It alternated scorching heat and opaque, battering summer storms all day today. The monumental buildings may mislead that this is the seven hills of Rome — the Potomac is our Tiber, or perhaps given it’s inaccessibility, our Chao Phraya — but after you’ve lived here for a while there’s no mistaking it: the heat, the damp, the vegetation, the smells of decaying plant gonads, the short primitive trees, the cicadas: Washington, D.C. is a swamp.