The Traveler's Tourist Plight, Virginia Beach, Intermezzo: The Norwegian Lady

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful. - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot


I won't leave you drifting down, but it makes me wild,
With thirty years upon my head to have you call me child. - The Grateful Dead, Ship of Fools

This respite, this visit back to Virginia, is an out of sequence slingshot back into territory I've been to recently. But given that I didn't get to spend much time with her when I was here before, and that My Dear Sweet Ma was going to drive out here anyway, and given that other than making sure I catch the right bus, I'm on my own time anyway

I decided, what the hell. 

And, I told myself, Virginia Beach isn't Norfolk.

More importantly, however, I wanted to spend a bit more time with The Kid before I spend some time out west. Now, this slingshot has been on the touristy side... trying to find things to do that keep us all entertained is more challenging than you might think. I'm an aficionado of dive bars, the Kid likes Kid-like stuff and fine food (she wants to be a chef) and My Dear Sweet Ma does what Dear Sweet Ma wants to do... whether it's pedaling a surrey up and down the boardwalk, mini-golfing like  Senior Tour Pro, or sitting around doing nothing. The good news is that I'm fairly reasonable as long as dancing isn't involved, and Stella will do most anything that's legal / moral / ethical to avoid being bored.

She's young. But she is my daughter. It's probably just a matter of time. Or she's become an accomplished liar. I'm opting for the former, since I've seen her try and lie. Let's just say she'll never be a professional gambler

Which is a good thing.

Among the usual touristy bric-a-brac around here to occupy people when the water's too cold and the clubs are too crowded, there are some random statues. One of them is The Norwegian Lady, located at 25th and Oceanfront. The statue stands, facing the ocean, fist held to mouth in mourning ... or defiance.

There's actually two of them... one here at Virginia Beach (pictured above with The Kid standing next to it) an one in Moss, Norway... in honor of the lives lost on Good Friday 1891, when the Norwegian ship Dictator sunk in Chesapeake Bay. The Captain was washed ashore, semi-conscious. His pregnant wife, their four year old son, and seven of the 15 crew members died. The statues were made after the Dictator's female figurehead. The plaque reads:

"I am the Norwegian Lady. I stand here, as my sister before me, to wish all men of the sea safe return home."

It's all very solemn, the statue, the thought behind it. Much of these little tragedies, often forgotten in the larger waves and breakers of history.

When people think about the latter years of the 19th century and sinking ships, they MAY think about the U.S.S Maine and The Spanish-American War. I add the small qualification because the Spanish-American War, it's causes -- the real ones --, as well as it's long term effects are rarely discussed except as a footnote in the myth of American Manifest Destiny.

That image of the waiting lady is one that haunts nautical cities. Another one is the Fisherman's Wives Memorial at Cape Ann in  Gloucester Maine.

There's a haunting romance to the image... that idea that mothers, wives, and daughters will wait on us to return. There's some inherent misogyny too... as if a woman's entire being will evaporate if the man she loves disappears. With respect to both the romantics and the feminists, though, the truth is probably closer to a little of both. What was it Hemingway said? The world breaks everybody?

Well, it does.


And To be fair, though, America didn't invent the trope of the waiting woman. Here's one in Vietnam, called Hòn Vọng Phu (Statue of Husband Waiting). No one knows exactly how the statue got there, but it was often used by locals to tell stories and teach moral lessons to their children.

The haunting romanticism, the lessons in endurance, the example of dedication, however, falls apart at some point. Life moves on. Daughters grow up. Wives learn to live in the absence of their beloved. Some of them get remarried. Mothers learn to let go of their children. Daughters grow up and leave. Sons sometimes don't come back.

And there are always reasons. And there are also good reasons.

When I had the chance to come back and visit Stella, even for a little bit, even though being a tourist drives me a little crazy, it was because I know she's not waiting. Time is moving forward and she's growing up and I'm getting older. A year from now she'll be preparing to graduate from high school. She's already thinking about her future.

For most of Stella's life, I've been haunted by a vision I had of the future when she was around 4 years old. Her mother was living in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. I was living in Lexington. At the time, I was seeing her one night a week and every other weekend... one of those standard divorce decree visitation schedules that screws the non-custodial parent out of real and meaningful time... as if the marriage not working out was somehow a mark against the whole of me instead of just against one role that I have apparently never played very well.

I picked her up, like I always did. We went to Burger King, where she was allowed to get as many ketchup cups as years she was old. The weather was nice that evening, so I took her to the of the parks, her favorite, near the hospital. There was a giant wooden jungle gym there that looked like a castle. She loved it. I had to park on the street, a little bit down from the jungle gym. I got her out of her car seat and set her down on the grass. There was a slight hill that ran down into the park, towards a merry-go-round... the kind that are difficult to find now because the safety fanatics decided they weren't safe.

The minute her feet hit the grass, she started running towards the merry-go-round, laughing. I was scared that she'd get her feet twisted and fall and started going after her. She made it down the hill and to the merry-go-round without falling, wanting me to hurry up so I could spin the merry-go-round for her.

She was still laughing.

Sometimes that image her at four years old flashes through my mind and I get a taste of that old fear... that she will run too fast and fall and that I won't be there in time to catch her. That she will run too fast and I will chase after and not be able to catch her.

But if life has taught me anything --  it's that parents always wait. Always. Whether it makes sense or not. Whether the kids know it or not. Whether it does any good or not. Waiting is the at the core of what defines parenthood. You start out waiting for them to be born. Then you wait for them to crawl, talk, walk. We mark off the inches they grow and we mark the mental checklist of things they need to learn. We wait. We wait for them to learn how to drive. Then we wait for them to come home. We wait to meet their boyfriends or girlfriends. We wait. And wait.

Then at some point, we may notice that we've been waiting so long that they're gone. And the only thing we can do is wait.

A Traveler's Tourist Plight: Virginia Beach, Day 3

The future belongs to crowds. --Don DeLillo

Youth doesn't need friends - it only needs crowds. -- 

Zelda Fitzgerald

So I woke up to what was, weather-wise, the most beautiful part of the day today: about a half hour just past sunrise. While yesterday's weather was sunny and warmish, but windy, a cooler weather system blew in over night... making today, according to my daughter, a "hoodie day."


My Dear Sweet Ma just said it was cold.  To be fair, though, anything under 70 degrees is cooler than she'd like the temperature to be.

After all of us were awake, we went out to breakfast and discussed our plans for the day. We were close to both the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. The Kid expressed a lack of interest in Contemporary Art, and said that she hadn't been to the Aquarium in long time. And so we decided on the Aquarium.

Aquariums and zoos have long struck me as odd. In the best of of them, you go and see critters in unnatural environments meant to enhance the experience of the humans poking fingers into the cages rather than improve the life of the fish and animals -- some of which were captured, some of which were born in captivity. In the worst of them, it's a dominionist's dream, designed to show the pre-ordained ascendancy of Mankind above all other critters. That most zoos and aquariums have embraced a more educational identity -- or that some try and save endangered species -- doesn't change the fact that it's always very clear which monkey is on the inside of the of the cage and which is on the outside.

Getting there took some doing. Even though between us we had three different GPS driven directional devices, a far more gravitational power held sway. Two people (My Dear Sweet Ma and me) who

1. Suffer from a tragic lack of any sense of direction, and
2. Don't really know their way around to begin with

can counteract the best GPS in the world by a degree of 1000 to the 10th power. It's as sure as a drought in the desert. As predictable as Tiger Woods nailing a bombshell blonde. As real as the fact that the city of Norfolk, Virginia was originally built on a swamp that itself must have been cursed. (Sorry. Curse-ed.)

We used the map function on my phone to find directions. It seemed easy enough. The directions took us back onto I-264, which I figured was just a way to circumvent stoplight traffic on Virginia Beach Blvd. Not to mention the fact that Virginia Beach Blvd is a long and windy street, much like Vine Street in Cincinnati. It made sense. And we had unshakable geographical certainties on our side. The Atlantic was to the east. We couldn't go too far without driving into the ocean. At some point if we drove to far west, we'd have to go through a tunnel and drive into Norfolk. 

That and turn by turn directions should have been enough; which means, of course they weren't.

We ended up doing a big circle and coming back around to the hotel... at which point we decided to go back upstairs and figure out just where in the hell we were going... during which time the Kid decided to take a nap.

Later, when we finally made ti to the aquarium -- it was only 2 MILES away from the hotel -- it became obvious very quickly that we were not the only ones to think of going to there. Vultures* were preying on potentially soon to be empty parking spots. There was a line just to get in. And once inside, there was an even longer line to get to one of the 5 or 6 overworked and over-stressed Admissions workers. There were people everywhere.

Once we had our tickets, though, we decided to go through and see the exhibits. And I was still reasonable optimistic. Maybe I'd get to see some cool fish.

All I managed to see was the Exhibit of People. It was beyond capacity crowded, mostly with people troweling in groups, mostly with small children, at least half of whom had no interest in anything at the Aquarium. But people stood in front of the displays and tanks, pointing and snapping pictures -- of the critter(s) in question and making the kids sit, stand, or kneel in front of the display or tank to take the prerequisite family vacation photo that will be posted on Facebook to prove to everyone that a good time really was had by all. 

I don't like crowds. I do like people watching... but that's not the same thing. Crowds make it hard for me to breathe and to move. I come by this honestly. My Dear Sweet Ma is exactly the same way... and while my daughter isn't really that way -- she generally can find better things to than have to listen to the inevitably present cadre of crying babies.

It was all we could do to get through the crowd and back out again. I still couldn't tell you anything I saw because I didn't really see anything. Once out, we had to go wait in line for an IMAX movie... which, had we seen it, would have been as close to anything fish related I had seen that didn't include my previous night's dinner. But it became abundantly clear very quickly that none of the three of us had any interest in waiting in another crowded line.

So we left and drove straight for Murphy's Irish Pub -- a not too bad looking place, though priced for the tourist trade. They did have Guinness on tap, though. And Maker's Mark on the shelf.

The day became instantly much improved.

_____________________________________________________________________

*vultures: those drivers in crowded parking lots that sit and wait for you to pull out of a spot rather than driving around and seeing if there's one not being used. These are the same sort of people who go to funerals in order to make sure the guest of honor is dead and not simply trying to get out of paying taxes.