What’s it like to live in Oahu and what’s it like to live in Virginia Beach?

Posted 14Nov2017.

This is an interesting question for the random pairing of two very distinct locations for a comparison.

Having lived in both locations – Virginia Beach (mid ‘80s to mid ‘90s) and Oahu for a total of 14 years (mid ‘90s through 2011) – I can honestly say that it really depended on the timeframe.

I loved living in Virginia Beach during that time. It was the twilight of the “seedy” era and beginning of the “family destination” years as a tourist destination. Places like Bubba’s served up ten-cent wings on Wednesdays, the Peppermint Beach Club hosted diverse gigs – anything from the Dead Kennedys, Nine Inch Nails, and Gwar to Ice-T. Cruising on Atlantic generated enough gridlock on Friday nights to warrant it becoming outlawed to pass by a spot more than twice an hour, swearing accompanied drinking on the beach, and Tara Thunder was that place that mothers hastened their teenage sons past. F-14’s and A-6’s were always inbound or outbound, and every once in a while, a target tow cable would fail to retract on a returning A-4 (wrecking cars and powerlines in its path to Oceana) or engine troubles would necessitate the crew ejecting as their bird crossed the Oceanfront and their landing in someone’s 40th Street backyard would always make for interesting conversations. The Reagan years brought the Navy to a strength now only dreamed about, and Virginia Beach swelled with the Sailors and Marines who transitioned through the area on a never-ending cycle.

Towards the end of my time there, the writing was on the wall: things were a’changin’. The relocation of power and telephone lines underground on Atlantic and Pacific brought other cosmetic changes, which resulted in property values increasing, leading to a change in the atmosphere and spirit. The lifting of development restrictions in Pungo to the south brought even more traffic to a poorly-designed suburban sprawl which had spiraled out of control long before. The moniker “family-oriented” became somewhat sour for a lot of the working folks – more taxes, more restrictions, and more headache from even fussier tourists from the north. “I thought this was a ‘family-oriented’ place,” we would grumble as we walked past the newest bloom of t-shirt stores which had replaced our favorite old haunts.

Visiting in 2001 and later in 2008, I was shocked at the change. Crappy time-share lots, the same crappy facades which I immediately recognized as from the “Generica” school of architecture, and the look of horror when was visiting my old boss and ranting (profanely) about the signs prohibiting profanity. The first visit also found me spectator to a drive-by in Kempsville – a place where no such thing would have happened decades before; the second visit included a conversation with an old friend from my Princess Anne days as we talked about the various 911 calls which were the results of strange acts of violence in once-safe places.

And, they moved the Jewish Mother.

…

Oahu was the next destination, and, like everywhere else the “good old days” of when you first get to a location often tend to be the best ones remembered. Traffic was rough, but nowhere near the maddening and futile morass it has become. Housing was the area where I really should have listened to the advice of the older NCOs when I first got to my unit there in ’96. “Buy a house now.” Ha. As an E-2, there was no waythat nonsense was going to happen – $180,000 on a Privates’ pay? Yeah. I should have starved to make it happen – I would have increased my return by enough of a margin to warrant a diet of saltines and ketchup packets. Culturally, while Oahu was still a tourist destination, the determination and financial investment involved in visiting weeded out those who would maybe swing a vacation to places like Virginia Beach. However, more money doesn’t necessarily make for a better tourist. I watched Waikiki shift from kitschy, yet somewhat exotic to “You’ve gotta be shitting me – five hundred dollars… for a TEE SHIRT?!?” (Note: Army guys and Prada are a bad combination… but I was curious – never been in one before… and never will again.)

It was the relocation of the powerlines underground in Sunset Beach which made me laugh. My wife at the time and I got into this huge discussion after I made the comment along the lines of: “There goes the property value and the places we like.” It was a pattern I had seen before in Virginia Beach and was repeated in Lahaina on Maui. Subtle “beautification” signals the inevitable appearance of a Starbucks and the lurking of high-end boutique shops as they circle the decades-old flagships of “character” like economic buzzards.

I left Oahu as the Light Rail debacle was breaking ground in Ewa, and I have visited every year since then with a sense of loss for the years when traffic did not dictate daily plans and going to International Marketplace was an adventure – you had no idea if you were going to find a bargain on decorative fans or get shanked with the latest from that shifty knife shop in that creepy-assed alley.

I miss both, but I miss the time I lived in each. Younger, more flexible, less crotchety, no constant back pain, and a sense of youthful immortality that we all foolishly think will last forever. They had their good points and bad – just like everywhere else – and they still do. For me to seriously consider moving back to either location would be for me to ask how much of the ghosts of those days past I want to revisit every time I look for a good cup of Chai on Kapahulu or want to color on the walls as I wait for my “Penicillin Soup” and “Mother’s Son Reuben.”