A Weekend in Washington

Fri 19	Bonnie arrives.
Sat 20	The Mall, on scooters. The Reflecting Pool.
Sun 21	Pride on the Mall with Leo. Packing.
Mon 22	Delta to Atlanta, Atlanta to Cape Town.

Bonnie flew in on Friday, and for two days we were tourists in my own city, which is a strange and pleasant thing to be. Saturday we did the Mall on scooters. I should say here that I am not a casual scooter user. I own three of them, which is at least one more than a reasonable person owns, and I have been meaning to sell one for some time now. I can ride a standing scooter through a crowd the way other people walk through one. Bonnie could not, and the Mall that Saturday was packed. She wanted to go slowly, which is the correct instinct and also the one that makes a scooter hardest to ride — they are steadiest with a little speed under them. So we threaded along at a walking pace, stopping and starting, until we got near the Reflecting Pool and gave up entirely. We parked them and walked.

The Pool

I had wanted to see it for myself. That was the whole reason we went down there. It was green. Thick, clotted, unmistakably green, with the paint peeling off the bottom in sheets of blue — and this was a pool that had been renovated, at enormous expense, a few weeks earlier. It was not reflecting anything. Park Service crews were working it with vacuums, and had been for days. And while we were standing there, we watched them arrest somebody.

The Reflecting Pool, June 2026

The renovation was finished in the first week of June: the bottom waterproofed, the joints sealed, the whole thing repainted “American flag blue.” The President had said it could be done for under two million dollars. The final bill was more than seven times that.

Within days the water went green. Crews tried hydrogen peroxide and so-called nanobubble technology; the algae stayed. Dead ducks were found in and around the pool, and the Center for Biological Diversity called for an investigation into whether the chemicals, the peeling paint, or the bloom itself had killed them.

The administration's explanation was vandalism. The President said, without producing evidence, that vandals had wrecked the pool — that a 250-foot section had been cut with a blade, that chemicals had been poured into the water. Five people were arrested and five more cited. One of the arrested men told CNN that what he had actually done was touch a piece of the blue lining that was already peeling off.

For what it is worth, I do not believe those people wrecked anything. The paint was coming off because the paint was coming off, and the algae was there because the algae was there, and somebody wanted a different answer. I am not going to litigate it here. But I had read the claims and I wanted to stand in front of the thing and see the condition of it with my own eyes, and now I have, and the condition of it was green.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, freshly renovated at a cost of more than sixteen million dollars, reflecting nothing at all.

The World War II Memorial, a few hundred feet away. Same city, same week, same weather. Clear water.

Sunday

Sunday we had lunch with Leo at the Wharf, at Du Jour, which is his favorite place. Then the three of us rode to the Mall for Pride. On three scooters. I would like the record to show that this is precisely why a person owns three scooters, and that I have not been meaning to sell one since Sunday.

Du Jour, on the Wharf. Leo and his cappuccino; Bonnie and something with an orange twist in it.

Bonnie and Leo, catching up. One frame of a bad video — but it is them, and they are moving.

Pride, and the Capitol at the end of the street. We rode there on three scooters.

Twelve and a Half Kilos

Then we went home and packed, and packing was the hardest thing we did all weekend. The bush planes have a weight limit, because the bush planes are small. One soft-sided bag, thirty-three pounds. One small bag, eleven. Forty-four pounds total, for three weeks — which, written down like that, is not actually as brutal as it sounds. Rigid suitcases are simply not allowed; they do not fit in the hold of an airplane that size. What made it hard was that I had no scale. So I did what you do when you cannot measure a thing and are afraid of it: I overcorrected. I took exactly one pair of shoes, and I took them by wearing them. One pair of jeans. A few pairs of shorts, which I carried nine thousand miles and never once put on. Because here is what nobody expects: it is winter down there. June and July are the cold months in southern Africa, and a morning in the bush starts somewhere near freezing and stays there until the sun gets up over the trees. So on top of the one pair of jeans I needed a sweatshirt, and on top of the sweatshirt I needed a coat. I found out later that everything I owned came to twelve and a half kilos. The allowance was twenty. I had spent an entire evening agonizing over a budget I then underspent by a third — and the only thing I truly did not need was the shorts. Monday we left. Delta to Atlanta, Atlanta to Cape Town. We flew Premium Something. I have never been able to keep Delta's tiers straight — Comfort, Premium Select, whatever the marketing department settled on that year — but the shape of it is clear enough: it is one step down from business and several steps up from the back. The seat reclines a little further than an economy seat and nothing like far enough. You are not lying down. You are leaning, at an angle that suggests sleep without ever quite delivering it, for fifteen hours. What we did have was the bulkhead, and the bulkhead is worth more than the recline. No seat in front of you means no seat back coming at your knees, and legs that can go where legs want to go. I would take a bulkhead in economy over a middle seat anywhere. Somewhere over the Atlantic the trip stopped being a thing we had planned and became a thing that was happening.