Explorers — Don't steal this book!

The Explorer's Guide to Rhode Island is out!

The other day I stopped at Borders in the Providence Place mall, and there it was, part of a big bookstore display on exploring America this summer. I don't have so many book titles on my resume that it's still not a thrill to actually see a stack of books with my name on them sitting on a store shelf for sale.

Yes, you can get it by mail from Amazon, but there's still just something about a real bookstore, isn't there?

This Saturday, June 21, I'll be at Barrington Books in the Barrington Shopping Center beginning at 11 a.m., signing copies of the book. With me will be photographer Richard Benjamin, who'll sign copies of his beautiful book of color photos, Rhode Island. (The two of us also will be pairing up for signings at the Providence Place Borders on July 19 and at A Novel Idea bookstore in Bristol July 26.

Hope to see you there!

Local clams? No, thanks

Are we all done talking about "food miles" and carbon footprints yet?

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for eating local when it comes to certain critical foods like strawberries, asparagus and tomatoes. Right now, I'm counting the days till I can pick my own strawberries at great local farms like Four Town in Seekonk and Sweet Berry in Middletown.

But anyone who thinks that forgoing foods that have come from other places in the country or the world is going to save the world is just plain loco.

"Big Foot," an excellent article in The New Yorker some months ago, should put to rest the faddish and simplistic notion that "eating local" is going to help save the planet. Quite the contrary, as it turns out. (Among its interesting points: Because there is more sunshine in certain parts of the world, and therefore a longer growing season, it is actually more energy efficient overall to grow foods where they grow best on the planet, rather than "locally," where the additional energy costs of things like fertilizers far outweigh the energy costs of shipping. And that's not even to mention the sheer impracticability of growing enough food in a heavily developed state like Rhode Island to feed all the people who live here.)

What this means to me as a Rhode Islander is that I can feel good about drinking the French, Italian, South African and California wines I much prefer anyway over the additive-laced stuff that is produced around here. Rhode Island wine-growers have to add the additives because the climate around here is not the world's best for wine-growing. Hello! There's a reason they call it Bordeaux.

Still, some people will go oooh! just because it's "local," just as they do for local seafood. They confuse "local" with "fresh." Fresh is good; local isn't always. Take clams. Over the past few weeks, Retired Guy and I have been engaged in a project of vast scope to discover what are the "Top Ten Fried Clam Shacks" in Rhode Island. This entails stopping at likely clam places that we come across in our travels and ordering a box or a clam roll to sample. (Look for the results coming up soon on Projo.)

What I've noticed is that the current fad for "localism" has made fried-clam purveyors skittish about admitting that their clams, in most cases, come from Maine. They hesitate, just for a second, when I ask where they get their clams, while they try to assess whether the answer I want to hear is "Rhode Island."

The truth is that the best-tasting clams and lobsters come from as far north as you can get them: Maine or Canada. The water is colder there, not to mention a whole lot purer than Narragansett Bay. (Check out today's front page Providence Journal story: Are our lobsters casualties of the war on mosquitoes? about the possible effect of the larvicide methoprene on the Bay.)

In most cases, clams for fried clams are frozen anyway, so it doesn't matter how far they've traveled to get here. Right now, there's a red tide alert in many parts of nearby Massachusetts, meaning that no clams are safe to eat from there. While the red tide algae doesn't typically spread south of Cape Cod, have you looked at the "shellfish closings" map that's part of the daily weather report in the newspaper? Those big dark blue areas that wax and wane with the rainfall totals mean that those parts of the local shoreline are too polluted to take clams from.

Well, excuse me for doubting, but I'd rather not eat a clam that someone in Rhode Island's state government has decided is clean enough today when it wasn't yesterday. So when I'm standing at that clam shack window asking, "Where are your clams from?" I don't want to hear, "Oh, they're local." I want to hear, "Maine."

Idea for bumper sticker: "Think Globally, Not Locally." Every food is local somewhere.

Can we all please stop talking about "carbon footprints" now?

Top photo: Evelyn's in Tiverton (clams from Ipswich, Mass.); lower photo: Flo's in Middletown (clams from Maine).

A day @ the (private) beach

There was only one thing to do yesterday, and that was to go to the beach. Fortunately for me, that's sort of part of my job. As soon as I woke up and saw that the temperature was already 80 in the breezeway, I knew where we would go.

As the Ocean State, Rhode Island is famous for its great public stretches of beach: Misquamicut, Narragansett, Scarborough, Roger Wheeler and Second are all beach names that roll off of everyone's tongue when you ask what their favorite beach is. Don't get me wrong: Those are all great, great beaches. But my own favorites are the ones that aren't on all the lists, because they're "private."

The word "private" in the context of beach has always been an invitation to me. My reasoning is that if they need to go that length to try to keep me out, it must be a really good beach. The more signs there are that say "No Beach Access," "Private Road" (heading straight to the ocean!), "Security Guard Ahead," the more I decide to make it my business to get there.


And you know what? It's not that hard. A security guard, even if there really is one, doesn't work 24/7. Generally, he's only there 10 to 3 on weekends between July 4 and Labor Day. And a lot of those "private roads" really aren't private. It's just that few people are willing to go to the bother of challenging a sign. Parking is generally the big hassle, but with a bicycle and someone else to drop off at the beach with your stuff, you can go anywhere, even between 10 and 3 in July and August.

What I like most about private beaches is that they are private. The noisy tattooed hordes are kept away, and you generally find a lovely spot all to yourself with no radios, no concession stands with their flocks of seagulls scavenging French fries, no lifeguards with bullhorns yelling at kids to quit horsing around in the water. There are no jammed parking lots, and no beach fees to pay.

So yesterday Retired Guy and I went to one of my favorite private beaches: Warren Point Beach Club in Little Compton. Getting there was especially easy because it was a weekday and, still being June, the club hasn't officially opened yet. And just as I knew it would be, it was the perfect first beach day of the year. The whole time we were there, from about 1 to 5 p.m., we saw maybe four other groups of people, most of them reading, collecting beach stones or watching kids play in the water. The small sandy beach is enclosed by rocks, and from a height of maybe 30 feet on the biggest rock, Little Comptonites have constructed a diving platform, which some people were already using yesterday.


No, I did not jump off the rock, but yes, I did go swimming. The water was cold but not that cold for this early in the year. My guess would be maybe low 60s. Retired Guy did not go in, saving that experience for Maine, where members of his family have braved the truly cold water of Saco Bay for untold generations. He has admitted to me that having spent all of his childhood summers on the rockless shining sands of the seven-mile-long beach at Ocean Park, with its huge tidal expanses and its seaweed-free water, he doesn't consider Rhode Island beaches to be in the same league.

Privately, I think he's wrong.

Hot topic: Providence Independence Trail tour

Sporting his trademark bow tie and button-down shirt, Bob Burke's only concession to yesterday's extraordinary heat was wearing seersucker shorts instead of long pants, which of course meant no socks with his loafers. Shortly after high noon, when the temperature downtown hit 95 degrees, Burke was leading about a hundred people on the second annual Providence Independence Trail walk, exploring the city's entertaining history on foot.

The oldest walker was 82, the youngest 6, and all of them had gathered to begin the walk at Burke's fabulously rococo Federal Reserve restaurant (built as Union Trust bank in 1901) at 60 Dorrance St. There, beneath the 24-karat gilded 20-foot ceiling and row of stained glass rosette windows, Burke was offering an array of Rhode Island down-home specialties — clam cakes, clear chowder, saugy dogs and Narragansett beer — to fortify the walkers for the tour. Serving such down-home fare in such luxurious surroundings was a bit of purely inspired Burke-manship.

Burke, who grew up in Rhode Island and was a pioneer on Providence's fine dining scene with his Pot au Feu restaurant, has had a love for the city's history since his days as a student at LaSalle Academy. He has taken on as his personal mission the correction of the false claim by Boston to have begun the American Revolution with the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773. Burke rightly says the Revolution actually started on June 9, 1772 (236 years ago today) when a group of daring Providence men boldly burned the British ship Gaspee in Narragansett Bay. "Compare that as an act of war with dressing up as Indians and throwing tea into the water 18 months later!" crowed Burke, who is himself plotting a bold march on Boston this fall to force the issue of correcting the historical record.

One of the many high points of yesterday's entertaining history walk was Burke's action-packed description of the events surrounding the Gaspee burning, beginning with the story of how the captain of the Rhode Island ship the Hannah not only eluded the Gaspee but also cleverly suckered the British ship onto a sandbar where ultimately it was burned by the pre-Revolutionary Rhode Islanders.

Burke expects to make his Independence Trail walking tour available to everyone for free with a cell-phone download keyed to the 48 sites on the 3-mile route. He's also working on a Web site for the tour. Right now, he's offering it for groups such as schools, scout troops, corporations and community organizations.

The number to call for information is (401) 273-8953, or email bob@federalreserveri.com.

Spellcheck please! Shining a light on typos

Typos happen.
They're everywhere — in the newspaper, online, on signs like this one, which I spotted the other day in Warren:


In newspapers, once an error is in print, it's there forever — and having written for a daily newspaper, I can say that I am embarrassed when I see errors like these recent ones: "peddling" instead of pedaling a bicycle; "boarder" instead of border collie; "mantle" instead of fireplace mantel; "bailed" instead of baled hay; "Dougway" instead of Dugway Bridge — even Narragansett Bay where what is being described is the Atlantic Ocean! You can't get much bigger than that in terms of getting it wrong. You can't fix a printed page, but you can fix online mistakes — and that's just, ahem, one more advantage of the new media age.

With a little effort, you can also fix errors on public signs — shine a little light on the errors of our ways, so to speak. In my Posts of May 22 and March 30, I lauded the transcontinental efforts of Somerville's Jeff Deck and his TEAL initiative to fix sign typos across America. At the end of his trip, he invited readers of his typo blog to go forth and multiply, fixing typos where we find them.

So I did!
Yesterday, I fixed my very first sign typo. Or, more accurately, I got it fixed. I called the church attached to the sign above, and pointed out the error. And they fixed it, although not without some defensiveness. Hey, I understand: I write for a newspaper! Typos happen: The important thing is to learn from them. And then fix them!


I've already submitted my fix to Deck's contest, hoping to win a TEAL T shirt, winner to be decided June 15. I'll keep you Posted.

Flower power: Rhody's biggest Rhody

Each year at this time, I have to marvel anew at the sight of this gigantic Rhododendron. It occupies the entire front yard of a house along Route 114 in Warren, and right now it's a regular mountain of blossoms. The rest of the year, it's just a pile of green leaves, but whenever I drive by it, I think: Oh, yeah— Just wait until June!