An Island in Winter: A story written a long time ago

 

Thanks to Antonia Noori Farnaz, esteemed Providence Journal reporter who brought this to my attention. She wrote wonderfully today about another island, Prudence, in winter.

An island in winter, a people apart Story by G. Wayne Miller in The Providence Journal, March 6, 1983

 

ICE SKIMS PONDS no larger than big-city puddles. Buildings are shuttered and boarded tight. The sounds are surf, cries of angry ocean birds, wind. And everywhere, in the snowless thickets and fields, in the sky and on the sea, along the towering southern bluffs, the predominant shades are browns and yellows and greys.

 

The road north to Sandy Point, where white settlers waded ashore 322 years ago, twists and winds up over rolling hills and back down into lonely hollows. The road is cold and bare, empty of people on bicycles or in cars. To the west, Great Salt Pond is one big mirror, a lusterless reflector of sky, unbroken by boats or bathers.

 

These are the broad brush strokes of Block Island on an overcast winter afternoon - a bleak, Victorian composition faithfully lifted from one of Thomas Hardy's best brooding landscapes. The summer visitors are all gone now, gone back home to far-away work and school and business. Now it is an islander's island, 12 lonely miles out to sea.

Tending North Light many years ago

"A PLACE where you can find yourself," says Barbara Brown, school secretary.

 

"A time to settle down," says Gladys Steadman, who is spending her 93rd winter on the island. A season of harsh, austere beauty, more Ireland or Wales than Rhode Island.

At night, and in day, the chilled wind whistles and moans as it comes sneaking inside, uninvited, through cracks around windows and loosely fitting doors. For a moment, the moon winks through the clouds, and then it is gone, leaving only the sweep of Southeast Light against the starless black of the evening sky.

 

On Water Street, the great turn-of-the-century waterfront hotels are all closed now, their breezy August charms locked and frozen. Inside boarded shops, an army of silent mopeds waits. The Empire Theatre's next screening is in June. "Sorry, we're closed," reads the small orange-on-black sign on Barone's Restaurant.

 

Only at ferry time, once daily at quarter past noon, and three times on Fridays, will Water Street barely - just barely - awaken from its winter slumber. Then, two or three dozen souls will gather to unload freight, or greet returning friends and relatives from the mainland, which almost everybody here on the rock calls "America." In half an hour, everyone will be gone again.

 

BACK A BLOCK from the sea, on Chapel Street, one of the island's year-round residents is having coffee at the Number One Cafe. He's Kevin Jones, licensed refrigeration specialist, owner of the island's two laundries, longtime Cable TV Committeeman. He's lived on the island so long that they've named a sandwich for him at McAloon's Saloon, a popular watering hole.

 

"In order to be here in the winter," Jones says, "you have to be a person basically happy with yourself. Otherwise, you couldn't make it. You're living in a very small community. You can't be a person who requires going to the movies all the time, all those other mainland things."

 

"It's really easy-going, low-key," says Howell T. Conant Jr., publisher of the island's only year-round newspaper. "There are no rules and regulations. There's no traffic. There's no noise. You can take a walk on the beach and not see a soul. You walk into a restaurant, and they're all your friends. You don't lock the doors or take the keys out of the car."

 

No one has an exact figure, and there have been several babies born since the last official census, but the year-round population of New Shoreham, R.I., is thought by most islanders to fall somewhere between 600 and 700 people, of which 80 are schoolchildren, and even more are retirees.

 

"On a busy summer weekend, when we have a harbor full of boats, when we have ferries operating and planes landing, we probably get up around 7,000, 8,000 people," says Police Chief Paul Riker, one of two year-round cops.

 

Riker has a summertime force of six, with at least one officer on headquarters duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In July, about the peak of the tourist season, his department responded to 353 calls. In January, it was two dozen. These days, when the chief pulls the graveyard shift, as he often does, he sleeps at home with the phone by his bed. It almost never rings.

 

ALMOST ANYTHING you can count on the island is like that - abysmally low in winter, astronomically high in summer. A crazy roller-coaster life, a peaks-and-valleys kind of existence that never lets up, never evens out year after year, for those who have chosen to sink their roots into Block Island's sandy soil.

 

With the cold weather come the closings and the reduced hours, the layoffs and shutoffs, the rollbacks and cutbacks. These are winter facts on the island: A single operating hotel, the 1661 House. One bank, Fleet National, hours, Tuesdays and Fridays, 9 to 1. A hardware store, John Rose & Co., open an hour a day, noon to 1.

 

These are more winter facts: One grocery store, the Seaside Market. One doctor. One state nurse. No pharmacy, no department store, no dentist, no baker, no barber, no hairdresser, no cobbler. In winter, these mean mainland trips. And this grim winter fact: unemployment averaging 27 percent, up 20 or more points from summer.

 

FOR THOSE workers without work, winter is a constant struggle, a touch-and-go battle against boredom and cabin fever - sometimes fought, and sometimes lost, inside the four bars that stay open year-round. Often, it is summer savings or unemployment compensation or pick-up work, never high-paying, never guaranteed, that help the unlucky and unable to scrape by.

 

Cheryl Shea, 19, was jobless much of the winter, until she was hired to cook meals for a group of phone company workers who spent several weeks on the island doing major maintenance. Still, for her and her boyfriend, who is trying like crazy to get an auto repair shop off the ground, winter times are tough times, tough finacially and emotionally.

 

"Winters are hard for everybody," she says as she cleans up after breakfast. "You're lucky to get a job. Families out here, I don't know how they do it. Still, we love it in the winter. You don't see your friends in the summer ever. Everyone is trying to save something for the winter."

 

THOSE HOLDING cold-weather jobs either work for the state, or the town, or in the few open restaurants or bars. They go lobstering or quahogging, or do construction - especially construction. On some days, when the ever-blowing wind is at rare whisper-level, the clutter of hammers and saws can be heard against the sounds of the ocean and its restless gulls.

 

There are those who say that Block Island is on the verge of a development boom, and there is no doubt that plenty of new construction is planned or underway, but the big chores in winter are repairs and additions to islanders' homes, to hotels, to cottages owned by off-islanders. Most new starts come in spring and summer.

 

Weather this winter, unseasonably mild and virtually snowless, has been a bonanza for everyone, particularly the laborers. So says the island's corporate memory, Fred Benson, a greatly respected old man who has been a baseball coach, a fisherman, a mechanic, a broker, a notary public and a whole host of other people in his eight decades on the island.

The late Fred Benson

"What we call a real soft winter," says Benson in his office, a hole-in-the-wall affair he has plastered proudly with the snapshots and proclamations and yellowing newspaper clippings and charts that document the many accomplishments of his 87 years. "I've seen it snow three days and three nights steady. I've seen 22 inches of ice on the ponds. I've seen upwards of 30 inches of frost in the ground."

 

THOSE WERE winters when ice skating and hockey were the big outdoors events, but there has been little of either this year. There have been some walks on the beach, some jogging, some mainland trips for shopping or entertainment, but this winter, like most, has been mostly an indoors affair.

 

That means cards and parties, dinners and Bruins games on cable TV. It means town politics - in 1983, the politics of development, the pros and cons of rental mopeds. It means hanging out in bars, or evenings by the propane-gas heater or the coal stove, because there's no abundance of home-grown firewood. Mostly, it means seeing more of your neighbors.

 

Winter weaves a bond, Block Islanders will tell you in their more poetic moments, a certain special fraternity that can't hide behind their traditionally crusty Yankee respect for privacy.

 

Their word for it is family, a word that crops up again and again, even in the idlest chit-chat. "You don't see them any other time," says Jones. "In winter, you see everybody. You catch up."

 

"Especially in winter," says the island's only year-round clergyman, Tony Pappas, Baptist pastor of Harbor Church, "Block Island is very human and personal, a face-to-face community. That's why we've stayed here for seven years. It's a community where we can relate to others."

 

IN WINTER, only the daily ferry and the noon fire siren really mark the passage of time, and an islander's schedule is relaxed and casual. Clothing, too, is casual - casual and rugged. Flannel shirts, wool caps and coats, Levi's copper-riveted jeans, down vests, work boots - these are the islanders' hallmarks. Maybe every fourth man is bearded; many others have two or three days' growth.

 

Beneath the outward tranquility and solitude, the satisfaction with their winter lot, is the islanders' shadowy feeling that, someday, somehow, paradise could be lost. Already, it is threatened. What years ago was the traditional Memorial Day-to-Labor Day rush is now an extended tourist season, three months longer. That's three fewer months the island is the islanders'.

 

Still, on an overcast Block Island winter afternoon, thoughts of tourists, the economic lifeblood of the island, are far away.

 

Says Conant: "I wish there was a way to make this place like this all the time. Twenty more people on this island is 20 too many. I think a lot of people feel possessive because they're part of winter here. It makes them special, like they're a part of Block Island."

Copyright © 1983. LMG Rhode Island Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved.