Saturday in Washington DC

Everything has a fence around it. The Reflecting Pool, the White House. We’re in DC and it’s a million degrees, but my husband and I want to go downtown and walk around and see things for ourselves. Is the pool really pond-scummed or is it “patriotic blue”? How are they coming along with the renovations of the half-torn down White House? The answer to both of these questions is: We don’t know. 

All we see is fence. 

Also, soldiers. They seem nice but not thrilled with the million-degree heat either. We walk along the Reflecting Pool fence and try to see the Reflecting Pool. We walk around the White House fence and try to see the White House. There’s a larger perimeter around the building every time we visit DC. More soldiers. More fence. The park in front is walled off too. Through the fence you can see the lovely trees and the empty park benches. 

I can’t stop thinking about the news I heard in the uber car on the drive downtown. How the Supreme Court just took away protection for the 300,000 Haitians who have been living here, legally, for many years. Someone from the administration said, The door to America is closed. Go home.   

We go to a Turkish café and order mango lattes. We walk past the Ford theater and it's closed. We head over to the Mall, the area where all of the Smithsonian museums are, but we can’t get through because it's fenced off. 

There’s some fair going on. I’m so out of the loop, I didn't know about this. What fair? The Great American State Fair, my husband says. For the 250th Anniversary. We shuffle through security easily. Not much of a crowd. The longest line is for the Ferris wheel. Or you can visit booths made out of cardboard. Every booth highlights a different state. 

We visit Tennessee where they have a video of Elvis and pictures of the Smoky Mountains and country music stars. We visit Connecticut and there's nothing. That booth is connected to Maine and there's nothing there either. Wait, my husband says. Do Connecticut and Maine border each other?   

No, I say. We drop into Ohio and someone hands us a sticker. Back outside the cardboard, and music blares over a loudspeaker. The Rolling Stones. Is this American music? No. I try not to stare at the other people wandering around. Foreign tourists or Americans wearing MAGA gear. Everyone looks sweaty and bored. 

I want to say to them, We’re not like this! We can do better than this! Instead, we escape into the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and learn about the treaties our government made and broke. Which is to say, all of them. A film is playing about one of the many forced removals of Native Americans, a story about a little girl carrying her baby brother, knowing that if she lets him go, the soldiers will kill him. 

Well, that’s depressing, someone says as they stride past. The museum is air conditioned, so we stay inside for a long time, and then it’s time to go home. Well, not home, because we don’t have one at the moment but who am I to complain. 

We leave the fenced-off part of DC and return to the part where people live and work and garden and shop and walk their dogs. I wish that they could see it, the foreign tourists, the MAGA people, this part of the city, the country, 

this place with no fence.