We stopped at the edge of an orchard for lunch. Sakamaki leaned the prayer banner against a peach tree, knocking off a few flowers. Mercury walked over and picked up the fallen blossoms, sternly warning Sakamaki against leaning the banner against any other fruit trees, destroying more peaches. For Buddhists, wasting food is a big sin.

We had counted on l5 miles today; it turned out to be 21. It sounds crazy, but each mile past eighteen seemed like two to me. We arrived at the Lexington church where we were to spend the night. It was about six o'clock. This was last-minute hospitality, due to a minister friend of Rev. Melnick, which saved our being driven ahead to Columbia for the night. His friend knew nothing about us beyond our need for shelter, but the family greeted and welcomed us, his wife saying to Jane "You mean, you are one of them!" Jane at 25 looked like a middle-class college student and after this tried to look less wholesome and clean-cut.

. We all slept in an old small house that was used for children's Sunday school classes. Its walls were covered with 8" by l0" crayon drawings and lettering, and there was a large chart with each student's name. A solid matrix of gold stars testified to perfect attendance.

. Tom from Columbia drove Carole, Mercury, and Sandy to the grocery store. They came back with $25 worth of vegetables for supper, so we had plenty of soup and salad. Carole, Mercury, Bill, Kurimori, Jane, Sandy, and Mary were vegetarians. The rest of us didn't require meat but would eat whatever was put before us by our wonderful hosts. It was hard to keep to a vegetarian diet on the peace walk.

After supper we met to discuss the schedule in Columbia. Bill chaired the meeting as current group leader. Since this was the first night where we had all stayed together since Grovetown we had several things to discuss. Yet we stuck to our agenda items, and the meeting lasted only an hour or so. Toward its end, the minister, his wife, and another couple stopped in to see how we were doing. (We were fine.) They couldn't stay, being on the way to see the movie "Missing" about political kidnapping/murder in Chile. Sandy asked whether they would like to walk with us tomorrow. He answered, "Oh, no. I've got to get my exercise tomorrow. I'm playing tennis." We let the topic drop.

Afterward we dispersed into three of the four rooms. Bill, Jane, and I took the middle room, supposedly to go to sleep. The Japanese gathered next door and stayed up past midnight, writing letters and talking. On the other side, Carole, Mercury, and Sandy also stayed up late, playing guitar and singing.

There was one song they sang at least a half dozen times a day, a simple song that went as follows. "This sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take, this sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take." Then followed an Indian chant. "Hey, yun-ga, Hey, yun, yun, Hey, yun-ga, Hey yun-ga, Hey, yun, yun. The earth is our mother, we must take care of her. The earth is our mother, we must take care of her." Then, repeat, over, and over. I liked Carole and Mercury a lot. But I didn't really want to hear about "walking every step" after twenty miles of walking from which I greatly wanted to rest.

They also sang many other songs that night.

   March l3, Lexington to Columbia
We got up early to prepare breakfast, wakened by the monks at morning prayers. There was little food left in our food box, but we managed a soup from the evening's leftovers, mostly cabbage.

People from the Columbia Friends Meeting and two local Buddhists joined us for the walk into Columbia. The Buddhists told us they also chanted "Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo" every day. Today's walk was supposed to be ten miles but was fifteen. Bright sun again was giving us all sunburn, as previously in southern Alabama. The teenage and pre-teen students around the Columbia area were a puzzle to us. Almost every day a school bus would pass by us and students would put their heads out and shout and wave enthusiastically, wild and happy. But here the shouts came from individuals and sounded like jeers and hate. We heard many rebel yells around Columbia and, the day before, US l had been a continuous cacophony of honking horns. So we were glad it was Saturday and we were glad to arrive at the capitol grounds at 2 o'clock. But our hosts had not been told to meet us, and we had missed a lunch date with them. We had drunk all our water during a rest break. So we sat down under large shade trees and took the food box from the van and got ready for cabbage sandwich.

It was 4 o'clock before the confusion had been straightened and the last host arrived. Meanwhile, four security guards for the capitol paid us a visit. They first insisted we sit upright and not lean against the large trees. I asked why. They said this was a rule to keep drunks away, and I had to agree with their logic. If I were drunk, that would keep me away from the capitol. Sakamaki had disassembled the prayer banner and put it in its black cloth carrying case. The guards wanted to know what it was -- a weapon? Sandy said it was a weapon for peace, taking them a bit aback; but they didn't check the bag. Now they wanted identification from everyone. Collins Baker wanted to know what was troubling them; it emerged they feared our camping on the grounds, our permit for vigilling on the capitol steps the next day changed them dramatically, and they left us alone then.

   March l4, Rest day in Columbia
Sunday. I slept til l0:30, then phoned my brother Doug in Durham. He hoped to join us for a week, maybe near Greensboro. He had already seen lots of leaflets and posters around Durham announcing the peace walk's arrival in a month.

Mrs. Baker, Bill, and I left to attend the one-hour prayer vigil at the capitol. This was just a few blocks from the USC campus but it was spring break. There were about 50 at the vigil, with two carloads from Aiken, and with lots of TV coverage.

When we got back to the house, we had a free afternoon in warm and sunny weather. I spent the time on the back porch, writing letters. There was always a need to write. In every town there were three or four people who did a special amount of work to insure the success of the peace walk as well as our own safety and comfort. Carole, Mercury, and I kept the addresses of these people, so as to write letters of appreciation. Some of them we were able to write several times, by giving them our forwarding addresses three or four weeks ahead. So we would often spend one or two hours a night -- and sometimes six to eight hours of our rest days -- writing. Despite this it seemed we were always at least two weeks behind in our correspondence.

Today was Bill's last day as group leader. Tomorrow I would have the job as far as Charlotte. The phone rang a lot this afternoon with problems about housing and speaking arrangements for the next few days. In one instance, the Board of Education in Winnsboro had threatened to revoke its permission for us to use the school gymnasium for an interfaith service. They charged that we were communists. There was not much that I could do with this besides let Kate and Collins try to resolve the problem. They were still working on this when it was time for the interfaith service here, to begin at 7:30.

A visible change would occur in a group leader's behavior a few days into the job. He or she would become more tense, smile less and less each day. I promised myself I would stay calm and not let anything upset me. But by the end of the second day out of Columbia, I realized that I had become tense and worrisome. And this knowledge did not help at all.

Tonight's interfaith service was held at the Catholic church. This was the first time that we had shown the slide show entitled, "A Message for Tomorrow" and the first time that most of us had seen it. We received the slides some time back, but the tape recording was in Japanese. We had to send the tape to the New York office of Mobilization for Survival for translation, which they kindly did for us. Most of the slides show the effects of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The speaker gives an eyewitness account of a young school girl. Her mother and sister had been killed by the bomb. Only she and her father remained alive, and she describes the days in Hiroshima immediately after the bomb fell, the horrors of people dying from radiation sickness, and the death of her father a month later from it. She recalled his last words, "The wind is blowing. The wind is blowing."

After seeing these slides, we could more easily understand why the monks and nuns of Nipponzan Myohoji had dedicated their lives to nuclear disarmament. It was no puzzle why Kurimori, a native of Hiroshima, had quit a high-paying job in Japan to join the peace walk. The real puzzle was, why had not all the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left their jobs to walk to the UN with us?

Shima, the construction worker, would leave us tomorrow to take a bus to New York. He would join either the walk from Montreal or the one from Maine. Ishiyama had decided to remain with us. go to page 24