Hidden in Plain Sight

“In this refulgent summer,”[1] bright sunlight is not always welcomed.ⁱ Beings like me search for cover. Cows rest under wild apple trees, feasting on fallen bounty. Mallards hug the marshy shoreline of a pond, tucked behind tall sedges and reeds. The hot summer sun is too incandescent for comfort. All is resolved when mid-October finally arrives with long, low light that makes everything serene. It’s also time to prepare for our annual pilgrimage to Block Island.  

The car is jam-packed with copious supplies, two humans and one big dog for our ten-day stay. We head south to Narragansett Bay and the once-humming fishing port of Galilee on Point Judith, ninety miles from Boston and a world away.  

Located twelve miles off the coast of Rhode Island, Block Island is a geological moraine formed from boulders and sediment deposited by receding glaciers over millennia. Covering just ten square miles of land, forty percent of the island is protected open space. Once on board the car ferry, I hurry upstairs to find a seat on the right side and wait for Block Island to magically appear. The North Lighthouse slowly morphs out of the fog, followed by 150-foot clay cliffs eroding into the ocean. The hour-long trip ends in the harbor with small shops, hotels, bike/moped rentals and restaurants now shuttered. Gone are the summer hordes that overtake the island with ten to fifteen thousand people arriving daily. Time slows down after the change in seasons for the fourteen hundred year-round residents. 

Off the ferry, we head to a small studio apartment above an old barn overlooking the North Light and the coast of Rhode Island, our rental “home away from home” for the past thirty-five years, the perfect spot for observing migrating birds and star gazing. We unpack as quickly as possible. Fred heads to the porch where he, like Thoreau, will closely survey everything Nature has spread before him. Jack dog and I head out for our first walk. 

We start down a grassy trail along one of the island’s many free-standing stonewalls, hosts to spiky black raspberry bramble (Rubus occidentalis), bayberry bushes (Morella pensylvanica) loaded with small hard aromatic berries and wild field asters (Symphyotrichum) pushing their purple heads forward for light. As I take in this beauty, I can’t help but remember this picturesque landscape actually camouflages a horrific past.  

Originally called Manisses (from manitou, Algonquian for great spirit) by the Narragansett (People of the Small Point), the island was reached by colonial settlers from Massachusetts in 1661, and in 1672 was incorporated as part of the Rhode Island Colony. Within a few years, on-going colonial expansion led to the King Philip’s War (1675-1676) and ended with the destruction of First Nation villages. Indiscriminate killings erased thousands, with those still living sold into slavery. Vanquished. By the eighteenth century, nearby Newport was the principal hub in North America for ships engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. With plantations of 1000 acres or more along coastal areas of Rhode Island, in 1790 the US Census listed forty-seven enslaved people on Block Island.[2] In fact, most of the four hundred miles of the island’s iconic stonewalls were built by them while clearing farmland. The walls still stand as actants, topography as both narrator and recipient of meaning, a phenomenology of place accountable to itself and to others. Although a recent AI search of Block Island found articles on the island’s natural beauty and extensive hiking trails with little mention of the island’s painful history, slavery still haunts. 

At Sachem Pond we discover an assortment of birds: Ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis), Double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) and Mute swans (Cygnus olor). Flocks slow­­ly glide by in close-knit groups as choreographed heads plunge for food in this salty brackish pond. Jack dog sits at attention. 

We then walk back up a dirt road past ripe milkweeds (Asclepias syriaca) with vivid red and black milkweed bugs feasting (Oncopelltus fasciatus), a scary and mesmerizing process reminiscent of a predator scene by Annie Dillard.[3] Like most bugs, these have straw-like beaks that inject digestive enzymes into the outside layers of seeds in each pod and then suck out the liquefied plant material. Females lay up to thirty lemon-yellow eggs a day into the crevices between seed pods that turn bright red before the nymphs hatch in a few days.  

At the top of the hill looking down the dirt road toward West Beach, my senses go on high alert: my beloved tree is missing. The twenty-foot sinewy Shadblow serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis) who welcomed me every year is no more. A solitary sentry, she withstood Super Storm Sandy, sudden squalls, dry summers and hungry white-tailed deer. Vanquished. Trauma derives from the Greek τραύμα, “wound, which implies a close relation between trauma and the integrity of the body.”[4] 

All that remains is the stonewall who had her back, watching over her since a seedling. Who kept her company. Who shared secrets. A lost witness. The “presence of the absent,” a landscape of grief.[5] 

At Sachem Pond we discover an assortment of birds: Ruddy ducks (Oxyura jamaicensis), Double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) and Mute swans (Cygnus olor).  Flocks slow­­ly glide by in close knit groups as choreographed heads plunge for food in this salty brackish pond.  Jack dog sits at attention.

We then walk back up a dirt road past ripe milkweeds (Asclepias syriaca) with vivid red and black milkweed bugs feasting (Oncopelltus fasciatus), a scary and mesmerizing process reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s predator.[3]  Like most bugs, they have straw-like beaks that inject digestive enzymes into the outside layers of seeds in each pod and then suck out the liquefied plant material.  Females lay up to 30 lemon-yellow eggs a day into the crevices between seed pods that turn bright red before the nymphs hatch in a few days. 

At the top of the hill looking down the dirt road toward West Beach, my senses go on high alert: my beloved tree is missing.  The 20 foot sinewy Shadblow serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis) who welcomed me every year is no more.  A solitary sentry, she withstood Super Storm Sandy, sudden squalls, dry summers and hungry white-tailed deer.  Vanquished.  Trauma derives from the Greek τραύμα, “wound which implies a close relation between trauma and the integrity of the body.”[5] 

All that remains is the stonewall who had her back, watching over her since a seedling. 

Who kept her company. Who shared secrets.  A lost witness. 

The “presence of the absent,” a landscape of grief.[5]

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson. Divinity School Address. July 15, 1838. https://emersoncentral.com/ebook/Divinity-School-Address.pdf

[2] David Lee Tucker. Stone Wall Freedom-The Slave. Two Harbors Press. 2012 Pg. ix

[3] A “Giant water bug…” Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Harper’s Magazine Press. 1974. Pg.6    

[4] Raben Rosenberg. “Trauma and Mental Disorders”, Trauma and Traumatization in Individual and Collective Dimensions: Insights from Biblical Studies and Beyond. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2014. Pg.30. 

[5] Paul Ricoeur. Memory, History, Forgetting. University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pg. 17