08 July 2004

The Eastern Front

The Great Leader Kim Il Song left us on this day in 1994. I may root around in the jewelry box and find my little enamel lapel pin with his stern but reassuring face on it. The North Koreans presented one to each of us when we left Pyongyang the year after he died. The older folks were still throwing themselves weeping onto his memorial.

As Westerners go, I think they found us to be useful idiots. For my part, I found them to be Kim's much like their brethren to the South, albeit with longer-range rockets and nuclear weapons.

If I wear the button I wonder what the other Capitalists will think about it at my business meeting this morning. They are training us on the Sales Funnel, which is how the Company forecasts revenue. I am not that interested in the metrics of it, since I am paid by salary and not sales incentive, so I found myself copying a plan of the Eastern Front from memory into my red notebook, making eye-contact with the lecturer and occasionally nodding vigorously.

I need to get closure on the Stones.

I'm not referring to the Greatest Rock N' Roll Band of all time. I am pretty well at peace with Mick and the Boys now that they are eligible for Social Security.

It is the completion of my District Stones project. It was the fifth trip to the border of the Decarlia Reservoir, wandering around in the undergrowth, thinking about deer-ticks and Lime's Disease, shoes soaked from fording the stream, wondering if I was going to smell the whiff of corruption from some ancient evil committed on public land.

Suddenly a young buck burst out of the trees burst out of the trees behind me, startling me.

I had to stop, light up a Lucky, and wonder what I was doing out there in the deep woods on the edge of the big city.

The Stone concealed in the undergrowth behind the fence was Northwest Five- NW 5, as those of us with minor obsessions call them. I believe the Stone is behind the trees in the reservoir, and I have come to the reluctant conclusion that I cannot find it without trespassing on a Federal Reservation.

That is not a good thing to do in these dark days of global terror, stalking around a public reservoir with a camera. To do this properly I will have to gain access to the Reservation, and to do that I must deal with the most intractable component of the United States Army, the Corps of Engineers.

It may prove to have been easier to get into North Korea than the Reservoir, but that is just the way it is.

NW-5 is the last prize on the Western Front. I have been to all the other ones on the South and West legs  of the District's diamond. I have reconnoitered the Eastern Front, where I once found myself map-less and in the midst of a well tonsured, bow-tie wearing platoon of the Fruit of Allah, the praetorian Guard of a store-front Mosque off Eastern Avenue.

There are some challenges on the Eastern Front. Heading southeast from the North Stone, away from the comfortable Bethesda suburb, things get progressively more interesting.

NE 1 is gone. It is represented by a plaque in front of a liquor store and the lot next door is a daytime social gathering point. The Stone was hauled off when they built the strip mall, allegedly a mistake by an enthusiastic dump-truck driver, although I suspect that is an oxymoron. A 600 pound mistake, if that account is to be believed.

The neighborhood blips back upscale in the quirky nuclear-free zone of Takoma Park. NE 2 is in a new non-standard metal cage, since the old one was rammed by an errant motorist. The stone is in fair shape.

NE 3 is on the verge of a parking lot of an empty former Hispanic Food store, which in turn had been something else. It looks like it was hit by a grenade. The stone is OK but the cage is twisted as if by a Giant's hand, and there was a cardboard nest there that told me someone slept there as well, nestled by the Virginia sandstone.

There is some stability further on down the line. NE 4, 5 and 6 are in private yards, and seem fine and content.

I could not find NE 7, though it is supposedly along the fence-line of Fort Lincoln Cemetery. I know it exists because I have seen a picture of it. The last time I was there the cemetery workers claimed no knowledge of it. I will make it a dedicated mission the next time. The land is a handsome plot, and interesting in its own right. It was the  location of the hasty defense against the British by U.S. Marines on the Bladensberg Road in the War of 1812.

The Marines did not prevail and the British burned Washington. The invaders left the Stone but drank the contents of the White House wine celler.

In the Civil War, the cemetery was part of the interlocking defenses that ringed the city. Some of the earthworks are still visible, looking out over the monuments and the tombs.

NE 8 is across a tributary of the Anacostia. I drove aimlessly between Route 50 and some other feeder streets. The runs and rivulets are as much a problem today as it must have been for the surveyors. I never did find it on that foray. I may need some help with that one. My sources tell me you can park your late-model suburban car in the lot of a run-down apartment complex and walk a long fence line to where an elderly man lives in a shanty of his own construction near it, guardian of the past.

Maybe he is still alive. The last one to see it, or rather the last one who was willing to say anything about it, reported that scene. Six years is a long time for a homeless man in the open, but perhaps he is still there. 

NE 9 is OK, resting easy in a front yard at 919 Southern Ave. And the East Stone is just fine. I saw it the last time in winter, wearing a cap of new-fallen snow like a jaunty beret. The fence around it is circular, as befits the dignity of a Cardinal Stone. The closest of the row-houses is boarded up, but I got the sense that people here were hanging on, doing their best. From over the East Stone, you get a sense of the geography of the city, the avenues heading off at a precise 90-degrees once you get beyond the undergrowth.

How did these things survive, when all else, buildings and streams and terrain have been swept before them? I suspect it is because they are the Border, of states and of real property. Precisely the dividing line, never the center. If they were in the middle of anything, they would have all been gone long ago.

If the Northeast Sector of the Eastern Front is a challenge, the Stones of the Southeast sector pose an even more enigmatic problem. Heading toward Ward Eight the infrastructure of the city is frayed. SE 1 is supposed to be east of 54th and D Streets, near a small trash dump. The day I looked for it I was disoriented and did not have a good calibration on my odometer. It should be on the left side of Southern Avenue, exactly a mile from the East Stone.

SE 2 is in the front lawn of a house at 4345 Southern Ave, and SE 3 is on the fence-line of a neat apartment complex. Those two are easy finds, ones that make you feel that this is an enterprise that can be accomplished. The Stones are in good shape, though overgrown, and the sandstone is green with microorganisms. The script is still visible on the sides, with the magnetic variation carefully noted by navigator and freed slave Benjamin Bannaeker.

SE 4 is supposed to be in the garage of a Maryland man, a surveyor associated with the Maryland state Government. They say the cage around the stone was struck by a car, and the stone salvaged with the goal of ultimately replacing it. I do not trust good intentions, though, and could not find it when I looked. But perhaps it has come back. I will look again. It was once next to Naylor Road near the intersection of Suitland Parkway.

SE 5 has survived the construction of the Metro, and is surrounded by a decorative brick circle. It is the only stone with a recent tribute, but there is no place to park and I had to leave the car in a traffic lane to take a picture.

SE 6 is supposed to be near the Near the entrance of the Henry Gilpin Company at 901 Southern Avenue. It should have not been hard to find, but the address or the Company had vanished and I find myself curiously bereft of memory of it. Perhaps it was because I was alone and alert to the possibility of mischance.

SE 7 is across the street from a gas-station on Oxon Run, on a busy street. There was a man doing business at the Stone, hanging some commercial items from the ornamental cage around it. He was suspicious of my presence and of my camera. I explained the reason for it, and for my interest, since it was an African American man who directed where the stone would be placed. He seemed mollified, if disinterested. "Yeah," he said, wary of the lens. "I knew that."

Southern Avenue ends there, and SE 8 is overland in what is now DC Village, a sprawl of undeveloped land the District Government uses for general administrative and custodial functions. The Daughters once considered the Stone to be located near a landfill operation, so it is with some trepidation that I consider whether it is there or not. I have read that a man in the '50s saw it, and a kid who looked in the '90s could not.

The Stone is reported to have vanished in what is now the impound lot for the District's abundant harvest of abandoned cars. There is not much as forlorn as an abandoned DC car, picked to the bone and burned to the frame.

Current Daughters say that they recently visited the Stone, and while suspicious, I am in no position to dispute their assertion.  Not till I go back over there, anyway. 

SE 9 is tough. Old accounts have the Stone placed at Jones Ferry, just about a mile across the River from the South Stone, the first to be placed. But now the traffic from the Wilson Bridge thunders overhead. A source from the '50s claims to have seen the stone underwater, just offshore, undermined by erosion.

Others say that the Stone was rescued and pulled inland a few hundred feet. It is said that you can visit it if you pull off onto the verge of the expressway hop down the embankment and follow the riverbank through the underbrush and over the trash, under the overpass and south just a thousand feet or so.

SE 9 is now supposed to be in a protective cage at the foot of the bluff that rises from the Potomac. Maybe it is. I will have to go look, but frankly, I would like to have someone with me to cover my back when I go.

So I may need some help on the Eastern Front. A Humvee would be useful for operations on the Front, but I need to get to closure on this.

My only obstacles now are the Army Corps of Engineers, a battalion of the homeless and the District of Columbia Impound Department. I am resolute and serene.

But an escort might be nice. At least someone to watch the vehicle while I search in the woods.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra