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This is Part 2 of Sarah Moon’s report on last week’s Capitol Climate Action. Read Part 1.

We woke up at nine a.m. on Monday, March 2nd at the Hilton Garden Inn just blocks from the White House. We packed up our things and headed to the lobby. It was a beautiful sunny day with a thick, fresh layer of snow on the ground. After waffles and eggs at a café on the Hill, we made it to the corner of New Jersey and D Street. Waiting there were the leaders of the mountain top removal movement including Chuck Nelson, Larry Gibson, Rory McIlmoil, Teri Blanton and Goldman Environmental Award winner Judy Bonds bundled in warm winter coats. It had been decided that those on the front lines of the fight against coal, the residents of Appalachia, would lead the parade.

After helping each other affix I Love Mountains stickers to our hats and the backs of our jackets, Ozzy, our waiter from the Brickskellar, showed up smiling in a red, white and blue striped scarf. I had to jump up and down to keep the blood flowing in my damp feet. We could hear the cheering of the mass of people gathered at Spirit of Justice park two blocks way. As the cheering grew louder, my excitement rose. No longer able to wait, I ran up the hill to C Street, the Capitol rising before me. I looked to my left and lost my breath. There they were. A mass of people that filled the street from sidewalk to sidewalk waving red, yellow, blue and green banners.

Wranglers with white armbands corralled the mass as they rounded the corner and we fell in step with them chanting “Tell me what democracy looks like, This is what democracy looks like”, our nation’s capitol at our backs. We marched just four blocks south to the coal plant that powers it then turned right and marched along its north side. As we approached the first gate to the plant, the blue group peeled off. By the time I passed the gate, a line of people with linked arms blocked it. They smiled as they chanted. In the middle of the line, I spotted a girl from Yale who I’d met in West Virginia at Mountain Justice Fall Break. Her head was tilted and her brown eyes were lit up. It was all happening. 
We marched on to the next side. The yellow group peeled off and blocked its gate. As the blockade was achieved, the marchers cheered. We were doing it. We continued on, under a highway overpass, bright banners against the concrete and metal made drab by coal burning and car exhaust, cheering, “Hey hey, ho ho, this dirty coal has got to go!”

Randy Wilson, the musician who’d first gotten Stephanie Pistello and I involved in this movement by asking us to do a street theatre piece on mountain top removal in 2007 was a few feet ahead of me playing guitar and singing. I raised my voice with him and the people around me, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”
I reached out in front of me to author and former Merry Prankster Ed McClanahan who I’d met after the talk at Lisner the night before and smoothed the I Love Mountains sticker that was peeling off his back. He said he’d never had so many pretty women touch him in one day. I told him he should wear the sticker more often.

And then we were at the last gate where the green group, which represented the mountain justice community, had filed in to form the final blockade. I spotted my friend Mat Louis-Rosenberg, founder of the Prenter Water Fund, in the line-up, smiling wide. My heart swelled. This was no naïve, privileged college kid with a carefully cultivated sense of indignation. This was a bright and humble young man who had devoted the past nine months to physically bringing clean water to sick families in West Virginia. I looked at the crowd around me and wondered how many such efforts were being carried out among these 3,000 individuals.

When Bill McKibben got up to the podium to speak, he announced that we’d succeeded: all gates were now blockaded and we’d shut down the plant. We cheered. He told us that this was the beginning. And it did feel like the dawn of something. The snow was not the damper Fox News ached to portray it as. Instead, the undiminished turnout demonstrated the steadfastness of our commitment. Through this event, for the first time, we felt the strength of our numbers. There are few more powerful moments in life than when you realize that you are not alone. Maybe I had felt happier before in my life with my family or friends. But I’d never felt happy like this before. A happiness shared with 3,000 people all at once, a happiness based not on unearned rewards but on the work that lay ahead and the knowing that the work would not end, that none of us would stop until we had earned our Sabbath.

For more information, photos and video of the event, please visit http://www.capitolclimateaction.org