Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Episode 5

Still Baiting, Still Switching…

By Robert Yarnall

The Tribe's original deed

Read the rest of the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot series:
Episode 1 – Getting Ready To Fish
Episode 2 – Watchaug Bites
Episode 3 – Avoiding Car Sickness
Episode 4 – Bait & Switch (Not!)
Episode 5 – Still Baiting, Still Switching…
Episode 6 – Mother Gooser & Friends
Episode 7 – Under the Radar with L-T
Episode 8 – Steering Committee Syndrome Unleashed, The Prelude
Episode 9 – Steering Committee Syndrome Unleashed, The Kiss
Episode 10 – Snagged on the Epilog Epic-Log

It’s just too damn hot to fish today.  It’s too humid, too dead of summer, too easy to remand myself to a subterranean dehumidified basement and reflect on the topical item for this week’s blog submission - an eighty-one acre chunk of terminal glacial moraine well known to ancestors of the Narragansett Indian Tribe living in the area about 7,000 years ago. 

I wonder about the daily routines of those early indigenous people, the array of tasks – fishing, hunting, food gathering – that they practiced right here, not as diversions, hobbies or recreational adventures, but as daily struggles for survival.  It occurs to me as I overturn rotting logs and small rocks in a pretty pathetic search for a couple of grubs or crickets to dress out my lures for yet another Watchaug Pond fishing visit, that the earliest Narragansetts probably caught a lot more fish with much more efficiency because they were highly motivated by their will to live, as opposed to my will to escape home maintenance tasks.

Time also to escape hazy, hot, and humid early August, kick back and reflect on Tax Assessor’s Map 17, Lot 186, site of the Whalerock Twin Tax Credit Turbine Proposal.  

Charlestown moraine - Whalerock site circled

For purposes of this fishy miniseries, I respectfully fast forward through 6,990 years of archaeological, cultural, and political events to one fine day in the early 1970’s when the terminal moraine in the back yard of my neighbors, Joe & Carole Dolock, was owned by the Narragansett Electric Company, a public utility not associated in any way with our native Narragansett neighbors, aside from misappropriating the Tribe’s name for convenient marketing purposes.

Narragansett Electric acquired the property for the sole purpose of running power transmission lines from the site of an ill-fated nuclear power plant proposal. From the University of Rhode Island Special Collections and Archives, “Guide to Yankee Ingenuity 1976” comes this entry:

The plan was a nuke at Ninigret

“ In the early 1970's, the New England Power Company proposed to build a nuclear power plant at the former Naval Air Station in Charlestown, Rhode Island. However, after a protracted legal dispute from local opposition groups, New England Power abandoned its plans and the Naval Air Station land was deeded to the town of Charlestown for use as a park and wildlife refuge.”

Among those local opposition groups was the Narragansett Indian Tribe. In order for the power company to market its electricity, it needed to string high voltage transmission lines from Ninigret Pond to the central part of the state, northward across Narragansett Tribal Lands. This required negotiations between the power company and the Tribe, presumably to establish some sort of lease to allow the project to become operational and, of course, profitable.

The Tribe made Narragansett Electric an offer the utility could not accept

While local environmental activist groups rightfully claim partial credit for stopping the nuclear power plant, local folklorists describe a negotiation in which the two parties were unable to reach a settlement, the financial terms set forth by the Tribe being unacceptable to the power company.

It was the Tribe that cut off the head of the beast, a Paul Harvey “rest-of-the-story” epilogue to the demise of another half-baked idea, the Perpetual Atomic Clambake.

(Your humble blogging correspondent has not - and will not - contact any Tribal spokesperson for confirmation or denial of this rural legend. I’m afraid they’d tell me the same thing they probably told the power company. Could be bad karma implications for my interactions with the flora and fauna of Burlingame Park and Watchaug Pond. Just not worth it. Laying low in the shade behind a large rock.)

Narragansett Electric[1] finally sold Tax Assessor’s Map 17, Lot 186 to Charlestown developer Larry LeBlanc a few years ago for a well-documented chunk of change. What has transpired since is the stuff of town-wide political intrigue that would test the story-telling skills of Paul Harvey himself. So what you’re going to get here from a J-school dropout won’t be nearly as smooth, nor as polished, nor as unobtrusive, as any of the grand masters of cultural commentary.

It will, however, be an insider’s view of grassroots political activism in the Charlestown, and how the piranha hatchery that Larry LeBlanc unwittingly created with his Whalerock proposal came back to bite him and a whole bunch of other political anglers in town. And the fish are still biting. Small fish. Big fish. And, of course, the proverbial fish to be named later.

 But for now, this sometimes-writer has exhausted his limited repertoire of non-fishing ruminations for one day, burnt like a sun-scorched earthworm wriggled onto a patch of baked asphalt, ready for the USDA-certified organic compost heap, “leaving no trace…”

How’s that for a catchy episode ending? Even Ruth would approve! Well, maybe just a few small revisions…

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[1] (Editor’s Note: The Narragansett Electric Company has since been acquired by National Grid, a multinational gas & electric utility based in London, across the Big Pond. The profits accrued by National Grid stream across the Big Pond as fast as modern transatlantic fiber optic cables can carry them. Not even our Planning Commission can slow the flow of American dollars to the UK. It must be payback for the original Tea Party uprising, the 1773 version.)