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01/20/97
GERRY GOLDSTEIN: The keeper of the pond
SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- For 65 years, Lloyd Whitford has transfused vitality into beautiful, fragile Trustom Pond.
Shifting sand often blocks Trustom's outlet to the sea, so in early spring Whitford hauls his backhoe to the pond's edge, a half-mile from his century-old farmhouse.
The machine scoops its way toward the surf at Moonstone Beach, a few hundred feet away, carving out a breachway -- a channel that provides Trustom an infusion of its lifeblood: salt water.
Thus refreshed, the brackish pond goes about a timeless and insistent business: nurturing the spawn of crabs and clams; the widgeon grass that feeds migrating geese; the baby eels that wriggle in its shallow, fertile water.
A year ago, when the barge North Cape crunched aground off Moonstone and hemorrhaged blood-red oil, the retired dairy farmer didn't need his television set to tell him what was spewing from the lacerated vessel.
Says Whitford: "I smelt it."
When morning came, he could see from his living room the cause of an unfolding obscenity: the grounded tug Scandia, which had been towing the unmanned barge.
Oil seeped along the shoreline, and in wild January seas managed to leap the sand barrier that had built up at Trustom.
All this was anomaly to Whitford, 75, who has lived near the pond all his life, tending to it and taking from it.
Nowadays, Whitford breaches Trustom at the request of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officers, because the pond is a federal nature preserve. But he remembers when opening the breachway was a community event shared by local farmers.
Since he was 10 years old, he has worked on the breachway; by hand, with horse-drawn scoops, and now, with the backhoe.
"The water would get too fresh for oysters and clams, so everyone went down to help," he says of the digging.
The rewards were bountiful. From September through April, "you'd go and get a bushel of oysters and come home. It was almost like going to the grocery store. We'd have fried oysters and oyster stew -- good grief, we had some beautiful oysters."
And then there were the eels, a Swamp Yankee delicacy best gathered in darkness by lantern light.
"Catch him and get him in a pail and you'd have fried eel that night. Eat him with jonnycakes and brine pickles and you are really living."
Whitford is as South County as it gets: plaid-shirt and suspenders, pragmatic and opinionated, a wisecracker as dry as the logs he stuffs into his woodstove.
Settling into a chair by the crackling stove, he asks, "Mind if I take off my boots? You might, in time."
He says his grandfather, Simeon Whitford, began farming down the road in the 1860s, leaving landlocked Exeter because he yearned for a place "where he could cut a cord of wood and dig a mess of clams before breakfast."
Says Whitford: "Folks seen him dig the clams, but they never seen him cut that cord of wood."
Whitfords have been around Rhode Island since 1640, according to what Lloyd has been told -- no big deal by the eternal timetable of the South County shoreline and the pond.
But the old farmer could be their human counterpart: resilient -- up to a point -- enduring, and indifferent to human foibles. So if you expect Whitford to wring his hands over the oil spill, you're in for a disappointment.
He does worry about the impact on fishermen, and he wonders what might have happened if instead of light home heating oil the North Cape had carried "the thick gooey stuff."
Otherwise, he's convinced that spills will happen no matter what we do.
He stands by his view that our waters are healing themselves, and he grouses that no scribbler from the newspaper will entrap him into eloquence on this topic of the spill.
But he does confess that he treasures the salubrious tranquility of his place in the world, at the edge of the sea. He says that he hopes it will endure "as long as the waves roll and the wind blows."
The satisfaction in living here, says Lloyd Whitford, "is knowing that the ocean is there, in its beauty. It's treacherous, but it will forgive you once in a while -- and a lot of times it don't.
"I like seeing it, the way it's always been."
Gerry Goldstein is the Journal-Bulletin's regional editor for South County.
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