Wiehle

Field Trip to America

About 8:30 Friday morning, crowds converged on the gates screening Inauguration seekers. The rain came steadily down as expected for only a brief moment. He would later remember he had expected to be drenched by day’s end but the events of the coming few minutes would so preoccupy his imagination that further thought of weather would not return until later.

A passing bicycle near the Grand Hyatt and Marriott at 11^th and G Streets, reminded him of radio advice, the District’s public bicycles would be sold out. He had to concede the day would be long, perhaps as exhausting as the Leesburg Trump rally which had lasted eight hours in standing-only venues.

Along the street were ominous SUVs with tinted glass, and a driver was out on the curb with the passenger door open. The Biologist stopped a moment to record impressions with a pencil, and the driver looked up suspiciously, and addressed him in a Turkish accent.

“Are you writing me a ticket?” he asked nervously.

“No.”

In a moment, the driver who worked at the nearby Trump Hotel, exchanged intelligence, for on the street it was impossible to comprehend the entirety of the event the way the newscasters presumed to do.

“Stay away from D. C. tomorrow,” advised the driver in a black uniform. The two shared a sense of irony and humor at the coming events.

“…a million angry women in once place…”

It amused the Biologist, and brought to mind that mysterious headgear alluded to a Women’s March organizers, the Pussy Hat. It would be a few days before visual images of the hat appeared online.

“How were the crowds yesterday?” he asked as the driver relaxed once he learned the Biologist was merely a Mall visitor.

“…it was bumper to bumper on the bridge…forty five minutes without moving an inch…”

There had been a concert at the Lincoln Memorial Thursday afternoon, and much windiness in the Press about who would, and who would not, apologize for performing at a Trump event. The pride of some performers was immediately exposed as arrogance when they publicly announced before they were asked, that they would not perform.

If asked.

As if.

It was an absurd assumption that, like the absent Congressmen, anyone cared whether or not a specific musician performed for a pro-Trump crowd, as if the event were somehow a celebration of a arrogant pop singer, not the national celebration of a new President.

The equivalence to the future of America that was assumed between a President and a pop culture’s icon’s self-importance, was truly stunning.

He silently recalled, one of his human genetics professor’s best pieces of advice in Houston years earlier, never to turn down a job you haven’t been offered.

They parted ways, this Turkish driver who seemed quite content driving for Trump International. Down the street, an awning in brown and yellow at the Hard Rock Café at E Street and 10th hung over the sidewalk. The fuss, commotion, and bobbing of the crowd seemed to draw inward to the center of the street.

As he approached, the sights and sounds that had begun to reverberate and echo that morning with the passing of helicopters, police sirens and flashing red lights, recalled similar excitements of five decades earlier.

Alone or passing in tandem, he could see them. Veterans: they were grizzled, overweight far beyond their sharp physique back then, the multiple-patched motorcycle leathers or denim stood out. When they caught his eye, their glance would hold a moment longer, and they thought they knew him.

It may have been the streaked long hair, or the way a smile hidden could contort a beard and thick moustache into a greeting, or the twinkle in the eye.

From deep within, was a wish that these fading veterans could have been part of the parade, the commemoration, a belated welcome home that they were denied too long ago.

The Obama years had been a desecration of military service, and what it had once been in the eyes of the people. The Veterans’ Administration had been allowed to drift into incompetence and was a shocking reminder of lies politicians told to the young who enlisted, or as in earlier generations, were drafted.

Nor was the failure of bureaucrats to care for servicemen a novel failing. There had been, near this very spot, a march of a million veterans just shy of a century earlier, of combat troops who had turned their doughboy uniforms in to government clerks, for mufti and set adrift to make their way back to farms and the countryside after a belated return from France by steamships in 1919.

The veterans of that era were dispersed and dislodged from tent cities on the Mall by younger National Guards with machine guns and bayonets that gleamed the same way they had in Seicheprey, Cantigny and Belleau Wood, and a thousand other muddy fields in Flanders.

Here a century later, via the era of Flower Children, now the grandchildren of flower power, were assembled to protest what had been loosely assumed to be, and was called out by protesters from DistruptJ20 and Black Lives Matter, the coming fascism of Trump.

He drew nearer, favoring the brick sidewalk near the storefronts.

“…This-Sizz-Whadda PoliState Looks-slike…This-Sizz-Whadda PoliState Looks-slike…” chanted the woman into a mike at the end of a curly phone cord through an amplified megaphone, hopping and bobbing around the inner circle of the entranced crowd like a Hopi snake dancer.

The line of stern faces, in later remembrance, was evident by their Day-glo yellow vests, not their dark police uniforms. The most grave and pale were the visages of young officers: the strain in the set of their square jaws.

Here and there a bare headed Secret Service officer walked purposefully, absent nonsense or uncertainty, squareness of body emphasized by flack vest and various dangling intercoms and belt full of black equipment.

He would circle around, and the crowd, by their visible heads, could be seen to swirl and converge.

He could not see what was happening a yard in front of him for the crowd, but suddenly the air was full of high-held cameras, and he caught a momentary glimpse through someone’s armpit, of a bare headed officer with the contorted expression of exertion, handling a protester who had dropped onto the sidewalk.

He stood back again, like everyone else, watching the proceedings, hearing the manner in which the woman pranced to the beat of three plastic bin drummers like Archibald Willard’s classic painting Spirit of ’76. In front of him in the street, the central drummer figure at the rally was blasting a police whistle in syncopation with the chants of the crowd.

In retrospect, he remembered that the drummer on the left was wearing a Death’s Head mask, and the one of the right, a blue western bandana across his nose, in the style of a bandit robbing a stagecoach.

There was no mistaking the whistling drummer, who like most of the howling crowd, was no more than seventeen or eighteen, or college age.

While watching and listening someone passing, shot him a grin, some healthy looking young man in a studded black leather motorcycle jacket with a shaggy head of curly black hair and a swarthy complexion.

“…are you from out of town?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Detroit…”

It was not that sly sidelong glimpse of homosexual interest one sees at LGBT events, but one of amusement that others watching, despite fifty years’ age difference, might be recognized, incorrectly it turned out, as Leftist comrades.

He circled around, and found a low foundation just beneath the street window of the Hard Rock Café, to elevate his vantage eight inches, and from there took images with his cell phone, alternately watching the police line and the tribal bouncing of crowd.

What was the beat? Conga? African, or Reggae? Later, he would remember a line of trombones and trumpets mouthed by ragged protesters, but whatever their contribution to the chaos, it had not been memorable.

And there was no sense of belligerence or allegiance toward either the protesters or the police, just an amused onlooker like most in the periphery of the crowd.

It was cold.

He later regretted not having had a word or two with the hoarse leaders of the protest, the one shouting instructions when confrontations with police would emerge, swirl a little, and evaporate.

“Sit Down! Sit Down! Sit Down,” she commanded. It would not surprise the Biologist if she were a lawyer aping some community leader. Clearly, she liked the drum beat and could not resist getting into it.

(Later, it must have been a few days, after reviewing the D. C. protest videos, the charisma seemed to be have subconsciously entranced him. His wife might catch him every so often, going from the den to the kitchen to refill a coffee cup, chugging with the motions of that 60’s dance step “The Locomotion”, feet shuffling, fists circling round and round like the drive wheel of a locomotive, mumbling to himself…”The Citizens…United…Can Never be Divided….The Citizens…United…Can Never Be Divided…).

As he watched a plain clothes cop interrogate, frisk and extract identification papers from a large, obese young man in a baseball cap, his gaze focused in on a sign above the steps where small group had gathered around the interrogation. Only one of the members of the group was in secret service uniform.

Drunk, it seems, that obese dude from the looks of his open handed excuses that could be seen from across the street. The cop seemed to be taking a sympathetic, paternalistic stance from the look of it.

The sign above was lettered “Ford’s Theater”. He swung around to look up at the sign immediately behind him.

“Lincoln’s Waffle Shop”.

Here in the triangulation of the Lincoln and Hard Rock Cafés, and the building where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the scenes before him took place, full of resonance and chanting and youthful exuberance.

He shuddered: assassination.

For a brief moment he wondered how that moment was connected in the greater drift of the events of the day, with what had gone before, long before.

It was just too cold, and he pushed through the door of the Lincoln’s Waffle Shop to find a loud, close room full of countertops, people with breakfast and coffee customers, and ordered only a single small coffee that he took to a counter that overlooked the street scene immediately outside.

The shop was warm and the conversations all around, animated.

The owner and his family, Chinese, would drift over to the window within an arm’s reach, and wonder how the events immediately outside would transpire.

The owner began to chat with two very large young ladies sitting at the same counter to his immediate right, the cook folding arms across his tee shirt, a baseball cap pushed back on his greasy hair.

Through the store front, he could see a wooden Christian cross made from construction four-by-four posts in the street being hauled around by protesters. It was unclear exactly how fringe Christians were related to the body of protesters for later, there would be a few “End is Near” signs, and exhortations to worship, but to forsake the Church establishment.

* * *

A glance at his watch punctuated his sips from the cup of coffee he bought at the take out counter for two dollars twenty. The plates of breakfast, the waffles and omelettes and sausage sizzling on a grill, made his mouth water.

From where he stood, he could read the signs and tee shirt slogans nearby in the street.

“Embrace Revolutionary Feminism,” exhorted one.

If he had to characterize the crowd of protesters, they were angry, slightly shorter of stature than average, and from inside, the drumbeats and swaying of the crowd were visible, although the street noises were muffled from where they listened at the countertops.

He saw an empty chair facing the street with barely enough space between counter and storefront for one of the owner’s skinny kids to sidle by with plates balanced just above the counter.

“Lincoln café,” he mused and from the corner of his eye he noted the extreme bulk of a young black woman a place or two away, and she was chatting amiably with a friend her own age. Little by little their two-way conversation included the owner who had come near, one glance at the women, the next out the window.

He shuffled nearer.

The muffled drumming and conga rhythms could still be heard as a backdrop to the clank and tinkle of plates and water glasses within the café.

“What time did it start?” the Biologist asked him, nodding over where the demonstration could be flowed through the large window. There were protesters in the street, three abreast like Willard’s iconic painting “Spirit of ‘76”

The owner ran a hand through his slicked-back hair, wiped his hands on an apron and nodded at him.

“We here at 5:35 this morning,” he said brightly in a way that suggested he often chatted with customers as his kids got the breakfast orders out.

They usually arrived by 5:00 A.M., but traffic had been intense. In the early days, they had slept overnight on the floor of the diner.

The women asked, and he replied he had been at the location since 1995. The owner was fully prepared for the Women’s Movement due over the weekend. He had managed to place a slender mannikin clad in skimpy hot weather clothes, her hand beckoning, adjacent to the door to his Shop.

“How does it compare with Obama?” he was asked.

“Big Party, Obama,” the owner grinned, remembering how good the pancake and waffle business had been that day in 2009.

“Much, much people…here in ’95…not like this…here 22 year…like ants on 9/11, not fun at all…”

“Like to go to gym,” he said to the women. “I not strong but try to stay shape…”

Outside, signs above the crowd were bouncing up and down.

“Embrace Race Liberalism”.

“Not My President”.

“Celebration…last time….different because…concert…last night…last two terms, tent. Have a party…Evabody hava good time.”

“Well, good luck, happy holiday,” the counter guy wished the young women as they rose to leave.

The protest here between the Washington Visitors Center and Hard Rock Café is not over two or three hundred people, and a few dozen cops.

A short woman in a habib wore a blue sweatshirt printed in white lettering with “Nasty Woman.” She seems happy, excited and expecting something. There seems very little outright hostility in the Waffle Shop or out in the street.

He wished for a moment that these young faces all around him could have been there in 1969 and 1970…every so often the dispersed crowd converges but there is no fight, no antagonistic mood but to sway to the drums and chant. It seems musical, polite but not an angry crowd.

By that time, the quarts of coffee consumed had begun to accumulate, and he was told of restrooms downstairs.

The lower room was darkened, tables with old chairs upended with legs reaching up toward the low, unprofessionally painted ceiling. One of the chairs at the bar was broken. A compressor or air conditioner rattled somewhere in the darkened room, and the room reeked of mildew or an old sewer.

There was another customer waiting midway between the Men’s and Women’s doors.

It seemed an eternity, but the young beaded man eventually lost patience and pushed into the Ladies Room, gingerly opening the door to find it unoccupied. After another eternity, the men’s continued to be occupied, so the Biologist followed suit into the Ladies Room, locking the door and hoping that in doing so, he hadn’t broken District law.

On the way out, he would catch a glimpse of his image in the uneven mirror while passing the darkened bar downstairs and climbed the steps back toward the Shop and the rally.

On the street again, despite the high-pitched, emotional, and occasionally cracking voices leading the chant, it all seemed a little contrived and artificial, hippies in appearance without conviction, less self-righteous than those of the 1960s, as if the attempt to ignite a fire of passion, didn’t quite succeed.

* * *

“My Body, My Choice,” rang out in shrill, angry voices in the chilly morning air. The day had not warmed, nor were there morning shadows, just a uniform dull eminence beyond the high buildings that formed a canyon above the street where the protest continued.

The slight dampness covering all flat surfaces of the city, enhanced the echos from one bank of glass windows for a dozen stories up, to the opposite bank across the street. The amplifiers had not been needed, and later, when reviewing the phone videos of that street drummer, the echoes of syncopation, the street sounds, the shrill cries of protest seemed imbued with a special quality that those present would remember.

The signs on 7^th and down closer to the Red Gate, caught his attention.

One waved a sign that read “Trust Women,” as if that were a novel and far-fetched concept that ought to be considered by the wiser heads of the population and government, not to mention boyfriends, husbands, fathers and grandfathers.

It wasn’t clear what wrong-headed presumption by the male half of the Universe, was being set straight.

And, “We Won’t Go Back.”

It seemed in the final day or two of Obama, the media were intensely focused not on Trump, but lingering on the final moments of Obama as if the historical limelight were giving way to an era of darkness in the Capitol.

The Biologist stood, beginning to feel the weariness of the dark hours earlier of his drive from Virginia, leaned on a lamp post, and looked over the brickwork sidewalk, the corduroy textured concrete of the street and a manhole cover that had not been welded shut near his foot.

By 10:32 A.M., the events at 7^th and E Street began to bore him: he had heard only one brief shout for Trump thus far Friday…

* * *

“Undocumented!” shouted the protest leader.

“Un-Uh-Fraid,” returned the crowd loudly.

At 7^th and D Street, he had found another protest en route toward 12^th where the Red Gate would be his point of entry to the Mall according to the Inauguration Tickets in his pocket.

He paused under cover of a recessed doorway where within, there were customers sitting at window tables out of the chill. It was charismatic, this crowd, and he realized his purpose, that until then had been obscure, as a man not generally attracted to political events.

As he observed the protest mob in the streets before him that had pressed pedestrians trying to get by, who would move close, he could not avoid looking directly, deeply into their eyes. He spent a few moments observing, trying to glean their mood, their motivations.

Those passing were not shouting: he realized suddenly, that he might not reach the Mall through the crowds by noon.

The chant began in Spanish. A man on the sidewalk between his corner near a door, and the protest, held up a printed newspaper.

The title was “Freedom Socialist.”

“With LGBT Rights, Wadda we do?” shouted the chant leader rhetorically.

“Stand Up: Fight Back,” they shouted back in rehearsed solidarity, in unison.

A poster claimed that “History Will Condemn Your Silence.” He stood there mute, indicted by someone he had never met, based on assumptions that were beyond the pale.

Silence?

He knew his was not to howl and wave and fuss, but to absorb the mood, the use and abuse of the English language, the imperative that Spanish, too, was suddenly an American language.

“The People…Un-Nite-ted…Will Not-Be…Dee-Vi-Dead”.

Behind him in gold on the glass door read number 410 on 7^th Street.

A black beret with a red star, channeling Che Guevera, walked past.

It was by then, 11:12 A. M., and he had drifted to the edge of the sidewalk. If any of his friends or his wife had attended with him, their claustrophobia would rise to the level of terror at this point.

But he was channeling the composite Face of America in its individual glances that momentarily engaged his gaze passing by within a foot or two of where he was watching. In their eyes, he caught a glimmer of American destiny.

They were struggling with identity, that much he recognized. The language of protest was important. Slowly, the ideology he had uncovered during his federal service during the Obama years seemed to come into focus during the protest.

Perhaps the country was in good hands after all, the chanting, the crowd feeding on its own electricity. The future was in their hands, not on the political podium. It was a time for a strong leader, not an experimental presidency founded on guilt about social justice caused by previous generations of the dead.

He wanted his America back, not to rule or be ruled, but just to live in the knowledge that all would have a voice that any could rise according to his ability, not artificially propped up by skin color or ethnicity or gender.

He had the sense that something long absent from America, had returned, and it had returned stronger than it had left, the chemistry on the street was enough to surprise even the most cynical among his kind.

It was that concussive drumming pulse, the sea of humanity, and he could feel its warm cleansing waves pass over along the side walks. It was not a passing sense of drifting rudderless, but a forgotten moment like a wall of water, all faces looking to the White House.

Watching the chants, it was not power they wanted but simply a leader to polarize their spirit and energy.

It was time to forget for the moment, their whiteness, their blackness, their darkness. It was the pivot in American history when Americans would suddenly cease going at each other’s throats.

For there was another energy outside the gate, not another American shouting slogans and grinning next to him, but a force that that sought to destroy both sides in their distracted antagonism, a force beyond the shores.

* * *

It was by that point, 11:45 A.M. and his hands had become severely cold.

He watched a little pantomime street dance to a boombox of Michael Jackson set in the middle of a street closed for the event.

There was a wiry athletic black in dredlocks posturing, and a tall white woman in a white, short minidress and boots, wearing large round sunglasses, gesturing in response to his moves.

The woman looked amused but not informed and the way the two were interacting, the Biologist was suddenly worried about the way this provocative display might proceed, right there in the street.

“Uh-oh, I know where this is going…,” he thought silently, and turned away.

It was in front of the Starbucks at the corner of E and 7^th Street, and the intersection blocked on all sides, was nearly empty of pedestrians, except one official-looking short, fat, bearded young man with a loud speaker, and clad head to toe in yellow DayGlo rubberized coveralls and reflective orange vest as if he were part of a D. C. road construction crew.

“No Fascist U. S. A. …,” he kept exhorting while wandering around, directed at no one in particular, and no crowd gathered. No one was listening, just placidly sauntering by on the way somewhere else while the howls of the crowd down the street were audible but an unremarkable jumble of sounds, not words…

As he rounded the corner near a souvenir table, the black dude behind it held out a knit cap with a printed slogan and said, “Black Lives Matter.”

“Black Lives Matter,” he repeated. “Buy it and burn it….”

The unexpected tone caught the Biologist unaware, and he broke into a chuckle, later considering that such a comment might have been directed at his white face. Nevertheless, it was funny to be stated so cynically with a subtle touch of irony.

* * *

The Red Gate was another block as he crossed a broad boulevard behind a small group in denim vests festooned with patches, a new vest, not a well worn ragged, bleached one, but one that belonged to a hobby biker.

There, the scene opened up between low federal granite buildings and he could see The Mall far beyond. The crowd there was smaller, and there were no loud protests, only a few hawking balloons and Inaugural memorabilia which were being ignored near Judiciary Square.

By noon, he found himself standing with a polite crowd, moving slowly toward the white tent where federal officers were screening people. He fumbled with papers in his pocket for the tickets he had been given, and pulled out a card from Jews for Jesus he had taken from a polite busker while entering Reston Metro seven hours earlier.

There was a muffled boom, and another. He would count twenty-one, the salute for the new President and behind him in line, a small crowd was clustered around the tinny sounds coming from a cell phone.

“…bring back our jobs….”

At that point, the phone was dropped and momentarily began again.

“…we will bring back our dreams…”

Nothing thus far from Trump had sounded in the least like Hitler as the press would later claim.

“…all…understand…back to American hands and American Labor…”

“…we will seek friendship and good will…we do not seek…let it shine…”

“…no longer accept politicians of all talk and no action…”

He was overwhelmed with the others in line who had voted Trump. A slightly built young man nearby was clutching his girlfriend in her sorrow: his white baseball cap had the word Obama on it in black letters.

“…and God Bless America…” came from the cell phone behind him.

It was 12:18 P. M.

Looking around him at the immediate crowd, some pushed back along the guard rail, leaving without the patience to await screening.

He saw a Giants knit cap ahead of him, a white enlisted sailor’s cap and uniform. Looking down, red shoes. Many, many red shoes, and fewer red baseball caps.

Diamond studs on male ears, and desultory howls and cheers ripple through the crowd as, somewhere unseen and nearby, the forty fifth President of the United State concludes his live remarks.

The news commentators takeover the airwaves, and the guy holding the phone looks up.

“They’re just not giving him any credit, are they…,” as the commentator parses out Trump’s speech as being merely an agglomeration of other speeches, other ideas, other sentiments. The announcer begins to drone on about the various parts of Trump’s speech which others were deeming brilliant and inspiring, that had come from somewhere else.

It was not clear which commentator had suggested the tone of the Trump inaugural was “Hitlerian”.

He again scanned the crowd now moving up quite close where there was a can of confiscated umbrellas. It was eighty-five percent college age, he noted, ten percent middle aged, and few others. A woman in a fur cap held a box, perhaps a commemorative coffee mug, lettered with “Make America Great Again.”

If he had his preference, this would begin with “Make America Whole Again.”

He remembered that Trump supporter had waited from four in the afternoon until after midnight to see Candidate Trump in Leesburg Sunday night and Monday of Election Week.

He suddenly realized at Security inside the tent as he emptied his pockets hoping his would not be mixed with the man in front of him, that he was perhaps the only one wearing a trench coat of the 571,000 on the Mall that afternoon, a coat with large enough pockets to accommodate a piggy bank’s worth of change, maps, Inaugural tickets, gloves, sunglass clip-ons, a black knit cap, a few receipts and crumpled low denomination dollar bills.

A momentary panic brought forth car keys deep in his jeans pocket and he tossed them on the table after the cop with an electric wand had ferreted them out.

He was in; it was over. Should he take a hard right and leave by the single exit next to the security tent?

It was nearly 1:00 P.M., and after briefly considering Georgetown for lunch where he had taken a moment for coffee on the way in, decided he was there to see the crowd, the America that had not made a fuss about boycotting the festivities, although he had no pressing schedule, nor did he have a good idea where, exactly, the Red Gate had deposited him near the Mall.

Only later by a few days, could he follow his wandering on a good map. Just inside was a band and a crowd of Bikers for Trump, both of which gave him comfort.

He had stood between two other groups in the line waiting to get in, for about an hour. In front was the young loving couple trying to keep each other warm. Next was a scraggly moustached, freckled man of slight and unapologetic redneck build who seemed to relate to the Biologist. They got to chatting and North Carolina, as the redneck seemed to fit that moniker, seemed to assume him likewise a Viet Nam vet.

The drawl was welcome and he immediately launched into that long Southern monologue of impressions and history and travels, and kin and food and weather that is impossible to stem or believably replicate, once it begins.

He was a Trump man, and damn glad of it in his own quiet way.

Next to him was a very short Italian, a D. C. native who had bought and was restoring an old house. Somewhat less flowing in his remarks, he was also very much a supporter, as was the loving couple in the Giants knit caps ahead.

Digging deep, the Biologist had passed each a single engraved ticket for he had been given four. What he did not realize was that no tickets would be taken, and he felt, despite his reluctance to capture their portraits with a cell phone camera for the benefactor who had given him tickets, he could capture their appearance well enough as he sat down days later to write.

The crowd swung around as one as a helicopter swayed overhead, a single helicopter, and people waved, a few muttering their goodbyes to Barack Obama. There were no catcalls or jeering or anything suggesting anything but respect despite the fact the crowd was overwhelmingly Trump.

He skipped down a few granite steps inside just north of Pennsylvania Avenue where the Canadian embassy was festooned at its roofline with Maple Leaf Canadian flags.

Nearer the parade route, an argument was brewing. He could see a thick crowd clustered around a heavyset bearded, wild-haired man looking like a Viking in a Confederate headrag, confronting two earnest, clean shaven young men who were arguing back.

There were jeers from some bikers in the crowd and one of their antagonists put up the hood on his gray sweatshirt.

The Biologist watched for a few minutes and turned away to walk toward the Capitol Building in the distance, now more aware than ever of the constant hovering just a few hundred feet above of a secret service or police helicopter that made circuits across the Mall, circling by the Lincoln Memorial, the back above the National Museum of Art.

Like the protests, he was there to take the measure of the crowd waiting three to five deep, shoulder to shoulder, along Pennsylvania Avenue. Beyond if there was a break in the throng, were cordons of uniformed officers and soldiers lining the route inside the fences and barriers.

There was a notable absence of inebriated jubilation as the crowd that had been closest to the viewing stands returned and was compressed at the low gate in the cyclone fence. There were two very blond, middle-aged women with sparking tinsel tricolor pompoms who, like others throughout the day, had mightily strained to inspire a chant of “U.-S.-A., U.-S.-A.” without success.

It struck him later, it was not so much a celebration of delight as a collective sigh of relief that Obama and his ilk were brought to the sideline and the focus on all Americans, not just the special interests, might once again become the primary business of government.

The crowd seemed preoccupied, serious in intent, focused on the task immediately ahead.

The Election of 2016, that long road, that painful event, the final act in the Trump campaign, was over and Trump was in fact, legally, and in the hearts of most attending despite the scattered waving of signs, President.

There was no jubilation, just a shocked silence that it had come to pass, this political experiment.

Would special interests ever again be allowed to rule by the fascism of the Left? It was on the back of the majority middle class, that Obama had climbed to and ruled the White House.

The middle class had been hopeful, they had made a place for Blacks and gays and atheists, and had saved their own festering anger for the voting booth.

It was over and yet, it had just begun.

Media coverage of the following day’s Women’s March, had quoted the leaders as having regretted being complacent about right issues with their man Obama in the White House, as if the light had been shown to all educated and compassionate and right-thinking citizens, and with the obvious stated both in 2009 and in 2012, there had been no need to plumb the actual heart and soul of those middle Americans whose President Obama would not, and could not, represent but were too polite to howl otherwise.

This silent class had been nearly obliterated in their economic status between 2008 and 2016.

The Biologist, as he saw the crowds, would mumble to himself as if it were a mantra, “It is Trump: anything is possible.”

And he could not shake the conviction that the minorities and special interests had squandered the final measure of good will among the majority, and allowed the educated street punks among them to exploit white guilt.

The Biologist realized without regret, he had been completely taken in by the soaring rhetoric of Obama’s first Inaugural speech. The past eight years had changed something in him.

He would not be the same. They would not be the same. America was new again.

* * *

The marble dome of the Capitol Building in the gloom of rain and wind, loomed in the distance above the street scenes. It would be there, not in the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue, where Trump would succeed or fail in the same way incivility in Congress seemed to bode ill for the future, but with Trump at least, he reasoned, there was a chance.

1:44 P.M. along the parade route outside the Barnett Prettyman U. S. Court House, the soldiers in uniform and parade rest could be seen, airmen, marines, army, coast guard, and the horizon blues of capitol police and black of TSA.

He wandered, waiting for the parade to begin, among Bikers for Trump. He had to love those guys, Viet Nam vets, the hillbillies like the one who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in line. The long beards and flowing gray locks, looking a lot like many of his old friends.

In a moment, they were full into it, that sweet rockabilly that reminded him of home. It wasn’t the pop icons who had refused to perform when, they had not bothered to notice, no one wanted them or welcomed them anyhow.

Trump was celebrated by country music.

And it reminded him to further ponder, once home again, why the Trump organization had chosen the music that had blasted throughout the livestock competition building in Leesburg while the crowd awaited Trump on November 6^th.

It had been classic Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater and, of all surprises, Luciano Pavarotti. It had, he remembered quite clearly, even then, sounded a lot like victory.

“We’re gonna win,” Trump had promised at Leesburg past midnight just after Laura Ingraham had brought the crowd to its feet in her introduction by exhorting the crowd to “DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!”.

He found it not the least surreal to be perched on a stubby granite barrier that Friday, Inauguration, as Trump’s limousine itself, President Trump he had had to silently remind himself, passed the review stand to the cheers of the crowd.

A few vehicles back just after Clarence Thomas had been hailed and cheered, the announcement of Nancy Pelosi, in the single display of incivility he had witnessed that long day, was soundly booed by each and every one present as apt compensation and punishment for the unpardonable antics of her party for nearly an entire decade.

It was time for her and those like her, to fade away.

* * *

Where it came from, he could not discern, later pondering the news commentary that followed The Weekend. In some ways, he did not recognize, from what commentators reported, scenes he had personally witnessed.

“…Step aside, you who would never admit to being Political Correct, the Hillbilly Ghetto is back in town and some of us are lovin’ it. No Hillary supporters here…”

A Texas two-step ringing out from the banks of speakers on either side of the tented stage brought him back to Houston and Birmingham. These rednecks were his people. The back beat bass smacked against his solar plexus and diaphragm.

There was something mean and unapologetic there.

“Not apologizin’ for nuthin’, Son…”

By 2:36 P. M., he had seen the Big Screen inside the Newseum flash images of tear gas and police running. For a moment, it seemed to be a flashback, some historical clip replayed.

Next door, he wandered up to the tall cyclone fence barrier where, inside the concrete grounds of the Canadian Embassy, a few uniformed officials wandering around with clear plastic glasses of Labatt’s.

Two were, like him perched on low granite barriers, inside the fence and he moved closer.

“What’s happening?” he asked after seeing nothing but a peaceful crowd awaiting the parade.

“They are trying to delay the parade,” came the response from the Canadians. He had known many, worked with a few and admired the Canadians.

“What time is it supposed to come by here?” he followed up, glancing around at the few people milling around.

“Two thirty,” the Embassy secretary said.

By 2:30 P. M., the day became dark, notably colder, but the rain held off. The chill and being on his feet now ten hours made for stiffness and impatience. He was watching police vans, only flashing lights visible above the crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue. Across the street was a becolumned modern building he later learned was the National Gallery of Art, East Wing.

They were waiting for their President. For the “Not My President” crowd, they were making a last stab at delaying the inevitable, irresistible momentum of history.

Obama was gone. He had to say it to himself several times before it began to register.

Inside the fence, a lanky Canadian flight officer was sipping a Labatt’s from a frosted plastic cup. There was a lot of red visible along the route, especially near this small corner of Canada.

2:57 P. M. In front of Canada, he hoped and prayed their highest calling would not be their unique identities, but their common citizenship. A few minutes later, the rain fell steadily.

He spoke with a Secret Service officer who looked up where he was perched and he anticipated being asked down.

“You looked like someone I know,” he smiled.

“How’s the crowd behaving?” the Biologist returned.

“I can’t say, officially, but off the record…” he began and suddenly stopped talking when the Biologist fished out a pencil.

“I’m not from a newspaper,” he said quickly. “I’m just a farmer.”

They chatted about tractors and milling and Virginia.

“They stood up for the National Anthem,” the officer said agreeably. “Haven’t seen that in a while.”

“’Bout time.”

“Yeah,” said the Secret Service cop and slowly made his way along the fence protecting the Canadian Embassy.

* * *

A little after three o’clock, the helicopter which had been making wide circles, was directly above and parallel to Pennsylvania Avenue, circling around over the Mall slowly. It was dark, cold, and raining, the chill creeping and penetrating rain coat, knit cap and gloves.

The sky had become surprisingly dark, and directly above the Gallery of Art rotunda faded from gray to bottle green, the color seen immediately before tornados in the Deep South.

The DHS police were gathered in a circle flirting with a woman on the barrier next to him and chatting below and to the left of where he was perched a hundred feet behind a white tented stand where the boom of the parade announcer’s voice emanated and echoed off the Canadian Embassy from across the street where it was reflected back by the façade of the Art Gallery.

Every pedestrian who had brought one, had by then donned their clear plastic rain parka with a hood, and immediately below him on the sidewalk, people hurried by toward the direction from which the marching band music was now coming.

Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the aluminum bleachers were two thirds full, and the helicopter directly above banked in increasingly tighter circles.

In some strange way, it suddenly occurred to him that, like him, all of those present were there to protect Donald Trump. If each pair of eyes were open and vigilant, nothing bad could happen.

Watching the tops of the black limousines pass slowly as the announcer identified the occupants, some days later, struck him as similar to the Kennedy funeral procession America had watched on small flickering black and white televisions in their living rooms.

They all, the witnesses, had a stake in the recovery of America for all Americans, not exclusively those special interests who had usurped the attention and energies of politicians for a decade, from illnesses and decay, she, their own country, had suffered.

They are, and will be, a productive people aware of how far they had come, and from where.

All wanted the same America, heaven help anyone who threatened her once she recovered.

It wasn’t, that greatest of all challenges, to make America great, but to make America whole again.

His reveries standing atop a pedestal in the gloom, in the rain, were broken as the big screen on the ground of the Canadian Embassy featured a close up of a matching band of Uniformed Colonial soldiers called the U. S. Army Old Guard, and the fifes among all hands went up in militarily precision as “Yankee Doodle” whistled out, piercing the rain and low clouds passing over the Mall.

The tune resonated the way Laura Ingraham’s exhortation in Leesburg had caught his attention with an upwelling of pride. Suddenly, he didn’t care which D. C. local high school bands and which Senators had chosen, with great fanfare, to boycott Trump’s triumphal Inauguration.

There was room in the new American heart for all, and none for the pettiness that divides the country in 2017.

Below in the sidewalk, Viet Nam veterans greeted each other. If only the nation had not scorned them, their own people, who served in Viet Nam. If only this, Trump’s rise, could have more widely shared the return with the outcast veterans, those who have been neglected of medical care, without honor except in word, those who never forgot their pride in service to the nation.

His hope was the country might yet be built on the crumbling pride of those remaining, the parents of the Flower Children as they faded into obscurity, to know and recognize them for what they accomplished as an example for the immediate future.

* * *

By five o’clock, it was nearly over and he had to check his watch to estimate how long it might take to return to Northern Virginia. The friends immediately behind him on exiting Red Gate a few minutes earlier, had been emoting just a few inches away from him in the packed crowd, about the cold beer they were imagining, and he again considered a detour home via Georgetown.

It would be two hours if all connections were perfect and he realized his trip back had to be top priority. There would be other occasions for Georgetown.

He had stopped a moment to capture a video outside the Hard Rock Café. The street sign showed it was the 500 block of 10^th Avenue and the 900 block of E Street, “Where Lincoln’s Legacy Lives”. The loud speakers under an awning above, blared an old rock tune from Fleetwood Mac, “It’s Already Gone” as passerby tried desperately not to walk in cadence with the beat.

At Metro Center, the majority of the 571,000 attendees at the Trump Inauguration on January 20th, converged at the numerous commuter stops. The lines at the value add machines were long, however the flow through the turnstiles proceeded unobstructed. The Silver Line back toward the Wiehle Station furthest toward Northern Virginia, was not nearly as packed as the same line coming in about seven that morning, and it was a simple matter to find a seat.

The man, the father of a currently serving Marine, who dropped down next to me after politely asking first, struck up a conversation with an Iraq veteran standing nearby who had been in twenty years, and never lost any of his patrol, a fact of his service of which he was rightfully proud.

The vet passed out the door at the next stop, McPherson Station, and he began to speak in earnest with the father of the Marine. In many ways, they shared experiences, and government service, and their ideas very much coincided in opinions about the former and new Administration, and how the middle class and majority had been ignored for almost a decade.

He had just turned sixty, and they chatted about wine in Virginia, and malbec in particular. It was a subject with which the Biologist felt quite comfortable. By the final stop, they were wishing each other well: in both households, the lady of the house and the gentleman’s vote had arithmetically canceled one another, with the exception that in the last election his wife could not bring herself to support Hillary.

His feet had supported a long trek along the angry streets of Washington, D.C. and the fact that some of the experiences had been captured in scribbled notes allowed him to give in to the day’s exhaustion that was rapidly taking its toll.

Crossing that same pedestrian bridge from the tracks to the parking at Wiehle Station with the howl of oncoming traffic racing up and underfoot, he would walk fully focused on his weariness and making the effort to retrace his steps despite fatigue.

A family passed in the opposite direction, toward the turnstiles across the bridge, and were fully attired in black tie evening dress. It brought to mind his own rarely worn tuxedo, and the academic robes he owned but had never worn.

His car accelerated, and he swung into the northbound six lane traffic, surprisingly dense for a holiday that Friday.

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