COVENTRY, R.I. — As it turned out, I wasn’t prepared for the interview. I arrived at the Dunkin’ Donuts at the entrance to a local shopping plaza expecting to talk about snow removal from bike paths and sidewalks. Or, more specifically, the lack of its removal.

My late January conversation with Steven Harrison, however, slowly morphed into a talk about addiction, coming out, Lyme disease, food, poetry, the climate crisis, solar energy (he’s flabbergasted that we’re cutting down forests instead of using roofs), and, eventually, snowbound non-vehicle pathways. It ended up being a more interesting and hopeful conversation than I had expected — although how pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure is routinely disregarded in Rhode Island remains a problem.

Shortly after shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, the affable soon-to-be 77-year-old, with a full head of white hair and a big smile that was missing a few teeth, mentioned in passing that “I’m gender fluid, so I dressed guy today. My wife told me, ‘Oh, you’re meeting somebody new, dress guy.’”

He was wearing a pink sweater and a brown scarf with a floral design. Up until that moment, I hadn’t even noticed his attire. I don’t write for GQ.

The northern New Jersey native and his wife, Linda, moved to Rhode Island in the 1990s, so Steven could attend Johnson & Wales University. After owning and operating a New Jersey deli for a decade — “nine years, one month, 16 days, 10 hours, and 5 minutes,” he said. He bought the deli after his father died at 53 and left his son his machine shop, which Steven quickly sold. He was more interested in food than drill bits.

His later-in-life return to academics came after the deli business wore him out.

“Seven days a week, four days off a year, and I was drinking like a like a fish. Well, actually, they don’t drink, so much worse than a fish,” Steven said. “We went on vacation for a week on Cape May, and I was drinking probably a fifth of whiskey a day, and boy on the way back, I was in sheer pain.”

The next morning, Linda took her husband to the hospital. Diagnosed with pancreatitis, he was hospitalized for a week.

“They put in a tube to pump your stomach. You’ve got the IVs on the other side, and you just lay there,” Steven said as he recalled his 1984 brush with mortality. “Finally, they pulled it all out, and I had Jello and then a little bit of food. Then, the doctor comes in. Says, ‘Well, you’ve got a choice. You can quit drinking or die a slow, painful death.’”

Steven choose the former. Nearly four decades later, in 2023 for this three-quarters-of-a-century birthday, he decided to celebrate with an adult beverage.

“On my 75th birthday I said I’m going to try a drink, and I bought a little pint of scotch. Let’s make a highball,” he said. “Took a couple of sips, and I said, ‘This sucks.’ And that was it.”

His abuse of alcohol and marijuana wasn’t caused by the deli, however. His internal strife about who he was played a significant role in his constant search for a buzz. At Rutgers University, he changed majors every year — engineering, chemistry, English, physics — until he flunked out.

“There’s trans men, trans women, and people like me that just dress,” Steven said. “I got to feel like that’s what has been bugging me my whole life. You know that dysphoria, whatever you want to call it, I worked it out.”

His time at Rutgers wasn’t a total waste. It provided time for Steven to refine his cooking skills. He also met Linda, whom he credits for helping him work it out.

“I always liked cooking; it was a cheap way to entertain girls. That’s how I met my wife,” Steven said. “You know, they come over, they’re living in the dorm, and I make a home-cooked meal. Go listen to the record player. I don’t have chairs. I only got the bed. You know, these things happen. She’s the one that never left.”

Linda was a student at Douglass Residential College, a school within Rutgers. “She didn’t graduate either,” Steven said.

Steven eventually told his girlfriend he enjoyed wearing women’s clothing.

“I come out with my gender fluidity, and it kind of threw her for a loop, you know,” Steven recalled. “She brings this guy back, and now he’s somebody else. We finally worked it out. I’m still me. We talk and I ask, ‘Well, how should I dress tomorrow?’ My wife is understanding. I mean, she’s a saint.”

They are still working on how to tell their son, the father of their three grandchildren. Their daughter knows, is fine with it, and actually buys her father dresses for Christmas and his birthday.

“The drinking and the smoking years, I wasn’t the greatest, nicest guy to be around,” Steven said. “So my daughter is OK; my son, we’re still working.”

Soon after arriving in Rhode Island three-plus decades ago, the Harrisons quickly discovered they “loved” the Ocean State. Steven also enjoyed his time at JWU, earning two associate’s degrees: culinary baking and information science.

After spending 25 years in South Kingstown, where they lived a half-mile from the bike path, the Harrisons moved to Fairview Avenue about five years ago. A year after that, Steven was diagnosed with Lyme disease. The next year and a half were difficult, and a blur. He was living in a heavy fog. For a month, he had an IV constantly feeding him antibiotics. He spent time at an adult day-care facility in East Greenwich.

“I was totally blank. For that year and a half, I do not remember much of anything,” Steven said. “I was mobile, and my wife took care of me. An Uber would take me to adult day care.”

His passion for the environment and being outdoors is what made him susceptible to the debilitating disease. “I love the woods. That’s how I got Lyme,” he said. “I spend a lot of time in the woods.”

Steven also spends a lot of time walking and bicycling. On the windy and chilly day we met, he walked about a mile each way from and back to his house. There was little snow left from the most recent snowfall, so the sidewalks weren’t obstructed.

As every Rhode Islander knows, sidewalks are seldom cleared after it snows, despite municipal laws that make property owners responsible for clearing snow and ice from sidewalks in a reasonable amount of time after it stops falling.

“People don’t shovel their sidewalks,” Steven said. “If you’re not on the sunny side of the street, it doesn’t melt. I’ve finally had enough. Why can’t sidewalks and bike paths be cleared?”

He noted a lot of people, especially older people like himself, who often walk to get around, are left out in the cold because sidewalks are impassable. Bike paths that help some commuters get to work or provide an avenue for exercise for others are left covered in snow and ice.

He recently sent a letter to the state Department of Transportation and a number of municipal departments expressing his concern.

“Our bike paths are a wonderful resource and I applaud how well they are maintained most of the year. However when snow and ice form they are rendered unusable for many of us, especially older folks,” Steven wrote. “Why can’t plows take a final run down the bike paths once the roads are cleared of snow and ice? Would the additional time (cost) be that much more given the benefit to us all?”

Despite the climate crisis gripping the globe, the blitzkrieg of lawlessness in D.C., and growing attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community, he believes we have the capacity and empathy to make change.

“We need to get back to a calmer level of discussion,” Steven said. “You know, instead of pulling and pushing, let’s start to work together, because I see this globe that we’re on as a small, enclosed environment. We have too much capability to keep going at each other, because the things that are changing around us are going to become too big to solve, and that means, you know, another mass extinction, and we might be the dinosaurs.”

At the end of our conversation, I asked Steven to send me one of his poems. A few days later, I received this:

Ancient Wisdom

Listen
to what the stones say
When your mind is quiet
your thoughts still.

They measure time
in millions of years
Certainly more
than I can understand.

Here before life itself
we humans must seem
but a recent blip
An unruly one at that,
not showing much respect.

Listen to what the stones say
they are the elders of the earth
You are but guests here
Act as such.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.