SEP-B-6
FURTHER STORMY WEATHER FLOODS THE
BATTERED DC AREA, AND DERWOOD’S DOWNED TREES,
WITH DESTRUCTION OF TWO OF THE PLACES
WHERE I HAD SPENT MOST
OF MY LAST THREE DECADES:
GWU HOSPITAL AND DERWOOD HOMEBASE:
WITH CONSTRUCTION BEGUN IN THE LATTER,
AS I ATTEMPT TO RETURN TO RUNNING,
THE ELDP PROGRAM STARTS UP—READY OR NOT—
AND I DO A WASHINGTON POST INTERVIEW
September 21--24, 2003
As I write this note, the DC area has still not returned to normal, with 700,000 people still without power. The traffic jams are unnerving with my commuting time to DC having edged up to a three and a half hour crawl, since there are many traffic lights out and the police are still directing traffic at some of them. I noticed that they had brought in mounted police to do the job since they are more visible at an intersection. The flooded intersections from torrential rains that have followed the Hurricane Isabel destruction have made the commute more dangerous along the Potomac and Monocracy Rivers and delayed the return of the city toward a normal schedule suspended for four days not yet possible. Freezers had failed everywhere and the stuff inside must be disposed of. There were convoys of Georgia Power and Light, and Detroit Edison trucks coming to the area, and retired Pepco personnel were put into service, supervising the newcomers as they have tried to spend another week putting lines back together. The first things they had done were to distribute dry ice, but that is a lost cause now.
At Derwood, the freezer and electric power are still on, but the telephone lines were knocked down—even though they are not being used. Ernie Shifflett tree service has not yet come on out since they are still dealing with emergencies to get people untrapped. When they do come, they will have to get out the big tree that was sheared off thirty feet off the ground when it “crowned” right next to the house and over where the breakfast room will be, preventing anyone from getting to that area where the foundations for the breakfast room and the deck would be. The progress outside the house includes a daily series of higher courses that the brick layers are putting down so that the most recent view, which I have photographed in sequence, shows the walls for the garage3 and storage room in the basement nearly complete. Inside, the tubs are gone and it appears that the last of the demolition has been done with the entire destruction of all the bathrooms and kitchen and the pulling down of all ceilings, wall covers, some walls and all fixtures. The most recent developments have been the interior carpentry has framed out and put up the studs of the master bedroom and its walk-in closet and the expanded master bathroom.
Ironically, the first call I got after the return to the office came in on my cell phone (now how do you think he might have got that number and tried to catch me so persistently despite my ignoring each previous call on my message service?) “Hello, this is Jim Hoffman, and I am eager to meet you to take only a few minutes of your time for which you will be very glad you did, since I am going to make you a multimillionaire; I have been going over the County land records, and I am going to develop your property at Candlewood.” I told him I had ignored similar calls from him and others before for a reason, and if he had any idea what was going on now he would see why. Big time development was already going on, but it was not as cluster development of townhouses in high density, but as the heavy investment in a single family home with preservation of the wooded estate. Big money indeed—but, unfortunately from my perspective—the sign is negative, not the cash jackpot he assures me that would be coming my way from his eager representations of my interests. Besides, if he looked at it now, the property is impenetrable without a chain saw, since Hurricane usable had dropped many of my trees, including the tricentennial oaks.
“Well, when you change your mind—as you will later—since it is inevitable you will—this is the choicest piece of prime real estate left in Montgomery County, and you are very lucky to be sitting on it in a very beautiful spot!”
Thanks a whole lot. Maybe he has mistaken me for prior residents who had represented themselves as the owners and eager developers of their own, and perhaps that is how he had got my unlisted cell phone number.
DEMOLITION IN DC AND DERWOOD
Two entities in my life where I have spent uncounted hours are going down in a dramatic crush of cement and steel. As I watch, the George Washington University Hospital is being razed with a wrecking ball and a giant “PacMan” like machine that
Takes giant bites out of each floor structural steel and all. Crowds gather on the streets to watch the ball falling inexorably until the floors crash beneath it. I remember events that occurred in each of the waiting areas where I had come down to see families after an operation—“Crash!”—down would come 4 South; the place where I had run to resuscitate someone in cardiac arrest—“Boom!”—there went the OR where I had removed Evelyn Pyle’s pheochromocytoma—“Bang!” Ah, yes—it does not pay for me to be anywhere where the memories of my one third century in DC and Derwood are going up in dust and rubble!
THE START OF RECONSTRUCTION—
EVEN AS THE FALLEN TREES ARE PILED HIGH,
AND FURTHER DEMOLITION IS STILL
IN PROGRESS
I saw lots of two by fours stacked up against the house as I came to pick up the mail each day of the last week near home. I knew that the upstairs bathrooms had been torn out in their entirety for which the dumpster hade been pulled around in front of the house to accommodate the later stages of the rubble. What I saw in the last two stages was a lot of sawdust upstairs and the smell of newly ripped wood. The framing and studs were inserted in the new walk-in closet and the new master bedroom, and successively, the nearly finished interior skeleton of the master bedroom appeared to be completed. At the same time, the back of the house had the A/S unit moved to the side, and the oil tank still in position. The first row of cement block from the large truckload that was dropped off the day after Hurricane Isabel by chainsawing through the debris that now covers the canoe and the area of the shed were put down before the rains came again. The next day the garage walls were almost completed, and half the storage room was also laid in blocks. The under story of the deck and breakfast room are impeded by the presence of the large logs of fallen trees above the site. But, it appears that the new timetable for completion of many parts is being overlapped so as to make up for some of the lost time from the delay in permits and now, the disruption of the Hurricane Isabel tree destruction.
I have tried to return to running. Each day I had noted that the commuting was taking longer and longer, as the days were getting shorter and shorter. The autumnal equinox arrived the day I started the ELDP program, so I decided that I could not run around at home, and would have to start up in my visits to the WHC, and did so each day, running around the various sites of storm damage at DC I will try to get in at least one long run before I leave for Sikkim, which may be all I can do since the Marine Corps Marathon will follow upon my return, and I have been essentially a non-runner all summer.
ELDP—
THE START OF A NEW GRADUATE PROGRAM IN THE ASHBURN VA CAMPUS OF GWU—THE
EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP DOCTORAL PROGRAM
With both bookstores and libraries closed along with the whole of GWU closed down for the Hurricane Isabel warnings, I could not get any of the assigned readings done before class, and now am far behind even before starting. I will have to read and type up papers with my reactions to the contents of several books in this class, which is the first of the group I have to take to be part of the Cohort 16—the sixteenth class of those graduating with the EdD. I do not know if I can make it through the distance, but at least it is an interesting group of people for various backgrounds—the head of Marriott Training Worldwide, the chief of New Jersey State Police training, the executives of various businesses and a couple of folk from GWU—the law school and at least two others from satellite offices of medicine who are looking to their retirement jobs given their new degree, which for the younger ones would be an automatic boost into the leadership cadre and probably the CEO position of even very big firms.
A CALL FROM A WASHINGTON POST REPORTER
REGARDIKNG PALEOLITHIC NUTIRTIONO AND CULTURE
Guy Gugliotta called me from the Post to say he had interviewed me before on the subject of iodine and cretinism, but wanted to know my opinions on a new piece appearing in Science on the early Britons shifting from fishing to animal husbandry in a relatively short time to give them a reliable source of protein. I tried to find him the articles I had written on this subject—which, as it seems almost all mine are—remains unpublished, and therefore unfindable. They are no less unfindable in my boxes and files in at least the buried strata of three or more spots—the attic at Derwood or basement file cases; the even more buried office boxes and impenetrable files, or wherever I have parked my head any time recently—nowhere consistently. I found a few of the items which were couriered over to him, and I will see what he quotes when the others arrive for his information base for the story.
My next weekend is going to be used making a quick trip to Iowa to work out the arrangement of multiple details including the vehicle I may be able to use to substitute for the Bronco if I deliver that to Michigan on one of the fall hunting trips. There is also a session coming up in Cumberland Island for which Donald has been invited, but with a deadline of the finalization of the application from the end of the participants I had pre-registered, I will see if any or all respond to this last call to the hunt.