Steven Ujifusa

It was a little exactly a year ago that I made my last research trip to Newport News, Virginia. During the course of researching my proposal and the actual book, I had made 3 trips to the Mariners’ Museum, the repository where the design material related to the SS United States, as well as William Francis Gibbs’s surviving personal archives, are kept under lock-and-key.

I took the train twice from Philadelphia twice in mid-2007, a dreary, 6 hour drive through towns that had only appeared in the TV news and history books: Quantico, Ashland, Fredericksburg. I would then get off at the small Newport News station, get a taxi to the Hertz rent-a-car, and drive to the Red Roof Inn in neighboring Hampton. There, I would live the solitary life of a researcher for a week, driving up and down Mercury Boulevard, with its monotonous strip malls filled with anonymous small businesses crying desperately for attention. The low structures were occasionally punctuated by the sickly yellow sign announcing “Waffle House,” hovering above a building illuminated by hanging fluorescent globes. Waffle House and I became quite friendly during these trips. But I did find one local restaurant, tucked away next to a hobby store near the intersection of Mercury and Jefferson Boulevards, a place that served both standard American seafood and Thai/Vietnamese fare. It was run by a wild-haired, bearded man who said he had worked as a fisherman. I remember that he made some excellent coconut soup. He knew of the SS United States, which had been laid in Newport News from 1969 to 1992. It was obvious he was a man of the sea. A framed photo display of a grand yacht named Chanticleer, built in the 1940s and now sitting rotting somewhere in the Hampton Roads area, hung on the restaurant’s faded white walls.

When I returned to Newport News in January 2009, I rented a car in Philadelphia and drove down to Newport News. I decided that I had to remove myself from the fetters of long-distance rail travel and take the scenic route through the farms and back roads of Delaware and Maryland.  I also crossed over the spectacular Chesapeake Bay Bridge, its piers slapped by the churning gray waves of winter.

When I arrived back on the peninsula, I discovered to my dismay that the Thai/Vietnamese restaurant was gone, replaced by an electronics store in its drab, anonymous mini-strip mall. So aside from the meals I cooked on my extended stay room’s small stove, I would be subsisting once again on Waffle House and chain restaurants.

The archives had moved from the Mariners’ Museum proper to Christopher Newport University, a stone’s throw away from the old location. Much of the campus had sprung up seemingly overnight. The new campus was, with the exception of the new library, built to fairly correct Georgian standards, with the exception of greatly exaggerated size. The brickwork, dormers, and arched arcades were executed in what appeared to be historically-correct proportions, although decoration was simplified and porticoes a bit more steeply angled than their older models. Then there was the massive Trimble library, which was a blend of “Virginia Georgian” and “McMansion Baroque,” topped by a laterned dome that loomed over the campus like St. Peter’s Basilica over Rome. The main staircase and rotunda were like the Titanic’s on steroids, all polished marble, dark woods, and gleaming brass. It was here that the Mariner’s Museum Library was now located, in a low-ceiling, windowless space that I spent 8 hours a day for a week poring through two massive volumes that covered all aspects of the SS United States’s design and construction. I took occasional 15 minute breaks, sipping coffee in the Einstein Cafe, or wandering the second floor reading rooms and meeting spaces, all in a baronial scale and plushness. As this was a public university, I wondered where the sudden infusion of cash had come to pay for all this historicist grandeur. An improvement over the cinderblock and concrete “Brutalist” (some would say “Stalinist”) campus architecture I had seen long ago at SUNY Purchase while a summer program student in middle school.

This visit to Newport News, I stayed at one of those extended stay joints that offer a studio with a kitchen. It was nestled in a woodsy area and surrounded by office parks. The room was spartan and institutional, but not exactly stark. I often made breakfast and dinner there, and was often so exhausted by hours bent over books and manuscripts that I would pass out by 9:30pm. But loneliness did set in, and I would hop in the car and drive down Jefferson Boulevard looking for a cheap place to eat. It was a far cry from Center City Philadelphia, where a drink, a box of sushi, and good friends were only a few blocks away.

The library was closed on the weekends, so I sought some cultural nourishment elsewhere. I made a couple of trips to Colonial Williamsburg, where I attended a Sunday service and a harpsichord recital (of all things!) at Bruton Parish Church. I also drove all the way to Charlottesville to make my long-overdue pilgrimage to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. The day was rainy, and quaint little Charlottesville glowered in the dreary, fog-draped Blue Ridge Mountains. Yet by the time I reached the summit of Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain,” the air had cleared somewhat. From the outside, the house looked a lot smaller than I expected, although appearances were deceptive. As I toured the well-manicured, terraced grounds and the Enlightenment-gadget filled house (Thomas Jefferson would have been first in line for an iPhone had they been invented), I could not help contrast the property with the sober, rambling wood-frame farm house occupied by Jefferson’s rival John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts. While Thomas Jefferson sat in his study, surrounded by French furniture and animal/geological specimens gathered during the Lewis and Clark expedition, John Adams worked the rocky Quincy fields alongside his farmhands, digging post-holes and clearing brush. Jefferson, as formidable a scholar and legal mind as Adams, of course had about 200 other people to do the manual labor for him.

Leaving the Mariners’ Museum, I found that there had been a new addition to the entrance: an 18 foot diameter, five bladed bronze propeller suspended above a cascading granite fountain. At dusk, the bronze cast a golden glow over the basin, a shimmering beacon on the street. I am glad that at least one portion of the Big Ship remains in her birthplace.