We were surprised to see Pete Seeger waiting at the bell tower. He had not told anyone that he would join us. He treated us to half an hour of music while we waited for everyone to arrive. Most of us joined in singing, as we all knew the songs. He and the monks sang "No More A-Bombs". l could tell that he had practiced it since yesterday afternoon. He had said then that it was the first time he had played it in many years. He ended the concert appropriately with "My Rainbow Race". We joined hands in a circle, which filled the area around the bell tower, ending the circle with "We Shall Overcome". Seeger joined us as we left the campus. I did not see how far he walked; some people said he was with us over a mile.

That night in Concord, we all stayed at one home. I spent a few hours watching a game in the NCAA basketball tournament. Then I joined the others relaxing in the front yard. Some neighbors were there with us.

Ishiyama, who had earned a black belt in high school before becoming a monk, was explaining that he now uses judo only to protect himself, the holds being such that the attacker would not be hurt. I told him I had taken a workshop on nonviolent resistance in case of attack. He asked me to demonstrate the positions and he would use his judo holds to counter them. I got down on all fours, assuming the crouch position to protect my head and vital organs. In less than a second, he had me flipped onto my back. People who had been watching from inside the house rushed out laughing, Morishita the loudest. He had seen Ishiyama demonstrate his abilities before.

   March 22, Concord to Asheboro
We walked 18 miles today but had to be driven 35, much farther than we would have liked.

Carole, Mercury, and l2-year-olds Matt and Rachel who had joined us for two days, talked to an assembly of elementary school students in Concord. The talks by Matt and Rachel were especially effective.

In the morning a woman pulled off the road to give us $l0 to buy drinks. (We would never use the money on such an extravagance as soft drinks.) She thanked us for walking for her children. Women who gave us financial support invariably expressed similar feelings. They realized we were walking for the future generations as well as for ourselves.

I had three newspaper interviews today and was surprised to find that some reporters were completely ignorant, or insensitive, to the issues. This morning I was interviewed by a reporter wearing a NAPA jacket and chewing on a toothpick. One of his first questions was something like, "I guess this means a lot to you, to keep you from getting a job and working?" This was one of the few times a reporter was openly hostile; the other interviews were much more professional.

We had a support vehicle with us only at lunch, so we had to carry our water with us all day. The directions were not clear on which roads to take. At one point, we thought that we were lost; later, at another point, we knew we were. For a couple of miles, we walked along various rural roads, far off the main highway. We thought the roads would be short cuts, and we may have saved a few steps but we saw only one person, a telephone repairman who was then at the top of a pole. When he saw us, he started cursing for all he was worth. I thought he was going to fall off the pole, he was so mad. We left a leaflet in his truck.

Come to think of it, there was another person, a young medic who stopped and offered to check our feet and to donate bandaids and moleskin. Then there were many more as we approached Asheboro along a busy highway. The motorists were most friendly. A newspaper photographer stopped to talk before taking his pictures. She gave us a gallon jug of OJ. Another woman, whom she didn't know, had given her the juice to give us. We were grateful, having run out of water.

Now we found our assembly point, a Quaker church. Quaker churches in this region were huge compared with the small Friends Meeting houses we had seen previously. Many of these churches also had pastors, again something we had not seen. The strong roots of Quaker churches here go back to the colonial period.

We were met by the pastor, Victor Murchison; I wrote letters for a while, then watched three monks in the backyard of the church. (Ishiyama was somewhere with Jane, having one of their million-subject conversations covering the ground from the Japanese alphabet to growing lawns.) The three were screaming and howling at the top of their lungs, laughing and seeing who could make the loudest and absurdest sound. We inside shook our heads, having never seen the monks act so silly before. Their way of relieving tension? Victor was going over the evening program, and I told him that the monks would be singing. They wererehearsing one of their songs now. His face dropped for a monent, then he regained control and said, "That will be fine." I then confessed that it was Carole and Mercury who would sing.

After supper, Victor asked all the walkers to tell something about themselves. He asked us to do this in the "Quaker tradition of witnessing." We each talked for a few minutes and the program was over. After the witnessing, hosts began to choose whom they wanted to stay with them that night. The monks were first chosen, then the women, then the non-American men. When the selecting was over, Bill and I were left; Victor added us to Mercury and Matt in his house.

I stayed up late talking with Victor and his wife, Marian. She like me was a "non-singleton", being a triplet. We spoke of disarmament and the peace movement. We usually got into good conversations with the people who hosted us; I often wished I could stay up all night talking.

   March 23, Asheboro to Jamestown.
The High Point area is well known for its furniture and we walked past many factories that day, taking lunch almost in the front yard of one, the smell of sawdust and furniture stain strong in our nostrils. I had worked in furniture factories when living in Lenoir; so I tried to explain what the inside of the factory was like and described the different jobs I had done. The memories made me thankful that I had the opportunity to be outdoors in this beautiful spring weather. Inside, I could have been wiping the stain from a chair before it entered the hotbox to be toasted golden brown.

In the evening I phoned Dena from the Quaker church where we were to stay. I found that Dad's tests were back from the lab and there was no evidence of a blood clot. Surgery would therefore not be done and he would be discharged from the hospital soon. But he was to enter Baptist Hospital, in Winston-Salem, for more extensive tests, and I would stay in close touch.

I then went into a room to meet some of the people who were arriving for potluck supper with us. This church was in a wealthy neighborhood and many people were dressed in expensive clothes. I laughed as I heard one of the women ask Bill, "Bill, will you be a dear and get me another cup of coffee?" When I saw him in the kitchen, we joked about it. Bill said, "Yeah, it's like I only walked seventeen miles today."

Our program that night was remarkably short. After showing the Hiroshima-Nagasaki slides, the floor was opened for discussion. The first question was, "What is each of your names, age, religion, and education?" This seemed an incredibly insensitive and irrelevant question after seeing "A Message for Tomorrow". When most of us had answered, it was Mercury's turn. He said, "Okay, if there are no more questions, then we'll go to bed. We are tired." Morishita immediately got up to talk with Mercury, but the damage was done, the program over.

It did give us time to talk together about our coming schedule. In particular, there were to be ten rest days in Norfolk, rest postponed from Atlanta. Morishita said the Japanese wouldn't be able to handle ten days with nothing to do -- after a couple of days "their heads would explode." Ten days looked great to me, but we arranged a compromise, if our state coordinator Tim McGloin could swing it. After being driven from Goldsboro to Norfolk as planned, we would go back and spend the first five days walking that stretch; I had lived nearby and knew potential hosts. We could add a prayer vigil at Ft. Bragg, where Salvadoran troops were being trained. The remaining five days would be Norfolk rest days. We phoned, and Tim said he would do the best he could. go to page 27