Opinion | An ancient tree falls in Washington, a neighborhood mourns

The white oak on the 2800 block of Northampton Street NW was a fixture of the neighborhood long before the neighborhood — or even the District — existed. In a 1989 report in The Post on a series of summer storms, science writer Robert Engelman noted that the tree, which “probably predates George Washington’s birth weathered the storm with panache. But it dropped a 10-inch-thick limb that branched out in 1880.” In 1991, The Post reported that city residents hoped there could be more done to keep it alive. By July 1998, The Post reported that one of its massive boughs had fallen, prompting concerns of its imminent demise. The tree survived another 26 years, being crowned the city’s largest in 2006, only to collapse without warning on July 15, 2024. I wrote this poem to send her off:

Let the record show: A white oak fell this day.

Four hundred years ago the Manahoac

circled her, chanting perhaps but otherwise

giving no second thought to an ordinary sapling.

Precolonial, present at the founding,

today she fell with a whump,

sounding, said one neighbor, like a loaf of snow sliding off a roof.

Worn out, tired of this Great Experiment,

she subsided with a sigh, her whalebone staves

like a dowager in a farthingale,

timely auspice of a Republic in peril.

Four hundred years passed, core rotted through.

She snapped at the base, the root net still embedded.

At midday she lay herself down precisely,

along the line of the road. Four cars wrecked

but no house hit, no child crushed, no dog walker damaged.

Before she fell, four men with arms outstretched,

hands clasped, could barely girdle the trunk, and the boughs

were wide as the boles of younger trees.

In memory at least, may that circle

not be broken.

John Richard Heath, Washington

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Home rule and the democratic idea

Regarding The Post’s June 19 Metro article “Led by Trump, GOP plans to ‘reassert’ control over D.C. at stake in election”:

At a recent celebration of the legacy of civil rights activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser answered Donald Trump’s threat to “take over the District” by encouraging out-of-towners in the crowd to use their vote to “stand shoulder to shoulder with us to defend our autonomy.”

With all due respect to Ms. Bowser, she has it backward: It is we D.C. residents who will preserve home rule by “standing shoulder to shoulder” with our fellow citizens in their states by helping them elect candidates who will preserve American democracy from Mr. Trump’s threats to assume dictatorial power. That is how Home Rule was won in 1973 as historians Chris Myers Asch, a Jackson-Reed High School graduate, and George Derek Musgrove described in their 2017 book “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”

In 1970, Rev. Walter Fauntroy, an associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was elected to the new position of nonvoting delegate to Congress and assigned to the House District of Columbia Committee, whose powerful chairman, John McMillan, a segregationist from South Carolina, blocked the proposed home rule charter bill. In response, as Mr. Asch and Mr. Musgrove wrote, Fauntroy “led a vigorous campaign to help unseat John McMillan” in which he helped send “dozens of organizers to McMillan’s congressional district in 1972, rallying black voters (who made up 28 percent of the district) and highlighting McMillan’s racist record. McMillan suffered a stunning defeat.”

McMillan’s successor as chairman, Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Mich.), helped push Congress to grant D.C. a home rule charter, which went into effect in 1974.

Thousands of citizens of D.C. and the states, including Washington Teachers Union retirees and volunteers with organizations such as the D.C. area’s 31st Street Swing Left, are already at work registering voters and working on behalf of candidates for state and national offices who are committed to defending hard-won freedoms by visiting voters at home, making phone calls, organizing letter and postcard parties, raising funds, and being role models for democracy.

Preserving D.C. home rule is inseparable from preserving American democracy and freedoms.

Erich Martel, Washington

D.C.’s bus blues

In Metro’s fiscal year 2025 budget letter, WMATA’s General Manager and CEO Randy Clarke wrote, “Metro’s focus is, and will always be, our customers.” I want to take him at his word, but I am disillusioned about that promise of customer commitment after attending several “Better Bus” public hearings, town hall forums and pop-up events this summer. I fear the city’s plans will fall far short of its stated goals of making bus transit the preferred mode of choice by 2030 and increasing public transit use for commuting to half of trips by 2032.

At its many forums, Metro officials have failed to answer key questions about equity and access to a critical public service that should be funded as such. Metro’s plan fails to recognize the vital role of Metrobuses in the lives of many of us. Our needs are simple: nearby, fast, frequent and reliable buses.

In the four forums I attended, D.C. residents of all demographics said they want the bus: seniors who can’t drive, parents of schoolchildren, people with disabilities and everyday workers traveling to and from their offices. Metro’s customers loudly voiced their concerns about the proposed changes, which directly impact their access to schools, hospitals, work and local businesses.

Yet bus lines are being cut and reduced in my neighborhood, which is becoming a veritable bus desert.

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I live more than two miles from the nearest Metrorail station. Until 2022, I could take the E6 bus line, which WMATA quietly canceled with limited public notice during the coronavirus pandemic. I now must walk 45 minutes to take Metrorail. This is just not reasonable and sometimes not possible. Under the city’s proposed plans, other bus lines in my area — the M4, E4 and L2 — will be reduced or rerouted with what seems to be little understanding of what these changes will mean to everyday bus riders who want to take the bus to where they need to go. Chevy Chase residents already have very limited access to weekend bus service. The so-called Better Bus overhaul will shrink this even further as the E4 will no longer offer weekend service.

Is Metro really listening to its customers? Is the proposed Better Bus plan actually better? As a decades-long regular bus rider committed to public transit, I say the answer is a resounding no to both questions.

Michaela Platzer, Washington

The summer closure of the Glenmont end of the Metro Red Line has burdened transit riders and has, no doubt, burdened already strained Metro budgets with contract busing. Since the end of June, the Takoma station has reopened, but Metro continues to operate shuttle buses all the way to Fort Totten.

The Takoma to Fort Totten shuttle leg is the most traffic-heavy segment of the trip and takes a disproportionate amount of time, enough so that taking the shuttle buses to Takoma and the train from there to Fort Totten is always faster. Metro should reconfigure the shuttle buses and stop paying money it barely has for busing on a useless route. This would save staffing costs for the bus stop at Fort Totten and reduce the number of buses and drivers required.

Instead of the current multitude of shuttle routes, two would be more efficient, saving cost and reducing transit time (perhaps thereby increasing ridership and revenue). The Silver Spring bus transit center is the only shuttle stop taking a significant amount of time out of the direct route. There should continue to be a local route connecting all closed stations and Takoma, and there should be an express route covering all stations other than Silver Spring. Metro cannot afford to ignore efficiencies that help riders at the same time.

Jeremy Teichman, Silver Spring

Kudos to The Post for the excellent July 13 Metro article “An uneasy peace with NATO,” which accurately captured the problems experienced by the locals during the security measures imposed on the downtown area during the NATO conference.

In depicting the traffic snarls though, The Post did not mention the significant contribution to those snarls specifically caused by the Metro bus drivers who made a consistent practice of running into intersections as traffic lights turned from yellow to red, thus blocking the ability of traffic in the cross street from proceeding on their green light. I repeatedly observed not just one bus entering the intersections on the red light in this manner, but additional trailing buses pulled right up behind them to form an extended wall that ensured that cross street traffic could not get through the intersection.

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You would think the management of Metro’s bus system would have enough sense to insist that their bus operators not make matters worse as they diverted their buses to new routes around the secured area? Or were these bus operators simply acting out of their own selfishness in prioritizing their own convenience, notwithstanding the enhanced “gridlock” they imposed on everyone else beyond what the street closings otherwise necessarily entailed? In a moment when everyone understandably had to pull together to make the best of the situation, the Metro bus drivers selfishly took care of themselves at everyone else’s expense.

George Baker, Bethesda

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