More About Weird and Wonderful Washington, DC (or, Wait, There's More Weirdness?!? There's More Weirdness!)

So.  I told you in my last entry that I'd be back in a day or two.  I should've said I'd be back in a week or two.  Actually, it's been a month and a day.  

But what's time when one is experiencing a pandemic?  A day or two stretches into a month pretty quickly.  

Sometimes a day or two stretches into what feels like a month literally within the confines of that 24 to 48 hours.

So, eh.  It's been a month and a day.  More time for you to anticipate the publication of this entry, right?  So settle down there, podner, and we'll git this wagon train a-movin'.  

I don't know why I said it like that.  We aren't going by wagon train.  This is Washington, DC, folks!  Wagon trains haven't been seen in these parts since...well, ever, I suspect.  And one today would gum up the beltway like nobody's business...if it isn't already gummed up.  Which it is.  It always is.

On to other things.  Have you heard of the Intelligent Whale?  Okay, let me enlighten you.  (I'm assuming you answered 'no' to the question.)  

Next to the U.S. Navy Memorial Museum, which is located at the Washington Navy Yard (a pretty remarkable place on its own), there sits an annex which houses a submarine.  It looks kind of like a cigar.  Actually, thinking about it, I guess most submarines (maybe all, but I haven't seen all of them so I'm not going out on that limb) look like cigars.  Anyway, this one definitely looks like one.

I'm going to take a short break here and ask you to visualize something.  You know those cartoons we watched as kids, the ones where the characters needed to suddenly run very fast, and the animators showed them hovering in mid-air while their legs were going around like pinwheels, spinning in place till the characters finally took off and little puffy clouds of ... exhaust, I guess? ... were left on the screen?  The music was usually a "tinkatinkatinkatinkatink!" sound played by the highest bars on a xylophone. 

Remember that image.

Okay, back to the Intelligent Whale.  It was built in Newark, New Jersey just post-Civil War.  The General who ordered it built had a dickens of a time finding anyone to actually climb in the thing to take it for a test drive.  In the same way I feel a mounting sense of doom when I'm in an airplane (for the record, I haven't been inside one anytime recently, but I do remember the feeling) because I know the thing weighs how many tons? so there's no way it can fly, these folks took a look at the iron cigar and for their own personal reasons were not willing to climb in it, sail it a few fathoms into the ocean and sink it a few more fathoms with any confidence at all that they would be home in time for dinner.  They couldn't fathom doing it.  Pah-dum-pum.

But Generals being what they are, and military men being somewhat restricted by what they can and can't refuse to do when a General gives an order (and why is a General giving orders anyway when this involves the Navy?), a crew was assembled and into the Whale they went.  They sailed (in a manner of speaking) into the New York harbor and took the submarine into a dive of 16 feet.  (Almost 3 fathoms.)  (A fathom is 6 feet.)  (You're welcome.)  

Oh!  The submarine was powered by 6 crewmen turning a crank by hand, which turned a big screw-type device on the outside.  Sort of like a propeller but maybe less efficient.  The top speed that the Whale could go underwater was 4 knots.  (A knot is just barely over 1 mph.)  (You're welcome.)

Now, the reason this particular submarine was built, as is the case with most submarines, I think, was so that it could travel unnoticed and sidle up fairly close to a boat, deploy an explosive which would hopefully sink said boat, and ta-dah!  One less enemy boat!  It was time to test this procedure, so the General had established a target ahead of time, which was an old boat anchored not too far away.  Also, the General (to his credit) was in the submarine with the rest of the crew, and (to his credit) he was the one who put on a diving suit and climbed out the underside of the Whale and paddled over to the target boat, attached an explosive to the hull of the boat, and then swam back to the Whale and got back inside.  One thing no one knows is exactly how the explosive was to be triggered to, well, explode, but presumably there was a pin (like a grenade has) and a string of some length attached to the pin, which, when pulled, would, yeah, explode.  So like I said, the General got back inside the Whale, and the crew got the submarine turned around and...

Okay.  You remember that story about the cartoon characters whose feet spin in place while they are frantically trying to get away from something threatening them?  Insert that image here.

Remember that the crew could only crank that big ol' screw fast enough to go 4 knots per hour.  That's roughly 4 miles per hour.  

They all survived.  However, the Navy decided to not pursue further submarine construction for about 30 to 40 more years.

I question why this vessel was named the Intelligent Whale.  I can understand the 'whale' part.  But I'm not sure it is more intelligent than a whale.  (And I'm not sure a whale isn't fairly intelligent.)  I DO know that the idea of tootling along inside a vessel such as the Intelligent Whale, with my objective being to attach an explosive to a neighboring watercraft, and then try to outrun the detonation by having 6 people try to out-paddle it, is not what I would consider intelligent at all.

But maybe that's just me.

And now for a short little story about one of DC's most famous tourist attractions: the cherry blossoms (and the trees that bear them).  People plan trips here in the springtime hoping to hit when the blossoms are at their peak.  It's a crapshoot because Mother Nature is fickle and one cold spell or a couple of unusually warm days can throw the peak forward or backward in one fell swoop.  Having been fortunate enough to be here during peak season a couple of times now, I can tell you that I've never seen anything like it.  I've been a lot of places and seen a lot of things and each place has its own appeal, its own beauty.  But the cherry blossoms are at the very top of the list.  Pictures do not do them justice.  You have to be here and see them in person to understand.

We almost didn't have any, though.  When the first shipment arrived from Tokyo in the very early 1900's, the Department of Agriculture inspectors looked at them and saw that they were diseased and also bug-infested, and they ordered them to all be destroyed.  

This cause a leeeeetle tension between Japan and the U.S.  Actually, it caused a lot of tension and we had us a big ol' diplomacy issue on our hands.  Someone who had some smarts asked the Japanese ambassador to please send more trees, but, um, could they please disinfect them first?  You know, so we don't have to chance offending the Japanese again and eventually end up in a war or anything like that?  After 3 or 4 years, new trees arrived and Mrs. Taft and the wife of the ambassador from Japan held a tree planting ceremony, and if you walk alongside the Potomac near the Lincoln Memorial you will see them.  There's a plaque identifying them.  

Occasionally the trees experience a bit of vandalism, but nothing too serious.  The worst I'm aware of is when Pearl Harbor was bombed.  Vandals cut down 3 or 4 trees in protest.  That's it.  It's hard to blame a tree for that, really.

Okay, boys and girls, that's it till next time.  In a day or two.  

Heh.