There are places you visit because they’re beautiful.
Others because they’re weird.
And occasionally I find myself traveling somewhere where the entire reason for visiting is remembering people who aren’t here anymore.
Arlington National Cemetery is one of those places.
I see dead people.
I see famous dead people.
Presidents. Astronauts. Generals. Senators. Names pulled straight from American history books.
But mostly, I see hundreds of thousands of military veterans, including far too many who made the ultimate sacrifice.
And somewhere among those endless rows of white headstones is a girl I went to school with.
That makes Arlington different for me.
This isn’t just history.
Somewhere in those rows is someone I actually knew.
RIP.
DESTINATION: Arlington National Cemetery
CURRENT WEATHER
overcast clouds (77F / 25C)
AIR QUALITY INDEX (AQI)
Good (18)
I SEE FAMOUS DEAD PEOPLE
Walking around Arlington can feel like somebody converted an American history textbook into a cemetery.
President John F. Kennedy rests here beneath the eternal flame alongside Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
President William Howard Taft is here.
Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee are here.
So is John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, who later served in the U.S. Senate and somehow decided returning to space at 77 sounded like a reasonable retirement activity.
You can spend hours wandering around looking for recognizable names.
But eventually I stopped looking for famous people.
Because surrounding every famous grave are thousands upon thousands belonging to people most of us have never heard of.
And one of those names isn’t unfamiliar to me.
ONE OF THOSE STONES HAS A NAME I KNOW
It’s easy to look across Arlington and see the cemetery as a landscape.
White stones.
Perfect rows.
Rolling hills.
Trees.
History.
Then you remember that every single stone represents an actual person.
That became considerably harder to ignore knowing someone I grew up with is buried here.
She joined the military.
She served her country.
And eventually, she came here.
There’s something profoundly different about seeing Arlington when you have even the smallest personal connection to one of those graves.
Suddenly all those perfectly aligned white stones stop being scenery.
Every one of them belonged to somebody’s childhood.
Somebody’s neighborhood.
Somebody’s family.
Somebody remembers going to school with them.
Somebody remembers their laugh.
Somebody remembers who they were before they wore a uniform.
I have one of those people here.
Thousands of other visitors do too.
THE PEOPLE WHO DON’T HAVE WIKIPEDIA PAGES
I’ve visited other memorials where the emotional weight comes from a single event.
The ValuJet Flight 592 Memorial in the Florida Everglades is one of those places.
ValuJet 592 crashed into the Everglades in 1996, killing all 110 people aboard.
I didn’t know any of them.
I had no personal connection to anyone on that airplane.
But visiting the memorial still meant a lot to me.
It’s small, isolated and incredibly simple. You stand there looking across an enormous expanse of Florida wilderness knowing that somewhere beyond the memorial is where 110 lives ended simultaneously.
You don’t need to know their names for that to mean something.
One flight. One moment. 110 people.
Arlington is almost the opposite.
There isn’t one tragedy here.
There are generations of them.
Civil War.
World War I.
World War II.
Korea.
Vietnam.
Iraq.
Afghanistan.
Different wars. Different generations. Different circumstances.
The same white stones.
At the ValuJet memorial, I had no personal connection to the people being remembered, yet standing there and understanding what happened made the place incredibly meaningful.
At Arlington, that distance disappears.
Among hundreds of thousands of individual stories spread across more than 600 acres is someone I actually knew growing up.
One memorial reminds me that you don’t have to know someone to feel the weight of their loss. Arlington reminds me how different it feels when you do.
ROW AFTER ROW AFTER ROW
The size of Arlington National Cemetery is difficult to understand until you’re standing inside it.
Perfectly aligned white marble headstones disappear across rolling hills and beneath enormous trees.
You walk past one.
Then another.
Then another.
Eventually they begin blending together into enormous geometric patterns across the landscape.
Until you stop and read one.
A name.
A military branch.
A war.
A birth date.
A death date.
Sometimes the person lived another 50 years after leaving the military.
Sometimes they barely had a chance to start living at all.
That’s usually when Arlington stops feeling like a historical destination and starts feeling like what it actually is.
A graveyard.
There are people underneath those stones.
Sons. Daughters. Husbands. Wives. Mothers. Fathers. Friends.
People who left home wearing a uniform and, in far too many cases, never came back.
THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER
High on a hill overlooking Washington sits one of Arlington’s most important memorials: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The Tomb represents unidentified American service members who died in war.
Their names were lost.
Their sacrifice wasn’t.
Since 1937, the Tomb has been continuously guarded.
Twenty-four hours a day.
Seven days a week.
Rain.
Snow.
Heat.
Middle of the night.
Christmas morning.
Doesn’t matter.
Someone is standing watch.
The sentinel walks 21 steps across the mat.
Stops for 21 seconds.
Turns.
Waits another 21 seconds.
Then walks back.
The number 21 symbolizes the twenty-one-gun salute, traditionally one of the highest military honors.
Every movement is deliberate.
Every step means something.
Watching the Changing of the Guard is one of those rare travel experiences where a crowd of tourists collectively realizes nobody needs to say anything.
With thousands of graves behind you and Washington visible across the Potomac, silence feels appropriate.
THEN AUTUMN SHOWS UP
Here’s something that feels slightly strange to say about a cemetery.
Arlington National Cemetery in autumn is absolutely fucking gorgeous.
The property is filled with enormous mature trees that explode into reds, oranges and yellows as temperatures begin dropping around Washington.
Those colors stretch across rolling hills covered with perfectly aligned white headstones.
Leaves collect around graves.
Sunlight cuts through the trees.
Washington sits across the Potomac in the distance.
For a photographer, it’s spectacular.
It’s also a strange contrast.
The ValuJet Flight 592 Memorial sits beside the endless flat wilderness of the Florida Everglades. It’s remote, quiet and almost unnervingly empty. The landscape reinforces the isolation of what happened there.
Arlington couldn’t look more different.
It’s meticulously maintained.
Orderly.
Peaceful.
And during autumn, stunningly beautiful.
Yet everywhere you point your camera, you’re photographing someone’s final resting place.
The beauty and sadness somehow exist together.
Maybe that’s part of what makes Arlington in autumn so memorable.
Nature doesn’t stop because this is a cemetery.
The leaves still change.
Winter still comes.
Spring eventually returns.
The seasons keep moving.
SOMETIMES YOU PUT THE CAMERA DOWN
Arlington National Cemetery is absolutely worth visiting while you’re in Washington, D.C.
But it deserves to be treated differently from almost everything else you’ll visit around the city.
People are still being buried here.
Funeral processions still move through these roads.
Families still come here to visit people they loved.
Somewhere among those hundreds of thousands of graves is a girl I grew up with.
And there are hundreds of thousands of other people here who meant exactly as much to someone else.
So walk around.
Read the names.
Look at the dates.
Visit Kennedy’s grave.
Watch the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Take in the absolutely incredible autumn landscape.
Take some photographs.
And then do what I eventually found myself doing here, just as I did while standing alone at the ValuJet memorial in the Everglades.
Put the camera down.
At ValuJet, you’re remembering 110 people lost together in a single horrific moment.
At Arlington, you’re surrounded by generations of individual stories.
One of those stories happens to belong to someone from mine.
And sometimes the most important thing you can do at a place like this isn’t photograph it.
It’s simply remember them.
RIP.
