STONEWALK 2004: BOSTON, MA to NEW YORK, NY.

August 9th
By Daniel Jones

August 9 – We began the morning at Mike and Barbara’s. Mike got up before Barbara and wondered if she would be able to get out of bed after her 5 mile involvement in pulling the stone. Bruce Nichols also stayed at Mike and Barbara’s. He got us all folding cranes for the caisson for Nagasaki day. I was thinking about the decisions to drop these bombs and the controversy 9 years ago at the Smithsonian in which a well researched, scholarly exhibit was changed to satisfy vets and the US government that did not want to question the decisions nor look at the impact of the atomic blasts. I remember getting into arguments with my father, a Depression era child, who was 14 when the war ended. It stated a really good dialogue between us and he challenged me to show him sources and documents of the time. What struck me the most when responding to his challenge was an Albert Camus essay. Camus conceded, for the sake of argument, that maybe the US did not know how devastating the blast would be when it dropped the first atomic bomb. But we could not use that argument three days later. We knew exactly what we were doing, whom we were targeting, and what the immediate impact would be for hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Today we began our journey with an almost two mile climb. Our impassioned plea for help last night resulted in five people from Brooklyn, including Paulette and Phyllis, our co-hosts last night, meeting us at the caisson. Some walkers from the area from 1999 have been following us on the web and joined us this morning, too. Eric from Vets for Peace returned after a couple days at home. Bob and Dave got an early jump in the deep end of stonewalk as we pulled out of Minnie’s and up the hill. A reporter and photographer from the Willimantic paper began a four day trek with us. They are running a series in their paper as we travel through the distribution area. Another affiliate of Central New England Cable hop-scotched us for the morning. Thank you, Nabil, for being the intermediary between a town’s selectman and the walk. I don’t know why Rusty (the selectman) would not call me or have one of his staff contact me, but he insisted on going through Nabil who was given the unfortunate job of telling Rusty we would not pull 4 miles out of our way to meet Rusty, then changing time as we hustled up the hill and down the road to our eventual location. This gave me the deeper experience of what I already know: that there are so many people who have done and are doing incredible amounts of work to make stonewalk work.

Mike, who decided to take the day off work to be our support vehicle, showed up with two cases of water and two cases of Gatorade. He followed us on the busy route 6 with our safety banner hanging from his truck. Two of Lewis’ alumni joined us riding on the caisson today. We also met Howie, a friend of the Peace Abbey, who despite recent hip replacement surgery and a broken rib, piloted the caisson. We made it to meet Rusty at a little hot dog stand called the Dog House on Route 6. They serve great Portobello mushroom burgers, sweet potato fries, and good ice cream. As I write this, I am ruing my decision yesterday not to eat lunch there. I guess next stonewalk, I’ll have to stop. Even Lewis ate lunch, without a church matriarch forcing him! We pulled out again and made it to Willimantic. It was a long, tiring afternoon, especially the last 45 minutes. But we pulled into the Willimantic food co-op and will leave from there the 10th. We ended the day with a couple beers at the old post office that is now a microbrewery in Willimantic.

I have been looking forward to Bob joining us and now he is here. I joked during the planning calls that Bob is the most physically fit person in PT so he should be part of the core team (now with all the media attention, we need the very photogenic Andrew Rice to be hear). But since beginning this stonewalk, I have often thought of the losses of PT members that I know about. I have had the privilege of hearing Bob speak about Bobby several times. Touching the stone in the morning, I thought of these times, and today, I was blessed to touch the stone with Bob. I am also looking forward to getting to know Dave, who not only recently joined PT, but has jumped into stonewalk for a week. I will say again that Cat and I are the fortunate ones who get to pull the stone everyday. It might be hard to understand. But Loretta and Andrea have changed their summer plans to join us Friday for the rest of the walk, so it shouldn’t be hard to believe.