Musings of a Restless Mind

I’ve made friends with a number of other writers online over the last several years, and many of them seem to gather annually at a Science Fiction Convention called Liberty Con in Chattanooga Tennessee. That Con limits its attendees (to 1,000 this year, even fewer in years past I hear), and last year, it was sold out before I knew it.

This year I had gotten in early enough to sign up, although I had postponed concrete plans until late May. I spent $500 on a 30-day railroad pass from Amtrak, and signed up for a cross-country trip to Atlanta via LA and Chicago. Amtrak doesn’t run any trains to Chattanooga, so I took the Greyhound for the 2 or 3 hour trip up to Chattanooga.

After the Con, I took the train to DC to spend 4 days being a tourist. Although I had been to DC once before, it was a business trip that was basically, “Look, there’s the Washington Monument–time to go to the office.”

In DC I stayed in a hotel in Chinatown (I didn’t even know DC had a Chinatown). It was about 9 blocks from the National Mall, so I walked to the mall each day where I had my pick of the surrounding museums. You can see my essay An Ignoramus Looks at Art on my website if you’re interested. I may write more about the trip later.

Sharon was a chemist and had been raised by her mother, the executive secretary, so she used to plan out trips like Eisenhower planned D-Day. I wanted to try a modified version of the Jack Reacher method (Look him up if you’re not familiar. The books are fun if you like thrillers.) Since it was just me now, I didn’t plan so thoroughly, expecting I’d find plenty to do.

It was my last evening, and I had been lucky up to this point, and the weather was perfect, about 80 degrees and not too humid. But when I emerged from the Air & Space Museum, it was overcast and there were occasional drops leaking from the gray sky. I didn’t think much of it, but I was worn out enough to contemplate hopping on the local bus for about 6 blocks of the 9-block walk.

Someone at the upcoming bus stop was having a loud argument, loud enough that a police cruiser, lights flashing, made a u-turn, stopping neatly at the place where the bus would have pulled up. Just then a small black terrier on a long leash made a mad dash away from the bus stop, barking furiously and lunging so hard that he pulled the leash from his surprised owner’s grasp. The owner took off after the dog, cursing at the top of his lungs for the dog to come back. It was at that point that we all saw what had interested the terrier as he stopped to flip an 8-inch long rat high in the air, only to grab him again on the way down. Seemingly undeterred, the dog’s owner supplemented his cursing with, “Put that damn rat down!”

That panoply of chaos and mayhem persuaded me that walking the rest of the way to my hotel was the better choice no matter how much my tired legs objected, at least at that moment. I’m sure that was true despite the minor drops of rain. If only I hadn’t stopped on the way for a gelato and to rest my aching legs. I was only 4 blocks away from the hotel, when the deluge hit. The wind was slanting the rain directly at me at about 20 mph as I tried to hasten to the shelter of my hotel, making me blink and shield my eyes as I sought every overhang or awning I could find. My foot slid, and I almost fell where some fancy establishment had substituted a smooth obsidian slab for the normal red bricks of the sidewalk. Despite my best attempts at leaping the streams that flowed at every curb, my shoes still got drenched even above my ankles. As I finally entered the hotel, my clothes were solidly plastered to my skin, and I left a puddle with each step.

Once I got to my room, I almost needed a shoehorn to pry myself out of my shirt and jeans. I wrung them out as well as I could and hung them up on the shower rod. Then I used the hotel’s provided hair dryer to try to turn them from soaking to merely wet in the hopes that they would finish drying overnight. Any thoughts of getting dinner vanished as I had only brought the jeans I had been wearing and a pair of shorts that I deemed unacceptable for dinner. I was carrying only a single duffel bag in the hopes of traveling lightly.

Fortunately, through some kind of divine intervention, my clothes were indeed dry the next morning, so I could go down to the restaurant to get breakfast. Meals on the trip had been catch as catch can, so when given the opportunity, I would eat heartily. Since I carry a decently sized spare tire around my middle these days, I usually manage even while missing the occasional meal.

After I had eaten and cleaned out my room, I checked out and sat in the lobby for about an hour. Unfortunately I had missed the opportunity to talk to Jungle Girl. That was my name for a young lady dressed in multi-pocketed khaki shorts, top, and a broad straw hat with about 5 suitcases lined up. I really wanted to ask her where she was headed in that get-up. Since she was already gone, I sat silently just playing with my phone like a good 21st century citizen until it was time to leave for the metro to Union Station where I’d catch the train back home via Atlanta and New Orleans. The escalators down to the metro station were only across the street. On the corner some 3 or 4 enterprising folks had set up a soap box and a microphone to take turns lecturing the passers-by with their received wisdom.

This kind of thing didn’t seem an unusual occurrence in DC, as I had been accosted by everybody from Greenpeace to Doctors without Borders soliciting on the mall. As I crossed the street, the man with the microphone belted out, “White people are the devil!” A lot of thoughts passed through my mind, but I decided on discretion, and headed silently to the escalator down to the tracks about 50 feet away from the makeshift podium.