Around 7:10 am, my wife and I left our house in Maryland. The plan was to drive to the nearby subway station, about a mile and a half; leave the car in a garage, hop the train downtown, and head to an office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, the parade route, where we'd been invited to watch the parade. We were going to get there early and just watch the swearing in on TV there.
There were plenty of parking spaces in the garage. So far so good. A train arrived immediately; we didn't have to wait in big crowds to board the train, finally squeezing onto the third or fourth train as I'd feared, and it wasn't even ridiculously packed. So far so smooth.
The train ride took a good bit longer than usual, because so many inbound trains were lined up one after the other. But in about 35 minutes or so, we got to our stop, not far from the mall. There were loads of people milling around, in fact loads of loads. But we've all been to big political events, or Stones concerts or something. It didn't look all that out of the ordinary at first.
The drill was that there was a pedestrian checkpoint to the mall every third block – 4th St., 7th St., 10th St., and so on. We tried 10th St. We could see the checkpoint a couple of blocks away. The throng was forbidding, and a cop told us things might be better at 7th St. Down to 7th we went. Bear in mind that it was maybe 20 degrees That's minus 6.67 celsius.
We lined up at 7th St. When I say "line" I don't mean an orderly single-file line. I mean that 7th St. and its sidewalks, roughly 40 or 50 feet wide, was jam-packed with people. We were packed in against one another, but it wasn't uncomfortable. It began to become so when it dawned on us about 15 minutes later that we'd moved maybe 20 feet.
Then came the police motorcycles and the buses. The motorcycles, sirens wailing, plowed slowly forward and split the crowd, forcing thousands of us, lined up in the street, up onto the sidewalks. Two buses followed the cops right through the crowd.
Now. Recall that these pedestrian access points existed at every third block. That would have suggested to me that the other blocks, 5th and 6th streets and 8th and 9th streets and so on, were dedicated to vehicular traffic. But evidently they were dedicated to something else. Or nothing much. They shot the buses through the same checkpoint.
Now it's been about 45 minutes. The buses have attained success, we've spilled back into the street, but forward progress remains blocked by the police. We were about 20 feet back from the blockade. Improbably enough, we ran into two friends, so that helped things a little, if only to share in the frustrated purgatorio. No communication from the authorities, no information at all.
At this point, the gossip starts. It's around 9:15. Someone has heard it'll take two hours from the point where we are to get through the checkpoint. A woman says no, she didn't merely hear it. She read a cop's lips as he instructed the revelers right in front of him. Someone else has heard that the mall is closed. I pull out my BlackBerry and check the web site of a local AM radio station. "Mall closed from Capitol to 14th Street," the headline said. You don't need to know the geography of Washington DC to figure out that 7th St. is probably between the Capitol and 14th St. Which indeed it is. We're not getting in.
At this point I make an executive decision. The one thing I absolutely had to do today was not, obviously, to watch the parade. I needed to be in front of a TV for the speech. That was my only work assignment. So I couldn't blow that. We left the queue and headed back to the subway station.
At that point the question was whether to head to the office, since I was downtown, or back home. We went down the first escalator of the subway station. We were waved through the turnstiles (so they made it free! Well now, there's a break!). But as we approached the second escalator, from the entry level down to the platform, an FBI agent, a very nice young fellow, said no. We're not letting anyone board trains now.
I looked down at the platform and it looked like people scrambling to get on the last helicopter leaving Saigon in 1975. We turned around to head back up to the street. Why didn't they have someone stationed up at street level saying "Don't bother to go down, they're not letting anyone on trains anyway?" Well, that would be a good question.
As we were trying to leave the station, an announcement came over the loudspeaker: a train had hit a passenger right here, in this very station! Service would disrupted for an indefinite period.
By this time, we'd suffered too many defeats. And remember that temperature. We just started walking away from the danger zone. Miraculously, we saw an empty cab. We hopped in and said, "Take us to Silver Spring." The driver laughed and said, "Gladly!" In the cab, we heard on the radio that the Red line (on the metro, the one we were hoping to use) was shut down between where we were and where we would have needed to go to get to the office. Meanwhile, my sister called. She'd made it through the checkpoint – after two and a half hours.
The drive from Washington up to Silver Spring, usually a fairly herky-jerky affair during a business day, was serene. I was home and warm and in front of my laptop and large-screen television by 10:53. And as you can see below, I did file on the speech, one hour after it was finished. So all's well that ends well I guess.
Hey. It's still a great day. It just wasn't a fun day.
