A couple of decades ago, when I was a features writer at the Savannah Morning News, one of my colleagues wrote a story about the hideous inaccuracy of local tour guides. History drips from Savannah like Spanish moss from its trees, so every downtown square and building has a story—or, rather, many stories—of industry, infamy or intrigue. Our incognito journalist climbed aboard several different horse-drawn carriages, and maybe some horseless carriages, as well, to listen in on the tour guides’ narratives and later fact-check their statements.
I don’t at this point recall any of the whoppers the ill-informed or just plain ignorant guides were overheard relating to gullible tourists. Suffice it to say, however, that names, dates, relationships and even basic logic, at times, were casualties of the need to fill dead air and to give moms, dads and grandparents the sense that their money was being well-spent. (The kids generally couldn’t have cared less, sitting there stupefyingly bored in those days before smartphones and tablet computers.)
Was it James Oglethorpe who’d founded Savannah in 1733, or James Otis in 1755? Who really cared? It was ancient history! Stories that were meant to kill time until the family proceeded down to River Street to lard up on fudge at the confectionaries.
Of course, we newspaper know-it-alls enjoyed scoffing at the stupid tour guides and feeling superior to them. Given that the only thing our college educations had gotten us to that point in our professional lives were poverty-wage jobs at a third-rate rag, we badly needed to redirect our contempt away from ourselves. We might never make it to the New York Times, we conceded, but we could assure any tourist that, no, Savannah’s Flannery O’Connor, the writer, was not kin to TV’s Carroll O’Connor, the guy who’d played Archie Bunker on All in the Family.
I got to thinking about all this recently, shortly after my friend Natalie Burt and her family debarked from the Washington, DC, area to return to their home in Henderson, Nevada, outside of Las Vegas. I worked with Natalie for a couple of years in Savannah. She’s now a high school teacher—I guess because, compared to print journalism, teaching at least is a stable low-paying, all-consuming, headache-producing occupation. Anyway, for years Natalie had been telling me that she, her husband Chris, and their two sons would come East for a family vacation in DC as soon as the boys were old enough to appreciate all the museums and whatnot, yet before they were old enough to realize that Washington is where our elected leaders come to bicker and posture and sit on their asses and not do the nation’s business. Earlier this month, the Burts’ long-promised vacation week finally arrived.
As it happened, they booked into a hotel that was just a few blocks from my office in Alexandria, Virginia. From there, they rode Metro each day into the District. Their schedule was very Smithsonian- and bird-centric, as 14-year-old Kyle is a natural history buff and avid birder. I checked in with them from time to time in the early days of their stay, and had a nice catching-up session with Natalie at the hotel one morning, while her family was upstairs sleeping and before I got to the office.
Anyway, I’m getting to the tour guides connection. We all decided that on Friday, near the end of their week here, I’d take the day off and drive the Burts to two rather far-flung venues not easily accessible by public transportation—Mount Vernon, the storied home of George Washington, located about a dozen miles south of Alexandria, and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Annex, which is about 20 miles west of DC, near Dulles Airport. (The latter facility is huge, and houses such too-big-for-the National-Mall aircraft as the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde, and this humongous black spy plane that used to fly over the Soviet Union at incredible speeds at a very high altitude.) The plan was, we’d spend the day at those two sites, then come back to my house for a great vegan meal that Lynn would prepare and that the boys likely would hate.
The day went well. The crowd sizes were manageable, the weather was fantastic for DC in June (sunny and mild), and 9-year-old Ryan kept the whining to a minimum despite being at peak age for hating pretty much everything about enforced activities with adults. The boys did end up, in fact, pretty much loathing Lynn’s meal, but that was fine. Here's what brings me to this blog post, though. As the day’s events wore on, the number of tourist- and local interest-related questions from the Burts—queries for which I had incomplete, bluffed or no absolutely no answer—started piling up.
The worst moment for me came when we were driving away from Mount Vernon, up the George Washington Parkway toward Old Town Alexandria. Chris, sitting next to me in the car, pointed to a structure situated on a promontory in the distance, across the Potomac River from us, and asked, “What’s that fort over there?”
I responded with a pitying chuckle, “Fort?” Tourists see what they want to see, I thought. You’ve just come from the home of the guy who led the Continental Army to victory over the British during the Revolutionary War, so naturally you assume that any stone structure on the horizon must be a fort that protected the region back in Ye Olden Times.
“I don’t think it’s a fort,” I said in my kindest let-him-down easy voice. Except, when we got a little closer, it became clear that, damn, it sure as hell was a fort.
“I have no idea what fort that is,” I admitted, feeling a little humiliated and a lot stupid. Where had it come from? How long had it been there?
Well, that turned out to be just the first of many questions I’d get from various Burt family members that day that would give me pause. At this point, immersed again in their everyday lives in the Western desert, they might not remember they asked them. But I do. Being able to answer each query correctly, if belatedly, has consumed me. I've done a lot of research between then and now.
Before I get to the answers, though, I feel compelled to note that I did correctly respond, in real time, in the face of direct Burt family queries, that 1) George and Martha Washington had no children of their own together, that 2) William Henry Harrison was the American president who died of pneumonia after just a brief time in office because he’d been improperly dressed for the cold when he gave his really long inaugural speech., and that 3) Lynn’s birth state of Rhode Island is “about 45 miles” north to south (it’s actually 48 miles long, according to 50states.com). Also, when Chris asked me if DC has a “rainy season,” I answered “not really” based on years of observation, and the data back me up. Per “DC Weather Facts,” average precipitation here varies fairly little from month to month, let alone from season to season.
So, here, by geographic categories, are my original answers to various questions posed by the Burts, and my subsequent findings.
Virginia
The stupid fort that sprang up across the Potomac from Mount Vernon all of a sudden, making me look like an ignoramus, is, in fact, Fort Washington. (Actually, it’s located in Maryland, but Chris asked me about it while we were in Virginia.) The structure was built in 1809 to guard the Nation’s Capital. It was DC’s only line of defense during the Civil War until several temporary forts were constructed in Maryland and the District. Fort Washington also was a troop-staging area during World War I, and it housed some government agencies for a time after the Second World War. It stands now primarily as mute testament to the fact that you can drive up a parkway many times over the years without noticing a major landmark if you’re about as observant as is Mister Magoo.
As far as the childless George and Martha Washington go, I might have added, had I known this at the time, that “it has always been thought that George Washington was sterile.” But then again, did the Burt children really need to know that the Father of Our Country was shooting blanks in the old featherbed with Martha? That tidbit probably was best left unsaid.
I remember asserting to the Burts that William Henry Harrison (who somehow came up in conversation while we were at Mount Vernon) had died after only two months in office. Oops. Let’s half that figure. Harrison gave his long-ass inaugural address (it dragged on for an hour and 40 minutes) on March 4, 1841, and he succumbed to pneumonia exactly one month later, on April 4. (I’m guessing he didn’t make it to his inaugural balls. At least I hope not, for the sake of his likely dance partners.)
Washington, DC
I’d been confounded by the Burt-ian question, “What’s a Hoya?” as in the Georgetown University Hoyas. I’d looked it up before, and I’d told the Burts that I didn’t believe there was a definitive answer. I'm vindicated in that response by HoyaSaxa.com, which notes, “The origins of the word ‘Hoya’ defy simple explanation.” A possible answer, I learned, is that a Georgetown student in the 19th century created the phrase hoia saxa from Greek and Latin, to mean “what rocks.” Whereupon fans of the school’s baseball team started chanting it, because it still would be more than a century until the British band Queen would issue the definitive pledge “We Will Rock You.”
OK, so, yes, I ‘d been right about Washington not having a “rainy season” per se. But Chris also had asked me how much precipitation we get annually, and how many inches of snow. I had no answer to the first question, and guessed “a foot” to the second. It turns out that DC gets an average of 39.35 inches of precipitation annually, and 17.1 inches of snow. In fact, since I’m a regular meteorologist when I’ve got a bunch of printed-out weather data right in front of me, I’ll go ahead and add that Washington gets precipitation on an average of 113 days during the year, and that Las Vegas, by contrast, averages only 4.49 inches of precipitation annually—spaced over 26 days—and a scant 1.2 inches of snow.
At one point Natalie and Chris and I were talking about how low-slung DC’s skyline is compared with that of Las Vegas because, by law, no structure in DC can be taller than the Washington Monument. While I went along with that statement because I couldn’t remember the real answer, I knew that the Washington Monument thing is a popular myth. Actually, the federal Height of Buildings Act of 1910 dictates that no residential building in the District can be taller than 90 feet and that no commercial building can exceed 160 feet, although there have been some exceptions to those prohibitions over the years. The law had come in response to the construction in the late 19th century of a hotel that Congress apparently thought was way too tall.
I found online a Slate.com blog post in which a guy named Matthew Yglesias argued earlier this year that DC needs skyscrapers so it can add jobs, lower hotel rates, and increase tax revenues. He scoffed at the notion that easing height restrictions might, well, Vegas-ize the city. To Yglesias, the need literally to raise the city’s profile is a no-brainer.
I’m not sure I buy his arguments. I do, however, see the height restrictions as yet another infuriating instance of taxation without representation, with DC residents getting no say in an important local matter. It’s a gripe I recall having expressed to the Burts when we were driving past the odiously named Reagan National Airport. Never mind that Ronald Reagan never had many fans among the liberal electorate of the DC area, and never mind, too, that the Gipper, was, ironically, the president who fired the air traffic controllers. If Congress says our local airport must be named after “The Great Communicator,” that’s that.
Maryland
When we were driving parallel to the C&O Canal towpath on the Clara Barton Parkway that Friday afternoon, closing in on my house, the Burt boys were disgusted/delighted to report that everything suddenly smelled as if someone had farted in a particularly epic manner. Their noses had registered what long has been a major annoyance to we locals. The parkway ride is lush and beautiful, and the towpath is a wonderful a recreational resource , but the malodorous truth is, the entire area often smells like a rancid turdfest—because of an exposed sewer line, or something.
That had been my answer to the Burts—that it all has to do with a sewer line of some sort. That was as much as I could remember at the time. Mostly, I just wanted to quash any familial suspicion at that moment that their chauffeur had just Cut One for the ages. Subsequent research reveals that, yes, a 50-mile-long “gravity sewer” transports wastewater from Dulles Airport to a treatment plant in DC, resulting in “notorious odors” at vent locations along the canal path. Apparently construction has begun, however, on a series of six “ventilation buildings” along the route that are supposed to markedly detoxify things starting sometime next year. I really don’t understand the engineering of it all. But I’d truly love, in the future, no longer to recoil in nasal horror whenever I'm near the canal and the wind shifts. Or to be asked by gasping out-of-towners, “What died—and how big must it have been?”
One final Burt question I received before we made it to the house that day was, “What’s the story with the one-lane bridge?” The reference was to an impressive stone structure less than a mile from my home that connects the Cabin John and Bethesda/Glen Echo segments of MacArthur Boulevard, above the Cabin John Parkway. This query was particularly maddening to me because, while I remembered enough to be able to confidently inform the Burts that the bridge had been considered an engineering marvel upon its construction in the 19th century, I couldn’t reel in any of the specifics—or even name the structure.
So, here’s that story. It’s the Union Arch Bridge (informally known as the Cabin John Bridge). It was designed as part of the Washington Aqueduct and as a roadway bridge. Upon completion in 1864, it was the longest single-span masonry arch in the world. The bridge was designated a Historic National Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972 by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and a year later, was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
I also could have told the Burts, but didn’t, that the bridge is breathtaking to look up at when you’re driving along the Cabin John Parkway, and that its single, traffic light-regulated lane presents a monumental pain in the patoot when traffic backs up during the morning and afternoon commutes.
Miscellaneous
One last thing related to the Burts' visit came up when I was listening, the day after our day together, to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the weekly news quiz that airs on National Public Radio. Host Peter Sagal had author John Irving on the phone. Riffing off the name of one of Irving’s best-known books, The World According to Garp, Sagal was asking the acclaimed novelist a series of questions about gorp.
Now, I don’t think I’d heard the word “gorp” uttered since my Boy Scout days in the early 1970s—until, in the parking lot at Mount Vernon, Natalie offered her family a baggie stuffed with the venerable trail mix. I forget which of the boys asked, “What does gorp mean?”, but Natalie or Chris answered that it's an acronym for “good old raisins and peanuts.” That explanation sounded right to me.
According to Peter Sagal, however, that's a common misconception, and gorp actually is an Old English word meaning “to gobble or eat greedily.” (If you didn’t know that, don’t feel bad. John Irving got it wrong, too.)
Some other gorp trivia, courtesy of the show: In New Zealand, what we call gorp is known as schmogle, and sometimes scroggin. Also, in 1980 a movie titled Gorp was released. It was about “a mischievous camp counselor with a mad crush on a sexy waitress played by Fran Drescher.”
I’m going to stop now, so I can post this piece and e-mail the link to Natalie. Surely she and her family have been losing sleep over all the unanswered and under-answered questions they left behind on the East Coast, so I feel it’s my duty to enlighten them.
Then, sometime soon, I’m going to drive over to Fort Washington to satisfy myself that it’s not really all an elaborate hoax—a giant painted backdrop, propped against a hillside and legitimized by a fake Web site, constructed for the sole purpose of making me look like some clownish Savannah tour guide.
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