USS Constitution | New England’s Gifts

I‘ve visited the USS Constitution during school vacations, crowded with chattering kids. I once sat in an open gunport, close to the water, during one of her annual turnaround cruises. I’ve seen the venerable frigate from below, when she was in dry dock, and I’ve touched her massive keel. But my most memorable visit of all was during a snowstorm.

It was the winter of 1968–69. I was a freshman at Harvard, and I’d invited a girl I knew at Smith to come visit me in Cambridge during the January break. I wasn’t very suave, but I liked history. So instead of taking her to a restaurant and a show, I took her to the old Charlestown Navy Yard.

We rode the T from Harvard to Haymarket and walked across the Charlestown Bridge. The snow was coming down hard in big, fluffy flakes. It was like being inside a snow globe.

It seems to me now that we were the only visitors onboard. Snow lay heaped on the wooden deck, on the cannon, on the flat hats of the sailors intheir 19th-century garb. Belowdecks it was warm and smelled of varnished wood. The snow blotted out the sight of modern Boston. We could hear the wind sighing through the standing rigging and the slosh of the harbor chop. It was as close as one could come to being onboard the Constitution in 1812.

I barely remember that girl’s face. But still I see the oily black water, the blanketed decks, and the tall masts disappearing into the white whirl.

—“Old Ironsides in the Snow,” by Tim Clark, January 1999