When a Love-In Spreads to Most All D.C. Streets

Yea, though we walk through the 395 tunnel . . . in a suspended sense of municipal reality, on a freeway open only to people on foot, as if something terrible and apocalyptic has occurred, the dawn light having chased off the zombies. It's an adventure we're on. Descending into the mouth of the tunnel beneath E Street NW at 8:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, two women from Miami, one in her pink knit Obama cap, pause to have their picture taken with the big, green exit sign behind them: 2ND ST. SW US CAPITOL 1/2 MILE.

"It's cool to walk on a highway," one of the women, Carolyn Koslen, 40, says. "I'm a crazy researcher. I got online and looked, and this supposedly seemed like a good way to get to where we're supposed to go in." It does seem like a movie, all these people on foot in empty lanes, her friend, Sasha Carr, 37, says. "Or something from real life, like [Hurricane] Katrina."

The women campaigned for President Obama in Florida. Connections got them tickets to the silver gate on the Mall, south side. Logistics put them on the north side, with a lot of barricades in between. They talk about the MTV party at the "Hilton where Reagan was shot," Carr says. "And we're staying at the Marion Barry hotel," Koslen adds.

This is often the Washington story for people: concrete, hotels, the January chill. On the subject of assassination attempts and crack-smoking mayors, the freeway beneath the Capitol is also probably not the city's most lovely legacy. The farther we walk, the more crowded the lanes become. All at once the ebullience level rises. The pedestrian pilgrims have been quiet (sleepy? reverent?) until someone figures out the acoustics are amazing down here. That is when 395 becomes a tunnel of love, a tunnel of woooooo.

A few minutes later we ascend up the Second Street exit ramp into the light.

Of course into the light.

Even just the dumpy old 395 tunnel is rife with dawn metaphors, out of the darkness, and all that. The mind tries to make every moment feel like the moment. But does that really make it the moment?

* * *

It feels like those old Benetton ads finally came true, in Washington of all places: a couple million multi-culti people with beaming smiles, wearing nice coats and brightly colored, woolly-wintry accessories, all seemingly attuned to the same grace notes, all crammed together and loving one another for the ways they are different. The Pepsi commercial to end all Pepsi commercials. It feels like going to someone else's church and admiring the church hats and the church furs and wishing you also could feel the spirit move you. The person next to you can very much feel it, and the person behind you seems to feel it, and a whole group of people in front of you give off the ecstatic warmth of feeling it very much.

Everyone says they came to "witness history." They came to photograph history and text history and make video of history. They came to witness people who are witnessing people who are witnessing history who are in turn witnessing you witnessing history. Constant status updates on the witnessing ofhistory.

All the buildup betrayed an addiction to logistical marvel: the talk about thousands of people per square acre and how many portable toilets to handle how much human waste. The talk and talk about the way people would get in and out.