NATION’S CAPITAL COVERED BY THORNBERRIES--Part II

Friday, July 9, 1999: The Nation’s Capital Unveiled

We rose quickly the next morning and threw ourselves together for our trip into the nation’s capital. Today would be the most rigorous day of the entire trip. The bulk of our planned activities would occur over the next several hours.

Jennifer and I did have to overcome the first hurdle, which was traveling the estimated 10 miles to the nearest public transportation system, the Metro. Once we got there, the parking was a nightmarish situation, as every vehicle was crunched next to every other vehicle like a neverending crush of automotive fish sticks. This was, after all, a weekday and we were there at morning rush hour. Just as I despaired that we’d ever find a place to park, Jennifer spotted one and snizzed into it. Our world fell back into place again, and with our trusty, if low-end, 35mm cameras stuffed into our backpack, we set off to confront the next unique part of this experience.

The Metro

I had only seen public transportation systems on television programs, so I had long associated them with other features of the Big City: crowds, filth, pollution and fear of crime. Once we entered the station of the Metro, I was confronted with crowds, filth, pollution and fear of crime. Sometimes, it sucks to be right. Ultimately, however, the most difficult part of navigating the Metro was figuring out how to buy tickets at the automated machines and then running them through the automated scanners. Jennifer quickly deciphered the bowel-like maps of the different colored train lines (We were on the “Orange” line.) and directed both of us to the waiting point. After that, it was a leisurely ride on the next train. The most remarkable part of the process was watching all the cars on the roads below and adjacent to us as we left them in the dust. One advantage of the subway system is that there are no red lights, so they can pour on the steam and just go until they stop.

I remember sitting next to Jennifer and listening to a father rebuking his son about being too rowdy. At one point, the son asked where they were going, and the father replied, “The Smithsonian.” I was both excited and annoyed when he said that; the former because we had plans to go there as well, the latter because it meant we’d probably have to continue to listen to the boy being loud and obnoxious.

Our First View of The Mall

It felt like the Metro stopped at a subterranean level just above Dante's first ring of hell. Oh, it wasn't unpleasant or anything, just crowded, rushed and seemingly deep underground. But once we rode up the long escalator and broke into the sunlight above, it was truly a sight to behold. We were in The Mall, the area of D.C. that houses many of the familiar landmarks we'd come to see. Behind us bulked the Washington Monument, though it took us a second to recognize it, because it was blue. Apparently, we had chosen just the perfect time to see it while it was under renovation. The blue was an insulated scaffolding that had been erected around the phallic structure, like flexible steel Viagra.

The memorable Washington Monument, under the scaffolding of renovation.

The renovation problem would follow us through a few other great tourist attractions as well, though it did nothing to detract from the appeal of the city.

As we would walk through D.C. over the next couple days, I would feel a strange niggling that something was amiss, sort of like finding that hole in your gums after having a loose tooth for so long. After awhile, I finally figured out what was missing…traffic lights! Yes, in the streets of D.C., they don’t run wires across the intersections and suspend the lights the way they do in Kentucky. No, they mount them on poles at the sidewalks. The result is an “open air” effect that allows one to see more of the sky and the trees. We didn’t realize how accustomed we’d grown to the webbing of wiring until we got away from it.

Hoodwinked and Hornswaggled!

We’re bumpkins.

Okay, that may be a little overstated, but nonetheless, one point was always poignant for Jennifer and me during our time in D.C; we weren’t in Kentucky any more. I’m sure that we just looked like gawking hillbillies, the potential prey for the crowd of sheisters and snake-oil salesmen who affix themselves to such places like sleazy barnacles on the side of a clueless boat’s hull. And so it was that one such con artist gravitated to us and generously sold us a map of the Mall area. We thought him helpful, until we later found that the same map was available in all public tourist buildings, for free. More, the one he sold us was just a photocopy, so it was in black-and-white! Jennifer and I agreed that we’d been shnookered, and vowed that such street people would never pester us like that again.

In point of fact, we were later accosted by another such person who started out his charm-spiel by saying, “Excuse me, sir, but you’re breaking the law!” When I gave him a look of dread, he smiled brightly and said, “…by being out with such a beautiful woman!” Once he had us roped into his spell, he proceeded to try to get us to buy some cheap bead jewelry as part of a contribution “for the children” of some nebulous cause. That time, we turned him down and kept our meager reservoir of cash.

Otherwise, we saw the expected plethora of the homeless and destitute standing around and panhandling for coin. Some played instruments with the stereotypical hat on the sidewalk. Others just marketed their hard luck. By and large, they left us alone.

The Smithsonian Institution

With glee in our hearts, we journeyed to the first attraction on our “to do” list, the Smithsonian. Yes, both of us had preferences for this trip and that venerable institution was clearly in my camp. Neither of us had any interest in the city’s art museums, as we figured those were for old fogies and pretentious professionals with something to prove. Boring!

Museum of American History

So it was that we entered the first branch of the Smithsonian that we had planned to see…the Museum of American History. That chapter held much promise, heralded as it was by the gigantic idealized statue of George Washington that waited to greet us at the door. I have to say that ol’ George was too buff for his own good; he had been rendered with a muscular build like a Greek god, an obvious attempt by the artist to depict him as larger than life. Onward we went into the museum!

Eh.

Insofar as the rest of that branch of the museum, it was okay, but not stellar. What really struck us was that the entire thrust of the exhibits seemed less about showing American history and more about apologizing for past wrongs done to every minority group in the country. They couldn’t just show a depiction of an old slave quarters, they had to dedicate ¾ of the educational card to saying how wrong slavery was. We know that; we had it drummed into us all through grade school. I was more interested in learning about how they slaves maintained their history, culture and families within a slave system than about how tyrannical our ancestors were.  Show instead what about them has survived and prospered, despite the historical atrocities. Educate us on how these people kept their dignity; don’t create monuments to their shame and our regret.

Jennifer too was a bit disappointed by the experience. She had hoped to see an exhibit dealing with “A Hundred Years in Film.” Apparently, however, our sources were outdated, because we searched fruitlessly for some time before asking one of the staff persons for directions. She told us that yes, that exhibit had been there as a temporary show, but that was over a year ago!

Museum of Natural History — Finding the Little Boy Within

Other parts of the Smithsonian fared far better in the judgmental eyes of Jennifer and I. The next branch we visited was the Museum of Natural History. Here at last, I gave into my boyish tendencies, as the environment resurrected from me what lies quiescent in the heart of every young man who was ever a younger boy - the love of dinosaurs! Yes, these were in great abundance here, those stone cold copies of long dead bones, the last evidence we have of the stunning megafauna that once roamed the lands of a much younger, less forgiving planet. We took pictures galore of creatures spanning not only the Mesozoic Era, but also the Pleistocene.

Thomas stands before the Tyrannasaurus Rex skull, what was once considered the mightiest predator in the history of the planet.

Since I had heeded Jennifer’s advice and started reading Clan of the Cave Bear novels earlier in the summer, I was eager to see the skeletal remains of an actual woolly mammoth. But alas, those 11-foot-tall pachyderms just weren’t in evidence this trip. My brief disappointment was assuaged by the replication they had of a prehistoric shark, which was probably three times the size of a modern Great White. Although it wasn’t prehistoric, I was also wowed by a 70-foot replica of a modern blue whale that was hanging down from the ceiling. I remember reading the descriptor that said the replica was bloated in its presentation, because the original specimen on which it was based had washed up on shore and begun decomposing by the time the artist started trying to capture it. As a result, its body had belched out a whale-load of gases that gave an artificial appearance of a ballooned creature. The 12-foot true skull of a blue whale that was adjacent to the model made up for that distortion!

Megafauna weren’t the only attractions of a Museum of Natural History. There also was quite a collection of stones, both precious and mundane. In particular, we got to see the infamous Hope Diamond, spinning slowly behind its cylinder of three-inch, bullet-proof glass. The whole wall behind that beautiful, boron-laced crystal was painted with its history, which has traditionally been very dark. In fact, most of those to whom it has fallen have themselves ultimately fallen…into misfortune or from the world of the living. I was amazed at how it will turn red under ultraviolet light, though we only got to see a picture of that, not the event itself.

The Hope Diamond in its bullet-proof glass casing.

Jennifer laughed at me as I ran from exhibit to exhibit, looking at all of the bones and other evidence of an alien world across an unimaginable gulf of time.

Museum of Aviation and Space Flight — Glee!!

Although I enjoyed the Natural History branch, I touched the very essence of glee at the next branch we visited, the Smithsonian Museum of Aviation. Here, we weren’t dealing with an alien world across time, but alien worlds across space. In the front entrance, they had some of the human race’s humbler beginnings with regard to heavier-than-air travel. The Spirit of St. Louis, that brave aircraft flown by Charles Lindbergh on the first transatlantic flight, hung suspended in the air over the entrance area, along with models of old satellites, and even actual splashdown capsules that still had the re-entry burns on their hulls. The little replica of the cutting-edge Pathfinder rover from the 1997 Mars landing was actually cute!

I tried to take a turn touching an actual moon rock on display, but there were so many children in front of me that I really didn’t get a chance to look closely. But Jennifer and I did see some actual granules of lunar regolith stored under glass in another display.

I could have spent even more time going through the various exhibits, even though my poor skull was filled to bursting with new knowledge about space travel and the planets. I had already learned, for example, that the original moon buggy that NASA used on the lunar landings was capable of driving 80 miles…though it was only actually used for 55. Jennifer would later comment on my prodigious memory for such trivia, but by now, she had centered her attention on the most immediately relevant topic in her present universe - food! Leaving behind the wondrous world of the Smithsonian Museum, we found a Hard Rock Café for dinner.

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—‘Nuff Said

Jennifer and I had decided that because of cost and crowds, we wouldn’t take any major tours of the different monuments and tourist attractions. There just was not enough time in a single weekend to wait in long lines for lengthy tours. We were there for a “grab and scramble.” But we did at least want to snap a few pictures of ourselves outside of the memorable entities of our nation’s capital. One such entity was the White House.

Not only was the seat of the Presidency a salient experience, but it was also a matter of endurance. After all, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was quite a walk from the sights we’d been seeing at the Mall. It took quite a bit of pavement-pounding to finally find our way there.

Eh.

Ultimately, we were both glad that we found it, but the view left something to be desired. The black gates that existed to keep people like us out were so far away from the White House itself that all we could really see were a few White Windows and perhaps a bit of White Shrubbery. Getting a camera shot was difficult, because there were just too many people milling about and lowing contentedly. But we managed.

Honest Abe is Big…Honest!

Ah, yes, both of us had yearned for this moment. After all, who hasn’t heard of the Lincoln Memorial? Jennifer and I pushed our poor tootsies back to the large location of Honest Abe’s old marble ass and stood before the majesty that was Him. He was huge!! Just looking up at him, nothing could really capture our awe, except Jennifer’s single, uttered: “Wow.”





Both of us wanted to abase ourselves before the mighty marble monarch and declare our loyalty to the Kingdom of these United States. The only mar on the marble was that the Lincoln Memorial too was under repair, so unsightly plastic flapped in the wind like the baggy granny-panties.  Didn’t matter. We still felt we were in the presence of Greatness. The marble man was truly a work of art.

Bloody Hunks of Foot Meat

ABOVE: Jennifer in her fashionable sunglasses, poses like a government agent before the Capitol Building.
BELOW: Thomas sits on the wall at the Capitol Building, with the Mall unfolding behind him.

Arrg!!

Yes, this had been a very trying day for our feetsies. We both felt we’d walked the length and breadth of the city and the Mall by the time all was said and done. Our shoes emitted a palpable gout of steam when we loosened the laces, and our toes were like individual cured hams. The bones of my feet felt like they’d been flattened and fused into one unified plate of inflexible calcium. Jennifer and I spent the evening using lotion and soothing touch on each other’s wounded soles. It felt good, but geez were we ever paying the price for our glee!


NEXT: A trip through American history.


Click for Part III