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RWhitcomb-editor 9/21/21 RWhitcomb-editor 9/21/21

Leave him up

*William Blackstone in glorious stainless steel in Pawtucket, R.I.*

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The bookish William Blackstone (1595-1675) (also called Blaxton) was an Anglican minister who might have been the first permanent white resident of what is now Rhode Island, moving down from Boston and settling in today’s Lonsdale section of Cumberland in 1635, the year before Roger Williams founded Providence. The Blackstone River and a bunch of other things around here are named for him.

In the future Cumberland, on the east bank of the river that would bear his name, the reclusive and apparently kindly and tolerant intellectual read, wrote, tended cattle, planted gardens, and cultivated an apple orchard; he came up with the first variety of American apples, the Yellow Sweeting. He called his home "Study Hill," and it was said to have the largest library in the English colonies at the time. Sadly, his library and house were burned down in 1675 during King Philip's War, the very bloody and destructive conflict between Native Americans and English colonists that lasted from 1675 to 1678 and changed the course of American history. Blackstone died in 1675, just before the outbreak of the conflict.

Consider that his friends included the Narragansett tribe chiefs Miantonomi and Canonchet and the Wampanoags’ Massasoit and Metacomet. Metacomet is also known as King Philip (to mark the friendly relations his father, Massasoit, had with the English), whose followers were the ones who destroyed Blackstone’s home.

But now some Narragansetts want a new stainless-steel sculpture of Blackstone at the corner of Roosevelt and Exchange streets in Pawtucket taken down. They’re trying to make him into some sort of symbol of the brutal white takeover of their lands and the vast suffering and death of Native Americans that accompanied the English colonialization of what the English named New England. But Blackstone is a pretty inaccurate example of white aggression!

It’s appropriate that his statue remain up, given his importance to the history of the region. It’s not as if this is a statue of the likes of the cruel slaveowner, and traitor, Robert E. Lee. Such works are best kept in museums. (There are no statues of Hitler in outdoor parks in Germany, despite his historical importance.)

And, yes, you could say that George Washington was a traitor to Britain and he owned slaves. But unlike Lee, he didn’t take up arms against “his country” to ally himself with a “country’’ whose central mission in its rebellion against the United States was the preservation and indeed expansion of slavery. And Washington, whose slaves were freed at his death under his will, also was not considered a cruel slaveowner.

Anyway, why not see if a statue of a Native American chief from Blackstone’s time in Rhode Island could be commissioned to be put up near Blackstone’s? It would be culturally healthy if we had a wider range of historical figures represented by our public statues.

Here’s a nice crisp biography from the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame:

http://www.riheritagehalloffame.org/inductees_detail.cfm?iid=45

RWhitcomb-editor 1/14/21 RWhitcomb-editor 1/14/21

Grace Kelly: Book author touts easy, healing walks

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

Thirty years ago Marjorie Turner Hollman found her right side paralyzed after brain surgery. She was unable to drive in the seven years of recovery that followed and turned to writing and taking walks down her dead-end road for solace.

When she met her second husband, an avid outdoorsman, she slowly began to move beyond handicap-accessible walks to what she now calls “easy walks.”

“If I had not found myself on a hospital bed paralyzed after brain surgery, I wouldn’t be doing easy walks,” said Turner Hollman, who lives in Bellingham, Mass., which is just over the Rhode Island border near Cumberland. “I have healed to the extent that I am able to walk with support, meaning hiking poles, and I’m very selective of where I choose to walk. I’m not your Appalachian Mountain Club material.”

Over the years, Turner Hollman sought out more of these easy walks, which she defines as “walks that don’t have too many roots, don’t have too many rocks, are relatively level … with something of interest along the way.”

In essence, walks that children, people with mobility issues, and those new to the outdoors can enjoy. Anyone, really.

And as Turner Hollman started her easy walks, she began to chronicle them — and the natural world around her — first for her local newspaper and later on her blog. Then, the questions came pouring in.

“I started having people find my Web site and they kept asking the question, Where’s Joe’s Rock?’” Turner Hollman said. “Well, it’s in Wrentham [Mass.] on Route 121 right near the Cumberland line, and after about the 500th time somebody came to that article, I said, ‘Well I think there’s a need here.’”

Turner Hollman wrote her first book, Easy Walks in Massachusetts, in 2014 to provide a one-stop-shop resource for anyone else in the state looking for easy walks. But the process was far from easy, since a lot of the walks she enjoyed weren’t in any guidebooks.

“At the time, they didn’t have any guides for outdoor things here. We’re not the Cape, we’re not in the White Mountains, we don’t have that cache,” she said. “Today, a lot of town offices have put up maps of their conservation areas, but when I started writing these in 2013, there were next to none. I visited town halls and said, ‘Help me!’ or called and said, ‘Do you have properties that kind of fit this?’ I did a lot of legwork.”

Since then, she’s written another three “easy walks” books, one of which was done in conjunction with the Ten Mile River Watershed Council, an organization with offices in Rumford, R.I., and Attleboro, Mass. This two-state watershed contains one of her favorite easy walks, Hunts Mills, which has a man-made dam and waterfall and trails that loop through the woods.

“It’s stunning and incredibly accessible,” Turner Hollman said. “You can even just sit in your car and watch the falls … it’s this hidden away little spot. It’s just a gem.”

In her most recent book, Finding Easy Walks Wherever You Are, Turner Hollman takes the principles of seeking out and enjoying easy walks to a broader level, providing tips and perspectives that anyone can use to seek out a special place to walk anywhere.

“There are plenty of places, but people don’t know how to find them because a lot of the time they’re off the beaten track,” she said. “I encourage people to consider places like, for example, your local cemetery to visit respectfully, understanding its first purpose is not a walking place … but they’re wonderful places to walk and often have paved roadways through them.

“So that’s a lot of what I talk about in finding easy walks wherever you are. It’s providing ideas that people maybe don’t think about.”

The book is also a culmination of Turner Hollman’s personal experience and belief that anyone, regardless of ability, can go on a walk.

“What I’ve learned in sharing Easy Walks is that many people can enjoy these outings, regardless of ability,” she wrote in a blog post from 2015. “Rather than my disability creating a barrier, I’ve found that working with, in spite of, and because of my disability has enriched my life, and the lives of many others. … These days I’m even more determined to search out and point others to places they can enjoy together.”

Grace Kelly is a journalist with ecoRI News.

RWhitcomb-editor 12/6/19 RWhitcomb-editor 12/6/19

Todd McLeish: Beavers continue their long comeback

On this property owned by the Cumberland (R.I.) Land Trust, the organization installed plastic pipes and fencing to address the flooding problems beavers created. There is large beaver lodge in the background.— Photo by Todd McLeish/ecoRI News) — On this property owned by the Cumberland (R.I.) Land Trust, the organization installed plastic pipes and fencing to address the flooding problems beavers created. There is large beaver lodge in the background.
*— Photo by Todd McLeish/ecoRI News)*

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

CUMBERLAND, R.I. — At the Cumberland Land Trust’s nature preserve on Nate Whipple Highway, beavers created numerous dams on East Sneech Brook in the years after their arrival in 2014, flooding the property and forcing the organization to detour its hiking trail and build a boardwalk over the wettest areas.

Worse, the flooding killed many trees in the Atlantic white cedar swamp, a rare habitat found at just a few sites in Rhode Island.

It’s a sign that beavers are continuing their comeback in Rhode Island, after being extirpated from the region about 300 years ago.

“There’s a historic culvert on the property, and we noticed it was being plugged up with sticks, but we didn’t know how,” said Randy Tuomisto, president of the land trust. “So we removed the debris, but it subsequently got filled in again. That’s when we noticed small twigs were being cut, telltale signs of a beaver.”

When the white cedar trees began to die, the land trust took action to address the situation. They hired a Massachusetts beaver-control expert to advise them on how to install a series of water-flow devices — a combination of wire fencing and plastic pipes going through the beaver dam that tricks beavers into thinking their dam is still working but which allows the water to flow down the stream unhindered.

While Tuomisto said he believes there are six or eight beavers on the property, along with a 6-foot tall beaver lodge, flooding has been reduced considerably.

“Now they’ve moved down Sneech Brook to other areas in town, to Diamond Hill Reservoir and Abbot Run Valley Stream. And they’re aggressively on the Blackstone River,” he said. “If you take a trip on the Blackstone bike path from Manville to Valley Falls, you’ll see the destruction of all the trees that they felled.”

According to Charles Brown, a wildlife biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, beavers were probably the first animal to disappear from the New England landscape after the arrival of European settlers. Their fur was in great demand by Native Americans and the new arrivals, and many beaver pelts were shipped to Europe as well. Brown speculates that the animals were extirpated from the area by the end of the 1600s

It took until 1976 for the first ones to return. That’s when a beaver lodge was discovered on the brook that leads into Carbuncle Pond in Coventry.

“They’ve been expanding ever since,” Brown said. “By 1982, my predecessor Charlie Allen did a float trip around Coventry and Foster and found several colonies within that watershed.”

Communities in western Rhode Island have been dealing with the inevitable flooding that beavers create for more than 30 years, but Brown said the animals have only recently arrived in the area of the lower Blackstone, Pawtuxet, and Moshassuck rivers, where municipal public works officials are now being called on to address flooding issues.

“Beavers have been entrenched in Burrillvillle and other parts of western Rhode Island for some time, and the towns there know how to deal with them. But they’re still finding new habitat and expanding elsewhere in the state,” Brown said. “It takes them a while to move around and get established in new areas. They were pioneering into the Cumberland and Lincoln area about 10 years ago, and now they’ve become a regular part of the landscape there.”

Brown had meetings with Cumberland officials to discuss how to address the flooding caused by beavers at Monastery and Diamond Hill State Park, and he often has similar meetings with officials in other communities. He offers counsel about beaver behavior and life cycle and offers advice on how to reduce the flooding using water-control structures and how to protect notable trees with perimeter fencing.

Sometimes Brown advises officials to consider hiring a trapper to capture the beavers during trapping season, which runs from Nov. 1 through mid-March. Rhode Island fur trappers typically harvest about 100 beavers each year, many of which are captured because of nuisance situations.

Despite their reputation for damming streams and flooding roadways, beavers play an important role in the environment by creating habitat upon which many other species depend, from river otters, mink, and muskrats to ducks, dragonflies, and amphibians.

“Great blue herons gravitate toward newly flooded areas with dead standing trees,” Brown said. “But beaver ponds aren’t perpetual. They come and they go. Beavers create a dynamic state of change that can benefit a lot of things.”

According to Ben Goldfarb, author of the award-winning 2018 book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter, beaver ponds also help to recharge aquifers, dissipate floods, filter pollutants, and ease the impact of wildfires. A 2011 report he highlighted estimated that restoring beavers to one river basin in Utah would provide annual benefits valued at tens of millions of dollars.

“Even acknowledging that beavers store water and sustain other creatures is insufficient,” Goldfarb wrote. “Because the truth is that beavers are nothing less than continental-scale forces of nature, in large part responsible for sculpting the land upon which we Americans built our towns and raised our food. Beavers shaped North America’s ecosystems, its human history, its geology. They whittled our world, and they could again — if, that is, we treat them as allies instead of adversaries.”

Tuomisto of the Cumberland Land Trust has a similar perspective.

“We want to keep the water level high enough so the lodge can sustain the beavers through the winter. We would rather live with beavers because they provide an ecological benefit in creating wetlands and wildlife habitat,” he said. “We understand the destruction they cause to neighbors and roadways, and we could have trapped them out. But we’re willing to take the bad with the good.”

*A beaver slowly chops down a tree with his teeth*

Rhode Island resident and author Todd McLeish runs a wildlife blog.

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