Blue Highways (58 page)

Down state 115 southeast toward Taunton. I had to keep checking route markers for the northwest-bound traffic in order to stay on course. Rule of the blue road: the highway side to where you’ve been is better marked than the one to where you’re going.

Perhaps inclined by days past, I found myself heading toward Narragansett Bay, an area in which I’d spent my Navy service during the sixties. The whole time, the shining waxen eyes of the old stone face, like Uncle Sam’s on the recruiting posters, watched from every angle.

F
ALL
River, Massachusetts, is chiefly memorable for me as the factory city I have never driven through without losing the way. Once there—predictably, inexplicably, and utterly—I am confounded by the knots of concrete. So, that day, entangled again, it was like old times. Maybe that’s what set me up to expect Newport to be the same.

The island of Rhode Island is a misshapen boot in Narragansett Bay; just above the instep stands the old town center of Newport, and around the sole stepping into the Atlantic is the other Newport: that of the exclusive oceanside gilded estate “cottages,” detached in space, attitude, and history. Old harborside Newport, however historic, was never quaint; it was much too rough and lusty for that. Nor was it ever a preserved relic like Wickford or picturesquely cute like Little Compton, other Rhode Island villages. In short, it was a
real
sea town.

I’d spent my share of Navy time in Newport down on Thames Street (also known as Bloody Alley), which had ever been the waterfront thoroughfare, although things had slipped and no longer was it the main business street. But in the seventeenth century only a madman or seer might have predicted that upstart New York City would have an avenue more important than the Alley.

Thames Street—a narrow, dark trench of a lane under hip roofs and gables and old doorways with fanlights—had seen the likes of Captain Kidd, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, Baron Steuben, Count von Fersen (a lover of Marie Antoinette), Nathanael Greene, Gilbert Stuart, Stephen Decatur, Oliver Perry (Battle of Lake Erie), Matthew Perry (opening of Japan), Herman Melville, most of the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, and Kennedys, and a thousand-thousand fishermen and sailors. Not bad for a street that began as a swamp.

Citizens of Newport hanged pirates at the north end of the Alley, buccaneers and merchantmen refitted ships at the Thames Street wharfs, and Englishmen impressed American seamen they found wandering “the Strand,” as it was once called. The first cobblestones were bought with receipts levied on each slave imported from Africa (later, any Negro who owned a pig and sty could vote in a mock election for a black governor at the corner of Thames and Farewell streets). In one house nearby, a boy in his father’s arms, upon seeing George Washington, said, “Why, father! General Washington is a man!” To which the general replied, “Yes, only a man.”

After the British stole the town blind and devastated the area, following their three-year occupation during the Revolutionary War, new businesses grew up around Thames: sugar refining, rum distilling, malt brewing, the bottling of sperm whale oil. Sea captains’ children, hoping for a pet monkey or a parrot from Brazil, came down to Thames Street to meet their fathers’ ships; officers of the line walked between piled boxes of Turkish brass, Chinese porcelain, Persian carpets, Japanese lacquerware, Indian spices; and they caroused in clubs where they drank Newport Punch made of rum, lime juice, arrack, and loaf sugar.

Before the Civil War, summer colonists from Charleston, Mobile, Havana, and the Indies strolled the Strand, although few stayed after dusk. Fishermen pitched pennies and bet on impromptu dog fights and sold fish from wheelbarrows on Bannister’s Wharf (Pero Bannister, a long-nosed oysterman, died suddenly and had to be buried in a makeshift coffin so shallow the undertaker was forced to cut a hole in the lid for Pero’s nose).

When I saw Thames Street the first time in the sixties, it was still a dark little guttery thing filled with the odor of beer and fried food and dimestore perfume; the noise was music, shouts, laughter, gull screeches. The Navy remained its main order of business. At five o’clock on a summer evening, when the Alley really came to, you saw pressed white uniforms of the gobs, shining black oxfords, and faces wiped down with Old Spice; but as the street emptied in the dark morning, the uniforms now smudged and rumpled and stinking of beer, there would be vomiting and sometimes fights. While the terms differed, to sailors and high society (“The Four Hundred”) alike, Thames Street was “the asshole of Newport.” Only when the cup races brought the regatta to town would the Four Hundred and the gentlemen from the War College come down to the Alley to play at the nautical life. Then the attitude was: SAILORS AND DOGS KEEP OUT.

Newport entrepreneurs neglected Thames because they believed that Broadway and the north-end highways should have the new commercial growth; and so, shopping centers saved the Alley from the twentieth century. From one war to the next, waterfront changes were small and slow, and the past, seamy and seedy and alive, continued. I came to like the street. It possessed something uncommon.

Now, nearly fifteen years since I’d last seen it, I walked into the lane where Washington Square—actually more an isosceles triangle—meets the old Long Wharf. The harborside of the street was gone. Where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings had stood were parking lots and a mall. My expectation sank as if flushed down a scupper. Most of the city-side of the street (now called America’s Cup Avenue) had been modernized into shops of concrete and glass that sold polymer plastic scrimshaw, driftwood lamps, lighted whelk shells, garish seascapes, marijuana-leaf beltbuckles.

The seamen’s taverns had yielded to places with olde-style signs:
SPIRITS AND VICTUALS. GROG HAPPY HOUR
. Navy outfitters were now women’s shoeshops, tattoo parlors, perfume boutiques. Where jacktars had walked with the sway the sea teaches, now coeds from the Seven Sisters waggled their precious butts atop Pappagallos, and permanent-press matrons, safe in tummy-control Spandex, their triceps swinging in the wind, lugged purses the size of seabags.

I stopped for a beer. The bartender brought a Narragansett. I asked what had happened to Thames Street. “Redevelopment for urban blight.”

The bar was crowded. America’s Cup Avenue was clearly a moneymaker. A man, young, said, “They trashed the place to save it. The American plan.”

“How did it happen?”

“Navy cut back. Businessmen wanted tourists who’ll spend more than sailors.”

“But the history.”

“American history is parking lots.”

The room was full of girls with orchid-colored lips, signed trousers, and disco pumps; hands full of high-technology cigarettes and sugary, Day-Glo drinks; faces agog with the fallal and frippery of the new Thames Street. They jabbered with twenty-one-year-old men of all ages.

I was glum and sour and critical of everything. The talk washed over me. One Touch & Glow girl had her arm wrenched behind her wiggling it about; I thought she was winding herself up, but she was just scratching her back. “Jesus!” she said. “I’m buying clothes like they were going out of style.” A man with a voice hollow like the drip of water in an empty pan complained, “She’s not so pretty—anyway, vanity’s only skin deep.” A squatty girl, working hard for that elusive leggy look, said, “He’s so trite. Nobody talks like that.”

I remembered an old fisherman I’d met in a tavern where a parking lot was now. He’d lost a thumb to a kink in a line, but he believed he’d had a good life. Around his neck hung a small scrimshaw, showing a crude yet detailed image of the Holy Virgin, carved from the knuckle of his thumb. “Your own bone,” he had said, “she’s the best luck.”

And I remembered another conversation I sat in on across the street. A third-class gunner’s mate told a seaman apprentice about peeling off the bandages and swiving a Haitian whore five days after his circumcision. He wasn’t lying. The day we pulled out of Port-au-Prince, I saw the infection.

Somewhere between that vile past and the vacuous present, somewhere between history and trends, there must have been other possibilities for Thames Street that the burghers of Newport missed.

There was no point staying on; what I’d come for was gone, replaced by things available all over the United States.

The Newport-Jamestown ferry was extinct too, superseded by a two-mile bridge. I said to the tollkeeper, “Damn expensive bridge—the toll, that is.”

“We got a joke here. It’s high because it’s high. Get it? They built it so aircraft carriers at Quonset Point could sail under. As soon as the paint dried, the Navy pulled its birdfarms out of Narragansett Bay.”

“What’s the bridge here for anyway?”

“Opens Newport up to New York City traffic. Lotta new businesses to support here now.”

They might just as well have opened the old harbor town to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I went on toward Quonset Point, the homeport of the ship I had been assigned to. The U.S.S.
Lake Champlain,
a World War II flattop, once held the trans-Atlantic speed record, and it pulled out of the sea America’s first spaceman, Alan Shepard. I’d heard the carrier had been sold for scrap, but I wanted to see the ships that had taken her berth—
if
I could get permission to go on the pier.

As things turned out, I didn’t need to worry about permission. On the west side of the base, where Seabees invented the Quonset hut, was a carnival. The new Navy, I thought. I drove down the long road to the air station and wondered what excuse might get me in—ironic after all the time I’d spent years ago thinking up reasons to get out.

But the gates were open, sentry boxes unmanned, the ten-foot chain-link fence torn and leaning. Still, I expected base security any minute. One of the messhalls had a name on it like a restaurant. The new volunteer Navy.

At the end of the road, a mile in, the big pier was empty. Nothing but rusting stanchions and bollards, and weeds along the railroad tracks. The whole bay stood open and vacant. The
Champ,
the
Essex,
the
Wasp
used to fill the sky with gray masses of hull, gun, and antennas. The great carriers were gone, and also tugs, tenders, big naval cranes, helicopters, jets; the shouts and hubbub and confusion of sailors and machines and aircraft, all gone.

On the shore a man was stacking lobster traps. Lobster traps? “What the hell’s happened here?” I shouted over to him, but it didn’t carry. I walked out on the pier where a lone tern watched. Once there was a gull for every sailor. Lobster traps! I was mad at seeing my service come to this. I had lived and died walking off and on this pier and many times had dreamed of the day I’d come back as a civilian, free of the tyranny of the boatswain’s pipe and his curses, free of working in a one-hundred-twenty-five-degree steel box. I felt cheated.

Where the hell was the diesel oil of yesteryear? Where the drawn faces when we left, the cockahoop faces when we returned, the sailors kissing girls and lugging seabags, mahogany statues, brass platters, straw hats, and black velvet paintings of bulls and naked native women; trucks honking, the sailors on duty cursing down from the deck and offering services to the women, the sea wind snapping the flag from the jackstaff, the last smoke blowing grit on us from the tall stacks? And now lobster pots! Christ. I knew you couldn’t go home again, but nobody had said anything about not getting back to your old Navy base.

A horn blared. A man with a bulgy, bulbous head shouted, “Got official business out here, mac?” That was more like it. He was a Rhode Island Port Authority watchman with all the command bearing of a dirty rag, but he was better than nothing. Writing my license number down on his clipboard, he did his best to be properly official. “What’s your name, mac?” That was much more like it.

“I was stationed here on the
Champ,
CVS–thirty-nine. She was a sub hunter.”

“What’s your name?”

“Drexel.”

“What’s your first name?”

“That’s it. Drexel. Drexel Twitty. I can’t believe it’s all gone.”

“Never saw it before the Navy turned it over to us. Okay, sailor, take your look-see and get your butt out of here by dark.” He drove off, and that was my triumphal return to Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

In the evening I went down along the Pettaquamscutt River to find a restaurant on the sound at Narragansett Pier called The Sunnyside; it was the kind of eatery that people start talking about by saying, “I know a great little place…” We used to eat cherrystones on the halfshell, clam chowder, jonnycakes and sausage, and drink Ballantine Ale.

After what I’d been seeing, I didn’t expect it to be there, and it wasn’t. Instead, condominiums and tennis courts. So I had supper at the Green Inn, a huge green-shingled, Victorian-era hotel just down from what was left of The Towers, a last-century casino bridging Ocean Road. I ate littlenecks on the halfshell and drank Ballantine Ale (once the most distinctive American brew until Falstaff bought the company and modernized the brewing process). Outside the window, in the last light, I could see the Atlantic horizon bent into a soft parabola by the old glass.

Plastic scrimshaw, carnival rides, condos. That was what history had come to. Then, like a night-blooming cereus, a thought opened: maybe the whole point of going to sea was to make room one day for lobster pots and roller coasters. To melt warships into Ferris wheels, that had to be progress. Maybe all I’d been cheated of was a preconceived notion of what the future looks like.

After dinner, I parked for the night on a jetty hooking into the sound and walked up the shingled beach. Breakers tumbled the round stones back and forth, ringing out of them curious metallic measures. For three hundred years warships had sailed the bay. Now dodge-em cars replaced gun tubs.

But it was all a fiction of progress. There were more warheads now than when I went to sea. Changes, yes, but movement away from the machinery of war, no. On another shingled beach in another century, Matthew Arnold spoke of ignorant armies clashing by night. Present situation report: as they say in Selma, ain’t nothin’ changed.