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. 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.
My buddy Joe is a photographer and has quite a voice in D.C. and he was who I was staying with and attending the events with. The night before the inauguration we were 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.
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.
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. I 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 Joe 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.
We 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.
At Indiana and 6, I joined another blob. Somebody close to me said, “They’re not letting nobody in nowhere”. National Park Regulations call for one portable toilet for every 300 people, and we could all see the orderly rows of relief on the other side of the fence. On our side, great billows of trash swirled in waist-high eddies.
I started to get the joke: Purple tickets were the gag gifts of the day.
By the end of the tunnel, people were sprinting. I can only describe the scene as something post-apocalyptic, a slice of humanity spilling past the initial checkpoint only to crush itself against a second. Then the crowd surged again, overwhelming the police and their metal detectors, and finally we were able to run into the viewing area.
Afterwards on the edge of Chinatown, we stumbled into an open-air bazaar and I finally found the shirts that had eluded me all day—Obama the prize fighter, Obama the DJ, Obama the slam-dunking Superman. I talked with a jovial fellow named Shakir from Philadelphia who sold foam V for Victory hands. Tony B Conscious, outsider artist of Los Angeles, handed me a business card flecked with spit. A hearty young white guy spanged by the Metro entrance, his hoodie reading “I [heart symbol] B.O.” In the distance, someone yelled “Obama’s black ass, $5!” I walked from table to table, snickering and then unexpectedly tearing up without reason.
After dusk, the temperature fell to the mid-teens. Swaddled in my jacket in front of the Gallery Place/Chinatown station, I was suddenly struck with two distinct and overlapping realizations:
