(The fabled Cardinal Stone of the North. Near 1850 East-West Highway, Washington, DC. Navigation by Jon-Without, transport and driving by Vic).
Let’s see: I got a call about a birthday party at the Front Page and decided to stay in Arlington for the occasion. I get the feeling I might not be here that much longer, and with a sudden hole in the schedule, decided to get out of the house and clean up some odds and ends.
I sent a note to Jon-without to see if he was up for and adventure, and it turned out he was. We decided to go look at some of the Boundary Stones and take pictures for my current writing project. Jon-without navigated and I drove- this is an adventure in seeing the District that the tourists don’t. I have told you before about the Bogus North Stone in the traffic circle where 16th Street and Georgia Avenue collide. I have a nice picture of it, but it has nothing to do with Benjamin Banneker or Major Andrew Ellicott and the planting of the Stones to mark the Federal Enclave.
We took the Beltway clockwise from Arlington, passing near the West Stone in Fall Church and arced around to Connecticut Avenue, and from there jigged and jagged to the East-West Highway. This is an important Stone, being one of the Cardinal directions, and Jon-without had not seen one before. It is a good one, and we only had to park slightly illegally to walk down the slope from the townhouses to actually touch it.
Then we got back in the Panzer on a chilly bright afternoon and loaded up the GPS to head for Fort Lincoln Cemetery, site of NE7. I had been there before and enjoyed the ramparts for the Civil War ear fort which are preserved as a memorial, and in fact, many of the green spaces in that quadrant of the District once contained massive earthen fortifications, now slumped down and thickly wooded.
There was a funeral in progress near the main chapel when we arrived, but we were headed back to section 18, where we were briefly stymied, just as I had been the last time I visited. The directions posted on the web make it clear that some had never actually been visited by the people who wrote about them.
The newest I could find gave us the sector, at least. On the previous attempt, there was a reference to proximity to a maintenance shed, but that may have been a hundred years ago. I had that feeling of disorientation rising, since the grounds are strewn with memorials, but Jon-Without won his certificate for Stone Finding by identifying the distinctive DAR-placed cage around the stone right at the fence-line by the columbarium (not the Mausoleum).
NE7 has a marker to mark the marker and has been restored nicely by the Colonel John Washington-Katherine Montgomery Chapter of the DAR. The ground was still saturated by the recent snow melt, and it was slipping and sliding across the graves to get to it, but well worth it.
Swollen with triumph, we decided to try to knock out NE8 as well- hell, it was only a mile away.
If I were to rate the uneasiness factor of the Stones, I naturally would rate SE 8 and 9 as the highest, but for the reasons I mentioned earlier, NE8 has some issues that would mandate a sturdy working party sufficient to watch the car while actually visiting the Stone. I had studied the overhead imagery carefully, since there is a construction yard that now blocks direct access to the scrub-covered patch where the Stone is located. We approached on Kenilworth Avenue, just off the I-295 pandemonium. I had calculated that by following Andalucía Lane, we could get abeam of the Stone and make it an easy conquest.
Not so fast. My spirits soared briefly as the lane appeared to our right, but my hopes were dashed by a towering gate shut tight. We turned around to see if we could approach from the east side but it is a housing project with very narrow streets and very large young people loitering, looking with interest at the shiny car.
“Dammit it. Not today,” I muttered.
Some sort of District infrastructure plant is concealed therein, so this is a matter for a visit on a working day. I noted that a scrap yard belonging to the Joseph Smith & Sons concern is there- I will call them this week and see who controls access to the property.
Jon-without wants to be part of the final assault on SE9, so I suggested we take the route I followed on Friday, and show him were the Stone was located on the banks of the Potomac, and actually stop and see if we could find the alleged hole in the fence. Traffic was loony on the Anacostia Freeway as we passed DC Village, where SE8 lies at the Impound Lot, and then I pulled off on the shoulder by the “Maryland Welcomes YOU” sign. Up close, this is daunting. A deep ditch adjoins the road, and there was deep standing water in it. Then an embankment tangled with scrub brush. If there was a hole in the fence, it was concealed, and this would require hip-boots on a winter day like this.
It was a useful reconnoiter, anyway, and since we had missed lunch, decided to stop at my son’s favorite taco place for a bite to eat and a victory margarita.
Jon-without punched in the address on his phone and navigated us across the Wilson Bridge to US-1 and through Old Town and into the Del Ray neighborhood and Mount Vernon Avenue. This is a hip place to be, and the Taqueria el Poblano is a fabulous hole-in-the-wall place with LA-style crispy tacos and burritos. Jon-without had the former and I the latter, along with a couple great cocktails prepared by Eduardo, a young man with many opinions that we shared in joyful Spanglish.
By the time we were done with that, there was no point in going home to change, and we proceeded on to the Front Page to await the arrival of Marty-2, Mandy, Cindy and Margaret the Birthday Girl with a cast of dozens. From what I could remember, much merriment ensued.
It could not have been a nicer day, and we are two Stones closer to completing the tale.
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303