By Russell Frank
Here’s a good way to get people to think you’re crazy: Tell them you would prefer to walk, despite the availability of buses, trains and cabs.
I did this in Our Nation’s Capital last week. I was staying at a hotel on the Hill, southeast of that white-domed edifice where America’s best-heeled lobbyists so vigorously exercise their First Amendment rights. I had a meeting out past the People’s House on the far side of the world’s largest and scruffiest lawn. My question for the front desk: Can I walk there? The clerk shook her head vigorously. Too far.
I told her I had an hour. She thought it might take an hour, which, to her way of thinking, was about 50 minutes longer than any sane person would want to walk. Mind you, this was the first of those two false spring days that teased us last week. The mercury flirted with 70. What could be better than walking from the Capitol to the White House on such a day? Heck, Jimmy Carter did it.
The desk clerk gave me a look that said Jimmy Carter was not the brightest bulb in the marquee and neither are you.
*
Her reaction recalled the time I took a train from Manhattan to Newark for a meeting with the editor of the Star-Ledger. I asked a cop at the station if I could walk from there to the newspaper. He looked at his watch. “You’ll be all right,” he said.
At that time of day, in other words, I probably wouldn’t become a crime statistic. Nice to know, but that wasn’t what I was asking him at all. I just wanted to know if the paper was within walking distance of the depot. It was. I set off.
Along the way I encountered a group of black teenagers.
“Good morning, Mr. Caucasian,” one of them said whitely.
I stopped laughing long enough to wish him a good morning in turn.
When I got to the paper I was greeted by an imposing woman seated on a raised platform protected by bulletproof glass. I must have used a different entrance than the one coming from the parking lot because the first thing the building security empress asked me was where I parked my car.
“I didn’t drive,” I told her. “I walked from the train station.”
“You what?” she said.
The editor took me around the newsroom, explaining that I was a reporter in Northern California who was thinking about moving back East. One of the Star-Ledger’s reporters took me aside.
“Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You want to move from Northern California to Newark, New Jersey?”
I responded with my best Jimmy Carter grin. I was not offered a job at the Star-Ledger.
Back at security, the empress asked me if she could call me a cab.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll walk.”
“Be careful,” she said.
Mr. Caucasian made it back to the train station unmolested.
*
It was lunchtime in the district. Federal employees flocked to the outdoor cafes, which offered dining al fresco for the first time since fall. Like punch-drunk pugs, snow-pummeled pansies got up off the canvas. Landscape crews, wearing sunglasses, sank their spades into the defrosting earth. Tourists congratulated themselves on having picked this day of all days to come to town. Everyone looked like they had just received the perfect gift.
I got to my meeting 10 minutes early. It lasted from 2 to 4 and I had no plans until 7 so I figured I might as well walk back. Sweet as the day was, I have to say that official DC is a little boring. For every stately edifice like the Supreme Court or the Treasury, and every quirky building like the Smithsonian or the Museum of the American Indian, there are many grimly functional office buildings like the ones that house the FBI, the Department of Labor and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Not to be unkind, but the federales seem to match the buildings they work in with their boring “business attire” and their flapping identity badges.
The walk was a tour of our tax dollars at work:
At Treasury I thought about asking for a cash advance to tide me over ‘til payday, but figured they were probably tapped out.
At Education I wondered if our children is learning. I went behind the building to reassure myself that no child had been left there.
At Justice I wanted to know how the closing of our enhanced interrogation techniques center at Guantanamo was coming along.
At Labor I realized I had no idea what they do at Labor, aside from providing jobs for their own employees.
At Transportation they were curious to know how I’d come.
“I walked,” I said.
“You what?”
