Destination: D.C.

Hundreds of local women road-trip to resist and march

by

We board the bus at the Dutch Mill Park & Ride at 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. As the sky darkens and we pull onto the freeway, someone passes around a bag of pussy hats. Each carries a small handwritten tag: “Handmade by a Wisconsin knitter. Please donate to a women’s shelter when you are finished. And thank you for standing up for justice and human rights.”

Sarah Smith hands out chocolate chip cookies baked by a friend and maps of the route for the Women’s March on Washington. She makes a few announcements before settling into the front seat next to her mother, Sue, who drove three hours from Eau Claire to join her on the bus.

Donald Trump’s victory hit Smith hard. “In the days after the election, I just felt downtrodden and didn’t know what we were going to do,” says Smith, a 24-year-old employee at Epic Systems.

But her despair didn’t last for long. Smith had helped organize four busloads of people for the trip to Washington for the Women’s March on Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration.

Wei Li Werner, a senior at East High School, is making the trip to register her numerous concerns about the incoming president. “Where do I even start?” asks Werner. “Hearing Betsy DeVos, [Trump’s pick for] secretary of education, she has no idea what she’s doing. It’s really scary.”

The Madisonians joined an estimated half million people who converged on the capital with a shared sense of purpose but for a wide variety of reasons. They hoped to create a space where a Kansas grandmother concerned about climate change could march next to a transgender activist from Seattle. Where immigrant families were celebrated rather than reviled. Where Black Lives Matter. A space where the word “pussy” was reclaimed from the president’s uncouth remarks, made into a whimsical hat, plopped onto thousands upon thousands of heads, and made into a symbol of power and resistance.

Smith recognizes that this diffuse focus was overwhelming to some people. “I think a lot of criticism of the women’s march was that there were so many issues,” she says. “But I think that was the point, especially if you think about the intersection of racism and sexism.”

Some on the trip, including Michelle Kaltenberg, were taking part in their first public protest.

“We decided to come two or three days after the election,” says Kaltenberg, a former village president in Johnson Creek, who was making the trip with her 16-year-old daughter, Clariese. “I was disappointed in the results and the fact that [Trump] treats women the way that he does. I started reading a lot about intersectional feminism and got really interested, and decided it was something I wanted to do.” Kaltenberg describes herself as a “fiscal conservative who leans Democrat on social issues.” She feels alone among the many Trump supporters in her community.

At pit stops, hundreds of women and girls, wearing pink hats, sweats and pajamas, pour out from the buses. Restroom labels don’t matter. Phones are charged, water bottles filled. Teeth brushed. Snacks bought.

As we drive off into the dense fog, seven hours into our 17-hour ride, MSNBC is already reporting that the protest crowd will significantly exceed the inauguration numbers. I drift to sleep to the sounds of women talking politics.

Traffic outside Washington is thick. When we reach RFK Stadium at 10 a.m., rows of buses already stretch out across the immense parking lot. Each has a sign in the window: Georgia, New Jersey, Missouri, Florida.

Media reports the D.C. Metro is overwhelmed. My buddy, Amy Bethel, and I set off on foot toward the U.S. Capitol, 1.6 miles away. Individuals and families of every shade trot together through the neighborhoods carrying signs. After a mile, we notice a military police tank. The officers are high-fiving the protesters. Residents have posted signs, some with quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. (“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him”). People wave from windows and stoops. The marchers begin to spill into the streets, while police and National Guard attempt to steer them out of traffic.

An hour later we can see the dome of the Capitol. People are streaming in from every direction. Nature calls. I breathe a sigh of relief as I spot dozens of portable toilets. But many are locked behind a fence topped with a “No Entry” sign. “Those are for the inauguration; we can’t let you in there,” says a security officer. “What will you do if we go through here?” one woman asks. “I’ll have to arrest you,” he replies. Given that there were zero arrests for more than a half million protesters, I assume no one was willing to go to jail for the right to use an inaugural porta-potty. Special flags made for Trump’s inauguration still flutter in front of the Capitol, where the new president had been sworn in 24 hours prior.

The rest of the day is spent in jubilant, cooperative throngs. With such a huge crowd, cell phone towers are overwhelmed, so messages filter through the crowd, like a massive game of “telephone.” Several people shout that the march has been canceled. Too many people are jammed along the march route, on streets surrounding the Capitol and the National Mall, to move anywhere. We know that just blocks away, Madonna, Alicia Keys, Angela Davis, America Ferrera and Gloria Steinem are rallying the crowd. We are shoulder to shoulder, accepting that this slow shuffling is “the march.”

Eventually, we run into some familiar faces from the bus. “There are so many more people here than we expected,” says Erin Johansen. “It’s energizing. It’s diverse. So great to see all the women and men, the different ages and races. It’s a great day. And it’s not the end. It’s the beginning.”

Stuck at the intersection of Independence Avenue and 3rd, the crowd tightens up around a mother with a stroller to allow her to kneel down on the pavement to change her baby’s diaper. Finally, after more than two hours of gridlock, we move, making our way through the mall and into the streets, past Washington’s Trump Tower, where people deposit protest signs. A statue of Ben Franklin is adorned with a small cardboard sign reading: “This is not normal.”

We never get very close to the stage, but complete the march route as the sun sets pink and birds flock above the White House lawn. The lights of Trump’s new home glow in the dusk. A row of signs, a quarter mile long, is propped against the chain-link fence that divides him from the marchers: “We will not be silent,” “Pussies Against Patriarchy,” “Keep your tiny hands off the First Amendment”...and on and on.

We take a Metro back to the vast parking lots of RFK Stadium, threading our way through diesel fumes, searching for the buses that read “Madison, Wisconsin.”

Back on the bus, shoes are kicked off and the phones come out. The buzz begins as the reports pour in about the huge turnout in Madison, in Chicago, on every continent.

Kaltenberg says the experience was “completely overwhelming and insane.” But also a little frustrating. “We just kept chanting ‘march, march, march.’ We needed to have the physicality and the symbolism of movement. When they finally said, yes, we are going to march, that was super-cool. My favorite part was being in the midst of everybody with their signs and their chants and the movement and the togetherness.”

Lucy Smith, a 17-year-old African American student at Madison College, had never been to a march before and didn’t know what to expect. “It was a lot,” says Smith (no relation to Sarah). “You’ve got the personal and you’ve got the national movement coming together.”

As the bus pulls out of the lot for another long night of interstate travel, Smith and I talk about what’s next. The Madison Facebook group, which had been designed to get people to Washington and back, will now become an action center.

“I think it definitely has to start on the local level. All of these women have to go back and decide that they want to do something,” says Smith. “A lot of women exchanged numbers, emails; they have these connections all across the U.S.”

Smith, like many of her fellow marchers, could not hear or see much of the official action on the stage. It turned out that really didn’t matter. “My favorite part was probably when we were all stuck together and nobody could hear anything,” says Smith. “But this group of women was together and they were talking and they were eating and sharing food. You have this moment with some random strangers — that’s special.”