WEST BRATTLEBORO — As I stood waiting for my phone to charge outside the historical apartment building on West End Avenue in New York City at the biggest climate march in U.S. history, I watched the crowd take the form of a long line stretching in either direction as far as the eye could see.
I marveled at the size and at the good humor of the marchers, who had been waiting for two hours to even begin due to the unexpected surge in numbers. Organizers expected at most 150,000; instead, our numbers swelled to more than 300,000!
I was proud of my fellow Vermonters. I had awakened at 4:30 a.m. from a delighted chirp on my mobile phone, alerting me to a text message: “The Burlington buses just left!”
That alert came from Maeve McBride, the statewide coordinator for 350.org, the global organization founded by Middlebury College scholar Bill McKibben and his students nine years ago as a winter-term study group. The state chapter, 350 Vermont, is one of its strongest affiliates.
“Oh, God,” I thought, “Do I have to get up?”
I did, and I am eternally grateful to Maeve and all the other Vermont organizers, including the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club and Post Oil Solutions, for working together to pack the 17 buses that left from all over the state and make them flow almost seamlessly down the highways and freeways to the core of the Big Apple.
* * *
When I first stood in line, in front of Brattleboro Union High School, I imagined my warm bed, the chill of fall in the air, the woodpile still to be stacked, some garden work to be done, the memoir about a woman biking across Afghanistan to finish reading.
But I began to see the beauty of this march, this gathering, as soon as we hit the road and I found myself with a bunch of Vermonters: Quakers, Marlboro College students, a Dummerston School eighth-grader, and a variety of other people, young and old, from all walks of life.
As I stood watching the crowd, I thought of my cell phone, of how it provided me with a link to the hundreds of countries sharing photos of their own People's Climate Marches around the globe, sharing through the strong web of 350.org.
I asked the tall Slavic doorman if my phone was charged.
“I could lose my job because of this!” he said.
And he handed the phone back to me, with a nod of approval.
* * *
I emerged from the building just as the planned 12:58 p.m., two-minute global moment of silence started.
I saw the wave first.
The silence moved up the crowd. The passersby on the sidewalks stopped to stare as arms flew up in an arc that appeared to be one of supplication, but also of an intricate choreograph of quiet solidarity.
You could hear a pin drop - it was that quiet.
As the silent marchers stood there, I looked back at our Vermont group, thousands strong, and I felt a surge of pride.
“We can do this,” I thought. “I know we can.”