Inside Problems
We're still grappling with the impacts of slavery hundreds of years after the events at Harpers Ferry
Packing up for an early morning departure from Washington, DC. We decided to try and drive all the way back to Chicago in one day, mostly because my wife is itching to get home and catch up on work piling up while we were away. DC has been a hit in the few days we spent here. Tonight we had dinner at one of the many Ethiopian restaurants here. There are more Ethiopians here than anywhere outside of Ethiopia. For my family, it was a chance to visit a few of the many free museums, including the Holocaust and African-American museums. I mostly had to work, but got to enjoy a few public transit rides on the excellent Metro train system. The busses and trains are for the most part, clean and efficient. You can get around the city pretty fast, and DC is a perfect city to host the fleet of scooters and e-bikes from multiple vendors. Getting from one monument to another in this ultra-humid weather requires more walking than I’d like, and the concrete walkways and plazas seem ideal for mixed-mode travel. Earlier in the day, I went and had coffee in Silver Spring, Maryland with a colleague. I was expecting it to be a sleepy exurb of DC, but it was actually an urban mini-metropolis of its own, with its own regional transit hub and what looked like a new light rail system being built. And it has some excellent Ethiopian food as well.
A Brief Visit to Harpers Ferry, WV
This almost didn’t happen, except that I had been researching ways to get to DC by train, and it turns out both Amtrak and the Maryland commuter train both stop here. I vaguely recalled some sort of historic significance to this town in U.S. history. I convinced my party to allocate a day here rather than stay in Shenandoah for another day, and my plan was well worth it. I won’t get too deep into it, but basically the events that unfolded here set in motion what would become the Civil War between the north and south. An attempted raid on the armory here by John Brown and his crew to capture weapons to spur a slave revolt ended in the deaths of the rebels, and the eventual burning down of the armory to keep weapons out of the hands of the Confederate army. Aside from the historic significance, this town also sits at the confluence of several rivers and rail lines. It is an immensely beautiful and scenic area marked by tragic and horrific events.
I’m not sure why I didn’t take photos of the buildings, but maybe it’s because I felt a deep reverence for the town, almost like it was a frozen memorial to events that still confound our country today. There are many who feel like we are on the brink of another civil war for the soul of our country. I was also saddened to think that the repercussions of slavery still confound our attempts 200 years later to form a “more perfect union”.
I’ll just close with a callback to the juxtaposition between the urban metropolis that is our nation’s capital, and the challenges of the vast swaths of rural America that are left behind economically.
When we were in DC we ate at an Ethiopian restaurant, I don’t remember which one, and were not impressed, and I thought I just didn’t like the cuisine. But I’ve done well at every Ethiopian restaurant since, including one I especially liked in Sioux Falls.
I also justness today that the grain, teff, used to make injera is being touted as the next quinoa style super grain in the US.