Frank Carini: Valiantly fighting epidemic of shoreline trash

During a single day in May 2019, Geoff Dennis and trusted sidekick Koda collected 282 balloons from the Little Compton, R.I., coastline. It was the duo’s largest balloon haul.

— Courtesy photos

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The mission is simple but the work is aggravating, especially since Geoff Dennis’ four-legged buddy no longer joins him on the almost-daily treks. Also, he doesn’t get paid.

For the past decade, the Little Compton, R.I., resident has been picking up other people’s trash that accumulates along the local shoreline. Between 2012 and 2020, Dennis picked up 35,607 pieces of litter from the banks of the Sakonnet River, at Goosewing Beach Preserve and a few other places. The vast majority of it was some form of plastic, from bottles to spent shotgun shells.

Despite “still missing my boy Koda” — his trusted black Lab died two days after Christmas 2020 at the age of 14 — the longtime quahogger and bird photographer remains a one-person cleanup crew.

“I miss him as much today as that last day with him,” Dennis said.

His immersion into litter began in 2012 while monitoring piping plovers at Goosewing Beach for The Nature Conservancy. The amount of plastic debris at his feet disgusted him.

When he returned, he picked up more than 100 Mylar balloons from the area. He’s been picking up coastline trash ever since. He’s bothered that 10 years later, most people still don’t seem to care about the state’s growing plastic problem.

Dennis said graduation time brings the greatest number of depleted balloons. July and August are the height of trash collection.

He recently tallied up his 2021 trash scorecard. Here is the breakdown:

Mylar balloons: 1,388.

Plastic bottles and aluminum cans: 1,349. He said year-end totals do not include old plastic bottles that have “become eggshell brittle and started the process of fragmenting. They go directly to trash.”

Plastic bottle caps: 1,209.

Latex balloons: 780. He said latex balloons are usually only the mouth piece, or ring piece, with attached ribbon. “I do find shredded pieces of latex too, but tally only the ring. Sometimes difficult to count when it may be a 30-plus mass of rings and tangled ribbon.”

Plastic straws: 328.

Spent plastic shotgun shells: 302.

Nips: 195.

Rubber gloves: 164.

Plastic and foam cups: 132. He said Dunkin’ Donuts (67) and Cumberland Farms (38) cups are the most common. “CF is still using foam cups and all found are foam. DD ceased using foam in 2020. Plenty of their paper cups were collected but are not in the tally.”

Golf balls: 119.

Plastic lids for plastic and foam cups: 104.

Plastic wads for shotgun shells: 86.

Plastic bags: 66.

Plastic cigarette lighters: 50.

Plastic K-cups: 45.

Since Dennis returned to Goosewing Beach 10 years ago to pick up Mylar balloons, there are 41,924 fewer pieces of litter along the Little Compton shoreline.

A trio of bills has been introduced during the current General Assembly session to address the Ocean State’s plastic pollution problem, including legislation to ban the sale of nips.

Frank Carini is senior reporter and co-founder of ecoRI News.

The Benjamin Family Environmental Center at the Goosewing Beach Preserve

The Sakonnet River as viewed from Portsmouth, R.I., looking south towards the ocean.

Grace Kelly: Get outdoors as much as possible in these fraught times

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

WRENTHAM, Mass.

The local wildlife hosted an opera March 14 as we scaled “Joe’s Rock here.”

{For information on the Joe’s Rock Trail in Wrentham, please hit this link. }

As my boyfriend and his friend climbed the rock face — our local climbing gym was closed because of the coronavirus — I traipsed through the underbrush to get a closer listen to the wildlife singing their songs, and to take my mind off the pandemic that is gripping world.

We’re not the only ones turning to nature and the outdoors for a respite from the news.

“I walk a lot and I’ve noticed the places I walk have a lot more people and the parking lots are full,” said Rupert Friday, executive director of the Rhode Island Land Trust Council. “And I was talking to our board president, Barbara Rich, and she said all the places she normally walks, she drives by the parking lots and they are totally full, and I heard the same thing from a former board member who lives in Little Compton who said the places she normally walks are so busy that she is going to new places that are less well known.”

It’s not really a surprise. Social distancing and working from home, along with shuttered gathering spaces such as libraries, cafés, movie theaters, and restaurants, create loneliness and cabin fever. When there’s a virtual lockdown, the great outdoors beckons.

That’s a good thing, too. According to a 2011 study by Japanese researchers, participants who spent more time in natural settings exhibited lower levels of stress hormones than those in the urban control group.

For Margie Butler, a Providence resident, going outside has been a huge source of relief and calm during these troubled times

“I’ve been walking morning and evening now for well over a week during our COVID-19 times,” the resident of the Fox Point neighborhood said. “I admit to being a walker even in normal times, but something feels different now. When all else in our lives is becoming scarce and cumbersome — provisions, going into stores, travel, seeing family in person, and work — stepping outside for a walk is still available for us. It’s both a privilege and a responsibility.”

Butler noted that social distancing has still applied to her experience outside, as if walking everyone is zorbing along the beaten path rather than walking it.

“As I walk, I am keeping distance, unfortunately not going into any stores, and being very highly aware,” she said. “My COVID-19 day walks are this odd mix of joyful and somber. I greet each person I see with a wave or a hello. I have only run into one pal during a walk and we hung out on a fence six feet from each other and talked for a long time.”

The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council has advised users of parks and paths to maintain distance and not to congregate.

“While nature, fresh air, and sunshine can be a tremendous help during trying times, we are all currently strongly encouraged to practice social distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19. This guidance applies when we enjoy the Greenway and other public spaces. If you arrive somewhere like the Greenway, and there are large crowds, turn around and come back another time,” the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council suggested in a recent email.

But, as Friday noted, for many people the solitude of taking a walk or going for a hike is the best part.

“We did some focus groups around our new RI Walks website, and I expected people to want to have organized walks and join a group, but we had more people say that they prefer to go out for solitude, to enjoy the peace and quiet,” Friday said.

He also noted that this recent explosion in outdoor activity could lead to a greater appreciation for enjoying the trails, hikes, and outdoors beyond this crisis.

“I think when people get out there and see how much better they feel or see how nice it is and how it helps them relax, it will catch on, and they will remember that it’s something that makes them feel better,” he said.

Grace Kelly is a reporter for ecoRI News.

Little Compton's splendid Stone House

The Stone House.

Visit the uber-charming Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I., across from Newport and on bucolic Sakonnet Point. It's on the National Registry of Historical Places.

It's made to order for honeymoons.

For more information, please hit this link.

Public hearing on Stone House's request to let scheduled weddings, receptions proceed

The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.

A public hearing is set for 7 p.m., Aug. 10, on Stone House’s request to the Little Compton Town Council to let the venue fulfill its agreements with families for long-scheduled weddings and receptions.

The request is made in order to eliminate further stress on those families who had expected to hold such events at the Stone House during the rest of the 2017 season. The Stone House was required to cease conducting such events until the Town Council grants the Stone House an entertainment license. But according to Town Code §6-7.6, the council may waive any requirement of the entertainment license ordinance. Thus the Stone House urges the council to exercise its discretion and let these very socially and emotionally important events go forward.

On Monday, August 7, 2017, the Stone House filed an application seeking zoning relief pursuant to the Superior Court’s recent order along with an application for an entertainment license in hopes of obtaining the council’s immediate approval to let the historic venue conduct its remaining 2017 events. The Stone House requested an expedited hearing on its application for zoning relief but a hearing date has not yet been scheduled.

However, a public hearing on the Stone House’s entertainment license application will be held at the Town Council Meeting Thursday, August 10, 2017 at 7 p.m. in the Little Compton Town Hall, at 40 Commons. The Stone House encourages anyone who has an interest in these scheduled events to attend. 

In light of the pending application for zoning relief and the potentially very heavy impact on the Stone House’s clients, the Stone House has requested that the Town Council exercise its power to permit the aforementioned events to be conducted as originally scheduled or with any additional conditions or restrictions that the Town Council wishes to impose to satisfy councilors’ concerns. 

Information and pictures, please, on the Stone House

The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.

We're doing some historical research on the Stone House, an old inn in Little Compton, R.I. We'd appreciate any information from readers about their own weddings and/or wedding receptions held at the Stone House or such events involving their friends and/or relatives. Dates of the events -- and pictures! -- would be most appreciated. We'd guess that there have been weddings and/or wedding receptions there going back to the late Twenties, when there was a speakeasy in this lovely structure, built in 1854 as a private home.

Please email such information to:

rwhitcomb4@cox.net

Information (including pictures), please, on Stone House weddings, receptions

The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.

We're doing some historical research on the Stone House, an old inn in Little Compton, R.I. We'd appreciate any information from readers about their own weddings and/or wedding receptions held at the Stone House or such events involving their friends and/or relatives. Dates of the events -- and pictures! -- would be most appreciated. We'd guess that there have been weddings and/or wedding receptions there going back to the late Twenties, when there was a speakeasy in this lovely structure, built in 1854 as a private home.

Please email such information to:

rwhitcomb4@cox.net

Information, please, on Stone House weddings and receptions

The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.

We're doing some historical research on the Stone House, an old inn. We'd appreciate any information from readers about their own weddings and/or wedding receptions held at the Stone House or such events involving their friends and/or relatives. Dates of the events would be most appreciated. We'd guess that there have been weddings and/or wedding receptions there going back to the late Twenties, when there was a speakeasy in this lovely structure, built in 1854 as a private home.

Please email such information to:

rwhitcomb4@cox.net

From grand house to greenie inn, with maybe a speakeasy along the way

The Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I.

-- Photo  by Lydia Davison Whitcomb

The Stone House, a gorgeous inn on Sakonnet Point, in the bucolic town of Little Compton, R.I., is like many such establishments in summer resort communities on the New England coast: It started as a  large private house.

The four-story structure was built in 1854 by David Sisson, an iron and textile manufacturer as New England’s Industrial Revolution really got cooking. It was also home to his son Henry Tillinghast Sisson, a Civil War hero and Rhode Island lieutenant governor in 1875-77.

The house became an inn in the early 20th Century. In its basement is a very cozy and inviting tap room, rumored to have been a speakeasy during Prohibition, where you can now have meals as well as drinks.  The booze for the speakeasy might well have been offloaded from lobster boats sent out a few miles offshore to pick it up from distributors. Lots of cat and mouse with the Coast Guard.

The Stone House is on the National Registry of Historic Places but it also has some green technologies, including heating and cooling systems that rely on geothermal technology. 

Charles Pinning: Recalling my disastrous Thanksgiving trip to lovely Little Compton

Friends (Quaker) Meeting House in Little Compton.

Speeding by the pastures and farms that lead out to Sakonnet Point and the ocean there was, for me, no prettier drive anywhere than through Little Compton, R.I.

I’d left Baltimore early in the morning in my old Jaguar sedan, which was performing admirably (knock on the walnut dash), and now under a darkening royal blue sky I no longer chewed upon the guilt of not spending Thanksgiving with my family back in Virginia, but pressed on with a mindless glee toward the expansive compound of my girlfriend’s family.

There was Bonnie, willowy in her bell bottoms and there was her scrawny sister, Suki, and her preppy brother, Rex, and their handsome mother and father

I put the special chipotle cranberry sauce I’d made before leaving Baltimore into the fridge and Bonnie and I took a walk to the beach with her sister.

Leaving the house, her brother said, “What kind of car is that anyway?

“It’s a Jaguar,” I said. “Mark Nine.” I’d bought it used for $600 when I was in high school, but  there was no need to divulge that.

I’d brought a borrowed Canon camera and asked Suki to take few pictures of Bonnie and me.

“This is a pretty fancy camera,” commented Suki.

Her parents seemed to have forgotten that although I attended college at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, I was not studying to be a doctor despite the international fame of Hopkins’s medical school. Rather, my interests were writing and acting. I reminded them I’d spent the summer doing summer stock just down the road at the Carriage House Theatre.

“Right-o” said Mr. Fort.

I’d met Bonnie in June at Wilbur’s General Store. She was buying chicken salad.

“Is it good?” I asked her.

“It’s the best,” she said.

Then I saw her at the beach. Heart Attack!

Bonnie went to Brown University, in Providence, and we bounced back and forth a few times after school started.

I spoke of George McGovern, whom I’d just voted for in my first eligibility, against Nixon, and how the Vietnam War had to end. “So much stupid, needless death!”

After dinner, I read a little story I’d written about meeting Bonnie at Wilbur’s then at the beach. Mrs. Fort complained about the annoying sticky door at the foot of the backstairs leading up to the bedrooms and the popping sound that it made.

First thing in the morning, I grabbed a tube of Door-Ease out of my toolbox and took care of the sticky door and its popping sound.

At lunch I passed around my cranberry sauce. Suki said, “What’s this?”

“Cranberry sauce,” I said. “It has a little kick. You’ll like it.”

The family talked about their upcoming Christmas trip to Bermuda.

I excused myself and went up the backstairs to my room to get a ceramic bulldog I wanted to give to her mother and father. The family had strong Yale ties and the university’s mascot is a bulldog. When I came back down through the door that no longer made a popping sound Mrs. Fort was talking.

“I just don’t like him, Bonnie. That car he drives is so ostentatious and—”

“Making us listen to that story,” said Suki.

“He always needs to be the center of attention,” said Rex.

“He’s arrogant,” said Mrs. Fort. “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. And why isn’t he having Thanksgiving with his own family? Doesn’t he have a family? Who are they, anyway?”

I waited for Bonnie to say something in my defense. Nothing came. I drew a deep breath and walked into the dining room.

“I’m going to be leaving now,” I said, and I handed the little bulldog to Mr. Fort. “This is for you. Thank you for not speaking ill of me.”

He looked down at the table, nodding his head. He died on Christmas in the next year. Mrs. Fort lived on another 30 years. Rex fatally contacted a tree skiing at Gstaad, and Suki married a wealthy Mexican avocado grower.

Bonnie….Bonnie and I still enjoy swimming in Little Compton whenever possible. It’s taken us awhile to understand each other, but we’ve persisted and have largely found it a worthy effort. Regular pilgrims we are, I suppose.

Charles Pinning is a Providence-based novelist and essayist.

I would forever be a complainer

-- Photo by JOHN PINNING

Green End Farm, in Middletown, circa 1960, where the author savored his Thanksgiving dinner.

We’re rolling merrily down my grandparents' lane in Middletown,  R.I.,  which is next to Newport. A border of weeping willows just beyond the passenger windows drapes into Green End Pond before the lane curves away at the stone wall and up between two towering maples and past the rarely-used front door of the white farmhouse. We pull around back by the cast iron water pump with the long, curved handle and trundle in through the back door.

My grandmother is at the kitchen stove, a pot on every burner, opening the oven door to baste the turkey. The entire house is rich with the aroma of pies, vegetables and turkey.

Everything glistens. The mahogany table, the backs of the chairs. The window glass and the cut glasses and candlesticks on the table. The silverware. Heat comes up through the scrollwork of the floor registers. It is here, in the big dining room, behind lace curtains with the afternoon sun streaming in, that we celebrate Thanksgiving.

Aunts and uncles and cousins arrive from Newport, Bristol, Warren and Providence. I am shy around some of these people whom I only see a couple times a year. These are working people; Portuguese, Irish, fishermen and plumbers. They are jostling and physical, and my head is rubbed many times, and I am hugged and kissed by aunts with booming voices wearing too much lipstick and perfume. I am not a loud person. I don’t know how to smile unless I am genuinely happy. I am feeling pretty happy at the moment, just overwhelmed and crowded.

The grand feast is served forth, the plates are loaded and the eating begins, soon followed by the arguing. Something is said about the Kennedys and my father starts in about the Bay of Pigs, and then an uncle accuses a brother-in-law of “double-dipping,” and the battle cry is raised about taxes in Newport and taxes in Bristol and why am I being sent to a private school — aren’t public schools good enough for me?

My mother’s younger sister is in high spirits with her new boyfriend and my mother has to take her down a few notches, accusing her of having more growing up than she did, and nobody notices when I slide down out of my chair and crawl out of the room. In the back hall I grab my coat and slip outside.

The sky is a watercolor wash of blues, grays and pale whites as I head up to the barn. My grandfather is inside, arranging the milking machines, the big grey tabby following him. I hadn’t notice him leave the dining room before me. He is wearing a work coat over his suit and a red plaid hat with flaps up.

I walk past him to visit the bull with the ring in his nose, watching us from behind the thick iron bars of his stall.

I follow my grandfather back to the front of the barn, where he takes another plaid wool hat, a green one like the red one he wears, and fits it onto my head. Then we walk down the lane to the pond.

Two swans glide over to us and my grandfather takes a chunk of bread out of his pocket, breaks off a piece and tosses crumbled bits of it into the water. He hands the chunk of bread to me and I do the same.

A group of mallards stream in, darting at the bread furthest from the swans and the last of the sun starts streaking the sky orange and purple.

“Time to bring in the cows,” my grandfather says.

We turn and head up the lane, toward the farmhouse and the pasture beyond. My grandmother is standing in a window watching us and I smile and wave to her. She smiles and waves back.

“She can listen to that. I can’t,” says my grandfather.

“Why do they complain so much?” I ask him.

“Not enough money,” says my grandfather. “That’s why your parents want you go there,” and he points to the Gothic spires of the St. George’s School chapel, lordly stoic beyond the fields on the highest point of land in the area.

And one day, I did go to that prestigious boarding school. But it was already too late for me. I was of the complaining class, and no matter how far life took me, I would forever see everything that was wrong and complain about it.

Still, Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday — even if for turkeys it is a complete disaster, and for the American Indian, a day of national mourning.

Charles Pinning is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel “Irreplaceable.”

William Morgan: The Quaker Coast

  Photos (below) and commentary by WILLIAM MORGAN

It has been almost a decade since I published a book of photographs on the Cape Cod cottage. Since, then, I have been looking for another suitable topic.

My (more successful) photographer friends tell me no one is underwriting black and white photos taken with film. And my favorite publisher nixed the idea for a photographic study of what I call the Quaker Coast (the towns of Dartmouth and Westport in Massachusetts, and Little Compton, just over the border in Rhode Island), declaring  that there would be no market for such a book.

Yet there is something special – and not yet ruined – about those three towns. Fishing and agriculture still survive, if not actually thrive, there. And the mostly unspoiled landscape and the prevalence of a plain vernacular architecture, mostly wrapped in cedar shingles.

In lieu of the fantasy book, I offer the readers of New England Diary three images from the book proposal.

Addendum: Much of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket were also Quaker. I went to a few family memorial services in the Quaker meeting house in West Falmouth, on the Cape.

Many whalers were of Quaker background -- but that didn't make them gentle at all. Rather, many were tough and rapacious.  Many became very successful capitalists whose investments spanned the world.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Charles Pinning: Looking for independence on Independence Day

We found the prodigious piece of driftwood on the shore, bleached bone white and tumbled smooth, once a stout tree of more than 6 feet, now our proud possession.“We can burn it at the Fourth of July fireworks party,” said Jessie. Jessie lived in Little Compton, R.I., and I lived in Newport, 45 minutes away, and we had just completed the ninth grade. We’d known each other since the fifth grade, when Jessie started taking the bus into Newport to attend the same grade school as I did, St. Michael’s. She was quiet and shy and my height. She had long, dark hair and hazel eyes, and when she opened her mouth she always said something worth listening to, in my opinion. Even my sarcastic older brother gave her the thumbs up. “Still waters run deep,” he said knowingly. She was the only girl I’d ever kissed on the lips, with intent, and she had been my girlfriend ever since. My mother approved of Jessie, which was rare, because my mother didn’t approve of any girls, especially Irish girls who lived in the Fifth Ward. She thought the Irish were big boozers. Back then, the Fifth Ward in Newport was a poor section of town and my mother felt superior, even though she was the daughter of Portuguese immigrants and had grown up on a farm. Jessie was half-Irish, but she didn’t live in the Fifth Ward and her family was old and prominent in Rhode Island. To visit Jessie, I took the bus to Portsmouth and got off before it veered toward the Mount Hope Bridge and Bristol. Her mother picked me up, Jessie waving from the passenger seat of their blue and white Ford station wagon. The three of us packed in tight on the bench seat listened to the radio that was hopefully playing a good song (Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc.), and sang along with it. Way out on West Main Road in Little Compton, we stopped at Walker’s vegetable stand for some fresh-picked strawberries and then continued out to Jessie’s big shingled house on Sakonnet Point. On Sunday, we went to church together, but it was Episcopalian and not nearly as repressive as going to a Catholic church. On the Fourth, we played catch on the broad front lawn in front of Jessie’s house, then we bicycled down along the edge of Round Pond ringed with grasses and cattails, and up the narrow road between the honeysuckle and wild roses and rosa rugosa, coasting down the packed gravel hill to Tappen’s Beach. We checked to make sure our log was okay, then we walked down to Warren’s Point where we went behind our favorite rock and made out for a while. As usual, I started coughing. “Your Catholic guilt cough” said Jessie. “Do you think you’re going to Hell when we finally have sex?” “Probably,” I laughed. “Unless we’re married.” “I really hope you don’t believe that,” she said. I smiled, as if to say of course I didn’t. But the truth was that my brain was a tangle of my parents’ fears and the thought control-power madness of the Catholic Church, corkscrewed into me from early childhood. After dunking, we gathered smaller sticks and pieces of driftwood to put under the log, which we encircled with big stones. We climbed up on a lifeguard stand and the light turned rosy on Jessie’s face. We held hands and our hands glowed. I kissed her hand upon which she wore a ring that matched mine. A flotilla of brown ducks bobbed in the light surf near the shore. Some of them were just ducklings the size of little rubber ducks. “Are they trying to make a beachhead?” I asked. “Or do you think they are feeding? Or training the babies?” “Look at the little one that’s behind. Here comes the mama to bring it back in line,” said Jess. Families began showing up and some of our friends. Picnic food and drinks were put out on folding tables and barbecues were set up. We lit the fire under the log. I wished my parents were here, but the truth was, it would be less fun. My father couldn’t relax. He was forever critical of too much noise and running around and people not doing things correctly, and my mother wanted to know where I was all the time. Honestly, Jessie’s parents didn’t ride herd on her at all. They just let her be. Our driftwood log burned impressively, snapping and sparkling and we stood with others, silhouettes in the wavering orange light of its flames. In the shorelit darkness, we drifted up into the dunes. Lying down we looked up at a skyful of stars. I wondered if God was watching us, when suddenly there was a long hissing whistle followed by a loud boom! Red and then white and then blue fireworks began exploding and lighting up the sky. I felt Jessie’s hand. “Happy Independence Day,” she whispered.

Charles Pinning, an occasional contributor, is the author of the Rhode Island-based novel “Irreplaceable.”