Trust Not Providence

If anybody can figure out a way to raise the water level of Narragansett Bay ten feet while leaving the rest of New England relatively undamaged, he has this newspaper's support, sight unseen. For abutting chat bay is Providence, Rhode Island, a squatty town of several hundred thousand people. As anyone who headed southward this weekend now well knows, there is no excuse for Providence.

It is not the city's people which make it our prime choice for prompt engulfment. Nor is it our sister university, Brown (which fortunately sits on a hill twelve feet high and which would be spared from the onrushing waters). It is the town's streets, which might jokingly be called its arteries of trade and commerce, its narrow and fetid alleyways which cross and recross without plan or purpose, which cry like a festering sore for the purging waters of the Bay.

Take a couple of days off some time, borrow somebody else's car, and drive at best through and at worst into this city. Before you even reach its limits you will negotiate picturesque Pawtucket, probably the only city in the East where U. S. One--Maine to Florida and main truck route of the nation--squeezes itself into a two lane subsidiary street and wiggles furtively through a series of coal yards while tree-studded residential boulevards intersect it every twenty-five yards. Yes, go through Pawtucket. But the worst is yet to come.

For you may not make it through Providence. Try as you will, within blocks you will be confronted by a one-way-street sign, then another, then another. In relentless profusion the little arrows follow each other on the sign posts. In ever-decreasing spirals you pursue them. Perhaps an accident of planning has left you an escape route, and you break out, breathless, into the welcome air of some more coal yards. But do not count on your escape. For eventually you must arrive at that squalid square where all the one-way signs point inward. It is a large area, teeming with unshaven men who will approach you and offer you fifty dollars spot cash for your car and throw in a train ticket to Boston; a square where cars go to die. Sell your car there, and be glad to get out alive. But better still, trust not to Providence. Trust instead to the salutary flooding that can come only from the Bay.