To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow
And if it be Thy will, O Spirit, that others should see too what we believed we saw, then when the time is right, embolden me. Let my memories of it come forward to convey in sincerity of heart the experiences of two young men, now growing into old age, who were seeking nothing less than the meaning of America, which I offer humbly as no earthly idol of Babeldom, burdened with the shackles of temporal ideologies, all of which corrode in time and congeal inevitably into tyranny, but simply as one nation among the history of all nations and peoples serving Thee, and subject to Thy Justice, Mercy and Grace.
We had driven across the country in the Dodge Dart to Louisiana, and then spent four days coming up from New Orleans to Nashville. Those four days would be the ones that would change the way we both looked at the nation, a revelation given to us in the form of an understanding of the tragic, laughing, riotous, ever-renewing epic that the country had lived out over the centuries. For both of us it would become the wellspring of much private communication, as well as introspection and reflection about our place in the nation's history.
We came into Nashville on the fourth day out of New Orleans, just a day's drive from our destination in D.C.. It felt to both of us as if we were coming back to ordinary life from outer space.
Charles had been born in Nashville, and he had arranged to stay at the home of family friends who had known him in his childhood, when his family lived down the street from where our hosts still lived. The mother of the family had been a close friend of Charles' own mother and had been instrumental in helping her start the toy store that she later operated for years in Colorado.
It had been years since Charles had been back to his birthplace. We navigated the quiet residential back streets using a city map to find the stately home of our hosts amidst lush lawns and ancient hardwood trees. They welcomed us both warmly. They were eager to show us Nashville, including the classic country music venues, and to take us to eat at a real Southern diner, to taste the delicious "overcooked" vegetables, as they lovingly called the menu items.
Charles had wanted to see the house where he lived when he was born. so when we had free time, we got in his car to drive the few blocks from our hosts' house through the neighborhood to the address he remembered. We misread the map, however, mistaking a dead end for a through street, and had to turn around after half a block. At the intersection, after we got back to the stop sign, Charles started slowly forward in the Dart.
Suddenly he slammed hard on the brakes. Had he not done so at the instant he did, the furniture delivery truck coming in hard from the right side through the residential neighborhood would have hit the passenger compartment where I was sitting. As such, the brunt of the collision was instead absorbed by the sturdy steel of the front end of the car and the engine.
I remember the world in front of me caving in all at once. Then everything stopped.
It took us a few seconds to realize what had happened. The car had spun around violently in place. Miraculously we were both unharmed. We got out of the car and stood in the intersection, neither of us with the slightest scratch.
The Dodge Dart, however, was a total loss. The car we loved, that had carried us on our adventures, was a twisted sculpture of junk, its glorious slant six engine venting its vapors and fluids into the otherwise placid street scene. I took out the 35 camera my grandfather had given me and snapped black and white photos of the wreckage as a Nashville police officer took the report from Charles, and as the tow truck operator loaded the car up on the crane and took it away. Right before they did, I took a screwdriver and pried off the cursive Swinger nameplate of the Dodge and gave it to Charles as a last souvenir. The perfect road trip was over.
As we stood there, I recall reasoning out how according to the laws of physics, the mass of the furniture truck meant that it imparted so much more destructive impulse than a normal car going the same speed, and that by all rights the speed limit ought to be a momentum limit. I have a habit of lapsing into this kind of detached rational speculation at moments of overwhelming emotional impact.
Because of the car accident, we had to stay in Nashville a couple extra days, which put us behind schedule. Once we got to D.C., Charles was to leave for South America on a summer-long backpacking trip. He had originally invited me along when he proposed the road trip but I didn't have enough money.
In order to make his international flight from Dulles. he had to splurge for a last minute plane ticket from Nashville to Washington. Unwilling to use so much of my remaining funds for the extravagance of such a ticket, I said goodbye to him as he got in the car for the airport. My plan was to take a cheap Greyhound bus to D.C, He said I was welcome to stay with Geraldine and her sister down by GWU once I was there.
Our hosts drove me to the bus station in the evening and I tried to sleep on the packed bus as it went up through and Virginia. In back of the bus was a group of young men on their way to basic military training played music and partied. By the time I got to D.C., Charles was just about to leave for the airport. I didn't see him again for many months.
It was the first time I'd been back in Washington since 1984. At that age, four years is an eternity. I was thinking somehow, with more experience and on the edge of getting my degree, I could rekindle something of my life that I had abandoned there, even thought I had no clue of what that might be. I had no real plans. I believed, even expected, that something would "happen" like magic, the way it always did. Wasn't that how the world worked? At least I could visit the Einstein statue again, now that I was a physics major.
After a few days staying with Geraldine and Stephanie, thinking I should act before I had used up my welcome, I said goodbye to them. I had looked up my old roommate, Andy from Dayton, Ohio, who had by now graduated and was living in an attic room of a house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C, in the north-central part of the city.
We had shared a room at Xavier Hall in 1983. We always called him Andy B. in order to distinguish him from another Andy on the same floor. He was the first person I'd ever met from Ohio. I was the first person he had ever met from Colorado. Back then that kind of situation was normal. We weren't so connected as we are now, and the different regions of the country were like foreign countries to each other in some ways. I had stayed with him again when I came back to D.C. the following year. The night that Reagan walloped Mondale, I opened the window of the apartment and yelled "Four More Years" out into the dark streets of Georgetown, thinking that I would relief my grief by mocking it.
Andy B. was glad to see me, asking me long questions about my life, and about the trip I had just taken. He was genuinely interested. He was a great soul, one of the finest people I have ever met in my life.
He said I was welcome to stay in his attic room in Adams-Morgan, but there would be complications. The landlord who lived on the first two floors was somewhat neurotic and complained to him frequently about his use of the flat. I would have to be careful when I was there, especially in how I walked up and down the stairs to the attic, to avoid making too much noise.
This was funny to me, as Andy was one of the most callow, amenable guys you would ever meet in your life. He was thin and bookish in his look, with wire rim glasses. He played the cello and was well-read, with the kind of intellectual grounding that smart kids had back then. His dad had been an American air force officer, and his mother was British, giving him perhaps the last genuine example of a classic Mid-Atlantic accent.
Most of the time, he said, he would be staying with his girlfriend, studying for the foreign service exam, so I would not even see him. I didn't mind being on my own. At least I had a place to relax, and a base to explore D.C., albeit a sweltering one without air conditioning. Between excursions into the oppressive humidity of Washington, I tried to keep cool with the electric fan while I reread my Optics textbook from the spring, that I'd brought along with me. Reading it in Washington, D.C., even after the course had ended, demonstrated to myself how much my life and interests had changed. At Georgetown, being a physics major would have been the most outrageous idea in the world to me. My original degree program had not a single science requirement. The fact that I could now crack open my Optics book and understand the sections about Fourier transforms and convolution integrals was testimony of the distance between the past and the present versions of me.
While I was staying there, I also wrote a letter to a friend in Oregon, many pages long as I often did back then, trying to narrate and capture the experiences Charles and I had shared along the way across the country. It was a mess of a letter. I know this because years later the letter would wind up back in my possession. I had forgotten I'd written it. I took one glance at my scrawled, fervid handwriting on notebook paper and realized what a mess it was, and how confused that person had been. I've never been inclined to actually read it.
Being restless and lonely, I spent a few days playing tourist in D.C. In the 1980s it was much easier to visit the famous sites, including the Capitol and the White House. At the height of summer, the city felt deserted compared to what it would be like in later years. It was not yet teeming with nonstop tour buses disgorging people to take social media photos.
When all else failed, I could down to the Mall to enjoy the free museums, and the monuments and history I had loved seeing in college, often to the detriment of my class attendance. Five years before, in August 1983, just before my freshman year had started, I had flown East early to stay with aunt and uncle and cousins in the far Virginia suburbs where they lived. A couple days before the start of the semester, the Democratic politician Jesse Jackson held a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial in commemoration of the famous address there by Martin Luther King twenty-five years earlier.
I was eager to attend the rally, as part of my political initiation as a college freshman. Stocked with bus schedules from my aunt that she kept in the kitchen cupboards, I caught the city bus at a lonely stop in the Virginia suburbs to get to the terminus of the Orange Line train, which at the time ended at Ballston, and then rode it into the city. I can remember the thrill of riding the spacious, clean train as it approached the city and disappeared into the tunnel to go under the Potomac. It felt like the first truly independent step of my adult life.
I came up out of the train into daylight at the Smithsonian station. The humidity and heat down by the Potomac was overpowering. The Mall was already swarming with people in mid morning, even down by the Capitol, far from the site of the rally.
In 1983 activism was so out of fashion. The Vietnam War was a distant memory to us. People of all ages were concerned about their daily lives, their jobs, their careers, as we were told in the media and Pop Culture. Change happened gradually through the system, and America wanted conservative steady government. Without the draft to worry them, students shunned radicalism as dangerous to their future careers, the wisdom went. The Sixties-era concerns were seen as throwback to a different era, confined on most campuses, even large state universities, to a tiny office in the student center shared by all the leftist groups together. Even in Boulder, even in Berkeley, one had to look hard to find surviving evidence of that bygone era of youthful malcontent.
Five years before, on day of the Jackson rally, I had weaved my through crowd, delighting in being among politically active liberals. It was like a time machine to an era of my early childhood when people actually bothered to protest. Tables and booths lined the sidewalk along the reflecting pool, where Leftist groups handed out pamphlets, even overt Communists with the hammer and sickle, which I found not appealing but nevertheless fascinating in a romantic way. Rising above the tables, the rainbow flag---the well-known symbol of Jackson's Rainbow Coalition---stood high on a flag pole. It was not yet associated with sexuality as it would become later, but was meant to symbolize an alliance of all races and creeds. I listened to Jackson give his speech in his growling, booming voice while I stood beside the massive speakers they had set up beside the memorial. He led the crowd in a chant of "I am...somebody."
It was exciting to be there, but at the time it seemed quaint and marginal. And that was before the 1984 election where the Democrats got wiped out.
By 1988, Jackson had now become a legitimate political candidate. He had managed to win several primaries that spring, albeit none of the early important ones. It was a sign that the Democrats were getting their act together. Even after Dukakis had clinched the nomination, Jackson had remained in the race through June, refusing to concede and endorse Dukakis. No one was surprised that he hung on, but there was little doubt that he would do endorse Dukakis at the convention, once he had secured a prominent speaking role, and had gotten the concessions he wanted in the party platform. Jackson knew how to play politics. He wasn't an idiot. There was talk of him as vice president, but no one took it seriously. Everyone knew Jackson would lose Dukakis more voters than he gained for him.
When I say "everyone knew," by the way, of course I know not everything had these thoughts. We didn't have pundits in the abundance we do know. I went by the tone of voice of people on the news, when they narrated it. I have always had that skill, to watch television and read the national consciousness by the way the news anchors reported on it, or the way late night comedians joked about it. Sometimes, however, my desire for what I wanted to happen overpowered the reality that I would have easily learned from watching those sources, and being honest about what I saw.
Scouring my memories about that '88 visit to Washington, I try to recall any moment where I looked at the White House, still occupied by the hated Reagans, and thought, "soon Michael and Kitty Dukakis will be living there." Even at the time this fantasy might have seemed unreal, which is perhaps why I avoid trying to imagine it all. It was as if we were all of us acting out a drama we knew would end in disaster, but we had no other option. We had to pretend like it was going to work out. After so much disappointment, it felt good to believe it was possible, even if we didn't have a clear vision of how it might happen.
One evening when I was down at the Mall I stayed past dark to see the monuments lit up in their nighttime glory. I walked around the Jefferson Memorial, where I communed with the spirit of the great man of Democracy, summoning inside me the romantic feeling of being a living continuation of that spirit. Then went up the little hill to the Washington Monument where I lay on my back in the grass, staring up at the stark, straight white stone. From my perspective on the ground, the monument rose outward like a featureless horizontal plank into the darkness of the sky, as if one could walk right up it to the end, and then jump into outer space.
On another afternoon, being the nostalgic and reflective type that I am, I spent a few hours poking around the Georgetown campus, which was mostly empty for the summer. I circled the buildings of East Campus, where I had lived, finding the window of the dorm room on Prospect Street that Andy B. and I had shared, and of course finding the long stone steps nearby that came up from M Street, on which they shot the ending of the movie The Exorcist, which every student who went to Georgetown knew about.
Nothing had changed in appearance on campus. As I walked around the familiar buildings, I took a sounding of my being and concluded that I felt no connection to it all anymore. All that remained was the memory of how out of place I had felt. Walking through the glass doors of the ICC building of the Foreign Service school, where I had taken my Russian language course, I got the familiar feeling of dread from the early days of freshman year, that feeling that I was way out of my depth, and too far from home.
I hadn't realized at the time that this feeling was normal, and that almost every other student was feeling it as well. My Russian professor had even tried to tell me this, explaining how he had felt the same way as an undergraduate at Haverford, barely hanging on by his fingernails, as he put it. But at the time I couldn't process his wisdom as part of my decision-making. I had to learn things painfully on my own, as part of my own self-absorbed drama.
I took that remoteness while walking around campus as confirmation that despite all the mess it had caused, and the second thoughts it engendered in me, dropping out of Georgetown had been the right thing to do. If nothing else, my otherwise pointless visit to Washington could allow me to find some peace about that. Secretly, however, I probably envied the people who had stayed. My bitter failure---yes it was a failure---had left me with something to prove to myself in a big way, that would take me years to overcome, and would influence my decision-making in graduate school and beyond.
Having absorbed as much nostalgia and sightseeing as I cared for, I called my aunt and uncle out in the Virginia suburbs, hoping to visit them. I was lonely and wanted to share the company of people I knew and loved, even though I knew they would rib me about how their beloved local team, the Washington Redskins, had blown out the Denver Broncos in the most recent Super Bowl. At least they were Democrats, so we would could share our observations about the upcoming election in a friendly way.
I learned over the phone that they were about to leave on a scuba diving trip---a recent pastime they had mastered. They were heading up to a quarry in Pennsylvania. They invited me to go along with them, if I could make it out to their house on my own. Of course I said yes, even though it wasn't exactly what I hoped to do with them. I didn't know anything about scuba diving, and didn't particularly care to learn, but I would do so if it meant a chance to spend time with them. They were always fun people, full of life and humor. Somehow I felt like perhaps I wasn't as welcome as I had hoped. Probably it would have been a burden for them to take the time to teach me, even though they would have done so with patience.
I told them I would use the Metro to get out to their house in Fairfax County, just like the old days. Doing so would evoke those pleasant memories of first being independent, and knowing how to get in and out of the city on my own.
At the time the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. had no Metro stations, so from Andy B.'s place I had to walk all the way to the Red Line by the Zoo---quite a trek in the heat. When I came around the concrete wall to the entrance, I found the escalators unmoving and the metal gate lowered. Inside the station was silent and dark. It took me a second to realize that I had forgotten that the Metro didn't run on Sunday. Had it always been that way? In humiliation, I called my uncle from the nearby payphone, hoping to meet up with them on their way out of town, but given their tight schedule, detouring into the city to pick me up was out of the question.
I never saw them on that trip, and it was many years until I was able to visit them again.
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