A personal essay originally published in "District Lines, vol. 2."

I have a confession to make: I’ve never seen The West Wing. I never pictured myself in the White House or on Capitol Hill. I don’t head down to the Mall to sit at Lincoln’s big bronze feet when I’m looking for inspiration. I don’t feel like an addict in detox if I go a few days without reading Politico. I’m not a political junkie. In fact, I never really wanted to move to Washington. There, I said it.

For four years, I had the good sense not to admit that I was living in D.C. on a whim, not a dream. I knew I was in the minority among my fellow idealistic, ambitious twenty-somethings in this town. There were no stars in my eyes when I looked down on the Capitol each time I flew into National Airport. I still managed to live a number of stereotypes in my time here, with stints in journalism, grad school, at a think tank, and at an embassy. I loved all of these experiences, for the most part. But they weren’t antidotes to the apathy I felt towards the looming, white, neoclassical buildings that had my peers hearing strains of John Phillips Sousa.

No, it took three months of Ward 1 ANC meetings to make me fall in love with the District.

Perhaps I should explain.

* * *

I spent my second summer in Washington near Farragut Square in a climate-controlled office with the shades perpetually drawn, poking around the Internet reading local blogs in an attempt to put my finger on the pulse of this city, to find out what made people come here and stay here. After a year living in the farther reaches of Connecticut Avenue, I knew enough to know that the answer lay not along nearby K Street or on the Hill, but somewhere deeper in the heart of the city. And I was getting closer and closer to finding it every Sunday afternoon that I spent meandering through the streets of Northwest D.C., watching one neighborhood give way to the next.

Ostensibly, my search for the District’s heartbeat was a research study I was conducting on Washington’s local media for a think tank project that analyzed how today’s media serves the democratic needs of citizens. As I burrowed into the blogosphere, I began to stumble upon some answers. There was the blogger behind JD Land, who lived in Navy Yard before Yards Park and Stephen Strasburg arrived and chronicled its development as it unfolded. There was the self-proclaimed “prince” of the hyperlocal blogosphere himself, who started wandering around his neighborhood of Petworth years back and soon began exploring the city’s farther reaches.

There was a twenty-something who arrived in Columbia Heights not long before the Target at DC USA and blogs about his neighborhood’s latest in his free time. An urban planner who keeps a watchful eye over Fairfax Village and Hillcrest, one of the few public voices trying to hold Ward 7 accountable.

Who were these bloggers? Did they go to Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) meetings? Did their readers? As I set out to uncover the answers to these admittedly obscure questions, little did I know I was about to get a crash course in the local history of a neighborhood that I had never lived in, and in fact hardly set foot in.

* * *

After a summer browsing blogs, I settled on Columbia Heights as the subject of my ensuing master’s thesis mostly because it was on the other end of the H2, which came all the way up to Van Ness, where I lived. I chose it, too, because it is a truly diverse neighborhood, in more ways than one; with newly arriving Hispanic families, long-resident African-American retirees, and hipster 20-somethings, the population is nothing if not varied. And so were the media these people all consumed, which gave me an easy starting point for my thesis research.

My real research began with a walk on foot up 16th Street one gorgeous, sunny Sunday afternoon in the early fall. Starting at the White House, I followed 16th all the way up to Meridian Hill Park. I traveled about two and half miles, but it felt like decades, and in many ways it was.

The original landed gentry of Meridian Hill, Mary Foote Henderson and her senator husband, looked down upon the site of the White House and thought it ought to move uphill to a more elevated location. She had plans drawn up for an ornate presidential mansion, but her lobbying proved fruitless. This was before the embassies came to 16th, before they decamped for Embassy Row, and long before the riots ravaged its neighboring corridor, 14th Street.

Mrs. Henderson lived in Columbia Heights when it was affluent and attractive, perched at the upper edge of the city with an elevation that caught whatever breezes there were to catch in Washington in the days before central air. It was from stately homes with state-of-the-art plumbing and electricity that Congressmen and their wives looked down on the same Washington Monument that I’ve gazed at from the balcony or rooftop of many an overcrowded house party. Meridian Hill Park was Mrs. Henderson’s elegant consolation prize for not getting a new White House. Who can imagine what she would have thought of the drum circle that meets there now each weekend?

But the thought of Mrs. Henderson’s White House still echoes nearby. As I finished my walk that day, I cut through Adams Morgan and up 18th Street, where I paused upon passing the mural of the White House on the side of a building, the one that reads, “If you lived here, you’d be home by now, but you still couldn’t vote.”

 * * *

The first ANC meeting I went to was a discussion on public safety in South Columbia Heights. It was held in a subsidized housing complex on the corner of 13th and Fairmount, and I was the first one to arrive. The meeting room could only be properly described as a rec room; there were no windows, a few sagging couches, several large tables pushed together. I perched awkwardly on the edge of a couch to watch the TV in the corner. It felt like a hospital waiting room.

A youngish guy from D.C. government was next to arrive, and we sat there not talking for just long enough that it felt awkward when one of us broke the silence. It turned out that, like me, he was originally from Massachusetts, but had been in the District long enough to have abandoned his Mass. driver’s license, which was then the barometer against which I measured my regional identity. Others followed, including one who came with his own personal business cards, handed out to everyone, which incidentally specified no particular trade. I remember little of the meeting itself, but everyone in attendance filled out my research surveys while waiting for a late-arriving public official. Mission accomplished. 

* * *

Other meetings I attended were more colorful, with the most memorable one having taken place on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday morning during the weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This one was a meeting of the Pleasant Plains Civic Association, a sub-neighborhood within Columbia Heights that had long been home to a majority African-American population, and the dozen or so people in attendance all appeared to be residents of many years.

I was a minority in every sense in that room – a young, white woman from New England with less than a year and a half in the District behind me – but I was there to observe and to learn and to pass out surveys to friendly people who insisted I eat some of their potluck lunch.

I took a plate of food while I waited to make my announcement, but first, there was a tradition to observe: a dramatic reading of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which segued seamlessly into a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” – seamlessly enough to tell this was something of a tradition.

I can’t pretend I became more of a local that day, but it was a glimpse into a community I would not have experienced otherwise. And as far as my research went, it was clear that “community engagement” would mean something different to the residents of Pleasant Plains than it did to the 20-something blogger who arrived just before Target.

* * *

I went to a handful of other ANC meetings that winter and spring, and interviewed a few neighborhood bloggers. I listened to restaurant owners make their case for liquor licenses and heard a local candidate make his pitch to voters. It seemed like I spent the rest of that semester riding the H2 or the Circulator back and forth between 14th Street and Connecticut Avenue, or sequestered in a Georgetown computer lab trying to run the statistics that would help me make sense of it all.

April came, and when my thesis was due, I submitted it, defended it, passed. I graduated, but I wasn’t done with D.C.

* * *

It was more than two years after I arrived in D.C. that I found myself standing in line outside the DMV on Branch Avenue at an ungodly hour of a Saturday morning. It was more than three years by the time I waited even longer outside Oyster-Adams Bilingual School to cast my ballot in a national election, finally a registered voter in the District. And it was almost four years later that I took my youngest friend in the city to the Fro-Zen-Yo in Tivoli Plaza for a farewell dessert.

* * *

A year and a half after I finished my thesis, I again found myself a regular on the Circulator to Columbia Heights. Every Saturday morning I went to Tubman Elementary to read with my 10-year-old partner as part of a program organized by 826DC, a community writing center I’d come across through my research. I loved riding the bus through the city at that hour, seeing each neighborhood as it awoke, across Calvert Street into Adams Morgan, down Columbia Road to Mt. Pleasant, and into Columbia Heights by way of 14th Street – all the streets emptier and more peaceful than they’d been ten hours before.

The most surprising part of the morning, every week, was the sight of fifty kids pouring through the doors of the cafeteria all at once to meet up with their tutors. With energy that could only be fueled by sugary cereal and early morning cartoons, they put up a unified front against which the tutors’ half-drunk cups of coffee were no match.

But it was hard to feel sluggish for long. Books in hand, my student would lead me around the school’s courtyard garden before we sat down to read. “Smell this,” she’d instruct as she pointed out the lavender her class had planted. “Touch this,” she’d say, fingering the fuzzy leaves of the aloe plants she’d studied. She took pride in pointing out her picture on the wall that marked perfect attendance, and naming all her classmates who’d earned the same.

At the end of the last day that I read with her, I took her and a friend for frozen yogurt, to say goodbye, but also, in a way, thanks – for showing me yet another sliver of Columbia Heights, another side of D.C.

* * *

Months after leaving the District, I miss the neighborhoods where I used to live. The coffee shops where I hung out for hours. The bus routes I knew so well. But I don’t miss the tourists who poured out of the Metro near my apartment; the transient diplomats I encountered on Embassy Row; the academics who flew down from Cambridge to speak on a panel; or the journalists who took the Acela from New York to do the same. I miss running into old coworkers during brunch at Meridian Pint, and long walks up 16th Street. I miss glimpsing the Washington Monument from a roofdeck at twilight.

Recently, I was talking to a woman who was about to move from Massachusetts to D.C. for the second time. I tuned out what she had to say about her job at the State Department, but when she told me she used to volunteer at 826DC, I got excited. The coincidence didn’t seem to mean much to her – she was still someone who shuttled back and forth between Boston and D.C. She still held both cities in her mind at once, whereas I could already feel them sliding farther and farther apart.

On a Saturday in September, I woke up in a suburb of Boston, got in my car, and sleepily headed for the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts. It occurred to me that at that same time, someone else would be walking down Irving Street towards Tubman Elementary. A different D.C. transplant would be picking out a book to read in the school library, but the same old man would probably be hopping on the Circulator on Mt. Pleasant Street.

The District I’d left was different from the city I’d arrived in. I flash my D.C. driver’s license with the same pride I’d once shown for my Massachusetts one. And I still made it out without watching a single episode of The West Wing.