- So I approached the editors of the journal and they said, "You want to do what?"

And I said, "I want to write a column about hiking."

- [Pamela] Tonight, a veteran newspaper columnist takes us on the often unseen paths of Rhode Island.

A forgotten language in Martha's Vineyard?

- My father, he said I was sitting right on top of history and I had no idea it was important.

- [Pamela] A great white shark rebound in local waters.

- So the best estimate is over that four-year period, that 800 individual white sharks visited the waters off of Cape Cod, which makes it among the larger white shark aggregation sites worldwide.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Good evening.

Welcome to Rhode Island PBS Weekly.

I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

Many of you, Memorial Day weekend as the unofficial start of summer, and with that, thoughts turn to getting outdoors.

- Hiking is one recreational activity that gained traction after World War II and spiked here in Rhode Island during the COVID pandemic.

But one journalist was ahead of the curve when finding the right path.

- That's the most surprising, interesting part.

Whenever you set out with a new trail that never been on before, it's intriguing because you really don't know what you're gonna find and what you're gonna see.

It's eyeopening.

- [Pamela] Taking in the exquisite views and exploring beautiful byways is a new calling for veteran newspaperman John Kostrzewa.

He is hiking and writing his way along Rhode Island's most breathtaking trails and discovering a bend in the road is not the end of the road.

- It was not an easy, straight path.

When I left the Providence Journal in 2017, I didn't really have a clear idea of what I wanted to do next or whether I'd ever work again.

- Kostrzewa worked more than four decades as a print journalist and spent the majority at the Providence Journal as a business columnist and editor.

What was it like to go from the world of high finance to forests?

- It was probably the furthest thing from my mind.

I think like a lot of people who retire, they're not quite sure what the next chapter's gonna be, though they know they want to contribute something, and so you find your way.

And luckily I found the path to hiking.

- [Pamela] Kostrzewa says he did a bit of recreational hiking years ago, especially when his sons were Boy Scouts.

He took it up again after retiring as a way to improve his health and sharpen his mind and spirit.

It was during the pandemic quarantine when he noticed an uptick on the trails.

- When I went in the woods, who are all these people?

Some of the Land Trust folks will tell you that three times as many people were hiking during COVID than before COVID.

Don't forget, we had a governor who said take it outside, and we literally did.

- [Pamela] So he did something outside the box.

- I approached the editors of the journal and they said, "You want to do what?"

And I said, "I want to write a column about hiking."

I said, "Look, it's pretty simple.

All I want to do is take people where they haven't been before.

If they've been there before, show them something different about the history or the geology or the wildlife."

- [Pamela] And he says... - There were a lot of readers who were never gonna hike.

They were never gonna go in the woods.

But in the middle of that first COVID winter, they really just wanted something good to read about Rhode Island.

- [Pamela] Instead of telling him to go take a hike, the journal editors brought Kostrzewa's career full circle.

Three years and 150 columns later, what started out as a trial run is now a regular route.

Kostrzewa's Sunday column is called Walking Rhode Island.

He's compiled 40 of the feature stories in his new guidebook by the same name.

And while the topic is far from his former beat, he says the essential skills are similar.

- I'm not a trained historian.

I'm not a trained geologist.

I'm not a trained birder.

What I have been trained in 42 years is to observe, to look to the right, look to the left, and see things, and then try to figure it out.

And then if I can't figure it out myself, then find those experts to talk to that explain it to me.

- [Pamela] In the book, there are nature walks for families, challenging hikes for the experienced, even urban explorations.

- There's a wonderful hike through West Warwick along the bike path, which you walk right through this old industrial area and as you're walking on a trestle along the bike path, you smell this sweet smell, this fragrance and aroma.

You say, "What could this possibly be?"

Well, that's the Bradford Soap Works.

- [Pamela] Also in his guidebook, Kostrzewa includes coastal climbs along Ocean State shorelines, such as Black Point in Narragansett.

- A lot of historical sites along the trail always fascinate me 'cause it really shows you how we lived 200, 300 years ago.

And you'll see foundations right along the trail.

You will see sluiceways built, you know, to speed up the water, to run lumber mills or gristmills.

And I'm always interested to find out, well, who built those?

How long ago and why?

And you put that all together and then you decide, okay, well, what story do I want to tell now?

- [Pamela] The stories start with reading online sources about the area, then stuffing basic supplies in his backpack, first aid kit, rain gear, compass and GPS, insect repellent, water and energy bar.

And because he says he's old school, he carries a map, where he makes notations and writes questions to research later.

And then he sets off, usually twice a week, following the blaze, these numbered markings that point out the trail.

Kostrzewa says he hasn't run into any dangerous wild animals, but he has encountered some fascinating lore and legends.

For instance, in Cumberland, the locals speak of the supernatural surrounding the newly opened Catamint Brook Preserve off Tower Road.

- They've seen children along the road, they've seen ghosts along the road, and then they've seen a creature they call Monkey Man, which I have never seen and never heard of.

- Like Bigfoot?

- Yeah, I guess some type of monkey-like, apelike creature that somebody had seen at one point, and for some reason it caught into the imagination of the folks there.

- Yep.

Do you imagine that we'll run into Rhode Island's Bigfoot out here?

- Well, I certainly hope not.

- [Pamela] During a walk through the preserve, we didn't see the Ocean State Sasquatch, but we did observe rambling stone walls, the remains of a one-room schoolhouse from the 1800s that burned to the ground.

We also trekked through colonial farmland.

- If you look back to the late 1700s, there was a census done and two-thirds of Rhode Island, 66% of all the land had been cleared of trees.

250 years after the farmers left, this is all we call second growth forest.

- [Pamela] And amid all the trees, there is a sound of silence.

- You have to be a little bit quiet in the woods.

Certainly nothing wrong with talking to each other and sharing stories, but the louder you are, the less of the wildlife you're gonna see, the less of those great bird tweets you're gonna hear.

You're not gonna hear those waterfalls you walk by.

- [Pamela] With that advice, Kostrzewa is following in the footsteps of his former Providence Journal colleague, the late Ken Weber, a noted columnist and outdoorsman who also wrote about rambles in Rhode Island.

Kostrzewa pays tribute to his mentor in this excerpt from his book.

- "Hiking should not be a race through the woods, but a chance to pause along the way, explore, and think.

I don't consider walking a competitive sport or endurance event," he wrote.

For a guy who was always racing on deadlines at the newspaper, that is wise, sage advice.

- [Pamela] And so Kostrzewa says he takes that to heart on all his journeys until he reaches the end of the trail.

- When I come out of the woods, if I'm hiking with a friend, we'll each do a tick check with each other to make sure we're not bringing anything home.

And then when I do get home, I'll go to the backyard, set up a lawn chair, and strip down right there.

- How do the neighbors feel about that?

(both laugh) - I haven't heard, but no complaints as of yet either.

- Oh, good.

(laughs) But all kidding aside... What do you love the most about wandering?

- Well, wandering is a good term.

I was just reading a book from Thoreau going way back, and he would never call it walking or hiking.

He called it sauntering because he said the idea, almost like what Ken Weber said, is that you don't go to rush through the woods, you go to explore the woods and experience the woods, which is why I say I hope to continue to hike and to continue to write until somebody tells me to stop.

- The most common question John Kostrzewa gets asked is if he will run out of areas to explore, and he says definitely not.

New trails open all the time and readers keep suggesting trails he's never heard of.

And on this Memorial Day weekend, it's a safe bet that many vacationers will be heading to Martha's Vineyard via the ferry.

The island is known as a salty escape with a culture of its own.

But few of those visitors know that long before there was ferry service, it was home to an old American sign language.

As we first reported last October, producer Isabella Jibilian explored that hidden history of Martha's Vineyard sign language.

- [Isabella] Martha's Vineyard is known as a salty escape, a place where celebrities and New Englanders alike can leave their mainland worries behind.

It has a culture and a lingo of its own.

- The little frogs called spring peepers are on the vineyard called pinkletinks, or tupelo trees are called beetlebung trees.

- [Isabella] But unbeknown to the average vacationer, Martha's Vineyard is home to another language.

- Cranberry.

Swordfish.

Swordfish.

- [Isabella] One not spoken, but signed.

- I can't hear, damn it.

- [Isabella] Joan Poole Nash grew up in the vineyard and learned sign language at age seven.

- I learned sign language from my great-grandmother and it became our private language between the two of us.

I had no idea where the sign language had come from or why she used it.

- [Isabella] Her best guess was that they were Native American signs from the back of the Boy Scout manual.

But when she went on to study American Sign Language or ASL in college, it dawned on her that these signs were special.

- There's a sign that no one had another sign for, which was twins, and this was a sign for twins, two of them rolling around inside.

- [Isabella] These were the days when many academics didn't believe sign language was a real language, so evidence of signs growing and changing could be groundbreaking.

- Everybody got super excited and we went over to the vineyard and interviewed all my relatives that we thought had been exposed to the sign language.

- [Isabella] Relatives like Eric Caudle.

- That was diamonds.

That was clubs.

That was hearts.

That was spades.

- [Isabella] Who remembered deaf neighbors playing cards in town.

- They could concentrate, you know, no distraction.

- We ended up collecting about 300 signs.

- [Isabella] Signs like scallops, codfish, and New Bedford.

The historic whaling port sign translates to... - Smells bad over there.

- [Isabella] But how did an early American sign language spring up in Martha's Vineyard?

We met Bow Van Riper, a historian at the Martha's Vineyard Museum, to learn more.

Today he's taking us to the home of Martha's Vineyard sign language, Chilmark.

- Maybe one in 150 people in Chilmark as opposed to one in, say, 1,200 people in an average village on the mainland were deaf.

Martha's Vineyard sign language developed in Chilmark into essentially a second language alongside spoken English.

- [Isabella] Our first stop, the Chilmark Town Church.

- Jared Mayhew, who was one of the biggest landowners and sheep farmers in town, was deaf.

But his wife, Lottie, short for Jerusha, could hear and she'd sign the sermons to him.

- [Isabella] We also went to the home of Katie West.

- She always told the story that at the age of three or four, she was struck by lightning and lost her hearing as a result.

- [Isabella] And visited the old town hall.

- Here in Chilmark, deafness was just another way of being human.

- What's our best guess as to where this gene for deafness came from?

- The first deaf person we know of who lived on the vineyard was a guy named Jonathan Lombard, who came to the island in the very early 1700s from an area of southeastern England called The Weald.

Martha's Vineyard in the 1700s and really as late as the middle of the 1800s was quite isolated from the rest of New England.

Most people, when they got married, married somebody else from Chilmark.

This meant that the likelihood of them marrying somebody who also had the gene, and thus both of them passing it on to their kids, was significantly higher.

- Chilmark became a deaf enclave, attracting the interest of one of the most famous inventors of the time.

What brought Alexander Graham Bell to the island?

- Alexander Graham Bell, having long been interested in deafness, his wife, for example, was deaf, was living at a time when the causes of deafness weren't yet well-understood.

Because he suspected deafness was hereditary, an area like Martha's Vineyard might shed some light on what was going on.

And here's Bell's name and address.

- [Isabella] Alexander Graham Bell painstakingly mapped Chilmark's family trees.

Today, however, his motivations for research are controversial in the deaf community.

- Bell was deeply opposed to sign language and was a proponent of what was known in the day as eugenics, the control of human reproduction in order to produce a better human race.

He discouraged the deaf people he interacted with from marrying other deaf people.

- [Isabella] Bell was never able to figure out the pattern of how deafness is inherited, but today, academics use his old records to find new answers.

Justin Power is a researcher in linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin.

He has a new theory about how and when the sign language began.

- Humans are homo symbolicus.

We're the symbol users.

If you have a group of deaf individuals who are regularly interacting with one another, they will try to communicate with one another.

In a short span of time, 1785 onwards, two families had a relatively lot of deaf children, and that's where we hypothesized that the Martha's Vineyard signing community actually began.

- [Isabella] A community of hearing and deaf, both using signs.

Power estimates that Martha's Vineyard sign language developed in isolation for about 40 years, but everything changed when the American School for the Deaf was established in nearby Hartford, Connecticut.

Here, ASL would develop.

- In 1825, the first three deaf individuals from Martha's Vineyard went away to Hartford to study at the American School for the Deaf.

- [Isabella] Today's historians have new ideas about the similarities between Martha's Vineyard sign language and ASL.

The traditional view says that signs from Martha's Vineyard were adopted by ASL, but Justin Power believes that it was mostly the other way around.

- So you can imagine that the deaf individuals would've shifted eventually to use more American sign language.

(ferry horn honking) - [Isabella] It was the start of deaf education in America, but it was the beginning of the end for Martha's Vineyard sign language.

- So the opening of the American School for the Deaf coincides with the beginnings of reliable steam-powered ferry service to the island.

- How did that affect the number of deaf people born?

- The marriage pool broadens, and although there are still deaf people born on the island, it drops significantly, - Lots and lots of words.

- [Isabella] After her landmark research, Joan Poole Nash went on to have a decades-long career teaching the deaf.

Before we parted, she had a lesson to share.

- So the only thing that's gonna move is your thumb.

You need to go up higher.

Yeah.

And now flick your thumb.

Yeah.

Cranberry.

As far as American sign language goes, they don't have a sign for cranberry.

So I make it my job to teach everyone so that sign doesn't disappear.

(uplifting music) - Finally tonight, as beach season begins, we wanted to take another look at a story we first brought you last September.

Contributor David Wright followed the environmental efforts to protect sharks in recent years, which resulted in a huge increase in the great white shark population off the New England coast.

It's a conservation success story with potentially unnerving implications for beach-goers.

- Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

It's not that little.

Comes a pointed reminder that you might want to think twice, at least in Cape Cod.

I guess the the headline is there are lots of sharks here, more than we thought.

- Yes.

- Meghan Winton of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy is one of the authors of a new study documenting a surge in the population of great white sharks here in recent years.

And what's your best estimate?

- So the best estimate is over that four-year period, that 800 individual white sharks visited the waters off of Cape Cod.

- [David] She and her colleagues have spent years patrolling these waters, tracking every shark they encounter.

- Nauset ORV.

Yeah.

- [David] You think about a signing?

They recently let us tag along.

- We did just get one.

Okay.

So it says white shark spotted 100 yards off southernmost part of Nauset ORV.

- [David] Overhead, they have a spotter plane.

The pilot, Wayne, keeps a sharp eye out.

- [Wayne] I think I just passed one, so I'm making a 180 here.

- [David] On the boat, they have underwater cameras and microphones and a ready supply of these things.

- It's just kind of like an easy pass for sharks.

This thing.

(David laughs) I mean, that's the simplest way to explain it.

- Do you charge toll?

- We should start.

- [David] A radio beacon with batteries that last 10 years.

Every time a tagged shark swims past one of these yellow buoys, it sends out a ping.

The conservancy relies on citizen sightings too from a growing number of eco tour boats.

You get to see some?

- Yeah, we saw one.

- Yeah.

- It's super shallow here.

About 14 feet.

It wasn't tagged.

- The people on that boat tell us they saw a 14-footer here moments ago.

Every sighting from people or pings gets relayed to an app you can download, Sharktivity.

They've identified more than 600 individual sharks here over the past 10 years.

Many of the sharks are return customers.

So I bet your app is fairly popular among beach-goers.

- I mean, I'd like to think so.

It is.

It's been downloaded over 100,000 times at this point, and it's a great platform for us to report sightings when we're out on the water, for eco tour boats to report sightings, and for anybody who's out.

- Sure.

- So it's a great citizen science tool.

It'll be more fun when there's a shark.

- [David] Meghan and her team deploy a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, listening for a ping from a tracker.

- Oh, look at!

Wow!

- [David] False alarm.

All we find here is this school of stripers, the shark apparently long gone.

(water splashes) (dramatic music) It may come as a surprise to know that nearly 50 years ago when Steven Spielberg scared the pants off just about everybody with his iconic movie about sharks in this part of the Atlantic, the population of great whites here was in danger of dying out.

- You're gonna need a bigger boat.

- [David] Greg Skomal was still in grade school when "Jaws" came out.

The movie caught his imagination in the best possible way.

- I was motivated by the scientist in the film, as were a lot of colleagues of mine at the time to become shark biologists, you know?

So as a young kid watching that, I was thinking, wow, this is a really cool job.

(researchers cheering) - [David] Skomal has personally tagged more than 300 sharks, fulfilling his dream at a time when Cape Cod is finally beginning to see the dividends of decades of marine conservation efforts.

Over the last 50 years, the Marine Mammal Protection Act gradually helped bring back the seals and the sharks who prey on them.

- If you think about it, in the time that both sharks and seals were gone, you know, Cape Cod has exploded as an area that draws people to enjoy this environment.

And so now the predator's coming back to feed on its prey, but it's overlapping with human activities and certainly humans are not used to that.

And so, you know, but they're coming to grips with it.

(drone hums) - The team deploys a drone for a bird's eye view of the water.

What they tend to find is that the sharks spend about half their time in water that's less than 15 feet deep.

- We've got the seals, which love the beautiful beaches of Cape Cod.

So do people.

And the sharks are coming in close to shore to hunt for seals.

So there is an overlap of these three species.

- It has a tag.

Finally, late in the day, a bonafide sighting.

- [Greg] Pretty.

- [David] Greg Skomal climbs out onto the pulpit like a friendly Captain Ahab, armed not with a harpoon, but a GoPro camera.

A 14-footer, a teenager, not yet fully grown.

Great white sharks are four feet long when they're born.

They can grow up to 20 feet long, their lifespan more than 70 years.

- So that shark right there is one that we tagged a few weeks ago, right in this exact same area.

So clearly it's been sticking around.

And I think the only reason they stick around is if they're successfully feeding because no point in staying in an area where you're not having any success.

I love it.

He's just staying in the shallows.

- [David] Most of the regulars have nicknames.

Not this one yet.

Who gets to name it?

- We've got a donor in the queue who gets to name that shark.

And that program helps us fund the cost of research trips.

- So you contribute a little to the work that you guys are doing-- - Yes.

Yes.

- And you get to name a shark.

- Exactly.

It's a pretty cool thing.

- [David] How much does a shark's name go for these days?

- [Meghan] $2,500, which covers the cost of a research trip.

- [David] That nickname will pay for another day out on the water like this one.

Adopt a Shark.

- [Meghan] It's basically an Adopt a Shark program.

(uplifting music) - And that's our broadcast this evening.

I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We'll be back next week with another edition of Rhode Island PBS Weekly.

Until then, please follow us on Facebook and X and visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at RIPBS.org/weekly or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Goodnight.

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