LAWFUL CONCEALED CARRY PERMITTED ON PREMISES.
--Sign outside the Apple Dumplin Restaurant, Springville, New York
The food was good, roadside diner fare in roadside diner surroundings. They waitress says "hon" and the owners don't accept plastic. The radio played music from the 1970s through to, perhaps, 2001. Ain't that America?
We spent the first night in small town Pennsylvania. Two of the lesser items on Nancy's bucket list are petting (1) a skunk and (2) a raccoon. While hiking in Allegheny National Forest we encountered a woman and her son, walking with their pet skunk (as one does).
Check.
Our larger goals for this road trip: (1) see Washington, D.C. before it burns and (2) follow a bit of a cryptid trail so that we can enjoy the backroads and I can do some on-site research for a book about the topic.
Life is Short. Smile while you still have teeth!! Please do not feed the whores drugs!!!
--Sign on the door of the Medix Hotel restaurant, Weedville, Pennsylvania
Another sign indicates that Presidents Garfield and Roosevelt slept here.
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We arrived in the District of Columbia Sunday night, a clean, well-serviced hotel with tiny rooms, ten minutes by foot from the National Mall. Some of that experience appears in the previous post.
The hotel had a restaurant and whiskey bar next door and a patio on the roof. Down the street a restaurant run by immigrant Chinese served American breakfast. It recalled more than a little Saturday Night Live's Olympia Café from the 1970s. They lack seating, but September shone with unseasonable warmth and the Thai place next door, closed until dinner, had a patio.
Walking the Mall is like reliving the American news footage of our lives crossed with the final season credits for Get Smart. Monuments and neoclassical buildings we've known from media take on weight and scale. Monday we toured together in the morning but separated in the afternoon. Tuesday we stayed together. That evening took us across to Georgetown and the 1789 for our one romantic splurge of a meal. The landmark restaurant, contemporary gourmet in a Federal Era building, lots of wood and Tudor echoes, was comparatively empty that evening, and would grow emptier. Everyone planned to be home or in a venue with a TV to watch the 2024 American Presidential Debate, if one can dignify current American political discourse with that term.
We made it back for the start. The TV occupied one wall of our small, clean room.
Wednesday morning we went in separate directions and reconnected in the afternoon. Since we'd never been to Washington before, much of our time we occupied with monuments and museums. Though I knew otherwise, I still imagine an Smithsonian Institute of childhood imaginings, where everything sits under one roof. You have to go from museum to museum to really rummage through America's attic, the Hope Diamond and the chairs from All in the Family (originally purchased second-hand for $10 a piece), the space shuttle Discovery and the Enola Gay and Neil Armstrong's space suit, but also the models for the Mothership and the TV Enterprise. A vintage computer system for satellites which had a whole 128 kilobytes of memory. One of the numerous signs set up over the years to mark the spot where Emmett Till was murdered, riddled with racist bullets.
Instruments of notable musicians. The history of the Wright Brothers. The Library of Congress. Of course. My wife, a singer, once studied to be a pilot. She became a librarian.
"They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rules... call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order."
--Franklin D. Roosevelt, engraved on one part of the Roosevelt Memorial
But there are also America's people. The pilot who shared an outdoor table at lunch discussed how air traffic works over Washington. Two scammers in robes handed out prayer beads as though giving a gift, and then demanded payment. Having watched them in action, we did not engage. They were from different racial backgrounds, so there's that.
People stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and looked out on where historic crowds have gathered, praying for a dream. A bearded man with an MIA pack took his young family to see the World War II memorial. "The greatest generation," he said. "It's been all downhill since then." Near the monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. a man offered Bipartisan Bicycle Tours.
They're adding a little museum below the Jefferson Memorial, one examining the complexity of his legacy. "All men are created equal...' Except, apparently, for the ones he owned. A woman walked up its steps to pose for a photo-op. As she did, her male companion filmed the sway of her bottom.
We encountered school field trips, already beginning.
I'd hoped to poke my head into Ford's Theater. Like the various Smithsonians, it's free. However, there was a rehearsal in progress. As I walked along to eventually rendezvous with my wife, I passed the J. Edgar Hoover Building, appropriately Brutalist. A man was screaming outside, jumping and crawling. The agents stood around him. Must be Wednesday. Metropolitan police pulled up. This is more their sort of thing.
Around noon on September 11, I sat in front of the United States Capitol and watched planes from Reagan National Airport fly over the Washington Monument.
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Before we left for Arlington I heard the following account. Make of it what you will.
At the Holocaust Memorial Museum-- the only one that required visitors to walk through full, airport-like security-- a survivor told it. She was never in the camps. Her family sent her, then a toddler, overseas during Kristallnacht.
Two of her granddaughters have similar fears now about America. They have decided to become dual citizens, inhabitants of America and a country from the EU. If their worst fears come true, she said, they intend to flee to the family's ancestral homeland.
Germany.
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Video.
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