Friday, June 15, 2018
By:
Multiple times this past week, I have felt like a spectator to others’ stories.
On Tuesday, the Washington Capitals held their victory parade. I got lucky: I was going to a series of events downtown that day, and the parade just happened to be in the right place and at the right time for me to stop by. So I ambled over to the parade route, accidentally finding myself in a good viewing spot just in time to see the crowd totally lose it as Alexander Ovechkin raised the Stanley Cup above his head. I was swept up in the energy of the moment, but I also felt like an outsider. I had never been to a victory parade of any of the teams I grew up with, yet here I was, less than two weeks into my first long-term stay in another city, celebrating their first major sports championship in 20 years. I took a video for good measure. Then I kept walking.
My next stop that day was a kickoff talk for the publication of a 40th anniversary report on the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences division (Sorry if that was a mouthful! I’m slowly becoming numb to acronyms and department names). Anyways: the report itself was written by a half dozen Department of Energy scientists and administrators, who were all there to present their work. They talked about the technology BES has helped develop over the years, from quantum computers to superconducting magnets to these things called SQUIDS, which apparently measure very small magnetic fields. The point of the report was to advocate for funding for BES, as made clear when attendees started advising the authors to shorten their summary “because Congressional staffers are dumb” (in the words of a Congressional staffer). Again, I felt like a spectator. The report’s authors had all flown in to Washington to present months of hard work, and most of the audience seemed to be well-connected to DOE world in one way or another; meanwhile I quietly sat in the back, writing notes, eating fruit, and taking it all in. The event, strangely enough, was held at a lobbyist’s office.
The next day, I took a run and found myself outside the White House. It was a warm summer night. Fireflies flickered in Lafayette Park, a place that I now know exists. Several police officers, a lone activist for unclear causes, and a few dozen tourists loitered quietly. All the politics, all the symbolic resonance of the White House was certainly present, but it also felt surprisingly distant. It was just a beautiful public space on a warm summer night.
Nathan Foster