I

Greenbelt Park is encircled by a 5.3-mile Perimeter Trail, a little longer than I want to stay out there by myself on your average afternoon, so I'm dividing it into four parts.  The first section is accessed from the park entrance road, just before you reach the Park Headquarters building.  It skirts around the edge of the park on the outside of the loop road (which means, at times, the trail is divided from a largish highway only by a chainlink fence and a few trees; other times, you are well inside the wooded area).  Eventually the trail takes a sharp jog south to parallel the Park Central Road, at which point I headed straight instead, towards the road and the Dogwood Trail parking area, then back around the loop by road until I reached my car where I'd left it at the Sweetgum picnic area.  Probably I covered just under 1 mile of the actual Perimeter Trail.

It was a 40-ish degree early spring day, and there were people in the park on this occasion, driving cars or walking on the roads.  However, as usual, I did not encounter any other person on the actual trail.  

The light, as you can see from the shadows in the previous photos, was really striking.  We'd had days of rain and now the sun was breaking through, but low (it was about 3:30 pm).

Because of the rain, the trail was a bit muddy; and there was a spot on the connecting trail back to the Dogwood parking area where the creek had escaped its banks, created something of a swamp, and begun to wash across the path.

In other places, the creek was still inside its heavily-eroded banks.

II

April now; I parked my car in the Dogwood parking area and took the connector trail back to where I'd left the Perimeter Trail.  The water was lower in the swampy area and I had multiple sightings of a pileated woodpecker in that spot.  From the calls, there were more of them.  As usual, I was unable to get a good woodpecker photo despite the size of the bird.

There was a pleasant, almost cedar-y smell in the forest, the worst olfactory offenses of early spring being already past.  While most things were still brown and bare, there were notable spots of green.

Climbing a ridge, there was a rushing sound that could have been either traffic or a raging waterfall.  It was traffic.  Much of this stretch of the Perimeter Trail ran alongside the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.

I passed through a dense stand of bushy material and could hear a zillion little creatures hopping around in there.  Just sparrows, squirrels, from what I could see, and began to walk past.  Then a half-reluctant double-take.  "Bird every bird," I thought to myself, a reminder from ornithology class that rears its head every so often.  I turned to look at the rustling on my immediate right.  It was a bird I didn't know; upon identification, a rufous-sided towhee.

I could still hear pileateds in the treetops, too.  But at this point the trail intersected with the road near the campground, and I walked back along the road to my car.  Only one person in the woods today: a male jogger who looked winded enough that I was pretty sure he was focused on exercise alone.

III

A week, maybe two, has passed, and everything is different.  The temperature is in the 60s, it's sunny, my husband is with me, and the trees are just starting to leaf out, unfurling very pale green buds.  The green "skunk cabbage" (or whatever it is) is much bigger and covers more of the forest floor.

There are rills of bright clear water running here and there between high mud banks.

IV

Final and longest stretch of the Perimeter Trail.  I parked at the campground and walked back down the Blueberry Trail to the Perimeter, then all the way around the rest of the Perimeter Trail to the entrance road near the police station, returning to the car via the paved road.  It was a 90-ish, humid, bright Saturday, and there were more trail runners and other fellow travelers than usual.   I felt safe.  On the other hand, having now thoroughly explored Greenbelt Park, I still feel there is something deeply unremarkable about it.

There are a lot of downed trees, often having pulled up all kinds of interesting roots and leaving massive holes in the ground.

Things were a lot greener than before.

The "skunk cabbage" has filled in quite a lot.  I saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers, but they didn't wish to have their photos taken.

I saw this interesting personage hiding beneath the edge of the bathroom stall.  Don't know who he was.

But then.  Before hitting publish, I used an archaic tool called a "field guide" to check into this guy, who I guessed was a moth, though I couldn't see much of his body.  I believe he is a "virgin tiger moth."  I also note, only as I am posting this, that there is another mystery object or personage in the top left of this photo.  If it is what it kinda looks like (the edge of a large spider entering the frame), then a) it may be the reason the moth is hiding under the stall next to his deceased buddy, and b) I'm glad I didn't see it when I was actually there taking the picture.

​Here ends my wildlife notes for Greenbelt Park.

The East Loop

​The Downtown Heritage Trail exists in three discrete sections: East, Center, and West Loops.  The East Loop begins along Pennsylvania Ave., by the Pennsylvania Ave. National Historic Site, and zigzags (extensively!) up through Judiciary Square and ultimately into Chinatown to the Gallery Place Metro.  It is a land of statuary: few businesses, lots of courts, all spare Washington grandeur.

The day was gray, but promises of spring lurked in the streets.

Though I'd planned to find someplace to sit and read, there was practically no place to buy coffee.  I got temporarily excited about going inside the cafe of the National Building Museum, but they turned out to be closed for a special event.

As I got close to the Chinatown neighborhood, I ran into a lot of construction.  One building was wearing a shroud:

And another was bravely holding its own against the onslaught... but how much longer?

DC's Chinatown is picturesque and full of restaurants, but tiny.  It's trendy and full of white people and African-Americans, fewer Asian people except for business proprietors.  Do Chinese people actually live here anymore?  Not too many, but some.

The Center Loop

The Center Loop starts at Pennsylvania Ave. again, this time at the intersection with 7th St.  There is a monument to Charity there, right in front of the National Bank of Washington.  I'm not sure what that means.

It was raining, and I didn't have an umbrella.  Everything looked a little blurred, like in this picture.

Here is where all the restaurants and retail establishments are located, adjacent to the stark courthouses and museums.  It's an unselfconsciously moneyed neighborhood: valet parking, expensive hotels and apartment buildings,  Anthropologie, Sephora, trendy restaurants festooned with strings of white lights, cupcake shops, J. Crew.  I ate my chicken salad sandwich at an Au Bon Pain, but I could also have chosen Starbucks, Pret a Manger, Cosi, or half a dozen other similar joints within a two-block radius.

There are some important tourist destinations here:

The West Loop

Foolishly, I decided to finish the West Loop of the trail on the same day Washington held its Capitals Stanley Cup victory parade.  The parade was over by the time I arrived downtown on the Metro, but thousands of people were still milling around wearing Caps attire, or at least whatever red clothing they could come up with.  The Subway restaurant where I stopped for a quick lunch after getting off the train was a surging sea of red.  

This loop, if I may be so bold as to say it, was incredibly boring.  It runs from the Metro Center station towards the White House, then back up New York Avenue, making a little loop on K Street, then back to Metro Center.  Besides the revelers, there was little to see.  There was a scourge of these kind of mirrored buildings:

Who doesn't hate those?  And it was hot and sunny, and crawling with sports fans (not shown).  There was still an overabundance of crappy fast-casual restaurants.  So close to the White House, and yet so dull and colorless.

Instead, I'll leave you with a photo of the Silver Spring Civic Center during early voting.  Now here's where the real action is!

Well, I finally found a DC neighborhood that hasn't gentrified yet-- although that doesn't mean it won't.  Getting to the beginning of the Greater Deanwood Heritage Trail meant taking the Metro to Union Station, then a long number 96 bus to 52nd St.  (The second half of the bus ride was the most alarming part of today's expedition: all signs pointed to the bus's having sustained a flat tire, but the driver appeared not to notice as we bumped and rattled and hurtled to and fro along the streets.  A man behind me said to his neighbor: "I'm just here visiting a friend, hope I make it out alive.")  From 52nd St., I walked north along Division Ave. until I reached the beginning of the trail at Foote St..

Division Ave. near E. Capitol St. had that poor-but-respectable look: small, drab houses with neat yards, quiet streets with trees.  As I approached Deanwood proper, though, the air of respectability diminished.  There was more trash along the street, everything looked grimier, and almost all visible people were male and appeared to be just hanging around.  Not that I felt directly threatened at any point; just out-of-place and highly self-conscious.  It didn't seem like a place where white people from outside the neighborhood go for exploratory walks.

It also didn't feel like a place where it was appropriate to pull out my phone and take lots of photos of everything; there was little that was picturesque, so I would have been transparently documenting the exoticism of everyday (black) poverty.  One thing I did wish I got a photo of: the police station.  I was passing a series of houses with front porches on which groups of young men were hanging out.  Just past one of these there was a clearing in which a police station suddenly appeared: long and low and vaguely ominous, with an impressive number of police cars parked in rows along the street outside.  Maybe twenty or thirty of them.  In that location, with that degree of overwhelming police presence, they seemed to be overtly threatening their immediate neighbors.  I wish I could show you; I should have shown you.

​There was one truly beautiful spot on the trail: a low mosaic building just across from Marvin Gaye Park, of obvious historic value.  (I learned, upon later research, that this building was the club in which Marvin Gaye began his career.)  But the park was, again, full of men standing around, and there was an ancient, perhaps drunken homeless guy on the corner in front of the mosaic, and once again it did not seem appropriate to photograph the scene with all these unconsenting people in it.  (This park is apparently much nicer than it was a few years ago, as is detailed here.)

On Nannie Helen Boroughs Ave, a hopeful note: a line of greenhouses tended by community gardeners.  I like their sign.

On 49th St., a middle-aged man passing by wearing a "Black Lives Matter" tshirt hit on me.  I mention the tshirt because it prejudiced me in his favor.  Also, I have to respect the rare individual who is capable of hitting on a total stranger on the street without coming off as aggressive or mocking.  I'm not a fan of stranger ambush, and I would totally make the rule that no man shall accost a woman walking by whom he does not know.  But, if you're going to do it, do it like this man: get in with the compliment (and don't make it overtly sexual), be friendly and respectful, and get out again.  Telling the woman to "have a good day" and then MOVING ON wins you extra points.  No creepy following or pestering.  I actually felt more welcome in the neighborhood after this guy hit on me, and that is, believe me guys, highly unusual.

I'd meant to stop and have some coffee and lunch while I was in Deanwood, but there were no restaurants along my way, just a few tiny makeshift food stores.  (I did see a Wendy's and a McDonald's a bit off the path, but did not go there.)  Deanwood is kind of a food desert.  What there was, instead of restaurants, was churches.  Churches and churches and churches.  A couple of them were biggish and pretty, like this one:

But most of them were like the food shops: tiny, dingy, in mostly residential buildings, with names like "Macedonia Holy Church on the Rock" and "Divine Love Baptist."  I'm having trouble finding the names, actually, of the more obscure ones, and yet it was the profusion of obscure ones that struck me.  In one location there were three contiguous church properties.  What Deanwood lacks in business investment, it apparently makes up for in faith.

The Minnesota Ave. Metro station, where I ended my walk, was dimly lit and had large amounts of water dripping from the entrance onto the floors below.  Even Metro looks like it invests less in this neighborhood.

May Deanwood find a way to enjoy greater prosperity without its residents being wholly run out of town by rich white people.

Every day, two or three times a day, I get a text message from the county informing me that it is still cold.  Hypothermia alert.  Today, school was canceled due to a half-inch of snow on the ground, plus impending chill and wind.  Suburban Marylanders are not known for their cold-hardiness, alas.  I went back to Greenbelt Park.  This time I didn't even expect to see anyone else there.  I was right.

​The Azalea Trail is a short loop connecting three different picnic sites, all of which were today windswept and lonely.  The snow lined everything and made my footsteps nearly silent.  No other human tracks, only animal.  There was a dog without a master-- fox?  coyote?-- rabbits, birds.  I saw none of them, except a few juncos and crows.  It was cold but not intolerable.  The most significant sound was of trees creaking and sobbing in the wind.

​As usual, alone in the woods, I am a little scared-- maybe wary is a better word-- but once again I was able to find that place of being at peace with isolation. Even if I were to encounter danger, could there be a better time to go?-- almost charging through the snowy woods mouthing "I love this I love this I love this?"