the National Air and Space Museum, which was more interesting.
But not nearly as interesting as it ought to be, if you ask me. Back in the 1950s and '60s, the Smithsonian was the Castle. Everything was crammed into this one wonderfully dark and musty old building. It was like the nation's attic and, like an attic, it was gloriously random. Over here was the shirt Lincoln was wearing when he was shot, with a dried brown bloodstain above the heart. Over there was a diorama showing a Navajo family fixing dinner. Up above you, hanging from the gloomy rafters, were the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers' first plane. You didn't know where to look next or what you would find around each corner. Now it is as if everything has been sorted out by a fussy spinster, folded neatly and put in its proper place. You go to the Air and Space Museum and you see the Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers' plane and lots of other famous planes and rocket ships and it's all highly impressive, but it is also clinical and uninspired. There is no sense of discovery. If your brother came running up to you and said, 'Hey, you'll never guess what I found in this room over here!' you would in fact guess, more or less, because it would have to be either an airplane or a rocket ship. At the old Smithsonian it could have been absolutely anything-a petrified dog, Custer's scalp, human heads adrift in bottles. There's no element of surprise anymore. So I spent the day trudging around the various museums dutifully and respectfully, with interest but not excitement. Still, there was so much to see that a whole day passed and I had seen only a part of it.
In the evening I came back to the Mall, and walked across it to the Jefferson Memorial. I had hoped to see it at dusk, but I arrived late and the darkness fell like a blanket. Before I was very far into the park it was pitch dark. I expected to be muggedindeed, I took it as my due wandering into a city park like this on a dark night-but evidently the muggers couldn't see me. The only physical risk I ran was being bowled over by one of the many joggers who sprinted invisibly along the dark paths. The Jefferson Memorial was beautiful. There's not much to it, just a large marble rotunda in the shape of Monticello, with a gigantic statue of Jefferson inside and his favorite sayings engraved on the walls ('Have a nice day,' 'Keep your shirt on,' 'You could have knocked me over with a feather,' etc.), but when it is lit up at night it is entrancing, with the lights of the memorial smeared across the pool of water called the Tidal Basin. I must have sat for an hour or more just listening to the rhythmic swish of the distant traffic, the sirens and car horns, the distant sounds of people shouting, people singing, people being shot.
I lingered so long that it was too late to go to the Lincoln Memorial and I had to come back in the morning. The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits there in his big high chair looking grand and yet kindly. There was a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head.
I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him. Afterwards, as I strolled across the Mall, I spied yet more trestles and draped ropes, with security men hanging about. They had closed off a road across the park and had brought in two helicopters with the presidential seal on their sides and seven cannons and the Marine Corps Band.
It was quite early in the morning and there were no crowds, so I went and stood beside the roped enclosure, the only spectator, and none of the security men bothered me or even seemed to notice me.
After a couple of minutes, a wailing of sirens filled the air and a cavalcade of limousines and police motorcycles drew up. Out stepped Nakasone and some other Japanese men, all in dark suits, escorted by some junior-looking Aryans from the State Department. They all stood politely while the Marine Corps Band blared a lively tune, which I didn't recognize. Then there was a twenty-one-gun salute, but the cannons didn't go 'BOOM!' as you would expect. They went 'PUFF.' They were filled with some kind of noiseless powder, presumably so as not to waken the president in the White House across the way, so when the battery commander shouted, 'Ready, steady, go!' or whatever it was he shouted, there followed seven quick puff sounds and then a dense cloud of smoke drifted over us and went on a long slow waft across the park. This was done three times because there were only seven cannons. Then Nakasone gave a friendly wave to the crowd-which is to say, to me-and sprinted with his party to the presidential helicopters, whose blades were already whirring to life. After a moment they rose up, tilted past the Washington Monument and were gone, and everyone back on the ground relaxed and had a smoke.
Weeks afterwards, back in London, I told people about my private encounter with Nakasone and the Marine Corps Band and the noiseless cannons and how the prime minister of Japan had waved to me alone. Most of them would listen politely, then allow a small pause and say, 'Did I tell you that Mavis has to go back into hospital next week to have her feet done?' or something like that. The English can be so crushing sometimes.
From Washington I took US 301 out past Annapolis and the US Naval Academy and over a long, low bridge across the Chesapeake Bay into eastern Maryland. Before 1952, when the bridge was built, the eastern side of the bay had enjoyed centuries of isolation. Ever since then, people have been saying that outsiders will flood in and ruin the peninsula, but it still looked pretty unspoiled to me, and my guess is that it's the outsiders who have kept it that way. It's always the outsiders who are the most fiercely opposed to shopping malls and bowling alleys, which the locals in their simple, trusting way tend to think might be kind of handy.
Chestertown, the first town of any size I came to, confirmed this. The first thing I saw was a woman in a bright pink track suit zipping past on a bicycle with a wicker basket on the front. Only an urban emigre would have a bicycle with a wicker basket. A local person would have a Subaru pickup truck. There seemed to be a lot of these bike ladies about and between them they had clearly made Chestertown into a model community. The whole place was as neat as a pin. The sidewalks were paved with brick and lined with trees, and there was a well-tended park in the middle of the business district. The library was busy. The movie theater was still in business and not showing a Death Wish movie. Everything about the place was tranquil and appealing. This was as nice a town as I had seen. This was almost Amalgam.
I drove on through the low, marshy flatlands, much taken with the simple beauty of the Chesapeake peninsula, with its high skies and scattered farms and forgotten little towns. Late in the morning I crossed into Delaware, en route to Philadelphia. Delaware may well be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and couldn't think of a single thing to say to her. I said, 'So you come from Delaware? Gosh. Wow.' And she moved quickly on to someone more verbally dextrous, and also better-looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they'd say,
'You know, I don't think I ever have,' and then they'd look kind of troubled too.
I determined that I would read up on Delaware so that the next time I met a girl from there I could say something droll and apposite and she might go to bed with me. But I could find almost nothing written about Delaware anywhere. Even the entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence, as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children's drawing slates on which you erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted up behind me as I drove, expunging the experience as it unfolded.
Looking back now, I can just vaguely recall some semi-industrial landscape and some signs for Wilmington.
And then I was in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the city that gave the world Sylvester Stallone and Legionnaires' disease, among other things, and was too preoccupied with the disturbing thoughts that this called up to give Delaware any further consideration.
