(Boundary Stone NW5 is in there somewhere. It is down this little hill, behind a fence, next to the reservoir that provides the water to the District. Good Luck.)

Having crossed the River, I was on my own. The light was bright but filtered by high cirrus clouds. The temperature was reasonable, and I wore jeans, since there was the prospect of venturing into the woods. Fred Woodward, dean of the wandering cameramen and pioneer of the physical documentation of the Stones, only did the Virginia side in his project to highlight the sad state of the First Monuments at the beginning of the century before this one.

Well, not exactly. There is a template to the next thirty-six Stones, the ones that still hold the force of law, separating the Territories of the United States and the State of Maryland.

I felt unsettled about NW4, tantalizingly thirty yards on the wrong side of the fence at the headquarters of the Dalecarlia Reservoir Headquarters. I mean, the point was to get a picture of the Stone, count coup on it, as the Indian warriors of yore did. Touch the same stone that Ellicott did, placed by the anonymous workmen who hacked at the brush and the unknown stonecutter who carved the elegant script letters on the Aquia Creek sandstone.

More than a bit frustrated, I navigated the Sebring convertible out of Dalecarlia Place and back to Norton Street and made a left turn. I had the top up, though this September day was nice enough that I could have had it down. I understood that I would have to dismount the vehicle for the visit to NW5, and that meant leaving the car to its own devices for a spell. Since I was in the District, I had stowed everything that could have looked tempting to thieves in the trunk.

Four blocks up Norton brought me to MacArthur Boulevard, and staying straight across the intersection, the road turned into Loughboro Place with the grounds of the Sidley Memorial Hospital on the left. After passing the campus, I bore left on the Dalecarlia Parkway. To the west was lush green, with no structures, so I surmised that it was Federal land.

The directions I had downloaded from BoundaryStones.org seemed confident and precise, if a bit vague on detail: “Six hundred Feet 600 feet west of Dalecarlia Parkway and 300 southeast of concrete culvert, within the fenced Dalecarlia Reservoir property.”

I needed to find a place to park on Warren Place, a neighborhood of substantial brick homes belonging to the Cleric elite of the Imperial City. I walked back to the Parkway, crossing it when there was a gap in traffic, crossed to the median, waited till traffic headed downhill had a gap and plunged into the forest.

(Warren Place, NW).

If you consider that the capital of the Free World is a place of manicured Disney wilderness simulation, you would be wrong. The vegetation below the trees was taller than the steel guardrail bounding the parkway. The directions claimed the fence along the reservoir property was supposed to be immediately visible, but was not. There was no discernable path, and I moved carefully downhill, wishing I had a machete to clear a path. The key to locating the Stone was supposed to be the little creek that flowed down to the Reservoir, and where the fence crosses over the creek, the concrete culvert was supposed to be “easily visible within the fenced area.”

I could not see squat. I was surrounded by a green curtain of lush foliage that twined through the links of the fence on one side, and an impenetrable emerald barrier between me and the parkway above. It was cooler in the green, but it was as though the city had vanished and I was in some primordial place, just as the original survey team had been more than two hundred years before.

If I could find the culvert, did I really want to cross into a controlled Federal space with hundreds more feet of greenery to cover with the destination concealed within? Would some Federal cop determine I was a terrorist intent on poisoning the city’s water? Even if I had nothing threatening on me, they could accuse me of doing the advance work for an attack.

Sweat began to dew under my arms, my senses were hyper alert as I blundered down the fence line. I was looking for water and light colored concrete when something big came toward me from behind. I whirled, trying to not stumble and raised my hands to defend myself.

Brown and white spots came by, perhaps five feet away.

A deer.

My hands shook. A frigging deer, five feet away and on the move. What the fuck am I doing? I thought. First NW4 is fenced the hell off, and now NW5 is guarded by frigging Bambi. God Damn Stones.

This was getting personal.

Eventually I came to the fence, and followed it along, but I had either come in too far above the stream or below it to find the culvert. There had once been what was “a person-sized hole in the fence, with the NW5 Stone several hundred feet to the southwest,” reportedly too deep into the forest to see from outside the fenced area. The directions noted that while it would be possible to pass through the fence, following the stream, bearing left at the fork, and up the next hill, the act of doing do would constitute trespass on Federal land.

Crap. Some things are too hard. This needed more research. I decided to cut my losses, and see if I could get out of the trees, and back to civilization. I crashed around uphill for a while, and reached the guardrail to the parkway a few hundred feet downhill from Warren Place.

I felt a sense of relief, and a sense of deep frustration. How the hell hard was this supposed to be?

As it turned out, much harder than I thought.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303