Journalism and jets have carried me to some of the world's great capitals. Most of those cities, like New Delhi, Paris, London, Prague, Mexico City, Rome, Brussels and Berlin, were in full flower hundreds, even thousands of years before the very idea for our nation - let alone its capital - was planted.
Yet, with the possible exception of Paris, none of these great cities is more beautiful in early spring than Washington, D.C. No capital I know mixes the rock solid tonnage of limestone and granite with the delicate lightness of daffodils and cherry blossoms than Washington.
Yes, I know: Washington, unlike most other capitals, is a single-purpose city, government. As such, however, its grandest buildings aren't castles and cathedrals but big shouldered public spaces that we, not kings or cardinals, own and enjoy.
It's a city that's easy to enjoy. Armed with nothing more than a good pair of shoes and two-minute tutorial on how to use its underground, the Metro, nearly every museum and site in Washington is accessible and free. The National Mall, for instance, is lined with world-leading art, history and science museums. No other national capital can equal these collections, their access or cost, zero.
Few of its citizens or commuters speak of Washington's charm because most who live and work there speak of little else but politics. They eat, drink and sleep politics and then wake up the next day and do it all over again.
That's why, to me, anyway, Washington is a forever-young town. Politics demands 30-hour workdays and fierce loyalties, abilities found mostly in the under-35 crowd, not in fogies 40 or older. That youth makes the city now move at a brisk clip, not a mosey like it once did three decades or so ago.
Back then I harbored a near-consuming ambition to work in Washington. A dozen trips to the city over the succeeding decades, and now a daughter's living and working there, have convinced me, though, I wouldn't have survived the move from flat Illinois to Capitol Hill. Too many people, too much hustle, too much talking.
But it is a grand place to visit. During a quick (driving, of course) trip to Washington over the Easter holiday the lovely Catherine or I or both enjoyed a luncheon lecture at Brookings Institution; dropped a knee at the National Cathedral; visited Julia Child's kitchen in the National Museum of American History; saw North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad walk a poodle down Eighth Street SE; attended a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor at the Kennedy Center; ate a street-vendor hotdog under a tree on the Mall; hiked to and from the Tidal Basin to see the famous cherry blossoms; and every morning walked to the Dunkin' Donuts at Eighth and Pennsylvania for coffee, artery-clogging pastries and a Washington Post which were then slowly consumed on the back stoop of daughter Gracie's elegantly-tired, century-old, rented townhouse.
That list fails to note an afternoon visit to the outstanding (free, also) museum in Navy Yard where the eagle-eyed Catherine spotted a poster-size enlargement of a 1944 photograph of her father watching planes being launched from the U.S.S. Yorktown in the south Pacific. Pretty cool, eh?
In fact, Washington in the spring is completely cool. The white capitol dome seems to float between the Mall's green grass and a sky scrubbed blue by winter. Magnolia trees appear as exclamation marks of pink hope and dogwoods carry white whispers of warmer days ahead.
And I love it all. If Paris, as Ernest Hemingway once noted, is "a moveable feast," then the first week of April in Washington, D.C. is a fine first course.
...
Alan Guebert's "Farm and Food File" is published weekly in more than 75 newspapers in North America. Contact him at agcomm@sbcglobal.net.
Farm & Food File
Related Photos
-
Alan Guebert Alan Guebert
Discussion
Farm and Food File: No more beautiful spring capital than Washington, D.C.
Originally published in the April 16, 2010, print edition.
- Farm & Food File
-
-
Farm and Food File: Trade talks stuck in past
The surest way to confirm if anyone in Washington, D.C. is telling you the truth about trade is to watch their lips: if they move, they're stretching the blanket one way or the other.
-
Farm and Food File: June was cultivator month; time for Uncle Honey show
I don't know where the term originated but I do know two things about laying-by corn. First, it never meant the weeds laid down; Dad always followed the last cultivator pass with a 2,4-D soaking a week or so later.
-
Farm and Food File: Alabama fried chicken - antitrust chief taking your calls
In a morning session of the May 21 U.S. Department of Justice-Department of Agriculture workshop on ag and antitrust enforcement, Alabama poultry grower Garry Staples told officials he expected "retaliation" from the firm he grows chickens for because of his participation in that event's discussion of poultry contracts.
-
Farm and Food File: Suppose you support farm bill reform; it could be cheaper
Suppose the House ag committee asks you to come to Washington to offer your ideas on how to improve the farm bill for its 2012 update.
-
Farm and Food File: Ag highlighted in new cancer report
The Agriculture Health Study that now tracks 89,000 men, women and children in the "agricultural population," shows that "Farmers and pesticide applicators have significantly higher prostate cancer risk, and female spouses have a significantly higher incidence of melanoma."
-
Farm and Food File: Elbow-deep in atrazine review politics
Forty-five years may have dimmed a frame or two of memory but I can still see my father emptying small bags of flour-like powder into a five-gallon bucket and, then, slowing stirring in a trickle of water until the two ingredients combined to make a chalky, white cream. The bags contained the still-new, pre-emergent herbicide atrazine.
-
Farm and Food File: Facts, figures and fools with money
What diesel fuel is to tractors, facts are to journalists. Diesel is expensive; facts, for the most part, are free. Moreover, facts are all over.
-
Farm and Food File: Main Street banks want reform
Rare is the day when the U.S. Senate ag committee lands on the front page of the New York Times. That day, however, came April 20 when the Times, in its running coverage of financial reform in the Senate, highlighted the aggies' role in that effort: regulation of casino-like derivatives.
-
Farm and Food File: I'm not making this up; it was in the newspaper
Asked once for the source of his best material, American humorist Will Rogers quickly replied that "Everything I know I get from the newspaper."
-
Farm and Food File: No more beautiful spring capital than Washington, D.C.
With the possible exception of Paris, none other of the world's great capital cities is more beautiful in early spring than Washington, D.C.
- More Farm & Food File Headlines
-
