“Those signs aren’t meant for us.”
My dad would say this when we crossed a sign saying No Trespassing. In the 1970s, in small-town New England, he often took some assortment of his children down cart paths and through old walled fields, searching for bottle dumps and cellar holes, or maybe we were on a dirt road heading to an old mine, hoping to find beryl or quartz crystals, or even looking for a pretty evergreen to cut for our next Christmas tree. We were always searching for something, sometimes just whatever was around the curve in the road.
In his mind, we weren’t causing trouble—drinking, setting fires, smashing beer bottles, riding dirt bikes—so we could ignore the signs. They were for other people.
I only remember getting caught once. On this trip, we drove out of state with our best-friend neighbors to a former rhodonite mine, clearly marked as private property. Imagine eight kids, three or four adults, and a dog happily scrambling over a rock pile, smashing rocks with a hammer, when the owner showed up. He was angry, and I don’t blame him; if it was my property, I’d be yelling too.
I still regularly ramble around in the woods, searching. And I’ve seen some strange things on my walks. Bloody latex gloves, presumably from deer poachers. A fancy Burberry coat, for a dog. The head of a doll. Decades ago, before the advent of the internet—Playboy or Hustler magazines discarded deep in the woods.
But let me tell you about the most disturbing thing I’ve seen.
My husband and I were on a trail in an Audubon property, during October, 2020. Most of the adjacent land is owned by Narragansett Electric, so neighboring houses are few. You have to know where to park, else it’s a long hike (for Rhode Islanders!) from the main parking lot to the loop we were on. Other hikers are scant, and that’s exactly why I wanted to go there that day; for quiet, and peace.
The day was one of those fall gems, cool and calm, when the clarity of the blue sky almost hurts your eyes.
The trail begins on a cart road, deeply engraved into the landscape, and lined with stone walls. It’s an old one, and I like to think about all the people who bumped up and down its hills in wagons, hundreds of years ago. Eventually we cut off the road, and came downhill, where the path runs close to the border of the property. Something flickering bright caught my eye, off through the trees, lit by the sun:
A huge, brand new Confederate flag, strung from the trees in the middle of the woods. Not in someone’s yard, or even near a dwelling, probably just outside the public land, and clearly set up to be seen from the trail.
I stopped, stunned, and immediately afraid. I felt vulnerable, even with my husband beside me. We had gear from a particular store, and wore certain brand-name clothes. We’d driven our very popular model of an all-wheel-drive car to hike in a wildlife refuge. We could very easily be stereotyped as “those people.”
I noted the coordinates so I could tell Audubon where to locate the flag, and we hustled on. But my peace was gone. For the rest of the hike I thought about how much more frightened I’d be if I wasn’t white.
Rhode Island is still a state where many people grow up, stay put, don’t cross the state line often, or even go over a bridge to the next county. I’m confident in saying that no one here is “celebrating their southern heritage” by flying the Confederate flag.
That flag signifies something else; hostility and hate. And that’s what scared me—because it was meant for us.