NEWSLETTER

As someone raised on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I have to report that the actual invitation to the 2009 presidential inauguration looked a tad underwhelming. Heavy linen paper and miniscule security threads gave the invite the feel of new currency, but its purple border, puffy embossment, and sparkly foil US Capitol symbol seemed mere flourishes on an otherwise conservative palate—a far cry from Wonka's golden ticket. Earlier in the week, my dad had received a fake ticket from some not-yet-demobilized echelon of the Obama fundraising machine, a cheerfully designed decoy requesting his presence "to attend and participate" in all public events. The only real difference between his ticket and mine was that mine allowed the bearer passage into the inner sanctum of the viewing stands. Only 240,000 people received such invites, a number both reassuringly elite and refreshingly inclusive. Jehovah's Witnesses believe far fewer will make it into Heaven.

I gave the ticket to my wife, Tara. She agreed to photo duty while I was to navigate the rabble. The night before the inauguration we'd shared a taxi with six other people, speeding through a city under siege—checkpoints, racing motorcades, constant sirens. In the flat light of early morning DC, the scene didn't appear nearly so chaotic. Just cold. Deeply, profoundly, disturbingly, not-fit-for-humanity, mega-shittily cold.

We caught a surprisingly placid bus to 16th Street and then walked south. Food is a laxative and liquids are diuretics, so I'd planned on fasting for the morning. This plan changed when I found myself scarfing down pastries and a jumbo coffee, willfully blind to the dearth of toilets in my near future. Oddly, the overworked all-black staff at the Starbucks on K and 16th seemed absolutely unstoked on the inauguration. Call me what you will—naive, patronizing, outside-the-beltway bumpkin—but until that very moment I had actually expected to see everyone in DC grinning wildly. Ninety-two percent of the city backed the winning horse; why the long faces?

Outside the coffee shop, a young Abe Lincoln impersonator loitered and posed with children. We headed east on I Street, zigzagging south and then east again. I saw only one discernible fashion motif: Proud, unsmiling black ladies in sleek fur coats. The crowd grew denser as we approached the checkpoint for official ticket holders, and we found ourselves moving against the flow of foot traffic as if walking straight into some vast disaster.

I wasn't that far off the mark. In an inaugural first, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty requested and received a preemptive federal emergency declaration from the outgoing president (and Gen X, if Obama's youthful tenure doesn't make you a little uneasy about your own life goals, please note that the capitol's ruggedly handsome mayor was born in 1970). Although attendance estimates had trickled down from an original 4 million people, the day was still expected to easily outstrip 1965's record of 1.2 million. With the prospect of cellular logjams and medical nightmares and logistical meltdowns, the city had steeled itself for disaster. Cutting upstream through the throng, I felt the opposite. This was the closest America has thus far gotten to a pilgrimage. I was expecting the universal brotherhood of the Hajj.

The map on the ticket showed viewing areas coded by color—purple, yellow, blue, orange—leading us to a checkpoint by the mouth of the 3rd Street Tunnel. Tara found a lone cop at the head of a long line and asked where to pass through to the viewing area.

The cop motioned back to the crowd with a weary laugh. The line curved around a street corner, and when we crested this bend I saw, with chilly disbelief, that the mob dipped back into the tunnel and extended beyond the line of sight. We descended down into a scene from a grim sci-fi movie, a procession of somber refugees having no apparent end.

We walked and walked through the dangerously tight crowd and still couldn’t find the endpoint. Every now and then I heard Tara reconfirm my own disbelief, "This is the purple ticket line, right?" Later I read, reports of "thousands" in this tunnel, but it must have been in the tens of thousands. If someone had told me it was over a hundred thousand—more than the population of the city I grew up in—I would have accepted that figure as well. We walked steadily for twenty minutes and found no end. Eventually our side of the tunnel merged with the empty opposite lane and there was some breathing room.

Only where the tunnel opened back onto the street did we finally join the line as participants. Strangely as we inched back in the direction of crowd, less than a dozen or so people lined up behind us. The crowd slowly marched forward, and the line widened without lengthening, leaving the polite rule-followers behind while the more aggressive pilgrims simply moved forward and cut back in. This was my first inkling that I might have to significantly ratchet down my expectations of universal brotherhood.

Tara and I parted ways with an agreement to meet later. Solo, I found one entry to the Mall closed, then another. Every passing conversation concerned the closed gates. Near the Archives/Navy Memorial Metro station, I found a stalled crowd of three of four thousand at another checkpoint. It was after 11, past the point when all of us could be admitted to the public festivities with any kind of security screening. The dull roar of distant Jumbotrons drowned out the crowd's fatigued chants. I passed an unhappy little boy sitting on a low retaining wall, his American flag drooping. "I don't want to stay here. I want to go."


CONTINUED
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