I realized about five minutes in that I’d forgotten my phone, but then they had asked that no pictures be taken of faces and it’s kind of hard to take one of a crowd without doing that so it’s just as well.

Notable signs: the Statue of Liberty saying, I said, Your huddled masses, not your hooded asses!

No Epsteinization! Open the files!

Near a dentist’s office: No Truth Decay!

The organizers had said to line up on the west side of what the Spanish conquistadors had named The Royal Road, a fitting spot for a No Kings rally. Seven miles long from town to town to town. Don’t take up business parking lots; they need their customers to survive. Here are the public places for it. Share a ride, take a ride share, we can make this work.

That they did.

At this rally, for the first time, they said one could drive alongside cheering the protesters on and that that counted, too. That was all I needed; I signed up.

I really fervently wanted to be on that sidewalk holding a sign of my own but UV-reactive lupus and reality said that I’d like to stick around to vote for my grandchildren’s futures. So I grabbed my red Norwegian/Minnesotan Resist hat and set off.

I figured out real quick that people couldn’t all tell from there just what kind of red hat that was–details like a braid going to a tassel get lost at windshield distance. I snatched it off. It was too important to risk messing the experience up for even a single person.

Two, and often all three southbound lanes were packed with cars honking and waving. The northbound lanes seemed actually less than the usual traffic: people had other things to do today. As one could see.

It took me an hour, waving and saying thank you.

But what is important is that time after time, eyes meeting eyes, protester to protester however we came to the moment, it felt surprisingly sacred.

The way voting day does.

I was not expecting to be in tears.

We were bearing witness–together!–to our reclaiming our right to the rule of law. To due process. To honoring the Constitution. To the separation of powers. Honoring the immigrant who is abiding by the law. Amen and amen and amen.

So glad the organizers thought to include even people like me in a way I could feel an active part of it.