While local marches took place on Cape Cod and in Boston, some Cape residents made their way to Washington, D.C., by car, train or bus.
I traveled to Washington as part of a media-gathering project for Women in Film and Video of New England. There I met up with the Cape Cod contingent of marchers.
Estimates of the size of the crowd vary, but it was a diverse group of women, men, families with young children, and wheelchair-bound elders. I traveled to the Capitol with my mother who is aided by a walker. This should have been a nightmare, but people were helpful, informative and welcoming to everyone around them. Even the Metro workers, many whom had just worked the day before for the inauguration, were in high spirits, well informed and welcoming. Police officers and volunteers were thanked, and they thanked marchers in return for being there.
I spoke to Dan Tritle Sunday morning to give him my impressions of the event.
The march was overwhelmingly left leaning, but there was a handful of quiet Trump supporters who either marched to support someone in the crowd or for their own stances on women’s issues. There was no violence, but pockets of counter-protestors were present. Both sides ignored each other with stoic respect for their right to attend the event.
The main march route became too crowded, so we made our way to the Mall, where Donald Trump had taken the oath of office just 24 hours earlier. Despite the large numbers of people, I managed to find friends of WCAI. The Illingworth family lives in Virginia but has also spent summers on Cape Cod. I asked 13-year-old Victoria why she came to march.
We left the march via the metro, which was our only tense moment, as people crowded onto a slow elevator. Once underground, what could have turned into a crush of exhausted marchers became its own celebration. As metro workers held groups back from the platform for crowd control, people broke out in song, usually for the length of a train arrival. Then, cheers went up as passengers boarded arriving trains heading out of the Capitol and the next wave came down the escalators.
