The Revolution

There are four seasons in Washington, D.C., but only one where the city is itself. No one ever wrote a song called “Autumn in D.C.” Nor should they. Fall is the season when D.C. gets disowned by incumbents back home with their constituents and savaged by challengers whose only professed desire to go to Washington is to completely change it. Now think about winter in the Capital—and what comes to mind? If you’re a yuppie, maybe a scene or two from Aaron Sorkin. If you watch the nightly news, maybe you sort of recall a fleeting feel-good shot of the White House Christmas tree lighting. The other 97% of the population? Nothing. What is there? Frozen breath, a dead brown and gray landscape, a couple wet and heavy snows. That’s about it.

Then comes spring. Spring in D.C. is like your job: it’s fine. Just fine. Better than not having it, right? Way better, in fact. And there are cherry blossoms! For two weeks, tens of thousands of people crowd the edge of the Tidal Basin with one goal, the goal of framing a picture of their kids or their girlfriends under a cherry blossom tree so that it looks like no one else was there. Then the blossoms shed and it’s over. Like I said, better than not having it, right?

D.C., though, was made for one season, and one season only. The founding fathers planted our capitol in the thick of a swamp because they had an idea about what would come with the heat.

People blame the fathers for this move, chalking up the Capital’s location to some boneheaded failure of imagination brought on by a cold snap during winter planning meetings in Philadelphia. Not me. I think they saw what would come of it. I think they saw the surprise of feeling yourself perspire under a wool suit and linen shirt at 7:30 a.m. They smelled the city summer air, before there was even a city, the thick, sweet, pungent smell of bus fumes and humidity. They saw fro-yo shops in Metro Center and on K Street, and the face-flushing dashes that besuited men and women would make across baking afternoon pavement to get there. The fathers imagined the legions—legions!—of interns descending upon the district like good-natured locusts, rising in the sky like clockwork in mid-May and disappearing again with the wind in mid-August, mighty swarms of 18 year olds and 23 year olds, cramming themselves into offices and agencies and think tanks and leadership institutes, devouring every last morsel of the subletting market. I’m sure, too, that even from Constitution Hall, the framers could imagine the tags. Everyone would wear a tag. Holstered on a belt clip, hanging around a neck lanyard, pinned to a neon tour group t-shirt—names, mug shots, magnetic charges, access, status, authority, proof of belonging. And in addition to all that, the framers saw the joggers in spandex and earbuds, darting across crosswalks, they saw the young women in sleeveless camisoles and pearl necklaces wrapped around their young, open-collared men on the metro platforms, the happy hour drones buzzing out on the patios, and people everywhere, man woman and child, adopting the universal default posture: head bent down at forty-five degrees, staring at a small bluish screen in their palm. In short, nineteen score and seven years ago, our fathers saw summer in this District and called it good.

The other night, I stepped out into an evening that bore the first hint of early summer. The veil of humidity was there, but warmth had not yet become heat. There was a forecast of rain.

In McPherson Square, the grass had been cut for the first time all year that morning, and now it was standing plush and fragrant. Homeless men and lawyers peopled some of the benches. Tourist families on their way back from the Mall to their hotels skirted around the giant bronze equestrian statue mounted upon a granite pedestal in the middle of the square. General James McPherson surveyed his namesake patch of territory with the same commanding resolve that no doubt inspired his brethren in the Kentucky Army to donate his likeness to the city back in the distant past, a time so distant that people must have remembered who General McPherson was.

The birds were out in full force, as usual. Pairs of mallards waddled through the grass together, while broods of pigeons flocked near any bench whose occupant bore a sandwich. Higher up, a small group of seagulls blown in from the Eastern Shore hovered. One of them alighted on the highest and sturdiest point in the park, which happened to be the peak of General McPherson’s hat. Together, the three of them, the horse, the bird, and General McPherson, gazed solemnly into the evening.

It reminded me of Hamlet, the graveyard scene, when Horatio tries to console the prince out of his macabre, melancholy musing about what must have become of the bodies of Caesar and Alexander, how flesh became corpse, became dirt, became loam, became a plug for a beer barrel, stowed away in a storeroom somewhere in Denmark. As for General McPherson’s flesh, who could say, but we saw what became of his likeness, his memory on the earth: General McPherson is now a place for gulls to perch in summer.