Commentary –

Springtime In Washington

 By Jeff White

Just the other week, I set off for a walk. Out the front door of my apartment building, I steered down Connecticut Avenue, past the newspaper and flower venders, and down into the dank depths of the subway.

On this fine afternoon, I was on a mission of investigation. I had heard that nothing brings the rush of Washington life to a halt quite like the budding beauty of a Beltway spring.

That anything could conceivably accomplish this feat was something took look into. For the past three months now, I have been in the middle of that hurried, power-lunching, business card-exchanging, can-you-attend-my-fundraiser culture that seems endemic to the nation’s capital.

I can appreciate that most big cities are like this, important people off to important meetings and events. It just seems that in Washington, the meetings and events start earlier and are more frequent. Thus, woe to the poor soul caught standing idly on the left hand side of the up escalator, blocking the human train bent on huffing up the metallic stairs in an attempt to save time. 

That almost anyone here will readily pass you on an escalator is just one way the pressures of time are made manifest in Washington. In elevators, people impatiently hit the “close door” button thinking the door will close faster the quicker it is hit.

Oftentimes, the worst offenders of these manic moments are the members of Congress themselves. During a typical week, their lives are lived in an almost constant state of movement, from meetings to hearings back to meetings, and to votes.

It is these roll call votes that send members off in great swirls of expeditiousness, through the cavernous tunnels that connect their office buildings with the Capitol, onto mini trains that help to speed up the trip, up small escalators and onto the House floor.

And they exit the floor after a vote with the same speed and purpose with which they arrived. You have to brace yourself against the wall during these times, and just watch the whirlwind pass.

Which is why I was skeptical that anything, much less a subtle turn by Mother Nature, could bring some surcease to this scramble.

But Washingtonians look forward to their springtime, in much the same way New Englanders anticipate the showy rush of a painted autumn. They see it as a birthright, a defining quality.

And so, slowly, as Newtown has been shaking the last remnants of winter off its back for the past month, Washington has opened its pink and white floral umbrellas against vastly blue skies and warm breezes.

I’m talking about cherry blossoms, which have sprouted out from the sprightly branches of Washington’s cherry trees. They look like soft, droopy paintbrushes that can deliver fat pink blotches right out of a Bob Ross painting.

They have taken over the city, forming floral tunnels over walkways and leaving a colorful carpet along sidewalks.

And Washington has noticed. I have enjoyed the cab rides from my apartment to Capitol Hill, winding along the Potomac, past the blinding Jefferson memorial, around the Washington memorial, beholding the National Mall draped in pink splendor.

Once hurried people now crowd sidewalks and bridges, their shirts rolled up, their spring ties loosened, apparently with nothing better to do than stroll. The cab driver lays off his horn.

And congressional members called to votes now eschew those dank tunnels to the Capitol, opting instead to mosey outside, through cherry-blossom tunnels and paths lined with bleeding azalea bushes that crisscross this way and that.

They are changed, these members are. The other day, eager to talk to Rep Jim Maloney, I caught him coming off the House floor. Did he have a moment to chat, I asked. Sure, he replied, “but let’s go outside and get some fresh air.”

So I emerged from the subway during this latest sojourn, in an effort to pinch myself, I guess. Life hasn’t slowed down, I said to myself. My observations had been shaky at best.

But of course, they hadn’t been. Leaving Union Station, the main train station here, I crossed the street and walked past a man playing lazy tunes on a saxophone. On this dusky, warm Friday, evening closing in, the streets circling the Capitol were calm and devoid of cars.

People were out, reading on park benches, walking hand-in-hand in front of me.

I turned onto First Street and walked up toward the Supreme Court. A man and woman walked just up ahead, and she ran her hand through a ceiling of blossoms just above her head. The air was replete with the kind of fragrance that makes you inhale, and the majestic Capitol dome wore a halo of gold from the setting sun.

The headlines, the debates and votes, the meetings and conferences and power lunches and ringing cell phones of weeks gone by had done just that… gone by. They were gone; they had no place in this calm, lazy springtime of strollers and sniffers.

Which, perhaps, is spring’s gift to us: an excuse to slow down and take a breath. It was a lesson this most busy of cities seemed to learn effortlessly.

I smiled at being proved wrong. And I also gave a hopeful thought to those places, like northern New England, where spring is around the corner, but has not yet fully arrived.

Soon. Soon.

I made a circuit around the Capitol, and headed back to the subway station, down an escalator on which no one passed me.

(Jeff White, a former Bee reporter, is in Washington covering Congress for the Waterbury Republican-American.)