By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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.
In distrusting the variables of safety, we distrust the other variables, such as joy. In the magnetometer line at the first of what turned out to be two security checkpoints, nobody has that enslaved look they have in airports. They are pleased, with a slight twitch of the hassled, furrowed brows of the post-9/11 era: What if in all this precaution, I miss witnessing history? The look that says, I already bought the T-shirt that says "I witnessed history," and my button that says "I was there" so let us in there, let us see it.
Another burst of light, through the tent, past the gate, with, it turns out, a ticket that gets us closer than we've ever been at one of these things. There's been some wonderful mistake and they've put us in Section Jay-Z, in the realm of hip-hop and movie stars and the sort of media people who don't have to file a dispatch right away -- pundits, who have time to consider the history they've witnessed and tell us what it all really meant. We are close enough to the Marine bandstand to hear the spit being cleared out of a clarinet and see the presidential podium behind the balustrade above. Some rows behind that, there's Denzel Washington in a slate blue knit cap. Jay-Z (in an enormous fur hat) and Beyoncé (black velvet outfit, sunglasses, door-knocker earrings) arrive with Sean "Diddy" Combs and some handsome heavies; Access Hollywood leaps in for the kill.
A woman named Angela Trotter walks by, with a companion. His name is Maurice Winters. She looks like she could be famous, too, in a fur-collared jacket and glamorously wild hair and a big smile. ("Who is she?" people ask.) Trotter and Winters ask us to take a picture using her digital camera. "We didn't decide to come until four hours ago," she says. They were in New York. They were offered seats. She was iffy. "I thought I'd just watch it on TV and at the very last minute I called the car service." She got to thinking about her parents, Nelson and Ethel Trotter, who got active in the civil rights movement. Her father died in 2000, she says; her mother died in 2004. Trotter realized she was blowing off a chance at history. "It's all God's doing," she says.
And you know what about sitting with VIPs? They cannot stop turning around to look at the huddled masses out there, stretching back beyond the ticketed realm. It's a bubbling sea of red, white, blue blurring together as pink. "They've all got flags," someone says, marveling at it. "They're all waving flags."
After a while, during one of the preludes to the prelude, somewhere between the arrival of congressmen and the announcement of former presidents, parts of the hundreds of thousands of people in the Mall can be heard chanting "O-bam-a" over and over. Diddy tries to get the rest of us to join in: "Don't be afraid, come on," he shouts. "O-bam-a. O-bam-a."
* * *
Dispersal and denouement are usually the worst part of these things. Armed personnel shout at you about where you can't go. This time, though, it feels like a street party. People aren't screaming expletives at limousines, etc. The thousands of people lingering in the Mall all scream when the jumbotrons show President Bush and former first lady Laura Bush walking toward the helicopter.
Ah, the helicopter departure.
It always feels like that's the history. There's that cinema verite moment where the helicopter you're watching on the screen suddenly becomes the actual helicopter overhead. Across the trashed-out fields, America sings "Na-na-na-na, hey-hey . . . "
An older man in gray sweatpants and a green fleece jacket is leaping for joy. He takes a picture of the helicopter. "You should get that framed," a woman tells him.
"I should, that's a wonderful idea. I've haven't been this happy in a long, long time," he says.
The man is Hal Abercrombie. He's 68. His brother, Neil, is a congressman from Hawaii. They knew Barack Obama's father in the early '60s. The story goes on and on, involving civil rights pioneers, Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis, social activism in San Francisco in the 1970s. Hal Abercrombie will talk our ear off, until we tell him to stop, but "It comes down to this," he says. "I spent every day of the last eight years feeling the worst anxiety. Now it's gone. . . . It's not only a great time just to be out here, it's the essence of emotion. As soon as [Obama] took the oath, I said to the person next to me, I said, 'I can breathe again.' "
A woman who goes by the moniker Tonya TKO stands on C Street NW near Judiciary Square, hawking T-shirts she made that proclaim in big, block letters: "Move Bush, Get Out the Way!" (a reference to Ludacris's hit several years ago). The minute the helicopter flew away the market collapsed. "Fifty percent off!" Tonya TKO yells at passersby. "Cap sleeves baby-T! Get one! Move Bush, Get Out the Way."
"We done moved him," a man tells her as he walks by.
"Then get the T-shirt," she says, undeterred. She still has a box or two to unload.
A certain grittiness settles in. The trash is swirling in circles, the sky is graying, and it feels exhausting now. It feels like all these solitary lost gloves you keep seeing on the street. The world rushes back into focus. "Do we want to try to see the parade or do we want to go home, and get there in time to see it on TV?" a father asks, polling his chattering, shivering brood. They all vote for TV.
Whatever gives you goose bumps now becomes a chill. Now comes the reassuring but far more dull feeling that Washington will take matters from here.
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