Wisps of Washington — II

(Further to Wisps of Washington Part — I)

A few minutes’ walk southeast of the Lincoln Memorial brought us to the Korean War Veterans Memorial, where nineteen steel soldiers move warily through low juniper bushes and granite strips evoking the rugged Korean terrain. Alongside them stretches the Mural Wall, a sweep of polished black granite eerily alive with the faces of servicemen drawn from more than 2,400 Korean War photographs. The wall also catches the reflections of the nineteen figures, turning them into thirty-eight—a reference to the 38th parallel along which Korea was divided. It is a remarkably thoughtful piece of design: the ghostly faces in the granite, the soldiers moving beside them, and the visitors passing before both are briefly brought into the same field of vision. The effect is sombre and strangely immediate.

My account had better retrace its steps a little. The day, unlike Part I of this account, had not ended at the Lincoln Memorial. Somewhere between the Washington Monument and my eventual arrival at Lincoln, I had also made the obligatory pilgrimage to the White House.

The White House did appear smaller than the image I had carried in my mind, though its silent, classical, all-white contours possessed just the right aura for a building that projects such extraordinary power across the planet. For much of the nineteenth century, it was known formally as the President’s House or the Executive Mansion; Theodore Roosevelt made the White House its official name in 1901. Plain vanilla though the mansion appeared from where I stood, decisions made within its walls have altered the course of American, and indeed world, history.

Across the barricades bordering the South Lawn, a motley gathering of protesters presented an interesting counterpoint. I did wonder if its most interesting resident might somehow make an appearance, though I had no particular reason to expect him to oblige.

By the time I eventually returned to my room, I felt obliged to heed my body’s call for rest. I had planned a quick nap, then to let myself loose on the streets of Washington for a solo late-evening, perhaps even nocturnal, sojourn. Instead, I fell into a sleep that would have done Sleeping Beauty proud and woke only at five the next morning.

Morning brought with it the sobering realisation of the complexity of the project at hand: the review of a foreign office using an ambitious new software platform, barely out of the workshop and now expected to prove itself in Washington. The objective had been clear for months; it was the journey towards it that worried me. Until then, the exercise had been conducted manually, its findings laboriously compiled afterwards. The new software sought not merely to replace that process but to recast it.

The project itself had begun almost casually, prompted by a passing suggestion from our top boss, who remained its most steadfast supporter but retired before he could see it rolled out. Afterwards, it made few friends among the echelons in between, perhaps because my colleague GC and I persisted with it. There are hierarchies in which initiative from below is not always received as generously as obedience. No wonder our persistence earned us a fair measure of hostility and left a few scars.

I watched Washington through the cab window as I travelled to the office at 1200 17th Street. The streets seldom seemed content merely to run ahead. Broad avenues arrived obliquely, cutting across our path, opening into circles and squares, or drawing the eye towards some distant dome, column or monument. Long vistas opened where an ordinary city might simply have offered another intersection. There was a sensible grid underneath it all, but Washington seemed forever to be breaking out of it.

It wasn’t long before the first major jolt arrived. The software module refused to load on the office intranet PC—or perhaps the office PC refused to load the software. Either way, Murphy’s Law had asserted itself with admirable promptness in the country of its birth. Fortunately, I had my official VPN-enabled iPad with me and managed to log in, but the expansive introductory sections soon proved too much for it.

GC had tested the module so thoroughly that she probably knew its flow like the back of her hand. Unfortunately, she was asleep in another hemisphere, as was the IT team that could tweak the code on her advice. There was little to do but carry a heap of documents back to the hotel and wrestle with the interface until I finally messaged her in the small hours of the Indian morning. Solutions eventually arrived, though sometimes only after agonising waits. Some required changes to the code; others were absurdly mundane—such as discovering that I could not scroll beyond a list without a mouse.

And so the pattern established itself for the next three days: a cocktail of Washington and Indian time, my working days seeping into GC’s nights and hers into mine, domain speak and code-writers’ speak, with problems and solutions travelling back and forth between the two hemispheres.

One afternoon, when the software had dug in its heels again, we abandoned it for the lunch hour and escaped to the National Mall. In front of the Library of Congress, the Court of Neptune Fountain detained me longer than lunch-hour arithmetic permitted. I framed it, reframed it, moved closer, stepped back—and remained dissatisfied. This was becoming dangerous. I could plainly spend the day doing the same thing, because Washington itself seemed to be one enormous monument, as though ancient Athens and Rome had somehow travelled forward through time and, somewhere along the journey, acquired lawns, traffic lights and federal departments.

Meanwhile, Washington itself was slipping through the hourglass. Except for brief escapes for coffee or lunch, there had been little time to see it.

I had therefore packed the free day rather ambitiously: a couple of Smithsonian museums in the morning, an organised tour of the Capitol in the afternoon, and then out to Great Falls for the evening.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum had been on my list from the beginning, and I was there almost as soon as its doors opened. For the next couple of hours, aircraft and engines kept yielding stories that were often more interesting than the machinery.

One was the Boeing 247, which helped establish the template of the modern airliner in the 1930s: all-metal, streamlined, low-winged, with retractable landing gear. More intriguingly, this particular aircraft had raced from England to Melbourne in 1934, finishing third in the MacRobertson Air Race.

Then there was the Turner RT-14 Meteor, a racing aeroplane from an age when pilots were celebrities, aircraft had personalities, and apparently nobody objected to turning a fuselage into a billboard for spark plugs. Roscoe Turner flew No. 29 to victory in the Thompson Trophy races of 1938 and 1939. He was sufficiently colourful to travel with a pet lion called Gilmore, sometimes in the aeroplane. Aviation clearly had fewer committees then.

A gleaming 1959 Chevrolet Corvette seemed, for a moment, to have taken a wrong turn into the Air and Space Museum. It hadn’t. Nation of Speed celebrates the American urge to go faster on land, on water, through the air and eventually into space; the Corvette merely kept its wheels on the ground while sharing the ambition. The museum’s collection seemed, among other things, a chronicle of humanity’s steadily diminishing patience with getting from one place to another.

At the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Hall of Mammals turned out to be an exhibition of other people’s bad days. A buffalo was discovering the disadvantages of having lions simultaneously above and beside it; an antelope had already lost the argument and been hauled up a tree by a remarkably relaxed leopard. Presiding over everything was Henry, the gigantic African elephant who has occupied the Rotunda since 1959, trunk raised and ears spread, looking as though he had just remembered where he had parked.

The David H. Koch Hall of Fossils, aptly called Deep Time, took me back a few million years. A Tyrannosaurus rex was caught in the middle of lunch, towering over a hapless Triceratops with the air of having been interrupted. Diplodocus presented a different problem: whoever designed the creature had clearly given no thought to photographers several million years down the line; there was simply too much of it for one frame. More curious still was an ancient whale from an evolutionary moment when whales were not quite whales yet—already creatures of the sea, but still equipped with tiny hind limbs, as though nature had neglected to dismantle the scaffolding.

I had a Capitol tour to catch. At the Visitor Center we were provided headsets and assigned to a guide, while two or three other groups assembled around us. It had the faint air of several parallel tours through American history taking place at once. Our little procession drifted through the enormous building, obediently following the disembodied voice in our ears.

We passed first through the Crypt, whose name promised something more sepulchral than its handsome circle of sandstone columns delivered. George Washington was once meant to lie beneath the Capitol, we were told, but remained at Mount Vernon; the Crypt consequently acquired the distinction of being a crypt without its intended occupant.

Almost impossibly high above us, the Rotunda drew the eye upwards and held it there. In The Apotheosis of Washington, the first President was being received into the heavens. Back at human level, American history played out across gigantic canvases around the walls: independence declared, battles concluded, territories encountered and claimed. Even the sculpted frieze encircling the chamber was an illusion, paint made to pass for stone. The Capitol, I told myself, had little use for understatement.

Our little procession eventually reached Statuary Hall, once the chamber of the House of Representatives. Its peculiar acoustics had once tormented the legislators who sat here; legend has it that John Quincy Adams turned the defect to advantage, positioning himself where he could overhear conversations across the chamber. Above the doorway sat Clio, Muse of History, recording proceedings from the chariot of Time. The legislators had departed long ago, their chamber had filled with statues, and Clio was still at her post.

My friend joined me again that evening for the drive to Great Falls. By then I was ready to exchange museums and monuments for the Potomac. The river narrowed between wooded banks before breaking over the rocks and plunging through the gorge in great masses of white water. We found a quiet lookout, settled down with our cameras and discussed the peculiar business of photographing a waterfall: how long an exposure was long enough, when flowing water became silk, and when too much silk stopped looking like water at all.

George Washington had looked at these same falls and seen not scenery but an engineering problem. In the 1780s he became president of the Patowmack Company, which attempted to make the Potomac navigable westward by improving the river and cutting canals around obstacles such as Great Falls. The enterprise never quite fulfilled his ambitions, but remnants of the canal survive beside the river.

It was late when I returned to the hotel. There was little time for reflection; clothes, camera and the accumulated debris of travel had to disappear into suitcases for the morning flight from Dulles. Departure itself was almost disappointingly uneventful, and Washington receded with the aircraft.

It was only at Doha, waiting for the connecting flight to India, that the past few days began to return to me in fragments: Lincoln in his marble chair, my father’s locomotive, an aeroplane bound for Melbourne, dinosaurs, the Capitol dome, white water on the Potomac—and somewhere among them, the software that had brought me there in the first place. There had scarcely been time to register one thing before the next arrived. Sitting in that vast airport between Washington and home, I wondered briefly whether I had actually been there at all, or merely hurried through an unusually vivid dream.