Rolling Stone Blows Smoke

As firmly perched as ever on popular culture’s cutting edge, I recently started subscribing to Rolling Stone magazine—45 years after its electrifying debut and at a time in history when print magazines are well into their death throes and Rolling Stone itself fights a mostly losing battle for relevance.

Like all magazines that have been around for a while, Rolling Stone is smaller and far thinner than it used to be, and its once-heralded long-form articles on political, environmental and social-justice issues have been abbreviated to better reflect the shorter attention spans of 21st-century readers. Still, I’d been finding that I often would pick up a newsstand copy, attracted by a cover article about some iconic musical artist who was big in my youth, or an intriguing profile of a newer artist about whom I felt I should be conversant, or a well-researched piece on something topical about which I could stand to be better informed. (Also, frankly, I’m of an age and disposition that I simply like the idea of buying something from a “newsstand” while such old-school purveyors of periodicals still exist.)

So, I decided it was cheaper to subscribe than to keep buying individual copies by the issue. This being the age of multimedia added value, however, becoming a subscriber also meant that I began receiving daily e-mail news roundups from my friends at Rolling Stone. Most of the linked pieces concern musical artists, but others reflect the magazine’s standard left-of-center political and social interests. It was by this means that one recent afternoon, my work day was enlivened by an intriguing teaser in the form the headline “Pot Legalization is Coming.”

I immediately clicked on the link—not because I long for the ability to toke openly, or even because I’ll seize any excuse to screw off on the job, although the latter certainly is true enough. No, I immediately clicked on it for two reasons—the first being that it struck me as being the kind of headline the once-young  hippies who still run Rolling Stone probably have been hopefully writing every five years since 1972, and the second being that the magazine’s proclamation seemed on its face so wildly improbable that I wanted to see whether this bold prediction was based in hard data, selective trend analysis, the writer having hit he keyboard while stoned on killer weed, or what.

Well, no big surprise, the lengthy article by Julian Brookes, the magazine’s online political editor, was enveloped in a haze of caveats. As it happens, voters in three states—Colorado, Washington and Oregon—will vote in November on whether to approve legalization of marijuana sales for recreational use. Those ballot initiatives may or may not pass. And even if they are approved, there’s still the not-insignificant matter of whether, or to what extent, the federal government will crack down on states that have elected to ignore the federal ban on marijuana sales. This all seems a rather far cry from the certainty suggested by “Pot Legalization is Coming.” (Although I guess a strict reading of the headline affords plenty of wiggle room. I mean, the gay-rights organization the Human Rights Campaign might similarly have forecast in its initial newsletter 32 years ago, “Right of Gays to Serve Openly in the Military is Coming.” That statement proved accurate—eventually.)

Proponents of marijuana legalization pose provocative arguments for their stance; Brookes’ piece hit many of them in a single paragraph:

"The prohibition on marijuana—a relatively benign drug when used responsibly by adults, and a teddy bear compared to alcohol and tobacco—has done an impressive job of racking up racially-biased arrests; throwing people in jail; burning up police time and money; propping up a $30 billion illegal market; and enriching psychotic Mexican drug lords.”

It’s no secret that the so-called War on Drugs has been about as successful—and bloody, and expensive—as has been the War in Afghanistan, or was the War in Iraq before that. Much firepower and piles and piles of cash have been expended, with the lasting results (beyond the requisite death and destruction) being that corrupt Afghani and Iraqi politicians, iron-fisted warlords and brutal cartel leaders seem as solidly in control as ever. So, why not, in historical effect, repeal Prohibition and let market forces do with marijuana what law enforcement has been unable to do: control it? Flood the market with product, set prices, and affix taxes to transform a big net drain on the federal treasury into a big net gain. That’s the argument behind a federal marijuana legalization bill introduced last year by congressmen Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX). It makes a certain amount of sense.

I come back, however, to Rolling Stone’s description of marijuana as “a relatively benign drug when used responsibly by adults.” First of all, even Rolling Stone concedes by its wording that pot use by non-adults tends to be neither responsible nor benign, and that use surely would  increase dramatically in a landscape in which marijuana is legal for adults and thus is ubiquitous—easier to obtain, even, than raiding the old man’s liquor cabinet. (Indeed, picture a world in which mom and dad regularly are getting high and it’s no stretch to envision open bags of weed tumbling out onto kitchen counters and family-room sofa cushions, where Mr and Mrs Stonington somehow forgot they’d left them.)

But beyond that, is pot’s effect really so “benign” when it’s used “responsibly” by adults? I have to wonder. And, OK, a big reason I have wonder is because I lack a frame of reference. I know from experience, for example, that I can drink a beer or two and still be fine to drive—and probably even to operate heavy machinery, if that was something I regularly did. But I’ve no idea how well I’d steer a car or react to road conditions after having smoked a joint or two.

It’s not that I’ve never been offered one, or even that I’ve never sucked on one. It’s that—and I really debated whether to reveal this here, for fear of somehow becoming the laughingstock of Cheech & Chong’s Twitter feed—I’ve never inhaled.

Yeah yeah, I know: “You and Bill Clinton.” But whereas the former president almost certainly lied for political reasons about whether he ever allowed the active ingredients in cannabis to reach his lungs, I spent years lying for social reasons about my inability to internalize those same ingredients.

You see, I just never figured out the whole inhaling thing. Not with pot, nor with regular cigarettes. I still haven’t. It’s not something my throat ever has seemed to want to do. As for my brain, I’ve always preferred to think it colludes with my respiratory system to protect me from the harmful effects of internalized smoke. Because the alternative explanation is simply that I’m pretty damn stupid.

I’m serious about this. From my very earliest days as a would-be cigarette smoker, I closely observed what presumably successful smokers were doing, but was unable to emulate it. Instead, I sucked smoke into my mouth, held it there and gradually expended it after what I deemed to be an acceptable amount of time had elapsed.

The great thing about pot smokers is that they’re always too stoned to notice whether those who purport to be getting high along with them really are doing so. This made it easy for me to fake my way through pot parties in college, and later I found myself in such situations far less often. I did, however, start, in my 20s, to bemoan my total lack of a misspent youth when it came to drug use. So, I seized upon my limited opportunities to snort coke and drop acid. I did neither more than a handful of times, and I have no stories more colorful than watching a Randy Newman poster breathe one night in the early 1980s. But to this day I’m happy to have a narcotics resume of sorts to share during “Back in the Day” reveries with contemporaries—who often seem surprisingly taken with my daring, unaware that I’d gladly have exchanged a few hallucinogenic moments for the mellow, giggling fun all the pot smokers seemed to be having.

So, I can’t really say from personal experience whether being a little bit high from marijuana is any more or less a threat to personal and public safety than is being a little bit tipsy from alcohol—or even if it’s easier or more difficult, after smoking a single joint, to say no to a second joint than it is to decline that second beer or martini. Still, it strikes me as unwise for government to sanction an additional mind-altering substance, thus encouraging the potential for widespread abuse among minors and adults alike. Sure, legalization might force some of the drug lords to alter their business plan and change up their narcotics mix, and yes, this might create the most lucrative government sin tax since states approved casino gambling. But if the end result is more stoned people stumbling around on our streets, more vehicular and pedestrian accidents, and quite possibly more addiction to harder drugs by people who come to find pot boring rather than enticingly illicit, is legalization really the answer?

I concede that I’m perhaps being an alarmist. (More likely, I subliminally dread the prospect of an endless stream of strangers insistently telling me their “really funny” stories that are far less amusing than incoherent, or enthusiastically recommending to me horribly unhealthy convenience store snacks that taste like gourmet fare when you’re high, much as Pink Floyd seemed as profound and moving as Beethoven to my generation of potheads.) Regardless, legalization strikes me as altogether a bad idea.

Not that, optimistic Rolling Stone headlines aside, it appears likely to happen anytime soon. If and when it does, the magazine itself likely will be history, given the realities of modern-day publishing and the dwindling numbers of aging rock fans and lefties who’ll pay good money to read cover articles about Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, and raptly consume doomsday warnings about scenarios Americans now seem happy to ignore, such as the global warming and economic stratification.

In the meantime, though, I must say that I’m thoroughly enjoying my subscription. Sure, Rolling Stone’s cutting edge now is a rather dull blade, but I still find its content interesting and edifying. And, as a guy who, actuarily speaking, is getting closer and closer to his own death throes, and who never has had any great illusions about his own relevance, I can relate, man.

Another Dark Night

Even when I was younger and better at staying up late, I wasn’t much one for midnight movies. Being among the first people to see a new film never was very important to me, and I wasn’t a member of the Rocky Horror cult or the avid fan bases of other movies that were midnight mainstays.

Not to mention that big crowds—as well as small but randy ones—tend to mean big noise. I hate noise in theaters. I don’t attend movies for the communal experience, and I prize silence among my fellow filmgoers. It frankly annoys me even when people talk during the coming attractions. I wish the public service announcement that tells people to silence their cell phones and refrain from “adding their own soundtrack” would be enforced by bouncers strong enough to literally toss egregious offenders out the door.

But I’ll stop short of even jokingly urging here that noisemakers be shot, out of abundant sensitivity to this morning’s news out of Aurora, Colorado, that a lone gunman, wearing a gasmask and a bullet-proof vest, opened fire last night in a packed theater during a midnight screening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. But, by the by, count this as another disincentive for me to attend midnight movies: the risk of being choked by teargas and pumped full of lead by some maladjusted masked avenger in gun-crazy America—a nation where the predictable reaction to this slaughter will be for the National Rifle Association and its millions of diehards (pun somewhat intended) to lobby all the harder for laws facilitating the arming of every audience member and theater employee—the better to kill the next bastard before he kills you.

In fact, I can see the ad campaign now: “Guns don’t kill people. People without guns allow guns to kill people.” Perhaps the spots will end with the stark image of the line of police tape—illuminated against the night sky by the theater’s bright neon—ringing the Colorado multiplex.

As I write this, much about last night’s bloodbath remains unknown. The suspect has been identified as 24-year-old James Holmes, and I just read an ABC News report out of San Diego that quoted his mom as saying, “You have the right person.” (It’s unclear whether than means her gut told her he’s capable of such a thing or he’d actually chit-chatted on the phone one evening about someday wanting to rid Gotham City of all the midnight moviegoers who ever put him down.) The most-recent casualty toll I read was 12 dead and 50 injured. There were unconfirmed reports of undetonated bombs having been found at his apartment complex. No word as yet on motive, although I’m guessing it will end up being something more substantive, but no less crazy, than profound disappointment with the quality of first two installments of the Batman film trilogy.

It’s really hard for me to know what else to write about this, even as I feel compelled to address it. I’ve written it all before: My horror at the utterly preventable carnage every time something like this or Virginia Tech or Columbine (what is it about Colorado?) happens, my sense of helplessness and despair in the face of the NRA’s strangling power and this nation’s historic deification of the Second Amendment, and my concurrent scorn for my own inaction and conviction that nothing I can do by way of personal advocacy or check-writing possibly will help lead to the adoption of meaningful gun-control laws.

Hence the “soft lead” to this post: A bitter joke about eschewing midnight movies, ‘cause they’ll kill ya.

Yeah, I know that taking guns out the hands of private citizens wouldn’t solve everything. The standard argument of gun apologists is that criminals always will find ways to secure firearms, and that if gun ownership is severely restricted by law, only thugs and (literally outgunned) law enforcement officers will be armed. Well, never mind the fact that meaningful gun control is a statistically proven deterrent to homicide, serving well to protect the public order in every nation in which it’s enforced. At very least, I’ve got to think, gun laws with teeth would leave less weaponry lying around for self-proclaimed superheroes of savagery, collegiate misfits, Goth goons and other sad-but-dangerous sociopaths to wield in waging their vendettas against what they perceive as a hostile world.

How many mass shootings will it take for America finally to disarm? I don’t think even Hollywood could conceive of that many sequels. Rather, expect our homegrown dark knights to return—rifles and pistols blazing—again and again.

Supremely Sweet

I just spent the better part of an hour beginning to craft a thoughtful, well-reasoned, articulate post on yesterday’s stunning Supreme Court decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But I decided to scrap that and, instead, share my gut reactions and spare you the grievous long-windedness of which I’ve so often been guilty.

First of all, like most people, I think, I was shocked not only that the law wasn’t gutted by the reliably conservative-majority high court, but that John Roberts, the Bush-appointed chief justice, sided with the court’s four liberal justices. Sure, he labeled the individual mandate a “tax,” and sure, Mitt Romney and the Republicans will place that word front and center in their continuing efforts to repeal the law and defeat President Obama this fall. But make no mistake, affirming the constitutionality of the act is huge, and augers well for its continuing and complete implementation.

Second, the wildly improbable Roberts-led 5-4 decision led me to fancifully speculate on what might be next on a court suddenly so unpredictable. Might the pugnacious Justice Antonin Scalia abruptly resign to follow jam-band Phish on tour, announcing that he’d been only half-heartedly providing legal cover to religious zealots and rich people since Jerry Garcia died and the Grateful Dead disbanded? Would Justice Samuel Alito suddenly reverse himself on the right of private citizens to bear arms? Most shockingly, might Justice Clarence Thomas actually speak during oral arguments next term, if only to ask, “Um, could you repeat the question?”

Third, I pictured with glee the fury of the Right—from Republicans in Congress to commentators on Fox News—as they bitterly eyed the champagne that would not be uncorked, and stuffed the thundering speeches they’d prepared on the court’s “vindication” of the socialist “overreach” of “Obamacare.” (A term that always has struck me as being  the equal of “Democrat” Party in shrill, childish pettiness.)

Finally, once I’d cycled through the stages of amazement and Schadenfreude, I did consider what the high court’s ruling might ultimately mean for the millions of currently uninsured Americans who now have the promise of a medical safety net. This, of course, is what I’m most happy about today. But I’d have to say my mental images of guys like John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and the irrelevant but deafeningly loud blowhard Newt Gingrich losing their lunches yesterday still comes a shamefully but deliciously close second.

The Truth's Not Your Guide

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.