A PIECE OF PORTSMOUTH
by Anita Rafael
The entrance to the 4 miles of hiking trails at the Melville Pond recreation area in Portsmouth is spectacularly uninviting, which is exactly what makes it so intriguing. The approach road is a flat band of thin asphalt, cracked and weedy. There is an intimidating barricade, a crude dirt parking lot and, as far as you can tell, nothing but rusty chain link fence. The park signboard ahead is stark naked on both sides and there is not a single trail marker indicating where to begin your walk. Standing there, trying to decide – go ahead, go home, go ahead, go home – out of the stillness comes the melodic sound of a waterfall. The curiosity it creates is enough to lure anyone through the trees and down to the brook.
A few short steps along what hikers quickly realize is the Orange Trail because of the painted plaques nailed to tree trunks by the trailside, is a not very high, but sometimes mighty cascade. It tumbles over a ledge and down a manmade embankment, splashing its way out of tiny pools above the falls, along a miniature ravine and into a lower, larger pond.
This nature preserve is stocked with a portion of the more than 70,000 brook, brown and rainbow trout that the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management releases in designated waterways throughout the state each spring and fall. The spot seems so undiscovered, however, that it makes you wonder if there might not be several great-great granddaddy trout and more than a few elderly pumpkinseeds enjoying the serenity of this small, lush habitat. During fishing season, from the second Saturday in April to the following February, you may see the half-bodies of anglers who have waded out past the cattails, but you cannot help but wonder if the hungry herons devour more than the most expert fisherman can ever catch.
This is a coastal refuge, and there are places along the Blue Trail where you can peer through the deciduous trees to get a glimpse of ocean over the masts of the boats at the East Passage Yachting Center. Yet, because it is small and secluded, Melville has the closeness of an inland forest. There are no wide meadows and no panoramic vistas, except out across the mysteriously calm pond.
WHAT IS A POND?Lest we Rhode Islanders waste our time and energy debating the matter, our state government has written a handy definition of the word pond: a pond is a place not less than one-quarter acre…where open, standing, or slowly moving water shall be present for at least six months a year.
The trails are respectfully litter-free and happily not much has been done to upgrade them. Forced to place one foot in front of the other, hikers zigzag along single file, but it is easy walking. Each person in turn, ducks the overgrown limbs and briars, climbs up a bit, then down some to trek around the perimeter of the ponds and across the brook. Along the path and in the underbrush, there is ample evidence of man’s former presence: some quarried stone, a water tower, fences, gates, pylons, a dam, a spillway and parts and pieces of now unidentifiable things that the military abandoned. Melville Pond is in territory that was previously owned by the United States government. In fact, in 1901, the basin, as it is sometimes called, was the Bradford Coaling Station, the Navy’s first coal loading depot. Not far from the wetlands, the military had a five-acre dumpsite. Officials claim the landfill was brush only. The area, encompassing 150 acres, has been owned and managed as a campground, recreation site and nature preserve by the Town of Portsmouth since 1978.The Green Trail starts from east of the signboard and circles a pond farther upstream that is actually one of many lesser pools. A grassy access road, once the Mott Farm Road, is now marked as the Red Trail. It runs straight along the northeast fence line, across the train tracks down to the pebbly shoreline of Narragansett Bay. Snap out of your reverie as you step over the rails. Even though the Old Colony Railroad chugs along at 10 miles per hour, the locomotive might sneak up on you. Hikers sometimes backtrack on this route to the parking area, but it is more scenic to cut through the woods on the Orange Trail. On the Orange Tail, a wooden footbridge crosses the brook, and below the spillway along the Blue Trail hikers can rock-hop from shore to shore on strategically placed cast-concrete stepping-stones.
One reassuring aspect of hiking Melville Pond is that, even if you cannot always eyeball every blaze through the colorful fall foliage, you will not get lost – at least not permanently. The trails eventually loop back to where they started and most of the crooked cutoffs dead end at places where the scenery is sublime, the birds and waterfowl are abundant and the frog watching is superb.
