The tower of power

The symbol of Rhode Island par excellance has for me always been the Old Stone Mill. When I was growing up, in New York, for many years my mother - whose father's family came from Newport - had a Newport souvenir letter holder/bucket-y sort of thing on her desk in the bedroom, and decoupaged on its side was a misty, greenish image of the Old Stone Mill. Whenever I would go into her bedroom to fiddle around with the things on her desk, I used to examine it closely, in the curious and accepting way of children, wondering to myself WHAT exactly was being depicted, although I can't recall it ever actually occurring to me to ask about it. The letter holder just sort of sat there, day in, day out, one of the insoluble mysteries of the adult world that would one day stand revealed in all it's glory to me.

That day is now here. Yikes. It's almost like that letter holder foretold my future. For the past 30 years, there probably hasn't been a day in my life that I haven't driven past the real Old Stone Mill, ensconced there in all its legend-shrouded glory behind it's railing in Touro Park.

Like all good symbols, the Old Stone Mill has always succeeded in being all things to all people. Pick your romance. Viking raiding tower. Remains of a Portuguese settlement. New England Stonehenge. Native American meeting place. Colonial windmill. Each successive Newport generation has had its own version of the Old Stone Mill. A thousand years from now they'll probably be interpreting it as a cell phone tower. These days archaeologists and scholars are convinced that the mill was originally a wind-powered grinding mill, built by Governor Benedict Arnold in the 1660's; back then it would have been faced with "parjet", a stucco-like covering, & would have had a large wooden superstructure that connected the wind-driven sails to an enormous grindstone within. Nowadays the only things moving inside are the indefatigable flocks of pigeons that call the place home, but in Arnold's day the area would have been a hub of bustle and activity, supporting a lifestyle most of us can barely imagine (grinding corn? when was the last time you needed to do that?).

But whatever the Old Stone Mill once was, it has the amazing quality of having survived all the intervening centuries, and moreover of connecting us to them and to ourselves and to the stories that are important to us. Behind that black wrought iron railing in Touro Park, link upon link pile up, some meaningless, some not, the past, the present, the real, the imaginary, all jumbled together. The Vikings. Portuguese dreams of exploration and conquest. The flickering flames of a Native American camp. Governor Arnold- progenitor of the notorious & much later Benedict Arnold - cutting his way up through the trees and the brush, from his roughly clapboarded house on Thames St to what is now Bellevue Avenue. The actual truth matters far less than these other, more symbolic realities. I look at the tower and for a second I'm carried back into my own distant past, a little girl again, with a letter holder in my hands. The sails might be gone, but the wheel still turns.