Searching at the Capitol Riot
On the six-month anniversary of January 6th, here's my journey from the archives
When we first arrived at the Washington Monument, Adam, my then boyfriend, demonstrated how to dodge a bullet. “If you hear gunshots, don’t run,” said Adam, who is a war photographer. In Washington, D.C., firearms are prohibited within 1,000 feet of a public rally—a law that gave us little faith as a steady roar of deep-throated “USA’s!” thundered over the hill towards us. Beneath a circle of American flags flapping in the chilly January air, the black crest of the crowd jostled like a line of cavalry on the horizon. If things were to get out of hand, Adam instructed me to lay flat on my stomach, motioning to the grass. “That way you become a much smaller target,” he said. Only then determine where the gunman is, and decide when and whether to run.
Goosebumps flared along my arms as we mounted the hill in silence. The “USA!” chants intensified until we reached the monument where, as if we had emerged from behind a stage, a theater of humans appeared all at once. Men dressed in full camouflage patrolled in groups of eight. They wore helmets and flak jackets. Walkie talkie static scratched the air. Some wore flags as capes, others carried wooden walking sticks, tightly gripped. Everywhere I looked, someone was leering back at me. As a young woman dressed in all black in an N95 mask among a crowd of Covid-deniers, I was a spectacle, too. I tried to appear vulnerable and non-threatening. I avoided eye contact with people. I made a show of rubbing my hands to stay warm, drinking from my water bottle, and holding Adam’s hand. He grabbed mine back, and promised to look out for me.
“The only way to get them out is to shoot them out!” a man in a flag tee-shirt screamed towards the stage.
As we waded deeper into the crowd of MAGA kitsch, the scene looked all too familiar. In the four months leading up to what we now know as the Capitol riot, Adam and I had seen this circus many times on the road, from far-right rallies in Louisville to Stop the Steal protests in Phoenix. Militarism masquerading as patriotism. Conspiracy cosplaying as truth. My conversations that day proved just as ludicrous. Protesters expressed fears of a communist takeover, civil rights being stolen, or an election on par with “Venezuela.” It all felt like a main stage performance of the Breitbart comments section.
Adam and I didn’t really want to be there. After several months of chronicling this absurdity while living out of a pickup truck, we were completely burnt out. We had just returned home to Brooklyn from an autumn on the road, and all we wanted to do was curl up in our apartment with our silky grey cat named Gaia who liked to bask in the feathery morning light. But this was the final Trump rally before Biden was to take office. It was the end of an era, at least presidentially, and the end of our grand journey across the country. Adam and I agreed: this would be the perfect final stop. We packed our bags once again and drove to D.C.
Adrenaline wove a lattice of blue veins across my hands. It was the same blood-coursing rush I felt last year while Adam and I were in Australia, his home country, when a blissful vacation turned into a storm chase with the eruption of the bushfires. That January, before Covid, we were in Sydney, and quickly jumped in the car heading south to cover the fires enveloping towns all along the eastern coast. We were back on the road, tackling another story on the elements in Australia; just how we fell in love. But then we stopped at the nearest hardware store to buy fire gear. My nerves began to gnaw at my stomach as the cashier rang up the protection equipment: pants, masks, jacket, boots. I hesitated, but I passed her my credit card anyway.
In D.C., we stuck it out at the rally for two long, cold hours. Like a bed of coals spread over the hillscape, the crowd of red hats and black coats flickered and crackled to Trump’s every breath. Things seemed relatively normal, in MAGA terms at least. Then the rally ended, and the crowd flooded down Constitution Avenue. Adam and I hung back in the stream. We needed to rest our legs and rehydrate. My fingers went numb in the cold. I lent Adam my extra battery pack to recharge his phone, and we trudged through trash and abandoned “Voter fraud is a crime” signs along the street. Christian groups yelled into megaphones about saving the children. One man pranced around in a Beetlejuice costume. I stopped to interview a man named Juan who wore a bullet proof vest and a knight helmet when a pack of men stormed past us. They ran towards the Capitol chanting, “FUCK ANTIFA!” stopping only to fist bump Juan. “If you see one, point them out!” They sprinted on and I continued the interview, wondering what they were so worked up about.
After a few minutes, I wrapped it up and scanned the road for Adam. He was gone. There was only a trickle of a parade at this point. His grey jeans and black beanie should have stuck out. I scanned again, and heard a faint howl coming from down the street—the same direction the men had run. My stomach dropped. My mind began to rattle. Adam had been right behind me. He couldn’t have gone far. He would’ve told me. He was probably just photographing nearby. I grabbed my phone to text him, only to see a barrage of messages from my sisters asking if I was okay. “They’re scaling the walls of the Capitol.”
Like the moment before a car accident, everything slowed, and my mind reached for one thing: Adam.
I ran. I was three blocks from the Capitol, huffing and sweating in my winter jacket. I sprinted down Constitution Avenue, the kind of pace you only discover within eyeshot of a finish line. I feared for Adam. The howls grew louder, reverberating through the colonnades of museums safeguarding Egyptian mummies and Da Vinci masterpieces. Protesters seemed unfazed, parading in tall hats and silver “No communism” capes. I kept running. Block by block, Adam was nowhere to be found. My calls and texts went unanswered. The roar kept getting louder. Now my parents and my friends were texting me. My phone was dying and Adam still had my battery.
I turned right onto the Union Square lawn and pivoted to face the Capitol, a sight that zapped me of any breath that remained. Through my icy gasps, I watched as a raging horde of red, white, and blue bodies swarmed the Capitol, eating away at the marble steps like barnacles corroding a dock. Helicopters chopped above. Sirens wailed. At 2:49 pm, my ailing phone blared with an emergency alert declaring a city-wide curfew at 6 pm. Rioters erupted with more chants of “USA! USA! USA!” and hung a Trump flag from a scaffolding, as if the Capitol had been conquered.
After several calls, I finally got a hold of Adam. Through the uproar in the background, he said that he had already run up on the steps, where rioters were now smashing their way into the Capitol. I had less than 10% battery. From covering the Hong Kong protests, I know that attending a protest these days without access to social media is like driving at night without your headlights. I needed that battery, but I also needed Adam. He told me to come to the western side, where he could throw it over the edge of some-30-foot wall down to me. “West? You mean left or right? My left or—okay uhm sure, yeah—sure, fine, see you.”
We hung up, and I ran through the lawn, zigzagging upstream through a concert of “FUCK PENCE!” and “TRAITORS!” But with every step I took towards the Capitol, my body resisted, my lungs begging me to come up as if I were underwater. Near the Reflecting Pool, one man called for politicians to take a ride on makeshift gallows, complete with a dangling noose. I veered onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where three women charged up the street in flak jackets, fists in the air shouting, “HOLD THE LINE!” and I slowed down. Bangs of tear gas seemed to topple the overcast sky. Like a broken Roomba, I turned around and went back over and over again. I combed through the crowd looking for a vantage point, a quieter path, a tree to pee behind, any reason to delay my advance, to buy some time to think and gather more information. What the fuck is happening? How far can I go? Is this really worth it? But I shoved my fear back under my diaphragm and pushed on, dashing down a path I wasn’t sure was mine.
The arches of my feet began to throb. I was wearing my Blundstone boots, the ones Adam and I had bought together at the hardware store in Sydney. We paid at the register and continued to drive south towards the fires, past the Opera House, past the airport. But with every exit, my nerves turned more ravenous. The sky grew hazy. Traffic going north was jammed with cars trying to evacuate. I started pushing myself deeper into the front seat. Like a Kodak carousel, my imagination spun with projections of our car melting, getting stranded on the beach, taking shelter in the ocean under blood red skies like the residents of a town called Mallacoota had to. I imagined my family getting a call. My tear ducts unleashed like fire hydrants. If I wasn’t going to come up for air, my body would just drown itself. Adam held my hand from the driver’s seat, telling me, “Darling, it will be okay.” But I was inconsolable. I asked him to drop me off at the nearest train station so I could return to Sydney. He continued south.
I waited on the platform feeling like the train had just hit me. The journalist in me wanted to feel the fires, to taste the smoke. But I couldn’t. My instincts simply wouldn’t allow it. It’s one thing to overestimate your bravery. But there’s nothing quite like looking like a coward in front of the person you love. Adam called me later. “This danger is for idiots, you’re smarter than that,” he said laughing, trying to make me feel better. But nothing made me feel more idiotic than sitting on that train with a puffy face and $300 worth of fire gear that I would never wear. I returned it all except for the boots. His came back later with a melted heel.
I finally got to the Peace Monument, a Civil War memorial about 300 meters from the Capitol steps. I froze as a heaving mosh pit the size of a football field came into full view. The carousel began to spin again. A pack of scraggly beards and fist-pumping sweatshirts seethed as it clambered up the stairs, and I imagined getting pummeled. I scanned the crowd, trying to estimate how many guns could be hiding under coats, where it might start. Would they target journalists? I wondered how hard and when the police would crack down. I had a gas mask but no helmet. I assessed which of the splintering avenues could work as an exit route. I wondered whether I could run fast enough, whether it even would matter, whether—Fuck the fucking battery, my gut slammed down on the carousel. I took a deep breath. I went to text Adam that I couldn’t make it to the wall, but my phone was now dead.
I gave myself a moment to decompress. My cheeks flushed with shame, feeling like a bad journalist and bad girlfriend. I drank some water. I let the tears pass, my racing heart rest. I took a bite of a pre-made peanut butter sandwich, the most I could stomach. Maybe I couldn’t get all the way up to the steps. But I was here, and I had a front row seat to a preview of American autocracy. I was not going to let this moment pass. I shook it off, swapped my dead phone for my notebook and recorder, and decamped to the lawn. I was here for a reason.
For the next four hours, I roved around the front lawn and Reflecting Pool, trying to understand theirs. Every single person parading in front of the Capitol had taken time out of their lives to support a fake fraud in the middle of a pandemic. Some traveled across the country. Some had lost relationships with their children. Meanwhile, cops were beaten and dragged down the stairs through the crowd. Rioters attacked journalists and smashed their equipment. Under the dome, a woman was shot.
As I observed the crowd, a still picture emerged, one that would be obscured by video footage from within the halls and chambers of the Capitol that would air that evening. I saw that there was more to the brainwash than bloodlust. Amid all the mayhem, protesters ran around high-fiving each other. They laughed, cheered, and blessed each other. Strangers leaned against a stone wall to watch the Capitol heave like a kicked beehive, and became friends. They shared how fun it was over FaceTime. Onlookers took selfies and live-streams. Families posed for photos in front of the mob, cheesing to “Trump won!” One man waltzed down from the booming melee, proclaiming, “That’s the sound of victory!” Another ran around selling Proud Boys shirts. Yet another skipped down the steps from the Capitol shouting, “WAHOO! I’m a Congressman now! Ha ha!” It didn’t matter how absurd or violent any of it was. Danger wasn’t a deterrent, it was the draw. Because they were searching for something, too. And sometimes, we do really stupid things to find that.
The sky grew dark, and a line of riot police advanced down from the Capitol to clear the lawn. My arches felt on the verge of collapse. My water bottle was empty and my bladder felt like it was going to rip open any second like an overweight grocery bag. And, most importantly, I still hadn’t found Adam. I didn’t know his phone number, so I called out his name in the crowd like a lost child in a mall. I sifted through my backpack, hoping that maybe his number was written down somewhere. Not in my notebook. Not in my wallet. I fished through the back pocket, and found a crumpled invoice from a camera shop. I unraveled it, and just like that, printed at the top, was his phone number. I ran to the nearest, least threatening-looking stranger to borrow their phone. Adam answered. “Casey, are you okay?”
On the corner of Independence Avenue and 1st Street SW, a parade of red and blue police lights flashed in silence. We reunited on the sidewalk. Tear gas peppered the air. We stared at each other. Adam was angry at me that I didn't meet him where I said I would. I was angry at him for leaving me in the first place. It turns out, when I didn’t show up, he went looking for me, too. He had even walked 20 minutes back to our apartment in the Navy Yard to drop the battery, just in case. Through shivers and a growling stomach, I blurted out some words, “I just—I just couldn’t,” struggling to explain that I ran as far as I could to find him, but that, just like with the fires, I just couldn’t go all the way. We looked at each other with equal parts upset and acceptance. We just got swept up and in the mess of it all, we lost each other.