Where Is The Love?

Hank Stuever: Yea, though we walk through the 395 tunnel . . . in a suspended sense of municipal reality, on a freeway open only to people on foot, as if something terrible and apocalyptic has occurred, the dawn light having chased off the zombies. It's an adventure we're on. Descending into the mouth of the tunnel beneath E Street NW at 8:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, two women from Miami, one in her pink knit Obama cap, pause to have their picture taken with the big, green exit sign behind them: 2ND ST. SW US CAPITOL 1/2 MILE.

"It's cool to walk on a highway," one of the women, Carolyn Koslen, 40, says. "I'm a crazy researcher. I got online and looked, and this supposedly seemed like a good way to get to where we're supposed to go in." It does seem like a movie, all these people on foot in empty lanes, her friend, Sasha Carr, 37, says. "Or something from real life, like [Hurricane] Katrina."