29 March 2006

WSKY

I walked down Plume Street after three hours on my mobile phone. I had come close to losing charge twice. It was a near thing. It was late afternoon, and I needed to be out in the air. There had been some minor controversy on one of the calls, some unpleasantness I had provoked over the static, not meaning it. But there it was.

Things improved on the next call, or maybe they didn't.

I don't know how to read civilians. And everyone is nervous about jobs and prospects these days. But I have a pension, a small one, but it gives me an escape valve that they don't have.

Plume Street still has some homeless folks, even if the downtown of Norfolk has turned around. It hit bottom around the time that most downtowns did, in the late sixties, and for the same reasons. Today there is construction everywhere, but the sad people are evident, one of them sleeping on a bench in the gathering warmth of the Tidewater Spring in front of the MacArthur Memorial.

I had seen him first in the early afternoon when I went to the hotel to set up my virtual office, and he was still there as I walked down toward Granby Street, his lined face folded in on itself. The Memorial once was the city hall, back before the war.

By that, of course, they still mean the one between the states. The tall pillar with the sad Confederate is just across the street, and there is another, equally disconsolate, in Portsmouth across the Elizabeth River. It was a profound experience being conquered by the Yankees, and hard to forget. There have been many wars since, and Norfolk has contributed to them all.

The cityscape is endearing. There are some unfortunate structures in the Stalinist vein, imposed in the years when Federal money was available to construct them. But much of the rest of downtown is still human scale and of the Federal period when this was a prosperous gateway to old Europe, and the ironclads were just a dream.

It was odd to find myself drawn to this little city. I had spent most of my professional life hating it, and treating those of my trade that lived there with contempt. Not hating the city, per se, since I rarely went there. My time was spent on the sprawling Naval base to the north, where the carriers were berthed, and the big-deck amphibious assault ships rested between deployments.

The Master Jet Base is twenty miles to the west, on the ocean itself, and I spent many weeks there, at the officer's quarters that were right on the ocean, where you could hear the surf and the cry of the gulls. They had a deck just off the little bar where you could sip whiskey and watch the dolphins swim parallel to the sand.

What I really felt was envy. I was a Pacific sailor, and I thought that what we did there was worthy. Fresh out of basic school, I took orders to an ancient ship in an ancient country on the western rim of the broad ocean. I liked Japan, and I loved and hated the amount of time we spent at sea, off to the Persian Gulf twice in two years.

And then Korea, and Hawaii when each tour was done, a vagabond across the broad waters.

My contemporaries who lived here had it all. They had the shore establishment and the ships and the air wings all within driving distance, and if they decided to marry and have children, the schools were a constant, and there were friends that you did not have to make every few years. I envied their soft lives, the small luxuries of buying a house and mostly staying in it.

What I actually resented was the insularity of the Tidewater, the self-contained nature of it, and the ability to maintain a web of associations in advancing the careers against which I was competing.

That all burned away when I figured it out, and became my own contemptuous careerist, migrating to Washington, determined to beat the insiders at their own game. Once I got to DC, I ventured out only twice, once to sail for the wine dark sea from Florida, and the last time to sunny California where life is that of the lotus-eaters, and from which the paucity of shore jobs meant the only real alternative was to return to the imperial city.

Why had I not just come here and stayed? It would have been so much easier. I was lost in the reverie with General MacArthur, who made his greatest fame in the Pacific, as I walked past the homeless man and crypt where the General's bones now rest.

I was debating whether to hit the food court at the downtown mall to take some food back to the room, or to sit down and order something from one of the funky new restaurants in the rapidly gentrifying downtown. Then I turned the slight angle on Plume Street that reflected the lines of the old port. At the end of the street was the Battleship, looming like a gray mountain.

The bulk of the ship perfectly fit the aperture of the street, huge, and the 16-inch guns poked proudly to the sky.

I was riveted. There is no feeling like that of looking at the ultimate manifestation of the Dreadnaught. There were four of them, monsters that raced across the deep and hurled the fire of hell into the heavens. Now they were memorials, and the Navy had given them to cities that would maintain them as attractions.

I have seen them all, and walked two of their teak decks when they were resurrected briefly from their sleep in mothballs. For all their age, they had slept much of their working lives after racing with halsey's fast carrier fleet, being woken only in times of crisis to bombard targets in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq. I can recite the names of the class: Iowa. New Jersey. Missouri. Wisconsin.

The behemoth at the end of Plume Street called to me, and I walked as in a trance. The basin where she lies immobile behind the flood-wall and the watertight gate that can be closed when the storm surge forces itself up the river. She towers far above it, showing the sleek turn that sweeps from her bulbous snout and great anchors to her massive midsection. The curve is exactly that of the grin of a bottle-nose dolphin.

If she was alive, though, she would be a warhorse of the Swedish line steady and swift. But of course, she was alive, if only on the blood and caffeine and whiskey of her sailors.

A friend of mine was graced to be the Captain of one of these astonishing machines. He is long retired now, and given to wearing bow-ties. But when he had his Battleship, they had been equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, and ready to go where they were needed.

The sleek grey ship before me had launched the first strikes of DESERT STORM, and now she lay alongside a public museum, seeming to move even as she slumbered. I could see the informational posters placed on significant parts of her machinery. It could all still move, if someone had the will.

I watched from a little park that has been established at a nice three-quarter vantage, where you can see the grace of her long hull. There are memorial plaques placed where you might contemplate what it takes to send these machines to sea, and what sort of people might be on them when things go awry.

One of them was dedicated to the Lost of a ship that I sailed in, the Forrestal, which we knew informally as the “Forest Fire” for that awful night when hundreds died in her fiery steel embrace.

The nickname of the ship that lies at the end of Plume Street is “Whiskey.” It was not an official name approved by the Navy Department. It might just be a sailor corruption of the name of the Badger State, or it might be a function of the awful morning when an escorting destroyer happened to cross her bow in a thick fog bank.

There is no force in the world that will stop a battleship at speed, and Wisconsin almost cut the destroyer in half, and pushed the lower part of her bow back sixty feet from the impact. She lived, of course, and so improbably did the destroyer, though with much travail.

There was another battleship being built right here in Norfolk at the time. It had gone far enough that it had a name, and a power plant of four mighty engines and shafts that were intended to propel the ship at over thirty-three knots. It was intended to compete with the mightiest leviathan that ever sailed the seas, the Yamato -class battleship of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

As it turned out, the USS Kentucky was never needed. Her elegant machinery was divided up for four new fast supply ships that I steamed alongside, years later, and the bow was chopped off to make a new one for Wisconsin .

The shipyard was said to have put it on in record time. Speculation is that the abbreviations of the contributing ships is what gave the Battleship her nickname.

“WS-KY.”

Maybe, I thought. And maybe it is just a sea story. I turned to walk back up Plume Street with the guns of the Wisconsin at my back. I had some whiskey in the room, and with darkness starting to come, I thought I might drink some, and think.

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