Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Inauguration Day

Here's the long-awaited post on my experience of Inauguration day in DC. Okay, so none of you were really awaiting it, since most of you didn't even know that I went. Honestly, I don't know what the hell possessed me to think it would be a good idea. I guess I got in to that sillyass mindset of "once in a lifetime experience" thinking.

Let me start by saying that the inauguration of the first person of color to the presidency is absolutely a cause for celebration. I remain ambivalent about Obama, in part because I don't vote for people who believe in the right of the state to murder its citizens (yes, he's pro-death penalty.) Whatever: time will tell whether the Obama presidency is really great, as many have hopes for, or whether it's like the Clinton years: full of promise, but ultimately a time of miserable public policy. (Just for starters, see: AEDPA, IIRAIRA, DOMA, Don't Ask Don't Tell, PRWOA ("welfare to work"), Federal Death Penalty Act, elimination of inmate education, Communications Decency Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, etc., etc.)

But I digress: here's how the inauguration story goes. My friend, we'll call her B, had tickets to the "VIP" bleachers on the parade route at Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue between 13th and 14th streets. I was going to be in NYC anyway, so it's not quite as absurd to travel to DC as it sounds. She gets Greyhound tickets, since Amtrak is charging superbowl scalper prices.

The adventure begins with Greyhound. Some of you know that I have long sworn off traveling on Greyhound, mostly for the limited leg room and stench that only a full Greyhound bus, and perhaps gutters running with raw sewage in developing nations can sport. On Monday January 19, we figure out that both our departure and return times are unworkable: we were on a 1:45am bus from Port Authority set to arrive at 6:05am in DC. With the crowds, it was clear that this wouldn't allow enough time to get in before the authorities closed off the checkpoints into the parade route. So we call Greyhound, but we can't change reservations online. So we go to Port Authority and wait in line, but we have to print out the tickets at the kiosk first: the online confirmation page isn't sufficient. But we try all five kiosks, which all say to see an agent. But the agent says they can't print or access online-purchased tickets; we have to print them out from B's e-mail. So we go to Kinko's and print them out and return to Port Authority. Then we go to the smaller (and much more friendly) of the two Greyhound counters at Port Authority, but they tell us we need a supervisor override to change the tickets, since they contain companion fares. So we return to the larger and less friendly counter, where they tell us that's silly, these are fully refundable and changeable tickets. We finally get them changed, and make plans to meet at Port Authority at 11:15 for the 12:30am departure.

I return to Brooklyn, get Alaska-level warm clothes, snacks, and bourbon, and identify a vegan restaurant within walking distance of Port Authority. Probably the highlight of the entire 36 hour experience, Zen Palate was delicious and friendly. I started with a lovely Grilled Sesame Tofu Salad, then had Tofu Delight (w/taro spring rolls, brown & red rice). As I was leaving, they insisted I take about two dozen Peanut Basil Moo-Shu Rolls with me that they couldn't use, which would end up being a huge bonus the next day.

The bus gets out on time with a super energetic driver and lots of cheering and clapping. This was one of the truly beautiful things about the experience: the energy, enthusiasm, and dare I say it, hope, was palpable. Until people got anrgy. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

With maybe an hour of sleep accomplished, we arrive in DC around 4:30am, walk the four blocks to Union Station, and have an early breakfast and coffee. So far, so good. About 5:30, we start the walk to try to get to 13th and Pennsylvania, a walk that was like an unholy chimera of Franz Kafka and Stephen King novels. The crowds were large but tolerable at this point. In the midst of all this, the volunteers in the red beanies were so astonishingly incompetent and ignorant it took my breath away. You could literally get ten different answers from ten volunteers within ten yards of one another. I know DC moderately well, but everything was different on this day: streets blocked off all over the place, and extremely limited ways to get to anything.

Here, due to ignorant advice from volunteers and cops, most of the latter out of town cops, we we pushed into the decision which would dictate much of the rest of the day's lack of success: despite offering otherwise contradictory information on almost everything else, they uniformly insist that the only way to get to the 13th and Pennsylvania is to walk south through the 3rd Street tunnel, also known as Interstate 395, and cross back over the National Mall later, near 12th Street. ZAP! Never again would be be able to get to the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue.

So we continue our Long Walk with ever increasing crowds. We walk west on Independence Avenue, and cut up 7th Street to the Mall. Somewhere in here, it started being nearly wall to wall people in places, and we had to hold hands constantly to keep from being swept up and separated by the crowds. We cut across the mall at 14th Street, and soon realized there was literally no way to cut across Pennsylvania Avenue to the north side. After half a dozen unsuccessful attempts and dozens more interactions with ignorant, worthless volunteers and cops, we doubled back along Madison Drive (the northern border of the Mall) to the checkpoint at 12th Street just a little above Constitution. We stood in a mostly polite, mostly orderly line in the cold for about an hour, until B had to go get coffee and warm up a little. We didn't see each other again until NYC the next day.

Sometime around 8am, the authorities opened up some gates that were holding people back on 12th Street just south of Constitution, and they swarmed toward the checkpoint that we were standing in our orderly little line for. Mob mentality took over almost immediately, and we all swarmed into a mass of people, thousands of us packed so tight you literally couldn't move, and thousands more pushing from behind you. I stood in this scrum for about an hour and a half to two hours, and in this time, moved forward toward the checkpoint perhaps 10 yards.

In this crowd I saw the first example of one of the creepier sights of the day: the crowds were being ordered around and managed by young men in military uniform, essentially identical to ACU (Army Combat Uniform), or what most people think of as BDU (Battle Dress Uniform.) Down to the boots and bloused trousers, the critical exception was that none of these Army soldier lookalikes displayed rank or unit patches. So to those not familiar with military uniforms or protocol, they looked for all the world like active duty soldiers, and indeed, many in the crowd were referring to them as "army guy" and the like. The problem, of course, is that the entire military chain of command is based on rank, and if you're not displaying your rank, the system doesn't function: critically, actual military personnel can't know if they can order you around, or be ordered around by you. I've read many blogs and articles since about "US Army" personnel doing crowd control. My best understanding of these guys is that they were private security contractors, dressed up to look like soldiers to give them an appearance of greater authority and power. (Let's not put aside for the moment the problems with posse comitatus, which prevents the government from using military personnel for domestic law enforcement except in very limited circumstances.)

So we stand in this crowd for a good long while in the cold. The only way I stayed warm was that I was literally surrounded on all sides by people, and even I was shivering and losing sensation in my hands. I saw several people actively going through the stages of hypothermia, including moving from limited shivering, to significant involuntary shivering, and then fading to intermittent or no shivering. Realistically, had any of these people collapsed, I don't know that it would have been possible for them to be evacuated from the crowd. The police standing around, representing departments and sheriff's offices around the eastern and central US, certainly didn't have the capacity or ability to properly treat mass hypothermia.

Finally, seeing that this crowd wasn't moving, and the very likely possibility being that I wouldn't even get in before the secret service decided the crowds were at capacity, I gave up and began my salmon spawning routine. It took about a half hour to move the 150 or so feet through the crowd. I tried to call B, but as has been reported, cell phones were borderline useless that day.

So I wandered around for another couple hours, including looking to see if it would be possible to cross over at 7th Street (strike two!) and played phone tag with another friend from NYC who I knew was going to be there. We finally connected on the Mall, where people watched jumbotrons of the inauguration ceremony.

It was a little unclear why it made sense to watch something on TV on the Mall that you could stay at home and watch on TV, but I suppose I can empathize with wanting to be "part of history." It's a little like the hundreds of thousands of people who claim to have been at the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thompson hit the shot heard round the world in 1951, except here you didn't need a ticket.

Anyway, I hung out with my other friend for a while, kept trying to get B by phone and text, and finally decided to go back to Union Station, which was our pre-agreed meeting point in case we got separated.

With the 3rd Street tunnel and the crowds, the crowds increasingly irritated that their tickets to get in to various parts of the inauguration and parade were basically worthless, walking from 12th and Jefferson to Judiciary Square took a little over an hour. From there, it was clear that there was basically no way to walk to Union Station, so I took the Metro one stop, on what was apparently one of the last Metro red line trains to operate, since a woman fell onto the tracks due to crowding at Gallery Place/Chinatown.

Thus began my functional imprisonment at Union Station. I got some lunch in the food court, and went upstairs to wait for and try to get in touch with B. The crowd here was thick but mostly positive, occasionally breaking into impromptu chants of "O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!" and comparing notes about how their tickets had been worthless to get them in. At some point, I finally heard from B that they had closed in the hundreds of thousands of people on the parade route, and by rumor, the Mall, so I should just go back to NYC whenever I could; she wasn't going anywhere any time soon. I began the trek out of Union Station, only to find out that authorities had closed every single exit except the 1st Street exit. Literally tens of thousands of us were inside, and many of us were trying to get out. Tens of thousands were trying to push the opposite direction, to get into the Metro red line stop. Cops of every stripe were screaming at us on bullhorns to "MOVE MOVE MOVE! STAY RIGHT! KEEP MOVING!" Confidential to every asshole cop that screamed at us that day: WE WERE TRYING. Really. I don't know if all of you were stupid AND blind, or just stupid, but it really wasn't possible to move any faster or more effectively than we were. To get about 150 feet took almost an hour.

I finally made it out only to be told by a particularly aggressive Chicago PD cop that 1st Street was closed, and I had to TURN AROUND MOVE TURN AROUND MOVE. I did, walked up North Capitol Street, and the five circuitous blocks only took about fifteen minutes with the rapidly thinning crowds. I was able to walk almost immediately onto a bus: Greyhound had contract buses ready and waiting to load people, no matter what bus you were scheduled on. As I've told several people, it's truly terrifying when the best organized logistics of the day are by Greyhound. Here I caught about five minutes of CNN's reporting of the inaugural parade which, at 4:55pm, was about 1/3 of the way along its route. (It was supposed to start at 2:30pm.)

The Bolt Bus gets a special shout-out here: comfortable seats with crazy good legroom, a friendly and efficient driver, and free wifi (if it had worked, but I didn't have my laptop anyway.) Apparently online fares as cheap as $1 NYC-DC, and walkup fares between $25 and $35 for NYC, Boston, and DC trips. What they can't control, however, is whatever jackass issued a false bomb threat on the New Jersey Turnpike, causing us to get stuck between exits 2 and 3 for just under two hours. Actually seems like it wasn't the jackass they arrested who was mostly at fault, but rather the jackasses' mother who called it in. So we sat and moved about 100 yards in just under two hours, because all of the other idiot drivers apparently felt the need to continually fill in the few few between themselves and the car in front of them.

I had food, wine (smartly purchased at Union Station before the temporary incarceration), my ipod, and took naps, so it wasn't the worst thing ever, but it certainly wasn't a pleasant way to cap off the day. We finally made it back to Port Authority around 1am, and after taking the subway to Bushwick, I arrived "home" at 2am. Ugh.

Here is an interesting article that doesn't make clear how many of the cops were from out of town, and didn't know anything about how to get around DC. It just notes "other jurisdictions."

So there it is: how this was, on the whole, one of the five or so worst days of my life. Note to self: don't EVER go to DC for a major event again.