The front porch at Mount Vernon

People here talk about George Washington as if he’s still around. “He’s like George Washington,” I overheard, “he walks into a room and he’s the leader.” In contrast, what I remember about George Washington from U.S. History is a collection of factoids: he’s the father of our country, he was tall, he had ill-fitting wooden teeth, he was commander in the American Revolution. He sounds more like a saint than a person. I wondered: What was it about him that so led people to trust and revere him so?

A visit to Mount Vernon (free today only!) helps fill out his portrait. It is a stately mansion by even modern standards, with a gorgeous view of the Potomac. The grounds and gardens are extensive, and a small village of blacksmiths, workers and slaves kept it running for him. He was an entrepreneur, who built a grist mill and found whiskey a high-profit way to store the surplus grain he was producing. Each spring, he netted thousands of pounds of herring that passed through the Potomac and preserved the fish in barrels of salt to feed his staff all winter. (”Salted herring again?”) He and Martha, the tiny, wealthy, beautiful widow he married when he was 26 and she was 27, had no children of their own, but he raised her two children.

The attached museum is even more instructive, with several wax figures created by forensics experts to reconstruct how Washington looked as a young man, up through the time of his death at age 62. It is highly interactive, with maps and quizzes meant to engage schoolchildren (Q. Who started the French and Indian War? A. George Washington). Other displays show the wretched conditions of Revolutionary soldiers.

The museum also touched on the Newburgh conspiracy, an episode of near-mutiny among the Continental Army explained in more detail in an op-ed in today’s New York Times by historian John R. Miller. Congress had failed to give soldiers their back pay and pensions, and there was talk among the Army of marching on Philadelphia to seize the government. General Washington showed up at the meeting of 500 angry officers and moved them to tears with his own commitment to the new government, stopping the rebellion in its tracks, and, as Miller noted, setting a path for the young republic to be led by civilians, not military leaders.

More::

• The Library of Congress has scanned copies of many of Washington’s papers and journals online.
• My photos on Flickr

Saturday, the temperature hovered around 30 degrees. There was three feet of powder on the ground. It was the beginning of a three-day weekend. Perfect for skiing!

The Whitetail Ski Resort is just 90 minutes from D.C. and had received good reviews from colleagues. “In the history of Whitetail Resort, the skiing, snowboarding and snow tubing conditions have never been better. We have received over 4 feet of snow in the past week,” its web site gushed. So we headed to Whitetail, just outside of Clear Spring, Pa., and arrived about noon Saturday.

Too bad thousands of other skiers had the same idea. There were only a few parking spaces left, and a sign at the registration window warned there were no rental skis left in sizes 150 or 160 cm. But we found one pair of skis to rent, and the three of us hit the slopes. The conditions were great, the view from the top was lovely, and despite the multitudes on the hills, it wasn’t until late in the day that the intermediate slopes developed icy patches. It wasn’t a big resort, however, and it was pretty much at maximum capacity — and then some. The lift to the easy slopes, even though it was a quad and the workers made sure each chair had four people on it, moved agonizingly slowly…

Whitetail was having its own Big Olympic Games, complete with a giant elevated copper torch at the bottom of the main lifts. The BOG race announcer noted that as it was 50 degrees in Vancouver, we had much better conditions than the Olympians. At home that evening, as we watched the women plowing through slush in the Olympics freestyle mogul competition, we had to agree.

I failed to bring my camera, but other skiers/sliders have posted on Flickr, like these.

The view from Connecticut Avenue and L Sts, NW, early this afternoon

I did make it out of Baltimore, precisely on time, Monday morning, even though BWI had only one runway open. I arrived in Detroit at noon, 24 hours before the first significant snow of the year in southeast Michigan. Metro Detroit received 8 to 10 inches of snow overnight, so lots of schools got their first snow day. Here are some things that happened in the ensuing anarchy:

• Grocery stores remained stocked with foodstuffs ranging from apple juice to zucchini
• Wayne County had 100 snowplows salting and plowing the roads, so that all main highways and roads were dry by midday
• City buses kept running (at least to the extent that they usually run)
• The People Mover light rail system kept running. Well, it didn’t really have far to go, and it doesn’t really move that many people, but nevertheless …

Alas, my Wednesday afternoon flight to Baltimore was canceled, so I had to buy more clothes and toothpaste.

In the meantime, this just in from a desperate shopper in the mean streets of the District: “It’s grim here. Safeway is shut down. Sign on door says no milk. Police tape around entrance. Roads impassable. Garbage piling up along street…”

Pedestrian traffic only

The 17.4 inches of snowfall recorded at Reagan National Airport yesterday is was the fourth biggest snowstorm in DC’s history of officially recorded storms, the Washington Post says. That doesn’t count the 36 inches of snow the area received in 1722, recorded in the diaries of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course, the District of Columbia wasn’t a district or the nation’s capital then, nor did the nation itself even exist. But our Founding Fathers were faithfully chronicling the Virginia weather with quill pens and sheepskin.

The worst officially recorded snowstorm was the 1922 Knickerbocker Storm, so named because it caused the collapse of the flat-roofed Knickerbocker Theater in Washington, killing 98 people.

From here in Capitol Hill, where the power lines are fortunately underground so that we still have power and heat, the 2010 Snowmageddon has been fun. Yesterday we ventured out on foot at midday. The streets had been plowed, somewhat, probably for the benefit of the firetrucks down the street. Everyone was walking in the street, even on Pennsylvania Avenue, as the sidewalks were impassable. An SUV would pass by only occasionally. Kids were sledding at the Capitol, and a lot of photographers were out. The Harris Teeter grocery store near Potomac Avenue was open, bless them. We didn’t make it to Dupont, but some 2,000 people celebrated there with a giant snowball fight.

The sunny weather today seems to have brought everyone out, digging out their cars and shoveling their sidewalks. We walked to Eastern Market, which was closed for the second day. It was a gorgeous day, perfect for skiing, if only you could get to a hill. It took Joe more than an hour to dig out our little car from the driveway, while I wisely opted to upload photos.

Tomorrow morning I’m scheduled to fly to Detroit, but BWI has cleared only one of its two runways as of this afternoon, so we shall see. The federal government is closed, so that should slow things down considerably. Besides that, more snow is possible Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, I hear Detroit is snow-deprived…

More of my photos on Flickr

The DC/MD/VA Snowpocalypse Flickr pool

It’s supposed to snow 16 to 24 inches Friday and Saturday, which would be the first time since 1986 that DC has received two snowstorms of 10 inches or more in a winter. (We got 16 inches on Dec. 19, which seem to have been enjoyed by everyone, as it brought Christmas vacation early. Except perhaps for that cop who pulled a gun in a snowball fight.)

And even though the first snowflake has yet to fall, and even though the 6 inches of snow we were supposed to get Wednesday turned into only 2 inches, yet schools were still canceled outside the district, PANIC is gripping the city. Our local Safeway was more insane than usual tonight, with people buying jugs of water and cases of beer. Tomorrow’s business meetings are being canceled, and federal government workers are on unscheduled leave, meaning, I guess, that they can have the day off if they can’t make it in. Channel 9 is teaching people how to shovel snow (You have to get under the snow with the shovel, apparently.)

The National Weather Service says, “A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW… SLEET…AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FRIDAY NIGHT.”

All right, we have our boots and coats, though we left the snow shovel in Michigan. We can walk to the grocery store. We have enough alcohol to last the weekend, or at least 48 hours. Good luck to all of you!

The Ypsilanti water tower

The famous Ypsilanti water tower embodies the spirit of the city: stand-up citizenship, hard work, and circumscribed living. But, you might wonder, how does it compare to the Washington Monument?