Location

March 13, 2008

I flew out Thursday to Norfolk – the birthplace of Wayne Newton himself and home to several military bases, including Naval bases, Army bases, maintenance shipyards – for a quick business trip in Chesapeake.

At the Norfolk airport I realized something: You can tell a lot about a city by its airport: how clean it is, how easily navigable it is (O’Hare sprawls and is cold and sterile, for example) and what sort of people are passing through it (Norfolk, a family-friendly city, has lots of young, clean middle-class parents and their children). Even its setting among rows and rows of stately lodge pole pines was calming, a nice place to spend the weekend.

Grabbed lunch in Chesapeake at Paradocks, a large, Outer Banks-themed sports bar in the new city center. Good ribs, hush puppies and local Williamsburg Ale. I had dinner at Sterlings, one of the sprawling city’s newest additions to its DIY town square, a large commercial development south of the city’s ambiguous center. It’s all planned development, since the city has no true center. Heck, it wasn’t even a city until just four decades ago, when the Village of Suffolk incorporated with several other small villages. Anyway, I had the Seafood Norfolk, a dish of crab, whitefish and other shellfish – although the fish wasn’t local.

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Chesapeake, Virginia
March 14, 2008

All business, all day, but a very insightful one. The city, home to 223,000 people, is one of the largest land wise in the state at 353 square miles. So naturally its Public Works Department has a lot of challenges. Its waste management fleet alone employs 80 people who collect refuse from 65,000 households.

More than 2,700 miles of ditches snake through the city, causing massive erosion problems when heavy rains hit the city.

It’s also the only municipality in Virginia that operates movable bridges, and only one city has more bridges overall.

Encompassing half of the city and stretching into North Carolina is the Great Dismal Swamp, an expansive, shadowy – and uninhabitable – place that George Washington thought he could drain for fertile farmland. The swamp defeated him. Today there’s a bike trail that runs along the old colonial highway (a corduroy road on which saplings were once laid because of a lack of other materials). For years the swamp was so remote that the road was named one of the most dangerous in America – especially when the swamp flooded. There was no escape route.

Washington did build the Great Dismal Swamp Canal as a trade route with North Carolina. It’s the oldest continuously used man-made canal in the United States and has been in service for more than 230 years. The canal was quiet, still and overgrown during my visit. It was also a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Another testament to the city’s colonial roots is the Intracoastal Waterway, which passes through Chesapeake. In the middle of the city is the neighborhood of Great Bridge – and that neighborhood’s namesake bridge, where the locks transition from the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River to the Chesapeake and Albemarle Canal. Just a few hundred yards away is the site of the Battle of Great Bridge, which was responsible for removing the last vestiges of English government from the colony during the early days of the American Revolution Dec. 9, 1775.

The site is located on a nondescript bridge over calm, meandering water among brown cattails, commercials buildings and parking lots. As quickly as I drove over it, I will never forget the scene: that was the place where the Revolution picked up momentum, right there among modern-day suburbia.

Back at the bridge, I had the honor of raising it for an empty fuel tanker heading to a fuel dock on the Elizabeth to return with a full load to the pipeline on the coast that supplies Oceana Naval Air Station. Considering all the mechanics involved in lifting such a massive bridge, I actually didn’t do much (the hydraulics did), but it was fun. The pedestrian gates closed, then the traffic gates, then I unlocked the two spans and slowly raised them, stopping traffic for a mile in either direction. Nice.

Chesapeake is the only city in Virginia with movable bridges and has the second most number of bridges overall in the state. I had lunch in the office of the Chesapeake Expressway, which efficiently moves traffic around the city to North Carolina, where it jams up again, but that’s not their problem.

Chesapeake is a city of villages, incorporated only in the 1960s, so its residents strongly identify with the areas they grew up in, such as the Village of Great Bridge.

An altogether different bridge – the Jordan Bridge – was created by an act of Congress in 1928. Since it is balanced by counterweights, it’s a smooth ride to the top in the lift bridge. The ride past the heavy lattice work of iron tresses is short, and before we knew it, we were 135 feet in the air, “higher than just about anywhere in southeast Virginia,” somebody said. I could see downtown Norfolk and the nearby Naval shipyards just a few miles north. The view overlooks the Elizabeth River north to the dry docks where the Merrimac was built and launched toward the Atlantic.

I drove to Norfolk past the Norfolk Naval Station, the biggest in the United States.

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Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia
March 15, 2008

Saturday was a day of nothing but soaking in the military history of Norfolk and Portsmouth as I killed time before my flight home.

I boarded the water taxi to Portsmouth from the Norfolk Naval Shipyard Museum, showcasing America’s oldest and largest naval shipyard on the Portsmouth waterfront. Its location is so strategically important that it has been burned three times by retreating armies. It also gave birth to such historic ships as the CSS Virginia (aka the Merrimac) – the first ironclad to engage in battle – as well as the Texas, the nation’s first battleship, and the Langley, the world’s first aircraft carrier.

What turned out to be more interesting, though, was the Lightship Portsmouth. Built in 1915, the 101-foot-long ship served under the U.S. Lightship Service as a navigational aid, similar to a lighthouse and buoy. The lights on her mast illuminated the waters off the East Coast for 48 years. Usually these ships would anchor at a strategic location at sea and remain there for months at a time. Think about it: A sailor worked through the night – every night – something that’s always fascinated me, the night shift. And out at sea. I suppose life grew dull, since the Portsmouth only held a maximum crew of 15. A National Historic Landmark, the ship is filled with artifacts, uniforms and photographs that highlight a time and place that I never knew existed.

Olde Towne Portsmouth is a largely residential district characterized by Federal, Greek Revival and Reconstruction-era houses and churches. Named at Portsmouth, England, the city was laid out in checkerboard style with its four main corners home to a church, a market, a courthouse and a jail. It was populated by Scottish merchants and ship owners as well as craftsmen who built and rigged the ships. Three-hundred-year-old houses line the gravel-and-brick-paved streets: silent except for the birds and the occasional dog.

The houses are genuine, renovated without pretense. They are utilitarian and certainly not ostentatious, with their chipped paint and broken windows here and there. I took the paddleboat ferry back across the Elizabeth, named by John Smith in honor of the sister of King Charles I. We passed the mighty naval cranes as a hulky military chopper buzzed overhead. The pristine harbor front is nurtured, no doubt, by the ever-present military way of life.

Back at Norfolk, I spent some time at the MacArthur Memorial, the final resting place of the general and his wife in downtown Norfolk’s restored City Hall.

… “War’s very object is victory and not prolonged indecision. In war, there can be no substitute for victory … to carry to the land of our vanquished foe the solace and hope and faith of Christian morals.” – MacArthur …

He was seemingly influenced by his father’s enlistment in the Civil War, in which General Sherman introduced the concept of total war – waged on civilians and soldiers alike, destroying the enemy’s capacity to wage war. Among the items in the collection are his famously slightly tinted aviator sunglasses, his massive corn cob pipe and cap, the flag flown from the USS Norfolk during the Leyto Gulf landing in 1944, his Congressional Medal from ’62, the pistol carried by MacArthur on Corregidor, his 1936 field marshal baton – gold, polished and proud, and the unassuming faded brown and green fountain pen that was used to end World War II when he signed the Japanese surrender document Sept. 2, 1945.

Then I stopped at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the only pre-Revolutionary War building in downtown Norfolk. Built in 1739, it was severely damaged Jan. 1, 1776, and a British cannonball remains lodged in the south wall. I tried walking the Cannonball Trail, which connects historic sites downtown, but it wasn’t as nice as Portsmouth’s, which doesn’t bother with the fancy doings of “registering” its houses.

One of the most memorable sites was the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, home to exhibits that highlight more than two centuries of naval activity around the harbors of Hampton Roads, which gave birth to naval aviation. I touched the bell of the USS Virginia – the famous Confederate ironclad ram.

I learned that it was on Hampton Roads that the British and French fought the most important battle of the Revolutionary War – off Cape Henry – to secure the independence of the United States.

I concluded the long military field trip with a walk on the Battleship Wisconsin. With its towering masts and streamlined silhouette, it recalls a bygone era of naval glory and lore. It’s hard to imagine 3,000 blue jackets and officers occupying it with its big-gun firepower throughout its long life, which concluded with battles in the first Gulf war.