No Country for Late Men

The time was 5:45 am. Walking past a deserted Kennedy Center, it struck my group that in the past ten minutes we had seen several sets of blue-red police lights but not a single fellow civilian. Deserted shopping complexes and the occasional pack of home-bound partiers constituted the early morning scene at the riverbank. The light of a purring black helicopter scanned the fractured sheets coating the Potomac, while a hovercraft zipped over them, fissuring the fragile ice.

I imagined the FBI sweeping in and rounding us all up for trespassing. That would be a hell of a way to miss an inauguration.

It turned out we had not trespassed. We emerged from under the Theodore Roosevelt bridge, tromped across Constitution Gardens, and reached the array of virgin portable toilets and as-yet-unmanned police barricades that marked the beginning of the viewing area behind the Washington monument. We were still over a mile from the Capitol steps on which the president-elect would take his oath.

Here I broke off from my unticketed acquaintances. My older brother’s hard work on the New Hampshire senate campaign had left him with a purple standing room ticket, and his post-campaign travels in Cambodia left him unable to claim it.

I made my way up parallel to Constitution Avenue, passing streets still populated by more police than civilians and eventually reaching the intersection at 7th Street. The time was 6:35 am. The gate for purple ticket-holders was at Constitution Avenue and 1st Street—just six blocks away. But national guard troops blocked the path, and none could suggest any way to bypass the inaugural parade route they guarded and reach the gate.

Leaving the gate, I joined forces with Josh and Amy—a staffer for Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) and his behavioral science funding lobbyist wife—in search of an alternate route. On our first attempt we overheard a displeased Samuel L. Jackson working his cell phone over his own inability to make it through the barricade. At least we weren’t the only ones. Eventually, after a three-mile detour, around the White House and parade route, we made the six blocks along Constitution Avenue and reached the purple ticket entry gate.

The time was 10:00 am, and 1st street was a mob scene. Thousands of people—white, black, Hispanic; political professionals and church hat-donning locals beside families from Alaska—pressed against each other in the street in a “line” lacking order and forward movement. Everybody had heard a different rumor: the section was full and even ticket-holders would no longer be admitted; the metal detectors had malfunctioned and each person was being screened by hand; someone had gone into cardiac arrest; all previous entrants had been re-checked once a series of counterfeit tickets were discovered. The only certainty in the throng lay in the fact that the ceremony could not be delayed, postponed, or rerun. It had to happen exactly at twelve noon. Always on time. By the constitution.

Josh and Amy abandoned the quest and elected to go watch the ceremony on TV, but I threw my lot in with the crowd.

“Let us in,” we chanted as the moment neared. By 11:30—the original closing time for security screening—I had advanced far enough to observe that slowly but surely ticket-holders were still making their way through the security point. By 11:45 I had found my way to a region of the mass of people actually moving forward, albeit slowly.

By 11:55 I was at the cusp of the row of metal detectors—at the front and center of the crowd—when the policewoman in charge announced “hold the line.” Five minutes from the moment, and those around me knew we wouldn’t make it. They really wouldn’t wait for us.

I watched those on the other side of the barricade trickle through the metal detectors. I could hear occasional cheers from inside the secured area but had no indication as to exactly how the ceremony was progressing.

At noon I heard, “open them up again.”

I removed my coat, passed first in line through a metal detector, received a pat down, and sprinted around a corner to encounter a cheering crowd standing along 1st Street, with thousands in front and millions behind. Finding a spot amongst the craning necks, I could just begin to focus on the dignitaries on the Capitol steps as Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) introduced the Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Jr. ’76 to conduct the swearing-in of the president-elect.

The time was 12:03.