Their Tales of the Great Trek for Peace Begin

On a pleasant April day about 600 years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer’s 29 poetic pilgrims took off for Canterbury to pay homage to a martyred saint. On March 1, rain or shine, about 30 pilgrims of sorts from Orange County--out of a total of about 1,500 at last count--will be setting off for Washington on The Great Peace March.

One march organizer said of the latter event, “It’s going to make a lot of saints.”

Pre-departure giddiness aside, the Orange County marchers, who have been getting to know each other at informal meetings, potlucks and fund-raisers for weeks now, are at least as eclectic a band as the odd assortment of medieval characters who introduced themselves at Chaucer’s Tabard Inn. And like the Knight and Miller and Wife of Bath, they, too, have tales to tell--although they are reluctant to recite them in rhymed couplets of Middle English.

The Wife of Irvine’s Tale

“I used to be a very fearful person, but these last 3 1/2 years I’ve been able to make a lot of change, mainly by saying yes to risk,” said Patti Dornan, 44, of Irvine. Last May, Dornan’s husband, Ed, came home from a speech by PRO-Peace founder David Mixner and suggested that, since he couldn’t leave his position as professor of literature at Orange Coast College, it might not be a bad idea for his wife to take a 3,235-mile stroll across the country. “I said yes without realizing what that meant,” Patti Dornan said.

With only days remaining before she was scheduled to report to the preliminary site of the PRO-Peace (People Reaching Out for Peace) traveling “city,” in the San Fernando Valley, “what it meant” was finally beginning to sink in for Dornan. Among other things, being part of the peace march means leaving her husband and her 14- and 15-year-old boys for nine months--and teaching them a few of the things they have taken for granted, such as paying the bills and doing their own ironing and cooking, she said.

It also means she will have to start thinking about making a few adjustments in her own way of life.

For instance, Dornan is going to have to get used to waking up at 5:30 each morning and walking about 15 miles a day for 255 days (rest days excluded). With that in mind, she has been walking and running about eight miles a day in the Irvine hills, she said. As The Marcher Preparation Manual provided by PRO-Peace suggests, Dornan purchased a good sleeping bag and a sleeping pad. She also picked up two pairs of Roc-sport “pro walker” shoes and two pairs of running shoes, “blister resister” socks, silk long underwear, a Gore-tex running suit and extra clothing--all of which she has to stuff into two plastic boxes (13x15x11 inches and 13x17x11 inches) that will slide in and out of a locker mounted on a specially designed luggage truck. And she is designing a color-coding system for the nylon mesh laundry bags that each hiker will periodically turn over to PRO-Peace volunteers to be tossed into industrial washing machines mounted on a trailer.

“This isn’t easy for a lot of us to do--to just let go of everything and leave,” Dornan said. Such an undertaking has particular significance for her though, she added, explaining that four years ago she experienced a severe anxiety attack and a “tremendous” fear of driving that kept her from venturing far from her house. In the past few years, though, she has overcome that fear, and last year she chauffeured herself 1,800 miles around Nebraska, she said. Now she sees “the March” as the culmination of her own “awakening,” as well as “a chance to wake up people who may not even know they’re sleeping.”

“I’m not a political activist, and I don’t even see this as a political movement. I see it as a way of being a collective voice to get people off of the sofa, where they’re sitting and feeling that there’s no hope for the world. I see it as a way of putting sparks into people and helping them appreciate that they’re not powerless. It will give us a voice to say we want peace and nuclear disarmament.

“I can honestly say I am not worried about anything (about the march),” Dornan concluded, with this afterthought: “Every once in a while I ask myself: ‘Do I really want to give up all those hot showers?’ ”

The Psychologist’s Tale

“I’ve been thinking about the emotional aspects of the march, about the behavioral aspects. I think we’re going to be in for some stressful times,” said Pat Walsh, 62, of Lake Forest.

Walsh, who retired last month as a psychologist with the Orange County Health Department, said he got his first inkling that the nuclear arms race might pose a threat during the 1956 presidential campaign, when Sen. Adlai Stevenson told a San Diego audience about the pollution nuclear testing caused. “I didn’t do much about it then,” Walsh recalled.

A couple of years ago, however, he heard another speech, this one given by a member of an organization called Beyond War. To demonstrate the current nature of the arms race, the speaker first dropped one metal BB into a galvanized tin bucket, saying that it represented the destruction caused by the atom bomb at Hiroshima, Walsh said. Then the speaker poured another 6,000 BBs into the pan, explaining that they represented the nuclear weapons now stockpiled on the planet.

“Between the threat of accidents and the threat of a real war, it’s just too scary,” Walsh said. Soon he was giving talks for Beyond War himself, and when he heard about the march, he signed up.

“I think the majority of the people are going to make it and are going to be thrilled,” Walsh said of the march. But that doesn’t mean he foresees pure peace, love and understanding.

For one thing, Walsh realizes that as the marchers make their final preparations, they are experiencing a “honeymoon” of sorts. He’s mildly concerned, though, about what will happen when the initial romance wears off.

“We’re all fired up over this cause of eliminating nuclear weapons, and we’re getting a lot of attention. But 15 miles a day is a long way.” And when people are physically exhausted, niggling problems can seem only slightly less annoying than global thermonuclear annihilation, he said.

“I guess we’re just going to have to learn to get along when we’re tired and cold and wet and after whatever else hits us.”

Other problems such as basic homesickness are also likely to take a toll on the marchers’ morale, Walsh said. “I’m sure I’m going to miss my wife and son and older children.” But visits from family and friends are permissible, and by adding 9999 after the ZIP code of whatever town the march is passing through, loved ones can get mail to their marcher.

Actually, the fact that the march is so “extensively structured” could lead to problems for some individualistic types, Walsh said.

Within the campsites, groups of specially designed dome tents will be divided into color-coded “cities,” which will be subdivided into “villages,” and each city is going to develop its own style of government, Walsh said. But some rules of the march--such as the ban on drugs and alcohol en route and in the camp areas will be “non-negotiable,” Walsh continued.

“Something like this has to have rules. If we don’t, we’re going to get cold and freeze and run out of food. This is like being on a ship going across the ocean; you need some pretty strong leadership,” Walsh said. “But some people are very independent and may not fit into a structured environment--they may want to call all their own shots and may run into difficulties.”

At the request of the PRO-Peace leadership, Walsh and a dozen other mental health professionals who will be marching met recently at the White Oaks campsite in the San Fernando Valley where the first “city” is beginning to take shape. Because of the disparities in state licensing laws, Physicians for Social Responsibility is arranging for medical professionals from each state to accompany the marchers.

The psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses and social workers, however, will train 100 marchers who will then lead smaller support groups, with the professionals providing only informal counseling should the need arise, Walsh said.

The Schoolteacher’s Tale

“I used to think the most important thing I could do was teach, which is why I went into teaching 12 years ago. But this is even more important,” Gayle Joliet, 38, said of the decision she and her husband, Tom, 34, made to rent out their South Laguna mobile home and march across the United States. She quickly added, though, that teaching is also a main goal of the march.

Joliet said she had never been well informed about the “incredible dilemma of the military industrial complex” until she met her husband, whom she married about 18 months ago.

“Tom was a medic in Vietnam, and ever since Vietnam he’s had ideas about alternatives to war,” she said. Currently a student in UC Irvine’s Peace Studies program, Tom Joliet created a slide show demonstrating what he sees as the threat of the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. He and his wife will be among a group of marchers making presentations on that and on “the conversion of the war economy to a peace economy” at schools and churches and civic meetings along the march route, and also for anyone who visits the big “education tents” PRO-Peace will be setting up at each campsite, Gayle Joliet explained.

She also will be joining a team of credentialed educators who will teach the three Rs to the school-age students who will be accompanying their parents and taking home study courses while on the march. (The University of Colorado will be offering college credit courses, she noted.)

Parents might be surprised at how much the sixth-grade pupils Joliet teaches at Palisades School in San Juan Capistrano understand about the arms race, she said. “We think the children don’t know. But they just don’t talk about it much because they think there’s nothing they can do. Many of them say they just don’t know how long the world is going to be here.”

Recently, Tom Joliet gave his presentation to Gayle’s class and talked to her pupils about the march. “It made them feel good that people are working on solutions,” she said. “They have lots of questions as to whether (the march) will do any good or not, but they think that if there’s anything that can be done it has to come from the people. They think this march may be able to get the government’s attention. . . . They do still have hope.”

Joliet said that so far, no parents have accused her of propagandizing their children, and, like many marchers, she downplays the political aspects of the demonstration. But she concedes that the march is likely to get caught in a political cross fire, and she has thought about some responses.

For instance, she denied that the marchers are undermining Reagan’s bargaining position in future arms negotiations. “We think the majority of the world’s population wants nuclear arms control,” she said. And even though Soviet citizens aren’t in a position to demonstrate their concerns, she thinks Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is aware of them.

She also said she realizes that some people might consider her naive for believing--in the manner of former President Jimmy Carter before the invasion of Afghanistan--that the Soviets “can be trusted.”

“Possibly things are changing. Gorbachev is a new force. . . . We’re not saying we can totally trust the Russians and let down our security, but we feel we have to start taking some steps toward trusting them,” she said.

The Dropout’s Tale

“I’ve said lots of times that I should have been born 20 years earlier,” said Joe Reese. But Reese, who will be 20 in May, was born in 1966, the year President Johnson ordered the bombing of Hanoi. He was 2 when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, and 3 the year 250,000 demonstrators marched on Washington to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In a sense, though, he lives in the 1960s in 1986.

He first became intrigued with the ‘60s when his parents moved to the small town of Gambier, Ohio, a few years ago, Reese said. “The town itself is kind of like a little time warp. The atmosphere is gentle. I kind of fell into the groove of that. I had a lot of friends there who were really into ‘60s music and what it stood for. . . . They had the posters, the tapestries, the rugs. . . .”

Reese said he grew his hair long and started listening to old albums: the Jefferson Airplane, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. “And the Grateful Dead, that was a major influence.” Last summer, with his clothes and sleeping bag stuffed into a backpack, Reese caught rides from town to town with the entourage of “Deadheads” that follows the band, he said.

He was a freshman at Ohio University in Athens when he heard about The Great Peace March. Without bothering to take his final exams, he quit school and flew to California to live with his sister and her family in Orange while waiting for the hike to begin, he said.

PRO-Peace organizers have asked each marcher to raise “a full sponsorship” of $3,235, or a dollar a mile, to cover food and expenses. A lot of marchers have been following the peace march’s fund-raising manual and are having house parties, rummage sales, raffles and barbecues to help pay their way.

So far, however, Reese hasn’t had much luck. His father forbade him to ask any family members for money (“it’s not that he’s opposed to the idea so much as that he’s unconvinced it will do any good; he doesn’t have a whole lot of faith in what I’m doing”), and Reese hasn’t been able to find a job since he arrived in California, he said.

Reese said his father has agreed to send him $50 a month to help him get by, and PRO-Peace is willing to cover the “sponsorship” of any full-time marcher who can’t raise his own funds. “So I plan to make up for that difference in any way I can. I’ll drive trucks or clean toilets once a week if I have to,” he said.

And, as the departure date approaches, Reese is hard pressed to contain his excitement. “I see (the march) as more than a turning point, more than just a challenge; it’s my turn to take part in history. I have four nephews, and when they’re in high school they’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I have an uncle who took part in that. . . .’ This will go down as one of the greatest things since Martin Luther King freed the blacks from social injustice.”

The Tree Trimmer’s Tale

“I’m a Vietnam-era veteran. I went to college in Santa Barbara in ‘68, ‘69, ’70 and played a moderate role in the peace movement there,” said John Bogner, 40. But Bogner, who rents a room in a large house on Balboa Island, recoils at the suggestion that The Great Peace March might actually be a bunch of burned-out flower children trying to relive the Age of Aquarius.

“When I left the ‘60s, I closed the door,” said Bogner. “I’m not one of these people who sit around listening to old Doors albums and yearning for another Woodstock.”

Bogner first read about the march last summer. When he saw news about it again in January, “something clicked” and he gave PRO-Peace headquarters a call.

“I had a lot of worries. I was afraid it was going to be a raggedy, hippie-dip kind of operation. I’m a very organized person, and I don’t like throwing my time and money and energy into things that won’t go,” Bogner said. But when he heard about the logistics of the march, he was awed.

The tree trimming business in which he is a partner had just landed “a really big job” that stood to make Bogner “some big money,” but he decided to take a hike instead.

“I don’t think 25 or 30 years ago people could have organized this kind of march across America. I don’t think there were that many people who would open their doors,” Bogner said. Although “a lot of silly things” happened in the ‘60s, that era also paved the way for this event, he said.

“My father, for instance, is a much more tolerant man than he was 30 years ago--racially, and in a lot of other ways. Today he wouldn’t put me down for being involved in something like this. Twenty-five years ago, he practically disowned me. I think the two generations have come closer together. I think the era of ‘get-it-while-you-can’ is over. I think as a society we’re having burnout. We’ve had two generations of heavy drug and alcohol use and wild hedonistic living . . . and I think people are starting to see it’s time to go another way.”

Recently Bogner told a gathering of Orange County marchers, “If I got any more excited about this, I’d probably drop over dead.”

“I have an instinctive feeling that this is going to be the happening happening of the 20th Century. I think it’s going to be the thing that starts the snowball rolling, a chain reaction that brings people together,” he said.

“My father went to World War II to make the world safe for democracy. This is my debt. If I didn’t go, I would always ask myself why. . . . I feel patriotic about this. I don’t feel like I did in the ‘60s fighting the system. This is more of a cooperative thing. Everybody wants the same thing; they just have a different way of going about getting it.”

Voicing “a favorite quote” that’s been making the rounds among his friends for some time, Bogner said, “I really believe this: ‘If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.’

“Now I think I’m finally in the right place at the right time with the right people doing the right thing.”