Prudence Island During Winter

When the cold settles on Prudence Island in the middle of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, the 150 year-round residents notice a special quality of light they call “winter blue” reflecting off the water. Photographer Ron Cowie found a place of self-sufficient people with deep roots, a place where he felt “time has a different sensibility.” […]

By Mel Allen

Jan 27 2016

Photographer Ron Cowie arrived for the first time on a late January morning just past 6:00 a.m. “I had just gotten off the ferry,” he remembers. “And it was so cold, so quiet. I didn’t want to photograph any clichés, and I know a lighthouse is a cliché, but the blue-green light was all here.” Prudence Island Light, known to islanders as Sandy Point Light, is the site of the island’s great tragedy. During the Hurricane of 1938, the lighthouse keeper’s cottage was swept into the sea, taking the lives of the keeper’s wife and son, a former keeper, and an island couple who had sought safety there.

Photo Credit : Ron Cowie

Last winter had already settled in hard, more bitter than most people could recall, when photographer Ron Cowie first stepped off the ferry onto the landing at Prudence Island. Though Cowie had lived only 40 miles away in Charlestown, Rhode Island, for a decade, the island, which is part of Portsmouth and sits smack in the heart of Narragansett Bay, remained one of those mysterious, all-but-hidden places that you mean to go see one day, maybe. That day for Cowie came on the last day of January, and the cold that ripped through his clothes gave him the gift of crystalline light when the sun rose over the bay. He returned three times, recording the way winter lay on the land, and its 150 year-round islanders.

Ethan Rossi, one of the owners of Prudence and Bay Islands Transport, steers the M/V Herbert C. Bonner on its early-morning trip from Bristol to Prudence Island, about two miles away in the heart of Narragansett Bay. Cowie heard stories of how the “temperamental” previous ferry operator would sometimes leave without you if he didn’t get along with you.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

“My first goal was to arrive with no impressions,” he said. “I wanted no preconceived ideas.” He came wanting to have what he called “a conversation with the island” through the lens of his camera. On foot and by car, he covered almost every inch of the landscape, roughly seven miles long and two miles wide, sometimes spending hours with no other people in sight, only flocks of seabirds or geese. On an island that even in the height of summer is known for its sense of solitude and quiet, the winter silence became his constant companion.

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With nearly 75 percent of island land preserved, Prudence seems to breathe quiet. “If you go off the path anywhere, you’re immediately in brambles,” Cowie observes. “It’s very peaceful, and stark. A lot is untouched. It’s not like they’re living in the past. But time has a different sensibility. So much history here. Almost like events happened just yesterday.” The stone wall indicates where an old cow path ran through.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

“It’s very peaceful,” Cowie said. “But it’s also very stark. A lot is untouched. I wanted to see how to turn what may seem to some like bleak isolation into a positive. What I found was that there is a collective knowledge, a rhythm they’ve built their life around; a sense of history that connects them. There was no sense of a ‘We’ve got to put Prudence Island on the map’ mentality. The people who’ve come before them, they seem to still be there. It’s a living work of art.”

Few people know the island’s history, geography, and stories as well as Joe Bains, pictured here at his home with his mandolin. His grandfather came to Prudence Island in the late 19th century; his parents met on the island and moved here full-time in 1948. “When my father built his house,” said Bains, who was raised and educated on the island, “every bit of siding came from used Navy ammunition boxes, and the posts and beams came from abandoned Navy buildings.”
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

One day Cowie met Joe Bains, who, like many islanders, has a split life, keeping a home on the mainland, keeping a home and his heart on the island, where his roots burrow deep. His grandparents first came in the late 19th century, when the island had a thriving summer colony. His parents met on Prudence and moved back there shortly after World War II. His father, like many, was a jack of all trades. He hauled trash, did carpentry, built and painted houses. Joe went to the one-room school, and soaked up the island’s history and lore.

“When I was a kid,” Bains said, describing in a few words the world-apart feel of Prudence Island, “you just had to be tall enough for your feet to hit the pedals and you could see over the steering wheel to drive, that’s all. I was 12 when I started driving, and my summer job from then on was driving my father’s trash truck.”

Narragansett Bay
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

On an early March afternoon, Cowie put away his camera and boarded the last ferry back to Bristol. “That last hour before getting on the last ferry back, I had a sense of completion. I had wanted to have a conversation with the island, and I got that.” — Mel Allen

Flocks of Canada geese, brants, and black ducks winter on the island, only two miles from the mainland but a natural world unto itself. The Audubon Society of Rhode Island is offering a “Winter Wildlife” tour of Prudence on January 9 this year.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

Prudence’s population swells to nearly 1,000 in summer when people return to their island getaways, like this trailer on Narragansett Avenue, awaiting its owners. — Prudence’s population swells to nearly 1,000 in summer when people return to their island getaways, like this trailer on Narragansett Avenue,
awaiting its owners.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

During World War II, the southern end of Prudence Island was the site of a major naval munitions depot, where more than 30 storage bunkers were packed with ammunition ready for loading onto ships. More than 20 of the bunkers remained active until 1973. Today it’s conservation land, part of the Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, attracting hikers, mountain bikers, birdwatchers, and wildlife. — During World War II,
the southern end of Prudence Island was the site of a major naval munitions depot, where more than 30 storage bunkers were packed with ammunition ready for loading onto ships. More than 20 of the bunkers remained active until 1973. Today it’s conservation land, part of the Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, attracting hikers, mountain bikers, birdwatchers, and wildlife.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

Narragansett Avenue, flanked by the East Passage, is lined with the modest homes and cottages that give the island a feel far different from summer island communities elsewhere. The island’s main route leads to the former naval munitions storage site, now in land conservation. Looking south is the Portsmouth shoreline. “My first impression when I arrived,” Cowie says, “was ‘There’s nobody here.’”
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

The Prudence Island school, built in 1896, is the last one-room schoolhouse in Rhode Island. While some older children take the early ferry to Bristol and then a bus to Portsmouth schools, others cluster together here. Islanders fought to keep it open when Portsmouth wanted to close it in 2009. Today the school has six students in K–12; Portsmouth pays K–3 costs, and island fundraising pays all other costs through the Prudence Island School Foundation.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

Fifth-grader Raya Young’s father is the island’s police officer. With no schoolbus, children walk to school or ride with parents.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

Marcy Dunbar, a lifelong islander, graduated from the one-room school and sent her six children there, as well. Her house is about a quarter-mile from the ferry landing, and until her late eighties, she was both postmistress and operator of the variety store, which islanders called “Marcy’s.” Now her daughter Lori has replaced her, and the store is known as “Lori’s.” In 2009, an island visitor blogged about the store experience: “It’s just a small place, sort of messy, dark, unorganized, with Marcy scooting back and forth from the post office to the store, lost in her own world. You patiently wait for her, because you’re definitely on island time once you go through that door. But then that’s a big part of the charm and appeal. It’s easy to imagine the store looking and operating exactly the same way many, many years ago.”
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

The remains of a World War II construction wharf speak to Cowie’s sense that time takes on a different feeling here. On an island devoid of most expected conveniences, what remains is this: quiet, beauty, a place to totally unwind.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

As Cowie traveled across the island, his eye was drawn to details like these deer skulls lying in an islander’s yard. “I saw a touch of reality in the antlers,” he said. The proliferation of deer has been a long-running problem, since deer ticks feed off the herd. The herd has been thinned in recent years by hunting, the surprise arrival of coyotes, and last winter’s harsh mix of snow and cold. — As Cowie traveled across the island, his eye was drawn to details like these deer skulls lying in an islander’s yard. “I saw a touch of reality in the antlers,” he said. The proliferation of deer has been a long-running problem, since deer ticks feed off the herd. The herd has been thinned in recent years by hunting, the surprise arrival of coyotes,
and last winter’s harsh mix of snow and cold.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

Vestiges of a past when Prudence Island boasted a lively summer colony are spread across the landscape. Here all that remains of the former yacht club, which dated from 1904, is a towering chimney near Potter Cove.
*Photo Credit : Ron Cowie*

To see more of Ron Cowie’s work, go to:roncowiephoto.com

Mel Allen

Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.

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