What remained: an essay
By Tom Cowen
EDITOR’S NOTE: From time to time, we run installments of creative writing, like this essay and work of literary nonfiction.
Boulders, dozens the size of basketballs, several as big as Mini Coopers, tumble one upon the next. downward to the sea. Pushing, thunderous, a hundred bowling lanes on a Rust Belt Saturday evening. Rocks fracture. Pebbles crush to dust and spit toward the sea in one quick swoosh. A final dust puff curls to the sky and lingers for a moment.
From the sea, a twenty-five-foot-wide gash is now visible on the Cliff Walk. First carved into the shoreline in the late nineteenth century, the Cliff Walk had withstood hurricanes in 1938 and 1954, surrendering an edge before reclaiming it each time. Centered between First Beach and Rough Point, jagged, bleeding rocks naked to the water below. It is 3 p.m. on a Thursday in March 2022, as a woman walks her dog nearby, hears the rumble and makes the 911 call. By some good fortune it is not a summer Saturday, and no one drops from the pavement to the sea.
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“The center will not hold.” 1
It is not until my Covid-delayed Salve Regina graduation two months later that I discover the Cliff Walk’s collapse. Virginia creeper lingers in my throat, as I search for the best angle of Easton Bay’s calm expanse to frame my graduation photograph. I wander a few steps off the lawn and stop short at a temporary fence. Cliff Walk closed.
Beyond it, the walkway is gone, the cliff’s face shattered, the vertical drop to the sea now exposed. The section that fell is familiar. It is on a stretch my wife, Ronee, and I had wandered through on our first trip to Newport thirty years earlier. The trip, inspired by The New York Times’ “36 Hours in Newport,” where the Cliff Walk was included as one of the stops.
We had descended the Forty Steps and watched the water work its way in and out of the rocks, crashing against its walls. We marveled over Easton Bay, First Beach on the left, and the Atlantic on our right. Eighteen months later, I led Ronee down the Forty Steps again and placed a blanket on the flattest rock outcropping I could find. I uncorked a bottle of the finest Meursault I could afford and proposed as Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” played. After dinner at Castle Hill, we drove back to the Ivy Lodge through a blinding downpour. Rounding Gooseberry Cove, I thought our car might wash into the sea.
Those trips were a beginning, a pilgrimage when we felt the urge, and Newport became habit over the next several years. And each time it was clam chowder at the Black Pearl, dinner at Castle Hill, the Cliff Walk, one of the Gilded Age mansions, and Ocean Drive, before crossing the Newport Bridge. In Newport, we were newlyweds, then a young married couple. A long weekend here, a night there. It became the place I told every New Yorker was the ideal long weekend destination. Many of them visited and returned home with Newport somehow theirs too. Newport, borrowed, admired, and returned.
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Two years after my graduation, I walked through the Salve Regina campus towards the Cliff Walk. To my surprise, the detour still existed, and work had not yet begun. Two years lost to debates over rebuilding, engineering studies, and who owned the problem.
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As our family expanded, first with Brandon and then Justin, we adjusted to Newport. Our stays always included the essentials, but we shifted from bed-and-breakfasts to hotels. From the Marriott my two sons and I stood at our window and watched the Newport Gulls play across the street. Newport had a baseball team.
On one Ocean Drive exit, we bought a kite and I sent it high into the cloudless sky. For a moment it flew steady and bright amongst the others, before nosediving into the parking lot. From then on, as we left town, we stopped at Brenton Point but never flew again.
Justin was eleven the last time we visited Newport as a family.
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” 2
Sometime after that last family trip to Newport, I began to write, trying to make sense of what once was. I took local workshops and improved, but I wanted more, so I began looking at MFA programs. That was when I found the low-residency program at Salve Regina. The thought of returning to Newport to write lingered. Going back to school at 54 felt improbable, almost absurd. Salve’s program was newly founded by Ann Hood, who had lost her five-year-old daughter, Gracie Belle, to a virulent form of strep. I read her memoir, Comfort, in a single night and emailed her the next morning. Two months later, I walked under the carved limestone arch at Ochre Court and through its heavy wooden double doors. From the Ochre Court patio, I saw the spot where I had proposed on the Forty Steps.
Through five residencies including three during Covid-19, I wrote about Justin and how it all started the spring after our last trip to Newport. What began as Justin’s late-night pleas from down the hallway, “Mom,” first an ask, then a cry, then a shriek, before it became something more.
After Justin was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in his cervical spine, weeks compressed into days. Cancerous cells pressed into healthy bones, crushing what had held his head upright and given his arms and legs movement. Solid bones eroded by bad cells, time beating against his spine.
He was twelve. His body thinned. I could slip my fingers between his ribs. His hair clumped in the sink. Ten weeks later, his arms fell like wet noodles to his sides. The surgeons brought his arms back to life and reconstructed his neck with titanium scaffolding visible on X-ray.
For a time, it held. The scans changed. The pain returned. Justin died six months later. Our suitcases stayed in the closet.
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In early 2025, the Cliff Walk remained broken. That July, after three years of detours and uncertainty, the City of Newport secured an $11 million federal grant to rebuild what had given way.
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Born and raised in New York City, Tom Cowen lives in the beautiful town of Ridgefield, Conn. He is an above-average sales engineer, retired amateur boxer, and barely serviceable hockey player. He has been published in Post Road, Connecticut Literary Anthology, The Forge Literary Magazine, and Montana Mouthful, amongst others. He graduated from the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University and is working on a memoir about his courageous son, Justin.
1 Joan Didion, “The Center Will Not Hold (2017)”
2 Joan Didion, “The White Album”
