Progressive News, Opinion, and Analysis
Here’s hoping that yesterday’s double rainbow signals an end to the very wet June that gardeners have enjoyed at the expense of beach bums.
A 32-foot lobster boat, the Henry David T, managed to stop a 688-foot cargo ship from delivering 40,000 tons of coal to Brayton Point last week.”The action may have been a preview of protests being planned against the power plant by New England activists on July 27 and July 28,” reports East Bay Newspapers.
Activists are calling for Brayton Point to be shut down. Check out their website here. This summer, it says, “over one thousand people will participate in a march from Brayton Point to the future site of the nation’s first offshore wind farm to demonstrate our support for a transition from the fossil fuels of the past to the clean energy of the future.”
Why are they calling for the coal plant to be shut down? Well, one reason is, according to the newspaper, it seems to be giving the neighbors cancer. They report:
Brayton Point power plant neighbors complain about the impact of the plant’s operations on their homes and health. On resident in his ’70′s, who declined to give his name, said he has cancer, his wife has cancer, and so did eight others on his street alone (naming them). “We call it cancer alley,” he said of his street.
One of the things I love most about these sustained deep freezes is my neighbor Jeff Stevens and I have a tradition of going for a walk across Greenwich Cove when the ice permits.
The Cove – the EG Riviera, as locals sometimes call it because of the confluence of working waterfront, high end bars and yacht clubs with a forested state park on the other side – might just be the stillest water on Narragansett Bay. Hence the best place for ice. It’s only a about a mile long and never more than a 1,000 yards across and I don’t know any part of it to be more than 10 or 12 feet deep.
This little spit of water hidden by Goddard Park freezes hard. As recently as 1979, according to Ray Huling’s “Harvesting the Bay” shellfishermen cut through the ice with chainsaws, under DEM supervision, to rake up the quahogs from beneath the frozen surface.
On Friday, I tweeted that it was getting solid. Stevens wrote back, “Fools rush in.” Prophetic, in that by Sunday morning we headed down to the town dock to walk across the water.
The ice could hardly have been more solid. Jeff jumped right from the dock onto the snow-covered Cove and its ice budged not at all. It was plenty cold enough to keep the brackish water solid. In fact, my iPhone froze after just one crummy picture!
We headed south towards the mouth of the Maskerchugg River when Jeff pointed out to me when he at first thought was a hawk. Then he said, “wait a minute.” And I chimed in with, “Is that a…??”
We both knew it was. A bald eagle. The avian symbol of our nation has returned to Rhode Island, and a specimen was flying over our tiny little corner of Narragansett Bay.
Bald eagles, once completely gone from the northeast, are actually being seen all over the Ocean State recently. The Sierra Club had an outing to East Providence to eagle spot today, and I saw a picture of a bald eagle (perhaps the same one Jeff and I saw) on Hundred Acre Pond in Barrington.
They have been spotted in Scituate, Tiverton and even Warwick. Last winter, I just missed seeing one at Trustom Pond near Matunuck.
If you’re going to be a bird in Rhode Island, there are plenty worse places to do so than Greenwich Cove. There are a gorgeous variety of ducks this time of year and both Jeff and I see the same couple hawks almost every day, along with almost every other kind of bird that enjoys salt water and dense forests (though I have never seen any owls here, disappointingly enough). The Cove is overrun with ospreys and kingfishers in the summer – and we even saw one of the latter today!
When Jeff and I got off the water and were walking back up towards his side door, I saw this guy fly into a tree in his yard. Jeff thinks it is a Cooper’s hawk, but I’m not so sure. He was hardly bigger than a blue jay!
Then we went inside, stoked up his wood stove and made a pot of coffee.
From his kitchen window, we watched our third raptor of the morning – one of the neighborhood red tail hawks – sit in a tree in the Stevens’ back yard for about an hour as we warmed up by the fire.
After a long weekend of work, I took some time today to reacquaint myself with Greenwich Cove. In the morning, I went down to the old town dump, now called Scalloptown Park. Then in the afternoon I headed over to Goddard Park on the other side of the Cove. Here are some of the pictures I took and tweets I sent out while there.
Maine has the lobster and Maryland the crab. Vermont has maple syrup, Wisconsin has cheese, Texas has the t-bone steak and California has its produce. Rhode Island, of course, has its own staple food: the quahog.
As iconic as our state clam is, though, many know little about the men who harvest them. Few, on the other hand, know these aquatic hunter-gathers better than Ray Huling, a 12th generation Rhode Islander whose new book “Harvesting the Bay: Fathers, Sons and the Last of the Wild Shellfishermen” tells the story of how, and why, his family worked the waters of Greenwich Bay.
“American food production has gone crazy over the past couple of centuries,” Huling writes, setting the scene that something has gone awry with our way of feeding ourselves. “A succession of technological and sociological changes has all but done away with the family farm and the small fishing operation. The industrialization and the capitalization of agriculture turned food wealth into capital and used that capital to further industrialize food. Americans replaced the food calories that powered human labor with coal and oil calories that powered machines.”
But the son and grandson of a bullraker, the local term for the shellfishermen who literally rake clams up off the bottom of the Bay, sees a better model in his familial trade.
“The bullraker connects our forebears with us, and he may yet connect us to our descendants,” he writes. “He may prove himself not an anachronism, but a precognition, a vision of the future. The bullraker may persist through time because he works sustainably.”
Huling’s book is a celebration of the shellfisherman: of how they work with the state to transplant quahogs around the Bay to ensure they are both healthy and plentiful; of how they work tirelessly through the cold winter – sometimes even having to resort to cutting holes in the ice to catch their prey; of their love of the water.
But, at the same time, he pulls no punches on the culture. He writes about the pirated catches from closed waters, selling illegally directly to customers and ripping off the dealers who control the markets. He also takes on the vulnerabilities and strengths of the quahogger.
“Most bullrakers deal with both inferiority and superiority complexes,” Huling writes. “They often feel as though they could not have held any other job, as if they have failed in life by resorting to quahogging. Conversely, they know they work harder than just about anyone they know, and that their profession has an immediately recognizable social purpose. They bring home meat – just the thing that brought God Almighty to favor Abel over Cain.”
Huling will be reading from his book tonight at 5:30 at the Brown Bookstore, and on Saturday at 4pm at Books of the Square.
For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you probably have already figured out I’m kind of doing a study of Greenwich Cove under the hashtag: #egriviera – which is what locals call the collection of bars, shanties, parks, inlets, marshes and parks on the waterfront in East Greenwich.
Since it was such a stellar day on the Cove, I wanted to share some of the pictures I took and tweeted:
