Four years in Rhode Island
Was it the end of a honeymoon phase? Was it pandemic languishing? Whatever the reason, the love I found for Rhode Island in 2020 all but disappeared in 2021.
This time last year, I shared that I finally fell head over heels with the Ocean State after the COVID-19 pandemic forced me to stay put and see its hidden beauty. But this second pandemic year felt drab at best and debilitatingly difficult at worst, and I find myself laying blame at the feet of the state I call home.
Does Rhode Island deserve my ire? Yes and no.
Let’s rewind to March 2020. I was learning to scuba dive in Cozumel, Mexico, the week everything changed. The day I arrived, the locals were cracking lighthearted jokes about switching from Corona to Pacifico to ward off the mysterious virus spreading through China, Italy and Iran. By the time I left, everyone on the plane was furiously slathering sanitizer over hands and tray tables, and my employer had just made the tough call to send everyone home for the foreseeable future.
I thought I’d feel trapped in quarantine, but in an odd way, it set me free. The flexibility of working from home suited me, especially in the summer. Without a bus commute, I was able to bookend my workdays with ocean swims and bike rides. Rather than planning out-of-state adventures on weekends and holidays, I discovered sweet nearby neighborhoods and gorgeous local waterways I’d previously ignored. I found myself charmed by the way Rhode Islanders banded together to keep their communities safe and healthy during the pandemic. I felt like I was finally beginning to see the magic in this odd place I call home.
After almost a year of fairly contented stillness, Ian and I traveled again in December. I hadn’t seen my family in a year and a half, but with coronavirus cases surging, flying west for the holiday season seemed out of the question. So we packed up the cats and a week’s supply of food and we drove all the way to California, stopping only to get gas (with nitrile gloves on) and sleep (in hotels with contactless check-in).
The next seven weeks were a balm for my soul. I hadn’t spent so much uninterrupted time with family since college. Yet the long stretch of sun and sand also set me up for disappointment in 2021, in a way: Santa Cruz is a paradisical place, and returning home from paradise is always rough.
On the drive back to Rhode Island in January, we encountered snowstorms, strong winds and the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, a bellwether for the year to come. Winter felt blessedly short, but spring’s damp chill dragged on into June. The “hot vax summer” New England had hoped for was an epic disappointment: We got little sun, record amounts of rain, bugs galore and relentless humidity. Two back-to-back August storms rutted out our driveway and knocked a huge tree on top of our house; the mess took weeks to clear. The state’s fall colors were unusually dull and came unusually late.
None of these things is terribly traumatic or heartbreaking, of course. But taken together, they offer a neat metaphor for the way 2021 felt to me: Colorless, humorless and mostly forgettable.
I’m sure the pandemic is largely to blame for the months-long stretches of mopey indifference I felt — an emotion The New York Times labeled “languishing.” This was supposed to be the year the world reopened, the year all of our delayed plans finally came to fruition. Like many who got vaccinated in late spring, I had hung all my hopes on the summer, fall and holiday season to come, picturing epic Fourth of July get-togethers, trips west to see my friends, long weekends going to plays and concerts in New York. But the Delta variant dashed those hopes one by one, and the poor weather lingered, seemingly mocking my naïvete. As the nation found itself in a state of permanent uncertainty, it became tough to make plans or find anything to look forward to. I often felt like I was floating aimlessly through each day, like I was only half present. I felt at turns anxious and ambivalent about all the precious sunny days I squandered indoors, too mentally drained to plan any outings. Sometimes I thought, what am I doing? I should seize the opportunity to make a positive memory. Other times I thought apathetically, I’ll try again in 2022.
Though the pandemic was the likely culprit for all this languishing, I was more than happy to blame Rhode Island. The state that had enchanted me in 2020 was once again beginning to grate. I found myself again frustrated and mystified by the contradictions inherent in the Ocean State. For example, why is it that, in the most Catholic state in the nation, there’s not a single neighborhood that is renowned for its Christmas light displays? Why do so many of its coffee shops open hours after most of us wake up? Why, in order to get a few minutes of surly service at the post office in the heart of Downtown Providence, do I have to ring a bell, knock on a door and yell at the top of my lungs — is this what passes for New England charm? Why doesn’t my neighborhood have any sidewalks? And how in the heck is it possible that, as I write this, Rhode Island’s COVID-19 vaccination rate is the highest in the nation, and yet so is its rate of positive cases?
Again, nothing earth-shattering here — yet combined, these puzzling things illustrate a kind of friction Rhode Island has introduced in my daily life. In my past lives out West, the days went by smoothly, for the most part. My bus and bike commutes were quick and painless, the mood at work was lighthearted, getting home to see family was quicker and cheaper, and like-minded people surrounded me. Whereas here, my days often bump along somewhat uncomfortably. It’s like in dreams, when you want to run or walk, but it feels like your legs are stuck in quicksand or submerged under water. On good days, I can stay positive enough to manage the friction and make it to my destination, albeit at a slower pace. But on bad days, the friction can immobilize me. And 2021 was one long, bad day.
I suppose a more concise way to say it is: In 2021, I grieved simpler times. But hey, didn’t everyone? Why bring Rhode Island into this?
Because it was more than friction. I was also growing disenchanted with the narrative of Rhode Island’s very founding. Residents have long been proud of the idea that the state was established by a man who preached religious tolerance, having been cast out of Massachusetts for his ideas. But this was the early 1600s, and tolerance only went so far. This was, after all, a man who thought it appropriate to found his own state on land that was already occupied by Indigenous peoples.
I’ve spent the last year delving into the history of my neighborhood, town and county, and it’s revealed some ugly, long-buried secrets that historical plaques tend to gloss over. For example, a local park recognizes Pettaquamscutt Rock as the place where Williams met with two Narragansett sachems, Canonicus and Miantonomi, to engage in a peaceful transfer of ownership of Aquidneck Island in 1638. Left out of this widely accepted narrative is the fact that the two sachems didn’t necessarily believe they were giving land to anyone by accepting wampum, hoes and coats from Williams and signing a treaty printed in a language that wasn’t theirs. Given what we know about traditional Narragansett ideas about land stewardship — namely that no person or group of people can “own” land, per se — it’s likely they thought they were agreeing to coexist with the white settlers on Aquidneck Island.
If they expected coexistence, they must have been bitterly disappointed in the years to come. Just down the road from Pettaquamscutt Rock are the ruins of a garrison house that, according to a plaque, was “burned by the Indians” in December 1675. That’s it, no other context. No mention of the fact that, in the months before, paranoid English militiamen had burned several Narragansett villages based on naught but their own unjustified worry that the tribe would abandon its stated neutrality in King Philip’s War. No mention of the Great Swamp Massacre that occurred just days after the garrison house altercation and killed so many Narragansett people that one historian has called it “one of the most brutal and lopsided military encounters in all of New England’s history.”
I can’t explain why Rhode Island’s ugly past got under my skin this year. It’s not as if my home state, or any other state where I’ve lived, doesn’t have an equally dubious, equally racist history. Perhaps this is just a rumination on a year that took a toll on almost all of us, everywhere in the world. I just happened to weather the storms of 2021, literal and figurative, from the Ocean State — and that soured me on the place.
With at least a year left here, I’m sure these will not be my final words on Rhode Island, and thank goodness for that! The state surely deserves better than these jumbled thoughts. I’ll wager a bet, too, that Rhode Island will look a lot better in the promising golden light of 2022.
