One Small Step
The ragtag army was jubilant as it marched down Route 1 in Maryland on the cold November morning. In the ranks, young girls with rosy cheeks and windblown hair laughed with delight. Little old ladies were bundled in down parkas, and lean, athletic men and women with the bronzed, glowing faces of people who have long been out-of-doors grinned and cheered. Buddhist monks in saffron robes played drums and bells. A man dressed as the “peace clown” waved at the bored car salesmen who had gathered behind showroom windows to watch the spectacle and read the gaudy banners that advocated peace and nuclear disarmament – issues seldom discussed by suburban auto dealers. A few of the salesmen waved back tentatively. They too couldn’t help smiling.
As the marchers proceeded down Queens Chapel Road, they could just make out the tip of the Washington Monument over a distant hill. At the University Park Elementary School, a class of second graders came running out to greet them, clapping hands and hugging. The kids had prepared posters for the marchers that read WE WANT PEACE and LET IT HAPPEN.
At noon, the procession stopped at the park that divides Maryland from the District of Columbia. This was the last border to cross – the triumphant step that four hundred of them had dreamed of taking for the last eight and a half months. Their ranks now swollen to more than a thousand, the marchers joined hands and spread out in a long line. Led by a bullhorn from a flatbed truck, they counted down all the borders they had crossed: “California! Nevada! Arizona! Utah! Colorado! Nebraska! Iowa! Illinois! Indiana! Ohio! Pennsylvania! New Jersey! New York! New Jersey! Pennsylvania! Delaware! Maryland!… The District of Columbia!” Then, with a triumphant shout, the Great Peace March stepped into the nation’s capital.
As the cheering subsided, the joy turned bittersweet. Dawn Friesen, a twenty-five-year-old from Denver, hugged her husband, Kent, as they both stood crying and smiling. They had quit their engineering jobs early last summer and joined the march when it passed through Colorado. Suddenly, they realized, it was over. “This group of people won’t ever be together again,” Dawn said, wiping away her tears. “We’ve been living with all these people for five months now. It’s hard to say goodbye to all of them.” “It’s so hard to believe we’re here,” Kent said. “I’m used to being so logical,” Dawn said. “The march has really developed my emotional side, my spiritual side. Everything you don’t learn in engineering school.”
But what did it matter? Did it make any difference – especially in the age of Reagan – that 400 people and more had marched 3701.4 miles over mountains and plains, from coast to coast, in the name of peace and in support of global nuclear disarmament? Like most of the marchers, the Friesens weren’t sure. All they knew, for certain, was what they had learned about America – the warmth and openness of its people, the stirrings of interest in their cause, the expressions of gratitude in unlikely places – and what they had learned about themselves.
“We planted seeds,” Kent said. “The children understood. Everywhere people were so giving. I have to believe we planted seeds.”
In Philadelphia, a dentist, caught up in the infectious spirit of the Great Peace March, organized his colleagues to provide free teeth cleaning for 120 marchers. The Dial-a-Pizza shop, in Laurel, Maryland, cranked out twenty pizzas for the passing army. In hot and humid small Nebraska towns, local firemen turned out with their hoses to cool off the marchers. “I will always remember Girard, Ohio,” said Tyler Divis, a twenty-two-year-old store manager from Nebraska. “We marched through, and they rang all the church bells, and all the kids came out to greet us. The whole town came out. The barber even came out of his shop and was waving at us, and his customer was standing there with shaving cream all over his face. It was wonderful. … I cried. I’ve cried a lot on this march.”
“My own personal high was the day I walked across Loveland Pass, in Colorado –— the Continental Divide, at 12,000-feet elevation,” said Bill Jensen, a thirty-six-year-old psychiatric technician from San Francisco. “Besides the beauty, it was the blessing I felt then. The mountains and trees were full of snow, but the sun was shining, and it even felt warm. It was such a good feeling, like ‘Well, from here on, it’s all downhill.'”
Like many of the others, Jensen had never been active in peace politics before. “When I read the pamphlets, it seemed like such a grandiose idea – walking across the country,” he said. “The next morning I woke up and I was compelled by this idea. I couldn’t not do it.”
As the march crossed Loveland Pass, Jensen met a local cop who did not share his enthusiasm. “He wasn’t hostile exactly, but when I said hello, the cop said, ‘It’s supposed to snow today,’ like it pleased him,” Jensen recalled. “‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’re a kind of magical group here –— snowstorms don’t bother us.’ The cop just smiled, and when we left, he said, ‘Good luck to you.’ I could see him melt right in that moment.”
The marchers, most of whom were white and middle-class, were especially moved by the reactions of poor people –— unemployed steelworkers in the mill towns of the Midwest, impoverished blacks living in big cities. They were among the most openhearted spectators along the way.
One Small Step, Page 1 of 3