Leesburg Pike is a traffic corridor through Reston, linking the Washington commute to the office parks and corporate premises where the 1989 monkey-house outbreak became a human and institutional emergency. In the book, it provides more than a backdrop: the road connects the routine movement of suburban workdays with the growing effort to understand and contain an unfamiliar virus.

Setting and Surroundings

Reston lies about ten miles west of Washington, D.C., just beyond the Beltway, and Leesburg Pike funnels traffic toward the city. Its surroundings combine executive homes, crescent driveways, and newer office developments with remnants of the area’s rural past: occasional modest bungalows, roadside stands selling autumn pumpkins and squash, and open meadows. The contrast makes the corridor feel neither wholly country nor wholly corporate; older traces persist among the newer growth.

The Hazleton Connection

The road served as a direct link to the Hazleton offices. Dan Dalgard, a consulting veterinarian at the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit, could drive from his work at Hazleton Washington’s nearby headquarters to check on the monkeys. The proximity made the outbreak part of an ordinary working geography: a short drive connected corporate offices with the building where animals were falling ill.

As the crisis deepened, Leesburg Pike also marked the passage of time through familiar routines. Near the middle of November, traffic jams formed there as daylight faded, while Dalgard worked on his record of events. On November 16, after learning that monkeys were dying in rooms beyond Room F, he drove up the road to the Reston office park; that evening, he and another Hazleton veterinarian euthanized the monkeys in Room F.

A Route Through the Response

The corporate offices on Leesburg Pike became a meeting place for the response. Nancy Jaax and C. J. Peters arrived there to meet Dalgard and speak with Hazleton laboratory employees who had handled tissue and blood from sick monkeys. Joe McCormick also came, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took charge of the human-health aspects of the outbreak. The employees’ fear had been heightened by radio reports on their commute, which greatly exaggerated the number of deaths in Africa.

The Pike’s narrative significance lies in this collision of ordinary access and extraordinary risk. Commuters still traveled toward Washington; office workers passed through their days; and investigators and veterinarians moved between headquarters, the office park, and the monkey house. The road gives the emergency a specific suburban geography, showing how a crisis centered in an animal quarantine facility reached into workplaces and daily travel without first announcing itself in the landscape.