A Capital Lastleaf and a Historic Election 2024!

Vienna, VA → Washington, DC → Vienna, VA
32.8 mi (52.8 km)

More 2024 Adventures

It’s Election Day, everyone!

While the Penguins were busy dispensing justice to their rogue counterpart, I set out to take in the ambience of greater DC during what was sure to be a historic presidential election! Earlier this year, President Biden surprised everyone by dropping his reelection campaign, putting Kamala Harris in his place and ultimately resetting a bar that most everyone had assumed would be fixed!

Regardless of who won the electoral college today, the president-elect would be historic. Kamala Harris would be the first female president and first president of Asian heritage! Donald Trump would be the second president after Grover Cleveland to serve nonconsecutive terms and the first convicted felon in the Oval Office! At the polling station I visited, where folks from both campaigns were handing out sample ballots, the numbers seemed like a real toss-up, but gosh, it was simpler here than in California. This year, California had a 6-page ballot, while Virginia only had one page. That’s because Virginia has elections every year, which lets Virginians tackle politics in bite-sized chunks!

After an hour hanging around the polls, I headed into DC proper, where I found a plaque on a wall near the White House that was super relevant to historic elections: Rhodes’ Tavern! In 1801, this was a town hall where DC residents petitioned for representation in Congress, which has evaded them ever since! The tavern was also a polling place in DC’s first city council election the following year and witnessed every inaugural parade from Jefferson to Reagan before finally being demolished in 1984. I hoped this wasn’t any kind of omen!

Part of my reason for coming into DC today was to see a newly opened national park site, the World War I Memorial! Somewhere in the gray area of my NPS filter, this was a long-overdue counterpart to the World War II Memorial I visited ten years ago, but which had been completed twenty years ago. This one was just finished on September 13th of this year, a collaboration between architect, Joe Weishaar, sculptor, Sabin Howard, and the DAVID RUBIN Land Collective. It was designed to honor the 116,516 U.S. soldiers who lost their lives in the so-called War to End All Wars!

Prominently situated at the memorial’s east end was a statue of John J. Pershing, namesake of LA’s Pershing Square and the only officer besides George Washington to carry the title of General of the Armies! After serving in the Spanish-American War, he led American forces into Europe’s Western Front in 1917 to ultimate Allied victory! Starting in 1923, he oversaw the creation of military cemeteries and memorials with the newly formed American Battle Monuments Commission, making his place in this Memorial (which began as Pershing Park in 1981) extra special!

Next to General Pershing was a long panel showing the key Allied movements along the War’s Western Front in France and Belgium. The US had waited to enter the War until 1917 when Russia withdrew and Germany promised to help Mexico reclaim land lost to the USA in 1848! It was a big mistake underestimating the US forces. It only took about six months for American troops to bring the Germans to heel, from first victory at Cantigny to the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the largest battle in US history, which resulted in Armistice at 11:00 AM on November 11, 1918, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, now commemorated as Veterans Day!

But the Memorial’s centerpiece, which just opened in September, is this bronze relief, The Soldier’s Journey by Sabin Howard. Even though there are 38 different figures spanning it, this relief shows the journey of one soldier, taking his helmet from his daughter, experiencing the horror and loss of war, then being lucky enough to return his helmet to his daughter at the end, all the while hinting of a darker sequel in upcoming decades. Surrounded by a beautiful reflecting pool, and backed by the brilliant colors of autumn, this memorial set the stage for Lastleaf, though it was going to be more contemplative than frolicsome.

I headed away from the Memorial, remembering all the news chatter of the last few months, I realized there was a lot at stake today, for LGBTQ+ folks, undocumented folks, and even businesses navigating the last few years’ soaring inflation! The votes determining who would guide these issues for the next four years were being cast right now, one by one, as I walked past the White House, now way more fortified than the last time I stood in front of it during the Obama administration. Since then, there’s been a lot of civil unrest, from 2018’s March for Our Lives protest to 2020’s Black Lives Matter rallies. More recently, the capitol riot of January 6, 2021 cast doubt on America’s traditionally peaceful transfers of power.

2014

2024

Sure enough, on the east end of the Mall, the U.S. Capitol had a solid barricade buffer to keep the public away from the bleachers being assembled for January’s inauguration. The mood around the mall was quiet, apprehensive. After all, the last election had seen over 2,000 people force their way into the Capitol, damaging the interior and hunting for those representatives they believed were trying to steal the election from Donald Trump. In short, when folks found out I was going to be in Washington, DC today, they told me to keep my head down and be careful!

2018

2024

I paused my Mall circuit in front of a very different kind of memorial, called “The Resolute Desk.” Unlike the World War I Memorial, honoring the ultimate sacrifice and the conversion of war into some form of peace, this bronze sculpture depicted a swirly pile of poo on an office desk. Its plaque honored “the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election.” Only permitted to be here through Election Day, this sculpture was a reminder that corruption and misinformation really stink and that voters had to decide whether they wanted to clean up the mess or just hold their noses!

I joined the Dinsdales for an election watch party that night, and as the numbers rose to 312 against 226 electoral votes, it became clear that America would be holding its nose the next four years. Maybe that will mean no riots next January, but it’s also left many vulnerable groups on edge, with all three branches of government now leaning against them. Regardless, this election proved to be historic, and surely the next chapter in the books will be an exciting read for folks fifty years from now! We’ll see what this means for beavers like me in the coming year. Stay tuned!

I vote to return home!