My Grant Park Election Celebration Story

I have done no editing of my photos yet, but I want to get some up here, so don't be surprised if the pictures change eventually when I've had time to fire up PhotoShop. My flash was completely useless in the giant crowd and I know that these are all kind of dark and grainy. I'll also be adding more video as I have time.

As I mentioned yesterday, I was mostly excited, but partly scared beyond belief to be attending the Election Night rally in Grant Park. With every minute that passed while I was getting ready to leave for Chicago, I got more and more nervous. Part of it was my natural tendency to envision the worst-case scenario. Part of it was Duke's survivalist nature starting to wear off on me.

My fear and paranoia culminated with me taking a black Sharpie marker and writing my name, date of birth, and two phone numbers in giant block letters on my leg, running from my knee to just above my ankle. When I confessed to a group of friends what I had done, they suggested I add my blood type. When I met up with my parents, my mother thought it was a brilliant idea, and my father asked her if she was going to write "Bud Light" instead of her blood type.

We spent the ride into the suburbs talking about various cases of voter suppression we had heard about on the news throughout the day, and my parents told me about my brother's own experience trying to vote. Because he's living on the University of Illinois campus right now, hours from home, he applied for and received an absentee ballot. After reading the directions carefully and filling it out, Wags looked at the postage area of the ballot, where it said 59 cents. At first, he pondered whether the ballot was pre-stamped, then decided that no, he needed to put 59 cents worth of postage on it. Not having 59 cents worth of stamps, he went to his local post office. The line to speak directly to the postal worker was shorter than the line for stamps, so he went to the counter. The postal worker looked at his ballot and declared that it wasn't 59 cents. It needed to be posted for over a dollar.

My parents and I arrived at Duke's office and parked in his parking lot and then walked to the nearest train station. Duke was the only one of us with Metra experience - our train experience is the Empire Builder from Hudson, WI to Minot, ND, which is a slightly different style of train travel - and we kept asking him the stupidest questions and he kept rolling his eyes at us, over and over again until I thought he'd go blind. We arrived at Union Station and started the long walk to the location where we were meeting our four "guests" and then on to Grant Park.

An aside: Last night was the first time I remember being at the base of the Sears Tower at night. The way that it completely disappears into the dark sky is really creepy. Creepy awesome.

When we signed up for our tickets, the form said that each person would have to provide ID that matched the ticket, so I assumed that each person would have to have their own ticket. After submitting the request and receiving confirmation that we would receive tickets, I learned that each ticket was valid for the person whose name was on it, plus one guest. So we had eight tickets. Not being entirely confident that we'd receive them without a hitch, I didn't advertise my extra "guest" tickets until I was sure that the four of us would all be able to get in without a problem. On Tuesday morning, tickets in hand, we found friends and friends-of-friends that wanted to be our guests.

We met those people at a bar and then proceeded to Grant Park, where we ended up in a line that snaked on and on and on for blocks. The mood was pretty fun. There were a lot of people with their iPhones and Blackberries in hand, trying to get results and not always succeeding because the cell towers couldn't handle the load of that many people in one place at one time.

There was only one incident of line-jumping in our vicinity, and Duke and one of our guests sufficiently shamed them into at least backing off for a few yards and jumping in further behind us. Their excuse for cutting into the line (that we had been waiting in for almost an hour and a half at that point) was "We have kids." My response was "Had I brought my children to an event like this, I'd want to teach them a better example than this."

But besides that, we had a great time standing in line. We chatted with the people in line on either side of us, shared election results as we received them, and chatted with random people that walked past us on their way to the end of the line. People would walk past wearing really funny or interesting t-shirts and everyone would stop and take pictures of them and chat. It was very jovial.

Shortly before we got to the entrance, we passed a bus stop, where Duke sat down, turned to the guy sitting next to him, and said "So. How long have you been waiting for the bus?"

As we neared the entrance, the crowd wasn't forming such a perfect line anymore, and it was just kind of a free-for-all to get inside without losing your guest, who had to enter with the ticketed person. We were required to have a photo ID and our ticket ready, and we were told to have our cell phones, cameras, and any other electronics powered on and ready for inspection, though nobody ever looked at them.

Once inside, we all kind of turned to each other and said "that's it?" It didn't seem like much of a security process. We walked 50 yards and realized that we had only just begun. We were directed into lines that passed through several checkpoints. The first just checked that our tickets matched our ID for the ticketed name. Guests were told to display ID, but there was nothing to compare it to, so I'm not sure I understand the security thinking there - my guest just followed me around as I presented my ID, pointed at her, and said "She's with me." Her name appeared nowhere on my ticket. The second checkpoint was a person who went through bags. I didn't bring a bag, not even a purse, so I walked right through. It was here that they started announcing that we needed to throw away our campaign pins and buttons because they wouldn't be allowed through the metal detector. I threw my one button (which I'd just gotten outside) away, and Mom took hers off and put them in her pocket, figuring that she'd throw them away when we actually got to the metal detector.

We continued walking, expecting a third checkpoint with the metal detectors, when suddenly we were just walking out into a giant field filled with people. That was it - that was the entirety of our security screening. We were very confused, and talked amongst ourselves about whether or not they had just given up, or what? It was a lot more lax than we were expecting. It was only when we sent Duke on a mission to find us some bottled water that we figured out what happened. We were still behind a chain-link fence separating us from the stage. About halfway through the giant crowd that you saw on the news last night, a chain-link fence separated two groups. We aren't sure if those in front of the fence had special tickets, or (most likely) had just arrived hours before us, but those people had to go through a metal detector and much more stringent security to get to where they were standing closer to the stage.

From where we were standing, I could see the top half of the jumbotron. I had to stand on my toes to see the entire screen, and had to jump to see the location of the stage. This wasn't just our distance from the stage - a lot of it was my own shortness. When I wanted to see something more clearly, I held my camera over my head with the screen angled down, like a periscope over the crowd.

CNN was broadcasting on the screen, and we watched the election results roll in. Timing-wise, we entered the park between when they called Ohio and when they called Florida. The roar of the crowd was so deafening with each new state projection that was announced that it was hard to tell when we transitioned from cheering each state individually to acknowledging that it was done, over, and Obama was victorious.

Shortly before McCain's concession speech, a man approached the microphone and began a sound check. We listened to him drone "1, 2, 3, check check check" over and over again while they adjusted the sound system, and then he said "1, 2, 3, check, check, this is a sound check, this is the final sound check for the next President of the United States" and the crowd roared yet again.

The crowd was very respectful during McCain's concession speech. We burst into applause at many many points. The only sustained booing from Grant Park was at the mention of Sarah Palin.

After McCain's speech was over, they played music, including "Signed, Sealed, Delivered", "Only in America", and "Sweet Home Chicago" among other songs.

Our phones were lighting up all night with text messages, voice mails, and calls when could hear them ring. My coworker Sprout, my friend Jenny, and my friend Mo were all people that I heard from and was thinking about all night, wishing they were there with me.

But one of the most touching phone conversations that I had all night long was also the shortest. My Great-Aunt S., who is a frequent reader and commenter here, talked to me and my dad for a brief moment after the results were in, and she kept repeating "We did it" through her tears. Aunt S. lives in Ohio and has been an active volunteer there, knocking on doors and spending time at the local campaign offices. It has not been easy for her to live in Ohio these last few elections, which is something I've never experienced in the bluest of blue Illinois. Her work for this campaign in such a hard-fought battleground state is unbelievably inspirational to me. Thank you, Aunt S.

Duke received one text message last night, from The Hairy Pretzel, another frequent contributor to the comments. His message said "Cubs win! CUBS WIN! Oh no wait, Obama WINS! It must be crazy down there." That message put into words exactly what I know Duke was feeling, what he's been feeling since the Cubs lost in the playoffs. I made the comparison months ago and it was painful to see it realized last night. My biggest hope for 2008 was to be in downtown Chicago celebrating an Obama victory, and Duke also wanted to be there to celebrate the Cubs World Series win. Only one of us saw our dream realized this year.

While we waited for Obama to speak, Duke started noticing the increased security presence on the roofs of the tall buildings to our right. If you squinted, you could see people moving around. The Chicago Tribune told us not to be surprised by the presence of snipers in the sky, and I don't know for sure if that's what they were, but we definitely saw them.

The only major disappointment of the night for me was the person who sang the Star Spangled Banner. She was a passable singer, but she flubbed three different lines in the song, and flubbed them very very badly. Wrong words, words that changed the meaning, but sang very convincingly as though she didn't know she was nowhere close to the correct lyrics. I don't know who she was, but I waited all night to hear the anthem and expecting it to be a very somber moment, but instead it was the entire crowd looking back and forth at each other like "Oh no. Seriously. Did she just say that?" I hate national anthems where the crowd is snickering and sighing. It takes away from the mood immensely.

A short film played before Obama took the stage, and I'm guessing that rest of you know just as much about what happened next as I do. I saw very little of Obama, and I plan to watch the speech on the internet to get the full impact of it, because I spent most of the time that he was speaking getting choked up and hugging my parents and Duke and looking around at the faces of those around me.

When Obama was done speaking and his family came back onstage and Joe Biden came out, Duke said "There better be fireworks." I replied "I doubt there will be. Wouldn't that be a distraction to the security force?" Duke's reply was "He has one hundred and how many million dollars left, and they can't even send Biden onto the stage with a couple of sparklers? I want fireworks!!" But alas, no fireworks.

We moved out of Grant Park very peacefully and orderly. Our only hiccup was when we followed the crowd right into a chain link fence, and there was that moment where you wonder if the 100,000 people behind you are going to realize what's happening and stop walking. But all was well.

We passed a couple dressed as Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, entering Grant Park as we exited.

We walked and walked and walked and I felt sure that we were blocks away when I looked up and saw the columns that we had passed through while standing in line. We were just finally exiting the park. A 20-something man stood on top of a concrete barrier and shouted "Hey everybody! Let's go back to my place! I have beer! We'll order pizza! C'mon! You're all invited!"

We walked straight down the middle of Michigan Avenue, thousands of people moving as one unit, and it was one of the more surreal experiences of my life. We turned onto a street to head to the Metra station and it continued for blocks and blocks, no cars anywhere. Just a throng of people moving in every direction.

The crowd would suddenly break into applause and celebratory shouting, and we would join in, and the noise would move up and down each street for blocks, like The Wave.

It was on this stretch that we ended up walking behind a couple carrying a hand-painted canvas version of the Obama Hope sign. We eventually overtook and passed them, but for a block or two, I was getting choked up again, walking shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people behind that sign, while the L train passed over our heads and the entire city sparkled and sang with cheers and honking horns.

With each block that we covered, there were less people, more cars, and a general disbanding of the crowd. We moved from walking right down the middle of the street to walking on sidewalks lined with police officers and cars. When we got to the area of the Federal Reserve, courthouse, and other assorted federal buildings, the police presence seemed even more intense than in Grant Park itself. Duke was fascinated, pointing out the numerous different types of law enforcement and identifying all of their guns and crowd control devices by name.

We were not sure what to expect of our Metra ride home, whether we would be able to get on a train at all, if we'd wait for hours, if we'd end up trying to cobble together the backup plan that Duke dreamed up to shut me up when I said "We need a backup plan." When we walked into the Metra station around 12ish, the board was displaying that the 11:45 pm outbound train was delayed, so we hoofed it to the platform to see if we could still make it instead of waiting for the 12:40. When we got to the platform, we were greeted by the longest Metra train Duke has ever seen.

When they said that they were increasing service, we thought that meant more trains. In reality, I think they took every train they had and hooked them all up. The Metra employees stood at each door, waving us further on and saying "Keep walking, keep walking, plenty of seats." We never reached the far end of the train, finding seats somewhere in the middle, so we assume that while we boarded at Union Station, the other end of the train was already in Schaumburg somewhere.

The ride back was uneventful, except for when I fell asleep and my family all got up and moved to other seats. We talked about what kind of dog the new Obama family puppy will be. While our conversations for months have been dominated by the election, we found little to say about it right then. Mostly we just sat there feeling a profound sense of relief and hope. We got back to our cars at shortly before 2 am and Duke and I walked into our house at exactly 2:45 am. He's at home sleeping right now, taking the morning off, and I woke up at 6:45 and rubbed the sleep from my eyes and came to work.

I can't stop thinking about what I experienced last night. I'm so thankful to have been a part of it, but also I'm thrilled that I got to be there with Duke, to hold his hand and to celebrate with him. I'm even more grateful that my parents were there with us, because nothing has shaped my views and beliefs more than the example set for me by my parents, and to be with them during such an amazing night, when so many of our dreams were realized, is a story that I will pass on for generations.

For months, I have struggled to understand the radical right's accusations that Barack Obama has a Messiah complex, that we treat him as a new coming of Christ. Last night, in that sea of people, it came to me. For somebody like me, who wavers between agnosticism and atheism, my faith is not invested in a god or a creator or a savior. My faith is in people, in humanity. When you go as long as I have, steadily losing faith in humanity, the hopelessness and desperation permeates everything. To spend so much time watching the world, wondering if you're the only person feeling this way, it makes a person grow unreasonably pessimistic.

But the flip side of the coin is that when the bulk of the faith in your life is invested in your fellow humans, moments like last night, like this election as a whole, are ten times more meaningful. Because while I stood in the midst of those 65,000 people, or 240,000 people, or 1 million people, or whatever they are reporting the attendance at now, I felt saved. I felt re-born. It's not that I believe Obama is my savior, it's more that I finally believe in my fellow man again.