Post by Grubb.
Monday, with one last look at the sea, we did the Newport Cliff Walk. This asphalt path along the coast was made for tourists. Pursuing their promenade, their heads can swivel between cliff top ocean views and voyeuristic peeks at the backyards of the rich or, even better, the campus grounds of Salve Regina College.
The goal for most of the visitors accomplishing the Newport Cliff Walk is to scope out The Breakers, a Gilded Age Vanderbilt mansion.
People have always mentioned it as a possible location for a Gatsby bacchanal, but movie scouts have preferred the ostentatious dwellings in places like New South Wales. From where I was standing, The Breakers would make a better location for Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”. The spindly Florentine arches look imperiled by an excessive stoniness that dominates the landscape like a mausoleum; I could imagine that inside its clammy walls, under dusty marble bas reliefs, lie a long line of warlords.
Turning my head in the opposite direction, in contrast to The Breakers forbidding stillness, I saw a fisherman hooking his catch off the rocks at the foot of the cliff.
An angler In action as opposed to a railroad magnate in repose, that’s how I’ll remember the cliff walk.
The turn-around point came when we reached the waves breaking on the walkway.
