PEACE MARCHERS NEAR GOAL_AND CROSSROADS

GROUP, IN MD., EXCITED AND SAD

Back home in Orange County, Calif., Sue Daniels has a red convertible and a house with a pool. She relays this piece of information with a little laugh. It all seems so remote now.

Earlier this year, she was a fourth-grade teacher whose life revolved around her psychologist husband, her two grown children, her needlework, her antiques and her neat schedules. Politically, she described herself as "a voting Democrat," and that was it.

But since March 1, Daniels, 47, has been walking across America with 700 other like-minded but very diverse people to make a point about global nuclear disarmament. The group arrived in Prince George's County yesterday.

Daniels has knocked on doors in Omaha, spoken to schoolchildren in Philadelphia and confronted hecklers outside Baltimore. She has trudged through cold, beating rain; fantasized about chocolate chip cookies and steaming showers, and surprised herself by befriending a fellow marcher with a pierced nose and a peace sign shaved into her hair.

Today, the Great Peace March, which has swelled to 1,500 participants, will cross the District line for the final segment of the journey -- a full slate tomorrow of rallies and prayers and emotional goodbyes in Lafayette Park. The marchers, many of whom began the trek in Los Angeles, hope to focus attention on the danger of nuclear war and gain support for their plea to end the arms race.

On Wednesday evening the site for Peace City, the mobile community of tents and trucks that has been erected and torn down in fallow fields and football fields and fairgrounds across America, was picturesque Rockburn Park near Elkridge in Howard County.

Across the vast grassy field were hundreds of pastel tents; in the middle was a giant tepee with smoke drifting lazily from its peak. Earlier, near the brick park shelter, workers had ladled out plates of salad and stew, and then the evening program of exhortation and inspiration got under way.

There is a sadness as well as a hectic excitement among the marchers. It's almost over. What next?

Many people don't seem certain. A middle-aged man who had mined for gold in Alaska said he will "hang around California for a while" before heading back north. A Vietnam veteran who quit his job as art director at a St. Petersburg, Fla., ad agency said he is checking out the possibility of similar walks through South Africa and the Soviet Union. A 20-year-old man from western Iowa who left his fast-food job and joined the march after it passed through his hometown of Earlham said he might go back to school.

For Sue Daniels, the end of the 8 1/2-month experience means going back home to her family, her fourth graders, her "things." But in a fundamental way, she said, there is no going back.

"Outwardly, I've done very routine things with my life," Daniels said. "I went to college, I got married, I had kids, I went back to college. But I do have yearnings and I guess I always did.

"I was at a point in my life," she said. "The kids were fairly grown. I had just gotten a master's in education. I was ready for a new challenge."

And now, having taken that challenge and mastered it, Daniels finds herself at an interesting crossroads in her life.

"I'm more of a risk taker now," she said. "I'm more comfortable living with less. I've lost some of my naiveness. I'm not sure what form my life will take next, but I do know I'm going home a stronger person."

On Dec. 1, Sue Daniels will be back in her classroom and, to be honest, she isn't sure she likes the idea.

"It's going to be hard to be in a building all day," she said with a laugh. "Careerwise, I think I'm not so interested in controlling kids anymore. I want to develop more of my artistic side -- I don't know if that means taking piano lessons or what. I also intend to be involved as a responsible citizen. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I do want to spread the issue of peace."

Daniels is a tall woman with a warm, open smile and short, wavy hair lightly touched with gray. Her husband Wayne, who flew in Sunday to share the last few days of the march, listened intently as she talked.

They saw each other twice during the past months of the march, once when Sue flew home briefly to see her son graduate from high school, and again when Wayne flew to Toledo to spend a week with his wife. He is the one who stayed home, paid the bills and held the household together while she walked across the Mojave Desert, the Rockies, the Great Plains, the urban centers of the East. They describe each other as best friends.

"I've tried to be part of what she's doing 3,000 miles away," Wayne Daniels said. "There's been a lot of loneliness. I've also come to a lot of realizations about how ignorant I've been about world issues. I call it 'middle-class myopia.' "

Sue Daniels learned about the march last year through a newspaper article. It appealed to her, the timing was right. But soon, she wondered if she had done the wrong thing.

Two weeks after it began, the march sputtered and died in the California desert because of the original promoter's financial difficulties. It was resurrected when the participants decided to continue on their own. Most of them raised several thousand dollars apiece to begin the march, and supporters donated cash and supplies along the route.

Still, as she trudged across the desert, Daniels kept asking herself, "Why am I uprooting myself and my family?"

Then she began to enjoy this strange and exhilarating walk across America. A native southern Californian, she found she enjoyed the changing seasons, the varied scenery and architecture, the different accents and life styles of the people she met. Time took on a different quality when she spent a day walking 18 or 20 miles. How she looked and what she wore were no longer important.

"I really let go of wearing makeup," she said. "I spent my life wearing pantyhose and girdles and, believe me, those days are over. I don't shave my legs, either. My 20-year-old daughter is going to be appalled."

The most enjoyment -- and the greatest education -- came from the other marchers, she said.

"I have connected with some dynamite people whose concerns go beyond their own satisfaction," she said, "unusual folks I never would have connected with in my old life."

She described the 24-year-old woman with the pierced nose and the peace-sign haircut. "Interacting with Nancy, scratching beneath the surface, I saw that she was a young woman with a very deep conscience and very well thought-out ideas about what is happening in the world," she said. "If I had seen her on the street before, I would have thought she was a jerk.

"I guess if there's been one major change in my life, it's that my horizons are broadened."

Daniels realized just how far she had come and how much she had changed during an encounter one night last week in a restaurant-bar in Rising Sun, Md., a small town northeast of Baltimore. She overheard several men at the bar discussing the influx of peace marchers in the area and joking that the marchers might benefit from a little "nuking."

"I went right up to them and said, 'Excuse me, but I'm one of those persons you want to nuke,' " she said. "They wheeled around on their barstools, very hostile, very belligerent. But one of them said, 'Let's give the little lady a chance to talk.' And I did.

"We were from totally opposite camps, but there was still some attempt to listen to one another," she said.

"And all I could think was, 'If we can just do this on the global stage . . . . ' "

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