11 Things Rhode Islanders Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union and has the longest official name — the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, recently shortened by referendum — and it has been conducting its entire existence with the energy of a place that knows it is small and has decided that this is not a problem but rather a perspective, a vantage point, a condition that concentrates rather than limits. Everything about Rhode Island is compressed — its geography, its history, its accent, its opinions — into a density that produces something that feels much larger than its 1,214 square miles of actual land suggest. You can drive across Rhode Island in forty-five minutes. You will not understand Rhode Island in forty-five minutes. You will not understand Rhode Island in forty-five years. You will be offered a coffee milk while you try.

1. Drink coffee milk like it’s the only logical state beverage

Coffee milk — cold milk mixed with coffee-flavored syrup, specifically Autocrat or Eclipse brand, a product so Rhode Island that it has been the official state drink since 1993 — is consumed by Rhode Islanders from childhood with the unquestioned comfort of people who grew up with it and have never needed it to be more exotic than it is. It is not coffee. It is not chocolate milk. It is its own thing, sweet and lightly coffee-flavored, consumed cold, and presented to visitors with the casual confidence of people who know it sounds strange and have decided that’s the visitor’s problem to work through. Most visitors work through it within one glass. The second glass happens without prompting.

2. Give directions in time rather than distance and treat this as perfectly logical

“It’s about twenty minutes from here” is a complete set of directions in Rhode Island. Not twenty minutes on which road, in which direction, through which towns — just twenty minutes, because Rhode Island is small enough that the direction is implicit, the route is obvious to anyone who actually lives here, and the time is more useful than the mileage anyway. Out-of-staters who ask for street-by-street directions receive them with mild confusion, because in Rhode Island you sort of just know, and if you don’t know, you’re from away, and if you’re from away, twenty minutes is enough information to get started.

3. Eat a hot wiener from a New York System restaurant and regard it as a culinary pinnacle

The New York System wiener — a small natural casing hot dog in a steamed bun, topped with a meat sauce made from a recipe so closely guarded it might qualify as a trade secret, yellow mustard, chopped onion, and celery salt — is a Rhode Island institution served by vendors who line the dogs up their arm and dress them assembly-line style, from the elbow down, a technique so specific to this food that it has its own name: working up the arm. It is called a New York System wiener and has nothing to do with New York. Rhode Island has never fully explained this. Rhode Island doesn’t plan to.

4. Pronounce “car” as “cah” and “idea” as “idear” and find both pronunciations correct

The Rhode Island accent is one of the most distinctive regional accents in America — a non-rhotic New England accent that drops the r from words where it exists and sometimes adds an r to words where it doesn’t, producing a linguistic landscape where “car” is “cah” and “idea” becomes “idear” and “water” becomes “watah” and the word “wicked” gets used with a frequency and a warmth that suggests it is doing a lot of emotional labor in the dialect. Rhode Islanders who move away are identified immediately by the accent. They do not lose the accent. It is structural.

5. Treat Del’s Frozen Lemonade as a seasonal religious obligation

Del’s Lemonade — a frozen slush made with real lemon chunks, tart and sweet in a ratio that seems engineered for the specific weather of a Rhode Island summer — is a roadside institution that Rhode Islanders consume with a seasonal devotion that borders on obligatory. The opening of Del’s stands in spring is a genuine milestone. The first Del’s of the season is discussed. The last Del’s before the stands close for winter is mourned. In between, Del’s is consumed at beaches, after Little League games, on the way home from anywhere, as a reason to go out when there’s no other reason, as the answer to a summer afternoon that needed an answer.

6. Refer to a drinking fountain as a “bubblah” and find the word “fountain” unnecessarily formal

“Bubblah” — the Rhode Island and eastern Massachusetts term for drinking fountain, derived from an early brand name — is used by Rhode Islanders with the complete naturalness of people for whom this is simply what a drinking fountain is called. The word “fountain” is understood and occasionally used but carries with it a slight formality that the situation rarely requires. Rhode Islanders who move to other states discover the word is unusual at approximately the same moment that someone asks them to repeat what they just said about the water, and the expression on their face as they realize they have a regional word for drinking fountain is one of genuine surprise.

7. Drive to the ocean from anywhere in the state in under thirty minutes and treat this as a human right

Rhode Island has 400 miles of coastline — an extraordinary amount for a state of its size — and a significant portion of the population lives within twenty minutes of salt water, which has produced a relationship with the ocean that is less recreational than existential. The beach in Rhode Island is not a destination. It is a default. “We went down the beach” is said about a Tuesday evening the way others say they went for a walk. The proximity of the ocean is not a luxury in Rhode Island. It is a baseline condition of life that Rhode Islanders who move inland discover they miss in a way they weren’t fully prepared for.

8. Take the mob history of Providence with a complicated, affectionate relationship that defies easy summary

Providence was for decades the home base of the New England mob — the Patriarca crime family, which operated out of a vending machine company on Federal Hill and maintained relationships with local politics and law enforcement that became the subject of federal investigations, journalistic exposés, and at least one very good book. Rhode Islanders discuss this history with the ambivalent fondness of people acknowledging something that was real and complicated and is now mostly gone and was, in its time, also kind of interesting. Federal Hill is now a restaurant district. The vending machine company is gone. The pasta is excellent. The history is present in a way that is hard to articulate and easy to feel.

9. Eat calamari as a state appetizer with a regional pride that the legislature has made official

Rhode Island designated calamari as the official state appetizer in 2014 — fried squid rings and tentacles, served with banana pepper rings and a dipping sauce, a nod to the state’s Italian-American heritage and its proximity to the sea — and Rhode Islanders eat it with the comfortable familiarity of a food that has been on every menu they’ve ever encountered. The calamari in Rhode Island is very good. The calamari at chain restaurants in landlocked states is not the same thing. Rhode Islanders who have experienced both are aware of this in a way that has permanently affected their ordering behavior at chain restaurants in landlocked states.

10. Refer to the entire state as a neighborhood and mean it structurally

Rhode Island functions socially like a neighborhood — everyone knows someone who knows someone, the six degrees of separation collapse to approximately two and a half, and social connections operate with the density of a place where the population is small and long-established and has had time to become thoroughly interconnected. “Do you know so-and-so from Cranston?” is asked and answered with a frequency that outsiders find remarkable. Rhode Islanders find it unremarkable because in a state of a million people where families have been here for generations, of course you know someone who knows them. Of course. That’s just how this works.

11. Maintain a pride in Rhode Island that is inversely proportional to its size and completely serious

Rhode Island is first in several things that matter deeply to Rhode Islanders: first in religious freedom, first in declaring independence from Britain (two full months before the Declaration), home to one of the finest art schools in the world (RISD), and possessor of a Gilded Age Newport that put on display the most spectacular concentration of American wealth in the 19th century. Rhode Islanders recite these facts with the quiet confidence of people who know that the rest of the country forgets about their state and have decided the best response to this is to simply know more about it than everyone else. They do. They always do. You’ll hear about it within twenty minutes of arriving. Which is, coincidentally, how long it takes to drive across.

Rhode Island does not need to be big to matter. It has been figuring this out since 1636, when Roger Williams founded Providence on the principle of religious tolerance and separation of church and state, and the state has been operating on that original stubbornness — the conviction that being small and being right are not mutually exclusive — ever since. It has its coffee milk and its hot wieners and its Del’s lemonade and its 400 miles of coastline and its accent that identifies you anywhere you go and its mob history and its calamari and its two-and-a-half degrees of separation and its completely justified pride in a place that is, by any honest measure, much larger than it looks. You can drive across it in forty-five minutes. That was never the point.