“It’s a magical place,” Paul Earnshaw says.

He has been the eyes and voice of Buckeye Brook since 2002.  However, after lightening hit his Conimicut property, he stepped down as vice president of the Buckeye Brook Coalition.

The bolt hit at 4 a.m. on Aug. 5 leading to an unfortunate series of events at the Earnshaw residence on Brightside Avenue. A large red oak, approximately 18 inches wide, crashed through Earnshaw’s kayak rack full of boats, as well as his neighbor’s car and roof.

“I literally rolled off my bed and onto the floor because I was so scared the branches would come through the window,” said Colleen Avakian, Earnshaw’s neighbor who lives on Henry Street. When the oak tree fell, it totaled her car, smashed through a window, broke seven rafters and put three holes in her roof.

When Earnshaw initially posted on the Coalition’s Facebook page after the fallen tree destroyed his fleet of boats — mostly kayaks and canoes that had been used for community paddle trips and cleanups — he received a lot of support to rebuild the fleet.

“I got a lot of good responses. People wanted to start a fundraiser,” said Earnshaw. “I was really excited but I had to check with the other board members.”

Earnshaw was met with opposition, which he says was not the first time in his 22 years with the Coalition that the board was not in favor of his ideas.

He officially resigned on Thursday.

“I’m tired of being kicked down,” Earnshaw said, disheartened. “But I encourage people to continue to support the Coalition. It is for the benefit of the watershed.”

Earnshaw looks back on his time with the Buckeye Brook Coalition fondly, despite his turbulent relationship with the board. Since the beginning of his tenure, he served as the volunteer coordinator for events and special projects.

When Earnshaw was president, the group did several community paddle trips from Conimicut Point, through Mill Cove, and up the brook, using the 14-foot kayak and 17-foot canoe that were destroyed by the tree. The last trip Earnshaw led was in 2016, and he said his hopes of doing more were rejected by the board over liability concerns. Two different paddling trip guides are currently posted on their website for public use, at https://www.buckeyebrook.org/.

When Earnshaw led these paddling trips, he made sure to highlight the natural and anthropogenic histories of the brook. He knows of all the places along the brook that were used for the Underground Railroad, where rum runners would store their contraband and where Native Americans kept their shell collections.

He also knows about the aquatic ecosystem that calls the brook home, and how the different species interact with each other just below the water’s surface.

“Nature knows itself,” he explained. “The striped bass know that if they don’t let the buckeyes go upstream [to spawn], they’re killing their future meals.” Buckeyes are an anadromous alewife and blue-back herring that make their annual spring spawning run up the brook.

One trip that comes to mind for Earnshaw is when the Warwick Neck Garden Club rented out 15 boats that were brought to Conimicut Point just for the trip in 2009.

“That was quite the scene to see the kayak center arrive with a whole trailer full of kayaks,” he said. “They had a blast.”

Earnshaw grew up in Warwick along the brook, and has memories from his youth of playing with his friends along its banks and catching river herring to sell as bait.

“This was my playground,” he said. “If it wasn’t the Saturday morning cartoons, we bolted. We went exploring.”

His favorite memory of being on the brook comes from his adult life. He, along with Buckeye Brook Coalition founder Steve Insana who passed away in 2009, went snowshoeing along the brook in the winter.

“It was frozen over, so we just walked along it,” Earnshaw said, grinning. “I have this one picture where Steve is just laying on the frozen brook. That was such a magical day.”

When his daughters were young, Earnshaw passed on his love for fishing and for the brook that he received from his father. He taught them how to catch the herring with nets, so that he could have “bait for a year.”

“Some day, when I’m back on my feet financially, I’d like to get a new kayak so I can go out and do what I love,” said Earnshaw, who has been “forced into retirement” due to a series of health issues. He still plans to go count the buckeyes when they run in the spring, with his white bucket of supplies, in his “favorite part of Buckeye Brook” off Warwick Avenue.