dozen mast-and-boom forklifts, scissor lifts, and manlift jibs, rising up to fifty-five feet high. Five strategically placed banners with the massive march for our lives logo ensured it would appear in every shot: directly beneath each Jumbotron, angled on both sides of the performance area, and a modified version above the width of the stage, with extra stick figures over the Jumbotrons, so the full name would appear above a tight shot of the performance. They had thought about this.
Metal barricades walled off a few levels of VIP access near the stage. Celebrities mixed among them, but it was mostly students, hundreds of them, from local schools and bused in from around the country. They carried hand-painted signs like we will vote, we will rise; the smallest coffins are the heaviest; and ban assault weapons or we will ban you; and many wore big orange Price Is Right–style price tags reading $1.05. Organizers were distributing them, and the MFOL website had a feature to print one out, and invited kids to create their own.
Early revelers were bopping to tunes thumping out of two 7,000-pound sound towers, powered by two massive generators cranking out 220,000 watts. The audio carried clearly for the three-quarters of a mile to Twelfth Street, thanks to eighteen more Jumbotrons along the route, plus seven additional sound delay towers, each one powered by a 70,000 watt generator. Free water bottles were everywhere, a hundred and twenty pallets of them, stacked six cases high. About 1,900 hundred Porta Potties were arranged in clusters stretching along Jefferson Drive to Seventh Street, and Madison Drive to Twelfth.
As I walked Pennsylvania Avenue, the early arrivals were enthusiastic but jittery. They were all true believers at that hour, and fear was rampant that the kids had made a strategic blunder. One person after another told me their friends had stayed home to attend local marches. Would that drain their force? All the coverage would hinge on the number of people who turned out in Washington. No one would remember how many people showed up in Denver or Boise or Birmingham.
A large press area was set up stage right to maximize coverage. In addition to two special access areas—the interview tent and a riser for cameras—there was a large roaming area with an assortment of views, extra monitors, and speakers, and a filing tent set up like a makeshift office, with monitors so you could watch the event and file a story without ever peeking outside. They had high-speed Wi-Fi, but forgot to post the password, and it remained a mystery for much of the morning.
My biggest surprise in the press area was a nervous young girl with braces, oversize glasses, and a long brown ponytail. She was one of us, though. A reporter’s notebook protruded from her puffy black winter jacket, and the 35 millimeter Cannon camera around her neck looked heavy enough to topple her over. It had telephoto lenses two to three times the length of her slim fingers. Half the pink polish was worn from her nails.
I introduced myself. My hand swallowed hers, but her shake was firm, voice confident. She was Julia Walker, reporting for the Viking Saga at East Lyme High School in Connecticut. Credentialing had been crazy, I said. How did she manage, when did she start?
“Well, today I was in the crowd and I looked in my camera bag and I found a press pass,” Julia said. She dug it out: just a beat-up laminated green card stamped press pass. It said “Go Vikes!” beneath a Norse logo, and it named the school and the paper, but not her. But she was getting ahead of herself. When she first saw the media area, she had tried to coax the guard with moxie alone. “They said, ‘No, you’re not allowed to come in.’” she said. “But I looked and I found this and I thought, ‘This might work.’ And then they let me in.”
I was amazed. Julia was a sophomore, but could easily pass for middle school. It was her first year writing for the Viking Saga, and she had never operated a camera like that before, but her teacher offered to lend it, and when would she get a chance like this?
“I came here with my mom because we wanted to march, but also because as a journalist I feel like it’s important to spread awareness about everything happening,” she said. “I mean, no one should be scared to go to school every day. And