Inauguration Day Out: View From the Mall

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ATTENDING BARACK OBAMA's inauguration was a study in contrasts: An uplifting glimpse at our nation's beautiful soul, followed by a stark glare at our more troubling instincts. It was a day marked by inspiration and confusion, all delivered in the space of four hours and served with a wind chill of 8 degrees.

YOU TAKE THE GOOD ...
At 11:30 a.m., I was standing in the center of a densely packed, but comfortably spaced crowd on the east end of the Washington Monument grounds. Surrounding me were people of many ethnicities, ages, backgrounds and sexual orientations. Before the ceremony at the Capitol blared through the loudspeakers positioned along the nearly 2 mile stretch of green space and memorials, the crowd was a sea of hats, scarves, gloves, coats and frosty, nervous chatter. But most seemed to take their predicament in stride.

"I'm standing on the Washington Monument grounds with, oh, about 10 zillion of my closest friends," a man in his 40s said into his cell phone.

But the chatter began to fade when the elected officials appeared on screen. Jimmy Carter was greeted with applause, Bill and Hillary Clinton with whoops and cheers. Leaders affiliated with the GOP didn't fare so well. George H.W. Bush received at first polite silence, then a chorus of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" that was probably intended more for his son, outgoing President George W. Bush, who received a loud chorus of boos.

Lavished with applause were incoming President Obama, incoming Vice President Joe Biden and their families.

While the crowd seemed to recoil in unison at the strange patter between Obama and Chief Justice John Roberts" ("He called him senator?") and the hiccup in the administering of the oath of office, they sat in rapt attention as Obama, now president, addressed them.

It was in that moment that all of the day's concerns seemed to melt away. As Obama spoke of duty and sacrifice, of unity and divisions, of the racial history that we had behind us and the tasks still before us, around me were faces deep in contemplation.

Like the strains of music before it from the bows of masters like Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, Obama's speech reverberated in the wind, giving it a delayed cadence like Lou Gehrig's famous farewell — a flourish which only added to its historic heft.

And for the first time all day, after jostling through the crowds and numerous adjustments of my winter gear for maximum warmth, I realized the weight of what we were witnessing. How lucky we all were to be gathered under that towering monument and watching our noble national experiment progress. And how hopeful I was that this man with so many ideas and such an eloquent way of phrasing them would make good on his promise to lead our country in the right direction.

But before me and my nearly 2 million cohorts could rest, many of us first had to be led the wrong direction.

YOU TAKE THE BAD ...
Inaugural planners didn't have an easy job. They had to secure our leaders and our monuments. They had to contend with an already overloaded transportation infrastructure that would be cut to the quick by the adjustments that would need to be made in the name of security. And they'd have to deal with me and the million others like me who would all seek to get somewhere and back all at once.

It didn't go so well.

Issue #1 — Tunnel Trouble. For me, the first hangup came when I tried to get from my apartment on Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument on 14th Street, an 18-block walk that would normally take 30 minutes to make. It took me more than an hour.

» The reason: crowds weren't allowed down Independence Avenue SW or C Street SW past the 3rd Street Tunnel. The result was that I and dozens of others — many traveling from the Capitol South Metrorail station — were routed into the tunnel, which was made pedestrian-only for the day.

» The problem: The tunnel would have spat us out north of Pennsylvania Avenue and we'd have been blocked from the Mall by security on the parade route along Pennsylvania.

» The result: We were herded back south through the tunnel once again and through the labyrinthine streets of Southwest until we finally reached our quarry on the Mall.

If security HAD allowed us through (check out the map here for more), we would have been spared a confusing, half-hour detour.

Issue #2 — Southwest Gridlock. The most insane situation, however, came after the speech, when I — and hundreds of thousands of others like me — were trying to get out of Inaugurationland.

» The problem: Overcrowding led to a crush of people trying to use Metrorail stations south of the Mall. My trip home — which, unfortunately, took me through the Southwest area again because security blocked all other paths — included two of the most intense crowd-related scenes I've ever experienced: One at L'Enfant Plaza and the other at Federal Center SW. In both cases, the problem stemmed from a lack of crowd control to keep patrons from overwhelming the Metro stations.

» The result: Human gridlock on a massive scale. I spent nearly a half hour pressed in a throng of people outside Federal Center — and for about half of that time, the pack didn't move at all. I learned why later: Federal Center had been closed due to overcrowding.

When the logjam finally broke, I was swept up in a tide of people pushing in different directions, some south away from the Mall, others southwest in the direction of the closed station, some north toward the parade and others east toward Capitol South.

It was chaos. It was a stampede. About two minutes in, a woman yelled, "Please stop pushing — there are children up here!" Another warned of a woman in a wheelchair, who, as I was nearly pushed into her by the surging crowd, looked understandably frightened. When I finally reached safety, I looked back, and the scene seemed nearly unchanged — people were still jockeying for position and those less able to defend themselves were pushed out of the way.

YOU TAKE THEM BOTH
For many of us on the Mall today, inspiration met reality. Maybe our big dreams and fancy rhetoric don't help much when we're cold, hungry and confused. Or maybe that contradiction is what will make this next page of history so interesting to watch.

Welcome back to Washington, Mr. Obama. Can't wait to see what you do with the place.

Photos by Greg Barber/Express

» Check out Greg's live Twittering from the day and his gallery of inaugural photos.