My wife had to work, so I took the train into the city alone, riding next to a poster that MoveOn had placed on the wall. It had a simple message: I Stand With Obama.
The cold was the second thing I noticed when I stepped off the train. The first was the crowds. It was ungodly early in DC on an icy morning, but the city was teeming with smiling mouths expelling frosted breaths, and the platform in the Metro station was packed.
I stood still as I rode the escalator up, packed too tightly to walk.
By just after six a.m. I was on the Mall, heading for my target. I had gotten it in my head that, on this day, I ought to stand where Dr. King stood decades before my birth, and look out over the grass and water and sea of humanity that he saw.
Large television screens lined the Mall, in one of the few nods to preparation that were readily discernible. By day's end, the poor preparation would become a major theme of the coverage, but there was no hint of the scale of the problem yet.
I made my way slowly to the Lincoln Memorial (it was too cold to hurry, and my boots hurt).
The crowd was much thinner here, the majority of my fellow subway riders choosing to make their way closer to the Capitol, to stake their spots. The stage from the incredible concert of just a few days before was still in place, there not having been enough time to remove it.
The spot commemorating where Dr. King stood in 1963 is hard to find in good conditions. It's a slab of stone with a worn and faded inscription in it, and this morning it was also covered in moisture. I finally found it.
I looked up and drank in the view.
It didn't take long for the irony to hit me: from this spot, it would be impossible to see the actual swearing-in, since the West Front was blocked by the Washington Monument. Standing there, it would have been impossible for even a visionary of King's prophetic ability to see what would happen in just a few hours.
I took one last photo, capturing a spectator who I think had to have been pleased with what he was seeing, as millions of people of all races arrived and huddled together as one, united, American mass.
...
The sun soon started rising off to the Capitol's right, and it became obvious that the day was not going to get any warmer. The crowd was already as large as I had expected it to get, but people kept arriving by the thousands.
It felt like Jubilee.
I worked my way forward as far as I could (which wasn't very far forward at all), and found a spot where I had a good view of at least one screen and a good chance of being able to hear one of the massive speaker towers.
Behind me, MSNBC had set up a mobile studio. They looked warm. Crowds stood below it, hoping that the camera attached to a large boom would pan over them and they would be on television for this momentous occasion.
Of course, I was far from the only person taking pictures:
And we stood, and waited. For at least three hours, there was no forward motion, no way to navigate the dense mass of parkas. We simply stood, we simply waited. And we talked with each other. We made friends with our neighbors. Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands, and all that.
At noon, some of us noticed the clocks and realized that, technically, the already sworn-in Joe Biden was the President, as noon had passed (marking the first moment in eight years when America did not have an incompetent fool for a President). But nobody wanted to rush Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, although a few of us did hush our neighbors so we could hear their performance better (had we known that it was a recording, we'd probably have laid off a little bit).
And then the moment arrived, after one cold morning and 220 fitful years of waiting.
(Look closely, and you can see it on a screen in the background.)
And yes, we all cringed a little bit when the Oath of Office was flubbed by the new Chief Justice and the new President. But that momentary discomfort, and the dull aches borne of standing in sub-freezing temperatures for hours, subsided immediately after the first notes of "Hail to the Chief" echoed across the Mall.
There are no words to describe the emotional surge at that moment. The melange of relief, hope, anxiety, patriotism, satisfaction, and jubilation combined with an historical appreciation of the moment to produce a feeling I can only imagine parallels that of a successful childbirth. It felt as if a new nation had been born, and for that moment, everyone in that crowd felt like the America of our grade school textbooks had finally emerged.
It was bliss.
And then it was over. Two million people all needed to get to warmth, to seating, to a respite from the elbows and footfalls of others. Escaping the Mall became the singular focus for most attendees, save for that delightful moment when Executive One flew over the crowd, and hundreds of thousands of us joyously and crudely burst into an impromptu chorus of "Na, na, na, na, hey hey hey, goodbye!"
The extent of the devastation that we had wrought was immediately apparent. The Mall was trampled, as though a herd of stampeding bison had been running laps.
We tripped over litter and choked on dust.
Some gave up hope of leaving for hours, and simply decided to wait until escape was a more viable option, huddling under discarded papers for warmth.
Some did their best to clean up a little, but the effort was futile.
I fought my way closer to the Capitol, hoping to cut north and reach Union Station, but the roads were blocked. But even though my plan was foiled by the Inaugural Parade that I knew I couldn't reach or watch, I did have a chance to photograph the empty dais, in all its star-spangled glory.
I made my way to the nearest open Metro station, but it was impossible to reach.
I sat on a nearby knoll and watched for a few minutes, resting my feet and trying in vain to stop my ankle from bleeding into my boot--by this point I'd walked over five miles in uncomfortable boots, and the pain was getting bad.
I detoured a few blocks east of the Capitol and made my way towards Union Station at last, but, again, it was too crowded to enter. Being so close to my campus, I decided to head there and rest for an hour to give the crowd time to thin out.
But the street in front of my school had been turned into a makeshift bazaar, selling all manner of Inaugural memorabilia. The impression was equal parts flea market and street party, and it was intoxicating.
I finally made it into the school cafeteria, where there were two flatscreens tuned to the news coverage of the only story that mattered. At one point, a campus security officer came over and asked me for ID, not believing that someone bundled up so tightly in a tattered old coat with missing buttons and bleeding into his boots was actually a student here. I looked like a wreck (as it happens, I'm typing this in that same cafeteria, looking much less damaged than I did then).
About an hour later, I returned to Union Station, which was down to a relatively typical level of activity. I made it onto a train, headed home, and passed out.
...
Though we all knew it at the time, and felt it to our cores, it wasn't until I'd had time to catch a few hours of sleep, a much-needed shower, and a change of clothes that I took stock of what a miracle we had just witnessed.
A black man was President of the United States.
A constitutional scholar was President of the United States.
An Iraq War opponent was President of the United States.
A supporter of universal health care was President of the United States.
George Walker Bush was not President of the United States.
And doubt the miraculous nature of what happened one year ago today if you must. But at 12:07 p.m. on January 20th, 2009, America was blessed, and we were once again placed in control of our national destiny.
And if that weren't enough of a miracle, consider this: though the chill was biting and the swarms of people daunting, on that day, the children of America walked on water.
Happy Anniversary, Mr. President. Here's to a great Year Two.