We streamed toward the National Mall from all across the frozen city. At 8AM, the crowds were still thin by the Washington Monument, but closer to the Capitol, the buses had begun to arrive, and the stream thickened into thick, viscous flows of human lava.

Nearly two million people showed up at the Capitol Tuesday to see Barack Obama inaugurated as President of the United States. Around 250,000 had tickets. Many of them were not able to get in to their designated sections. We heard that a generator went out, and that magnetometers were therefore down - so some sections' gates were closed. At other gates, security (the Secret Service had the lead; Capitol Police were the boots on the ground) decided that the sections were simply too full - and so thousands with tickets were turned back.

Thousands of ticketholders were stuck in a tunnel through the whole thing. There was virtually no crowd control. They should have hired an extra layer of rock industry professionals.

Every official ticketed entrance point was a choke point (though, at least at the Silver standing section, no one was actually checking tickets - the police were only looking for weapons.) Crowds thickened and thickened into them, with the occasional fear of a mad crush. Word was that an early push in which crowds in the front of the Mall bore down through the fencing separating off the wheelchair section left two people injured. Another woman, earlier in the morning, had been pushed by the surging throng into the tracks on the underground Metro. There was plenty of disappointment, but there was no violence, and no riot. Instead, when people tried to jump the lines, others said, loudly, "Barack wouldn't do it like that." Tempered, already, by those better angels.

When we finally got through the line, we were relieved, to say the least. We wound up just behind the reflecting pool, close enough to see the Capitol, the big picture, unobstructed, but we had to consult the big screen off to the side for the details. One woman (she works for Health and Human Services processing grants to Universities) and I traded notes as we watched the screens and commented on which dignitaries were approaching through the hallways, or being shown to their seats. Kennedy in a white hat, Jimmy and Roslyn Carter, Dan Quayle, the Clintons, the elder Bushes, and Cheney, all in black, in a wheelchair, with a villain's black cowboy hat - the evil F.D.R. from a parallel universe. When the M.C. introduced him, two million Americans booed.