The last inning of vacation, with Homo erectus leading off and John Wayne hitting cleanup

Since the National Geographic Society’s headquarters was just across the street from our hotel, we walked over one morning to explore its famous Explorers Hall.

Even from the street, through its great glass walls, we could see the world’s largest globe--11 feet from pole to pole and 34 feet around its equator. A 60-mile walk, according to the society’s leaflet, would cover just one inch of its surface.

Various exhibits illustrated the explorations undertaken or sponsored by the society in its almost 100 years, including reconstructions of Homo habilis , Homo erectus and other precursors of modern man. (Since coming home I have read that the indefatigable Dr. Richard E. Leakey has dug up yet another exciting skull in his search for the missing link.)

A treasure of the hall is one of the sleds that carried Robert E. Peary’s party to the North Pole in 1909. It was rude and efficient-looking, with no accommodations to comfort. In this dog-drawn vehicle Peary had made his trek to the pole six years after the Wrights had pioneered an easier way to go at Kitty Hawk. Looking at that sled made me think more kindly about the 747s that had brought us to Washington and would take us home.

We also saw the diving saucer in which Capt. Jacques-Yves Cousteau had plunged to depths of 1,000 feet in the Mediterranean and Red seas, and a 3.9-billion-year-old rock brought back from the moon by Apollo 12.

I wondered if somewhere in the building the society had a shelf containing every copy of the National Geographic magazine published since its beginning. I had read a piece in the Journal of Irreproducible Results (March, 1974) pointing out that no one ever threw a National Geographic away, and that their accumulated weight in attics and garages would sooner or later crush the continent’s mantle and cause it to sink into the sea, like Atlantis.

While I’m sure its goals were purely scientific, in my generation the society’s magazine was always cherished by small boys for its colored photographs of semi-naked native girls. In those days there were no such publications as Playboy and Penthouse, and National Geographic had a monopoly on soft porn. Evidently American morality of the ‘20s and ‘30s permitted photographs of women with naked breasts as long as they were only “natives.” No wonder the magazine was kept in attics.

But such thoughts are mean beside the great human accomplishments the society has sponsored; its expeditions have opened the Earth like a flower.

That evening we fell into conversation at the Jefferson Hotel bar with a woman who was some kind of an executive with the society. I wondered if she was familiar with the article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

“Yes,” she said, “but we don’t talk about it.”

From the hotel we walked a block to the Capitol Hilton and had dinner downstairs at Trader Vic’s. It seemed incongruous, dining in the spell of the South Seas, in an atmosphere authenticated by shells, ship’s lamps and fishing spears, listening to the dreamy love songs of the islands, and knowing we were only three blocks from the White House.

I knew I’d rather not be President. Doubtless he was dining in the East Room with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Frau Kohl, in an atmosphere of heavy cordiality. He couldn’t just pop out to a phony South Seas restaurant any time he liked. But then again, as President Johnson had said, he owned all those helicopters.

All the time we were in Washington the World Series was going on. It permeated the city like a subliminal awareness. More than anything this side of war, the World Series unifies the nation. Somehow taxi drivers always knew the score. One evening at the hotel bar a man sat beside us, brooding and drinking old-fashioneds as if they hadn’t gone out of style.

“I couldn’t stay in my room watching the game on television,” he said. “I can’t stand to watch the Red Sox lose.” (The Jefferson bar was too classy to have TV.)

We were scheduled to leave Dulles International at 4:45 on Saturday afternoon. We could hardly believe the change in the parkway since our arrival on the previous Saturday. In that week the trees had gone completely to their autumn colors--red, amber, yellow. It was a sight we had never seen.

In flight they tried to get the World Series on the movie screen. It was the worst picture I have ever watched for more than a few seconds--a hash of wormy vibrant horizontal lines, with now and then just a shadow of a pitcher winding up or a man at bat. It was impossible to make out what was happening.

But so great is the magnetism of the World Series that they kept trying. Tantalizingly, the sound was good. I turned around and saw that most of the men in the plane were watching; most of the women were reading or sleeping. It was a much truer test of the difference in taste between American men and women than any scientific survey.

Finally other stations began to fade in and out, with equally poor reception. At one point I thought I saw horses and a touch of yellow and blue. It’s the cavalry, I thought, coming to the rescue.

Then a very familiar voice said, loud and clear: “Gentlemen, we’ll leave a rear guard here under command of one officer.”

It was John Wayne.

America was safe.