MARYLAND CLOSED TO VEHICULAR TRAFFIC BY ORDER OF THE GOVERNOR. DO NOT PROCEED PAST CHEVY CHASE CIRCLE. VIRGINIA ALSO CLOSED. D.C. RESIDENTS, GO HOME! STAY SAFE!
To turn back, you needed to go around the traffic circle. I saw a couple of cars — their drivers must have also been trying to flee the city — going all the way around and coming back toward me now. The faces inside these cars were furious or frightened; crying children in one car, a couple arguing in another. On the far side of the circle sat a line of idling Maryland National Guard vehicles, and troops ready to stop anyone attempting to enter the state.
I took a chance that the soldiers in the Humvee had not been trying to stop me, but to warn me. Nauseous with tension, I took a right turn into the circle. When it was clear that I was going back into the city, the Humvee peeled away and stopped on the far side of the circle, by the National Guard line.
Little soldier-to-soldier social call, now that duty was done.
I’d sweated through my shirt.
Safe, for the moment. But trapped in D.C.
As I headed back into the city, I had no goal except to get distance from the soldiers. I didn’t touch the dangling cassette until I was a mile away. Then I pulled off Connecticut and onto a suburban-type side street. I was breathing hard, as if I’d just sprinted a mile. I hit the windshield wiper knob by accident, and the wipers slashed back and forth before I stopped them. When I tried to ease the tape from the slot, it ripped again. Three feet of tape dangled on one side, a foot long strip from the other.
Tape lay spooled in a mass on the wet carpet.
What do I do? I can’t go back to the house. I can’t turn myself in or I’ll end up in one of those detention centers, or in a military prison. I don’t even know if the tape is audible anymore.
High above, I saw a lone jet leave a fading contrail as it angled into the blue, looking more like a vestige from history than a common sight. Looking as far away as Venus. The airport — any place with police and soldiers — would be out of the question. To board a plane, I’d need ID and a ticket that cost ten times the usual price, and even then, I’d need a medical check. Roads would be blocked. Military flight? Private airfield? I sat there thinking, with a pile of prepaid phones on the backseat, and my fuel supply draining away while I didn’t move. I could not fly planes. At a private field I’d need a plane and a pilot. Did I know a pilot? I knew one in Alaska, and a few in Kenya. I had an old Parris Island buddy who’d retired as a major and now owned a small Cessna in Provo, Utah. They were all thousands of miles away.
I thought harder, spooling some twisted tape back into the cassette. Try to lie my way onto a private air base, if it wasn’t guarded? Hope I find a pilot hanging around? Try to hijack a plane? Was I that desperate?
It was over.
Turn yourself in. Throw yourself on their mercy. Give them the ripped-up tape and hope they can fix it, and that they bother to listen to it. There is no other way.
Doggedly, I told myself there would be no harm in trying to find a private airfield. Maybe a bolt of luck would strike. Then I had a better idea. Not exactly a good one. Just better than anything else I’d considered so far.
As the Prius reached Anacostia, I realized that I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. The onetime home for the Nacotchtank Indians, on the banks of the Anacostia River, was named for that long-slaughtered tribe. They’d hunted black bear and deer in the woods that once stood here. I drove through an impoverished, ratty wasteland neighborhood famed for its street gangs and high crime.
Freight trains are still running, the newscaster on WUSA9 had said. I hoped that she was still right.
Back during the Great Depression, tens of thousands of Americans had hopped freight trains to move around the country. Now as I cruised Anacostia’s commercial strip, I saw more moving cars than elsewhere, and from the packed belongings inside, and nervous faces, I realized that these refugees sought the rail yard, too.
My GPS flickered on and off. Soldiers blocked some streets. Where to go? I saw several high-end cars circling around blocks, nosing around, backing from one street, gliding across a supermarket parking lot and into an alley. It was as if the cars were animals looking for a water hole, as if the vehicles themselves had a lumbering intelligence. They sought exit from the city in which they’d been trapped.
I think all us drivers were aware of each other, aware of a competition, but we also watched to see if someone else knew a secret route to Benning Yard. I made eye contact with a male driver I’d passed three times in the last five minutes. I saw a Mercedes packed with young people, displaying American University stickers on the back window. I saw a low-slung white Cadillac Escalade — windows down — filled with tough-looking young men — locals, I think — who eyed the circling cars as if we were a herd of antelopes and they were cougars. I spotted high wires and cranes over a low rooftop. These would mark a rail yard. I turned down a side street in that direction. The street turned out to be a dead end. I turned around.
For the next frustrating twenty minutes I tried different streets, guided by the smell of boardwalk — rail ties — and by the high, crisscrossing mass of guide wires and loading towers jutting above the lower rooftops. I was tantalizingly close to the rail yard, but every time I tried a route, it was wrong, or blocked.
I tried one street heading in that direction, and rolled past row houses. At the end, a six-foot barrier of plowed snow blocked the way, forming a cul-de-sac. No way through. The oily Anacostia River flowed by.
Another street looped into a turn, which took me back the frustrating way in which I had come.
A third street was occupied by troops ahead, warming themselves around a trash can fire. I turned away.
I changed tactics. I pulled over on a commercial strip, Eisenhower Place, and watched other cars. Maybe I would learn something from circling traffic. The block featured a rib joint and a seafood store and a 7-Eleven and a funeral parlor. The commercial stores were untouched by looters. The steel grille of the funeral home had been smashed in.
Go figure. Why loot that?
The white Escalade came around the corner, passed me, and a block later, made a U-turn and stopped. It idled there, tinted windshield like enormous square sunglasses, side windows up now. Previously, they had been down. I felt eyes on me, who the hell is there? I saw faces looking out from the upper-floor windows of an old brick apartment building. I felt watched by riders and drivers of other cars, as they realized that one of their number had changed behavior.
The Escalade made a quick left and left the block, spraying snow.
The admiral’s Glock lay on the seat beside me. I pulled out a sandwich, unwrapped it, and chewed while my eyes went from the view in front to back. I told myself that it had been stupid to put coffee in the thermos. Water would have been smarter. I drank the coffee anyway. I felt a tug at my bladder. Great. The power of suggestion, I thought. Not now.
The Escalade pulled up beside me, so close that it blocked my door. The front window remained up, smoky and inscrutable, but the rear window rolled down, and sound emerged. It was Pachelbel’s Canon. Strings, not drums, baroque, not rap. I looked into the face of a twenty-something man below a broad-brimmed Nats Cap, with a heavy faux gold chain around his neck, and an M9 Beretta pistol in his hand. The man beside him held an M4. How did they get military weapons? I thought.
“How much mileage that little car get?” he asked.
“Fifty. Sixty.”