Landscapes

This time in a trip to Washington, D. C., I took the bus rather than the train during my first and second research visit to this capital of the United States of America.

In my first trip, I took Amtrack from New Jersey and the second by train from West Virginia. In the first, the landscapes of America’s towns and cities have that American character we see in movies while the second visit brought me and my cousin Gloria “Baby” Estoya Savillano along famous battle fields we read in American history.

Since the first two visits were in spring, the American landscapes bloom with flowers and new leaves while in Washington, the cherry blossoms were just changing the colors of Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue into an array of white.

This trip last October 23-25 passed along the freeway from New York across Delaware, and Baltimore. We did not regret taking the Greyhound because the bus was cheaper, half the train ticket and lesser still because of the senior discount.

The landscapes throughout, one hour after the busy and steel and concrete jungle that is New York (except Central Park), was breathtaking with multi-colored woods as autumn finally came.

Fall came late this year as it did last year and so by mid-October the woods were still green, but during the third week the leaves turned into colors of yellow, purple, red, brown, ash gray and orange.

The woods were on the right and left of the freeway which was fenced to prevent the inhabitants of the forests from crossing the highway with the speeding cars and giant cargo trucks. The vultures hovered high in unfenced areas looking for carcasses and then sweeping to pick them to the bone.

The vultures do not eat freshly killed animals but wait for a few days as they also relish the maggots eating the meat, some kind of side dish, a friend said.

It was only after we passed Annapolis did the forest begin to recede and disappeared altogether, warning as it were, that we were within the Washington’s inner city.

Union Station where public transport – trains and buses from outside the Capital converge remains as majestic as ever but for two things. One is the conversion of almost half of the main lobby into a restaurant and the second is the absence of sidewalk vendors.

In fact there are no more sidewalk vendors and peddlers anywhere. It looks like Washington has been swept over. How I wished, all of us would wish that we can also clean the landscapes of Bacolod with the removal of sidewalk vendors and peddlers. The streets would thus look clean and pleasant to walk around.

The outskirts of Washington to Maryland also seems to be expanding, like the old City of Rome preserved and frozen in time, but the outskirts are expanding with more modern buildings.

When I came here for research in 1979, I stayed in a hotel behind the north lawn of the White House, Franklin Hotel which must have served guests since before World War. In the preserved Rome, I stayed in 1983 in a baron’s palace converted into a pension house. These two lodging places within the protected cities were provided with the amenities of the olden days.

The hotel where we stayed in Washington is Courtyard Marriott. It is a modern structure of glass, as the four other buildings beside it.

In contrast, the inner or old Washington is mostly of lime rock, bricks and concrete in classical Greek and Roman architecture.

Even the National Archives and Records Administration has expanded as it consolidates many of the archival records of the United States and made it the largest archive, and I think, the most modern archive in the world.

The usual research assistances are extended with more modern technology. In the past registration involved filing the blanks in a form, but this time a computer briefed us and we filled in the spaces and the data automatically transmitted to the receptor.

Then we entered a room where we had our pictures taken and our credit card-like IDs came out. This was swiped when we entered or left a room to indicate our entrances and exits.

My work was faster this time because my wife, Verns, who also got a researcher ID, helped a lot. She even learned to reproduce war photographs in Negros and the Philippines.

There are hundreds of war photographs of the Philippines alone but time constrained us from copying most of them. The short research, however, is worth it for the next book I was commissioned to write by the Filipino-American History Society of New Jersey after my October 17 talk.

The archival documents here about us are staggering.

The American landscapes are changing but remaining the same.*

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