Itinerary for a wander around northwest Washington DC
Brioche sprinkled with sugar like thick snowflakes wolfed down, before wandering westward to meet the Potomac, in a boulangerie that bears my namesake, if you drop the last letter, like my aunt and a chain-smoking high school administrator used to do. The brisk, damp March morning reminiscent of those same school days and walks along the shores of the Lac Léman, not too far from where Lord Byron composed his romantic tale of a martyr imprisoned in the medieval Chillon castle, whose walls, erected onto the rocky shore of the lake, have been battered for a thousand years by fresh water waves gorged with runoff from the snowy alpine peaks that surround it. Picture Byron’s prisoner dreaming, not only of a free Geneva Republic, but of adventures. He escapes by diving into the frigid waters on a winter day, then boards a small fishing sailboat he’s arranged, with hefty bribes to a sympathetic guard, to have moored nearby. He first sets a westward course, with the hope of returning to his native Geneva, but soldiers are already waiting for him. By cover of darkness he sneaks past them and steers his vessel into the Rhône river, carried by the strong current, bearing due south now. It’s a spectacular ride; a good mistral barelling down the Rhône valley fills his sails from the stern. He reaches the Camargue marshes and bursts into the Mediterranean in no time. He’s got a big decision to make; make a left to follow the established silk and spice trade routes to the Orient, or make a right to seek his fortune west, in the new world. He crosses paths with a speedy Portuguese caravel returning from Alexandria, whose captain convinces him to follow them to Lisbon where he will be able to gather the best, most experienced maritime information. “After all, we’ve been doing this exploring and colonizing longer than anyone else,” the captain says. The prisoner, unfortunately, buys the argument and finds himself robbed of all his belongings and supplies save the clothes on his back. Unceremoniously, his vessel is sunk, which is a good thing because, while it was lake and river worthy, the small fishing dinghy would never have withstood the far rougher seas of the Mediterranean. Some members of the crew demand the execution and disposal of the prisoner; he has to be fed and food and water supplies are running desperately low after their long voyage. The captain refuses to murder another christian–the prisoner is wise enough to conceal his true faith in the reformed protestant church, as he is well aware such a confession would have earned him a speedy catholic hanging from the main mast. Instead he is abandoned in the very busy port of Lisbon. Penniless, hungry, physically diminished by the journey and years of imprisonment, and free the prisoner laughs out loud, as he walks along the Restelo, and even louder when he sees the Belem Tower, a chilling visual reminder of the Chillon dungeon. In a flash, he sees himself back in his dark and danky cell. Understandably, he doesn’t linger in the neighborhood. With the incessant traffic of ships in the harbor, it is easy to find work on the docks, and so in a short time, the prisoner rebuilds his strength and composure. At night, he earns a few extra coins serving ale and rum in a tavern, a well-frequented watering hole for travel weary sailors full of tales from around the globe. The word is there’s trouble in the east. The dutch, the brits and the frogs are gaining control of the African coast, east, west and south, rendering the journey to the ‘land of spices’ perilous. Real opportunities for enrichment lie in the west, where mountains of gold await, guarded merely by bands of pagan savages. Such are the rumors that emanate from the tavern’s piss and vomit-soaked sawdust and smoky haze.
Almost five hundred years later, after brushing brioche crumbs off my beard and jacket, I set my own northbound pedestrian course through Georgetown and the greater northwest District of Columbia. Every other street named, in ascending order, after a letter in the alphabet. Dead presidents surveying the lazy Saturday morning foot traffic, young couples walking babies and dogs. The stately neighborhood library on top of Book Hill Park, open early with a very clean bathroom and large high-ceilinged reading rooms with tall windows giving readers southern views of the park, the elaborate homeless encampment sheltered by an evergreen tree and the national monuments in the far distance. Daniel Boone guards the southeast corner of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, half a block away from a brightly painted donkey hiding behind a manicured bush that I only later recognize as a political figure, a statement–didn’t see any elephants. What is the connection between Daniel Boone and Duke Ellington, a frontiersman folk hero and a musical genius? Could they have both treaded these grounds? Not likely. Yet today they cohabit this block on the north side of Reservoir street, the explorer who inhabited my youthful fantasies of the Wild West and the master composer so eloquently praised by my first favorite writer, Boris Vian. who wrote in L’Ecume des Jours, a love story so potently infused with a cocktail of emotions, satire, Ellingtonian tunes, and surrealistic botany that it could very well have reverberated back in time, turned back the clock as it were, to infuse the burgeoning love between our escaped Chillon prisoner and Felicidad, the mulatto cleaning girl in the boarding house where he’s taken residence while saving money for whatever the next stage of his journey is to be. Their journey, as it turns out, because Felicidad is ferociously homesick. She has been planning her escape since long before she met the dreamy prisoner, saving every escudo for her return to the land beyond the sunset she was abducted from, five years earlier. Besides sailors and bandits, the tavern hosts a nightly troop of buskers, traveling actors, troubadours, poets and a poet in particular who has ensnared Felicidad’s and the prisoner’s imagination with the virtues of what he names his drunken jalopy. “Needs no sails, no crew, no captain, no compass, but pour me a little more of that ale there lass, before I tell you how this enchanted vessel will take you wherever you wish to go.” At the end of a long and very wet night, Felicidad and the prisoner walk the poet home, carry him is more like it. “Where can we find such a jalopy?” They ask him. “Find it? You can’t find this heroic schooner, this transformative galleon, this precocious submarine, this…this…Ah, fuck it. I’m all out of images. You can’t find it. It finds you. It is you and you it.” Befuddled, the hopeful lovers drop the poet in the middle of the street. “Be the boat my friends. Be the boat.” The prisoner wanted to kick the sense out of the poet, but Felicidad talked him into emptying his pockets first, hoping to at least find some compensation for the many pints they’d sprung him in exchange for information. The verse scribbler’s pockets were predictably empty, except for a map, illustrating a navigation route to the Indies, the new Indies, the ones that lie west of LIsbon. It was a schematic job, with little sense of scale, or respect for proportions–Portugal, for instance, occupied more than half of the Iberian peninsula, and the African continent was represented by a triangle no larger than Europe–and an abundance of crosses, the kind that the King and his wandering subjects had planted all over the shores of the worlds they had ‘discovered’. There was also a name clearly written on the back of it, the name of a captain, Captain Arthur R. The drunken poet smiled and said “you two lovebirds dream of greener pastures? Find someone who can decipher that map.” This turned out to be easy, as if it had been written somewhere that because they’d found the map, Felicidad and the prisoner would find the adventurer that would recruit them, as a cook and a sailor, on his next expedition in search of Eldorado, leaving within a fortnight. And so their voyage began. For her, the hope of returning home, for him, the hope of finding a new home; for both the hope of freedom.
Although totally unintentional, there is a decidedly French bend to this narrative, so it came as no surprise when I passed the bucolic campus of the French embassy before reaching the “Hidden Entrance”. To what? Not sure. But beyond the sign lay a wide meadow, intersected by fallen trees, overlooked by a hospital, and a dedication to Rachel Carson who, I learned, wandered in these parts. Carson, who warned humanity of the danger of acting without perspective, and of being just plain dumb–and greedy–for refusing to assume responsibility for the catastrophe that’s staring you in the face and that you created. You spray enough DDT in an apple orchard, you’re not merely killing bugs, you’re poisoning the apples, the apple trees, the apple eaters. Duh! It’s not a unique chapter in our history, the pattern’s clear: industries with mouth-watering margins of profit–pesticides, tobacco, oil, guns, opioids–turn a blind eye to the monsters they create. Speaking of monsters, the Rock Creek trail was blocked by stretches of “Danger Do Not Cross” tape made all the more visible by the winter bareness of the forest surrounding it, which diverted me to the backside of a University campus, where there were ominous signs of night time activity involving a basketball hoop, and then onto another, less traveled trail, I shared with a couple of deer too busy to munch on budding greenery to pay any attention to me. I found out only the next day that they occasionally find bodies in Rock Creek Park, so there are monsters around, but that’s another story. An unlocked bike in seemingly good shape. A familiar construction with a blue tarp, tent and debris, no trash, all around. And a pedestrian tunnel whose first half is covered in tags and then magically, completely paint free. Then the river, the destination, gorged with the season’s record precipitation, its muddy, swampy shores unwalkable. Disregard the helicopters, the aerodynamic bikers, the neon-clad joggers attached to their earbuds and you might, given the right flight of fancy, suspension of disbelief, literary connection–the kind of connection where two surfaces don’t actually touch though they ignite a spark, like in a Michelangelo painting, or the neurons in your brain–you might see something. Something like a Portuguese carrack anchored downstream, where the river is wide enough, and a row boat tentatively sailing towards Fletcher’s Cove, before it was called Fletcher’s Cove, before we had presidents, before Duke Ellington moved to New York to play at the Cotton Club, before Rachel Carson saved the world, before anyone ate sweet brioche sprinkled with sugar–actually, I’m not sure about that one. The small vessel has only two occupants, a couple. Their eyes are filled with wonder and caution as they step onto the muddy shore, their balance is wobbly from the weeks they’ve spent at sea, and they are completely unaware that they are being watched, with equal caution and wonder, by a young boy who takes off running when he sees them embrace and kiss.
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