Last summer my wife, Jess, and I hit Washington D.C. for a little week’s long vacation. Evidently, in junior high, I missed the boat on a school funded trip to our country’s capitol (something about grades, I guess). So now, nearly twenty years later, I decided to fund my own way, with my wife as my travel companion.

It helped that Jess has a cousin in D.C. who works for a congressman on Capitol Hill. She lives in a dizzying high-rise apartment building in the center of Ballston, Virgina (not to be confused with Boston, Massachusettes), a twenty minute Metro jaunt to the Capitol Building. She was nice enough to let us stay with her, and even sectioned off a makeshift bedroom for us in her studio apartment, which involved a curtain and a shower rod wedged between two walls. The light, breezy fabric of the curtain isolated us from the outside world, making it easy to imagine we were enjoying the comfortable quarters of an Arabian sheek.

Washington D.C. was fascinating. I got to see most the sights: the Capitol Builidng, the White House, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the place where Forrest Gump and Jenny splashed to each other’s warm embrace in the middle of the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument rising majestically in the background. Standing in the exact spot where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had made his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, I aborbed the beautiful landscape of democracy. As a history buff, it was all I had dreamed it would be. But, surprisingly, one sight put itself above all the rest: the D.C. Metro.

I hadn’t spent much time on a real-life subway. Having grown up in a small town, the extent of my experience of public transportation was pretty limited. For the most part, it amounted to nothing more than my buddy driving over to pick me up, or, regarding my earlier years, being packed into a rowdy school bus full of children who, to my endless adolescent torture, played out their impish roles as products of bad parenting. 

As we descended into the deep underground, leaping from one escalator to the next, I half expected to meet up with the earth’s core. Backtracking a few missed turns, we finally stumbled upon out platform, which began to tremble. Two beams of light raced toward us, flooding the dark tunnel encompassing them. Our train screeched to a holt and flung open the doors. A hard light with the same wattage as a bug light burned out my retinas before I noticed that inside was a certain mix of society you don’t see everyday. Besides a federal prison, it was the only place I could imagine where all classes of society are jammed into one place together. Homeless men sat next to big shot lawyers reading the Washington Post. Blue-haired elderly women shared seats with gothic teenagers, clutching their skateboards, packed away into their own little worlds, just them and the tunes pumping from their i-Pods.

I was just starting to get the hang of the Metro, even liking it a bit, when it came to a stop and picked up a rather intimidating man with a physique that could hurt someone, a moustache, a battered army jacket, and a head that was skinned to the quick. He did not sit down but stayed standing, holding on to the rail. “Good morning,” he announced, loud and clear, to two poor teenagers sitting nearby. His articulation was impeccable and fast, like the man on the old 80’s Micro Machines commercial, but with a deeper, richer tone.

His remarkable monologue first began with the Boston Red Sox - this I suppose because the one kid had on a Red Sox hat. He prattled on about a player for “The Sox” a long time ago who was appropriately nicknamed the human vaccuum cleaner, because of his ability to suck up sizzling ground balls from the field. From there, he continued to bounce from story to story, each showing zero relevance to the last, until finally he landed on the dangers of drug abuse. He blamed drugs for his inability to stick to one chain of thought for no longer than ten seconds at a time. I believed him. And Jess did, too, even though neither of us spoke a word about it until the man was off our train and at least two Metro stops behind us. Drugs had messed up his brain, and now he was a living poster child to all teenagers everywhere.

Then, just as quickly as drugs came up, he dropped the subject all together, and began again about ”The Sox”. Then it was drugs again. For his grand finale, he spoke of his faith in Jesus and how, why, just last night, for reasons unknown, he found a loaded gun stuck in his face.

When he finally reached his destination - thank the Lord - he got off, and everyone in our car sighed with relief and searched for someone or something sane to focus on for a bit.

Other than that, the Metro wasn’t such a bad way to get around. However, I did find it tough picturing Abraham Lincoln, back in the day, riding it to work.          

Categories: Travel