THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996 TAG: 9604110022
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE KERNELS SPECIAL TO REAL LIFE
LENGTH: Long : 163 lines
IT LOOKS LIKE an old farmhouse. Chipped white paint. A rusted, green metal chair overturned on the porch. The smell of biscuits and coffee heavy in the damp, morning air.
But at 6:48 a.m., most of the town is here. Pick-up trucks crowd the dirt lot. Farmers wearing coveralls and John Deere hats murmur and laugh about crops, women and politics.
It's rush hour at the Orbit Grocery.
Inside, wooden shelves are crowded with aspirin, bread, Pepsi, blaze-orange safety vests and Laffy Taffy. Also for sale is the grocery's main staple: conversation. Yarns. The doings up the road, the last fishing trip, the recent cold snap.
``This is where they tell the news,'' says Charlotte Scott, who helps run the store with her husband, Richard, ``whether it's good or bad.''
Says Margaret Cofield, 77, one of three living residents left who were actually born in Orbit: ``We've always said there are more crops raised around the Orbit store than on the farm.''
Welcome to a burg that lives up to its on-the-fringe name, a scattering of houses, tractor sheds, roadkill and 30-odd souls on the farmland of Isle of Wight County.
Families named Gwaltney, Scott and Stiltner raise cotton, soybeans and poultry here, as they have for generations. The Methodist church is 120 years old. A grass airstrip harks back to the century's first half.
Yet, like many villages in Western Tidewater and throughout America, Orbit goes unmentioned on most maps, and unrecognized by its own county government.
They are villages virtually unknown, yet with rich histories.
Places apart.
A time apart, as well.
``It's like watching National Geographic,'' Regina Arnette, a 15-year resident, says. ``You can almost set your watch by when the geese fly by in the morning.
``It's just that little section of God's green Earth. All I have to do is go out my back door, and there it is.''
A ways down one dirt road is Garner Airport, a single hangar and a patch of closely cut grass.
It's in Orbit, most folks agree: You land at Garner, you're in Orbit. Beyond that, there's little consensus about where Orbit begins and ends, or what makes a person a citizen of Orbit versus some other part of the county.
June Scott, an Orbit Grocery employee and no kin to her co-workers, remembers calling Virginia Power when the electricity went out at the store a few years ago.
``I called and I said `I live in Orbit,' '' she says. ``And they said, `Sure you do.' ''
Fuzzy though the village's boundaries may be, its long-timers are clear on what sets the place apart. ``Nobody bothers you,'' says Scott, lighting a cigarette. ``Nobody cuts through your yard. Nothing gets stolen.
``This is country living.''
Stirring his third cup of coffee is farmer George Gray. Born and bred here, 59 years old. He left for a while, lived in New Jersey, came back.
``When you look on television at night and see all the corruption,'' Gray says, ``you realize that you live somewhere where there's a little peace.''
The locals still leave doors unlocked, leave car keys in the ignition, seal deals with handshakes. Honesty, integrity and good will, Orbit residents say, are more than highfalutin words.
``This is the garden spot of the world - to me, anyway,'' says chicken farmer John Stiltner, putting a wad of tobacco in his mouth inside the store's lone booth, a recent addition.
``I think one of the best things about living out here is while they talk in the morning about the tunnels being backed up for miles, I'm drinking my coffee.''
Stiltner, 32, describes himself as an ``old country boy,'' but he keeps up on what happens outside of Orbit. He'll tell you about the 3-year-old girl shot in Norfolk, the coach accused of videotaping girls in the locker room, a self-proclaimed vampire in Virginia Beach.
He's grateful to be right here. ``Reason No. 600 not to move,'' he says. ``There are just good people here, that's all.''
A local cow was accidentally shot this past year, the first time Orbit's country quiet had been shaken up by gunfire in 20 years.
Last time saw an enraged Orbit resident settle a minor dispute with the then-manager of the Orbit Grocery by unloading buckshot into a store window.
Both times, things were sorted out peaceably.
``If we can't be neighbors, then what good are we to each other?'' asks Richard Scott, 59, from a nearby stool. ``It doesn't matter if you're sick or have bad luck - we have good neighbors here.''
Scott, the third generation of his family to run Orbit Grocery, speaks from experience. When his son's trailer burned down, the citizens of Orbit were there to help.
``It's like a big family,'' June Scott says. ``Everybody knows everybody. Your kids can go out in the yard and you don't have to worry about them being snatched.
``Back in town, they move in and out. You don't know what kind of nut is going to move in.''
Gray agrees. ``Something about the city is different from the country,'' he says. ``And it's not a nationality thing. It's a people thing.''
As if on cue, Earl Dickerson bursts through the screen door, his blue coveralls layered in soot, dirt speckling his face, looking like he's had a tough day.
Leaving the safe, routine confines of Orbit can do that to the local citizenry, especially when it means going to the city, or in town. Go anywhere that has stoplights, a coffee house, a shopping mall - any semblance of urbanity - and you have gone in town.
Dickerson's just back from a run into Virginia Beach, delivering lumber to a hardware store. He doesn't know which one. There are so many, and they all seem the same to him.
He grabs a Pepsi, plops down in a deep chair next to the door and lights a much-needed smoke. ``The traffic don't bother YOU?'' he asks a visitor. ``They roll down on you, brother. They'll run you over like a locomotive, man. You've got so many turn-offs and bypasses.''
Outside on Orbit Road, all is quiet. Seldom do more than two cars pass at a time.
The conversation turns to Orbit's history. It's brief: No one is really sure how or when the hamlet came to be, or what inspired its name.
Isle of Wight's 19th century records were meticulously maintained, and remain intact today. There's hardly a word, however, about Orbit.
Historian Helen Haverty King spent 10 years documenting the history of Isle of Wight in her 1993 book, ``Historical Notes on Isle of Wight County.''
But King, a county native, later draws a blank on the origin of the Orbit name. ``It's strange,'' she says. ``Very strange.''
What seems clear is that someone, sometime, had a penchant for things celestial. Moonlight and Comet dot other parts of Isle of Wight. Suffolk is shadowed by Eclipse. Sunbeam shines in Southampton County.
What little information can be had on Orbit comes courtesy of Margaret Cofield, seated by the door, the self-appointed ``old maid of Orbit'' and the burg's self-appointed historian.
She writes it all down - births, deaths, marriages - in a pale green ledger book originally used as Orbit's voter roll. The book is always close at hand.
Orbit's modern history, she says, started when a man named C.T. Garner bought Orbit Grocery in 1915. He, along with son Fleetwood, also built Garner Airport in the early 1940s.
The Orbit of old was open land, a few farmhouses. Kids rode to school in a pick-up truck. The grocery sold farm supplies and hardware. Water came from wells.
Come to think of it, not a whole lot different from the Orbit of today.
The conversation trails off.
The rush hour, all of 15 minutes long, comes to an end.
The farmers leave.
``Business,'' June Scott explains, ``is slow on Tuesdays.''
She settles into the now-vacant booth, opens a Danielle Steel novel, lights a smoke, and eases into the long day ahead. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JOHN H. SHEALLY II/The Virginian-Pilot
Robert Edwards walks to work along a logging road in the Isle of
Wight village of Orbit. Each day, he makes the three-mile trek on
foot from his trailer on Route 637 to his job cutting timber for
Kirk Lumber.
Photos
JOHN H. SHEALLY II/The Virginian-Pilot
June Scott minds the Orbit Grocery as she reads a book and enjoys a
cigarette. Behind her, William ``Boo Boo'' Eley warms himself by the
oil stove before going to work at the Burger King in Windsor.
Orbit residents like the rural quiet. ``It's just that little
section of God's green Earth,'' says Regina Arnette. ``All I have to
do is go out my back door, and there it is.''
by CNB