THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 26, 1996 TAG: 9606250002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Glenn Allen Scott
LENGTH: 74 lines
The scent of the sea is in the Elizabeth River.
So, too, is the promise of the sea: great ships bearing cargo or warriors, voyaging to and from exotic ports.
Adventure is in the Elizabeth.
Sitting in the back seat of the gray Mercury in the 1940s, my sister and I could sense the sea as the car neared the river, inching along narrow streets toward the ferry.
We would be in Portsmouth, on our way to Norfolk from Smithfield, our parents in the front seat. Always during the day. Always on business. Always in a hurry.
No matter. The trip was ever wondrous.
Always a line for the ferry - cars, trucks, motorcycles stopping, starting, stopping, starting; engines off, engines idling, engines cranking up.
Always newsboys hawking papers - the Portsmouth Star and the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, I suppose. Newspapers and money exchanged through car windows.
Peanuts, too. Always vendors of peanuts, which invariably summoned the image of the sporty ``Mr. Peanut'' and the peanutty fragrance of Suffolk, ``Peanut Capital of the World.''
Peanuts sold at the ferry were packaged in small brown bags and had been roasted in their hulls. Broken hulls and peanut skins littered streets and sidewalks.
This was life! Grownups, mainly, rushing by. Lots of sailors in bell bottoms. Some children, like us, but on foot and looking lost in the throng.
Then, at last, the ferry landing and the vehicles rolling across the metal ramp: Clank! Thump!
The lucky motorists - sometimes us - were the first or the second to board, going all the way to the bow, where shouting men chocked the cars' wheels with wooden blocks.
Before us, around us, beneath creaking gulls, the river. Channel markers. Docks and bulkheads. Tugboats and barges hilly with rock, sand or gravel or, marvel of marvels, transporting weathered railroad freight cars, dirty yellow, dirty red, black. You never forget the sight of freight cars in a river.
The low Norfolk skyline, the towering National Bank of Commerce building the striking exception.
The ferry shushing into the slip, bumping to a halt. Rattling chains. Shouts.
Then cobblestoned, capacious Commercial Place, with lines of cars waiting for us to disembark. The Confederate Monument, with Johnny Reb sky high, facing north, and the W.G. Swartz department store behind it. Nineteenth-century structures, sturdy but weary, some vacant or nearly so, flanking Commercial Place.
One building with plate-glass windows sheltered the Old Dominion Paper Company, our destination, to buy reams of paper, often very fine paper, for this, that or another order at the Smithfield Times job-printing shop and weekly newspaper, and maybe also to the nearby typesetting service.
All gone. The Elizabeth River, we knew in the 1940s, was not for swimming. Raw sewage and toxic metals flowed into it. Flotsam and jetsam and oil and tar floated in it.
Boatyards, shipyards, terminals and two cities owed their existence to the Elizabeth, as did the whole robust scene that thrilled us, enthralled us.
Last week, Nauticus - the National Maritime Museum on the born-again downtown-Norfolk waterfront - was the setting for the virtually all-volunteer Elizabeth River Project's jubilant announcement of an ambitious plan, developed by hundreds of citizens representing scores of interests, to freshen the waterway and make it again hospitable to aquatic life.
Journalist Charles Kuralt, a North Carolinian who now resides beside the Hudson River, spoke warmly, eloquently of Hampton Roads and the Elizabeth and of what's being done to breathe health into great rivers of America.
Cleansing the Elizabeth will be a labor of generations. But, then, generations have been nourished by it. It's our turn to nourish it. Our debt to the river is far greater than we could ever repay. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB