by Peter Sagal
I think about my motion, and my breathing, my muscles, and their state of agitation or stress or relaxation. I note my surroundings—the downward slope I would never notice driving this street, the hawk’s nest I would never see for lack of looking up, the figure in a window caught in a solitary moment of their own. I think about the true meaning of distance—about the learning that comes from running a mile in your own shoes. I think about blisters and bliss, and the voices quiet.
So, in Hamilton, New York, on that April day, two days before the 2013 Boston Marathon, I looked out at the crowd and said, “Take off your headphones. A 5K is a little over three miles, and let’s say you run a ten-minute mile, so that’s about half an hour. You can spend half an hour without distractions. Pay attention to what you’re doing, pay attention to your body, pay attention to your breathing. Some of you are about to run your first race ever—be here for it.”
Some of the runners took my advice, taking off their headphones and stowing them in their bags. I watched those people as we all shuffled to the line, and started to watch for the first indication of someone spelunking into the darkest depths of their own head, their lips starting to move as their own inner monologues emerged to fill the sudden silence.
• • •
That evening was one of the first times I had lectured on the Constitution, and I decided to tell a slightly different story than the one related in the PBS documentary that would be premiering at a Washington event the next week, two days after the Boston Marathon. Instead of the issues addressed in the documentary—Federalism, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Commerce Clause, etc.—I wanted to address a basic question: why did our constitution work (with many exceptions for many people over the years) when so many other national constitutions have failed?
The question had rattled around in my own mind since I’d shared a casual conversation with Yale professor Akhil Reed Amar, the featured expert in our documentary. He had said, “You know, the Soviet Union had a bill of rights, too.” A Google search showed me that it had. It’s a really good one, in fact. It guaranteed all citizens liberty and equal rights, as well as housing, a decent income, and even vacations for all. Man, that sounded like a great place!
Obviously, the Soviet bill of rights was a meaningless joke. The more important and more difficult question was why ours wasn’t a joke. Our film crew did “man-on-the-street” interviews all over the country, from the line of customers waiting to buy medicinal marijuana in Oakland to a Tea Party Express rally in Appleton, Wisconsin, and our conclusion was: nobody knows anything about the Constitution of the United States. “What does the Constitution mean to you?” I would ask various people, and they would say, “Freedom!” (a word that does not appear in the main text of the Constitution) and if I were to ask, “Freedom to do what?” they would respond, “Whatever I want! That’s America!” Sometimes they would argue that it gave them the right to carry guns wherever and whenever they liked, or to walk around naked if they wanted to do that, or to walk around naked with guns. Certainly, whatever the Constitution means, the people you don’t like are obviously and clearly violating its spirit and have to be stopped.
A lot of people we met, like Steve DeAngelo, the cannabis activist who ran the clinic in Oakland, believe the Constitution affords states (like California) the right to do whatever they please (like legalize cannabis). Others, like Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, from geographically and philosophically nearby Berkeley, believe the Constitution prevents states (like California) from doing what the population of the state wants it to do, like banning marriages between same-sex partners, as California did in the state election of 2008. (Kris and her partner, Sandy, were co-plaintiffs, along with Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo, in the successful federal lawsuit against Proposition 8.) There are people like Gary Marbut, a gun rights activist in Montana who believes the federal government violates the Constitution by not protecting his right to sell his firearms to anyone he likes whenever he likes, and there are other people like Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, who feels the federal government violated the Constitution by not protecting her civil right to attend a desegregated high school, even though it once sent in the 101st Airborne Division to do just that.
So given all this sometimes vitriolic disagreement as to what the document means, I asked the audience in Hamilton: why does the Constitution continue to function? Because even if the citizens of this country don’t know much about the Constitution—its language, its history, the complexities of constitutional law as established by two centuries of Supreme Court jurisprudence—they believe in it. Almost everyone in America, from peon to president, believes that we are ruled by laws, that everyone must subject themselves to a duly constituted government, and that we will settle disputes by peaceful (if sometimes rhetorically vicious) means. We all believe the solution to an election that doesn’t go your way is the next election, not violent rebellion. We believe that the way to solve even the most bitter dispute with a neighbor is through the courts, not by firebombing their house.
If the principles of the Constitution are violated, the document itself does not flap its parchment wings and fly out of the National Archives to beat the reprobate about the head and shoulders until he relents and confesses his error. He is restrained, if he can be restrained, by a collective belief, a civic religion, an irrational faith in the power of democratic rule. Nixon, I pointed out, knew that if he handed over the Watergate tapes after the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1974, his presidency would be over. But if he didn’t do what the court ordered, if he simply refused, what would have occurred? He was the one who had the army. But even Nixon knew what he had to do when the final choice had to be made. He knew that to do otherwise would instantly change his place in history from disgraced president to quite possibly the last president, the man who ended the American experiment.
Thus, I said to the happy people of Hamilton, the Constitution was and remains a communal agreement, an imaginary construct given weight and meaning by collective belief. It is the Tinkerbell of national charters—it only stays alive by our constant and enthusiastic clapping. If enough of us stop believing in it, if we reach some tipping point, unknowable until we reach it, when enough people cease to honor it or any of its provisions, then it will fade away, like the picture of Marty McFly and his siblings in Back to the Future.
Everybody laughed and clapped and nodded.
I’ve given that lecture many times since then, and it has occurred to me that there are a lot of other things that we take for granted as reality, as agreements and understandings that can’t be broken. And then they are, and we are left gaping at the new paradigm like someone returning home to a house consumed by fire. How can something disappear so quickly and so completely? A home, a marriage, a family? “How could . . . ? What has . . . ? It was just here.”
We live in a world of mutually assured hallucination. That which we imagine to be immutable is not. Those which we think of as laws are, to paraphrase Pirates of the Caribbean, merely suggestions. And if enough people decide to believe something else . . . then that other reality supplants our own. There were times, many of them, during the course of my first divorced year, when I would say to myself, “Things will have to get back to normal,” not realizing that reality is democratically determined, and I only have one vote. Three years later, in 2016, this principle would be proved on a national level, although that too was something I then didn’t have the capacity to imagine.
People enjoyed my presentation. I was taken out for a drink by my host, then I went to bed in my hotel, and in the morning I got up and flew to Newark to connect to Boston. Sitting in the Newark airport, waiting for my connecting flight, I realized that it had been (as far as I could remember) exactly forty years since my first airplane flight, when as a young Master Sagal of eight years, I had flown the same route, from Newark to Boston, to visit my grandmother. I remembered getting a cool metal pilot wings pin to put on my blazer, which I wore ove
r my turtleneck sweater. As I got on the airplane, which I hoped was a different one than I had ridden forty years before, I told the flight attendant the story, and I asked her if they still had wings for traveling minors. She laughed and nodded and handed over what passes for souvenir airline pilot wings these days, a cheap-ass bit of plastic. Things really did seem to be on a downward slope. I pinned it to my shirt nonetheless, posted a selfie to Twitter, and settled in for the flight to Boston and the marathon.
I was nervous. Marathons are hard and I hadn’t been adequately training for this one. A man named William Greer, whom I had never met, was going to be depending on me and he might prove to be foolish to have done so. I honestly didn’t know what would happen.
• • •
It was the loudest noise I have ever heard. An enormous, percussive, deeply metallic
BANG
and it was close, close enough to feel as well as hear—about a hundred yards away, judging from the rising plume of smoke. Our view of the spot was blocked by the superstructure of the finish line, the camera towers, and the armature of ceremony. We couldn’t see what was happening.
Then there was a second
BANG
farther away. Another plume of smoke.
I like to believe, now, that at that moment, in that place, as the smoke dissipated into the sky, I considered walking toward the source of the sound to see what had happened. I am a curious human being and though not a journalist, I work for a prestigious journalistic organization and a very unusual and alarming thing had happened. A braver man might have at least tried to get a closer look.
Instead I just stood there, and a woman said to me, “What do you think it was?”
And I said, “I don’t know, maybe a power transformer?”
The woman: “Maybe a car backfired.”
“Too loud for that.”
“You think it’s a bomb?”
“No way,” I said. “I mean, seriously? A bomb?”
I met that woman again, two years later, at a function for Team With A Vision. She introduced herself to me as “the woman who was standing next to you when the bomb went off.” I quizzed her carefully as to how far away she thought we were—as I have told this story over the years, I have become anxious about the possibility of overstating our nearness to the bombing. I feel like I owe it to the people who were unlucky enough to be closer to not claim their proximity. Anyway, she agreed with me: about a hundred yards. Like me, she had returned to the spot where we were standing and tried to measure it.
The chute volunteers encouraged us to get moving, away from the finish. William, completely exhausted, his adrenaline draining from his system, was feeling every mile he had just run, and he slowly walked along as best he could. He told me later that he was as alarmed as the rest of us, but, as the enormity of whatever had happened became clearer around us, he mainly started to worry about Ellen, his wife. Where was she? Had she taken advantage of the lateness of the day—the winners and elites had long since finished and were probably showered and dressed by now—to find a premium spot to watch, right by the finish line? Right where the plumes of smoke were?
We heard sirens. One, two, then a lot. The finishing chute volunteers around us looked worried, too, although they were as ignorant as we were. The volunteer coordinators, though, the ones sitting in the high lifeguard chairs to spot runners in trouble or other crises, looked scared. They had radio earpieces. They all waved their arms, shouting, “Keep moving!”
We shuffled through the finish chute, just like you always do at the end of a normal race, so we acted like it was one. Smiling young students looped finishers’ medals around our necks. We picked up some bottles of water and Gatorade. We heard more sirens. We might have noticed, if we had turned around, that the flow of runners across the line behind us had stopped. We were the last ones on that day and in that place to do anything normal. In the city, state, and country around us, tweets and texts and news alerts were flashing across everybody’s phones, screens, and TVs. The runners on the course, miles back, were being told they couldn’t finish the race, but not why. Still in the chute, we had no phones and nobody told us anything, so we continued shuffling along and picked up a granola bar or four. “William,” I said as the world around us convulsed in shock and horror, “you want a banana?”
The first moment I knew for certain that something was terribly wrong was when we stepped out of the chute onto Exeter Street and an enormous Boston street cop with a red face and moustache, straight out of a George V. Higgins novel, went sprinting down the street toward the finish line, shouting, “CLEAR THE STREET! CLEAR THE STREET!” He was followed by an ambulance, flashing everything red. “Wow,” I said to myself. “What would make that cop run that fast?”
We exited the finishers’ area and made our way to the appointed meeting place to find a very worried Josh Warren. “They’ve stopped the race,” he said, telling us that police were holding all the runners still on the course a mile behind the finish line. Which meant, for Josh, that he had up to twenty people scattered along ten miles of pavement, and he had no way of reaching them, because he was holding all of their phones in a plastic bag, and by the way, half of those people were legally blind.
We retrieved our phones from Josh and, like everybody else on the planet, tried to figure out what had just happened; unlike everybody else, we were able to smell it: the air had an acrid tinge, like something had been burned on a pyre. The first thing I saw were texts from friends who knew I was there. “Are you all right?” Twitter said there was an explosion at the Boston Marathon. Nobody knew what it was. I could not believe it was terrorists. It just seemed so unlikely, the kind of thing my mother would worry about, and I would say, “Mom! Don’t be ridiculous!” A woman nearby downloaded a picture of the explosion site. She showed it to me. The sidewalk was covered with a sticky-looking red slick. “Maybe it’s Gatorade,” I said, far up the denial river.
William was trying to reach Ellen, who was not at the meeting place. The cell towers apparently were overloaded. So I was surprised when my phone rang with a DC area code showing on the screen.
“Peter? This is Julia from All Things Considered. We understand you ran the Boston Marathon today?”
I told her I had, and was now standing a few blocks from the finish line.
“Great, yes, apparently there’s been a bombing? Could you go on the air and talk to Robert Siegel about it?”
I walked around the corner and back toward the finishing chute while they hooked up a phone line to Robert Siegel in the Washington studio. In the fifteen minutes since we had walked out of it, the finishing chute had been entirely dismantled. Every table and piled crate of bottled water, every banana box, every awning and medical station, gone. The movable fencing that had delineated the chute was still there, though it had all been rearranged to form a perimeter about three blocks east of the finish line.
Robert got on the line. I’ve known Robert for years, of course, and he’s always convivial and joking. Not this time. “Hello, Peter, I understand you’re at the finish line? I’m told—yes, we’re about to go live, thank you.”
Robert has the ability to remain preternaturally calm no matter the circumstances. If we’re lucky, we’ll have him narrate the apocalypse. The transcript of my one and only contribution to NPR’s breaking news coverage follows.
ROBERT SIEGEL: Peter Sagal, the host of the NPR news quiz program Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, ran in the Boston Marathon today, and he joins us now. Peter, how close were you to the explosions?
PETER SAGAL: Robert, I was about a hundred yards beyond the point of the explosion, in what we call the finishing chute. It’s a long area that runners walk through after finishing a marathon. We had just finished at about—I think it was 2:45, around there, Boston time; heard a huge explosion. I had been guiding a blind runner today, so both he and I were shocked. I turned around and saw a big, white plume of smoke that appeared on the other side of the finishing lin
e from us; that is, on the course side. Then another, second large explosion happened just a moment later, with another plume of smoke.
SIEGEL: And did the second explosion come from the same side as the first?
SAGAL: It seemed to. It seemed to come in the same place, from my perspective. At that point, the officials in the marathon asked all of us in the chute to keep moving forward away from it. I’ve now returned—it’s, I guess, twenty minutes, [a] half hour later—to Boylston Street. The chute is completely closed. They’re moving people off Boylston Street, and there are no people finishing the race. They seem to have stopped the race. There were many people behind us. Normally, there’d be people flowing through this area by the hundreds, at this point. There’s nobody, except for emergency vehicles and police personnel. . . .
SIEGEL: Can you see if there is a building that has been blown out by an explosion, or where the explosion might have originated?
SAGAL: I’m standing a good three to four hundred yards away. I can see the place where I believe the explosion was. But I cannot, from this distance, see any damage to anything. It’s just too far, with too many things in the way. . . .
SIEGEL: And so far, any official description of what happened, or announcement that they’re making?
SAGAL: No. I’ve heard, in just talking to people, I’ve heard four different rumors, all of which would be irresponsible to share with you because they weren’t at all clarified. No official person has made any announcement. Even if they had one, given the chaos and large scale of a postmarathon area, I don’t know how we’d hear it. There’s no general [PA]. But no, I’ve been reading my Twitter feed and trying to see the news, just like everybody else has, to find out what happened a hundred yards behind me.
SIEGEL: And Peter, just before you go, once again, the time difference between the two explosions—how quick was that?
