They've Changed Rhode Island
but maybe not enough
If you follow The Pilgrimage Inc on the Meta sites, you’ll know that last week I took a day trip to Rhode Island.
Do what the lady said and subscribe to The Pilgrimage Ink if you’re here at Gathered and Scattered for Bible, theology, and spiritual formation takes, as well as personal stories that relate to those three things, like the one I wrote over there yesterday. Those are likely going to be migrating over there almost entirely, while this space remains for…stories like what follows.
My mom and her brothers grew up in Rhode Island. My uncles and their families migrated elsewhere, but I mostly grew up in New England, and, given that and the fact that my brother and I are the two oldest grandchildren in the family, we got to experience a lot more of Rhode Island than our cousins.
Grandma and Grandpa didn’t move into elderly housing in another state until I was a couple of years out of college, and in the summers from my junior year in high school through college graduation, I worked as a camp counselor at the 8-week day camp hosted by the church my grandfather had planted decades before. This meant that even though I avoided driving a car for most of that time, preferring to navigate the neighborhood via a vintage bicycle from my other set of grandparents, I got to know their section of Rhode Island pretty well—and them, too.
These days Paul and I are the only members of that branch of the family still in New England (which is funny to me sometimes when I think about it, because I was the one who was going to move overseas and never come back). Life gets busy, so our trips to Rhode Island are few and far between. Which means that every time we venture there, things are different. This, of course, is to be expected any time you return to a place you once spent lots of time and haven’t visited often since. My uncle wrote a song about it.
For example, when I was a camp counselor, the nearby town of Warren was “the wrong side of the tracks.” Now the place is so gentrified as to be almost unrecognizable, except for the fact that it’s been gentrifying for a couple of decades now, and that’s usually where Paul and I meet my cousins for coffee and/or lunch if they chance to come up to New England for a visit, so we’ve watched its transformation and aren’t blindsided by it.
There was something different about this trip, though: once I pulled into the morass of highway that has always been Providence, nothing looked familiar anymore.
Here’s what was the same about Rhode Island on this trip:
Everything is prohibitively expensive, even by New England standards. (For grins, I looked up my grandparents’ old house to see how much it could list for if it were for sale. It’s a cool house, but it’s smaller than mine, and the lot it’s on is a postage stamp…and it is estimated at over a third more than our house could likely sell for, which is not insignificant.)
Providence doesn’t want to let anyone out.
What I mean by the second thing is that even though I’ve driven through Providence at least once a year for my entire adulthood (except the part when I lived in London), the highway through it is overwhelming. The exits are all in the wrong places (including sometimes on the left). The signage doesn’t necessarily queue up the non-intuitively-placed exits appropriately. Invariably I end up getting off at the wrong one and having to detour back to where I was, and try not to take the wrong exit again. Weirdly, every time I go there, it’s the same wrong exit. And the same thing happens again on the way back home, where it’s a different Same Wrong Exit. This is…probably a me-and-Providence issue, and not the full fault of either one of us, considering it’s been happening forever.1
Except this time was different, even though the same thing happened. Because as I found myself sailing down the wrong in-bound exit yet again, and trying to follow the GPS prompts to the Old Stomping Grounds, the GPS prompts did not put me back on the highway I had prematurely exited, nor did it reroute me to the highway onto which I should have exited. Instead, it dumped me off on a regular old road and took me the back way to Barrington-by-way-of-Riverside, where I planned to stop off before meeting my cousin and aunt in Warren at Blount Clam Shack for lunch.
And all the way to Riverside, including once I got there, I did not recognize one thing. Admittedly, I got there (or was directed there) in a way I don’t usually take. Every so often I’d glimpse something and think maybe I had got my bearings…and then I’d realize I still didn’t know where I was. Then all of a sudden I was staring at the enclosure around the Crescent Park Carousel and thinking, “Wait. Is this where it’s always been?”
That last vestige of a mid-century amusement park2 is now surrounded by retirement housing (probably for people who used to hang out at the amusement park), and I haven’t ventured into that particular neighborhood for probably ten years, so I guess it’s not surprising I didn’t recognize it, except that after I got there, I had absolutely no idea where to go from there. And everything remained unfamiliar until I got routed onto the one main road that connects Barrington to Warren.
The seafood was great, as was hanging out with my aunt and my second-youngest cousin. The two of us have not spent a lot of time together in our lives, but we are both very different and uncannily similar, and it’s always fun to re-encounter that dynamic.
But then I had to get back in the car and head home. And while the return to Providence was a little more recognizable from Warren than to Barrington, once I got on the highway through the city, I proceeded to get off not just one, but three wrong exits. In rush hour traffic. It took me twice as long to get home as it should have. And that is why I say They’ve changed Rhode Island. But in some very specific ways, They haven’t changed it enough.
Kind of like that one restaurant in London I used to like to take guests to, but because I got there by getting lost the first time, I had to go the “lost” way all the rest of the times, so that I wouldn’t get lost some other way and never make it there at all. (Now “that one restaurant” is an international chain and there are so many in London it looks like if I got lost going to one, I’d easily end up at a different one.)
You’ll want to click that link…