Vacation Joys at Old Dominion Beaches

Tidewater Virginia Opens Its Pandora Box
of Summer Charms for Visiting Host

By Georgia Dickenson Wardlaw

"I love all things that cluster around the sea.

Sand-dunes wave washed, and wild, glad wings that beat

Against the wind, the flash of children's feet.

I could ever smell the tang--of great

Waves breaking . . . and in my

Ears I ever heard the sand-dunes calling me."

               --John Richard Moreland

 

 

How well might this poet of the Dune country have penned his vivid lines at any one of several enchanting spots along the vast Virginia Seashore! In the shadow of the old Lighthouse at historic Cape Henry--along the magnificent stretch of sand and surf that is known as Virginia Beach--or anywhere along the miles of beach and dunes and semi-desert that is Ocean View.

Thousands of tourists visit this section of the Old Dominion annually, and literally descend on it like flocks of seagulls during the summer season when the siren call of the sea is heard far inland. For along the Southeastern tip of Virginia there lies a 25 mile stretch of sand-beach as beautiful as the Southland owns, where rugged green pines protude from sand-dunes milky-white, and the blue of sky and sea meet at what is sometimes an undistinguishable horizon.

The greatest stretch of beach at Virginia's Seashore lies a few miles due east of Norfolk, and extends from Willoughby, on past Ocean View, historic Lynnhaven and Ocean Park on Chesapeake Bay, to Cape Henry and Virginia Beach on the broad Atlantic Ocean. It has been accurately termed "A year-round playground among historic shrines," for the area embraces Norfolk, Portsmouth, Ocean View, Virginia Beach, Cape Henry, Old Point Comfort, Newport News, Hampton, Phoebus and Cape Charles. Where else in all America has Virginia's vast Seashore a parallel in beauty, history, or pleasure?

Virginia Beach Modern Yet "Au Natural"

Perhaps the most popular and prominent spot on Virginia's seashore is Virginia Beach proper. For here every possible whim and caprice of the vacationist or tourist can be satisfied--surf-bathing and swimming in the Atlantic, with exhilerating salt air as an hourly tonic! golf on the fairest and most flawless of fairways; walks and rides through the rustic and beautiful Virginia Seashore Park at Cape Henry; tennis, archery; horseback riding over beckoning bridle paths; deep-sea and fresh-water fishing unsurpassed, and yachting and hydroplaning to the heart's content. And alluring shrines--here, there, yon--old forts and lighthouses--churches and houses of Colonial era. Truly the voice of Captain John Smith is wafted down by the breeze, through the pines to the waters edge. The land about--Virginia--is all that he said of it in 1607.

"Within is a country that may have the prerogatives over the most pleasant places of Europe. Heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation--the mildness of the air, the fertility of the soil, and the situation of the rivers are propitious to the use of man that no place is more convenient for pleasure, profit and man's sustenance under any altitude or climate. The vesture of the earth doth manifestly prove the nature of the soil to be lusty and very rich."

It was more than 300 years ago that the doughty adventurer-captain first made his footprints on the sands of Virginia's seashore, and so enchanted over what met his gaze, yielded to an inner urge to record for his King his impressions of the new country he was about to explore. All that met his wandering, critical, delighted gaze then, meets that of every visitor to Virginia's seashore today--only more.

One of the great charms of Virginia Beach is that one can accept, and enjoy to his heart's content, all of its modernity and sophistication, without losing sight for so much as an hour, of its God-given beauty, and nearby historic shrines. This compensates to the full for the fact that Virginia Beach has gone modern. Fads, fancies, fashions, foibles--call them what you will--designed to intrigue and amuse the thousands of visitors who bask in its glorious sunlight, lounge on its silvern beach, and play or swim in its aquamarine surf--are in evidence everywhere.

The beach proper might be Newport, Atlantic City,--even Lido--gay as it is with hundreds of beach umbrellas, blazing their riot of colors that run the gamut of rainbow or Jacob's Coat. For of course, if one stays at Virginia Beach for any length of time, a beach umbrella is de rigueur! Flaming orange and green, blue and yellow, red and black, black and white.

Beach Fashions Would Shock John Smith

Of course one comes to the beach to loaf and invite the soul, hence beachbeds are much in evidence. These very utilitarian contrivances are about the width and length of a hammock, and when rolled out full length on the sand reveal simply a plain stretch of awning-like material, with a long, narrow pillow attached. Beach-bags lie beside them--bags that are a veritable salmagundi of cigarettes, matches, dark glasses, bottles of sun-tan oil, towels and what-have-you.

One notices a very decided change in the mode of bathing attire, both among men and women. The suits--both male and female--emphasize less thought of appearance, and more of comfort--they are more decolletage than ever, or perhaps it is just the other extreme--up in front and utterly void of back. Men are in seriously for a real coat of tan--their erstwhile simple one-piece bathing suit is conspicuous by its absence--and in its place, simply trunks. Bare backs are as common a sight as bar feet--backs that are as bronzed from the pitiless rays of the sun as one might expect on a Chinese coolie.

As for the ladies, the bizarre seems to have given way to old-fashioned simplicity, for ginghams are much in evidence in the latest beach attire. One assumes they are really swim-suits, for many of them look as though they had been thoroughly drenched in the briney-deep. Of course the more familiar and practical bathing suit of wool or rubber has by no means vanished from the scene--all-whites and peacock blues seem particularly popular, to the accompaniment of novel beach-sandals and gay towels thrown nonchalantly over one shoulder or around both.

Hand in hand they go--in two's fours, and sixes--up and down the beach, more oblivious to the onlooking throngs than one might expect, and very absorbed in themselves. Pleasure-bent of course--but health-bent and rest-bent as well. This air--this tonic water--these wonderful rays of Old Sol are priceless--or so it seems they feel about their day, their week end, their month at Virginia Beach.

Surf-boards are becoming increasingly popular--their riders seem equally as daring as "The daring young man on the flying-trapeeze." The large showy beach-ball has given way to hand-ball. And in the distance, seemingly on the rim of the blue horizon, one glimpses a passing ship--the silhouette of a white sail boat drifting by.

A stroll down the two miles of boardwalk overlooking the miles of sandstrip, is not what it used to be, for a new traffic problem is to be encountered, and there are no green and red lights! For believe-it-or-not, the bicycle has invaded Virginia Beach, and nowhere so much as the Promenade proper. At intervals, in front of the hotels, one sees bicycle stands, with their for-rent signs in front--all of them doing a thriving business. Turning back the clock of time quite a few years, your writer ventured bold and rode the full length of the promenade. Indeed, "everybody's doing it" -- even on the bicycles "built for two," and that it is a paying pastime as it is a pleasurable one may be judged by the fact that an estimate of the number who rent and ride them is put as high as two thousand on "a good Sunday or holiday" --- 500 any normal day. At 25 cents per half hour-ride, the man in the bicycle-renting business should truly feell that prosperity has emerged in full view from around the corner.

Cape Henry is Hallowed Spot

Five miles north of Virginia Beach, and 17 miles northeast of Norfolk, is Cape Henry -- hallowed and historic site of the first landing of the first permanent English settlers in America, on April 26, 1607, before proceeding to Jamestown, where was definitely established the first permanent English settlement in America.

Here where the blue waters of the Atlantic and Chesapeake unite; where creamy-white sand dunes rise majestically between clumps of rich, wild greenery, and dwarfed pines sway back and forth as if fanning the vast stretch of blue above and beyond -- there rises like a watch-tower of the night the old and the new lighthouse--the cynosure of all eyes that turn Cape Henryward.

As early as 1627, the colonists had debated the advisability of placing a lighthouse at Cape Henry, for in the early days of Virginia's history, the bay and its tributaries was a favorite haunt for buccaneers along the Virginia coast. The plan for the lighthouse somehow failed to materialize, and those intrepid colonists were forced to resort to the next best plan they knew--that of building bonfires of pine knots, and appointing relays of men to keep them burning all night. All too soon the pirates turned this improvised lighthouse to their own advantage, and with true piratical cunning used the burning knots as a decoy to run vessels aground and put cargoes and crews at their mercy.

Finally -- many years thereafter -- the Federal Government erected at Cape Henry the "Old Lighthouse" one still sees standing today. The year was 1791, and it was the first structure of its kind erected by the United States.

The new lighthouse was built in 1879. It's light, one of the most powerful in the world, can be seen 20 miles away, and Norfolkians, listening in on their radios, are accustomed to hearing announced daily the ships which have passed in and out of the capes--as seen and reported from the powerful observation tower.

Today, Cape Henry is one of the most important points of military strategy on the coast, where the United States Government has established what promises to be one of the strongest fortifications of the country. Fort Story, constructed here during the past decade, is already equipped with some of the most modern implements of war known to science. It invites hosts of visitors, who behold in it an example of the very latest plan of coastal defense fortification -- "The key to the entire system of defense for Chesapeake Bay and the Nation's Capital."

The climax to a perfect day at Virginia Beach is an hour or so at Cape Henry. With one's own inviting picnic basket, spread on a secluded sand-dune as smooth and clean and warm as if it had just emerged from the bed of the ocean and been dried by the afternoon's sun--here, within plain view of the sounding sea--sheltered from the too strong breeze by a screen of green shrubbery, one may truly look out upon the fast setting sun and say to himself--"The end of a perfect day."

The "Coney Island" of the South

If he is still amusement-bent there is the splendid highway at his back which goes past Lynhaven Bay, on to Ocean View,--"The Coney Island of the South." From here he can look across the water to where stands Old Point Comfort and historic Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the collapse of the Confederacy.

For our own part, one hurried visit at Cape Henry is not enough; we have gone three times, and supped and lingered on just such a picturesque spot as described. Fire-flies darting against the white of sanddunes; the smell of salt and pine; the roar and rumble of the sea--distant lights and strange sounds--all make for an enchanting experience never forgotten.

For here is a mixture of the old and the new--land still unexplored in the Cape Henry Desert at one's back--tropical splendor in the great Virginia Seashore State Park within Cape Henry's limits; the fathomless mystery of the ocean within hands reach; the old lighthouse, a symbol of the fortitude of those first settlers,--while the new lighthouse casts its powerful rays 20 miles out to sea--a guiding hand and arm of strength to ships which come and go today.

One leaves Cape Henry in the twilight, somehow thinking of nothing so much as the fact that 300 and more years ago, three storm-tossed little vessels that had plied their way across the merciless Atlantic, somehow found their way to this hallowed site of Cape Henry--the "Sarah Constant"--the "Goodspeed" and the "Discovery"--with none but a Divine Light to guide them.