Home » United States » Washington

I used to find myself in Washington at least a couple of times a year. (At one point when I was at Borland I did two trade shows there in the same month.)...

Washington

Hank Shiffman
2003-12-02 20:36:06

Displayed times (last time: )

I used to find myself in Washington at least a couple of times a year. (At one point when I was at Borland I did two trade shows there in the same month.) On one trip I finally took advantage of what the city has to offer: making the rounds of the Mint, the Smithsonian and, in this picture, the Vietnam Memorial. Having come too close the draft for comfort, I felt a strong connection to the names enscribed on the wall and an anger at the incredible waste of it all.

As I get older I become more and more fascinated by history. Perhaps that's because I don't have to learn it just to satisfy a teacher. But it's also the discovery that history is never as neat and orderly as we're led to believe. A small example: what possessed a 18th century Englishman named James Smithson to leave his fortune to found a museum in a place he'd never seen? From that curious beginning grew the Smithsonian Institution, surely the most wonderful collection of museums on the planet. Even the buildings are a marvel, from the castle where the collection began (now a visitor center) to the building that houses industrial exhibits from the museum's centennial. Every part of the Smithsonian calls forth a different time and gives the merest hint of the treasures within.

The Air & Space Museum speaks to me in a way museums rarely do. After all, I grew up with the space program, watching each Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launch with bated breath while taking in a steady diet of the most fanciful science fiction. But I love Air & Space at least as much for its collection of aircraft as for its rockets. They're all here: The Wright Brothers 1903 flyer; The Spirit of St. Louis that took Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic (the real one, not some movie prop); the X-1 that broke the sound barrier for Chuck Yeager; the Voyager that went round the world on a single tank of gas; and this plane that made commercial aviation ...