By Michael F. Duggan
The first thing you noticed was the desolation of the place. No more than 20 people got off of the train at the long platform at Union Station where a year ago hundreds would have detrained. It was before 7:00 and mostly dark.
The station was well-lit and more alive than I expected, so strange, so unchanged since last March. The virus had shut down the routine life, and for ten months I had driven to work. But The Hill was now buttoned-down. Major arteries were blocked off making driving difficult, and I was back on the commuter train. A half-dozen people crossed the great airless concourse of the station at 7:04. Outside under the arches facing south to the Capitol were the perennial homeless, restless and unmasked in a pandemic.
There were clouds on the east horizon and the sunrise was more vivid than usual, and the light of dawn reflected in the windows of office buildings along North Capitol Street to the west of the station’s plaza. There were no cars for blocks in either direction on Massachusetts Avenue at Columbus Circle. The crosswalk too was deserted and terminated at at the base of nine-foot-high fence-barricades, and I entered the green zone at First Street, NE. The barricades were topped with razor wire.
The checkpoint was manned by police flanked by solders of the Guard. I recognized the insignia of the Twenty-eighth “Keystone” Division and the yin-yang shoulder patches of Twenty-ninth “Blue and Gray” Division—heirs to the men who went in with the first wave on Omaha Beach. There were other patches I did not recognize. You just presented your ID and named your building, and the police officer let you in. Two MTVs were parked back-to-back but unaligned across First Street just below Massachusetts blocking all but a single lane of traffic between them. But few cars came and in spite of the sunrise it did not feel like rush hour.
Walking up The Hill, there were many more Guardsmen and women than pedestrians: young people with M4s, some of whom nodded and called me “sir” as I passed. Constitution Avenue was blocked off from traffic below the Hill and there were no other people as I crossed adjacent to the Capitol. As I passed the Supreme Court I could see that both it and the Capitol grounds were enclosed behind the high fence-barricades and concertina wire—green zones within green zones. I was alone outside of this internal line of barricades and kept walking.
All was quiet. And I went into my building, turned on my computer and drank my coffee and went to work.
January 15, 2021