Two days after Obama’s inauguration, the crowds barely gone and the Mall barely cleared of trampled water bottles and blankets, the March for Life came to town.

It was a Thursday and I headed to work early, looking forward to the post-inaugural respite of an empty metro train. Instead, the turnstiles and trains were crammed with people in neon orange stocking caps: teenagers, moms, brown-skirted Brothers, all decked out to spot each other during the day’s march, about which I had forgotten. They took head-counts and shrieked and stole each other’s caps and then disappeared, to the relief of us commuters, at the Chinatown stop.

As they filed off the train, I gathered from their shouted conversations that they were headed to a pre-rally Mass. Slipping into one of their vacated, still-warm seats, I half-wanted to follow them off the train, slip up the escalator and into their midst to watch a public spectacle unlike any I had ever seen in D.C. But I knew that I wouldn’t.

Despite the democratic convenience of living in Washington, I have marched on the Mall only once. Otherwise, I have observed. When I was just out of college, I lived a few blocks from the Capitol, where regular busloads of shouting, preaching, praying zealots lobbied me and my numbed neighbors, hounding us on the sidewalks and shoving pamphlets at our closed hands.

I tired of the crowds’ fervor and I hated walking the gauntlet of vying sides, but I always enjoyed the odd puppets, wigs, and placards, the theatrical kitsch of belief. I especially loved the vehicles—a giant, oinking pig with Vermont plates, a flatbed truck ferrying stacks of fake Oreos—until I saw the abortion truck.

Everybody in D.C. knows it: a moving van plastered with giant pictures of bloody, mangled fetuses. The first time I saw it, I was driving to dinner with some acquaintances, unaware that any protesters were in town. Mid-conversation, I swung my head around and came face-to-face with a huge, rubbery, inky-red mass on the flank of a chugging van. It took me a moment to realize that it was a human profile, tiny and dead. I tried to recover, choking a bit, unsure of what to say.

“That is obscene,” one of the girls scoffed. “I can’t believe people do that.” She meant the truck, not the act. The rest of us were silent.

I came face-to-face with the truck again a few years later, during my one foray into protest: the historic 2004 March for Women’s Lives on the National Mall. My mom and my sisters, all of whom are pro-choice, had talked about coming to the March with the Planned Parenthood of Mid-Missouri or a feminist professor at the Baptist college that all of us sisters have attended.

In the end, I was the only one there. I stood on the South side of Seventh and Constitution, lonely, awkward among the counter-marchers, new to the pro-life movement and feeling the fear of a family traitor. I held a carefully chosen “Feminists for Life” sign and tried to shout along with my side of the crowd, but I was so ashamed: of the bloody posters, of the boys with bullhorns shouting: “Shame on you!” and, sadly, of the giant Mary of Guadalupe banner, stretched as wide and taut as an old-fashioned firefighter’s net—as if, at any moment, the ladies who toted it would turn it on its side to save someone jumping from a fiery building.

All the while, the abortion truck roamed. I watched its red body make scuttling laps around the Mall, mercenary, ultimate. I think at one point it was parked along the Mall’s side street, and that I passed it as I dropped my sign, turned my T-shirt inside-out, and crossed Seventh Street: the physical line separating pro-life and pro-choice. I wandered the crowd, listening to the Mall carousel’s tinny songs crank under the swelling chants. I wove my way to the tables where they gave away the last of the bright-pink Planned Parenthood commemorative buttons. I took two or three for my mother.

The Tuesday after the March for Life, exactly one week from Obama’s inauguration, D.C. got an overdue snowfall. I took the bus to work. Full and warm, the 52 lumbered down 14th Street and emptied out at the Archives, leaving me to glide south alone, on Seventh Street, across the Mall, now dimpled with footsteps of the Inauguration-goers and the Marchers for Life. We passed the corner where I stood several years ago, and I thought about how I had stared into the faces of the women who flowed down that street, imagining that I saw my mother, my sisters, my grandmother across the barricade. I would have cheered and waved when I saw them go by. I would have reached out for their hands.