Norfology

Norfologists, 2010

For a moment I felt like I was in a pub in Amsterdam. Well, I was drinking a Dutch beer. And I was surrounded by a crowd of hip young people. And it was a pub only in the respect that the hip young people were gathered around tables engaged in earnest discussion about the future of the city they call home.

Norfologists, they call themselves. Norfology is a joint project of AltDaily, a local online magazine and the City of Norfolk Department of Economic Development. The purpose of the project is to create a sense of community among young professionals that can, among other things, help stem the city’s brain drain.

Last night’s gathering was designed to give some of the project’s followers a chance to identify issues of importance to them and see if there were ways they could work together to address these issues. There were table discussions on such issues as public transportation, the local music scene, bike paths, high-speed rail and, just to keep things lively, spiritual mindfulness.

Strictly speaking, I was just there to observe (hiding discreetly behind a succession of bottled beers and peeking out only so often to grab a coconut-encrusted fried shrimp from my plate before Walt and Hannah ate them all). There’s a good thirty years of age and grizzled life experience between me and most of the people there. I don’t even live in Norfolk. But I am very interested in civic engagement and wanted to see how this group worked and what kinds of issues they raised.

I’m always impressed when I see people come together determined to work on something. Last night’s group had a sense of enthusiasm and open-mindedness that was energizing. I don’t know if all the young people there fit the “young professional” definition exactly. But they cared enough to come out by bicycle, bus, car and foot to take part in the conversation. That’s more than enough for me. Did I mention there was beer?

Oh, and the picture above? That’s, from left to right, the charming Ginger expounding on the merit of keeping sand bags around for when the Lafayette River rises, Stan politely trying to look interested and Walt trying to bring us all to our senses with a rousing read from the book of Leviticus.

More Norfologists, 2010

Riding the Rails

Grand Central Terminal, 2007

My father worked almost all of his career for railroads, most of that time for just one, the Norfolk & Western Railway. When I was a kid, family members of railroad employees got passes that allowed them to travel for free anywhere on the line. My sister came along just in time to take advantage of this when she was in college. But the time I came of age, the passes had been phased out and the whole concept of passenger rail was undergoing change. The once genteel passenger rail service on the N&W—on trains named Powhatan, Pocahontas and Raleigh—was disappearing and would be eliminated or substantially reduced by the time I got to college and could have used one of those passes to see the country.

But those years of riding the N&W up and down the track between Norfolk and Roanoke left their imprint on me. To this day I can think of no more civilized way to travel than to step on a train, take a comfortable seat by the window and watch the view as the train glides down the tracks.

Of course, rail travel isn’t what it used to be. When I was a child and rode the train back and forth between Norfolk and Roanoke to visit my father, the passenger cars were becoming worn looking. But the dining cars were still shiny and were staffed by proud black men who were not only thoroughly serious and professional in their jobs, but also had pride of being among the most respected members of the African American middle class. On the N&W, the dining car service was impeccable and you ate off real china and used real silver flatware. In my mind’s eye I can still see and hear those silver pitchers from which they served ice water and tea.

I’m far from a serious rail aficionado. But when there is a good opportunity for me to take a train instead of flying or driving, I’ll be on the train. My friend Greg Ward wrote the other day about a trip he and his son took to and from Washington by train. This is a trip I’ve taken a number of times, and extended as far north as Boston and, on VIA Rail Canada, across Eastern Canada from Toronto to Quebec.

Union Station, Richmond, 1970

Trains are great places for stories because you’re generally seating around a lot of people for several hours at a time. It’s also my experience that train people also tend to be more sociable than airplane passengers, too. One time I got on the club car headed north out of Newport News, Virginia, and the only other passenger in the car was a woman freshly released from a psychiatric hospital. She was clearly nervous to be on her own and had the slight difficulty walking that people who use lithium to stabilize their mood sometimes have. But she was friendly and harmless. The two of us rode alone in the rail car for the first twenty minutes of the ride up to Williamsburg. But in that twenty minutes the woman managed to tell me her entire life story, all of the protocols of her most recent hospitalization and all about the relatives she was going to stay with in Philadelphia. While doing this, she also managed to dump everything in her purse and suitcase out on the floor of the rail car. I mean everything. The floor around her seat was awash with eyeliner pencils, lipsticks, coins, pens, train tickets, Chap sticks, candy wrappers, all kinds of scraps of paper, cigarettes, keys and underwear.

When more passengers got on at Williamsburg, I was relieved to have someone else on board to keep the woman occupied. Several very proper Southern ladies—the kind who still wore white gloves when they traveled by train—looked as the woman as if she was dangerous. By the time the train pulled out of the station and headed for Richmond, though, the woman had gathered up all her belongings, the porter had helped her pack them back into her bags and settled the woman back into her seat, where she was much calmer now that we’d gotten a few miles closer to her destination. Every now and then for the next couple of hours, I’d hear her laugh out loud as she described to seatmates who got on in Richmond, Washington and Baltimore how much fun she was going to have when she got to Philadelphia. But by then hers was just one of many conversations floating among the congenial band of travelers in the last car on a train headed north.

Final Voyage

Final Voyage, 1989

On a blustery March day in 1989 that still carried the taste of winter, the S.S. United States was indignantly nudged by tugs down Norfolk, Virginia's Elizabeth River after being out of service for 20 years. United States was once the mighty mistress of the North Atlantic cruise trade. The design of her rakish bow and hull were, quite literally, state secrets. She held the transatlantic crossing speed record for her entire term of service.

During a routine annual overhaul visit in 1969 to the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company, where United States had been built only seventeen years earlier, the United States Line abruptly took her out of service, a casualty of the growing popularity of trans-Atlantic air travel. Her crew was given only enough time to pack their personal belongings and depart the ship. United States was later towed to an empty pier a few miles away in Norfolk, where she remained sealed and rusting for twenty years.

During her time in Norfolk, a series of investors and speculators came and went with plans for returning United States to service, none of them viable enough to result in any action. Despite her structural integrity and speed--there were reports that she was so fast that water literally blew out of temporary swimming pools rigged on her upper deck--United States had been designed for North Atlantic service and wasn't suitable for the growing Caribbean cruise trade.

By the late 1980s, the owners of United States were years behind in their rent for the pier and the Norfolk International Terminal wanted the space she occupied to expand its container handling operation. The ship's owners announced an auction of the ship's interior furnishings. Remember, everything on the ship was left just as it had been that afternoon in 1969 when she was taken out of service. Beds were unmade, ship's logs letters to loved ones were left unfinished, menus were in mid-course. Visiting the ship to see auction items was like pulling back the cover on a maritime pyramid. Hermetically sealed behind rusty hatches, the sleek moderne furniture and interior décor of United States was so untouched that you half expected the ghost of Cole Porter to start playing one of her famously fireproof pianos. Following the auction, the ship was to be moved temporarily to Newport News so that she could be readied for a tow to Turkey, where breakers were to gut the ship's interior so that she could be redeveloped.

On the appointed day of the move, I accompanied a few friends on a small sail boat to watch the move. It was a bitter cold and rainy morning. We left before sunrise in order to arrive at the United States before she departed Norfolk. Because the chains holding United States to the pier were so rusty, it was actually late afternoon before they could be broken and the ship pulled away from the pier. I was using my 22 year-old Nikkormat camera and filled several rolls of film documenting United States's trip down the foggy river. It was thrilling to watch her under way, even if not under her own power.

Unfortunately, only a few images from the day survive. The place where I took my film to be processed managed to destroy most of the negatives. The photograph above is an admittedly impressionistic view. The original negative was so damaged that anything else was out of the question. Over the years I've actually come to like this image more than a more literal interpretation would have been. I'd love to have this on a canvas large enough to cover a wall.

[In 1996, the S.S. United States returned home to the U.S. from her asbestos gutting sojourn to Turkey and the Ukraine and has been laid up and rusting in Philadelphia ever since.]