Defending Ft. Reno

Fort Reno never saw much action in the Civil War (read:never), but it became for me and others one of the greatest teen hangouts in the country.
First, there was the height advantage. From the top of the underground reservoir there you could see whoever was coming way before they had a chance to ruin whatever you were doing. If the cops showed up, you could simply chuck your beer in the undergrowth or over the fence. If you were up there making out, you could see any jackasses that, for no other reason than jealously, thought it was hilarious to shout at and otherwise hassle you.
Then there were the blinking lights. Reno was on or around the highest point in DC (400 something feet). The television towers were all around you, each crowned by a blinking red light. They reminded me of the green light at the end of Daisy's dock in "The Great Gatsby." The future that seemed so close you could touch it, yet year by year recedes before you. Gatsby believed in that light, and so did I.
There also were other lights in the distance. Miniature skyscrapers, which turned out to be Tyson's Corner, on the horizon. They sat out there gleaming in a sea of darkness, the trees so lush they seem like a vast cushioned dark ocean. THe smell of thousands of them in summer like breathing in the Congo.
Wilkerson took us, for Sheehan's going away (to Iraq's) party to a cemetery on Wisconsin Avenue, with views out over the the lit up monuments and the bowl of light in which they were centered.
It was a much better view than Reno, he said. And that was objectively true. But Reno looked out over OUR Washington, not the tourist postcards. And I must admit, as a horny teenager, I would sit up on top of Reno and think of all the girls lying in their pink bedrooms out there, lush and fragrant as the trees that hid them under their thick canopy.
I've been told that the Reno music scene had mellowed considerably before I got there. In the 70s, people said, you could bring coolers of beer and drink right there in front of the stage. It was grit heaven, they said.
Nevertheless, all you had to do was go drink someplace at least semi-hidden. Like underneath the Wilson pool, or on top of the reservoir. Easy enough, and plus you could feel like a badass for flouting the rules.
The bands were a kind of secondary reason to come. Most of the time all you wanted to do was hang out with halfway cool people. It was always surprising to me that, at G'town Prep, very few knew of the dischord scene, though it was so close. But the 80s were a triumph of emotionless synth pop, and pure schmaltz like "I guess that's why they call it the blues" (or, in Kreisberg's version "I guess that's why they call him the Boog." ("smoking Bronx killer, raping those sophomores...").
THe roses covering my eyes came off, though, when I was briefly working for a community newspaper out near Tysons.
I hated Tysons. I hated almost all of Northern Virginia's centerless and souless sprawl. Just before I quit, I looked to the east from a Tyson's parking lot. There was the fake Norman castle at Ft. Reno. I was looking at the opposite of the view I had loved for years. Like the main character in James Joyce's short story "Araby," the scales dropped from my eyes, and I realized what a fool, what a deluded romantic I had been. The world was glass buildings and parking lots, not the grassy expanses of Ft. Reno. Take your frisbee and throw it in the Potomac. Hope it makes it out to the sea.