On Being Outdoors in Wintry Providence
January 25, 2009 by Susan Korte
Filed under Environment
January 20, 2009, more than two million people spent the day in 20-degree weather and lived to tell the tale ~ and what a tale! What a day! What a sight, to see about twice the population of the state of Rhode Island standing on or near the National Mall during the inauguration of President Obama. No one minded, or at least, folks put the cold out of mind and let their hearts and bodies be warmed by the day’s events. Did anyone get frostbite? Aren’t they glad they were there? Isn’t the memory of that day and their presence in Washington, DC, worth standing for hours in the cold? Two million people would say yes.
So what are we doing inside TODAY? We don’t need a special event or invitation to get outside and enjoy the day. It may even be a bit warmer than yesterday in DC. Are you going for a walk? I’m reluctant to get out there when it’s so icy on the city sidewalks, but the roads in the parks are clear and not too distant. Why don’t I just go over to Roger Willliams Park and take a walk? There are 10 miles of roads there. North Burial Ground is a Providence Parks Department responsibility and it’s closer to me. I can walk there, and it also has 10 miles of roads within it. Cemeteries often have cleared their roads of snow and are beautiful places to walk.
By the way, THANK YOU to all my wonderful neighbors who help me shovel the snow and who shovel their own walks! Way to Go!
And with all this snow there’s sledding! We have lots more snow today than when I took this photo of sledders in Roger Williams Park last week, so it could be even more fun than these folks were having. Make your own memories and have a great time! There’s cross-country skiing, there’s ice skating if the ponds freeze hard enough. RI DEM provides ice safety information for Lincoln Woods, Goddard and Meshanticut State Parks on its 24-hour Ice Information telephone line, 222-2632. They advise us to contact local recreation departments for skating opportunities and conditions in individual communities since DEM does not monitor ice conditions in local communities.
If you do want an invitation to the outdoors, though, check the Outdoors Calendar on the unfinished redesign of What Grows On in Rhode Island! I have been working on a reorganization of the information in The Providential Gardener and What Grows On in Rhode Island to make them more useful, but there’s still a lot to do. It’s keeping me from writing posts for the Providential Gardener. Other Rhode Islanders are writing on other websites, though. You can see there are some news feeds on my test website from various local and national environmental groups…. This aggregated set of feeds is incomplete, to say the least, but it gives a taste of what’s to come.
[Originally published on The Providential Gardener]