Nobody was alone in this crowd

Highway traffic turned the usual four-hour trip from North Carolina to Washington into a seven-hour sojourn. It took Tiffianna Hon- singer another two hours Tuesday to get to the National Mall, most of that time spent on a subway car packed “so tight you couldn’t even move your arms.”

“I thought, it can’t get any worse than this,” Honsinger said, shivering in the cold, straining to see Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony on a distant Jumbotron, in a crowd so large that none of us could clap without bumping against someone.

Victor Carruthers was stranded behind the Jumbotron, ready to pack it in and leave, even though he had driven 20 hours in an RV from Oklahoma, then endured a five-hour predawn journey Tuesday morning from Virginia to the mall.

“I’ll watch it on television,” Carruthers said as he tried to push through a crowd that had been stalled for almost an hour behind barricades while a procession of parade buses and security vehicles rolled by.

It was slightly scary, the press of all those people. That’s one thing the TV cameras didn’t capture as they panned across the smiling throngs gathered before the Capitol.

But as Carruthers and I talked, the crowd finally budged. We inched forward -- surprisingly smoothly -- listening as the musical prelude to the swearing-in boomed from speakers across the mall. Then the crowd surged and scattered, everyone searching for a rare spot of empty ground.

Carruthers turned to thank me. “If you hadn’t stopped me to talk, I’d have been gone,” said the 57-year-old high school history teacher, who came to the inauguration with his four younger siblings at the urging of their elderly mother.

He handed me the Obama backpack I’d admired. “Keep it,” he said. He said he’d be taking home the only souvenir that mattered -- the memory of watching the first black president take the oath of office.

And I felt warmed by the spirit of generosity that permeated a morning that had been difficult and uncomfortable.

--

‘A sort of catharsis’

If I hadn’t been there, I would not have believed that so many people could stand so long, so patiently, shoulder-to-shoulder in the frigid air without regret or complaint, buoyed by pride and hope.

They began gathering during the night. By the time I arrived at 7 a.m, the crowd stretched for two miles, to the Lincoln Memorial from the Capitol.

Honsinger, 30, a south Texas native and Obama campaign volunteer, captured the spirit when I asked why she’d come: “We worked so hard and worried so much. This is a sort of catharsis for us.”

And for our country and our world, it seems.

That’s the sense I’ve felt since I boarded the Washington-bound plane in Los Angeles last week, and it’s grown every day. People smile, ask where you’re from; there’s a giddiness, a sense of relief. It seems everyone’s sporting an Obama pin or cap or scarf.

It was hard on Tuesday not to get choked up at the sight of the American flags waved by old folks in wheelchairs and toddlers in strollers. And impossible not to notice something else the cameras couldn’t capture -- the many acts of kindness:

The strangers who carefully hoisted an old woman over a tall stone ledge, so she could stand in a spot to see. The way the crowd parted to let harried mothers get their children to the portable toilets.

Tracy Swatts Whitfield saw me struggling to take notes, my bare hands numbed by the cold, and offered me a package of hand-warmers she’d bought for her three children. She and her family are here from South Africa, where they had moved from Indianapolis.

We’d all heard warnings: Hold tight to your purse. Label your children. Tuck away your wallets. Instead, we all seemed to look after one another.

Julie Messinger and her husband, Brian, drove down from Long Island. On the subway here, he dropped a lens from his camera. Someone jumped to grab it and make sure he got it back.

“A lady dropped her purse, and somebody found it,” Julie Messinger told me. “And the crowd passed it back, from one person to another, until it reached her. It wasn’t what you’d expect in a crowd this big. It’s incredible.”

--

No barriers here

Like me, Messinger was by herself in the crowd. Her husband, a high school teacher, had a ticketed seat, courtesy of a former student who had worked on the campaign.

But it was impossible to feel alone in this crowd, undivided by race, age, geography or history.

And when Obama recited the oath of office, I turned to Messinger and we embraced -- not the quick hug you give a stranger, but the life-affirming, familial hug you share with someone you know and love.

When I looked back I saw a black woman in a fur coat unclench her sister and beckon to a young white woman, who was smiling, but unhugged. “Come here, baby!”

They wrapped their arms around each other. “After all,” the older woman told her, “we’re all family right now.”

--

sandy.banks@latimes.com