National Mall, The Sequel

I return now to the National Mall, on our first afternoon in D.C., picking up our tour of the monuments with the Korean War Veterans Memorial. The path into the Memorial is a sort of diorama in steel, a scene of soldiers in combat gear that evokes a little of what it might have like to be there. The memorial includes versions of elements that appear in other nearby memorials -- it has a wall of fallen soldiers (like the Vietnam Memorial), a list of United Nations member nations (like the U.S. states at the War II Memorial). It seems to me that the Korean War has become somewhat forgotten amid other conflicts; perhaps there's something poetic in this memorial being overshadowed by others in D.C. that have used similar elements in more striking fashion?

The nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is quite the opposite. The path in to see it leads through what feels like a narrow gap between two massive white walls. You emerge to see a huge stone, and have to circle around to see the towering statue of the man himself. He's still not fully emerged from the block from which its carved -- to me a fitting symbol of his life's work for equality, not yet fully finished.

We then made our way along the Tidal Basin to a memorial I hadn't even known was there until I'd begun planning for the trip, one to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It turned out to be one of the most distinct memorials, built almost as more of an "art installation" rather than in the large scale format of so many of the others. Walls, greenery, and waterfalls divide the memorial into four "rooms," one for each of the presidential terms he was elected to serve. Spread between the rooms are different statues of Roosevelt, different famous quotes from him, a representation of Eleanor Roosevelt -- with a pleasant, tranquil feeling throughout. I'd call it a highlight among the D.C. monuments, and well worth a visit.

You have to keep walking a fair distance around the Tidal Basin to reach the Jefferson Memorial, and so when we happened upon some rent-a-scooters, we gave that a shot. It took my husband and I a few minutes to download the app and get set up, since neither of us had ever done it before. And then it turned out to be more a "check off the list: 'rented a scooter'" moment than anything else. The app had "every place near any memorial" marked as a no parking zone and wouldn't let you end the ride there -- so we ended up riding past Jefferson and walking back in from the other direction. (Though it left me curious: when you see abandoned scooters left in strange places -- as we did here, right outside the Jefferson Memorial -- what's up with that? Are people just eating the fines you're warned will apply if you do that?)

In any case, the Jefferson Memorial features a tall statue of the man, in the center of a high-domed space, surrounded by four quotes from him (including a portion of the Declaration of Independence). One quote in particular, about the need to adapt laws to follow the times, struck me in particular. This "original" Founder, it seems to me, would have found the concept of "originalism" appalling. Certain Supreme Court justices are (as always) using cherry-picked history to support their preconceived views, and deliberately ignoring contrary evidence... say, carved in marble only a mile or two away.

At the end of such a long walk and travel day, we decided to call it. We went for dinner at a nice Indian restaurant, feeling slightly underdressed (and learning only later that indeed, we were probably right on the line of acceptable for the actual dress code they had). Then it was trying to get a good night's sleep to prepare for the next big day.