Washington D.C.

I capped these travels with five final Carnegies in the nation’s capital, giving me a grand total of forty-nine for this trip, including one I had previously visited.  I saved the grandiose former Main Library as the last after swinging by three branch libraries and the Carnegie on the campus of Howard University.  The finale was a very early Carnegie, the eleventh that he funded.  It’s opening in 1903 was of enough significance to Carnegie that he  attended its opening, something he rarely he did.  He was joined by the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt. 

The anticipation of seeing the Library mounted after I met the engineer who saved it as I bicycled into the city from Maryland after camping in the backyard of Jesse and Jamie in Silver Spring. Getting together with Jesse, who I’ve known since he was a lad, was as exciting as meeting up with any Carnegie.  

We’d canoed the Boundary Waters when he was a teen.  I’d last seen Jesse a couple years ago when he was visiting his father Dwight in Bloomington while participating in a job fair for Indiana University’s business school, which he graduated from before going on to get a master’s from the University of Michigan in environmental studies.  Both he and his wife found jobs in DC nine years ago with environmental organizations.  Jesse’s, the World Resources Institute, is presently looking for a new CEO, as its leader, Dr. Andrew Seer, just left to head Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund. Seer had been at the helm of WRI, founded in 1982, the same year as Jesse’s birth, for the past nine years, as long as Jesse’s been there. 

Jesse and Jamie are well-entrenched in DC, having bought a house several years ago.  Their second son was born three months ago. Their home is ideally located near the Sligo Creek Bicycle Trail into the city, and six miles north of the first Carnegie Branch Library on my itinerary.  The trail was a most pleasant slice of thick woods in the torrent of the metropolis.

After a mile on the trail, I came to a fork that had me puzzled.  A bushy-haired older guy on a bike paused to see if I needed help.  “Follow me,” he said.  “I’m going the direction your are.”  After several minutes of conversation I mentioned I was seeking out Carnegie Libraries.  He blurted, “I saved the Main Library.  I was constructing the Convention Center across the street from it.  The library had been closed down for ten years and its basement was flooded.  I asked if we could set up our architectural offices there.  I brought in a diver who unplugged the drains, making the building functional once again.”

He said he had retired a little over a year ago and had been getting out on his bike for ten miles or so every day since.  He’s up to 4,000 miles and is forty pounds lighter.  A few blocks before I left the trail for the Takoma Park Branch Library, we came to the intersection where he lived. We chatted a few minutes longer as he told me about living in Rome for several years and the deluxe racing bike he had there.  Before we parted he said if there was anything he could do for me while I was in town to let him know.

The Washington street numbering system is a little tricky, so I feared I had the wrong address for the Takoma Park Library, but I continued down Cedar Street and the numbers suddenly changed at a bend in the road and a few blocks away there was the library on the corner in a residential neighborhood.  

The still functioning library was closed for the just declared national holiday Juneteenth.  I could old peer in to its dark-wooded interior, which appeared to retain its original ambiance.

 

It was four miles south to the Mount Pleasant Branch. It was one of the last Carnegie Libraries built in 1925, six years after Carnegie’s death, when his funding of libraries pretty much ended. Carnegie had promised DC more branches, so his foundation lived up to his promise. A homeless guy was taking advantage of it being closed as he laid sprawled at its entry.  A rental bike awaited use on the sidewalk out front.  

Getting to the the Southeast Branch took me past the fenced-in Capital, the only fencing I saw in my meanderings.  The fencing seems to suffice, as there was hardly a police officer and no military to be seen about the city.  There was hardly a tourist, though a group on matching bikes and helmets following a guide passed me in front of the Supreme Court.   The Southeast Branch was just off Pennsylvania Avenue.  It was another library that came after Carnegie’s death, dating to 1922.

Howard University was a few miles north of the Capital.  This all-black university will be receiving a lot of attention next basketball season, as it pulled off a monumental coup enticing one of the premier high school players in the country to come play.   I had to pass a barricade and a security guard to gain entrance to the campus, but he paid me no mind.  The Carnegie was well-identified and is now the dean’s office.  

The magnificent, sprawling Main Library is as eye-catching as any of the iconic buildings liberally sprinkled about the city.  The wide avenues and striking buildings seemed to have inspired the layout of Brasilia, which I visited a little over a year ago.  It was startling to see the Apple emblem on the Library.  It had taken possession of the lower half of the building two years ago, sharing the upper half with the Discovery History Center.  

The Apple greeter was a Carnegie aficionado.  He hadn’t seen the Howard University Carnegie and was delighted to see my photo, deftly using his fingers to zoom in to see the features under its roofline.  He recounted the history of his Carnegie and others he’d visited.

Before my DC incursion I visited one last Carnegie in Virginia the day before.  It was in Waynesboro and now served as the Army JROTC Center for Leadership  Development affiliated with the Fishburne Military School. It was an amiable smaller town library with no additions.   Below its roofline on all four of its sides were etched the names of authors—Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Virgil, Milton, Bacon, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Poe and Lanier.  Shakespeare was the only one to have a side all to himself.

I passed through Charlottesville and the University of Virginia after Waynesboro, where I was able to drop in on another anchor of the Telluride Film Festival, Melissa, who has been in charge of Development, recruiting sponsors, for the last fourteen years, a full-time position of importance.  My shipping department is under her supervision, so she was able to fill me in on what to expect in a couple months.  She had worked out of the Home Office in Berkeley, but was able to return to her collegiate roots and much more affordable living a few years ago, and work from there.   Her young twins were off at camp.  She pointed out some tabs on the wall of her house where she hangs a movie screen in front of her slanted driveway and shows films for the local kids.  Its a big hit in the neighborhood.

It was a hundred miles from there to DC.  As the traffic intensified I was happy when bike paths started turning up along the highways, though they weren’t all in the best of shape. 

 A few miles before I crossed the Potomac into DC, I stopped at a Safeway for some final supplies.  When I came out, I discovered my sleeping bag had been liberated from my bike.  That would have been a monumental disaster if I had been planning on camping in a forest in a few hours.  

Jesse lent me a sleeping bag for my final night of camping.  It’s just the second time in  decades and tens of thousands of miles I have had something stolen from my bike while it sat outside a store or library.  The other was in San Francisco outside the Chinatown Carnegie Branch Library.  That thief made off with my tent and dayback.  I wished this one had taken my tent too, as it is riddled with ant holes and is due to be replaced. It was a bummer too to lose my silk sleeping bag liner.  I locked my bike near the entry to the store where an employee was sitting taking a smoke break, but she didn’t linger long enough.  I’m trying not to let the sour taste it left last long.  

DC’s Amtrak Station could be mistaken for a government building with its grand matching architecture and location right in the thick of them all.  It was teeming with people and short on personnel.  I had to wait an hour to get a bike box.  It was fortunate I had allowed lots of time and had skipped going to the nearby REI to replace my sleeping bag in case the air conditioning was cranked up too high on my overnight trip.  Instead I just stuffed a lot of extra clothes into my dayback along with what food I had left.  After a couple of long, hard days I was looking forward to a day of ease on the train.

As always, there is much to digest after my 2,736 mile ride through eight states and a district that hopes to become a state—all the libraries and campsites and friends visited, the many acts of kindness and generosity, the miles and miles of unraveling countryside and the ever cascading memories of trips past.  And I have to figure out when I return if I can make it to France in time for The Tour.