Episode 60 | Newport & Narragansett, Rhode Island
I found out last night, watching a movie in my hotel room, that I had apparently been an extra in a Woody Allen film without knowing it.
The movie was Irrational Man, the one with Joaquin Phoenix wandering around in an existential fog making questionable decisions. About halfway through I had the unsettling feeling that the scenery looked familiar, and sure enough — the film ends along the same stretch of Ocean Avenue I had driven the day before, nine months before I watched it, blissfully unaware I was somewhere just off camera from Emma Stone. I’m choosing to view this as a sign that I was in the right place.
The Breakers
Cornelius Vanderbilt II built the Breakers in 1895 as a summer cottage. Seventy rooms. Marble imported from Italy. Ceilings hand painted by European artists. Gold leaf, crystal, the kind of craftsmanship that no longer exists because it can no longer be afforded by anyone except someone who already spent a hundred years ago the equivalent of what it would cost today to build a small city.
I walked all of it. By room forty-seven or so, the walls started closing in, which is not something I expected to feel inside a seventy-room mansion but apparently is possible. There’s only so much mahogany and silk brocade before the eye stops processing and starts looking for somewhere to rest that doesn’t cost anything.
I read while I was in there that Cornelius Vanderbilt died of a stroke at fifty-six. He got four summers in the place. That landed differently than the gold leaf.
The docuseries The Men Who Built America covers all of this if you want the full picture — the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the forces that shaped the country. Worth watching before or after a visit like this.
The Cliff Walk
I slipped out the back of the Breakers and found the Cliff Walk, which is Newport’s best feature and costs nothing. Three and a half miles along the edge of the peninsula, the backs of the mansions on one side and the Atlantic doing what it does on the other. One moment you’re walking past manicured lawns behind iron fences. The next you’re climbing over rocks with the wind in your face and the ocean a misstep away.
I watched surfers work a break below the path for longer than I intended. There’s something about watching someone do something well that holds attention in a way that fifty rooms of marble simply doesn’t. The surfers were shredding. The mansions were just sitting there.
If there was a walk like this in Palm Beach, I’d do it every morning.
The Surf Shack, Narragansett
From Newport I drove south to Narragansett, which felt like arriving in a different state. Quieter, more local, the kind of coastal town that doesn’t try very hard because it doesn’t need to. The place I stayed was called the Surf Shack, third floor, accessed by an outside stairway, small enough that you had to think before you stood up quickly. A vinyl record player on the shelf. Two albums. Subway tile in the bathroom in a shade of gray that I’d apparently been eyeing at Floor and Decor back home.
The neighborhood looked like a California surf village transplanted to New England, and I walked it until I found a section called Great Island that nobody had told me to look for.
The Crab Fisherman
I stopped because I saw crab traps. Then I saw a man sorting crabs into perforated crates and lowering them back into the water on a rope off the side of his boat, and I asked if I could talk to him.
He’d been fishing since 1980. This particular piece of it since 2013. Before that, thirty-eight years at General Dynamics, and then he retired to get back into fishing. He does dockside sales, sells his crabs within two days of landing them, and told me he doesn’t get rich doing it but he’s not sitting in a cubicle either.
I did most of the talking, which is the thing I keep trying to stop doing. He was hard to hear on the recording. But standing there on that dock, smelling the salt and the low tide, watching him work with the practiced ease of someone who’s done this thousands of times, I had a clear picture in my head of a story worth telling properly someday. A full day out on the water with a commercial fisherman, from before sunrise to after dark. That’s a documentary. I’ve had the image since Greece in my late twenties, watching the fishing boats come into harbor in the morning.
I didn’t tell that story here. I bumbled through an interview and got some B-roll. But I know what the story is. That’s something.
Dinner and a Hurricane
That evening I found a place to eat near the harbor. A band was playing across the street, people dancing, summer-in-Rhode Island energy even though it was fall. Good food. Good light at blue hour for the iPhone shots I took afterward.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it I started seeing posts from Chimney Rock, North Carolina. Hurricane Helene had come up through the Gulf, hit the panhandle, kept moving, and done something that inland hurricanes aren’t supposed to do. Chimney Rock, Lake Lure — places I’d been to, places I’d stayed — largely gone. The village, the streets, the things that had been there for decades, just not there anymore.
I sat with that for a while. The band kept playing. People kept dancing. I’ve volunteered after storms in Florida. I know what those towns need in the days after. And I was up here in Rhode Island eating dinner, going to seven states, telling small stories.
That’s a strange place to be in your head. I don’t have a resolution for it. I just know that’s where I was.
Cape Cod next.
