The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [57]
Across the street there is a permanent settlement of disaffected people and crazies, living in cardboard boxes, protesting at the Central Intelligence Agency controlling their thoughts from outer space. (Well, wouldn’t you?) There was also a guy panhandling for quarters. Can you believe that? Right there in our nation’s capital, right where Nancy Reagan could see him from her bedroom window.
Washington’s most fetching feature is the Mall, a broad, grassy strip of parkland which stretches for a mile or so from the Capitol building at the eastern end to the Lincoln Memorial at the western side, overlooking the Potomac. The dominant landmark is the Washington Monument. Slender and white, shaped like a pencil, it rises 555 feet above the park. It is one of the simplest and yet handsomest structures I know, and all the more impressive when you consider that its massive stones had to be brought from the Nile delta on wooden rollers by Sumerian slaves. I’m sorry, I’m thinking of the Great Pyramids at Giza. Anyway, it is a real feat of engineering and very pleasing to look at. I had hoped to go up it, but there was a long line of people, mostly restive schoolchildren, snaked around the base and some distance into the park, all waiting to squeeze into an elevator about the size of a telephone booth, so I headed east in the direction of Capitol Hill, which isn’t really much of a hill at all.
Scattered around the Mall’s eastern end are the various museums of the Smithsonian Institution – the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, and so on. The Smithsonian – which, incidentally, was donated to America by an Englishman who had never been there – used to be all in one building, but they keep splitting off sections of it and putting them in new buildings all over town. Now there are fourteen Smithsonian museums. The biggest ones are arrayed around the Mall, the others are mostly scattered around the city. Partly they had to do this because they get so much stuff every year – about a million items. In 1986, just to give you some idea, the Smithsonian’s acquisitions included 10,000 moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a MiG-25 jet fighter. All of this used to be kept in a wonderful old Gothic brick building on the Mall called the Castle, but now the Castle is just used for administration and to show an introductory film.
I strolled down towards the Castle now. The park was full of joggers. I found this a little worrying. I kept thinking, ‘Shouldn’t they be running the country, or at least destabilizing some Central American government?’ I mean to say, don’t you usually have something more important to do at 10.30 on a Wednesday morning than pull on a pair of Reeboks and go sprinting around for forty-five minutes?
At the Castle I found the entrance area blocked with wooden trestles and lengths of rope. American and Japanese security men in dark suits were standing around. They all looked as if they spent a lot of time jogging. Some of them had headphones on and were talking into radios. Others had dogs on long leashes or mirrors on poles and were checking out cars parked along Jefferson Drive in front of the building. I went up to one of the American security men and asked him who was coming, but he said he wasn’t allowed to tell me. I thought this was bizarre. Here I was in a country where, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I could find out how many suppositories Ronald Reagan’s doctor had prescribed for him in 1986,fn1 but I couldn’t be told which foreign dignitary would shortly be making a public appearance on the steps of a national institution. The lady next to me said, ‘It’s Nakasone. President of Japan.’
‘Oh, really,