Location: Not Mashapaug Pond

Mashapaug Pond is arguably the most controversial body of water in the greater Providence area. The pond is one of the most heavily polluted in the state, the former site of a Textron-owned silver manufacturing plant that closed decades ago but has left a legacy of lead and other toxic pollutants in the soils and groundwater of the surrounding area. Recently, the brand new Adelaide High School building was erected on the contaminated site, and many children have developed asthma and other sicknesses as a result. Since the neighborhood is predominantly working-class and African-American, many see this as an environmental justice issue and have sued the city of Providence for endangering the children.
When I heard about the pond in class I decided immediately that this would be a brilliant place to go to examine the often tense interactions between people, the environment, and urban development. So, as usual, I hopped on my bike, off on another one of my weekly adventures. It takes about an hour to bike from College Hill to Mashapaug Pond and I had forgotten how early it gets dark this time of year. It is around 4 pm and I’m still pedaling. It’s nice to get out of the leafy cloister of College Hill once in a while, and though the scenery is distinctly not nice in the working class neighborhoods I am biking through, at least it’s something different. One distinct difference I notice: there are far less trees here than on the streets surrounding Brown. Apparently their reassuring verdant wholeness I spoke of in the last sketch is a luxury reserved for the wealthy.
Anyway by this time it is getting dark and I still have not found Adelaide Avenue, the road that should lead me to Mashapaug. I bike up and down the street lined with the ubiquitous chain store sprawl that seems to demarcate the boundaries of pretty much every major metropolitan area in the country. Still no Adelaide. So I decide to stop in at a gas station and ask the man behind the counter for direction. “Mashapaug what?” “Um…it’s a pond, it should be right out here off Reservoir.” “Never heard of the place in my life.” And it continues like this for a while. I ask a woman getting into a minivan in the parking lot, I walk into a hot dog place and ask the kid sweeping the floors, I ask a homeless man sitting on the curb, and every time I get the same answer. None of them have ever heard of it. And they all claimed to live in the vicinity. What had happened here? How were all of these people ignorant about this relatively major body of water in the middle of their community?
Even if I didn’t find Mashapaug Pond, maybe I had unearthed something just as important. Back in the early days of America, the water source was typically the accepted center of town. A pond would have been a meeting place, a crossroads, it would have drawn people to its banks on muggy nights in summer. Apparently this had been lost in Cranston, Rhode Island. Perhaps as more and more development crowded the shores of Mashapaug, the collective conscious of the community got paved over as well, and the pond was lost in the sprawl. Perhaps this is what we do to the environment when we treat it as a convenient vessel for society’s refuse, we slowly strip it of its cultural significance. If you had asked the citizens of Cranston two hundred years ago where Mashapaug Pond was, they would have pointed in its direction right away. After all, this is where they went to fish, this was the pond that fed there wells, this was a favorite gathering place for picnics. Ask someone today and they will draw a blank. The only people that care about Mashapaug Pond anymore are those who are concerned about the poisons it hides in its murky, eutrophic waters. It is a socio-spiritual casualty of the area’s voracious urbanization and pollution. It has lost its significance. In our contemporary America, nature that isn’t assigned the aesthetic role of park or garden waxes into obsolescence. A hole has been left in the environmental consciousness of Cranston.
Epilogue: I never do find the pond. It is already 5 pm and way past dark. I wait at a RIPTA station for a full hour. No bus comes. I am put on hold for twenty minutes when I try to call the Transportation Authority. I finally decide to bike back to College Hill, another hour and it’s cold. I stifle my frustration and start pedaling. On the way back I pass a small street sign that says Adelaide Ave. I have to chuckle or I might start crying. It’s too late by now anyway, I wouldn’t even be able to see the water. I continue towards campus.