The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [58]
I stood with the crowd for a while and waited for Mr Nakasone to come along. And then I thought, ‘Why am I standing here?’ I tried to think of anyone I knew who would be impressed to hear that I had seen with my own eyes the Prime Minister of Japan. I imagined myself saying to my children, ‘Hey, kids, guess who I saw in Washington – Yasuhiro Nakasone!’ and being met with silence. So I walked on to the National Air and Space Museum, which was more interesting.
But not nearly as interesting as it ought to be, if you ask me. Back in the 1950s and 60s, the Smithsonian was the Castle. Everything was crammed into this one wonderfully dark and musty old building. It was like the nation’s attic and, like an attic, it was gloriously random. Over here was the shirt Lincoln was wearing when he was shot, with a brown blood-stain above the heart. Over there was a diorama showing a Navajo family fixing dinner. Up above you, hanging from the gloomy rafters, were the Spirit of St Louis and the Wright Brothers’ first plane. You didn’t know where to look next or what you would find around each corner. Now it is as if everything has been sorted out by a fussy spinster, folded neatly and put in its proper place. You go to the Air and Space Museum and you see the Spirit of St Louis and the Wright Brothers’ plane and lots of other famous planes and rocket ships and it’s all highly impressive, but it is also clinical and uninspired. There is no sense of discovery. If your brother came running up to you and said, ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what I found in this room over here!’ you would in fact guess, more or less, because it would have to be either an aeroplane or a rocket ship. At the old Smithsonian it could have been absolutely anything – a petrified dog, Custer’s scalp, human heads adrift in bottles. There’s no element of surprise any more. So I spent the day trudging around the various museums dutifully and respectfully, with interest but not excitement. Still, there was so much to see that a whole day passed and I had seen only a part of it.
In the evening I came to the Mall, and walked across it to the Jefferson Memorial. I had hoped to see it at dusk, but I arrived late and the darkness fell like a blanket. Before I was very far into the park it was pitch dark. I expected to be mugged – indeed, I took it as my due, wandering into a city park like this on a dark night – but evidently the muggers couldn’t see me. The only physical risk I ran was being bowled over by one of the many joggers who sprinted invisibly along the dark paths. The Jefferson Memorial was beautiful. There’s not much to it, just a large marble rotunda in the shape of Monticello, with a gigantic statue of Jefferson inside and his favourite sayings engraved on the walls (‘Have a nice day,’ ‘Keep your shirt on,’ ‘You could have knocked me over with a feather’ etc.), but when it is lit up at night it is entrancing, with the lights of the memorial smeared across the pool of water called the Tidal Basin. I must have sat for an hour or more just listening to the rhythmic swish of the distant traffic, the sirens and car horns, the far-off sounds of people shouting, people singing, people being shot.
I lingered so long that it was too late to go to the Lincoln Memorial and I had to come back in the morning. The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits there in his big high chair looking grand yet kindly. There was a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head. I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him. Afterwards, as I strolled across the Mall, I spied yet more trestles and draped ropes, with security men hanging about. They had closed off a road across the park and had brought in two helicopters with the presidential seal on their sides and seven cannons and the Marine Corps Band. It was quite early in the morning and