Eventually admitted to the cafeteria, we wanted to mingle with the students and get a sense of their attitudes. I ate with a senior who hoped to work with the American Friends Service Committee. He was excited about our walk and our reception through the South. He had not heard of us previously nor known we had spent the night on campus. Other walkers had similar conversations; no one had known that we had been on campus.

We started walking past tobacco factories in Greensboro's industrial section. (Our permit didn't allow us downtown because children were walking.) But, despite the police permit, we had no police escort. At lunch, we stopped in an open field near a small country store where I bought a pint of milk. The store owner and a county policeman were clearly hostile to us.

Our 25 AMS friends left us at 4 o'clock in Sedalia on their bus; we were driven to our hosts' farmhouse near Burlington. The two families living there had spent six years building the house themselves.

Today Ishiyama said he wanted to adopt a U.S. custom while he is here. He will introduce himself, and we shall call him by, his first name, Kajo.

I phoned my brother Doug, who tomorrow would join the walk for a week. My father, just admitted to Baptist Hospital, would take medical tests, the results to be known in three days.

Two of the four adults in that house taught at the local Quaker school. We all sat in the living room, talking informally. Nagase listened to Beatle records wearing a headset, pacing back and forth with a distant look. He told Mercury and me that he was "escaping", that people were trying to be number one, that he was sick at heart. He was referring to the ongoing leadership struggle between Kajo and Morishita.

This was the first real indication that the monks were divided on how to conduct the peace walk, that they were not satisfied with each other, although a few days ago Nagase had refused to join the monks at the front of the walk. Instead he had walked a half-mile behind, beating his drum and chanting loudly. Morishita had explained that Nagase was depressed, but I now knew that he had been saddened by the leadership struggle.

   April 2, Sedalia to Burlington
This day's walk was short, 13 miles, and a lot of good things happened. The major event was Doug's arrival; he was taking a week off from his job as a chemist at Research Triangle Institute.

We had been walking for a little over an hour when he arrived in Susan's car. Sakamaki laughed as he pointed at Doug and said, "Andy." We are identical twins. Approaching New York, we were joined by many people who learned to tell us apart by the color of our shoes; sometimes this required looking under a table to see who they were talking with.

We finished walking by lunch and were to spend the rest of the day and the night at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church. We were welcomed by l35 students, who joined us in a large circle. We sang a few simple songs. The young people seemed awed by the monks. All wanted to hold the prayer drums.

After lunch, I spent some time talking with a reporter, a student from Alamance Community College. He and a few others were trying to get a peace group going on campus. But he was discouraged. Someone in the administration had told them that if they continued their "unpatriotic" activities they would be expelled. I suggested they take up the challenge and not be intimidated. Then they would be working for their first amendment rights as well as for peace.

I told him how a member of the Greenville (NC) Peace Committee took up a similar challenge from Pitt Community College. A dean there threatened his arrest and expulsion if he kept handing out leaflets against draft registration. He would be charged with "unlawful solicitation of ideas." The student let it be known he would respond in the courts and was given no further problem. People who would deny us our freedom of speech are the ones acting unpatriotically.

At 3 o'clock we walked a short mile to the city hall, to be officially welcomed by the mayor. Other officials, and reporters, were present. The mayor gave Morishita some literature. Morishita gave him the Hiroshima mayoral peace proclamation and the photo booklet, then our disarmament petition for his signature. He signed his name, with his title, and then I truly appreciated Morishita's political skills.

After supper we went to evening mass. Not previously announced, this caught Sandy unprepared and we were out the door before she realized she wasn't wearing shoes. Well, it was her head that had to be covered, according to l Corinthians; and she could be emboldened by the priest Bob's friendship with Philip Berrigan and the fact that Bob was proud also that this was the first Catholic church in the state in which a Buddhist prayer for peace had been given.

Only a dozen local people were at the mass. But people were asked to come to the front of the church to light a candle for peace. I encouraged her to light the candle; God was probably not wearing shoes now either. But I learned later from Pamela that some parishioners had contacted her to express their displeasure at Sandy's bare feet flaunted at their ceremony.

Toward the end of the service the priests gave the monks a gift, a pair of "tar heels" honoring UNC's basketball champions. After the service, in our room (the school gym), Kurimori asked Bill to step on his foot as a massage; Bill, unwilling, finally stepped -- but way too hard. Kurimori limped for several days then, but walked every step of the way.

   April 3, Burlington toward Chapel Hill
It was 18 miles in harsh weather -- cold, rainy, and very very windy. That wind kept at forty miles an hour; our banner-carriers were blown all over the roadside. Sakamaki couldn't manage the prayer banner, and Kajo carried it for the first time since we left New Orleans.

At first, it seemed simply impossible. Jane and I started out carrying the banner; we found ourselves constantly turning and straining as we tried to make forward progress. During especially hard gusts against us, one of the monks would push with his body against the middle of the banner, and Jane and I would burst out in fits of laughing. Though exhausting ourselves in the first mile, we had to laugh, it was so ludicrous. Once we did an old comedy routine unintentionally. I looked at the lowering gray clouds, then at Jane, and shouted, "Cheer up, it could be worse; it could be raining." It poured down on cue.

At last came our first rest stop. The banner was nearly torn from the poles, and Mercury went into a store to buy some nails and borrow a hammer. The rain kept up through the break and through the morning. The cold, with strong winds, was with us two more days. As the morning wore on, we began trying to guess the miles we had come, knowing they were few against that wind. "Surely six miles?" But the monks would estimate mileage with the certainty of Jerry Falwell quoting the Old Testament.

About one o'clock we were greeted by a lone man, standing by the side of the road and holding a small bouquet and bowing reverently. We smiled and waved and walked on. Then, a sudden thought hit us: Steve Fisher. Could he be our local coordinataor, Steve Fisher, who was supposed to have met us at noon with food and water? Mary went back; it was Steve, and we stopped where we were, in the driveway of a volunteer fire department, for food and rest. It had stopped raining and I took off my raincoat, placing it on the driveway, and lay on it to rest. This had been one of the hardest mornings I remembered.

After a ten-minute rest, we had enough energy to start to eat. A gourmet restaurant in Chapel Hill had donated lunch, and we feasted on cheese, nuts, and mineral water.

We asked Steve how many miles it was yet to our host's house. He said it wasn't far, about eleven miles, and our spirits sank. We cut our lunch break short to resume walking. And, somehow, those eleven miles went by much faster than I would have thought possible; I recall nothing else of that afternoon.

Rick's house was memorable. It was an historical landmark, first used as a military academy by the Confederate States of America; in World War II, the United States of America used it as an army barracks. The house and outsheds were in the process of complete restoration, a building in which bricks were made still standing near a well. But there was neither electricity nor running water. Rick wasn't there, but we went in. Upstairs, military maps were stacked in a corner; they were used in WW II for teaching map-reading. Now the building was about to serve differently -- immediately to house peace walkers and then as a retreat and workshop for area artists.

Rick was an artist, as well as the caretaker. He had asked us to stay in this place to counter some of the negative forces from its past. He was a sculptor, his work displayed inside the house, on the porch, and in the front yard. Some, in the yard, had been blown down by the wind, which had even blown Jesus off the cross.

Rick drove up soon, in a pickup with his Saturday night date. We were earlier than expected, but he had purposely left the house unlocked and I admired the friendly and nonchalant greeting we got from him and his friend. Another friend jumped from the back of the truck, a large Doberman pinscher who wanted to play a game with me. He walked up and dropped a small log at my feet. I picked the stick up, thinking he wanted me to throw it to fetch. He had another game in mind and grabbed the middle of the stick and worked his teeth down toward my hand with swift small bites. I think I saved losing my right hand by a fingernail as I let go.

Rick and his friends stayed just long enough to make us feel welcome before returning to Chapel Hill. A vegetarian restaurant there had donated our supper, and even brought it out to us. We ate by candlelight, sitting in a large circle on the floor.

Our first efforts to tailor our evening entertainment to our surroundings failed when no one could remember a complete ghost story. But the idea was not forgotten during the Japanese fishing and other folk songs that followed. Coming in from an outhouse visit, the young monk Sakamaki reached for one of Rick's sculptures to scare Sandy when she came back from her visit. It was a ghoulish female mannikin with blood running from the mouth. But she was bent on scaring him and arrived just as he bent over. Her scream as he was picking up the mannikin scared him, and he yelled and jerked it apart in his hands; this surprised him again and he yelled even louder. Sandy, pleased with her effect, was running back and forth across the porch, almost doubled over from laughter. Sakamaki was also running back and forth, moaning loudly, "Ohhhh Ohhhh!" We ran out to see with the help of flashlights, and the mannikin was put back together in something fairly close to its original form.

Back inside the house, we resumed our circle. Now we all sat in silence, listening to the wind in the trees. It was still blowing strongly. The unity of the group was strong too. There was a spell of happiness there. go to page31