To abuse a cliche: After I got a full night’s sleep, it seemed like a bad dream. But another YouTube clip gone up overnight from my friend and past collaborator Robin Bell corroborates the reality of it all.

Yesterday DC was hit with a snowstorm that we’re now told ranks higher than anything in 70 years, and which brought the most snowfall in December in the city ever. Grocery stores were emptied, places shut down, people were forced to stay home or into the streets (so few sidewalks were even given one attempt at being shoveled), bars were packed with snowbound locals. It had the air of a “snow day,” an extra day off because of the weather, even though it was a Saturday. The city went a little nuts.

But apparently no-one could out-do a certain Detective Baylor of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Now I don’t know all of the details, I never actually saw an announcement first-hand, but I hear that some of the same folks who’ve organized some past public group activities in good fun — a public pillow fight, the “Tweed Ride” perhaps — were also involved in organizing a snowball fight at 14th and U Streets yesterday. (Update: The Washington Post appears to have found the original organizer. Where the Post story differs significantly, I hold to what I saw or didn’t see.)

I had prepared to haul a large tripod down into Rock Creek Park and to the National Mall; my own sort of expedition, with a friend playing chauffeur and photographer’s assistant, to capture the blizzard conditions. We invited a third videographer friend along who told us of the snowball fight. After reassessing the roads and finally realizing the little 2-wheel-drive hatchback we had might not really make it out of the park, we went to see the snowball fight instead.

When we got there it was well under way. Two factions like opposing 19th Century armies were lined-up along 14th Street just north of the intersection with U. From what I could see, when the rare vehicle made it through the intersection, snowball fire died down or it was purposefully arced up over the cars and thrust to the other side of the street.

Most battle techniques seemed to involve small vanguards surging forth from one side or the other and attacking at closer range — something not palatable with the threat of a car bearing down on you.

It looked like a mess, it looked like fun, it looked like a small faction of anarchist anti-war protesters had joined-in and tried to make a point with their banner “no war but snowball war.” At one point some of the participants stopped to help a police car trying to make a u-turn.

Now with every event, there are some tone-deaf participants and maybe the people who inadvertently helped change the course of the afternoon were such: At some point a small group of people, mostly on the east side of the street, mostly on the south end of that stretch of people, decided to throw a few snowballs at a maroon Hummer stopped at the intersection.

Snarky? Yes. Constructive? Not if you’re looking for a dialogue between the driver and the crowd that would result in world peace and less carbon emissions. Stupid? It’s harder and harder for me to say it wasn’t, but I’ll stick with maybe. Dangerous? Well, in hindsight… but no. There’s no way the Hummer was being hurt by snowballs. I think whatever groupthink was behind this forked-off action also expected the driver to leave, pissed-off, and they’d have their laugh.

But that’s not what happened. The driver got out yelling, gesticulating wildly, waving a walky-talky and you had to wonder, who was he? He didn’t say. He pointed into the crowd, which shouting and laughing back at him, a couple more snowballs might’ve taken flight in his direction. He gets hit. Suddenly, he’s waving a gun. Still no one knows who he is.

What I overheard from a cop later is that someone called 911 about a man with a gun at this point, and this is why more police soon arrived. Video I’ve seen and reporting by Jason Cherkis at the Washington City Paper seems to corroborate what I’ve overheard.

At this point the mood has changed. Everyone knows there is a man with a gun and the snowball fight is now an asymmetric battle of sorts: The man with the gun weilds deadly power and the crowd knows that, whatever and whoever started the confrontation, this is wrong and they maintain resistance. They won’t be cowed.

By the time more police arrive, the gun as been reholstered, and an officer — who responded with his own gun drawn (given the context, that made a little more sense) — is directed to the big man in the big coat with a gun on his belt, it is revealed that he is Detective Baylor. The officer seemed confused and defensive, in an obligatory sort of way but tries to de-escalate things. He’s more civil and more even-toned, if a little clueless about what just happened.

But Detective Baylor isn’t satisfied, and doesn’t see cause of the indignance on the side of the snowball fight participants — even if some of them started it. He keeps yelling, he gets up in peoples faces, and he lunges into the crowd — going in many feet, through many ranks of people — to yank out someone he thinks threw a snowball at him. The man is dragged out to the hummer and people shout “he didn’t do it!” The crowd rallies and the chants become political. Somehow DC Mayor Adrian Fenty gets pegged for all of this, “Fenty killed Christmas!” shout some in unison.

It’s fuzzy what happened next, but I don’t think anyone got arrested, just detained briefly. The detective drives off to shouts of good riddance and victorious chants by some of the snowball fight participants — but the event is over, the crowd has lightened some. The word goes out that there was another snowball fight in Dupont Circle, which seems like a better venue anyway, but few seemed to go. (Eventually my fellow photographers and I headed over there to find it had died-down by that point.)

As I wandered around, trying to get my bearings on what, if anything, was still happening, I heard one uniformed officer say that whoever threw snowballs at the Hummer was stupid, but the detective was too. “He sounds like an ass,” he said.

On a radio on a uniform’s belt I heard Detective Baylor’s name, and someone say “they hit his car with snowballs and now they’re trying to blackmail him,” presumably a reference to those who angrily declared they wanted to see Baylor fired.

I’m not sure how everything ended — as of this writing, I’m not sure it really has yet.

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A sort of FAQ about what I observed

These are brief responses to rhetorical questions I’m setting-up for myself based on what I’ve actually been asked and see in comments through the media that have reported this.

Were you a participant in the snowball fight?

No. I went to observe it, photograph it, on my way to other activities.

Were the participants “kids?”

Maybe some, if you mean people under twenty-one or under eighteen. But it looked like a twenty-something crowd and some people could easily have been bracketing thirty years old. These were mostly adults.

It was a bunch of white people, wasn’t it?

No, the crowd was not that homogenous. I don’t think it is as simple a black vs. white. But I do see how the general nature of this event and the relationship between most of its participants, the rest of the neighborhood, and the police is a dynamic of gentrification and all of the issues tied into that — among such issues, I’m sure, are some identity politics.

Were they throwing snowballs at random cars?

Not as far as I could tell. I did not see the beginning of the snowball fight, but from what I saw the crowd over all was pretty civil, while engaging in the fun they publicized well. Only a small group of people chose to target this particular maroon Hummer.

Were they throwing snowballs at random strangers?

Again, not that I saw.

They were having a snowball fight at a busy intersection?

The intersection of 14th and U Streets NW is typically busy and I also wonder about the choice of location. The other, unrelated, snowball fight that was happening in Dupont Circle seemed to be better placed: an accessible and central location with its own space to contain the battle. But the intersection really wasn’t all that busy given the weather conditions. It seemed its busiest after police vehicles arrived, responding to a call about a “man with a gun” (the unidentified detective).

Update: I corrected this post on 21 Dec 2009 to reflect that the source of the snowballs aimed at the Hummer came from the east, not the west, side of the street.