WASHINGTON, D.C.—There's a traumatic scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King where Denethor, the steward (interim king), slowly approaches the wall of his fortress city and peers over to find some hundreds of thousands of wicked creatures neatly arranged for battle at his doorstep. He collapses against the stone, shaking, unable to breathe. It’s a terrible, emotionally backward metaphor, I know, but the sight coming up from the Metro onto the National Mall yesterday felt something like it: a sight you know in your soul is coming, but when it’s actually before your eyes, you’re not quite sure it is really happening.

For most of the almost two million who attended the inauguration, including some of the ticketholders, it was a choice between two evils: arrive early and endure the brutal beating of an 8-degree wind chill for hours before the ceremony, or arrive at a more decent hour and waddle along Independence Avenue at a pace slower than your great-grandmother shopping for Tums. I chose the latter, figuring it’d be at least a chance to ruminate on the nature of crowd-movement-slash-herd-mentality. It also turned out to be the warmest option: squeezed up against someone else’s giant derriere, there’s not much opportunity to get cold.

It took almost exactly an hour and a half to walk the 1.1 mile from the L’Enfant Plaza station to the foot of the Washington Monument, where I hoped the incline would help me look out over the crowded valley bellow. No such luck. The best I could do was to watch a nearby JumboTron by standing on my toes at the crucial moments. Toes that, I should mention, became painfully cold after remaining stationary for a couple of hours. By the time President Obama finally started on his speech, I could barely concentrate.

But enough about me; the surrounding crowd was far more fascinating. Overwhelmingly African-American, they were unsurprisingly worshipful of the new president, and the psychology being worked out next to me was both vivid and moving. We media people have tossed around punchlines and mock-serious analyses of Michelle Obama’s wardrobe since Grant Park night, but the instant the incoming First Lady appeared on stage, the black woman next to me craned to see the screen. “What’s she wearing?!” she demanded excitedly. The angle changed. “Oh, she’s looks wonderful! So much better than that red dress! Oh my God Oh my God!” She was near tears. Her husband smiled back at her from in front of me.

She was no less emotional when Aretha Franklin took the stage, repeatedly calling her “the queen” and straining to make out her hat. The people around me mumbled the Lord’s Prayer along with Rick Warren, but most of the African-Americans in earshot prayed it fervently, interrupted with exclamations like “praise Jesus! He has answered our prayers.” It felt, the best possible way, like a church service in which an astounding miracle had just taken place. There was palpable catharsis, something that we of the majority race cannot quite comprehend. It was wonderful, wonderfully American.

The one expression in common with black and white, old and young: the bitter, distasteful booing of President Bush when Obama thanked him for his service. More partisanship found its voice in sneers when anyone mentioned unity and oneness—before the 12:00-sharp swearing-in. “Heh, not yet,” one man scoffed when Dianne Feinstein said something about unity. “We’ll be unified at 12:01.” The crowd hooted and jeered when Dick Cheney was rolled onto the platform in a wheelchair.

I love moments. Marking them always makes for great memories, from the important ones (the exact instant a friend goes from single to married), to the slightly less crucial ones (the instant I legally became a New Yorker). They’re simultaneously unremarkable and monumental. I could sense the crowd, particularly the African-Americans, awaiting the exact moment when Obama became the 44^th President of the United States—almost as if it was all a dream until he had sworn on Lincoln's Bible. Obama calmly, monotonously repeated his oath of office, igniting a deafening roar from the Mall. The woman beside me was now crying hysterically, reaching forward to hold her husband’s hand. He had tears in his eyes, too.

Obama’s speech passed without much fanfare—occasional applause, but mostly shifting to relieve the pain of the cold. When the wind picked up, the flags circling the monument would flap so feverishly that they nearly drowned him out. But there were moments in the address that felt electric. Even channeled through hundreds of echoing loudspeakers and across the rough wind, Obama’s voice still conveyed passion and conviction: “We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” More applause, more eye-dabbing, and a few began to extricate themselves from the claustrophobia-inducing crowd.

There was a lot more to Inauguration Day. The scenes of the mass exodus from the Mall were described as "dramatic," but they were closer to apocalyptic. Crowds covered bridges, wandered across medians, and scaled barriers as if it were War of the Worlds or Children of Men. Trash lined every surface of street and sidewalk—a living recreation of the world described in The Road. There was lots of cold bodies and plans thwarted. But what we’ll remember from our frozen hours in Washington was the moment something in America—something we’ll probably understand down the road, looking back—changed.