It was strange to think that to the kids World War II really is history, rather than something to which anyone they know can personally relate. Some of these kids have grandparents who served in Vietnam; to them World War II is many generations in the past. They were, however, properly respectful-which is more than I can say for some of the other visitors to the site. The place was overrun with middle school kids from Ohio, all of whom seemed to be shouting at the top of their lungs and none of whom seemed to care in the least what they were seeing.
Most of the kids also wanted to see the nearby reflecting pool. They know this landmark primarily from the movie Forrest Gump, where the central character apparently sits in it. I've never seen that movie. What comes to my mind here is Martin Luther King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial and the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the mall to hear it. I was too young to know what was happening when King actually said "I have a dream", but I've seen those images so many times they are burned into my brain.
We walked back past the Washington Monument to the metro station. I mentioned that there didn't seem to be any special security in the metro. That's definitely not the case with the Washington Monument. The place looks like a really ugly construction zone. Instead of the green mall surrounding it, you see a gray fence about seven feet tall; it looks like the kind of thing that should surround an empty lot where they're building a skyscraper. I don't think you can visit the Washington Monument at all these days, and with the ugly fence surrounding it, you really can't even get a decent view of the place. I could understanding having the monument surrounded by cops, but blocking it off so you can't even see it seems ridiculous
We took the metro west about two stations to McPherson Square, a little park just north of the White House. We surfaced, and several people snapped pictures of the back side of the White House all lit up at night. I know from experience that such pictures never come out, so I just wandered around the park a bit. We discovered soon that Washington suffers from a problem common to a lot of Eastern cities, rats. We saw at least three rats scurrying around the park at night. I can't say it exactly made us eager to go back to the subway, but we didn't have a lot of other choices.
* * * * *
We saw more wildlife as we walked the trail back to the Econolodge. In addition to the cicadas, we saw a raccoon sitting on top of the wall that separated the trail from interstate 66. I don't think of seeing raccoons in urban areas, and it made an interesting sight.
The kids were surprisingly tired by the time we got back to the motel. Everyone settled into bed fairly quickly, and we had a very pleasant and restful night.
Arlington, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Daryl (who shared my room) and Angie went out jogging early this morning. While Daryl was out I showered, enjoyed the motel's breakfast muffins, and wrote some notes for this journal. I then double-checked to make sure the kids were up and that everybody would be ready to go before long.
We drove to campus right at rush hour, but we got there with no problem. We had two games this morning, both of which were in a new building that was a sort of student union named after some woman who was obviously a wealthy donor. We parked in the same lot I had parked in yesterday, and we made sort of a big "U", walking uphill and down to get to the building.
When we checked in, the woman apologized that because of construction they were using different facilities than they normally use at this location. We found out during our first game that the apology was definitely in order. The game was in what was probably a seminar room, the sort of place that is designed to comfortably fit eight or ten chairs around a long table. It was far smaller than a standard classroom or the lecture halls they normally use for competition. They had crammed two tables for the teams competing in an "L" shape in the corner of the room. The moderators sat in two small chairs at the side, with a tiny portable table (the sort of thing you might put a projector on them) holding a laptop computer between them. At the other end of the room they had about twelve chairs set in three very cramped rows facing the tables. We were thankful our delegation got here early. We occupied ten of those chairs between our alternates, coach, and "fans". By the time the other team arrived, it was standing room only, with about seven people lining the walls.
Our captain and I gave a sarcastic look at each other when we walked in this room, both knowing when we saw the moderator that luck would not be with us. Our moderator was "the Jeopardy guy" I wrote about in my St. Louis travelogue a year ago. This gentleman won a million dollars on Jeopardy, at that time the most anyone had ever won (although the record has since been surpassed, since they changed the rules of the show). He is an annoying and condescending S.O.B., who made it very clear a year ago that he found it hard to believe that hicks from Iowa could have any intelligence. He was slightly less annoying this year, but he'll never be on a list of people I'll look up to.
The main thing I remember from this fame was that when our team sat down, the Jeopardy guy looked at the junior on our team and went on and on about how much he looked like basketball player Larry Bird. He asked repeatedly if people told this kid that he looked like Bird. The kid, who ended up without question being the best player on our team this year, said (probably honestly) that no one had ever said that to him. Having had the resemblance pointed out, though, I can verify that it is for real. Probably no one told the kid he looked like Larry Bird, because Bird is older than me and has been retired from sports for years. I'm not sure I've heard Bird's name since Michael Jordan came on the scene, and Jordan's been retired for quite a while now, too. This wavy-haired blond boy does, however, resemble the pictures you see of a much younger Larry Bird-about the time he entered the N.B.A.
The two games we were playing this morning were against two different teams from the same school. That happens all the time in local tournaments, but we've never had that happen before at nationals. Even for a big high school, it would seem pretty pretentious to think that you have enough talented kids to make two national-level starting line-ups. The school we were facing, though, was both big and pretentious. The Bellaire School is a large private school from Houston. It is vaguely Christian, but not affiliated with any specific church. While I don't think it actually is the girls' alma mater, Bellaire came across as the kind of place President Bush would sent his daughters.
Bellaire's "A" team, which we were playing first, had won the Texas state academic championship. There is no state quiz bowl championship in Iowa, but if there were the crown would be passed from year to year between Ankeny and Ames, perhaps occasionally going to Urbandale or Dowling. We've played all of those schools on various occasions, and Bellaire was a lot like them. The kids found out quickly that they were very good (better than us), but they really weren't super-human. While they knew some categories we didn't (like classical music and European literature), there were glaring gaps in their knowledge, too. The Bellaire kids, for example, seemed to know very little about history-a topic "Larry Bird" did very well at. I knew going into this match that we probably wouldn't win, but I was pleased that we made a respectable showing. We ended up losing by about 200 points; that sounds like a lot, but the way quiz bowl works a turn of about four questions would make up that difference.
I spent some time after the game being a real coach. That's something I don't get to do much during the actual competition season. At most quiz bowl tournaments the coaches are busy reading questions or working as judges. At most tournaments we enter, Garrigan sends between two and four teams, and since I'm busy in a center, I almost never get a chance to see the kids-let alone offer any suggestions. At nationals I could offer observations and advice and hope that the team might learn from it and improve in later games. Probably the #1 piece of advice for success in quiz bowl is to not leave any question unanswered; a wrong answer is always better than no answer. There were several questions in our first game that neither team made a stab at or that Bellaire answered wrong, but then no one from Garrigan answered. On a couple of them the kids hit themselves after the moderator read the answer; they had known it, but they were afraid to buzz in, because they thought they might be wrong. I gave a couple of other pieces of advice, too, and I could tell in our later games that the kids had learned from it.
* * * * *
We had about an hour to kill between games. We headed down to the basement, where there was a very simple game room. Some of the kids played foosball or ping pong, but mostly we just sat around and killed time.
Our second game was in a big cafeteria inside this student union. There was a little stage at one end of the place, where I'd bet musicians occasionally perform in a "coffee house" setting. They set up tables for the teams there, with the moderators seated at a round table facing them. Any spectators just found empty tables somewhere in the cafeteria. The room was very noisy. In particular an espresso machine kept gurgling and hissing. They had both the moderators and the students miked, though, so it wasn't all that big of a problem.
This time we were playing Bellaire's "B" team. When we go to regional tournaments, there is no way you can tell in advance which team is a given school's "good" team. Most schools either just distribute the teams randomly or check the schedule and give their best team the easiest opponents. (When possible, I almost always use that second strategy myself-and it's not at all uncommon for "Garrigan 3" to be the "good" team.) At nationals, though, "B" did in fact mean "second best", a team that was good, but notably less gifted than the "A" team.
We've played teams like this a lot of times, too, and over the years we've enjoyed quite a bit of success against them. The second-best teams from Ankeny and Urbandale are usually fairly equivalent to the top teams from Boone or Spirit Lake ... or Garrigan. That was true here, too; we were pretty well matched against Bellaire B. We got off to a good start, answering the first three questions. That gave the kids some confidence. It was back and forth after that. They'd be up by 10 or 15, then we'd take over the lead. That continued through the toss-up, bonus, and "60 second" rounds. At nationals there's a fourth round to each game called "Stump the Experts". These are high-value toss-up questions that are supposed to be harder than any of the other questions. Sometimes they are, but today they happened to have a bunch of questions (in fields like science, popular music, and sports) that played right into our areas of strength. We were trailing after the "60 second round", but we soon re-took the lead and kept increasing our score until we had about a 50-point lead. Then there was a whole series of questions (probably five or six, for a value of well over 100 points) that nobody on either team knew the answers to. I kept wondering how many more questions there were, because if the other team had gotten on a roll they could easily have beaten us. Fortunately the game ended with us still in the lead; we had our first victory.
I was delighted that Meisters got to see us win. While it's a fact that most games at nationals for schools our size are losses, it would have been embarrassing to have them travel so far just to see us lose. I had also made a point in these two games of making sure everyone got to play, at least for one round of one game. I figured that even the alternates deserved the change to play in front of "fans".
* * * * *
Behavior-wise this was one of the nicest groups I've traveled with, but in some ways it was also one of the most frustrating. Most years when we've gone to nationals, I've let the kids divide into small groups and go out on their own sight-seeing. That's as much for my enjoyment as theirs. All of them can see the things they want, and I can see the things I want. The perfect example of that was the year we went to New York, when my sister Margaret and I were entirely separated from the kids all day long. They divided into two groups (basically the boys and the girls) and saw the sorts of things kids would be interested in, while Margaret and I saw things like the Cloisters Museum. We chose a meeting place (sad to talk about in retrospect, the mall in the basement of the World Trade Center), and everyone came back there at an appointed time and shared their stories. We all had a wonderful time, and dividing up worked beautifully.
Unfortunately, this year everybody seemed to want to do everything as a big group. The idea of dividing into small groups just seemed alien to these kids; everything was all or nothing. What's more, they really didn't want to go anywhere on their own. While some of them are really quite well-traveled, they seemed honestly scared of trying to find points of interest without me there to guide them. There are certainly parts of Washington that they should be scared of, but there's no reason a tourist needs to encounter those places. If I agreed to guide the whole group around, the next problem was that no one could agree on where we should go. I think they wanted me to plan a minute-by-minute itinerary, so that they could just follow without thinking. I wanted this trip to be theirs, not mine, but it was hard to do that when they weren't willing to give input into the decisions. This all seemed especially strange because this was overall the oldest group I'd ever traveled with (eight seniors and a junior), yet they really seemed the most insecure and least mature.
At this particular time no one could decide where they wanted to go for lunch. I had offered several possible choices, assuming different groups would choose different ones. After giving them about five minutes and finding no one would make a decision, I announced we were taking the metro to Rosslyn. I knew there a number of fast food places and also some "real" restaurants near that station, and I also knew Freedom Park-which houses a section of the Berlin Wall and other symbols of the fight for freedom-was nearby.
We got to Rosslyn and made our way up to street level, but then no one could decide which of the many places they wanted to eat. ... I really couldn't have cared less where we ate, so when once again no one would make a decision, I just walked to the closest one: Burger King. The kids followed me like I was the pied piper, and no one complained about Burger King once we were there. (Had I chosen myself, I'd have more likely picked Subway, but I just wanted to get the arguing over with.) Ordering was a bit of an experience, since the all-Hispanic staff refused to speak Spanish (one of the kids tried) but didn't really communicate well in English. We all got our food, though, and everyone seemed to enjoy lunch.
Daryl and Angie set off on their own after lunch to find the Iwo Jima monument. None of the other kids could decide if they wanted to see that or not, so I made the decision for them that they wouldn't. Instead I told them they would see Freedom Park. (Actually I said they would see "the Berlin Wall", which sounds a lot more interesting.) I kept offering the opportunity for people to split up and see other things, but absolutely everyone tagged along toward the park.
I had brought along a baseball cap from the Huntsville Stars (Garrigan graduate Brad Nelson's AA team), and I realized shortly after we set out that I didn't have it on. I had paid $20 for the cap, and I really didn't want to lose it, so I left Gene and Mary Ann with the kids and literally ran back to Burger King. Fortunately it was still there, sitting under the bench in the booth where I had eaten. I grabbed it and ran back. The kids (many of whom run track) were impressed at how quickly I had gotten to Burger King and back, but I was definitely winded. I may walk a lot, but I'm no runner.
We followed an assortment of signs to Freedom Park. We could see it (it's on an overpass that used to be a freeway off-ramp), but we couldn't figure out how we were supposed to enter. When I was here before, you entered through the "Newseum", a museum of journalism sponsored by the publishers of USA Today (which is Arlington's local paper). The Newseum has moved to new quarters in the city of Washington, and there was no indication of how you were supposed to get to the park now. Eventually I asked a woman on the street. She thought for a minute and then said she thought you entered from the Gannett Building (the place where USA Today is published), which was across the street from where we were standing. We made our way there and asked in the lobby, where they confirmed that we just needed to take the elevator up to the second level and then take the skywalk to the park.
There was a bank of four elevators in the lobby of the Gannett Building. Gene Meister and one of the boys got in one elevator, while everyone else in our group crowded into another (together with three people who worked in the building). We pressed "2" (as well as whatever higher floors the workers needed), and the doors closed. There was a small jerk, but then the elevator stopped. We hadn't gone anywhere, but the elevator was stuck and the doors would not open.
I'd never been stuck in an elevator before, but I found out quickly that the main part of the experience is that it's very hot. All those bodies confined in a very small space generate a lot of heat. "Larry Bird" was standing next to the control panel, and he got out the emergency phone. He talked quite a bit, but he seemed unsure if anyone had actually answered him or not. Two of the seniors couldn't seem to shut their mouths; the longer we were stuck, the more annoying they became. (Now you know why I never give specific names in these journals.) One of the workers (with whom they were trying to flirt) was clearly annoyed with them, but she tried to make the best of things and humor them. Her colleagues ignored the boys, but they added to the noise level when they each got on separate cell phones and called people upstairs to explain why they were late for work.
A couple of the kids had done the calculations and figured out that even if we weighed an average of 200 pounds each (which was certainly a very high estimate given all the fit runners in this elevator), we would still be under the rated capacity that was listed above the controls. Even so, I gathered from comments the workers made that these elevators get stuck all the time.
We were stuck for about half an hour-long enough that I started to wonder about things, if not really panic. Finally we could hear some clunking outside the door, and after a few minutes of that the door opened to reveal a tiny Asian man on a ladder holding a crowbar. We thanked him, and the three workers proceeded to go into another elevator. Our group sensibly took the nearby stairs up to the second floor. When we got to the top the two who had been waiting there broke out laughing, and we all joined in. It was certainly one of those experiences you don't have every day.
After all the excitement leading up to it, Freedom Park itself was nothing special. I've described it in earlier travelogues, and there's only one major change. Where they used to have just one meter-wide panel of the Berlin Wall, they now have a section of about half a dozen such concrete panels. The kids posed for pictures by the Wall. The kids seem to view the fall of the Berlin Wall the say way I view landing on the moon; it was obviously the most important event of their childhood. For most of them, though, it's less of an actual memory than a legend (the same sort of memory I have of "I have a dream"). It's weird to think how long ago it happened, but most of these kids were in pre-school when the Cold War ended.
We made our way back to the park next to Burger King and waited around there for Daryl and Angie to return from the Iwo Jima monument. While we waited I had our captain call the Algona radio station. They did a fairly lengthy interview with him, both asking about the games and inquiring as to what we had done. Little did we know that our adventure in the elevator at the Gannett Building would be played up as the top story on KLGA today. I'd be hearing about that elevator for weeks after I got back to Algona.
We all went back to Rosslyn station and said goodbye to the Meisters. They got on a train for the airport, and shortly after it left we headed back to the motel. The kids were really touched by the Meisters' generosity and surprised that anyone would make such a trip just to see them. While it's not boring to watch, quiz bowl almost never draws much of any spectators. Even parents who seem to spend their lives tramping to all their kids' activities rarely make it to quiz bowl tournaments. Gene and Mary Ann were certainly the first school employees who had been to a tournament without being there to work, and the kids were delighted someone had taken interest in them.
The kids changed back into nicer clothes, and we soon made our way back to campus. Our schedule this year was set up so we played three games all in one day, so we'd know in an hour or so just what our chances of advancing to play-offs would be. Our third game was against Horace Greeley High School from Chappaqua, New York. Before this tournament I knew Chappaqua mostly as the residence of convenience where the Clintons bought a home to allow Hillary (born in Illinois and most recently from Little Rock) to claim she was a New York resident and thus represent that state in the Senate (the exact same thing Fred Grandy--"Gopher" from The Love Boat--did when the Californian claimed he "lived" in Sioux City as my Congressman; it's not like politicians of both parties don't do that). Chappaqua was apparently the birthplace of the journalist best known for the phrase, "Go west, young man", and a large high school in New York City's northern suburbs is named after him.
Horace Greeley won the championship in last year's national tournament, and the kids had expressed just a bit of fright at having to play them. The good news was that we weren't really playing the national champions; that team had graduated, and we were playing the younger people who took their place. The 2004 Horace Greeley team was good, but not really national championship caliber, and we could definitely compete with them. The game was back-and-forth going into the "60 second" round. Our kids made an unfortunate choice of categories for that round, and when "Stump the Experts" was also went back and forth, the few points we missed out on in that third round made the difference in a very close game. We lost, but the kids felt they'd really played one of their best games-and they were right.
After the game several of the kids bought tournament T-shirts. Then we went to a little minimall on Lee Highway. I went into a Safeway supermarket to pick up a thank-you card that the kids could sign for Meisters. Meanwhile the kids went into a Hollywood Video store next door, where a couple of them actually bought things. I kept wondering why you'd buy videos on a trip; it's not like they couldn't find those exact same movies within an easy drive from their home. These were the same kids who wanted to watch movies in the suburban on the trip out, though; I guess they're just addicted to entertainment.
When we got back to the motel, once again no one could figure out what they wanted to do. Eventually I made the decision that we'd take the metro back downtown and go to the National Archives. I remembered that when we were out here for quiz bowl before, the Archives was surprisingly uncrowded at night. I just hoped it was still open, since I could picture it being restricted in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
There's a metro stop called "Archives/Navy Memorial" that's about three blocks away from the tourist entrance to the National Archives. It was raining when we left the station, and we got a little wet as we made our way down the street. Getting to the archives also required us to cross a major street (Constitution Avenue, I think). There was almost no traffic, and in the interest of time I jay-walked-crossing against a "Don't Walk" light. The kids all followed right along, crossing on red immediately after me. Daryl and Angie are more law-abiding, though. They waited on the corner a good minute and a half before the light finally switched to "Walk". The rest of us had to wait for them, of course, and we all got thoroughly soaked.
The walk/don't walk lights in Washington are kind of interesting. In addition to the stylized drawings of a walking person and a hand raised to signal "stop", the "walk" part of the cycle has a timer that counts down how many seconds are left before the signal changes. That's good to know. We've all seen lights that allow almost no time for walk, even though the traffic signal stays green much longer. These seemed fairly well coordinated with the traffic signals, and the timers showed anywhere from about 15 seconds for walking (on minor cross streets) to over two minutes (on a major thoroughfare).
The National Archives was still open, and we entered and dried off a bit. It surprised me that security was not unusually tight at the home of our nation's most important documents. They X-rayed bags, and everyone had to walk through a metal detector like you would in an airport. That's exactly what they had here years ago, though. What's more, the security wasn't set particularly high. Several of the kids were wearing various metal objects (belt buckles, necklaces, watches, etc.), but none of them tripped the machine.
I suppose the security is not more tight because it is, after all, just paper that's stored here. While it would be sad if a terrorist destroyed the original copy of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, it's not like the country would cease to exist if that happened. Still, with all the emphasis some people put on the flag as a symbol of our freedom, it surprised me they didn't protect historic parchment a bit more than modern cloth.
In the holding room after security, a guard told us that photos were allowed at the National Archives, but flash photography was forbidden. I'm sure she gave that same speech to everyone, but not very many people seemed to pay any attention to it. I was appalled at how many flashes went off as we filed past centuries-old documents. Each time someone took a flash photo, the guards glared at them-but that was it. I've seen museum guards in Mexico and Europe who confiscated cameras or opened them up and exposed the film when tourists took flash photos; here, though, all the violators got was "the look".
They really should just ban all photos here. They could have postcards of the documents for sale in the gift shop (which, oddly, they didn't), and that would take care of it. A lot of modern cameras are set up so you can't control whether it flashes or not, and I'm sure a number of the flashes really were accidental. If they just said no photos-period, they'd solve a lot of problems.
While there were no postcards in the gift shop, they did have a number of interesting items. I picked up a book highlighting the hundred most important documents in our nation's history (some of the modern ones were interesting choices), as well as a coffee mug with a reproduction of the World War II propaganda poster "Loose lips might sink ships".
It was still raining as we made our way back to the metro station. We took the train to Pentagon City, where we went to the same mall (the Fashion Center at Pentagon City) I had taken kids to when we'd been in Washington for quiz bowl before. The kids explored the mall for quite a while (I'm not sure when I've seen a group of boys who were more into shopping), but I basically just had dinner. Everything in the food court at Pentagon City is ridiculously overpriced. Their lease fees must be exorbitant, because the same value meals that cost $3 in Algona and maybe $4 in Chicago are a minimum of $6 here. I had a cheesesteak, fries, and iced tea, and I parted with over $9 after tax. (Later this summer I'd order almost the same food at the ballpark in Huntsville, and the whole meal cost $6.50-and that's with stadium prices.) I also had a pretzel, and I stopped at the Haagen Daaz ice cream shop, which I knew would be expensive. It was. A single waffle cone was $4.95, plus tax. It was worth it, though. I had an outstanding scoop of dulce de leche ice cream that tasted out of this world. I probably downed a week's worth of calories in fifteen minutes, but I enjoyed it.
(CONTINUED IN PART 3)
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