Texas Attempted: Washington touched

Washington is freezing. Fucking freezing. Ow. It’s cold. Ow, ow! Fuck, it’s freezing. It’s fucking freezing!

I arrive at 1. I reach the hotel at 2. I’m in bed by 3. I’m woken up at 6. Rock on.

We get picked up for our tour, cold, tired and hungry. Our guide is called Bob, and he’s a combination of Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson – in short, the ultimate black man. He blathers at us with Evangelical glee as we cling to the bus heaters. First stop: Capitol Building.

‘Don’t worry about the paintings,’ says Bob L. Freeson, ‘If you spent thirty seconds on each exhibit in Washington, you’d be here for twelve years.’

The dome of the Capitol Building is cast-iron and weighs nine million tonnes. That is the single factoid that we are given to ruminate on as we stand in a long line for the tour tickets. And did I mention that Washington is fucking freezing?

People hug each other for body-warmth as they stand, twitching from the pain of their bladder infections (liquids are prohibited and there are no restrooms for 5 miles). I think about resorting to the Empire Strikes Back approach to hypothermia, but my lightsaber has already been confiscated. Motorcycle officers circle the queues, hunting for Sprite.

After being stripped, molested and beaten by the security guards, we move into the main chamber of Capitol Building, where the history of the American people has been painted by various artists who invariably died mid-brushstroke. There is a crack on the floor where one of the poor bastards fell from the scaffolding whilst chiseling a Spaniard. Above us, on the underside of the dome, George Washington sits in heaven surrounded by angels and frolicking maidens. I guess forging a country has its perks.

We then enter an oddly-shaped chamber where you can hear people better the further away from them you are. Very strange…

I am the walking dead. I need a cookie, a Starbucks – anything. The wonders of the most powerful nation swirl around me, and I struggle to take it in. We exit through the crypts (where George Washington wasn’t buried), and rejoin Bob. He takes us through Chinatown and past the place where Lincoln was shot. We then run into a veterans parade – Asian men with yellow flags. It’s Veteran’s Day apparently, and the roads around the White House are closed off. Bloody veterans – they always spoil things!

We disembark and leg it to the White House, where I squint through the fence, imagining how to execute a left-flanking echelon attack (another relic of my army days). Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a jellybean thing; I just like to imagine this stuff. The White House doesn’t look that secure. Just give me a platoon of Scotsmen and some well-oiled SA80’s – we’ll be fine.

We have lunch in the Ronald Reagan memorial building, where we have to remove our coats for the metal detectors in order to get to the food court. They ask us for ID and the love child of Oprah Winfrey and Wesley Snipes points out that my MOD card has expired. But she lets me off… this time. That was close – I almost got pistol-whipped for a Philly Cheesesteak.

With my blood sugars finally in the green we return to the bus and visit the Air and Space Museum. Planes and stuff… yeah… We then ride to the WW2 Memorial, almost killing a small group of flag-waving veterans on the way.

And now I have to slip again – I’m sorry. As I walk between the pillars of the memorial, where wreaths and statues mourn the dead, I feel that ache again, the trembling in the nose and jaw. I am being moved by something again, something underneath the haze of things. I read the inscriptions from Midway, Dunkirk, Iwo Jima, and I feel the spirit of their sacrifice. A lie perhaps, but a good lie.

At the west side of the pillared circle, framed by the Lincoln Memorial, I read the words on a large stone slab.

“Here we mark the price of freedom”

Behind it there is a wall of stars, rows and rows of stars. Each one is a hundred servicemen.

Why are the tears coming? Why am I the only fucker in this memorial crying, when everyone else jokes and takes pictures? Is this about me? Is this some metaphor – a man marking the price of his freedom and mourning the dead parts of himself? I don’t fucking know. It’s the sacrifice and the honouring – it makes me so fucking sad to see this. Will everything that I do be reduced to stone, like that war, those people?

No, I am a writer: I shall have only paper.

I hide my reddened eyes from my family and the other travellers. This is it – Washington - the summit of myriad principles. A city of remembrance. But it’s not enough; it’s just not enough. That’s why I’m crying.

Texas: attempted. Washington: touched.