Paramendra Bhagat
July 25, 2002
The Metro Maze And The Free Shows
Paramendra Bhagat
July 25, 2002
Lara and I accompany her friends from work and a friend's friend working at the Environmental Protection Agency for a Monday evening free movie on the Mall, a gift of corporate sponsors, a Hitckcock movie on that: oh, what a plot! What was a thrilling muder suspense for its times - Strangers In A Train - comes across as a comedy today. There is a scene with the Washington Monument in the background and the crowd watching the movie under the same comes alive.
Amy, who is from Florida, has joined us serval times before. Sophia is from Portugal, working on her doctorate on Environmental Economics in California - "Did you think I was Mexican?" Joanna is the EPA person, a Californian in Bloomington, Indiana, with Amy for grad school - "Urban temperatures are two to 10 degrees higher, for all the asphalt and construction."
The food Joanna and Lara, primarily Joanna, has brought with them sustains our small group.
"Where are you from?" Sophia asks Lara.
"Indiana."
"Where is Indiana?"
"Do you know Chicago?"
"I've heard Chicago, but where is Chicago?"
Sophia had recently presented a paper at the RFF summer retreat in Monterey, California, attended by a Nobel Laureate: "The guy was a bad presenter."
Lara and I are on mark here after our now several trips to the Kennedy Center for the free 6 PM concerts. It really helps that the Center has a free shuttle service to and fro the Foggy Bottom metro center. Washington DC: the city of freebies, an ideal tourist town, but I did not see this other freebie coming.
A weekly metro pass with two more days left on it comes the way of Amy's brother, who had been in town for the weekend to see Amy, to Amy to Lara to me, and so I come up with the idea to go to every station on the metro rail network: pop out, walk around, go back into the hole, off to the next station, and so on.
So I walk Lara to work, a 20-minute walk, and head to the DuPont Circle station one morning. After a can of pepsi in the outdoors shade, and a quiet contemplation of the undertaking ahead of me, I get on to the escalator for an effortless descent into the underworld.
I decide to start out at the east end of the blue line but, at the Metro Center, take the yellow line going in the opposite direction by mistake, and have to reverse direction at the next stop. After changing onto the blue line a few stops later, I head to the final stop and get off: Addison Road - Seat Pleasant.
I get hold of a free map and peer at the surrounding area map - "You are here" - a routine I am to relive again and again, station after station.
A long stay in line at the local Taco Bell is a minor disappointment: "We don't take credit cards." And so I opt for a Chinese lunch instead after getting a 20 dollar bill out of an ATM.
"Do you have a quarter?" two pre-teens approach me. And so there go 50 cents. But that helps land a conversation with a bystander, a middle aged African American woman who is a full-time salesperson with Mary Kay Cosmetics. She shows me her $6000 check for the month before walking off.
"Every ten years there is a shift. The black folks make way for white folks as it becomes fashionable to be living by the metro station. Or even downtown. Prices go up."
Few roads, few shops, few buildings, many trees. I step into a barber shop. The only barber in the shop is busy. So I keep my hair. Lara can use my clippers once in Terre Haute, and I can get rid of all my hair then. The non-decision saves some money.
I add a thousand minutes to my phone card and call home: they are 11 hours ahead of me. And I have not called in a while: out of job, have to keep tight. Silly excuse.
Rita will probably get married in a few months. Santosh is off to Kathmandu to get some lessons in English and possibly computer hardware. Babita has enrolled in a new, private college in town for her bachelor's level studies in business. Mother is happy and prepared and sent a kilogram of "amot," a dried mango pulp delicacy, for Lara by the way of a doctor from our hometown now in New York. Father is fine and refuses to go to the doctor's for a checkup, because he says he is "fine." Mother notes I have not called in a while. They need to be talking about Renu more often.
At the next stop I come up for air, and a stop later I decide to walk over to the Minnesota Avenue metro station on the orange line to reach out to its east end, and hop back, one station at a time. I am set to see much greenery, but after a distraction at a local library I pass by.
At the New Carrollton station which combines with the Amtrak station, a Bangladeshi cashier clerk at a newsstand makes some small talk. He has the hesitancy of a newcomer to the country.
"Do you own this shop?" I ask, perhaps thinking of the newsstands on railway stations in India.
No, it is owned by a company that owns all shops like this one at all Amtrak stations all over the country.
He has been in the country a year, is with his wife and two kids attending local schools.
"Are you from India?" he asks.
"I have friends from Bangladesh. Last year my roommate was from Bangladesh."
After a few more stops, just when I am thinking metro stations are nothing more than whistle-stop park and ride tarmac spreads surrounded by thickets and trees, I get off at the Denwood station, and finally encounter humanity.
"You live around here?"
"All my life."
""I'm from India."
"Yeah, I've some idea where that might be."
Directions.
"You got 35 cents?"
12 cents later, "Sorry, all the change I have."
"Hey, don't worry 'bout it. It's the thought that counts."
I go into a 7-11 round the corner along the Eastern Avenue that runs along the DC-Maryland border - a few blocks later Southern Avenue serves the same purpose - and bump into another Bangladeshi. He owns the store and has been running it for six years.
"Nice talking to you," I say, having paid for my pepsi.
"Alright, brother," he says.
This is South-East DC, the part with a bad rap. I walk along. There is relative poverty, but nothing scary. I am comfy. After crossing the Anacostia River on the metro, I get off to check out the RFK stadium, and then map out a walk to the Capitol: take the Independence Avenue, divert on to Massachusetts, hit Lincoln Park, take North Carolina Avenue, hit Independence again, and there you are, at the Mall.
At the park a woman walking her dog explains to me the statue there of an African American civil rights pioneer woman leaves this gap through which you can see the statue atop the Capitol, and that is the direction to Africa. Not across the Atlantic, I think, but keep the thought to myself. She has worked at a post office for 30 years, and for the past six has worked as some sort of a fortune teller. She explains her work in detail, but does not name it, I do not press for it. For all there is, she might be a psychic. I do not care. The conversaton is pleasant. She talks of Louis Farrakhan - "No, I'm not a Muslim" - and the continued racism, and her search for the woman in spirituality, and the "higher powers," her impatience with patriarchy.
I try to get into the Library of Congress. It is late in the evening. The attempt fails. Tourists go to that other building, and during the day, I am told, after I have already gone through the metal detector. And so there I am, walking along to the L'enfante Plaza metro station, in the drizzle, to take the green line home, call it a day.
I have only covered nine out of a possible 85 metro stations on my first day. The strategy has to be changed for the second and final day of the trip. But because I board the train before 9:30 in the morning, when I get off at the last stop at the south end of the green line, I end up paying 50 cents in exit fare, because the week pass works slightly different during rush hour, unless you travel less than four miles, or travel four miles, get off, get on right there, and travel another four miles, and so on, but I stick it out, all in one swing, and pay.
I am to get that money back in a mysterious way. A few stops later, when I proceed to make a phone call to the last comany I worked for - Eagle - which still owes me some money, the machine drops 50 cents in error, or if the last caller had put in the money, and not taken it back when the call did not go thorugh. I take it for the dignity of the week pass.
I come north, one station at a time, then call it quits at Navy Yard to walk to the Waterfront station, and then to L'enfante Plaza, then I am off to check out the south tips of the yellow and blue lines, one station at a time.
The Franconia-Springfield station reminds me of when I was in DC with fellow student government officials from college for the Spring Break of 1998: we stayed with one official's grand-parents, and this was the station we started out at each morning for the day's sight-seeing. I remember, half the party did not show up for our meeting withe the Kentucky Senator Wendell Ford, an embarassment.
The fun starts when I get off at King Street. I take it all the way to the Potomac, walking through oldtown Alexandria. Finally I have found a place Lara might want to visit one of these evenings, I think. I am to find more, a trail along the river, an airport, an underground shopping mall. Lara could come.
So I walk along the Potomac, headed north along the Alexandria Waterfront Walk, part of the Mount Vernon Trail. I discover on the map, there is King Street, two blocks north, Queen Street, another block and there is Princess Street, a block south is Prince Street, another block and there is Duke Street. Some fairy tale, Alexandria.
Seagulls in hordes making the seagull sound, planes flying low over the river headed toward the Reagan National Airport, boats chugging along at different speeds, people walking, jogging, picnic blankets crowded with food and groups, I see as I saunter along.
Chesapeake Bay fact: it is 200 miles long, 20 miles wide, and the average depth is 21 feet, meaning, a person 6 feet tall can wade 700,000 acres of the Bay without being completely submerged. Good news: the Bay is healthier today than it was 10 years ago. "Oysters were so plentiful, they could filter the entire volume of Bay water" in a few days; now the process takes over a year.
You see the Capitol, the roof of the Library of Congress, and the Washington Monument in the distance, but then don't you see the Monument no matter where you are!
Standing across the Bay from the airport I watch planes land and take off. The trail has become a bike trail. About four planes land and five take off, taking turns, within what appears to be less than 15 minutes, and two more appear behind in line to take off - some scheduling that. My clear view from across the Bay, the metro trains passing behind me across the George Washington Parkway, become one better when I stand again to watch the planes take off and land from much closer, right by the metro station.
Inside the airport I read a chapter of Dinesh D'Souza's new bestseller, his take on what is so great about America. He came to the U.S. as an exchange student from Bombay in the late 1970s, and by now is an established conservative thinker and writer. His style is absorbing, but he needs a rebuttal, I think.
Another spot for Lara: the Crystal City undergound mall, a fancy way to keep the dust out and keep the people walking, from shop, to shop, to shop, like in the ancient-most bazaars, an urban experiment of some appeal, an attempt at a theme, this block of a city.
"Did you want a newspaper?" he left the door open for a moment after he had picked up his paid-for copy. Not necessary.
"My mom e-mailed me saying Eagle called her. They want to know if you will go work for them again," Lara delivers news as she comes out of the shower to meet me in the kitchen where I am cooking some chicken curry, extra spicey, with hungry looks, hungry for food, period, and hungry for spicey food in particular.
And we discuss our weekend plans, and plans for the approaching final week in DC. I eat heartily, and lick my fingers. It is close to midnight.
References
Part One - DC : Summer 2002
Part Two - DC Street Architecture, A Relationship Unfolding, And A Few Books Thrown In
Part Three - The Metro Maze And The Free Shows
Part Four - Over A Weekend
Part Five - Kamal, Ujjwal, Gyanu, Netra
Part Six - Jody Duncan: In Exile In Russia With Style
