Wisconsin State Capitol Stairs

Wisconsin State Capitol Stairs, 2011.


John and I visited the State Capitol a few months ago to check out the Assembly Chambers as a possible wedding ceremony site. I hadn't been in any of the Capitol rooms since grade school field trips and barely remembered what they looked like. I'd read online that couples could use rooms in the Capitol for their ceremonies, and I knew at once that was where we'd get married.

I remember hearing once when I was younger and just starting to drive in the big, scary world on my own that all roads in Madison lead to the Capitol. It's sort of true; Madison is a concentrically designed city, with the Capitol as the center point and all major roads branching out from it like spokes on a wheel.

But since I moved downtown, I've started to think about that phrase more and more in a philosophical sense. We are always around the Capitol - going out at night, restaurants, Farmers' Markets, getting from here to there. Even when we're not near it, it's a beacon on the skyline, and I always get a little shiver when it unexpectedly pops into view, towering brightly over everything else.

So it was only fitting that it was where John proposed, and it would be the location where we would hold our wedding ceremony, in the grandness of the Assembly Chambers.

A month or so after John and I woke up early on a Wednesday to visit the Capitol during business hours, the building was flooded with protestors, the drama unfolding on the national stage. Suddenly everyone, everyone was talking about the Madison Capitol building, the Assembly, the protests. A building that was virtually empty less than a month before was overflowing, bursting with people and noise and heat. After a frantic call from the Sergeant at Arms, we finally secured our date a month after we originally intended, which is fine. "I've worked here for 14 years," he told me on the phone, "and I've never seen anything like this."

I assured him I was fine with it, that we didn't have our hearts set on the date but we were not willing to compromise on the location.

The photo above was taken on our first visit to the Assembly Chambers, long before Scott Walker made his announcement, long before the protestors came in droves. I was attracted to the scrollwork on the stairs, the lines and framing, the attention to detail.

A Day With the Protesters in Madison

The following is my column this week from the Reedsburg Independent regarding my experiences at the protests in Madison on February 17:

On a normal day, I wake up at 6 a.m. to drive from Madison to the Reedsburg Independent. Last Thursday, the news from Reedsburg came to me. There had been rumblings all week of protests at the Capitol Square, and though I live less than a mile from it, I had avoided the area up until then.

Despite my minor obsession with 10 p.m. news broadcasts, I didn’t really have a grasp of what was going on up there; I had watched but not really paid attention to it, because it seemed farther off like TV news can’t help but seem. Last Thursday, I woke up, grabbed a cup of coffee and headed up the hill to see what I could see. 

It was a damp, cloudy spring day, the kind of wet cold that sticks to you. I was traveling light - small camera bag slung over my shoulder with only the necessities - notepad, pen, lens cleaner, one credit card and my camera on a hand strap.

I bounced up steep West Washington, fidgeting with the nervous, frenetic energy of not knowing what to expect. The Capitol building loomed ahead, and not many people had gathered outside yet. I was told specifically to look for Reedsburg teachers, having no idea how I would spot them in the reported crowd of 30,000. I wandered around outside for awhile, out of habit walking counter-clockwise around the Capitol, the same direction in which car traffic and Farmers’ Market foot traffic flows. There was litter everywhere, and I found out later that the police weren’t allowing sticks in the Capitol, so many people were breaking them off their signs and leaving them by the entrance.

The inside of the Capitol building always has an orange hue to it, relying on dim sconces and daylight coming through the skylights. I  had visited only a few weeks before on Super Bowl Sunday; my fiance and I seemed to be the only people in the entire massive and intimidating building. Last Thursday, the Capitol was surging with people, that orange hue bouncing off thousands of red T-shirts, voices and drums echoing off the marble and high ceilings. “It sounds like a gym in there,” I heard someone remark.

And it was hot. Hot in the way that relatives’ small houses get hot during the holidays with all the people talking and moving around. At my aunt’s house, someone always has to crack open the sliding patio door and let the freezing winter air in. But at the Capitol, there was nowhere for that stifling, stagnant air to go, and it made the whole building feel smaller, the walls closer together.

I have heard reports of tens of thousands of people filling the Capitol during these protests, and I don’t know how they come up with those numbers. But it was two hours before I saw someone  I recognized, when I finally and completely by dumb luck ran into Dave Moon and his family outside with their protest signs. I was so relieved that I nearly hyperventilated. Dave pointed me in the direction of more Reedsburg teachers and if it were not for his help, I don’t know how I would have found them. They were mainly stationed on the third floor above the Assembly room that morning, and I had been by there at least twice before that and not seen any of them.

The third floor (which is really the fourth level of the Capitol) was crowded by that time. But as someone who has lived in New York and experienced rush hour crush on the subway, and as someone who joined 215,000 of my closest friends at the Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington DC last year, I have to stress that even though it was hot and hard to get around, the people gathered in the Capitol last week were some of the nicest and most cordial people I have ever met. I never had a problem asking someone for their spot so I could briefly snap a photo, and there were people handing out more signs and bottles of water. Though people there are upset with Governor Walker and his proposed bill, they are polite and even kind to each other, and any news report that says differently is greatly exaggerating.

It was difficult to know what was happening with the people who were making the decisions that day. There was a TV with a live broadcast, but I couldn’t see it or hear it. Without my Twitter feed on my iPhone and people constantly tweeting updates about #wiunion, I would have had no idea what was going on. I never saw another Reedsburg teacher after I took a group shot that morning.

I left for lunch around 12:30, wandered down to a less crowded coffee shop a block from the Capitol square. When it came time to pay for my coffee and cookie, I had to peel my camera out of my right hand; my fingers had been clenched around it like a claw, and I had been pulling the hand strap so tightly that it had made red indents on the back of my hand.

After lunch, I headed back up to the square. More people had gathered outside - ironworkers, children, a drum circle, and Bucky Badger. I saw at least two different people dressed as Captain America and another one in a gorilla suit. I ducked into the Walgreens on the square for an energy drink and the store was crowded with people buying posterboard, cardboard boxes and markers.

I hiked around the inside until I got too warm and then did a few laps outside until I had cooled down, taking photos the whole time. People outside and inside were chanting, “Kill the bill,” and “This is what democracy looks like.” They were energized but uncertain, passionate but pessimistic. Somehow four more hours passed and looking back on it now, it feels like I had highway hypnosis, when your subconscious is focused on the task at hand while your conscious mind wanders and you arrive at your destination, wondering how you had gotten there.

As a reporter, I’ve grown comfortable observing and reporting, secure in not having an opinion and just relaying facts. And having spent a day with the protesters, taking their photos, watching them on the news, I still have no idea how I actually feel about the issues. So many thousands of people have converged on the Capitol to express their opinons for and against, and I am in awe of all of them.
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The rest of my protest photos can be seen on my Flickr.