Lost & Found: Rediscovering my roots on a coastal Rhode Island road trip
I left Rhode Island nearly three decades ago and didn’t look back. Having grown, in my own estimation, too big and worldly for the place once marketed as “the biggest little state in the union,” I had little sense of nostalgia. I was relieved to divest myself of the neighbors who knew everybody’s business, of the peculiar accent, all dropped r’s and elongated a’s, of the snickering when people asked where I lived and I replied, “I live in Harmony”—the actual name of my northwestern town, green and overgrown, its sidewalks cracked and gritty with sand coughed up by the tires of passing cars. What was once charming and easy to navigate, with one end barely more than an hour from the other, had grown predictable, close, nearly claustrophobic.
Rhode Island is now known, in an attempt at capitalizing on its stiff-jawed Newport sailing roots, as the “ocean state.” And things have changed here, though I was, as young people with a sense of unlimited time are, too busy being busy to notice. In the decade during which I built a career, the armpit of downtown of Providence had been transformed into a lively waterfront park, with brick walkways, stout iron railings, a swanky shopping mall, and a sculpture installation that rings the Providence River in fire twice a month. I focused on traveling for the next decade, and when I returned, the highway running through and around the capital seemed to have been rerouted in a twisting maze of white concrete and neon yellow. I blinked again, and I had unwittingly slid into middle age and very wittingly gotten divorced, much of my extended family had passed away or left, and my own mother died, fitfully, in a haze of morphine and regrets, the day after Thanksgiving, while I was on my way to her hospice center.
In June, my father sold his house across the busy Route 44 freeway from Waterman Lake and moved to a rental cottage on the water on Warwick Neck. I drove out with my husband, Floren, to visit. The drive seemed composed of highway through the least scenic stretches of the state, its multitude of construction zones outlined with bright orange cones tipped in white reflective tape. Nearing the three-hour mark, we were spat off the highway and into the middle of Warwick—pronounced “Warrick” in the local parlance, and Rhode Island’s second-largest city.
The commercial capital of the state, Warwick’s downtown is laden with strip malls, eyesore industrial complexes, and the squat brown concrete commercial buildings that proliferated like fruit flies in the 1950s. We turned onto Airport Road, a four-laner that passes around the backside of TF Green International Airport, the smell of motor oil and exhaust fumes so pungent, I had to roll up my window.
A few turns later onto Warwick Neck Avenue, the landscape transformed. Commercial buildings were swapped for neat saltboxes and Cape Cods wrapped in cedar shake, their windows and porches lined with rectangular planters of bright impatiens. As with all coastal areas, the shoreline boasted the largest homes, like something out of a Nancy Meyers movie with a title like She’s Gonna Be Alright. Even the lawns seemed trimmed to a matching two inches. I rolled down my window and took a breath.
The GPS routed us onto Paine Street, a dead end with a fabulously out-of-place mini mansion at the tip and a hodgepodge of smaller homes along the remainder. Most were built as summer beach cottages in the 1960s and 1970s. Though they’ve been added on to and winterized over the years, the people who’d had the foresight to purchase land when real estate was cheap weren’t exactly Vanderbilts—they and other bluebloods built their swishy estates on the shores of Newport—and the homes have remained stubbornly of another era.
My father’s rental was no exception. Between its unusual orientation, with its shortest dimension facing streetward, and its mishmash of wood paneling, carpets, and Formica, it probably hadn’t seen an update since I was in diapers. But Dad was besotted. He showed off each room, weaving through the mess of boxes and plastic storage bins, the accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of things we never use and never want until it’s time to downsize.
In the kitchen, a large window opened onto an inlet of Greenwich Bay, a mix of small cabins, large estates, and tranquil marinas lining both sides of the shore. The tide lapped against the hulls of moored boats painted the color of hardened snow. A trio of dragonflies so large I nearly mistook them for hummingbirds flitted by the window before alighting on a patch of black-eyed Susans. The hull of a trawler quietly sliced through the water just offshore. It was the antithesis of my parents’ old house, where the sound of traffic slowed only during a snowstorm.
We helped Dad load empty storage bins into the attic. We hung art—“I just want to add some color,” said my father, who, in the fifty years I’ve known him, has rarely paid attention to the color of anything, let alone shown a fondness for brightly painted fish and sea critters. We discussed the placement of extra shelves and cabinets. We dawdled by that water-view window.
No coastal Rhode Island road trip is complete until you’ve gone to Iggy’s
Ready for lunch, Floren cleared his throat and tapped his wrist. I returned an exaggerated wink, like a cut-rate spy in a Monty Python skit. We piled into Dad’s car and made the 4-mile drive to Oakland Beach.
Both a neighborhood and a beachfront located at the tip of a small peninsula on Greenwich Bay, Oakland Beach was a militia encampment in the late nineteenth century, before the armed forces got wise to the fact that Quonset Point, 16 miles away in Narraganset, provided a better lookout. After the first World War, rising Italian, Greek, and Irish families created a constellation of cottages along the shore. As the neighborhood grew, Oakland was fashioned into a mixed-use recreational area with restaurants, a yacht club, a waterfront pavilion with a bowling alley and a roller-skating rink, and even a Ferris wheel.
But as the Great Depression ground on, many of the families who’d built the cottages could no longer afford them. The neighborhoods fell into disuse, and Oakland Beach became the cheap seats of southern Rhode Island. Then came the Hurricane of 1938. The storm’s 95-mile-per-hour winds blustered across the Atlantic and up the East Coast, dropping, in a single day, nearly 7 inches of rain and walloping the shore with tidal waves almost 30 feet high.
Many of Oakland Beach’s cottages and virtually all its amusements vanished, smashed into life-size pick-up sticks. Efforts to rehabilitate the neighborhood stalled as the United States made its late entry into World War II. In 1954, the battered area was hammered once more by Hurricane Carol.
Today, Oakland Beach is the redheaded stepchild of Rhode Island beaches, the place to visit only when more popular shores are too crowded, or for lesser-trafficked kayaking coves. Or for hearty coastal snacks at the small cluster of restaurants along Oakland Beach Avenue, including Top of the Bay, housed in the old governor’s residence. Across the way, Rhode Island institution Iggy’s owns the block.
We found a table at the full-service Iggy’s Doughboys and Chowder, in its first week of pandemic reopening. The kind of relaxed, homey place where the waitstaff calls you “honey” without it feeling sexist or condescending, the restaurant is usually filled with people. That day, we had the dining room almost to ourselves.
We ordered more food than we needed—Manhattan clam chowder, a battered cod sandwich, and lobster rolls, served in the Maine style, with chunks of claw and tail meat in a cold mayonnaise sauce. Plus the food that comes to mind first when I think of Rhode Island: clam cakes. A handful of other coastal states serve the seafood fritters, but the ones I grew up with—golden brown and crunchy on the outside, tender and mildly sweet on the inside, with chewy bites of clam—are the originals. And Iggy’s is the state’s current clam-cake champion.
Revisiting the site of Rocky Point amusement park
Overfull, we drove to Rocky Point State Park to walk off lunch. Originally built in the 1840s, Rocky Point was a well-known amusement park. Its midway also hosted classic carnival games, concerts, and stands selling serotonin-boosting junk foods like wispy cotton candy in rainbow pastels, crisp-chewy doughboys dusted with powdered sugar that stuck to your fingers in a slick of fry grease, and hot dogs with casings that audibly snapped when bitten.
When I left the state in my mid-twenties, Rocky Point became one of those places consigned to the dusty reaches of memory. The amusement park succumbed to financial mismanagement and quietly closed in 1995. Within half a decade, its elegiac decay became the photographic fodder of “urban explorers.” Weeds grew up through the rides and cracks in the pavement. Ceilings caved. Graffiti decorated nearly every vertical surface. Decapitated kewpie dolls littered broken tables and game booths. Rides sat, rusted and leaning, their hinges groaning in the wind.
Twelve years ago, the state and the City of Warwick purchased the land and auctioned off the park’s more popular rides. The rest—along with the Shore Dinner Hall, which seated 2,500 and was home to on-the-cheap dinners of clam chowder, clam cakes, French fries, and fresh watermelon sliced into pink quarter moons—were demolished in the cold maws of mechanical cranes.
In 2013, the state refashioned the property into a park with walking and biking trails. Over its 120 acres, only a couple recognizable pieces of the Rocky Point I knew still stand. There’s the 60-foot-tall arch, imported from the 1964/1965 World’s Fair in New York City, that served as a gathering point—“Meet you under the arch in an hour,” we’d say. There’s also a pair of hulking blue steel turnarounds for the Skyliner, essentially a chair lift that used to glide riders over the park, sneakers dangling above a thronging mass of people.
My feet touched down on the park green to a disorienting rush of memories. A ride operator seating skinny preteen me on the inner side of the psychedelic-themed Musik Express car, so I wouldn’t be whipped against the metal frame by centrifugal force. Child me in the House of Horrors, giddily screeching at the rubber hands dangling from the ceiling, and the fiberglass boogeyman that snapped into view, as if affixed to garden rakes. College-age me getting motion-sick on the Enterprise, a sort of upside-down Ferris wheel on speed, then waiting for the nausea to pass before getting in line again.
Tired from the heat, Dad rested on a park bench overlooking the bay, three bridges—to Newport, Bristol, and Jamestown—visible through the haze. Floren and I continued on to Rocky Point’s brand-new fishing pier and walked out over the water, raising our voices above the rushing of tide against rock. We picked our way down the opposite side to a sunny beach I never knew existed. I stood, looking out, trying to reconcile the mix of memory and discovery.
We rode home, a Styrofoam quart container of Del’s frozen lemonade, another of Rhode Island’s inimitable snacks, wedged between my feet on the car floor. Back at Dad’s, we spooned the slushy mix and its bits of sour lemon peel into highball glasses, leaving two fingers of space at the top. My father filled them with vodka, and we took the glasses out to the waterfront patio.
We talked and drank, letting the cold sugar slide down our throats. I noted to myself, not for the first time, Dad’s easiness. Our relationship had been so fraught at times that the difference was jarring. Whether because he’s happier in this new place, away from the reminders of illness and mortality, or because age has dulled the edges for us both, something had shifted, morphed, like a tadpole finding its legs.
At low tide, Dad pulled on his water shoes and disengaged a long-handled rake from a clutch of tools piled beside the house. He clipped one end of a bungee cord to a pilfered red grocery shopping basket, lengths of sun-faded pool noodles secured around its upper edge to make it float. The other end he attached to his belt loop. He waded into the water, swim trunks sagging, in search of quahogs.
With sunlight waning, Floren and I walked the neighborhood. We passed houses with small flower gardens densely planted with bright bee balm and daylilies, their patios arranged with red Adirondack chairs or elegant curved iron bistro sets. Colorful painted wooden buoys strung on fraying ropes of alternating lengths decorated the sides of more than one shed. A copper scarecrow weathervane turned lazily, pointing one accusatory finger at me, then off into the distance.
The lamps were just starting to come on at Harbor Lights Marina and Pool Club, and we turned like moths in their direction. Along the docks, multimillion-dollar yachts sat alongside modest-by-comparison $50,000 cabin cruisers, gently bumping against one another in the quiet squeak of vinyl fenders. Floren and I sat on an elevated grassy area surrounded by blue hydrangeas and capped by a teak arbor, a popular spot for weddings and engagement photos. We watched in the last of the light as an egret, its pale feathers wraithlike against the coming dark, dipped its beak into the shallows.
The coastal Rhode Island road trip continues
A few weeks later, my father called me. “You wouldn’t believe all the beaches past Rocky Point,” he said. “You can see them from the boat. At least three I didn’t even know about.”
“Boat,” I echoed. “What boat?”
“The one I bought,” he said matter-of-factly. I rolled my eyes and shot my sister, Jill, a text: He bought a damn boat.
??? she returned. The first time he actually has some money . . .
At my silence, he added, “Don’t worry. I bought it used.”
Partly concerned about what else his retirement savings might be going toward and partly drawn back to the water, I came out to Warwick Neck again, this time on my own. Dad had settled into his new environment. Though the run-down marina where he’d docked the boat couldn’t have been more than a half mile from the house, we drove over. In one hand I carried a small duffel bag containing inflatable belt packs and hand tools. In the other, I held Dad’s fishing rod. I handed them down before stepping onto the small, reconditioned skiff, which gleamed with a fresh coat of white paint. As the engine hummed to life, I uncoiled the ropes and pulled in the fenders, much as I did as a kid, when Dad owned a pontoon boat that we took out on Waterman Lake.
Out in the open water, we navigated past a set of new sights. Small beaches, some private and some public, most all but empty. Warwick Neck Lighthouse, a 35-ton tower that has been moved inland twice to prevent it from being swept into the water by hurricanes and coastal erosion. Aldrich Mansion, a Gilded Age beauty built by master architects Carrère & Hastings and made famous as a filming location in the 1998 Brad Pitt dreamboat vehicle Meet Joe Black. It’s now operated, by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, as a wedding venue.
I leaned against the captain’s chair and stretched my arms overhead, letting the sun warm my back and the smell of salt fill my nostrils. We eased out beyond Rocky Point and into East Bay, pausing at the squat, fat-bottomed Conimicut Lighthouse. Marking the eastern entrance to the Providence River, this “sparkplug” light—made of cast iron and built offshore, on top of a large, hull-ripping shoal—was one of the last in the United States to be electrified. State and city officials have been debating what to do with the lighthouse for years. In the meantime, it waits, its seams weeping with corrosion, moss clustered around its awning, surrounded by double-crested cormorants resting on its diminutive shore before diving out for a meal.
Dad turned the wheel over to me. I steered past a boat that appeared to be abandoned, but on closer inspection bore the red diver-down flag of quahoggers. I spun the wheel again to turn at a right angle into the wake of a tugboat, the little skiff plunging and rising. Closer to the coastline, Dad and I made a game of choosing homes we could never afford.
“There’s your next house,” Dad said, pointing to a hulking brick mansion.
I shrugged and shouted over the din of the engine, “Maybe for the summers.” I nodded toward a large Tudor-style house with dark, sharply peaked rooflines and a sprawling lawn. “That’s my three-season cottage.”
For nearly three hours, we piloted the skiff past 20 miles of affluent neighborhoods, sandy beaches, and stony coastline. Past Patience and Prudence islands, both important seabird nesting sites. Past a flock of squawking kittiwakes winging over the dark discoloration in the water that signals a traveling school of fish. Past landmarks and sights I’d never seen, but were all a part of the place where I grew up, the place I thought I knew thoroughly enough to disregard.
Creatures of habit, we stopped for lunch at Iggy’s. “Here you go, honey,” said the waitress, delivering our drinks. We sat on the restaurant’s porch, sipping a pair of sweating cocktails so potent, we both needed a nap by the time we got back to Dad’s house.
Family connections in Pawtuxet Village
With hours to go before sunset, we roused ourselves for a round of drive-by sightseeing, the only kind my father seems to enjoy these days. “Your blinker’s on,” I said after he had driven half a mile down Meadow View Avenue.
He turned again, and we rolled through Conimicut Village, one of the state’s original colonial communities. It traces its lineage back to 1643, after Samuel Gorton, a charismatic nudge who managed to irk an impressive roster of the seventeenth-century rich and powerful, was denied residence in Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Providence. Nowadays, the tiny village is all New England picturesque, with brick sidewalks, newly painted buildings, and overflowing baskets of pink and purple petunias hung every few feet from lampposts.
We turned onto an unfamiliar series of streets. “Your blinker’s on,” I said again. I squinted out the passenger’s window and added, “Where are we?”
We’d entered Pawtuxet, a former port established around the same time as Warwick, by followers of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams. It later became a mill village. Like Conimicut blown up to three times its size, Pawtuxet is laid out in appealing New England-y fashion, with tight huddles of historic brick and clapboard buildings housing cafes and shops, many with the polished, touristy veneer common in waterfront cities. Dad parked and blasted the air conditioner while I walked up and down the street, poking my masked head into a smartly merchandised gift shop, a wine and spirits store, and a pair of buildings packed full of nautical antiques.
Back in the car, Dad narrated points of interest: his favorite restaurant, Basta, some graceful old houses, and Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, a 105-year-old event venue where my parents used to attend dances and my aunt Pauline—the only blond, blue-eyed person in our family—once won a beauty pageant. She died twenty years ago, but her mention brought a flash of recollection, of her smiling, holding out crochet hook and yarn for me to try.
This in turn conjured a memory of my mother, Pauline’s sister. I was a young adult then, maybe a senior in college. I heard the shouts, tasted the bitter insults, felt the slammed door vibrate under my palm. For a moment, I choked on my own viciousness. I should have been kinder to her, I thought. I should have been more patient, less judgmental. I should have known that one day I would no longer be inconvenienced by her overprotectiveness, her prying, her desire for my life to be better than hers, and bigger than the boundaries of the place where she raised me.
Dad made a stop so I could take photos at the edge of the Pawtuxet River, then dropped me off at Conimicut Point Park while he gathered supplies at the market. The wind gusted, lifting miniature tornados of sand off an arrow-shaped beach littered with the broken shells of snails, mussels, and clams. I walked past a long-haired man in a canvas director’s chair, who flashed a peace sign in my direction before checking the line of a fishing rod braced in a holder in the sand. The sail of a kite, caught in a tree, rattled against the branches behind me. In front of me lay the empty shell of a horseshoe crab, like a helmet discarded during a forgotten war.
I stood at the tip of the beach, where the water flows in opposite directions over a narrow sandbar, snapping photo after photo of this place I’d never known, where my parents had lived a life I had no part in, in a state I’d been convinced could no longer surprise me. I hesitated, looking around, wondering what else I’d missed.
Looking back, looking forward
Back at Dad’s, we watched a generic comedy on TV, him on one end his new sofa, feet propped on the coffee table, and me on the other, legs curled beside me. As it ended, I left him to flip through the channels while I went into the kitchen to call my husband. I talked absentmindedly, my attention on the darkening sky shot through with streaks of gold and apricot. One boat, then another, slowed to a putter and steered into the marina. A female mallard, a gaggle of fluffy ducklings following in her V-shaped wake, paddled through the water and under the docks. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass, and felt the world winding down.
I resumed my seat at the end of the sofa. Dad had fallen asleep, chin lolling against his chest, one hand clutching the remote control. I didn’t wake him.
In his new house, the room lit by the flickering of the TV, I thought about the state where I grew up, how it has formed and informed me. It would be both trite and dishonest to say I’ve come home again. Rhode Island isn’t my home anymore, but it exerts an indescribable pull, pressing me to notice everything good and intriguing and enjoyable that I’d previously been too willful and righteous to acknowledge. There in the semidark, in a place that’s simultaneously familiar and new to me, I understood that sometimes it’s only in the looking back that we discover.
