A Walker in the Suburbs

On Metro this morning I read from “The Outermost House” by Henry Beston. Beston was a naturalist and this book is a classic. The section I read today cataloged the flocks of birds he studied during the year he lived alone in a small house on a Cape Cod dune. Here he describes a flight of swans: “Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean — their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals.”

I rode the Metro escalator up into the cold gray dawn of Judiciary Square and walked east toward my office with those words echoing in my head. And suddenly there in front of me were scores of gulls, careening and crying as they wheeled in the urban sky. It was probably garbage that brought them here, but I’d rather imagine their flight as evidence of that “old loveliness.” They’re here to remind us that we share the earth, that, as Beston says of animals, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time…”

Washington, D.C. is not kind to street musicians. The most recent and infamous example of this happened a couple years ago when the brilliant violinist Joshua Bell played Bach and Schubert on his 1713 Stradivarius outside the L’Enfant Plaza Metro stop while a crowd of morning commuters rushed by. Almost no one stopped to listen.

But there are exceptions, and one of them happened yesterday at Metro Center when a crowd gathered around three men singing “Under the Boardwalk” and other barbershop favorites. I’ve heard these guys before, and I know they’ve been arrested (Metro doesn’t allow music on its cars and platforms; that might make the trip too pleasant). But the buskers always come back, sometimes three of them, sometimes four, with their doo-wop melodies and their studied gestures and their hat to collect the day’s earnings.

Every time I hear them I think about the first time I heard them. It was late, 7 or 8, and I was blurry-eyed from reading page proofs, trying to get the magazine to the printer. And there they were, singing “What is Your Name?” Every time they reached the refrain, a woman in the crowd would shout, “It’s Donna. I already told you — my name is Donna.” It was a priceless Metro moment. We all laughed; we caught each other’s eyes. In a way, just a small way, we felt as one.