Washington DC

DC was... complicated. A grey, fraught city. On the surface it's cleanly fraught, staid and solid iron arabesques of history spreading themselves over the city, balanced on by tourist acrobats intent on making the rounds and bridging the then and the now.

One level down it becomes a little messier, clogged with the obvious and inevitable ley lines of power and influence one would expect of a capitol. The lines almost invisible but coalescing in fleeting clouds, illuminated dew-pricked and sparkling like spiderwebs at dawn by the breath of Washingtonians in November.

Beneath that all the complications were my own.  A reunion with a cousin who shares the blood of two of my most tangled and missed family members and who subscribes to the tough love school of photography mentoring; and some ill-advised romantic kerfuffle I would've done well to avoid but that was just too momentarily decadent and sticky to deny myself.

I am not a political animal. Politics leave me feeling vaguely ill and grimy around the edges, like I've been handling old newspapers that were used to wrap up yesterday's fish-and-chips. It was fashionable, when I was a teenager, to declare that the very people who went out for team America were the ones who should be left on the sidelines: greedy and grasping and too damn slick for their own good. None of them could possibly want to actually HELP the country. Can't they see we're beyond help? Rather they were all- to a man and a woman- victims of their own rank ambition. Somehow I carried this platform- one I adopted years and years ago to seem sophisticated, when really I was just a kid and had no idea what I was talking about- into my otherwise fairly self-aware thirties. How this happened I'm still not entirely sure. It may well be that all along it's been just as fashionable to think more or less the same thing, but with a more educated patter behind the facile cynicism, to make it sound a little more polished and a little less jejune.

Well, I skipped the educated part.

Washington DC and my republican cousin, thank you for opening my eyes.

Listen, o ye liberal youth. Believe it or not DC is full to bursting with people who go to modular desk jobs every day with the sole aim of making the country a better place to be. (God, I sound dismayingly up with people even to MY converted ears.) They actually believe in all that stuff we were taught in third grade, and probably still put their hands over their hearts- without any ironic inflection whatsoever!- when they say the pledge of allegiance. Shoot, they probably still say the pledge of allegiance in the first place. I can't imagine the hope and dedication, the defenses against the crud of cynicism and irony, that must entail. These people go to work every day to herd cats. Administrating the American people, with all our wants and demands and endless bickering? Herding cats. The President? Herding the meta-cat.

I've lived in a few big cities, coastal ones, along the years. Each of them has been alive and vital in its own way, and creativity tends to flourish (for better or for worse). But I've never felt such a clarity of purpose in a city as I did in Washington. Those other cities, they're fractal places, kaleidoscopes, jigsaw puzzles of Jackson Pollock paintings. But DC? The entire city, brick and wood and grey cement, is built on a principle.

...

Let me say that again.

THE ENTIRE CITY

IS BUILT

ON ONE PRINCIPLE.

What city can boast this, this focus? This hewing to an axiom that was hammered out a few centuries ago? It's a city built to foster a nation, and even with our infighting and the cracks dulling and webbing what was meant to be a shining example to the world IT'S STILL DOING IT. After all this time. Those national monuments we've all seen in textbooks: Jefferson looking quirky, Lincoln looking foursquare, soldiers looking sodden, lines of names with no faces looking heartbreaking, the Capitol all lit up like the top of a wedding cake? THEY'RE ALL REALLY THERE. And the impact can't possibly be conveyed through postcards or pictures or television specials. Washington is still fostering a nation, whether this generation of skeptics likes it or not.

So show some respect, kids. Jettison this ubiquitous attitude of contempt and unearned familiarity. If you own a t-shirt that says anything about the government- ANYTHING- throw it away. Open your mouth instead and say it yourself. And say it as loud as you want! Disagree! Go ahead! That's the point! But don't behave as though the country- and the people who are trying to run it, human and fallible and sometimes downright wrong as they are (LIKE ME, LIKE YOU)- are a grudgingly tolerated litter of younger siblings, to be alternately mocked, abused and ignored. We only make ourselves look silly. Instead educate yourselves, if you haven't already. Treat your media-filtered information with a healthy dose of skepticism, minus the contempt. YOU try running the country sometime. Me, I think I'd rather stick to cutting meat and baking pies and getting a perfect sear on a scallop, if it's all the same to you.

I know you've heard it before, but remember that way back in the day the crew that started all of this, THEY were the hotheads, THEY were the iconoclasts, THEY were the heretics. And no matter how far we've come, backwards or forwards or plenty of both, the lineage is clear and unmistakable. It was a straight shot from there to here. So respect the people who daily mine that seam, even though sometimes it's fools' gold and sometimes it's diamonds and anyhow diamonds or pyrite, it's generally all subjective. Just respect the work that goes into it, and respect the grime worked under their nails just like it's worked under ours.

Vermont

Vermontese cats.

Vermont is very... Vermont. It's just like Vermont. Knuckled fingers of denuded trees reach modestly up from a thick, spongy blanket of leaves that now- in mid-November- have lost most of their golds and reds, and have subsided into a sort of dull, tarnished copper. A thin net of crisp leaf veins spread gently over the dark business of winter rot. Stubbled fields, the sky a gentle, resigned blue and the air colder than it looks.

It all gives me a vague yen for red plaid blanket coats and the crunch and melt of maple candy.

On a back road, the sunlight hazy and fragrant through the drifting smoke of fall's first fires, laid in fields and fireplaces belonging to graciously sensible, plain victorian houses. the houses neatly shingled and painted and telling me that self-reliance and an attention to detail have a beauty all their own, and that dirt under the nails and the scrubbing thereof is a sweetly closed loop that deserves repetition.

The neat houses and the woods and hills beyond share a family resemblance, like a cousin you don't see often but who has your nose and your way of smiling.

On my backroads run yesterday I went past a house on a large patch of neatly-mown lawn with a flagpole in front- a rambling brown ranch house, weather-stripped, freshly painted and complacently waiting for winter. Hooked through its ankles and hanging points-down from an iron armature near the road was a beautifully gutted young buck, eyes still bright and looking from the back entirely whole, not a hair out of place. From the front he was an elegant hollow, a beautiful suit with clean lines and a shining striated absence where his guts used to live.

Someone respected that buck by killing it cleanly and gutting it cleanly and hanging it cleanly. Someone slit open its belly and plunged their hands down into its organs, pulled them out into the chill air of fall in long, steaming ropes, and held its heart in their hands.

I wish I could've seen it.