Day Three: Six Year-Old Matt Demands a Detour

I'm sure everyone had one or two things that they became obsessed with when they were children for no real good reason. I had a whole string of them, from sharks to dinosaurs to the space program, but when I was six, it was the Battle of Hampton Roads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, better known as the Merrimac. The battle was fought at the mouth of the James River on March 9, 1862, and it was the first battle between two ironclads in naval history. It was a draw, but whatever. I remember being six and watching a made-for-TV movie about the battle, that my parents had taped sometime in the late 80s or early 90s.

I LOVED this movie. I loved the battle scenes and the cannons and the burning of the USS Cumberland, which was the first victim of the Virginia when it arrived on the scene. I had to have my parents explain to me what the Civil War was to try and put the battle into context, and Andy tried to helpfully compare the Civil War to Star Wars, with rebels fighting against the established government. Of course, since I was six, I took this to mean that the Confederates were the good guys, since they were the Rebels like Luke and Han and Leia. Thus I rooted for the Virginia and her crew, and when my parents bought us models of the two ships, I was always the Virginia, and Andy or Scott was always the Monitor. I wasn't until sometime much later that I fully grasped the idea of slavery and that I was from the North.

Anyway, later on my interest in the battle was piqued again when I learned that the USS Monitor was designed by John Ericsson, a Swedish engineer who had tried to sell his idea of a ship with a rotating turret to Britain and France without success before coming to the United States. Being a proud Swedish-American myself, I became obsessed with the battle again, though from the Union point of view. I appreciated the Monitor for the engineering marvel it was, and tried in vain to dig up the old made-for-TV movie. Maybe I'll try again when I get back home.

Anyway, as we left Gettysburg this morning, all we had to do was make it to our friends' house outside of Jacksonville, North Carolina. We'd seen the major battlefields on this side of Virginia yesterday, and if we really wanted to, we could have powered through to NC. However, as we'd be passing through the Virginia Beach/Newport News area, I couldn't resist adding the Hampton Roads area to the list of battlefields I wanted to see. This was before I even found out about the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, which has A. a full-scale replica of the Monitor that you can walk around, and B. The Monitor itself, raised from off the coast of Cape Hatteras, NC, where is sank in a storm only a few months after the Battle of Hampton Roads.

The Mariner's museum itself was really well done, shiny and engaging but also informative. They had a lot of information on the history of naval warfare and the construction of the two ironclads, as well as replicas of the gun deck of the Virginia and the captain's quarters on the Monitor (surprisingly spacious and luxurious!). There was a theatre with a movie about the battle itself, and a while exhibit about the battle's place in popular culture. Unfortunately they didn't have a mention of the movie that had captivated me as a kid, but did have other movies and old-timey ads that used the Monitor to sell everything from whiskey to refrigerators.

But the crown jewel of the museum is the ship itself. Raised in the late 70s, it's still undergoing rigorous desalinization, with most of it submerged in special treatment tanks, with the circular turret being sprayed with solution. There was an observation deck from which you could see the whole process, and an updated whiteboard with what was on the docket for preservation on that given day. Pretty neat.

The replica of the ship was also really freaking cool, since you could actually walk around it and get a sense of how big the whole things was. Honestly it was a whole lot bigger than I thought it was going to be, given that it was a ship designed for river defense, and that it sunk right off the coast while being towed back to Washington. All in all we spent about an hour and a half there before getting back on the road, to head down to Jacksonville and our friends at Camp Lejeune.

Through Virginia and into North Carolina, Amanda and I formulated a new game as we began to really enter the South with a Capital S. It's called “Megachurch or Regional High School”, and it's a lot harder than you'd think. Sure, sometimes it's made a little easier with a steeple here or a baseball field there, but after the third Megachurch with a football field out front, the line begins to blur. It also took us until we were right outside of Jacksonville for us to see any Catholic Churches at all. Another thing you just assume will be everywhere when you're from Massachusetts, I guess.

So now we're snug at Rich and Jacquie's place, where we'll spend the next two nights. It's almost a vacation from our vacation, being able to stay in the same place for a couple days, and where we don't have anything specific on the agenda. Rich wants to show us around Camp Lejeune tomorrow, but other than that we'll play it by ear, and that sounds fantastic right about now. But anyway, it's getting a bit late (11:30!) so I should probably wrap up.

-M