WASHINGTON, D.C. — Walking. That’s the easy part. Your mind goes blank as you walk along the highway shoulder, a slim path between speeding cars and the drainage ditch. Even exhaust fumes that reach up your nose and into your lungs don’t disturb the meditative feeling.

Clara Wilson describes it as “a surrendering.” Wilson and two others from her native Lexington, Ky., who are supporters of presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, joined ISU graduate Jon Meier in New York City Oct. 31 to accompany him on his cross-country peace walk.

“I’ve never been political, or very active, really,” Wilson said. “But when I saw that [Meier] was doing something so courageous and with such purpose, I thought it couldn’t hurt to do as much as I could to help him.”

So Wilson threw some essentials into her backpack — wind suit, leg warmers, jacket, long-sleeved T-shirts and sneakers — and boarded a Greyhound bus to New York with fellow peace walkers Tom and Tak Schmitz. Wilson’s massage therapy job had slowed down, and she was looking for a change.

Her first night in New York was spent on the floor of a Methodist church. Her first dinner in New York was spent in the penthouse of two of the original creators of “Sesame Street,” Carole and Bruce Hart. Just half an hour after Wilson and Tom and Tak met up with Meier, they learned a couple had volunteered to make them dinner.

“[The Harts] didn’t even tell us who they were — one of their friends did,” Meier said.

Meier began his walk Oct. 17 in Portland, Maine, and plans to end it Feb. 29, 2004, in San Francisco, Calif. Meier has already walked through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania.

Amy Kaplan, an intern at Kucinich’s campaign headquarters in Cleveland, helps arrange shelter and food, but the walkers receive no direct financial support from the campaign. Kaplan and Meier speak on the phone every night, planning routes, events and interviews.

Meier said his goals for the walk are twofold. He wants to spark peace walks for Dennis Kucinich by inspiring people to meet their neighbors, go to low-income neighborhoods, talk about the presidential campaign and talk about peace. The walk is also about putting his life in the hands of others and building a sense of community between disconnected people.

“What [Meier] is doing — in a brave way — is publicly mixing politics and spirituality,” Kaplan said. “The biggest challenge is to incorporate spirituality into party politics, and vice versa.”

Spirituality and politics aside, the walkers know they face logistical, political and weather-driven challenges, such as walking against driving rain, campaigning for a candidate with little name recognition, finding a place to sleep and perhaps some professional challenges.

“I heard [Meier] gave up his GQ modeling career just to walk for peace,” Wilson joked.

Tom Schmitz sees walking as a way to spread progressive ideas that he doesn’t see in the popular media.

“Stuff that Nixon talked of was no more progressive than Dennis Kucinich,” Tom Schmitz said. “That’s how far right everything has spun.”

Tom Schmitz, 48, calls himself a “recovering consultant.” He and his son Tak, 14, moved back to the United States in 1999 after living in Japan for seven years, where Tom worked as a marketing consultant for machinery and automotive industries. He wasn’t looking for a change in his life, but when he heard about Jon’s walk, he vowed to join up if Tak Schmitz “bought into it without me trying to convince him.”

Skeptical at first, Tak decided he was tired of going to school in portable homes with torn textbooks, and a year on the road sounded pretty cool. Tom and Tak are home-schooling during the walk, which prompted Tom’s fatherly joke of Tak being a “road scholar.”

“Walking is a form of stability. You know you’re going to meet someone new each day that you’ll get close to,” Tom Schmitz said.

It’s the personal connections that drive the four walkers across the country, through housing projects and posh suburbs, no-stoplight towns and wintered farmland.

Meier spoke of his parents, who he says have been “trapped in a cycle of poverty” for the past five years, and of a woman he met in a converted motor-lodge low-income housing project in Newark, N.J., who worked three part-time jobs to keep food on the table for her three children.

She took yet another job to make ends meet, but the state took away two of her daughters because she spent too much time away from home.

“I talked to her for half an hour, and she was obviously emotionally distraught. She wasn’t a bad mother, but just trapped in the system of poverty,” Meier said. “She had every reason to give up, yet she volunteered to talk to people about Dennis Kucinich and his ideas for a living wage, universal health care and pre-kindergarten through college education.”