Smile, shake, smile, shake, smile, wash

EVENTUALLY, JUST SO YOU KNOW, THIS IS GOING TO

be a column about endurance, the national psyche and how John Kerry looks in a wetsuit. But it starts here in a crowded hotel lobby, where my wife and I and five of our friends stand zipping parkas, fiddling with gloves, wrapping mufflers and wincing at the white wasteland just out the door.

Some people chase storms, or wars, or skirts. We’re chasing handshakes.

And we’re doing it amid this stark, strangely peopled landscape, one that’s reborn every four years, like Brigadoon with overnight polling: New Hampshire, during the first presidential primary. Only in these weird winters does the state’s southern end teem with politicos, press and campaign buses, the red-brick buildings festooned with signs and slogans.

This time around, the highs are in the teens, the lows below zero, the breezes biting, the blue skies a cruel warmth-implying hoax. But like those guys with their names on the signs, we’re all about character.

“Kucinich,” says Bruce, setting the agenda. Off to the rental cars.

We scour schedules, work cellphones, speculate on routes. Then we lower shoulders and plunge, or sidle along a wall, or wait and shiver by a bus. If you guess right, you’re reaching for a hand, looking the candidate in the eye, taking measure and testing his grip.

You accost Kerry, towering next to his chunky chum Teddy Kennedy. You chase down Howard Dean, the bulldog who now hesitates to bark, and John Edwards, chirping in the face of tracking-poll adversity. You tick him off the list and head for the next. It’s like birding, except the free world hangs in the balance.

Bruce, Kevin and Kirby started this ritual in 1988: Every candidate you can get, every four years. No other event compares for concentration of important people and ideas, informality of setting and ease of access. We have no credentials. None of us is registered to vote here. Nobody cares.

Saturday: The top contenders snub a forum at Southern New Hampshire University, but Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) turns up, and we’re ready at the side door. Then off to a charity hockey game, where we shiver in vain hoping to buttonhole Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). On to Nashua City Hall for Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). Firm grip, miserable prospects. Then to a bowling alley, where we sidestep an angry fire marshal and wade through chanting masses to reach Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.). So easy it’s scary.

No ease for the candidates, though. You hear the mileage in their voices, see it in their eyes. Give Dean credit for finding energy to scream.

Maybe it’s no surprise that most of these guys are athletes. The boyish 50-year-old Edwards has completed at least three marathons and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Former Gen. Wesley K. Clark, 59, who endured 34 years in the Army and four gunshot wounds in Vietnam, says he tries to swim daily. Accepting a dare on a 1995 trip to the Balkans, he dived from a third-story hotel window into the Adriatic and swam across a harbor.

Then there’s Dean, the 55-year-old former Vermont governor and ski bum (Aspen, 1971-72), whose statehouse portrait includes a canoe paddle.

Meanwhile Kerry, 60, looks like an aristocrat but has war medals and a garage full of sporting goods, from Harley to hunting gear. Garages, actually.

One afternoon, a Kerry booster named Nevin Sayre shows me a copy of American Windsurfer magazine featuring the Massachusetts senator in all his storklike wetsuited glory. In September 1998, Sayre tells me, Kerry joined a windsurfing race around the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The wind was scant. For five, six, seven hours, Kerry and his 32 competitors flailed in the swells, looking for a breeze. Twenty-seven of the others gave up. After eight hours, having covered two-thirds of the 55-mile route, so did Kerry.

Then he zipped back to Washington, and early the next morning, there he sat on live national television, mulling over the Monica Lewinsky matter.

“We were trying to get out of bed, sore as hell, and here he was on ‘Meet the Press,’ ” remembers Sayre, who organized the race.

Now look at Lieberman, Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton bringing up the rear. They lack strong sporting metaphors. Don’t you suspect they’d run stronger with tales of slogging the Appalachian Trail or summitting Denali?

Sunday: Back to Southern New Hampshire University for Dean. Then through a back door to catch Kerry in a packed gym. So far, so good.

And so strange. Day and night, these hopefuls have to pretend down-home merriment while their extremities lose sensation, the hairs in their noses freeze, their throats rasp. After all, when you close your eyes to picture grass-roots American democracy, you see a New England scene full of Norman Rockwell characters. A president should look at ease here, right?

What if the primaries kicked off with these guys poling canoes through a Louisiana swamp or riding the el in Chicago? We’d be another country.

Come Monday noon, we’re camped out on the front steps at Nashua City Hall. It looks bad. Amid subzero gusts, Clark bulls his way through the crowd, bravely grabs the microphone with ungloved hands. We don’t get near. The general speaks for five minutes, rhetoric rising in the cold like puffs of smoke, then retreats. But on his path we lie in wait.

Grip. Grin. Game over. Six candidates, six handshakes, not quite 48 hours. Sharpton? President Bush? They weren’t here, so we don’t care.

And in a world that tolerates the idea of mountain biking on unicycles as a legitimate sporting pursuit, I have no problem thinking of our winter vacation, our democrathon, the same way.

As for the future that awaits Kerry, Dean or whoever remains in the race: When the White House’s jogging, iron-pumping, bass-fishing incumbent enters the fray in earnest, eight hours of wrestling with a board and sail in the Atlantic sounds like a bubble bath.

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To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.