Today all day it threatened to rain, so I ducked underground to the Metro, and spent the day in one of the museums I’d been longing to see, the National Air and Space Museum. I think what struck me most about the exhibits was the size of them; they were all so small. No less impressive because of that, though. More impressive. I stood next to a Messerschmidt, and marveled at how tiny it really seemed, how cramped the cockpit was, how fragile this elegant fighting machine really had to be.

The feeling was amplified as I wandered through the displays on the history of aviation; the Wright Flyer was vast, certainly, compared to my expectations, but the World War I planes were tiny, intricate contraptions. Standing next to machines that had actually seen combat, uniforms from soldiers who had been there, the bric-a-brac they carried in their pockets… the whole period of time became, for the first time, very real to me. Mundane. Human. I keep trying to wrap my head around the scale of the devastation that was involved, but I still can’t quite fathom the devastation of one soldier dead in the trenches, let alone millions. This brought it closer to home.

The strange sense of scale culminated when I walked around the original capsules from the Apollo 11 and Gemini 2 missions. Those things are incredibly small. I could fit four or five in my living room with careful planning, and I have a small living room. They’re smaller than my car. In the case of the Apollo 11 crew, the little can took three men to lunar orbit, stayed there sustaining one of them for 26 hours, then made it back to earth, falling red-hot through the atmosphere to splash down in the ocean. And now I’ve laid eyes upon it, it seems entirely different than the capsule that was on TV all that time. It seems cramped, and smelly, and battered, and even more legendary therefore.

The Smithsonian castle

I sense the beginning of a theme here; the humanization of legends. We see these awesome achievements that were made by the people of the past, and we assume that they were fictions, that they were larger than life and made of sterner stuff, giant-borne and towering. And instead they were just people. Wilbur Wright played the mandolin. The Apollo astronauts peed through disposable sheaths into a tube in the capsule. And then their urine was jettisoned into space. Which means that somewhere out there in between the earth and the moon, there is frozen astronaut pee, glimmering.

History is only clean and magnificent at first glance. Look any deeper, and it’s just made of humans. I expected to feel dwarfed by being in proximity to all of this greatness, and instead I feel ennobled by their contributions.

I’m writing this in the National Museum of the American Indian, full of good food and saturated in two distinct types of guilt. The museum is shutting down for the night around me, so I’m going to wander to the National Portrait gallery to close out my evening, and then back to the sumptuous hotel room to recover and read a while.

This vacation, I think, was a great idea. I had moments today, wandering the displays, when I realized I was just totally content.