Patience at the Monument

Inauguration Day approached DC like the standard blizzard warnings, with nobody really knowing what to expect and a general sense of festive bracing-for-the-apocalypse, we're-all-in-this-together, contingency-plans-ahoy.

My contingency plans were scuttled: AFI ran out of its tickets to watch the whole show for free at the huge Silver Theater before IE and I could get ours, and IE got a last-minute ticket to the Silver Zone and canceled the brunch/watch party she was planning. La Mère and I agreed to avoid the Metro and to bus it down 16th Street instead, although I attached a contractual rider that I was out of the party if more than three buses packed to the gills went by.

To its credit, though, WMATA did really well with the buses, and after waiting maaaybe four minutes we shared a merry ride downtown with the previously mentioned Canuck cutie and about 50 other people before being dumped at M Street, where holy shit it was the many people. The local bike group was valeting madly away, and the vendors were selling every possible bit of Obama swag that could be pinned to, wrapped around, yanked over, or otherwise donned by the masses in public. We joined the river of humanity flowing along L toward downtown, and at some point—maybe on 18th?—I turned to look back up the hill, prompting the first of many startled exclamations that there were, in fact, more people than I thought lived in DC following us. And we were late, having not gotten out of bed until 7 AM; the really dedicated people were already ensconced on the Mall.

We followed the crowds onto the Washington Monument grounds, which has enough of a hill that we could see most of the Mall and get a good view of a Jumbotron (the only way most of us saw or heard anything). Finding a place was a bit like being a fruit bit dropped into jello: We moved until we couldn't go forward any more, and shortly thereafter the crowd behind us solidified.

It was of course a very partisan group, with the "hey hey, goodbye"-ing to former President Bush and huge cheers for the Clintons and the Obamas. There was some quiet grumbling about Rick Warren (whose dreary presentation added little to the show and who should've been supplanted by Reverend Lowery), though the most eloquent reaction I saw came from the couple behind me, who silently raised a gauze rainbow scarf about their heads. And when the John Williams piece was played, my God. Who would have thought so many people could be so quiet?

The sound system was drastically out of sync with the visual, so there was some lag to our reactions relative to those further up the Mall. Cheers during Obama's speech were enthusiastic but short, since everyone wanted to hear as much as possible; the closed captioning was a nice gesture but not easy to read. Big cheers for the line about restoring science to American life (about damn time), huge cheers for the one about not sacrificing our values for security, and a murmur of surprise when "nonbelievers" were included in the list of citizens. Around this point I realized that my feet were slowly freezing solid—the morning's coffee was also a reality, but the prospect of portajons in 20-degree weather was sufficient to make me think of England—and as soon as the address was over we joined the throngs fleeing the inauguration poem. We were not alone.

The oddest part about this mobscene wasn't that it was ethnically heterogenous, or incredibly warmly dressed, or even that it didn't have any protesters; it was how gentle everyone was with their neighbors. People whose flags obscured the view of the monster screen were asked politely to put them down once the ceremonies began; they apologized promptly and did so; people who sat down to cram new heaters into their shoes didn't find their places usurped; when La Mère stumbled as we left, a stranger steadied her before moving on. Given the cold, the poor instructions for exiting, and the sheer masses of humanity, I'd expected at least some grousing, but no. "There's a look," said La Mère as we left. "Heavily dressed, tired but pleased, and doggedly trudging." The evening's dinner and pints at a local Irish bar went down very gratefully; being chilly and excited for that long takes it out of you.

I had teased La Mère that she was so bent on joining the throngs because she hadn't gotten to the Election Night parties. "No," she said firmly. "It's one thing I did and another I didn't. When the Iran hostages were released, they took them on buses from the airport to DC, and people lined the route to cheer for them. I was there for that, and I've always been glad I did. But when Pope JPII was in town, I didn't go, and I've always regretted it. So this is a case of not wanting to regret this, and if you don't want to join me, that's fine. But I live next to something that people are flying across the country to see, and I. Am. Going." And so we did.