Blue Highways: Newport, Rhode Island

Unfolding the Map

As we pull into Newport, Rhode Island with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), do you feel a bit of nostalgia?  Do you have some melancholy associated with a place that was, but now feels different?  As I come home again, I feel it keenly, and will share some thoughts with you on the subject.  If you wish to visit the years gone by, you'll only be able to do that in your memories.  But if you want to see where Newport is located, navigate to the map.

Book Quote

"....I went on toward Quonset Point, the homeport of the ship I had been assigned to."

"....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.

"....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?...Christ.  I knew you couldn't go home again, but nobody had said anything about not getting back to your old Navy base."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 5

Downtown Newport, Rhode Island. Photo by Daniel Case and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Newport, Rhode Island

It's often jarring when you go back to someplace that you frequented after an absence of a number of years.

While my absence from my home town hasn't spanned as many year as LHM's absence from Newport, Rhode Island, it still astounds me every time I go back and something has changed, landmarks have disappeared, and I am left sometimes with a profound sense of loss.

Of course, time moves forward whether we want it or not.  But when one wants to capture something of the past, some marker that reconnects us to previous eras of our lives, and it is no longer there or has changed in some unalterable way, it can be a shock to the psyche.

LHM goes to Newport expecting to see something of the old Navy base out of which he served.  When he gets there, what was once a huge industrial facility for maintaining ships of the fleet, including the big aircraft carriers, is now gone.  All he is left with are the memories of the base and Newport as it once was.  His reaction is one of shock and annoyance: why are there lobster fisherman where there once were the finest of the Navy.  He even references Thomas Wolfe.

It may be that one can't go home again.  I often say now that I'm "going home" to visit my mom, or to see old friends.  In reality, home as it was in Fort Bragg, California has really ceased to exist for me.  The house where I grew up has changed too much.  Gone is the horrible brown carpeting, replaced with a durable wood floor.  My room has become a guest room, with nothing left to mark my years of passage there.  An acre of our big yard, where I used to play football with friends and where I constructed two holes of a six hole golf course, has been sold to the neighbor and now there is a shop and a bunch of his equipment on it.

The lumber mill where my father worked, and where I spent four summers as a worker and a security guard, is gone.  When I drive down Oak Street toward what used to be the main gate, it still shocks me to see the ocean rather than the huge sawmill building that rose higher than any building in the town.  Along the whole of the downtown, in fact, the only thing that separates the town from the sea is a vast tract of silent oceanfront property that once housed mills, drying sheds and what seemed like endless stacks of cut lumber stretching far away north and endless decks of newly cut logs that stretched far away south.  Now, the steam-powered rattle and noise of the mill machinery, the revving motors of the forklifts and carriers, and the signature noon whistle that could be heard all over town are all ghosts on the ocean breeze.

All this is coming back to me now because it is the advent of my 30th high school reunion.  Recently, on the trip home to attend that event, I learned that an old college friend had come out to California for a conference and decided to stay with some friends in the wine country.  We talked a little about old times, but mostly we looked at each other and, at least for me, a certain wistfulness about the time that had passed and the changes in us.  While much change has been good - for him, a debilitating disease in remission, a stable relationship, and a good job in Maine - one still cannot be unaware that time is marching and we've gotten older.

At my high school reunion, as I walked into the room I saw some people who I've kept in semi-regular contact with over the years, either by seeing them when I come home or through media like Facebook.  Despite that, I saw a couple of people that I hadn't seen for those 30 years.  A number of people I didn't recognize through the changes that time and experience had wrought.  A number had trouble remembering my name.  High school seemed to be such a huge part of our lives that it has grown out of proportion to many of our other experiences.  A classmate that I spoke with put it in perspective.  I went to school in a small town and was with most of my classmates all through my school years.  He reminded me that all of my classmates, at the age I now am, were a part of only about a third of my life.  Yet that period, and especially the three years of high school I attended, seem like such a huge thing.  All of the successes, and all of the failures, have been magnified.  All of the slights and praises from classmates, while hidden under the veneer of my adulthood, still rattle around in there if I choose to go back and remember them.  I suspect that a small few of our alumni don't come back to the reunions because of the trauma they faced in high school from an equally small number of cruel classmates.

That's where I would modify Thomas Hardy and LHM.  One can come home again, but sometimes one might not wish to.  Home is in the past, and home can connote much that might be painful to relive.  When I think of what was home to me thirty years ago, it consisted of a dysfunctional family, a tortured and negative sense of self, and a longing for something different.  When I think of what is home now, it consists of a more positive sense of self, many accomplishments, and different family dynamics albeit with echoes of the past.  The nostalgia of the past is often best left as a place to visit, at a time of our choosing, and not as a place to dwell in.

Musical Interlude

The song that best encapsulates the melancholy of the past, at least for me, is Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days.

I'm not sure why, but I get a melancholy homesick feeling when I listen to America's Ventura Highway off of their aptly named Homecoming album.  And I didn't even live in southern California...

If you want to know more about Newport

City of Newport
Discover Newport
Newport's Cliff Walk
Newport Daily News (newspaper)
Newport Mansions
Wikipedia: Newport

Next up: Westerly, Rhode Island

Blue Highways: Newport, Oregon

Unfolding the Map

This is the first time that we see the Pacific with LHM.  Aahhh...for me, smelling the ocean, hearing the crash of the waves and the crying of the gulls and terns, and being able to sit on the beach in the late afternoon sun, well, there's nothing like it.  Of course, LHM doesn't stop here - it's too touristy.  We'll explore the idea of coastal tourist towns in this post.  To get your elegeomental bearings, try the map.

Book Quote

"Newport has been a tourist town for more than a century and it showed: a four-lane runway of beef-and-bun joints and seashell shops; city blocks where beach bungalows jammed in salty shingle to shiplap."

Blue Highways: Part 6, Chapter 4

Harbor and bridge in Newport, Oregon. Photo at the newportoregon.com website. Click on photo to go to host page.Newport, Oregon

In terms of being a tourist town, it sounds like Newport has the advantage on my hometown.  With a over a century of practice, it most likely knows what it needs to do to attract and keep tourists occupied.

You see such towns all over the U.S.  The Eastern seaboard has many of them.  From the founding of our country onward, people began identifying places where they wanted to go to escape the crowded towns and cities.  Usually, if they were close enough, they flocked to beaches.  Cape Cod and Long Island are classic places where people got away to beat the heat and get out of the metropolitan areas.

My wife's parents live in Sarasota, Florida.  It is a beach destination, but it is now becoming somewhat more metropolitan itself.  However, one can drive to the east coast of Florida and find little beach communities with the classic bungalows and surf motels that LHM writes about.  These cater to tourists with beachfront bars that generate an ocean and surf feel, restaurants that serve seafood (whether it's locally caught and fresh seafood is another matter) and maintain their attraction simply because of the beach itself.  We found this type of atmosphere when we visited New Smyrna Beach on Florida's east coast.

Many of these communities, probably a lot like Newport, have large and stately houses that were the beach getaways and retirement homes of some of America's wealthy, and the towns sprung up around not only tourism, but the infrastructure needed to provide services to those wealthy families.  The attraction of such coastal places to America's elite also attracted people from lower classes, who for a while might dream that they too were beachfront dwellers with unlimited resources to enjoy some of our country's natural wonders.  Newport itself had a number of seaside hotels, according to Wikipedia, and regular ferry service even before it was reached by its first permanent road in the 1920s.

Some communities have made a practice of touting their beaches and their nightlife to draw visitors in certain demographics.  Daytona Beach in Florida and South Padre Island in Texas are places that play hosts to thousands of college students on spring break each year.  Other places prefer a more sedate clientele and focus on local history and culture.  The Outer Banks, which LHM visited earlier on this journey, tout their historical connections to England and their accent as the last bit of spoken Renaissance English in the world.

This lies in contrast to those places that relied on industry and therefore did not need to cater to tourists.  My hometown of Fort Bragg, California is one of those places.  Almost completely dependent on the lumber industry and fishing, when both of those industries began to slow and die, Fort Bragg was left to tourism as a replacement.  Unfortunately, it did not have much experience as a tourist town, and it is further hindered by the fact that the defunct lumber mill property occupies all of what would be oceanfront property.  Still, it has made an admirable go of it, partly through the resourcefulness of a new generation of natives and the influence of some newer residents who have brought their entrepreneurship in arts, crafts, culinary arts and other fields to the town.  In contrast, Mendocino, it's neighbor to the south, embraced artists, crafters and culinary artists early and made a name for itself in those areas.  I feel for my hometown.  It is difficult to take what was essentially a blue collar town and remake it into something else.  But I am really impressed that it has survived.  The landscape of America is littered with the remains of towns that died soon after their main industries died, but Fort Bragg lives on and each time I go back, I am heartened to see another new shop, or a new hotel.  And even though my mom complains about the traffic each summer, I am heartened by the tourists who come to partake of sport fishing, camping, beachcombing and sightseeing, thereby keeping things alive in the corner of the world that I hold close to my heart.

I have never been to Newport, and probably my idea of what it is (or should be) would clash with the reality.  I would predict a quiet community, with some small local shops and restaurants that cater to the tourist community.  Aloof from the tourist part of the town, there would be large houses belonging to families that have held the town together since its founding.  Newer residences would be occupied by those more recent arrivals, who would also have created their own social structure.  Their interests might sometimes clash with the old-time families.  The town would have some sort of special celebration or two during the year, when everyone - older residents, newer residents, and tourists - comes together.  Tourists sprinkle the town in the winter, but flock there in the summer.  Because it is on the coast, it rains a lot.  The rain and weather adds character to the town, which given its site on Oregon's rocky coast, is surrounded by beautiful coves and lonely beaches. 

The reality seems a little different.  On reading about Newport, I find that it has over 80 local restaurants, and 1500 rooms ranging from inexpensive to upscale.  LHM writes that a four lane highway (U.S. 101) runs through town, and that was 30 years ago that it had that many lanes.  However, no matter what the town looks like now, ultimately, the natural wonders in the area plus the unique things that Newport itself has to offer will keep people coming to what would otherwise be an isolated coastal town.

There will always be complaints from those who remember the town as it was, and frustration by those who envision what the town could be.  For those towns that rely on tourism, however, all depends on how visitors experience these places in the present.

Musical Interlude

LHM has regained new purpose, as I explained in my last post.  However, he is still struggling the things that brought him on the journey in the first place.  Bob Schneider's Big Blue Sea conjures up some of that struggle, as well as acknowledges that with this post, we touch the Pacific with LHM for the first time.  If you want to see the lyrics of this song, find them here.

If you want to know more about Newport

Discover Newport
Essential Links: Newport
Historic Nye Beach in Newport
Newport Chamber of Commerce visitor page
Newport News-Times (newspaper)
Oregon Coast Aquarium
Wikipedia: Newport

Next up: Agate Beach and Cape Foulweather, Oregon