MEETING E.P.(Ezra Pound)(Column)

Anacostia was a bitch to go into, back in the early fifties when I flew there. It wasn't the strip itself that was the problem; it was long enough for any plane I was likely to fly, and there were no obstacles--no tall chimneys, no power lines strung across the approach. What worried me about Anacostia was the traffic: the air over the Potomac was just too full of planes. Two military airfields ran along the east bank of the river, end to end: Anacostia Naval Air Station (to the north) and Bolling Air Force Base (to the south) were so close together that their two main runways were really one long runway. If you landed at Anacostia heading south, and touched down a little long, you'd find yourself looking up the stacks of an Air Force jet waiting to take off; if you took off heading north, you'd have to watch over your shoulder for the bomber thundering up out of Bolling.

That wasn't all. On the other side of the river, maybe a mile away from the two military fields, Washington National Airport spread an umbrella of commercial air traffic over the whole area. Passenger planes landing and taking off there cut through Air Force and Navy airspace as though it were theirs. A few years earlier, a Bolivian pilot in a P-38 approaching Bolling, or maybe just sightseeing, had let down on top of an Eastern Airlines DC-4 heading into Washington National. The Bolivian survived the collision, but everyone on the DC-4 died in the river, including the New Yorker cartoonist Helen Hokinson and a couple of politicians. So I went into Anacostia that August morning in 1953 nervously, with my head on a swivel.

The flight up from North Carolina had been pleasant, like a drive in the country. The day was what summer days in that section usually are--hot and sweaty at ground level but cooling as you climb, the sky a bleached-out blue, visibility unlimited except toward the sun, where heat haze blurs the line between earth and sky. No need to navigate on a day like this: just head north, sit back, and look around. Below my right wing, the Outer Banks are sand-bright, with a line of white waves breaking along the ocean side. Farther out, the whole Atlantic lies blue beyond blue, flashing light up at me. To the west, green fields stretch and fade into a different blue at the horizon.

Up here, the plane seems to float, scarcely moving, while the land scrolls past below. Here comes Norfolk: along the beach I can see the wakes of small boats drawing white lines in the surf--maybe marines practicing island landings. Beyond, in Chesapeake Bay, capital ships lie at anchor--a battleship, a cruiser--surrounded by the smaller ships that serve them.

We continue north, the plane and I, along the west side of the bay. At the mouth of the Potomac, I turn northwest, and there's Washington and its monuments ahead and, on the opposite shore, Bolling and Anacostia. The crowded air begins here.

And so does a certain nervousness. It's not just the air traffic; it's the mission I'm on. Here I am, a Marine captain in his Marine uniform in a Marine airplane, flying into Washington to visit a man who has been accused of being a traitor to his country--my country. Isn't that "conduct unbecoming"? Isn't it against the rules, Navy regs and all that? If the Navy admirals knew, would they let me park my plane on their flight line? But of course they couldn't know that this Marine captain taxiing in has another life, in which he is trying to be a scholar, a professor, a literary critic, maybe even an intellectual.

We'd built that other life together, my wife, Liz, and I, in the years after the Second World War. I went back to college in Minnesota (while Liz worked at the phone company), and then to graduate school in New York (she worked in a bookstore), until our money and my tolerance for going to school ran out. Then I heard of a teaching job at a small Pennsylvania college. It wasn't a very promising one--just a one-year appointment as an instructor. But then I wasn't a very promising job candidate--hadn't written my dissertation, had no teaching experience, didn't know much about anything except flying. So I took it.