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.)

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?