Both of us had Summer/vacation jobs at various places in the city, and our family lived in three different houses in Bethesda and Cabin John. When planning what to see, we (or at least I) was tempted to see a bit of where we used to live and work. But I realized that it's very likely this would have been disappointing. I hadn't been there for over 40 years, and the ghosts I would have been looking for are long gone.
And when I looked for a hotel, thinking that there might be one close to Bethesda, I found the pickings in Arlington were actually by far the best. And so my feeling was that we should forget trying to capture the past, that we should stay in Arlington, walk over the Memorial Bridge onto the Mall, and see stuff around the Mall with our modern eyes until we dropped. There's more stuff there than you could see in a week, including a lot of stuff that hadn't been there 40 years ago when we were young!
Funny to call something around Washington "the Memorial" this or that, since the place is chock full of memorials. The bridge we were destined to cross is officially called the Arlington Memorial Bridge, but Washington is chock full of nicknames and so I'll try to use the canonical names here. And I have to preface that day by again saying that was another dread full experience. Not "dreadful" ... we had a wonderful time, and the day was full of lovely, moving sights and personal interactions. But the feeling of dread associated with the current crisis in our government was thick. I always found Washington to be a straight-laced place, with people more concerned with convention than freedom. I had lived there back in the Vietnam War days when every limousine, every police escort, and every collection of military suits represented the bad guys. And this was the situation again. Every time a helicopter took off from the White House or a street was suddenly blocked off, the feeling of dread was exacerbated.
But anyway, time to wake up at the Red Lion, do my morning routine, and go to breakfast! SarahP and Jim had gotten some breakfast yogurts at the Safeway yesterday, but SarahE and I walked the few yards over to the pizza place in part of the hotel, Ledo's, where they offered a typical "diner" breakfast. I had the vegeterian omelet [sic].
Didn't need to pack up and load the car that morning and we knew what we were going to do. The four of us were soon out the door and traversing the pedestrian walkway over Arlington Boulevard in the thick mist. Only a few blocks on city streets and then we were in a National Park area, as we were for most of the day.
The first site we saw was the Marine Corps War Memorial, also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, just South of our hotel. I'm very familiar with the image the memorial is centered on, and have always considered it a little unreal. In fact, the iconic picture was staged, though that should maybe be classed as an authenticity vs. sincerity issue.
I should have looked at the sculpture more critically, but instead my attention was taken by all the place names around it. These were places where U.S. Marines had ... what? Been dispatched to? Invaded? Died in? Well, anyway, it was a list of conflicts the Marines had been involved in and it was amazingly long. There was an unsettling number of entries in the list that we'd never heard of, though between the four of us we were very familiar with American history. If you follow the link above you can see the list. But it begged the question, are we supposed to be proud that our Marines have been involved in so many conflicts? I'm sure some of them were justified, but for instance I know that the Grenada conflict in 1983 was nothing more than an embarrassing power grab. How many of these incidents should we be proud of? Oh well, this was the first of many memorials to violence that day.
The day was a little cooler than the recent average thankfully, and still a little overcast, though the sun would come out later. The grass was damp beneath our feet and so we mostly stuck to walkways, though this was perhaps being overly conventional
Next up was the Netherlands Carillon, a gift from The Netherlands to the United States in gratitude for aid during and after World War II. The Carillon was locked that morning and probably only opens for concerts. We were lucky enough to hear it though, when it struck 10:00. It's made of steel and features a lot of rust, but that's the medium they chose. It's meant to be a "modern" sculpture, distinctive of Northern Europe, rather than another cookie-cutter Washington thing made out of marble, granite, or bronze. And it's pretty successful in this, though not a compelling structure. The best thing about it is its vantage point, looking West towards the National Mall across the Potomac, evocative of The Netherlands looking across the ocean at the U.S. And they have musical-note-shaped flower beds that must be very colorful at the right time of year.
OK, next on our short walk down to the Memorial Bridge was skirting the Arlington National Cemetery. We walked around the perimeter, between the Cemetery and the Jefferson Davis Parkway, and saw thousands of white tombstones in well maintained rows. When we finally got to Memorial Avenue, we looked way down the straight road to our right and could see the grand entrance to the Cemetery and the Custis-Lee Mansion up on the hill (a.k.a. the Robert E. Lee Memorial ... we were having a hard time getting away from the Confederacy). There was some kind of event going on there, people were pouring out of the Metro station and heading into the Cemetery. We turned left...
... and we saw from a distance that the Memorial Bridge was closed! I remembered that I had seen some signs about this on the parkways, but I hadn't had time to read them thoroughly. We stopped a young couple and asked if they knew if the Bridge was closed to pedestrians, or just to cars. They were very nice to us tourists and the guy looked it up on his phone ... it was closed to everything that weekend. This must have been the same people who closed the pool at the George Washington Grand on the night we were there and closed the Mexican restaurant in Elkton on Monday nights!
Oh well, we didn't have much choice; this meant that it was time to take the Metro. Believe it or not, the Washington Metro hadn't even been started when I last lived there. It's now been around for long enough to show signs of age in some spots, but is basically an effective transit system. We all had to buy cards for $2 and put at least $8 on them. We used them that morning and that evening (at $2 a ride) and so felt a little ripped off when we all had $4 left on our cards. But this is par for the course these days and SarahE found a homeless center where we can contribute the leftover cards.
While the other three wrestled with the fare machines, I approached your typical mass transit employee who looks like she has much better stuff to do than answer your stupid-ass question. I told her we were tourists and the Bridge was closed and we needed to know how to get to the Mall. She seemed to take pity, for a second, and told me, "Take Largo to Smithsonian," which was all she needed to say and was a masterpiece of concision.
So that's what we did, after hanging out on the platform for about 10 minutes and checking out the maps and stuff there. We realized that not every station stopped at by more than one of the six lines allowed transfer between the lines, but that some were hubs for a large number of lines. Looked pretty well organized to me. Next time I go to DC maybe I'll just ride around the Metro and eschew the depressing war memorials.
Whatever, we were going to see the depressing memorials that day (and hopefully some non-depressing stuff too), and it wasn't that long before we exited at Smithsonian, the seventh stop on the Blue Line. By now the persistent overcast was pretty much gone and it had become a pleasant, mostly cloudy, breezy day, which was still too hot for me! Our first stop was the Smithsonian Castle, where Dad worked for a short while, but just to visit the bathrooms. From there we headed West toward the Capitol.
Just past the Castle and the Arts and Industries Building is the Hirshhorn Museum, which had been opened when I was living there. And my spirit jumped when I saw their sculpture garden, on the Mall side of the Museum. Don't know if I've ever been in the Museum itself, but I'd been to the sculpture garden several times and was delighted at the opportunity to do another quick visit there. I strongly remembered a Henry Moore sculpture in the Garden, so vividly that I could almost feel its curves. I hunted a bit and there it was, a beautiful organic thing in the middle of a lot of sterility. I was home again in some way.
This was one of my favorite interludes of the day. If you ever go to Washington, gentle reader, be sure to stop by the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden. Besides several Moore sculptures, it contains Rodin's Balzac and Burghers of Calais, as well as a sculpture of a tree (well, in fact it *was* a tree) contributed by Yoko Ono. And a dancing rabbit.
We'd already seen several sites and we hadn't even arrived at the one we meant to see first yet! The incredible number of choices among the Smithsonian Museums is pretty intimidating, but SarahE had expressed a strong opinion and I agreed wholeheartedly: we wanted to see the National Museum of the American Indian, just beyond the Air and Space Museum.
I hesitate to try to describe this museum ... go there! We didn't see anywhere near all of it or spend as much time as we should have, seeing what we did. It's surrounded by gardens meant to evoke the kinds of places Native Americans live/lived in; which is in fact, America. The plaza and the shape of the building are meant to evoke the landscapes of the world, and the place of the world in the firmament.
When you get inside there's a grand concourse rising up to the 4th floor and you're supposed to take the elevator or stairs up to the top and work your way down. Of course, in the way of museums 'n' stuff these days there's a film to see first to orient you, but we missed it by a minute or two and we just got started anyway.
Getting an overview of where native Americans lived, how they were organized into tribes/nations, and how the range of these nations changed is the information I most wanted to get, and this is difficult. The answer is multi-dimensional, but there were exhibits that tried to give you parts of the answer; it could not be all done at once. The exhibit I spent most of my time with was on treaties between American Indians and the [European] U.S. Government. They addressed the concept of a treaty and how that resonated in both the Indian and European world, and how both parties were committed or not to the idea. They displayed specific treaties, and they had displays on the geographies involved, the people involved, and how the treaties turned out. Let me just say that the Europeans flooding the continent did not come off well in this exhibit, though the exhibit was always objective. One of the treaties featured was the one Johnny Cash has memorialized in song, where George Washington betrayed the Senecas.
This exhibit of course concentrated on tribes located mainly within the borders of the United States, though others depicted Indian heritage throughout the Americas. We all spent a lot of time at an exhibit of three-dimensional figures of animals from all over the Americas, some created a few hundred years ago and some very recently. We also looked at a display case of toys and clothes created over a similar time span. This was very much a living museum in that their mission included collecting contemporary artifacts as well as historic ones.
And this aesthetically and functionally oriented artwork was incredible! I had seen belts of wampum in the treaties exhibit that must have taken incredible technical skill to make, and these objets d'art generally combined that incredible skill in beadwork and wood-shaping with a simultaneous timelessness and immediacy of form. This seal had not only just jumped out of the water in front of you, it had been doing that for time immemorial.
Wow, this was a great experience! But we were weak with hunger by the time we'd just skimmed through half of the exhibits. Luckily they had a great cafeteria downstairs, which was also an integral part of the museum. They had food stations in it that concentrated on Native American dishes from particular regions, and though the prices were a little high that was fine with us. SarahP and I went to the meso-American station and I got a fantastic bean salad, Sarah got a quinoa soup, and we shared a piece of cornbread. SarahE got frybread and buffalo chili at a Southwestern Indian station ... and I got a Belgian beer.
Got a great table in their crowded cafeteria and we decided that as much as we wanted to stay here, we had to press on after lunch. We had done a lot already and there was still plenty of time in the day, but we had to seize it! SarahP and Jim wanted to get over to the Capitol and maybe around it to the Supreme Court and I was a little skeptical as to whether this would be worth the long walk, but as always our group decision was the right one. We left NMAI (I had to drop a few bucks in their hopper, this is a fantastic museum and we need this kind of stuff), exited out a different way than we had come, and proceeded up to the Capitol.
The next Act in our trip to Washington was the most dread full. This was the day that the Kavanaugh nomination was going to be voted on by the Senate, and analysis was showing that they had the votes. We were headed right for the Senate chamber (Jim correctly identified the Senate's wing of the Capitol by the fact that it was flying the flag) and we could sense the evil fog emanating from the place, though this was probably just standard Washington humidity and that area has seen plenty of fog over the last 218 years.
The Capitol Reflecting Pool was empty, and we headed up toward the West lawn anyway, still a little unsure as to whether we'd go all the way around that huge building. It was great fun to watch tourists from all over the world taking group pictures and selfies with the Capitol and the Mall in the background. We took a few ourselves, both of us and them! And then we pressed onward, around the Senate wing and up to the business side, where a large impromptu rally was in progress.
Groups of people were pressing up to the steps in the center of the building on that side, chanting. Hundreds if not thousands of others backed them up, and we moved to the center. We were expressing our rights and our indignation. Poll after poll showed that a majority of the American people were opposed to Kavanaugh's being seated on the Supreme Court, and it was a blow to our concept of the people being in charge of the government for it to be about to happen anyway, to say the least. And we were right there, staring at the demonstrators, the building where it was happening, and the blameless Capitol police who saw this every day and considered it part of their job.
And there was a group of demonstrators from the Holton-Arms School, wearing t-shirts proclaiming this. SarahP had graduated from Holton-Arms about 10 years before one of the events we were all indignant about, where Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a Holton-Arms student in their teenage years. The women were delighted to meet an alumna as successful and exotic as Sarah, and the representative oldest woman there admitted that this alumna pre-dated her significantly. They were out of t-shirts but had us all sign their placard and gave Sarah follow-up information.
There was another, perhaps bigger rally going on on the Hill simultaneously, over at the Supreme Court. We headed over there around the long line of people waiting to get in to the Capitol and sit in the galleries of the Senate, as is our right. We got as far as the edge of 1st St. NE, near where it meets Maryland Ave. There were groups of people on the large steps of the Supreme Court building; probably they'd gotten in for a tour and then stepped outside to watch the scene. There was a police barrier between the steps and the crowd, where there was a real rally going on with speakers, though often drowned out by enthusiastic chants from elsewhere. The passion in the crowd was palpable, as well as the evil smog that overhung it all. And of course there were Trump/Kavanaugh supporters scattered about, though they were few and far between. A group of teenagers on motorized scooters who were wearing Trump t-shirts broke out of the pack and headed downhill past us speedily, as we wended our way back to the Mall.
Oooh, have I mentioned the motorized scooters? Major cities have been going out of their way recently to declare themselves bike-friendly. In fact, the Red Lion Hotel had a rack of bikes that guests could take out for the day. But there seems to be a subversive movement going on connected to this: motorized scooters. Of course the problem with a bike is that you need to actually pedal it, and this can lead to you looking harried rather than cool. Motorized scooters (electric) were all over the fucking place, clogging up the bike lanes and running people off sidewalks. I didn't think this was cool.
Finally dropped down off the hill and back onto the Mall, though navigating many urban crossings was required. Our next goal was to see the outside of the new National Museum of African American History & Culture, and then the White House. The Mall was beginning to wear on us, this was a long walk. But we'd warmed up for it in SNP. It was a weekend admittedly, and right in the middle of the Fall school term; but even so there were an incredible number of people on the Mall. The line to get in the National Museum of Natural History, which I'd hoped we'd have time for, stretched around the block.
The African American Museum looked impressive, taking up a massive block in the Mall, and featuring a gold frieze of natural shapes. There was no way we could get in, though SarahP tried. We would have had to have gotten tickets by email months ago. But the lawn leading up to the White House was free, when we got that far. We were still way South of it when we declared ourselves to be close enough, and we sat down for a good rest and some water.
There's been pressure on the NPS to close off areas around the White House, to suppress the ability of the people to demonstrate. They had a large part of the Ellipse fenced off, like they were re-seeding it, but they weren't. This meant people couldn't gather on the lawn to yell truths at Trump, though the people standing on the sidewalk along Pennsylvania Ave were doing what they could.
There were a few more things that were at the tops of our lists for things to see on the Mall, and SarahP proposed a plan for a loop that would allow it. We started off due South and then followed the paved path a little West, curving past the Washington Monument, which is a tall sucker. We saw a bit of the National World War II Memorial at the East end of the Reflecting Pool. We didn't stop there, but I thought it very successful in looking like a monument from the 1940s, though it was built on the 1980s.
Where we were heading was the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, slightly off of the Mall, across Independence Ave. Before we could get there we caught a glimpse of the District of Columbia War Memorial, and a glimpse was fine.
The King Memorial was inspiring and is in a beautiful setting, off the craziness of the Mall and bordering the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. You enter it through a mountain of marble, evoking one of his most famous speeches. On the other side is the slice of the mountain that he's symbolically removed, with a monumental statue of him emerging from the other side. He's facing the Tidal Pool, but is not looking out, rather he's looking thoughtful and reflective, like he's considering his next speech. His suit is stylized, with even waves of wrinkles. But his hands and his face are human, belying the scale.
It was just then that phones all around us let us know: the Senate had just voted to confirm Kavanaugh. This was an especially sad, emotional, moving moment. We were standing there, staring at a monument to the underdog in our democracy, who had the moral virtue necessary to a true leader. And we were hearing of another false leader advancing. The backdrop of the statue was a long wall, bearing quotes from Dr. King. One of my favorite quotes of his was there, and I found it particularly relevant: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Another incredibly moving experience, and there were a couple to go! We cut back across Independence Ave and through the bit of woods by the Park Service stables over to about halfway down the Reflecting Pool, then turned to our left, towards perhaps the most meaningful monument I've ever seen, the Lincoln Memorial.
This end of the Mall was perhaps even more crowded than the other end had been. Every one of the steeper and steeper sets of steps up from the Reflecting Pool was covered with people, and we had to weave back and forth to get up to the top. We stopped several times on the way up and turned to take in the incredible view of the Washington Monument appearing more and more in the Reflecting Pool, and the Mall being revealed to us, with all the buildings, trees, and people on it getting smaller and smaller.
At the top of the steps the view is complete and you can see the Capitol on top of its hill in the distance. Then you turn and the shadows part and there is Daniel Chester French's monumental statue of Lincoln, sitting in his chair and thinking deep thoughts. His head turns to the side and his gaze is downwards, showing sadness mixed with resolve. There are signs asking people to respect the quiet of the place, but it was filled with people gabbing in all languages, toddlers crying, and groups shouting at each other while they took pictures.
I walked over to the South cove of the memorial and read the Gettysburg Address, and studied the mural over it, showing an angel presiding over a scene of discord. After that I went over to the other cove and read his second Inaugural Address, under a mural showing the same angel uniting the people. The Lincoln Memorial was just as I remembered it from over 40 years ago, corny, overblown, mobbed with people, and incredibly moving. There is hope for our union and our world, and words of truth will lead us there.
We ducked into the small gift shop to see how crowded it was. There were some interesting looking books but we got out of there, assembled, and picked our way down the steps. Only one more destination to go, the site that was at the top of my list of things to see, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
This was another memorial that had been built after I left Washington, and I'd wanted to see it for years. It's also another memorial that I don't feel I can describe as well as I should. You have to go see for yourself. I'd read a lot about it and seen smaller replicas. When we approached I felt I was ready for it, and it was perhaps less imposing than I expected at first. It's in a corner of the Mall that gets a lot of auto traffic noise, and there's a lot of foot traffic down at that end too. And the heart of the monument itself, the Wall, was packed with people tracing names, taking selfies, coddling toddlers, and doing all those things people do.
But then it strikes you, and I had to hurry out of the Wall area to see this more completely. The memorial is not one artifact, or a monumental statue, it's an environment consisting of lawn, trees, people, baby carriages, a couple of movingly realistic bronze sculptures, and also the Wall and the people interacting with it, and the short lawn at the top of it, leading to a busy street. I was alive during that war and I demonstrated against it on the Mall and saw it every day on the TV. That was the meaning of this environment, to show the connection between our reality and the reality it was commemorating, and the mindless incomprehensibility of the war.
We'd recently seen marks left by the Civil War all over the countryside. Perhaps people wounded physically or psychically by that war were able to go to the Lincoln Memorial and feel the same kind of depiction of their experience.
And that corner of the Mall is a little sunken, and you can look up the gradual slope and see the top half of the Washington Monument poking up above the horizon. And way in the distance you can see the top half of the Capitol. And you realize that not only is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial a whole environment with a message, the whole Mall and the whole world is part of that environment. The Park Service tries to maintain the Mall as a homogeneous experience, and we had just traveled it from one end to the other. Perhaps the United States was no more comprehensible after this experience, but we definitely felt closer to the complexity.
OMG, the others were as affected as I was and SarahP took a long time at the Wall. We showed her the Vietnam Women's Memorial section after that, which is really part of the whole thing. And then we tried to get away from there a bit and strategize about dinner.
It was SarahP's turn to pick a restaurant, and she wanted to find somewhere concentrating on vegetables. Several possibilities popped up on SarahE's phone, and we decided to head up to the Beefsteak location on 22nd St. One good thing about this was that it was right in the direction of the Metro stop we wanted to end up at. It wasn't that far, but we walked very slowly up there, into the middle of the George Washington University campus. Across Constitution Ave, up 21st St, diagonally up to 22nd St on Virginia Ave, and finally to the right block. We found a statue of Pushkin on the way, as well as a little memorial to a liberated slave (Leonard A. Grimes) who'd moved to Boston.
Finally made it up to Beefsteak on I St (labeled "Eye St" so people don't get confused), and there was some debate over whether we really wanted to eat there or go to another restaurant. But everything else in the neighborhood was very high priced, so we did eat there, getting some nice bowls (I got a "crunchy avocado" thing) which we ate at tables on the empty and quiet sidewalk. We confused the heck out of them though. They thought they were a hip venue for college students and when these elderly people came in and started expecting them to do advanced math, like to put four orders on one check, they were discombobulated to say the least.
Dragged down to the end of the block after that and dropped down into the Metro's Foggy Bottom stop. It was just one stop across the river over to the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington and we were more than ready to get back to the hotel. Two things happened when we got off of the train in Rosslyn though. One was that we went up the longest escalator that has ever existed, or at least that I've been on. Seriously, this thing must have been a mile. SarahE reports that she was hallucinating on it, thinking when she looked up that we were moving vertically. And the second thing was that when we got out of there we didn't know which way to turn and probably turned the wrong way and headed in the right direction, but were now on the wrong side of the looking glass and so were a little lost.
Luckily, several phones were deployed and we turned around and headed in the right(?) direction. We were getting a bit confused again and then there it was, Dark Star Park! I had seen on the map that there was a park right near us named after the epic Grateful Dead musical work. Oh wait, it wasn't?? You mean, this was just synchronicity that when we were lost we found this sculpture garden pointing us the way home (or to the Red Lion at least)? Whatever. We frolicked in the park for just a bit and then headed back to the hotel.
Yay, we were finally back! It had been a long, long day and we felt very good about what we'd achieved. By my count we'd seen 16 things, as well as the GWU campus and the Metro. And we'd had a couple of great meals and hadn't been arrested.
The Red Sox - Yankees Divisional Series came on, but the Red Sox fell behind early and I went to bed. Past time after an exhausting day!
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