way. Making our way to the water’s edge is considered a birthright, a privilege granted to every Rhode Islander by the colony’s original charter, as ordained by King Charles II, and affirmed later in the state Constitution.

Here, people have the right to fish from the shore; leave the shore to swim in the sea; gather seaweed; or merely pass along the shore on their excursions and ramblings. Jim Bedell, whose Coast Watcher’s Journal column appears in the arts section of Independent Newspapers, writes eloquently about the natural beauty, history, science and encounters that can be combed from the southern Rhode Island shoreline while informing citizens of their public access rights.

Unfortunately, not everybody shares the same democratic spirit. Over the years, some public rights of way have been obliterated – marked improperly with Private Property, No Trespassing or No Parking signs; blocked by grown trees or shrubbery, illegal dumping or fencing; even paved over.

I am reminded of what a blessing Rhode Island’s rights of ways are every day, from my little cottage on the cove, where the public access (and parking) are plentiful. People come to sit and watch the waves and the light, the rising moons and the setting suns, the bonfires and fireworks around the Fourth of July. They come to fish, explore the little beaches, swim or launch kayaks.

I often walk to the beach at Allin’s Cove, visiting swans and herons, geese and ducks, gulls and crows, shore birds and songbirds. From there I sometimes ramble through the neighborhood, connecting to the East Bay Bike Path, and wander over to the other side of the cove in a neighborhood once known as Drownville. A little over a mile leads to Mussachuck, where the other day I watched herring run up the creek and two nesting osprey take turns looping through the winds. Not far away, just past Annawamscutt Beach, another pair of osprey has successfully established a nest.

Last week, after visiting Rosecliff for this Thursday’s paper column, I meandered to the Cliff Walk and settled on a small beach between Marine Avenue and Ruggles Avenue, where the waves were wild and white, giving off an “Aquidneck Five-0” vibe. A day later, my commute took me toward Sakonnet, so I dropped by Warrens Point – perhaps my favorite spot in the state. The place is generally inaccessible since the way to it is guarded by a man in a little security booth during the warmer months and, unless you have a boat, you can’t get there without someone claiming you’re trespassing. Some day, when I can afford the jail time, I’ll challenge the blatant abuse of wealth at work here, but that’s a fight for another recession. For now, I’m content to limit my visits to three seasons. Even though signs say the beach is closed; truth is, nature never closes its beaches. Only people do.

As much as we should celebrate every right of way, we should challenge every wrong of way. If I can ever afford to retire (not likely), I’ll start up a Wrong of Way Brigade. We’ll wear buttons that say WOW and march to all of Rhode Island’s inaccessible shore paths, demanding our way to the waves and the wind and the light that belong to nobody but are shared by all souls.

What is your favorite Rhode Island right of way?