A Young Girl's View of Our Nation's Capitol

So I've been thinking a lot about the origins of my wanderlust. Here I am in Miami, 3000 miles from my home in San Diego (which is 2000 miles from my original home in Missouri). I'm in a job that forces me to travel in order to stay employed in my profession year round, and I still want to travel outside of it. I am a walking dichotomy; on the one hand I yearn for roots and other hand I am more than happy to be living out of a suitcase.

I started looking back at all of the trips I've taken in my life, and there are some that stand out more than others. I think I'm going to start writing about them on Sundays. Sort of a neurotic, odd travel guide for someone who wants to get into my head... The first one is my first remembered vacation. This was when I was 11, back in the day of long family road trips that lasted the entire summer (or seemed like it). Fights in the back of the minivan with my two brothers over who got the seat to themselves and who had to set up a seatbelt barricade. This particular summer we piled into the Aerostar and my father headed due East to the birthplace of our nation.

I have vague, childlike memories of this trip. I remember driving through Belle, West Virginia and thinking that was awesome because we had a puppy named Belle. I remember stopping at Cathedral Falls nearby Belle, a waterfall that sprung up out of nowhere and invited my mother to take off her shoes and run into the spray. More childlike behavior abounded from my parents when we finally arrived in Jamestown, no longer an actual town but a town reenactment for the pleasure of tons of Midwestern tourists like ourselves. My mother had mock sword fights with my brother in Pocahantas' cabin, and sat in the stocks posing forlornly for a photograph with my other brother. There was a glassblowing establishment in that area that made these rough-hewn glasses that caught the eye of my parents. They bought a set as an anniversary present to each other and I remember drinking out of them through my adolesence. I looked for them the last time I went home and I have no idea where they've run off to. My memory of the glass blowing is a man in traditional costume rolling a glowing green stick in a fire. Molten dripping green and blue incandesence and sweat dripping from the man's forehead into his long beard (like my daddy's).

Virginia also has a bevy of Presidential homes. We saw two of them (only a mountain apart): Monticello and Ash Lawn. Everyone always goes on about Monticello, saying how grand it is and how beautiful the gardens are. When I think back to the tour there, I remember a kitchen below the house that, to me, seemed sad in that it would have been full of slaves during Jefferson's life. I remember an alcove bed in Jefferson's room that I would beg for until I moved away from home, a winding staircase that led to a wing of the house that was forbidden to the tourists of the day, and a monument to Jefferson in the garden that was surrounded by elderly people resting along the garden wall after the official tour ended.


The house that really got me was Ash Lawn. Monroe's house was much more modest than Jefferson's. They were great friends and, if I remember right, Jefferson had Monroe's house built for him on the opposite mountain so they could always see if the other was home. Sure enough, when you stood on the lawn of Ash Lawn, you could look across and see the dome of Jefferson's home winking back. As beautiful as that was, Ash Lawn seemed more like where I wanted to live. It reminded me of my parent's house with a bit more clutter, more inclined to knick-knacks and flourishes on the curtains and sofa. There were sheep and flower boxes and so many little things to look at that I didn't know where to turn. My knick-knack phase now ended, it's hard for me to imagine choosing Ash Lawn over Monticello, but everything seemed more welcoming there at the time.

There was one little decorative plate that I took to. It sat on a small occasional table in the drawing room. Clear glass, it was etched with the profiles of a man and woman with huge grins on their faces and the words, "On their wedding day." Amusingly, when you turned the plate over, the smiles turned to frowns and the words read, "And Three Years After." I thought the plate was so funny . . . amusing to me now since I look back and see that my parents were in such a happy marriage. Did I think it was funny because it wasn't true? Did the idea of marital strife make me laugh because I wasn't exposed to it? Whatever the reason, I have said plate in my house. In my child's mind, I remember taking it off that drawing room table and bringing it with me, but my mother assures me that we purchased the cheaper replica in the museum store.


Idyllic....I remember the rolling hills of that area. I feel like we drove for days through that part of the country, going from house to house and seeing all of the treasures that each had to offer. We ended our Presidential journey with dinner at Michie Tavern, seemingly at the bottom of the hills that housed Monroe and Jefferson, this little restaurant/museum had been around since those gentlemen (and more) frequented the place to take a draught and talk politics. I remember clinking silverware, women dressed up in Colonial dress, and a huge grist mill outside.

Washington, D.C. came soon enough. We stayed in Manassas, Virginia, and walked around Bull Run. My brother's were blown away by the old house with cannonballs nestled comfortably into the brick. We spent hours running through the grass searching the dirt for musket balls to take home.

D.C. is a sweaty memory. All city, dirty, smoggy and hot. I can feel my tired feet in my Keds tennis shoes. I think we walked twenty miles through that city. It's hard to discern my actual memories of being there with photos that I see of the city and its monuments. I remember standing in the rotunda of the capitol building and looking up at the artwork on the walls, walking through a hall of statues from each state in the same building and wondering at the Hawaiian King, the only statue not made of cold, white stone, but of a chocolate brown with gold gilt on the crown and scepter. We spent time in the archives there, one of my grandfather's being Thomas Ustick Walter, who was the architect of the dome on said capitol. Our lineage got us past tourist lines, which was great fun for my mother and for me and the brothers, a long trip down into an office that looked like any other.


I have memories of standing in a line that seemingly reached around the block to see the Constitution in its case. We had just studied the Constitution in school and I was looking for the names of the signers at the bottom that I had written and read about. My mother stayed as long as possible, trying to read the whole thing, but the guard told her she couldn't linger. We had to "move along." We can read the whole thing in a book.

I wish I had memories of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and the White House but I don't. Everytime I try to pull them out, I feel like I'm pulling at straws to get something beyond the photos I see in books. Those weren't the things that stuck.


The Smithsonian didn't stick either, though we spent several days there. I have four memories from inside those hallowed halls: A flag from the Civil War, hanging behind glass, huge, in a dark room with holes and rips and frays along the edges, the Hope Diamond shining out at me from a small viewing window, like a glass eye gleaming from inside it's cell, Dorothy's ruby slippers, and Archie Bunker's chair, green and sunken in a mock up of the original set.

So, Keturah goes to Washington and she remembers a chair with an imprint of Carol O'Conner's butt. Funny what nearly twenty years will filter out and keep in.

I remember feeling history on that trip though. I remember climbing lots of stone steps and thinking about all of the other footsteps that have fallen in those places. I remember feeling lost in the years that have passed since those buildings were first put to use. I remember thinking that I would have to go back when I grew up.

I will.