30 March 2007
The Tulip Tree
I began to sneeze yesterday, and I carefully checked my vitals, thinking I might have been tagged with the last head cold of winter. It was not until I headed out for a trip across the District that I realized everything was fine and normal. Just pollen and alergies. The early trees are in bloom, just as if someone had flipped a switch.
The ground plants have been poking up insistently for weeks. Skunk cabbage was first, hardy and pugnacious, and the yellow daffodils followed. Yesterday, the season crept upward and the blossoms were on the trees and painted the town in daubs of pastel.
The wisteria is out, in pastels, and the Japanese Camellia- camellia japonica, in the Latin. That means the famous and venerable cherry blossoms are tingeing the Tidal Basin in delicate pink. They are expected to peak in color and intensity on Monday, and that, in turn, signals the surge of the buses and the tourists.
I hate the buses, since they block the streets with grim intransigence. They cause churlish behavior all around them, but this season, I resolve to try a little toleration. It will be easier, since I no longer work downtown at the Bus Station or pass through the 12th Street tunnel each day.
It is a paradox, I know. As the beauty of the flowering season comes on, it means the end of the historical season. Not long after the delicate pastels comes the deep green, and with it the earth will be cloaked for the summer. The ground, and the long views will be foreshortened. Then the old scars on the ground will be invisible, and the reason for their placement will return to obscurity. End of viewing until Fall, and time to turn attention to other matters. Like the opening of Big Pink's pool in only seven weeks.
It has been a good historical season. I was on the spot on the Arlington highlands where Fort Woodbury stood, looking down on the river having my fingerprints taken this week, and the view was grand. The prints were taken by an imposing woman in the brown uniform of the Arlington County Sheriff. Her office was on the ninth floor of the courthouse building across from the Jail; I was in a buoyant mood, since the Police records check on the second floor had revealed that there were not arrests on my record since arriving in the County five years ago.
It did not seem to matter to the Jurisdiction where I might work, once they get a look at the papers, that this is old ground, and a fully digital record of my whereabouts and activities is available to those with a reason to know in more places than I would like. This particular agency is old fashioned and careful, and I am happy to comply, so long as the paychecks keep coming. The travel to a variety of offices around town kept me out in the fresh air, and not shackled to the desk.
It had been a good viewing season, thus far. On the Arlington Line, in addition to the County buildings where Woodbury's ramparts had stood, I had visited Forts Ward, Ellesworth, Willard, Richardson and Scott. To the North I had crawled around Fort Marcy. Along the Anacostia I had cruised under the mound of Fort Dupont and past the vista at Fort Davis, where I was uncomfortable leaving the proximity of my car.
To the north, I had stood on the gun platform at Fort Stevens where President Lincoln peered at the Confederates. He had gone there to rally the troops, some of whom had been dispatched from hospital wards on their crutches to man the ramparts until Regulars could be recalled from Petersburg. The Rebels could not see that some of them were amputees.
The duplex dwellings now obscure the view north, but the roof of the main building of the Walter Reed Hospital complex looms near where the Tulip Tree stood.
I took a side trip along Quakenboose Road, where the trenches ran east and west, to the highlands in Fort Slocum park. The fort has been scraped down to nothingness, though a few rifle pits remain in the scrubby third-growth trees down the hill. I would have explored further, but as I peered through the branches, I realized there was a man crouching there, and decided to leave him alone.
The road runs across what had been the parade ground. What remains is the splendid view of the radio towers on the heights, though Walter Reed is only a cannon shot away, or perhaps thirty of them, if the account of the battle is reliable.
They might have been able to see the tulip tree from here. In this latitude, it grows tall and straight. The unusual flowers were the inspiration for the common name; they're shaped much like a tulip with greenish-yellow petals blushed with orange on the inside. Because they generally are found high in the leaf canopy, once it fills in, the flowers often go unnoticed until they drop off after pollination.
They would have been long gone when the cannons of Forts Stevens and Slocum were in action, flanked by supporting fire from Fort DeRussey in Rock Creek Park.
When left alone, the tulip poplar can soar to almost two hundred feet in height, but a mature specimen can reasonably be expected to reach seventy. They are studier than one would think, for a fast-growing species. The Maryland Liberty Tree on the campus of St. John's College in Annapolis was a Tulip Poplar, and was the last remaining of the thirteen that marked the rendezvous points of the Patriots of the Revolution.
That last link to the Patriots passed away in 1999, due to disease. The Tulip that stood at Walter Reed lasted until at least 1900, but it is long gone now. It must have been a tall one; Louis Cass White was a Civil War Veteran did well commercially after the conflict. He became distressed by the condition of the old battle ground, and spearheaded the movement to memorialize the field. He purchased the land between the Piney Branch and modern Georgia Avenue where Walter Reed now stands around the turn of the last century, and identified the Tulip tree as the one from which the Rebels fired at the President.
It must have been a tall one, though it is impossible to tell now. It is long gone. The site is about a hundred yards inside the old Georgia Avenue gate to the hospital, which is now disused due to enhanced security. The Army has placed a marker on the spot, though, flanked by two cannon balls that are said to have been fired from the union forts.
I don't know how they can tell, since they are anonymous spheres. Perhaps they were dug from the earth of the Hospital grounds. In searching the fence line to find the marker, I came across some of the officer's quarters that are literally falling down; once-quaint structures in the dollhouse style, from the turn of the last century; an abandoned auto hobby shop. It is an amazing aggregation of structures; some in good shape and others falling in. That is a function of the herky-jerky evolution of the campus, based on the needs of the wounded, and now its devolution into closure, scheduled for 2011.
I don't know how they are going to do that, since there is such need. While some of the infrastructure is being allowed to crumble, the main hospital itself is in great shape. There is even new construction happening, too, in the form of an amputee rehab clinic that will likely be completed later this year.
They are going to be on their toes at Walter Reed this morning, since the current President is going to follow Mr. Lincoln's route uptown to visit the wounded soldiers. It will be his first visit since the scandal broke about Building 18's mold and rats, where the troops were billeted. After all the controversy about the disintegrating facilities, a dramatic gesture seems to be just what the doctor ordered. The photo ops will be a useful counterbalance to the continuing crisis in the theater of war, and the embarrassing disclosures about what the Attorney General knew, and when.
The President will assure the troops of his continued commitment to their welfare. The new amputee ward is being constructed only a little way from the monument marking the place of the Tulip tree. The presidential visit to rally the troops is almost a tradition on that part of Georgia Avenue.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com