Middletown
I'm not exactly someone you would call "in touch with nature" and to be honest, I had no intention whatsoever of spending a Saturday afternoon at Sachuest Point until the cab dropped us off at the visitor's center.
It was the end of September, and we had made grand plans for what was to be summer's fantastic last gasp: a night on Block Island, with nothing but us, the beach, peanut butter sandwiches, a few bottles of wine and as many pairs of socks and blankets as we could carry.
The circumstances of our ending up in Newport instead of St. Judith's point (the main port of departure for the Block Island ferry) that morning are complicated, and ultimately do not matter. With our Block Island dreams suddenly evaporated, we found ourselves perusing brochures in the Newport Visitors Center and five minutes later, by a general nod of heads and shrugging of shoulders, agreed to hop a cab for the 10-minute ride from the Newport bus station to Sachuest Point.
The Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge is technically in Middletown, a place I was not aware existed until I fell into its lap (or, perhaps, it fell into mine). According to its Web site, the refuge is a 242-acre "vast diversity of habitats," from salt and freshwater marshes to grasslands to sandy beaches and dunes. It occupies a peninsula between the Sakonnet River and Rhode Island Sound and was originally a horse racing area, then a Naval communications site and now a refuge, with the Norman Bird Sanctuary nearby.
My friends and I set up camp on what appears on the map as "Island Rocks" - several hundred yards of coastline made up of smooth rocks and hardened, brittle seaweed. The stones made our asses hurt, but it was fun to throw them and chase the spiders that scuttle over the rocks in hordes.
I recommend taking a venture into what I imagine must be the grasslands portion of the nature preserve. We wandered there amongst strange yellow flowers and reeds, keeping an eye out in the very blue sky for the raptors of Rhode Island we had read about earlier on a handy signpost.
Suddenly a flock of small, black flying creatures clouded the sky. They flew impossibly close to our heads, making strange noises that sounded like a cross between birds and insects. They hovered in a wavering, dense pack that darted back and forth in a frenzied, impulsive manner.
Luckily my suitemate had taken a course on bats and dolphins last fall, and she explained to us the bizarre nature of our circumstances.
"They're bats," she told us before a look of horror came over her face. "And they poop, a lot." Just then we watched as several thin streams of white liquid splattered the ground near our feet. "Run!" she shrieked. There's nothing like getting chased by bats.
My day trip to Sachuest Point concluded on the beautiful Second Beach, which is an uninterrupted stretch of sand just to the west of the grasslands and island rocks. We watched people - native Middletowners in their element, perhaps? - ride horses at dusk in the surf (don't ask me what the hell was going on), and picked up goopy jellyfish stranded in the sand, watching their gelatinous, translucent forms quiver and drip through our fingers.
It took about eight phone calls, but a cab finally came to pick us up, and we were back home before midnight - though we all agreed that the morning felt eternities away.
