The Capital Hills
Away From Cars and Concrete, Urban Hikers Discover Fresh Views Of a Monumentally Pretty City

Steve Coleman, Don Briggs and Roza Oblak slosh along Langston Golf Course during the Washington Ridge hike. (Andrea Bruce Woodall - The Washington Post)

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 11, 2003; Page C01

They have been hiking across the city for two days -- in the rain, through ankle-deep mud, across raging streams -- and now they pause atop a hill and behold Washington spread at their feet:

The Capitol and the monuments like ivory sculpture. The blocky office buildings set in a froth of green foliage. The rivers swollen and brown. Hills rising and melting into gray infinity.

The vantage point for this stunning vista usually goes unmentioned in tourist guides. For most people visiting Washington, and many who live here, it is a secret. It's the view from the parking lot of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Anacostia.

"Everybody likes this overlook," says a lady in a blue dress getting into her car after church. "It's home. I live in Virginia, but my whole family lives here. This is home."

The hikers get out their cameras. "There's the HUD building," says one. "I work in the HUD building."

Steve Coleman, the visionary instigator of this crazy mission last weekend -- this "cockeyed" idea of walking nearly 20 miles from the Potomac River along a curving ridge that shapes the city -- can't help smiling. Discovering secret vistas like this, and talking to the people for whom each place is "home" -- that is the point.

The point is to discover that there are many ways of looking at Washington.

"People always talk about the 'other' side of the river," Coleman says. "Now look at the 'other' side of the river. It's over there."

He points at the monuments, then continues:

"What's cool about these sights along the ridge is they're the natural Washington monuments. You don't have to buy a ticket and stand in line. You just have to come to these communities along the ridge and see the city from a whole new perspective."

'A Grace and a Flow to It'

Remember when geology mattered? Remember when physical space was something to be reckoned with?

Remember hills?

Sometime in the last century, the lay of the land ceased to have relevance. Humans could go over, under or around any barrier.

Now doomsayers grumble that we have lost touch with nature. They're usually talking about big Nature -- Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Shenandoah. They count cities as part of the problem.

But what about urban nature, the physical city -- the city shaped by the land?

In our cars and our Metro, we may have forgotten Washington is not a flat city. We may not have figured out that vast sections of the District can be traversed in dense forest -- and not just the marquee woods of Rock Creek Park.

The people who designed the city knew all this (even if they did try to fill the valleys and trim the hills) and took advantage of topography to create a city of views and refuges.

"The original geography [of Washington] has a grace and a flow to it," says architect Don A. Hawkins, who is making a map of the hills and streambeds of pre-development Washington. "The 20th century geography is nervous."

But one reason for the two-day hike called the "Washington Ridge Crossing" was to revel in the quirks that escaped the bulldozer. The route roughly followed the rim of the bowl that encircles the center of the city. Washington was like a jewel that kept coming into view from different angles.

The other reason was sociological. By walking from neighborhood to neighborhood, could you suggest that barriers having nothing to do with geology can be overcome as well?

"If we can make the connection on a physical level, maybe we can connect on a human level," Coleman says after descending the hill from Howard University to the McMillan Reservoir. "Maybe we can be one city. That's the quixotic question here."

A Scenic Walk in the Rain

Somewhere dawn has just broken but it is impossible to tell in the driving rain on the bank of the Potomac River on Saturday morning. Coleman scoops up some river water in a spice bottle and puts it in his backpack.

The Adams Morgan resident shows no disappointment that a grand total of six people have showed up at Fletcher's Boathouse, upstream from Georgetown, for this journey of discovery. Last year, during the debut ridge crossing hike in fair weather, 300 people walked parts of the route. Coleman, head of Washington Parks & People, and Cultural Tourism D.C., the co-sponsor, hope this will become a twice-a-year event and have scheduled another for October.

Feeling like the comically doomed tour group in "Gilligan's Island," the hikers fold their umbrellas and duck into a culvert that tunnels under Canal Road, scramble up the bank and set out across W Street NW, the beginning of the escarpment.

Nothing like a 12-hour urban monsoon to teach lessons about physical reality that you'd rather not learn. Springtime mud is cold between your toes. Wet clay is more slippery than ice. Dirt trails like the ones in Glover Archbold Park quickly become tributaries of mud.

It's not all miserable. The light is mother-of-pearl and green, and the raindops strafing the tree canopy sound amplified and musical in the deep cathedral hollows of the forest.

"Our crossing is flooded," Coleman announces, redundantly.

They splash across a stream.

Soon they pop out of the woods onto the streets of Adams Morgan. All the way from the Potomac they've had to walk only a few blocks of asphalt.

The first great views of the city come near Meridian Hill Park and Cardozo High School at the southern edge of Columbia Heights. This ridge helped shape the city: Pierre L'Enfant placed the northern border of the original capital at what is now Florida Avenue NW, because it was at the ridge's base. Later efforts to smooth out the incline to make way for 16th, 15th, 14th and 13th streets NW have not erased the drama of the city revealing itself as the land drops nearly 200 feet.

Some new hikers join the group, including Roza Oblak, who works with Coleman, and Don Briggs, superintendent of the Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail for the National Park Service. Others begin to call it a day. Rhonda Sincavage, a preservation lobbyist who lives on Capitol Hill, peels off when they reach the National Shrine.

"When you travel by Metro, you pop in one area and you get to know the neighborhood around the station," she says. "This is nice to see how the neighborhoods are connected and how the trails connect in bits and pieces. You don't think of walking to Fletcher's Boathouse, but you can do it."

But the rain washes away any hope for sociological connection. All streets are deserted.

Gently rolling Brookland descends to the gritty industrial plain of Ivy City, the portal into the green groves of the National Arboretum -- three completely different universes the hikers experience in just 45 minutes.

As the hikers reach the top of 200-plus-foot Mount Hamilton in the Arboretum, through a tunnel in the thick tree canopy, the Capitol comes into view. Just the Capitol, a classical dome out of context, like a slide in an architecture class projected on a forest.

Nature has one more lesson when the hikers reach the Anacostia River. The current is swift from the rain and the channel is choked with logs. It's too dangerous for the boat that was to ferry them across.

Bummer.

Coleman tries to find a moral: "It's good for us to learn a little respect."

But they must cross the river.

The words "get a cab" cross Coleman's lips.

But that would be wrong.

They detour through a hole in a fence onto the 15th fairway of Langston Golf Course. They hike past geese swimming in sand traps and a turtle lounging beside a puddle and trudge across Benning Bridge, with cars racing by and a Metro train gliding overhead.

It's past 6 p.m. and the last hikers abandon the journey and catch a Metro home. Coleman is left to complete Day 1 -- following Watts Branch Park across far Northeast to the Capitol Heights Metro station in Maryland -- alone with his thoughts and someone carrying a notebook soggy as a sponge.

Was this a bad idea?

Coleman ducks into Campbell's Barber Shop. The place is hopping. Music blasting. Four barber chairs filled and people waiting. John Campbell, a friend of Coleman's, is one of the pillars of this neighborhood.

The barber greets the hiker with a bear hug and invites him to the neighborhood fish fry he hosts every June, "the best fried fish this side of the river!"

Connection at last.

Not Just 'the Same Old D.C.'

The next morning no one shows up at the rendezvous in a park near the Minnesota Avenue Metro station.

Coleman is crushed.

"Oh no. Am I just crazy?" he says. "Because this is a cockeyed thing to do."

He walks back to the station . . . and perks up when he sees a dozen hikers heading his way! Another half dozen join later.

"This is a side of D.C. I've never seen before," says Maria Bertacchi of Falls Church, who works in product development for MCI, joined by her husband, Andy Smythe, a defense consultant. "I was interested in seeing something besides the same old D.C."

All the hikers live in the city west of the Anacostia River or in the suburbs.

"This part I wouldn't visit," says Bernie Berne of Arlington, a medical reviewer for the Food & Drug Administration. "I'm afraid to take this trail by myself."

From the upper Northeast corner of the city down to Southeast near the Suitland Parkway, the hikers are able to stay mainly on trails linking the sites of Civil War forts built on the tops of 200-foot hills -- Fort Dupont, Fort Stanton and so on. They've been turned into parks overlooking the city. But in the woods there is no evidence this is a city. They hear the song of a wood thrush -- a bird you find in dense forest.

Every once in a while, they emerge onto streets for a block or two. There are small well-kept houses. The sound of a baby crying comes from a garden apartment. Church is still in session, and they hear snatches of fiery sermons as they pass one house of worship after another.

"Just as God is the creator of the Earth . . . Satan is real as well!"

"God has something for you. Surprise! 'I got something for you you didn't think you needed!' "

On some blocks weeds are growing through the windows of abandoned apartments, and some houses are reduced to burned-out shells. But next door will be a neat brick Victorian with flowers and a lawn groomed like a putting green.

The Frederick Douglass Home overlooks the city. The hikers sit on the front porch and one invites the rest to imagine looking down on the Capitol from the angle of a freed slave.

Douglass knew about walking the city. He used to walk to work at the Recorder of Deeds office in Judiciary Square, Coleman says. Down the hill and across the river to the other side.

Church is letting out. People are curious about the rag-tag column. They smile when they hear the cockeyed idea of walking across the city.

"I'm glad you decided to come to this side," says the parking lot security guard at Union Temple Baptist Church in Anacostia.

"It's good for them to be hiking through here," says Carolyn Johns Gray, president of the Frederick Douglass Community Improvement Council. "It helps in two ways. They get a chance to see us, and people from other parts of the city see there's nothing to fear in coming here."

Lunch was supposed to be at Cole's Cafe on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Mama Cole does not always open her place on Sundays, but Coleman had arranged with her for the hikers to eat there. But there has been a mix-up, and Cole's is closed.

It's the only restaurant in Anacostia.

A lesson in sociological reality.

"One of our major concerns, you can see, is restaurants here," says Bernard A. Gray Sr., Carolyn's husband.

So the hikers join the crowd outside Union Temple and buy homemade fish rolls and chocolate chip cookies from a resident who has set up a stand. Coleman also calls Oblak on his cell phone, and she Metro-lifts a pizza in from Adams Morgan.

There's one more hill to climb.

They hike up MLK Boulevard to the locked gates of St. Elizabeths Hospital. Coleman has obtained permission for the group to be allowed inside the deserted west campus. The remaining patients are across the street. Winding drives pass overgrown shrubs and an old tennis court. The red-brick main building with tall turrets looks like a haunted castle. A ring-neck snake slithers across the path. A resident herd of deer is hiding somewhere, according to a security guard.

From a promontory with battered park benches the hikers can take in the breadth of the city from Hains Point to the National Shrine, the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, the edge cities of Virginia to the hills of Maryland. They can see the ridge where they walked, and with a little imagination they can pick out the bend in the Potomac that must contain Fletcher's Boathouse.

The best view of Washington, under lock and key. Another secret.

The city looks . . . small, intimate. Places don't seem so far away when you have walked there.

They hike back down to the shore of the Anacostia at Poplar Point, near the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge. The fishermen listen to the cockeyed idea. "That's a long walk," they say. Waves gently lap the river wall, plastic cups float by.

Coleman takes his spice bottle of Potomac River water out of his backpack. Most of it has leaked out, but there are a couple tablespoons left.

"We're trying to enlarge the sense of what is home," he says. "Here's putting the water back where it belongs."

He slowly pours the Potomac into the Anacostia.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company