MARCHING TO SAVE THE WORLD

"Do we hafta walk in the raiiiiin?"

"I love it when you whine."

"Ooooooh Nooooo| Not another hiiillll."

"That's it, Michael," laughs Liane. "Get it out. Share your feelings."

"Myyyyy feet hurrrrrrt."

Michael and Liane are marching across America. Their cause is Global Nuclear Disarmament. This is Day 231, Mile 3,007. Their feet hurt.

Michael is wearing his fourth pair of tennis shoes, Liane is in her sixth. The shoes are soaking wet. So are their socks. Rain beats the hoods of their ponchos, echoes in their ears. Now and then, beads of sweat will drop and tickle their ribs. They breathe exertion up a hill, wisps of steam against the dying green foliage of the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Last night was Bedford, tonight will be Breezewood, but Michael and Liane don't know this, and they don't really care, because one town's the same as the next -- a fairground, a tent, a line for rice and beans and an occasional Sloppy Joe, a sing-along or a meditation or a meeting or bread bake or a slide show on nuclear war.

Michael is 23. Liane has a daughter 24. Michael had been acting and doing odd jobs in New Orleans before coming on the march. He came with his girlfriend. Now, seven months later, she's pregnant by another man. Liane was an executive for Weight Watchers in Lake Arrowhead, Calif. She lived in a house with a hot tub and a glass-walled shower. Her husband, back home, is vice president of a company in Silicon Valley. He makes parts for nuclear weapons.

Michael has a sparse beard and tortoise-shell glasses and a young, open face that could belong to a first-year student of law. In April, he spent six days and 10 hours in jail in Goldfield, Nev., with several other marchers for squeezing under the fence at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. He had never done anything like that before. But he had felt the vibration of a nuclear test beneath his callused, bunioned feet and he knew he had to do it, no matter what the cost. As Michael sees it, you have to put your body on the line for what you believe, make your flesh a living sign for what burns hot and bright inside. He never thought things like this before the march. He's glad he came along.

Liane jokes that she came on the march for the cause of thin thighs. You know it's a joke because nobody quits her job and leaves her whole life behind and walks seven months across the Mojave Desert, across the Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains, across the Mississippi, through ghettos in Pittsburgh and mountains in Pennsylvania just because she wants her thighs thin. No, something drew Liane to this march. Something unexplainable. Something weird, she says. All she knows is that when she read about the Great Peace March, she sent for an application. It was time for change in her life. The march is just the beginning.

Liane's eyes are the color of the rich sky over Barstow, in the desert of California, where this march died as a media extravaganza on March 14, where it was resurrected two weeks later as a people's crusade -- a trek of conscience across a continent, a city on a hike with a dream as a master plan, a hope that someday, somehow, the world will be free of nuclear arms.

Left-right-left on the gravel shoulder of Rte. 30, in south central Pennsylvania, a snaking two-lane through the mountains, past May's Diner and Mile Level Mobile Home Park, past clapboard and concrete block, past big, tin mailboxes and car parts planted on front lawns, and old people leaning on the rails of porches, smiling and waving and giving out apples, returning, now and then, that old hand sign from the '60s, first fingers forming a V, a sign of peace.

From the top of the hill, just past Lehman's Flea Market, stretches a valley, a geometric cut-up of farmland, and then, in the distance, another hogback hill to climb. In between, a straggled line of peace marchers walk against the gray sky, 700 men, women and children in blue, orange, green, and yellow rain suits and ponchos and plastic trash bags.

Left-right-left. Feet Across America, people for a cause. A souped-up Chevelle blows past, a tractor-trailer, a station wagon. Michael and Liane throw peace signs. The drivers throw them back, honk their horns, smile. They are marching to reach the roots of the country, the grass roots, the real people, and to turn them on, to empower them with the feeling that real people can make a difference in the politics of a nation, that desires can, sometimes, trickle up instead of down, that sane thinking can prevail.

Jeff from Australia passes Michael and Liane on the run, feet slapping puddles, a lantern swinging in hand. The flame came from Hiroshima. It was given to the marchers when they set out to Washington from Los Angeles. At one point in the march Jeff took the flame to the Soviet Union and carried it in a marathon. Michael doesn't remember the date of the marathon. It was sometime in eastern Iowa.

A woman named Katherine walks even.

"Hi, Katherine," says Michael.

Katherine doesn't say anything.

"Still not talking?" asks Liane.

Katherine shakes her head.

"How long until you speak again?"

Katherine gestures. Michael looks puzzled. Then Katherine takes his hand. She outlines letters on his palm. The letters spell out "I refuse to give up my principles to secure a livelihood." Then Katherine waves and walks ahead, chin down, stolid purpose in her stride.

Michael shrugs. Welcome to the march, as they like to say.

It's a peculiar thing, this trek across the country, this Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, an epic tale in a time of high concept, a mustard seed amid the circuitry. Never before have so many people walked so far for a cause. It sounds a little silly in this day and age, but they are marching to save the planet Earth, to keep their fellow earthlings from blowing each other up. That is their goal, and that is what they have in common, that and Peace City, their address, their temporary, permanent home, a microcosm of a world a little better, a little more caring, a little more tolerant, a little more committed than the ones they left so many steps behind.

It is hard to explain why they are here, left-right-left through the mountains of Pennsylvania, bound for New York and then for Washington next Saturday, where they will march down 16th Street and demonstrate at Lafayette Park. Adventure was a factor, as was the promise of participating in the history of the peace movement, as was, for some, the puzzle of lives gone awry, or at least gone sour. Whatever the subplots, they are here mostly because this march seemed more important than their own daily lives, more important than home, bed, family, food, showers, everything.

Unlike the many, these few feel the threat of nuclear war, palpable, possible and dark. They can't just ignore it. It won't go away. Someone has to do something, and the someone is them. And, after seven months in Peace City, after seven months of walking the highways, of talking in the churches and the schools and the diners and the newspapers in St. George and Cedar City, Rabbit Valley and Grand Junction, Big Springs and Ogallala, Treynor and Adair, East Moline and Hillsdale, Columbia and Montpelier, Monaco and Legonier, of sensitizing and educating themselves and the people they meet, they know they have done the right thing. They know, for instance, that all the Allied firepower in World War II, including the two atom bombs, equaled one megaton of destructive power, and that currently the world has at its disposal 18,000 megatons of nuclear weapons.

Imagine a train full of TNT stretching 3.6 million miles.

That's why they're marching.

And that's their common denominator. A desire for Global Nuclear Disarmament.

Beyond that, they are from all religions, from all professions, 50 children, 100 people over 50 years of age. There have been four marriages, one death.

They come from 12 countries and all 50 states. There's a guy who helped set up the Off Track Betting Corp. in New York, a farmer who lost his farm. There are single women on welfare, a former ad executive who has donated $25,000, several lawyers. A Buddhist monk from Japan. There's a man from Denver who used to sell supplies to uranium mines, a retired Coast Guard officer, a dentist from L.A. who drives a Winnebago with a dental chair set up in the back, a reporter from the Iowa City Press-Citizen who came to cover the march and stayed, a professional clown who enters major towns at the head of the march on a unicycle, juggling a replica of the planet Earth, a baby doll and a plastic nuclear bomb.

One man pulls his son along the march route in a red Radio Flyer wagon. One woman rides a mountain bike with a two-wheeled trailer attached. Her son rides in that. A young woman named Michelle says she "listens to the Grateful Dead and follows the Rainbow." A guy named Oliver wears long blond dreadlocks and a tie-died, ankle-length dress; a woman from Amsterdam cashed her life insurance policy to come here and march. There's a Vietnam vet who spent two years in a POW camp, kids with names like Yolkai and Lasara, Patience and Josh, a guy from Hawaii who was once a "hired escort."

There's a homosexual who wears a "Grandmothers for Peace" sign on his back and carries three suicide notes and a box of razor blades in his knapsack, a fiery 72-year-old named Phyllis who has worked for peace with Gandhi and Bertrand Russell, some members of the Rainbow Family, some anarchists, some punks, some hippies, some yuppies, 30 guitar players, a feminist rock

jumpline to come group called Wild Wimmin for Peace . . . .

Welcome to the march. Left-right-left.

The great peace march began as a political consultant's pipe dream, a high-tech traveling roadshow of 5,000 protestors who would pay $3,200 each for a cross-country package march for peace, complete with solar showers, daily laundry service, six limousines for transport, Friday night movies, near-gourmet meals, paid staff counselors.

The consultant was Los Angeles-based David Mixner, and he had an impressive re'sume'. In 1969 he organized the national Moratorium Day demonstrations against the Vietnam war. In 1977 he managed Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's campaign for reelection. In 1984 he served as national co-chair for Gary Hart's presidential campaign. Then, in 1985, he conceived PRO-Peace, People Reaching Out for Peace. The slogan was "Take

Em Down"; his ambitious plan was to raise $15 million in funding, to walk across the nation, to change the world.

For a while, the appearance was good. Three floors of an office building on trendy Beverly Boulevard, 150 full-time staffers in 12 cities, pledges of support from Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Jesse Jackson, Cesar Chavez, and a full computer setup that gave a professional '80s aura to the groovy '60s scenario.

What happened to Mixner's march is a long story, and it is not this story, and perhaps it is better that way, for The Great Peace March, as it turned out, is about emotions and spirit instead of glitz. Suffice it to say that Mixner couldn't deliver, that perhaps his mission was too ambitious, that perhaps he lost sight of his goals, that perhaps the lack of support for the march among the more than 5,000 different peace groups listed by the Institute on Defense and Disarmament sealed its doom. But anyway, after a big kickoff rally in Griffith Park, 1,200 marchers walked out of L.A. and into the desert, whereupon the march stalled in Barstow, and vehicles and property began disappearing with the repo man, and marchers left in droves.

And there in the desert, something very strange happened. The 400 marchers who remained decided to do it themselves. They reorganized as The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament. They elected a board of directors and a city council. They applied for nonprofit status. They hired an accountant in Santa Monica. They picked up more marchers along the route. They set up systems whereby everyone worked two days a week to keep the city rolling. They talked about how they felt, what they wanted to do, how to get money to do it.

And from the rubble rose this Great Peace March, a modest march of modest people dedicated to a cause, a jury-rigged, string-and-tape construction that makes do and figures things out as it goes along. Though there are elected representatives in Peace City, there are no real leaders. Their brand of democracy is consensus; board of directors meetings go on for six days at a time because all are allowed to speak their feelings about everything, and because no one can ever agree on anything. There was the controversy about having a dress code; four days of debate concluded when all the men on the march wore dresses. There was the controversy about marching formations; five days of debate on whether the marchers should march in close or straggled ranks ended when some people decided to walk close and others decided to walk in straggled ranks. There was the controversy about prewashing dinner plates; about taking responsibility for the portable potties; about thefts in camp; about having rules for who could and could not join the march; about Oliver, the boy with the dreadlocks; about the guy who thought he was Jesus Christ; about what to do after the march . . . .

But somehow, everything gets done, and that is because everyone cares about Global Nuclear Disarmament, and because, after seven months together, seven months of left-right-left, they all care about one another, even if they don't like everyone. They have built a city and a family. Their system is based on volunteerism, on sexual equality, on the rights of the few, on the rights of the many. They have a medical trailer, a mental health unit, a pregnancy counselor, a security team called The Peacekeepers. They have old school buses bought or donated along the way and converted into classrooms for the children, a financial department equipped with computers, a Peace Academy with a television and two VCRs and a volunteer staff that dispatches speakers in radiuses of 50 miles wherever the march goes, a book mobile, a media office for en-route PR, a mechanics' bus with a full set of tools.

A 4,000-gallon water truck accompanies the march, as do 30 custom-made toilets bolted to three different trailer beds. There are tractor-trailers for cooking meals, freezing supplies, washing dishes, stowing gear (each marcher gets two plastic milk crates to hold all his or her personal belongings). There's a daily newspaper, a march-owned copier, a low-power radio station, a post office bus, a souvenir bus, an advance team that scouts future campsites, offices in several cities. And, for those who need them, hugs are available 24 hours a day.

The march has 29 different functioning departments with separate budgets. The numbers are posted for anyone, including guests, to see. In all, it costs $25,000 a week to keep Peace City moving. Thus far, the march has met its budget wholly through donations, $650,000 collected along the way, much of it in tens and twenties. Maintenance of march-owned vehicles runs $1,000 a week, fuel for vehicles and generators runs $7,000 a month. Meals -- cooked separately for vegetarians, macrobiotics and carnivores -- cost about $5,000 a week, roughly 20 cents per marcher per meal. Food has been donated along the way, everything from several tons of rice and potatoes to truckloads of tomatoes to 1,000 slices of pizza.

In all, it is a monumental effort, a miracle. And if you had spent time marching, a week or two or maybe more, you would know that to call it this is not hyperbole. The logistics are a nightmare, but everything runs smooth as a rainbow, and this is probably because there is a certain spirit that prevails in Peace City, that hangs above the pastel geodesic tents like a karmic umbrella. Spend time in Peace City, and the cynic in you tends to evaporate. You still might feel a bit suspicious of people who believe in something so strongly; you still might think that the Left, with all its good intentions, is its own worst enemy, a Medusa's head of competing agendas, a parliamentarian's nightmare of elusive consensus. But walk 20 miles or so down Rte. 30 in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, hit the crest of the hill and look down to the valley, see 700 marchers in straggled ranks walking left-right-left through sheets of rain, and it hits you: These people have marched across a continent. Maybe, just maybe, anything is possible.

What a long strange trip it's been. To come so far, to walk seven months across America. Life on the Great Peace March has been a study of things very small and very large, of things mundane, of things intense.

"The environment sort of demands very immediate attention, just the real dailiness of the focus," says Tracy Bartlett, 30, a social worker from San Diego. "I have to get something to eat, I have to walk, I have to drink water, I have to put my tent up. It's nice because it changes your world view. There's this real small issue of yourself and your daily existence -- my foot hurts, I'm hungry -- and then there's the issue we're here for, Global Nuclear Disarmament."

Much has happened in the course of 3,000 miles. There is much to remember:

Walking 20 miles a day along an unpaved road through the Mojave Desert for 13 days without ever seeing other people. Squishing through ankle-deep mud in Cottonwood Pass, Colo. Hugging and exchanging presents with a group of Russian citizens on a paddle-wheel cruise up the Mississippi on the Delta Queen. Jumping into Lake Erie after a long, hot march.

Jackson Browne singing a few songs and then handing out granola bars at 1:30 in the morning. Tiny Tim playing the ukulele after his show at the Toledo Holiday Inn. Robert Blake reciting the Lord's Prayer. Jack from Maui, Hawaii, giving a surf conditions report at 4 in the morning in the desert.

Collecting $18 apiece in Las Vegas from a New Yorker who hit the jackpot. Collecting a $25,000 check on the spot from a doctor in Denver who came out to see Peace City.

Five hundred people forming a giant human peace sign at the Living History Farm in Urbandale, Iowa. Twenty-nine people getting arrested for demonstrating at the Rock Island Arsenal in Quad Cities, Ill. One thousand people holding a candlelight vigil in Kennedy Square, Detroit.

Eating dinner with the Paiute Indians on their reservation in Utah. Staying in donated ski lodges -- complete with Jacuzzis, swimming pools and tennis courts -- in Vail. Eating free nachos at Shirley & Mary's Mexican Restaurant in Fruita, Colo. Giving blood to the Toledo Red Cross. Participating in the weekly vigil at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant near Golden, Colo. Visiting Rod and Mary Kirkbride, ranchers from Cheyenne, Wyo., who have an MX missile silo on their spread. Sleeping in a Buddhist temple, a potato barn, a Catholic high school. Holding a die-in in Dixon, Ill., Ronald Reagan's home town . . . .

No matter how you regard the Great Peace March, its arrival here in Washington on Saturday will mark a blip in history's time line. Neither violent like the riots during the Democratic convention in Chicago, nor massive like Woodstock, the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament will nevertheless be remembered in newspaper clippings, in television reports, in the hearts and minds of people across the nation who welcomed marchers and their message into homes, schools and churches, people who waved from front porches, who handed out popsicles on hot days.

It remains to be seen whether the marchers have changed, in some small way, the attitudes of their fellow Americans toward the course of the future. But in the meantime, one thing is certain. Those who gave their lives over to the march have changed their own irrevocably. They have done something they can be proud of, something they will remember all their lives.

Elizabeth Hancock, 25, a carpenter from Oakland, says she will remember Barstow the most. After PRO-Peace died, after two weeks in the desert not knowing what would happen, "All of a sudden there was a sort of spontaneous circle of everyone in the whole camp. People danced, sang, meditated, chanted, you name it. It lasted for like two hours. I don't know if I can describe it. It just created this incredible sense of unity. Everyone was there, all the different types of people on the march, all the little subgroups. It was really cold, everyone was all bundled up, and we did everything from cry to do the hokey pokey. It ended in a collective massive hug, with Robert Blake saying the Lord's Prayer and everyone humming 'We Shall Overcome.'

"It was like an affirmation, that there was no way we weren't going to march all the way to Washington, D.C., PRO-Peace or not . . . ."

Chris Ball, 30, who quit his newspaper job in Lorraine, Ohio, to come on the march remembers Victorville, Calif. "I remember walking through town and seeing a woman with a young girl standing in the rain handing out oranges to the marchers. Their clothes were all kind of ratty, and you kind of knew that the oranges were all that they could scrounge up to help us . . . ."

Madeline Hyman, 20, was an interior design student at California State, Los Angeles, before the march. "The thing I remember most was the first day I was on the march and it really, really started to pour. It was like, oh God . . . But I looked around and I saw that there was no doubt in anybody's face that we were going to walk, 'cause that's what we do and that's our commitment. We're marchers. We march."

Ann McFarlane, 52, left her children in New Zealand to come to America to march. "Some days," she says, "like when we were walking through the heat of Nebraska, the temperature was so hot, the distance so long, that when I came in from the march my legs would just be aching, and I'd lie down to recover, and they'd continue to ache, and I'd drop off to sleep with them still aching."

Bartlett, the social worker from San Diego, says separation from the march is going to be difficult.

"I think what we really need, now that the end of the march is in sight, is some kind of way that people can begin the grieving process about this thing being over. The march is this huge thing that's defined our whole world. Separation anxiety is coming in big time. I know I'm heavily into denial about it. I mean, I'm aware of it intellectually, but it really hits me emotionally. I just feel like, 'Oh, God. What am I going to do without this.'

"There's a real sense of feeling important on the march, feeling like you're on the front lines of something. We're like veterans of a war. We have this real sense of immediate aliveness here, of purpose, and now we have to go back to a world where people are worried about haircuts and if their shoes match and stuff like that. Well, everything seems so banal by comparison.

"I don't know what the hell I'm going to do when I get back, but I know I don't want to live where some moment in my past was the highlight of my life . . . ."

Left-right-left.

Left-right-left.

Left-right-left.

Down a hill, up a hill, left-right-left, 3,007 miles, 231 days and counting, rain beating on the hoods of their ponchos, sweat tickling their ribs, breath a little heavy against the dying green foliage of the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Left-right-left across the Mojave Desert, across the Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains, across the Mississippi, through ghettos in Pittsburgh, 700 people on a trek of conscience across a continent, a city on a hike, a mustard seed amid the circuitry, a march to save the planet Earth. Left-right-left. Last night Bedford, tonight Breezewood, tomorrow, maybe, the end of nuclear arms.

"Why are we doing this?" asks Liane.

"We're crazy," laughs Michael.

"No, really. Why?"

"Maybe we have a life wish." :: Mike Sager is a Washington writer.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.