Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run

“You training it? Or perhaps running?” (My friend J’s e-mail message about a planned trip to Washington to see K and J.)

*

It’s a joke, of course. Not one that makes me laugh, but intuitive of J, and the truth is, as I wrote in RFYL: Mental Landscapes, I do look at roadscapes differently when I’m driving. With M still in India, I’m alone on my way to visit K and J in their new apartment in D.C., (It is a thrill to think that I will be my daughter’s first visitor to her new life with J!) and, yes, J (my friend) I do imagine myself on the highway, running. I’m
traveling in Vanya, a friend’s Volvo that was near-gifted to us when I had to drive to work for the Wall Street Journal after the events – as they say – of 9/11. I call the car Vanya because about that time I saw Simon Russell Beale in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and in those first days, sitting inside the 1993 Volvo 850, I felt an uneasy comfort that reminded me of Beale’s Vanya and how life can be quiet suffering and for so many won’t end well despite our best intentions, a sense that hasn’t been realized until the last year or so when I’ll be zipping along in sync with the broadest SUVs and Lexuses and tricked-out tech marvels when suddenly Vanya will sputter and chug and it’s all lights up on the dashboard, not death exactly but Vanya will suddenly stop working, only a temporary thing, as long as I have a place on the side of the road to pull over, the emergency flashers blinking, on this trip to Washington it was on Washington Avenue, lost as I was, GPS-less of course, driving not toward K’s apartment, talking to K on the cellphone to try to get back on the right path, when Vanya suddenly rebels, stops, and again on the road home, just through the EZ-Pass at the Goethal’s Bridge, but that was cake because there was no traffic and gobs of room to pull over, let Vanya settle down, or whatever, because in three minutes (tops), the car will start like a charm and be off again.

So I’m not really alone, as I listen to Vanya and watch the road. Plenty of time on this drive, one of the most oft-traveled routes, New York to Washington, but not on the air shuttle to Reagan or the Acela to Union Station (“You training it?”), it’s been an age since I’d last been to D.C., the Pen-Faulkner literary awards, with M and a phrase of writers, no way can you get a sense of a place during a special event weekend in formalwear and too much rich food and drink; the journey is the destination, the slow-down landscape of the runner, the flourish and too-large for the sign font of “Welcome to Pennsylvania,” some floral? graphic, and in the Philly suburbs, a cheese grater of billboards, the one that stops me is Jack Black’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jan. 14-15 I’m traveling, it’s a mega-message, ever the jester, the wide foolish face of him, masturbatory in delight as he’s being tied down by countless Lilliputians, opening DEC. 22, so long now out of the theaters, it’s not funny, only telling. Somewhere near here a second beaut: great colors and graphics and for the life of me I don’t remember the tagline, but the theme: the best in basement waterproofing. Next, “Welcome to Delaware.” Don’t forget the period. How intuitive is that, the home of Wilmington, where I’ve sent more first-class mail than anywhere else on the planet, credit-card payments stretching back twenty-plus years, trial-lawyer capital of the free world, file suit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, remember the payout debacle that undressed Disney, then-CEO Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz, his former No. 2, business headlines for months, reporters filing dateline, GEORGTOWN, Del.; accountants, lawyers, pantsuits, and the sign, “Welcome to Delaware.” No graphics, only the words, helvetica-no flourish font, and that period. Just so.

Running-imagining tops out along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Here Vanya must hold steady at 55 mph, a speed at which it will hesitate, uncertain; now I’m hyper-listening, watchful because road shoulders come and go, and its stall-outs are idiosyncratic, it’s been 3½ hours of trouble-free driving; so I’m thinking, any moment now .¤.¤ Ha! Big brown and blue sign. “NSA Next Right Employees Only”. That is one exit I have to take. NSA, the National Security Agency, “The Puzzle Palace” by James Bamford still holds up, they say, where America listens to the rest of the world and, of course, to suspected troublemakers in this country, or anyone who steps out of line, I’m thinking that it was strange my first cellphone talk with K, who lives close enough to the Capitol Building to see it on the horizon, is surprisingly crackly, am imagining a ’40s-era spook in a trenchcoat and fedora, keeping watch, beware of what you say, K, I think THEY could be listening. K, not sure exactly if I’m serious, oh Dad, the Park Slope liberal, always with the Jeff Daniels character, the film “The Squid and the Whale.” Why would they chose to put anything on the parkway? Pride? Highway ordinance? A mile later a sign says, “NSA Entrance Employees Only”. Does the NSA have so much turnover that employees, new ones, need the sign or they would miss the turnoff? Do studies show it is better to be direct and upfront with terrorists, that by creating a “soft” target we, in effect, are telling them not to bother with this location, that if the NSA entrance were unnamed it would only encourage them to go to the lengths necessary to uncover the hidden location, seeing it as a much more desirable “hard” target? It could not be any more clearly marked – certainly much more so than the monuments and special attractions on the mall, which I will find out later that day – and more than anything I want to go and check it out.

But I don’t. K’s waiting. I make mental note to tell her about this sign. She’ll like that. And the next turnoff, we’ll come back to visit, perhaps when I return later this month: the National Cryptologic Museum: a site devoted to codebreakers and codemakers. That we have to see!

Next: Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run II