How One Writer Rediscovered the Beauty of the Ocean State

A native Rhode Islander comes to learn family visits aren't always what they seem.

Partly concerned about his retirement savings and partly drawn back to the water, I came out to Warwick Neck again, this time on my own. Dad had settled into his new environment. Though the run-down marina where he’d docked it couldn’t have been more than a half mile from the house, we drove over. In one hand I carried a small duffel bag containing inflatable belt packs and hand tools. In the other, I held Dad’s fishing rod. As the engine hummed to life, I uncoiled the ropes and pulled in the fenders, much as I did as a kid, when Dad owned a pontoon boat that we took out on Waterman Lake.

Out in the open water, we navigated past a set of new sights. Small beaches, some private and some public, most all but empty. Warwick Neck Lighthouse, Aldrich Mansion. I leaned against the captain’s chair and stretched my arms overhead, letting the sun warm my back and the smell of salt fill my nostrils. We eased out beyond Rocky Point and into East Bay, pausing at the squat, fat-bottomed Conimicut Lighthouse.

Dad turned the wheel over to me. I steered past a boat that appeared to be abandoned, but on closer inspection bore the red diver-down flag of quahoggers. I spun the wheel again to turn at a right angle into the wake of a tugboat, the little skiff plunging and rising. Closer to the coastline, Dad and I made a game of choosing homes we could never afford. “There’s your next house,” Dad said, pointing to a hulking brick mansion. I shrugged and shouted over the din of the engine, “Maybe for the summers.” I nodded toward a large Tudor-style house with dark, sharply peaked rooflines and a sprawling lawn. “That’s my three-season cottage.”

For nearly three hours, we piloted the skiff past twenty miles of affluent neighborhoods, sandy beaches and stony coastline. Past Patience and Prudence islands. Past a flock of squawking kittiwakes winging over the dark discoloration in the water that signals a traveling school of fish. Past landmarks and sights I’d never seen, but were all a part of the place where I grew up, the place I thought I knew thoroughly enough to disregard. Creatures of habit, we stopped for lunch at Iggy’s.

“Here you go, honey,” said the waitress, depositing our drinks on the table. We sat on the restaurant’s porch sipping a pair of sweating cocktails so potent we both needed a nap by the time we got back to Dad’s house.

With hours to go before sunset, we roused ourselves for a round of drive-by sightseeing, the only kind my father seems to enjoy these days. “Your blinker’s on,” I said after he had driven half a mile down Meadow View Avenue.

He turned, and we rolled through Conimicut Village, its overflowing baskets of pink and purple petunias cheerily swinging from lampposts, and onto another unfamiliar series of streets. “Your blinker’s on,” I said again. I squinted out the passenger’s window and added, “Where are we?”

We’d entered Pawtuxet Village’s tidy downtown. Dad parked and blasted the air conditioner while I walked up and down the street, poking my masked head into a smartly merchandised gift shop, a wine and spirits store, and a pair of buildings packed full of nautical antiques.

Back in the car, Dad narrated points of interest: his favorite restaurant, Basta, some graceful old houses, and Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, a century-old event venue where my parents used to attend dances and my aunt Pauline — the only blond, blue-eyed person in our family — once won a beauty pageant.

This in turn conjured a memory of my mother, Pauline’s sister. I was a teenager then, probably a senior in high school. I heard the shouts, tasted the bitter insults, felt the slammed door vibrate under my palm. I should have been kinder to her, I thought. I should have known that one day I would no longer be inconvenienced by her overprotectiveness, her prying, her desire for my life to be better than hers and bigger than the boundaries of the place where she raised me.

Dad made a stop so I could take photos at the edge of the Pawtuxet River, then dropped me off at Conimicut Point Park while he gathered supplies at the market. The wind gusted, lifting miniature tornados of sand off an arrow-shaped beach littered with the broken shells of snails, mussels, and clams. I walked past a long-haired man in a canvas director’s chair, who flashed a peace sign before checking the line of a fishing rod braced in a holder in the sand.

I stood at the tip of the beach, where the water flows in opposite directions over a narrow sandbar, snapping photo after photo of this place I’d never known, where my parents had lived a life I had no part in, in a state I’d been convinced could no longer surprise me. I hesitated, looking around, wondering what else I’d missed.

Back at Dad’s, we watched TV, him on one end his new sofa, feet propped on the coffee table, and me on the other, legs curled beside me. As the show ended, I left him to flip through the channels while I went into the kitchen to call my husband. I talked into the phone absentmindedly, my attention on the darkening sky shot through with streaks of gold and apricot. One boat, then another, slowed to a putter and steered into the marina. A female mallard, a gaggle of fluffy ducklings following in her V-shaped wake, paddled through the water and under the docks. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass, and felt the world winding down.

I resumed my seat at the end of the sofa. Dad had fallen asleep, chin lolling against his chest, one hand clutching the remote control. I didn’t wake him.

In his new house, the room lit by the flickering of the TV, I thought about the state where I grew up, how it has formed and informed me. It would be both trite and dishonest to say I’ve come home again. Rhode Island isn’t my home anymore, but it exerts an indescribable pull, pressing me to notice everything good and intriguing and enjoyable that I’d previously been too willful and righteous to acknowledge. There in the semidark, in a place that’s simultaneously familiar and new to me, I understood that sometimes it’s only in the looking back that we discover.