For such a puny little state - only 48 miles long - Rhode Island has a most heroic seashore: 400 miles of soft sand beaches, marsh flats,
brackish pools, glacially sculpted cliffs, and windswept, rocky promontories that bring to mind Gothic novels. This ratio of size to
shoreline is due in part to Narragansett Bay, which insinuates itself into the state, stretching 28 miles from Newport up to Providence.
Referring to Rhode Island's beaches, the state's glossy tourist brochures call them "New England's best-kept secret," and it's true in a
way. Even in the heat of August, when I visited, the beaches were never crowded. Certain blue-blooded Yankees, however, know the secret of
Rhode Island beaches very, very well. Every summer like clockwork, they feet the pull of the tides, the lure of the old hotels, and the
reawakening of sweet shoreline villages steeped in history. They wouldn't dream of missing a year.
I had been to the Rhode Island beaches once - during my college years in Providence - when I spent the night sleeping in the dunes under
so many stars the sky looked gaudy. Last summer I finally went back, motoring slowly along the irregular coastline from bottom to top, from
Watch Hill to Little. Compton. This coastal area is known within the state as South County, though no such county officially exists. I slept
in beautiful old inns where white curtains blew at my open windows and I could hear the surf purring all night.
Before beginning my coastal journey I spent one night in Providence at a bed-and-breakfast called Old Court, on Benefit Street. The
mile-long street, perched on the flank of a steep hill overlooking downtown Providence, is lined with a priceless hoard of early Federal
clapboard houses painted in vivid colors: dusty blues, autumnal reds, mustard yellows, and sage greens with contrasting doors of crimson,
eggplant, and deep green. Here you can catch a whiff of the wealth brought to Rhode island by the triangle trade of slaves, molasses, and
rum.
Walking along Benefit's sidewalks embroidered with light and shadow in the green fullness of August, I popped into the Providence
Athenaeum, a subscription library established in 1753. Housed now in a Greek Revival building, its tall rooms decorated with white marble
busts and towering wooden bookcases, it's the sort of place that makes you want to read Aristophanes and Edgar Allen Poe, forswear computers
and possibly electricity. I also stopped in at the john Brown House to see the rare secretary crafted in Newport by those famous
cabinetmakers, Goddard and Townsend.
The next morning, with the ocean on my mind, I got on fast, charmless Interstate 95 and drove south for 45 minutes, heading for Watch
Hill. Along the way I passed through Westerly, a quiet little 19th-century railway town with a main street, Elm, lined with pristine white
Greek Revival and Victorian mansions. On the streets branching off Elm are scores of similar houses, but they're faded and cheerfully
unkempt, like those in an Anne Tyler novel.
Going south again, I took Route IA. This and Route 1 are South County's most scenic roads, curving past rolling farmland, wilderness
preserves, colonial houses, and beachfront towns. Soon I was in the Victorian resort town of Watch Hill, where 19th-century midwestern moguls
- those who couldn't abide flashy, striving Newport - built their Shingle Style summer houses. Though these houses are quite grand, they are
friendlier than the pretentious simulated French chateaus and neoclassical spectacles of Newport.
Between Labor Day and Memorial Day, Watch Hill all but shuts down, but for three months a year the lanes of this tiny village bustle with
visitors. The main street, called Bay, curls around a harbor where a crowd of sleek sailboats bob gently at anchor. Rows of shops and
restaurants - distinctly touristy places, but pleasant enough - line both sides of Bay Street, their screen doors slapping through the
afternoons. In a span of four blocks you can eat a good bowl of clam chowder at a sidewalk table, try on a pair of flat shoes made from a
kilim, pick up a cotton sweater in a pale summer color, and succumb to a superior chocolate chip ice cream cone. Don't miss the Flying Horse
Carousel, the oldest in America, at the foot of Bay Street; each horse is hand-carved and adorned with a horsehair mane and tail, a leather
saddle, and glistening agate eyes.
Perched on a hill atop the town is Ocean House, an immense bright yellow clapboard hotel with a 200-foot-long porch facing the Atlantic
Ocean. It's a lone survivor, the last of the seven wooden hotels that lined the coast here in the late 1800s. Though it has a certain faded
elegance, Ocean House is far from luxurious. Its rooms have creaky beds, polyester bedspreads, no telephones, and certainly no TVs. Mediocre
food is served in its ballroom-size dining room. None of this bothered me in the least. I found it all sweetly idiosyncratic. These old
Yankee hoteliers are not going to let their guests be distracted by fancy food or plush pillows from the one thing that matters - the
ocean.
The spartan accommodations certainly do not bother Miss Frances Raymond of Tenafly, New Jersey, who has spent the entire summer at Ocean
House every year since 1918. In the splendor of late August she sat daily in her wheelchair on the hotel's bowed porch, gazing over the white
balustrade at the rhythmic, unraveling waves. While other guests sported T-shirts and baseball caps, Miss Raymond wore a white jacket, white
gloves, and kept a white pocketbook near her feet. In the old days, she arrived with her mother; now she enacts the ritual alone. "It was so
much more formal then. Every Friday and Saturday night there was dancing in the ballroom. The women wore long dresses and the men wore suits.
We called each other 'Mr.' and' Miss.'" Miss Raymond's very presence tells the history of Ocean House and of Watch Hill.
From Watch Hill, I drove east through Misquamicut (where 20th-century strip motels dominate) and Charlestown (where a community of
Narragansett Indians still lives), then south to the Galilee State Pier to catch a ferry to Block Island. It's worth pausing for an open-air
lunch in Galilee, a fishing village with a large-scale seafood market and a working fleet of greasy old boats. At Champlin's Seafood Deck, a
no-frills family spot, I got a paper loaded with a native Rhode Island lobster, french fries, and cole slaw and took it outside to a bright
blue picnic table. There I watched the busy harbor while seagulls swooped around me.
Not hectic or celebrity-studded like Martha's Vineyard, not postcard-perfect like Nantucket, Block Island remains a holdout, a place where
simplicity survives. In summer the population can swell to 15,000, but the island was named by the Nature Conservancy as one of the Western
Hemisphere's "Twelve Last Great Places," a distinction it shares with the Amazon rain forest.
New Shoreham, its only village, is clustered around the old harbor, with most of the island's hotels, restaurants, shops, and bars in it.
Gray Victorian clapboard hotels with white gingerbread trim and bed-and-breakfasts in early-19th-century houses are scattered throughout the
town, along with upscale shops, casual restaurants, bicycle rentals, and one or two souvenir supermarkets. Beyond lies a sublime expanse of
unspoiled hills, beaches, wilderness preserves, marshes, and scattered Victorian houses as pretty as handmade Valentines. I rented a bicycle
and in five minutes I was spinning over hills, windswept and scrubby like Scotland, and through lightly forested glades of pine and
wildflowers. Sixty-five miles of fieldstone fence built by the early English settlers kept my mind tilted toward the past.
"We're in our own little world here, away from all the madness back in America," explained Tom Wilkinson, one of the island's 750 or so
year-round residents, as he walked with me on the beautiful Clay Head Trail one afternoon. The trail runs high above cliffs that drop
hundreds of feet to the ocean licking at craggy rocks below. "While some visitors might worry about getting trapped on the island," he said,
referring to the fog that often isolates the place for days, "to us, there's nothing worse than being trapped on the mainland."
Just before leaving, I spent a clear blue morning bird-watching with local author Joseph Kastner. Once an editor at Life magazine, Kastner
is a summer resident who takes enormous pleasure in the island's natural life. He wrote a book about bird-watchers throughout America, so
he's thought a lot about this prim form of spying. Birders, he says, talk paragraphs about what birding means and how birds are a symbol of
spirituality or even Christ. "But I just find it pleases me very much to look at them, he said. "I don't take it too seriously."
It was low tide at Andy's Way, an expansive sun-glazed mud flat where millions of tiny crabs and minnows lay exposed. No birds were
apparent at first. Then Kastner set up a telescope. There they were, poised in the grasses. He pointed out several greater yellowlegs,
various terns, egrets, plovers, and a couple of flapping great blue herons. To me, this seemed like a bounty of birds. To the experienced
Kastner, the expedition lacked some critical frisson of surprise. "Not much for birding," he concluded gently, "but a beautiful Block Island
day."
Reluctantly, I took a crowded ferry back to the mainland, then drove up the coast toward Newport, perched on the tip of Aquidneck Island.
(Rhode Island is made up of 35 islands, some of them stitched to the mainland or each other by ferries or bridges or both.)
Along the way, the scene grows rural with farm fields rolling down to the ocean. The Silas Casey Farm - a 1750 house, a collection of
shingled pearl-gray barns, and lush fields spread across 300 acres - is still a working operation but is open to visitors. just up the road
is the Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, an unprepossessing shingled Colonial house museum where one of America's foremost portrait painters was
born.
Minutes after drinking in those humble sites I was easing past the outrageous, processional splendor of Newport - Bellevue Avenue's row of
millionaires' mansions spaced as formally as buttons on a tuxedo shirt. My final nights on the ocean were spent at one of Newport's most
romantic hotels - the Castle Hill Inn & Resort. The rambling shingled house, rich in gingerbread woodwork, exuberant curves, and jutting
porches, perches on a secluded peninsula ten minutes from downtown Newport. My room, with chintz slipper chairs and chintz settee, seemed
decorated by somebody's bluestocking Yankee grandmother. When I opened my five sets of chintz curtains in the morning, sailboats were framed
in most of them.
I toured Newport on foot, focusing mainly on the 18th-century colonial town - called The Point - rather than the 19th-century Gilded Age
mansions built by robber barons. Essential to this tour was the beautiful Redwood Library, happily marooned in the past with its noble marble
busts and antique reading chairs. Its scuffed-up wooden card catalog delights certain technophobes so much "they see it and practically
caress it," according to Robert Behra, curator of special collections. Also essential is a stop at Trinity Church, a splendid baroque
structure from the early 18th century with a rare wineglass pulpit.
Nobody in Newport should miss the Cliff Walk, a dramatic four-mile path flanked by the Gilded Age mansions to one side and on the other,
the rocks and the breakers below. Walking along it, seeing the overblown American palaces, then the precipitous drop, then the elemental
drama of water foaming over rocks, is a lesson about beauty and vanity.
The next day, after leaving Castle Hill, I took a last country spin along Route 77 to Little Compton, one of those impenetrable Yankee
enclaves where the beach is so private you can't find it and aloof natives shun any form of publicity. Quiet and unflashy, these people don't
want their paradise compromised by too many tourists. Prick up your ears, and you might hear some o them talking about ancestors who arrived
on the Mayflower as if the boat had sailed in yesterday.
I couldn't blame these old Yankees for their protectiveness. Little Compton's historic village center, called The Commons, is one of the
fairest in the state, with a perfectly preserved 1832 Congregational church poised inside a manicured rectangle of green. Church and
churchyard are flanked by a tiny post office, an old grocery where sunburnt people shop in bathing suits and bare feet, and The Commons
restaurant, whose seafood chowder is popular with locals.
On nearby roads, the timeless old saltboxes and beachy shingle-style houses are almost always clad in weathered gray with painted trim;
many are set back on ample grounds behind high hedges. In summer, the three or four remaining farms reap bushels of corn, tomatoes, basil,
sunflowers, and other crops that flood the farmstands
"I think it's really great that these old Yankees are the way they are," said Olga Bravo, proprietor of Olga's Cup and Saucer. Next to
Walker's Roadside Stand, it's an enchanting dollhouse-size bakery and cafe that is one of the few hangouts in town. "There are no ATMs, no
McDonald's.... I wouldn't want Little Compton to change either."