John Long: Ruminating on deep history amidst current beauty on a late-Winter walk
A Brandt goose
View of Gaspee Point from the north
— Photo by Magicpiano
A couple of weeks ago, in early March, the wind was west at about 10 mph, and it was 28 degrees F. I’d just begun my afternoon walk on Gaspee Point, in Warwick, R.I., and was on the southern bluff facing Greene Island, which is in Occupessatuxet Cove. The sky was a Robin’s egg blue, with not a cloud in sight. Middletown and Bristol’s Colt State Park were well defined in the distance.
Several miles away, as I looked southeast toward the shipping channel near Conimicut Point Lighthouse, I saw the tan, red and white Janice Ann Reinauer making a 90-degree turn in Narragansett Bay, She’s a Pusher-tug, built in Rhode Island, in 2020, powered by two GE (rated at 4720 hp) diesel engines, and with her pilot house rising 53 feet above the bay. She travels from Perth Amboy, N.J., along Long Island Sound to the Mobil oil and gas terminal in East Providence.
Looking east, about 30 yards off the sea wall, I see a small flock of Brandt (Branta bernicla) geese feeding on seaweed at low-low tide. Brandt are about half the size of Canada Geese, and winter on our Narragansett Bay.
However, in the summer they breed on the west coast of Greenland. Mute Swans (Cygnus olor) are swimming further out in the bay, their long, graceful S-shape necks letting them bottom-feed on plants in the shallow water.
I am intrigued by two boulders, called “erratics,’’ deposited by the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet about 10,000 years ago. Presumably they were once one boulder, which centuries of seasonal ice slowly pried apart, eventually splitting the boulder into two, which are now 50 yards apart on tidal flats.
These erratics’ rounded “heads and shoulders” rise above the bay’s surface at low-low tide. Tidal action over millennia have moved these rocks further and further apart. A half dozen Double-Crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) often rest on them while warming themselves by stretching their four-foot black wingspans.
Along a worn footpath above the seawall, a Robin, in a sign of spring, is feeding on berries, maybe Bittersweet, and looking for worms beneath dry leaves and bushes below sandy highlands.
As I saunter along, I occasionally hear a wind chime calling out from a backdrop of nearby houses, but mostly it’s wind whistling through oak and maple branches above me. There’s no aroma of the tidal flats here because of the wind and cold.
Tidal flats stretch out a couple hundred yards into the bay, glistening light-brown in sunlight, and revealing two abandoned 19th Century coal-barge skeletons stranded on what’s left of Greene Island. In the early 1900’s, Greene Island was about five acres, and farmers would bring herds of sheep out to it for grazing on Cord Grass (Sporobolus alterniflorus) during the summer. But on Sept. 21, 1938, a totally unexpected hurricane came with a huge tidal surge and raged across Greene Island, obliterating many summer houses on Gaspee Point. I try to envision the power that it would take to forever obliterate the island’s acres of waist-high Cord Grass. The island is now nearly submerged at high tide.
During the same storm, further south, on the bay’s West Passage, a lighthouse on Whale Rock that had been bolted to its foundation was torn off the rock; the lighthouse keeper’s body was never recovered.
In my sometimes askew imagination, there’s a snapshot of a diorama with a plodding ancient time backdrop, but immediately in front of me, a 270-degree view of the bay’s singular beauty now, with its splendid seasonal cycles. In my mind’s eye, I see reminders of Nature’s power—ice sheets that were nearly a mile thick, big boulders deposited by the sheet, and the hurricanes of 1938 and 1954.
In a month or so, folks like me will look for a pair of ospreys returning from their winter quarters, in Venezuela. We all worry about whether they’ll safely arrive here. They mate for life. The male migrates to Gaspee Point first, to begin rebuilding the couple’s nest on a telephone pole nesting platform. The female will join him a few weeks later.
It won’t be long before we see a dazzling abundance of pink Beach Roses (Rosa rugosa) above Gaspee Point beach’s high-water mark. Hooray for Spring!
John Long is a Warwick-based writer