CryptoDad

Chapter 5 Meeting the Locals

When all's said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it's not so much which road you take, as how you take it.

—Charles de Lint (writer, poet, and musician), Greenmantle

Summer Breeze

Ordinarily, September in Washington is marked by warm sunshine, dry air, and a returning breeze. The lightening languor signals the passage to fall.

Every four years, though, autumn on the Potomac is marked by a dense, frenzied cloud of politics. You can't escape it. It's omnipresent. Politics blares from radios and TVs in apartments, airport lounges, and barbershops and dominates the chatter in swank restaurants and loud Irish bars.

As fall arrived in 2016, presidential politics was particularly feverish. Constitutional term limits were guaranteeing an end to the Obama era, and one of the two candidates vying to succeed him was totally unprecedented: Donald J. Trump.

I had spent most of August giving but a sideways glance toward the presidential race. I knew from my farm travels that Trump was winning over rural voters, while Hillary Clinton had a lock on urbanites. The race would be won or lost in the suburbs. There, Trump was behind. Yet nothing Clinton said or did seemed to engender strong passion as far as I could tell. The race was still up for grabs.

I had been raised to believe that politics and religion were matters best kept to oneself. Although I was a registered Republican and had served as president of my small town's Republican club, I had ...