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Ill Wind of Change

© Eugenia E. Gratto

When I started writing this column, my goal was to highlight things I love about the city in which I live and work.

“Whether you're planning a visit to the Washington, D.C. area or if you're a resident looking for some of the best this area has to offer, you've come to the right place. Stop by regularly to read my articles on living (and playing!) in Washington D.C.,” I said in my introductory paragraph. I envisioned this site as a place where I would be able to show off what’s fun and good about the city, where I could recommend places to go and tell stories about things that happen here.

Since September 11, however, things have most certainly changed.

This is still a fun city. There is no doubt that there are wonderful things to do here, beautiful monuments and museums to visit, amazing cultural experiences that aren’t available anywhere else.

But it has also become a city pulsing with sirens and the thwock-thwock-thwock of helicopter blades. The Metro police is much more visible these days, standing on the upper levels of stations scanning the people waiting on the train platforms below.

I had a plan to write about ghost tours and Halloween events. I wanted to write about places to take a beautiful Fall hike. But I sit down to write about these things, and they still seem a little too trivial in the wake of what has happened.

I continue to arm myself with information. I walk that tightrope between utter calm and sheer panic, balanced by knowledge gleaned from obsessive browsing of washingtonpost.com. But there small hands tug at me, teeter me toward fear.

This morning, for example, as I walked from Union Station to my organization’s building, I noticed a police officer guarding a gate blocking the sidewalk on North Capitol Street between D and E Streets. Beyond him, up on the grass next to the sidewalk, two men in gas masks and gloves decontaminated something. I couldn’t see what they were working on, exactly, and I took small comfort in the fact that the police officer wasn’t wearing protective gear. I assume they knew what I didn’t—that whatever they were decontaminating just feet away from me and the rest of the crowd waiting for the light to change wasn’t going to cause spores to float through the air toward us.

“That’s comforting,” I said, gesturing toward the hazmat workers with my head.

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