COLLEGE HILL is quiet on weekends this time of year. Many of its denizens have places to escape nearby, on the Cape, Rhode Island’s mainland shore and to the south and east from Block to Nantucket Island. Others may migrate further “downeast” to Maine, but they do not go until Memorial Day or so, even though it’s only a matter of hours on the turnpikes and interstates these days, even if the gasoline fare is getting pretty steep, and cutting the cord with the mainland via the ferry still renders it a ritual, a rite of passage into summer. The truth is, much of College Hill is vacant year round on weekends and especially during the academic vacations, with many taking trips to the ski country of Vermont and New Hampshire in winter, as well as the opposite direction, the sunny south to Florida, New Mexico, or to the islands in and beyond the Gulf Stream.

At no time is the quiet more evident than at intercessions between terms and vacation weeks, when it becomes powerfully evident that the eponymous epicenter of College Hill is—obviously—college, and when almost overnight the streets are hauntingly devoid of pedestrian traffic for weeks at a time. This is especially the case in late December through mid-January, and at the end of May and early June before the summer sessions get under way, when the sidewalks are crowded with dumpsters for the end-of-term detritus from the student rental housing and the college dorms. Those who stay in town and see it already know this; those who do not may not. It may be my illusion, but I feel safer when there are increased numbers of people around me where I walk, even realizing these numbers perforce include the very predators who lurk beneath the guise of Everyman. It appears safer when there is a distant silhouette to which I can yell out “Help!” Who knows whether anyone would actually listen?

The upscale campuses of Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, the Hill’s historical landmarks and conspicuously pricey real estate, the host of luxury cars from Europe and Japan lining every street, along with the constant work of restoration carpenters, painters and landscapers testifies to College Hill’s affluence. The student population is intriguing, too, dividing into distinct groups of the haves and the have-lesses. An amazing amount of pulchritude unveils itself as the weather warms, most evident in the young women of the Hill, while the men, by and large, go incognito, relatively hidden in a ubiquitous uniform of athletic shoes, baggy shorts and visored caps, less commodities on display than diamonds in the rough. Or is this just because I am a heterosexual male, and fail to notice, being otherwise distracted?

College Hill lets RISD and Brown to have their cake and eat it, blending the secure insularity of the college scene with an urban one, yet one not quite so fraught with the problems of town-and-gown and the grittiness of many college cities as are, for example, the universities situated in nearby New Haven, Cambridge, Philadelphia and New York. While Providence may look like a city viewed from I-95, living in it feels more like it is a town masquerading as a city. Like the rest of Rhode Island, it is a village where one is seldom more than six questions away from a distant relative or making a close connection with the friend of a friend. The Hill itself is akin to a bastion, ramparts-like above a city built below it on a filled-in, swampy backwater. And while there is no actual protective moat, gravity and the Gravity Games run down and away, not towards the intellectual heart of the East Side, which would have to be Brown University’s campus, or for some, the intersection of Thayer and Angell Streets. In other words and many ways, you have to climb up to get in.

For now, with the florescence of pear trees covered in white, the cherries with their pinks, and this year’s crop of chartreuse leaves fast unfurling, the lawns all greening up in time for graduation, the town feels fresh and full, as comfortable as a college town can ever be. It appears that it is a good thing to live upon a hill, with the narcissism of perfect, immortal youth — the gems in the crown — on full display, and ringed within the protective, historical context of College Hill. And there is no better time to be here than right now, in the seasonal interregnum between the ice and WaterFire, in the fleet season we know as spring.

Charles P. Whitin lives on College Hill.