To The Meadow

Part I of The Block Island Chronicles

Dear Readers,

I began a new book this week! It was not one I was expecting to write, though once I started it feels inevitable. For years people have been telling me I should write about Block Island whenever I tell them a story, but I’ve never felt the call to do it until now. Below you’ll find my first sketch of what will be a book about my coming of age, or initiation, through the land, water, and community of Block Island. I’m very excited to share this new project with you. If you enjoy it let me know in the comments, please share, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do!

It began the summer I gave up the comfort of my third floor apartment in the Phelan house nestled one block behind the old Victorian buildings of Water Street, which obviously faced the water-Old Harbor, in fact, where in summer The Block Island ferry disgorged tourists onto the waterfront like an oil spill, a slow, sticky, black ooze that choked the life from the little bit of unpaved beach still visible at the harbor’s edge owned by The Phelans. They could have sold it for development a thousand times over, but they were the kind of family that valued the view, and the deep shade of the maples that surrounded their old house where hostas thrived up against the stone foundation, holding the coolness into the summer nights where the house was a sanctuary in the middle of the circus that was the Block Island summer.

I had the attic studio all to myself in exchange for being a companion to the family’s matriarch, Harriet Phelan. The studio was a rare commodity on Block Island where employees were stuffed into basement rooms, shacks and dorms because the island economy was totally reliant on tourism, all spaces rented out to maximum financial capacity in order to survive the long, windy winter when it got dark at 4 o’clock and the biggest social event of the week was either Friday night happy hour at the bar or church on Sunday. Harriet was well into her 90s by the time I moved in with her and still sharp as a tack, kind, humorous, and full of goodwill, she embodied a rare kind of belonging in a century where hardly anyone lived their whole lives in the place they were born. Harriet was a treasure, beloved by her family and the town, and I knew I was lucky to live with her even without the fabulous apartment.

But…I had never lived in town before. I had walked through town-stepping off the sidewalk in summer to bypass strolling tourists who had nowhere to go, or briskly strolling unencumbered on the empty winter sidewalks, but I’d never lived there. I’d been on the island 7 years, but town had always been a place to pass through or stop in for a cup of coffee and a chat at Juice ’n Java.

I’m not sure if it was the hum of the industrial refrigerators or the smell of grease from The Mohegan Cafe’s fryalators spouted out the roof vent into the Phelan house yard, but within a month I knew I couldn’t live there. The feeling was urgent as the need to pee on a third class bus. I didn’t want to lumber down the aisle to the loo, but I knew I had to do it. I was going to have to disappoint the Phelans, perhaps even upset them, which I never liked. I dreaded conflict and was willing to tell white lies, and sometimes bigger ones, in order to avoid it. That summer, though, just after Independence Day, July 4th, celebrated as an actual Bacchanal on Block Island whose people had been rum runners during prohibition, hardworking fishermen and farmers who loved to drink and carouse, I told the Phelans I was moving out. They were surprisingly unphased, wishing me well. (As anchors in a tourist town they had seen a lot of people come and go.) In fact, their primary reaction, at least in person, was amusement. They were highly amused that instead of hanging out with their lovely grandmother, cooking her a few meals a week and cleaning some apartments the family rented out to said meandering, carousing tourists in exchange for my own apartment where I didn’t have to sleep with 4 roommates and could cook my own meals, I was going to move into a tent. Close family friend Adrian Mitchell teased me, “Heard you can’t take the hustle bustle of the big city, Jen,” he chuckled, cracking himself up at his own joke. I laughed too, and was grateful at their good humor and kindness. Back in the old days when there were no cars the West Side of the island was the country. This distinction wasn’t just because of the island’s small size. I know, because even in my time, those who lived on the island, hemmed in by the ocean on all sides, made even short distances long, perhaps in order to push the sense of being alone out in the middle of the ocean further away. If you’ve lived there, even in the modern age of cars, you’ll understand how far all the way down the Neck is, and if you live in town the West Side is practically another country, wilder and more primitive.

And that is what I did. I stashed most of my belongings in my 20 year old Jeep Cherokee, stashed a few more in my aunt and uncle’s basement, and pitched my blue L.L. Bean tent in a clearing in a meadow off the left branch of Coast Guard Road. The meadow belonged to Ellen Jacke, another formidable island matriarch, who had taken a shine to me during my years as her daughter’s employee, extracting and bottling honey at The Littlefield Bee Farm whose operations were located in Ellen’s basement. Ellen was generous, kind-hearted, and somewhat of a closet radical. That summer she was also hosting a dread-locked, pierced anarchist punk with a lot of bone jewelry named Ben and his girlfriend, whose name I can’t remember, but whose willowy beauty and composure I envied. Maybe she got worked up about things, but I never saw it. She didn’t talk much, but Ben did. Unlike me who was deferential, Ben barged in wherever he wanted to go. He was charming and good looking so he got away with it, and he was good company. I was shocked when he told me he and Ellen had enlightening conversations about politics and social justice. “Why don’t you ask Ellen if you can camp here?” Ben suggested when I told him how miserable I was listening all night to the Mohegan’s refrigerators that sounded like an airplane taking off outside my window, and of how the smell of grease was so strong it overpowered the aroma of beach roses that was so strong sometimes you could smell it half a mile out to sea from the ferry.

What was he talking about? Abandon Harriet? Disappoint the Phelans? Impinge on Ellen’s goodwill? Though I dreaded being a burden, the call to get out of that house was stronger. Only it wasn’t a call to get out of the house, it was really a call to go to the meadow.

For the rest of that summer I woke up on the ground. I was a novice camper and didn’t know there was such a thing as a camping pad. I couldn’t have afforded one anyway. I worked 15 hours a week minding The Encore Gallery, a cooperative of island artists from the island’s Bohemian heyday who created whatever they wanted, most of it unappealing to tourists. The space was minimalist, one or two paintings on each wall, and shared a building with Juice ’n Java, which in those days was open until midnight, sometimes beyond when we’d leave the bars and dance some more with Michael under the disco ball. I opened up the side door to the J ’n J porch and chatted with my friends as they came and went, watched the Red Bird parking lot like a curious crow, and sold a couple of paintings that summer. The internet existed, but you had to access an actual computer to use it and this was way before smartphones. It was even way before flip phones, at least in my world. I wouldn’t get one for another 7 years or so. I sat, read, took notes, took in Cynthia Bloom’s neon abstracts, Mary Newhouse’s painted gardens, caressed Sean Hartnett’s marble sculptures, admired Josie Merck’s evocative lines and Ben Wohlberg’s mysterious aquatic canvases. The Gallery was so sleepy my brother nicknamed it “The Ensnore.” It was wonderful and I felt like the $15 an hour I got for sitting there was so much money I didn’t need to get another job.

I had no concept of the future. I lived on coffee at J ’n J, an occasional falafel from Froozies (I honestly can’t tell you what else I ate that summer), spearfishing for striped bass and tautog, bodysurfing, island cruises, sunset at the North Point with Weaver, boozing at Nicks, sometimes Kittens, dancing with Megsy, beach fires, singalongs, Walter on Sunday nights at The Shoals, and laughing with Lightnin’ and MaryAnimal so hard we almost fell in the dirt parking lot up behind Nicks where I parked my Jeep back in the day when there was still a back entrance. I think that was the summer Meg knocked her drink off the upstairs balcony railing and it landed on Ringo when the Beatles tribute band was in town. Ringo was so pissed he jumped up from his kit and shook his fist at me. Meg had been quick enough to jump back from sight! I could see him pointing at me to the bouncers, gesturing at them to throw me out, but when they trudged up the stairs and saw it was Meg and me the bouncers just laughed and went back downstairs. Ringo glowered up at us for the rest of the show.

Lightnin’ is my brother, by the way, and we still sometimes refer to that as the summer of the ‘roni because when the bars closed we would go out that back entrance of Nicks and have a Jeep tailgate after hours party that consisted of he, MaryAnne and I eating slices of pepperoni I stored in a styrofoam cooler. (I have no recollection of ever buying ice but I do remember the cooler was there all summer. Maybe it magically produced the other food I must have eaten that summer. I think it also stored striped bass I speared and filleted on the beach. It must have stank. Lightnin’ scoffed at the styrofoam and said why didn’t I get a better cooler. I honestly thought I couldn’t afford a better one.)

My friend John Mancuso, high-kicking gay Italian-American former punk rocker from Philly had brought the pepperoni to the island on an earlier summer visit. It was one of those kinds you see coiled up hanging from ceilings in old world delis, which is where John found it. It was a strange hostess gift, but I’m pretty sure it lasted the whole summer and a couple of slices definitely hit the spot after a night of beers and shots. Best of all were the laughs we got out of it.

If you’re thinking it sounds like I had a great time sowing my wild oats in my youth, you may change your mind when I inform you that I was 33 years old that summer, past my Saturn return when I was supposed to metamorphose into an adult.  At my age my parents had 9 year old me and my 6 year old brother, and had owned two homes, one of them the small Berger cottage on the corner of Cooneymus where Block Island cast its spell on me, becoming the touchstone I returned to a year after college when crushed by depression at having to make it in the world, I returned.

Instinctively, without thought, I had refused my society’s markers of marriage, motherhood and career growth. In limbo, looping through adolescence over and over, playing in fairyland like there was tomorrow, I was waiting for something I didn’t even know existed, had been waiting since my actual adolescence-initiation.

I hesitate to use the word because it’s so easily appropriated from cultures my culture has destroyed or tried to wipe from the earth, but the fact is my bones, my genetic memory of what it really took to become an adult, was stronger than my cultural upbringing. Since there was nobody to tell me initiation was what I needed, let alone guide me down to the Underworld and back up, the land stepped in and helped me along. Block Island. Manisses to the Narragansett. Island of the Little God. Manitou’s Little Island. I answered the call of its rolling hills, its salty meadows, rocky beaches, cold surf and sandy coves without even knowing I was being called. I just set up my tent and lied down. For the rest of the summer I slept in a meadow.

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen