The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,66
the pack. The Square is packed shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter, but once we’re farther in, there are pockets of open ground. The Washington Monument looms needle-like overhead.
“Everybody stick together!” Chas shouts, holding his sign aloft as a beacon.
Vernon keeps up a running commentary. “I mean, in 2004, absolutely. In 2006, all right. But now, this hardly makes sense anymore. It’s like marching against slavery in 1870. It’s over, whether people realize it yet or not. The damage is done.”
“Let me ask you something, though. Why did you come?”
“Good question.” He looks down at his marching feet. “It was a Saturday and I had nothing better to do. Plus, somebody has to be here to inject a voice of reason.”
“Someone has to protest the protestors,” I say.
“Exactly. I’m the gadfly, I suppose.”
I nod, wondering how many of the others see themselves the same way. It’s human nature, wanting to be the outlier. Drop me in the middle of the Bodice Ripper book club, and I want to be a lefty liberal. Drop me in among the war protestors, and I want to wave a flag.
Somebody’s beat me to it, though. Once we’ve circled to the other side of the Monument, we pass a young man sitting alone in a wheelchair, strumming Lee Greenwood on his guitar, singing, “At least I know I’m free.” He wears tan camouflage fatigues, with his empty pant legs folded underneath him.
“That’s gonna end badly,” Vernon says.
“What do you mean?”
“If he’s not careful, he’ll get himself roughed up.”
“At a peace demonstration?” I ask, incredulous. “He looked like a veteran.”
Vernon narrows his eyes at me, as if to say, You’ve got a lot to learn about the world.
Maybe so. But the mounted policemen worry me much more than the drum circles or the middle-aged militants. Even though the demonstrators try to give the horses a wide berth, the riders push in closer, hiding their gaze behind mirrored sunglasses.
It takes forever to work our way around the World War II memorial, and once we do, I lose my bearings entirely. In every direction, I’m confronted by a wall of backs, too close for me to see over them. I stick close to Vernon, afraid of being lost. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “You go ahead where I can see you.”
Through the chinks between the people in front of me, I glimpse light ahead. Soon I hear Chas rallying the troops. Bunching forward, I find myself pressed against Barber and Jed.
“Wow,” Jed is saying. “It’s not what I thought it would be.”
“What’s not?” I ask, sliding between them.
And then I see it. We have emerged at the near end of the Reflecting Pool, opposite the colossal temple where Abraham Lincoln sits enthroned. Only the long rectangular pool doesn’t reflect anything—no blue sky, no fluffy clouds, no wind rippling the surface. It’s been drained. All that’s left is a huge brown gash in the earth, a never-ending mud pit transected by a grid of wooden stakes. And without the water, there goes the illusion of depth. The pool turns out to be as shallow as a half-dug grave.
“The Reflecting Pool looks more like a Reflecting Ditch,” Barber says.
Coming up behind me, Vernon chuckles. “Is that a metaphor or what?”
There are speakers (oh, goody!) lined up on a distant stage, their voices echoing and incomprehensible. They’re all mad as hell, judging from the high-pitched shrill of their voices, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Apart from the cluster of die-hards swarming the platform, the swirling sea of demonstrators seems indifferent. Despite the anger coming through the public address system, the atmosphere on the ground is celebratory. A surprising number of people have turned out with folding chairs, blankets, even coolers. There are cameras everywhere too: video cams, phones, SLRs with telephoto lenses. I can’t turn around without ending up in somebody’s frame.
Chas leads us toward an open patch of ground near the perimeter, seizing a park bench to use as a base of operation. Marlene enlists Jed to help pass around packed lunches. We sit cross-legged on the brown grass, having a picnic amid the chaos. Once the food is distributed, Barber huddles with Jed and Marlene, the three of them settling just to my right.
“This is Mob 1.0,” Barber is saying, “totally old school. This kind of thing will be happening less and less. You can’t get this many people to rally around anything unless you keep the principle so vague that it’s practically meaningless.”