That evening I got out my camera and went for a walk. It was a 16mm Canon Scoopic, modified to work as a sync rig with my tape recorder, a late-model Nagra. The camera didn't have an interchangeable lens but it was light, easy to handle and went to work in a hurry. Originally all I had wanted to do on the trip west was shoot some simple film, the white clapboard faces of Mennonite farmers, the spare Kansans in their churchgoing clothes. But now my plans were a bit more ambitious, scaring me somewhat, at least in their unedited form. I clutched the handgrip, rested the camera on my right shoulder and walked through the quiet streets. Soon a small crowd was following me.

Remarkably the bench wasn't green. It was light blue and it faced the yellow bandstand. The playground area, off to the side, was even more cheery in color, perhaps to counterbalance the stark forbidding nature of much of the apparatus. I sat on the bench and watched a small girl sail a book of matches in a puddle below the water fountain. I waited and slowly they approached, six welcomers in two loosely joined teams of three. First came an old man and two old ladies; then a teen-age boy leading two men who looked as though they might have shared a watch or two on a tin can off Guadal (in the Warner Brothers forties) and talked about the body-and-fender shop they would open when they got back to the States. Of course it was the camera they were interested in, that postlinear conversation piece, and they gathered around me in stages, introducing themselves, asking questions, being exceedingly friendly, secretly preparing their outrage for the moment of my incivility. But I remained well-mannered throughout, a guest in sacred places.

The old man was Mr. Hutchins, who said he liked to be called either Mr. H or Hutch, the latter name being favored by his Florida cronies. The women were his wife and his sister, Flora and Veejean, and they appeared to be in their mid-sixties, beautiful, smiling and silent, a pair of lace curtains fixed in sunlight. Hutch had once owned an Argus that he'd sent away for. He said the whole works only cost him one hundred fifty dollars-camera, projector, tripod screen, camera case, roll of film. His footage of the Everglades had been shown to a packed house in the basement of the Methodist Church.

The other men were Glenn Yost and Owney Pine and the boy was Glenn Yost Jr., who preferred to be called Bud. It turned out that each group knew the other only by sight, living in different ends of town, having been collected here, as it were, by the sight of the camera, the boy's curiosity equal to the old man's.

"How much the camera cost?" Bud said.

"Twelve hundred and change."

That was good for a whistle from Mr. H.

"I might get a super 8 this summer," the boy said. "I'm hoping the Bolex 155. We have a club at school. So far I haven't done much because the equipment they have is pretty limited. But if I can get a Bolex, I'd go right out of my mind. What kind of diopter range that thing give you?"

His father stood behind him, reflective and gloomy, left eye jumping, head tilted far to one side, almost resting on his shoulder, and I was reminded of the ancient relief pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm standing on the mound waiting for the sign to be given, fingers knuckling along the seams of the ball, men on first and third and none out, nobody caring anywhere in the world. There was a young man with a guitar sitting on the edge of the bandstand.

Mr. Hutchins described himself, in no particular context, as a stickler for accuracy. He and the ladies said goodnight then, time to catch Bob Hope on TV, and we watched them walk past a huge skeletal flywheel and out into the street.

men with all sorts of insane technical data. Owney Pine finally put one of his fat white arms around the boy's head, muffling him in jest and holding him that way for a minute or so, a quality of mutual affection informing the little scene as the man quietly jostled and bumped, barely aware of the struggling boy, who, at an overgrown fifteen or sixteen, could not have been easy to hold.

"Plan to be here awhile?" Glenn said.

"A few days maybe. My camera seems interested in this place."

"Are you one of those people from the mass media?" Owney said, still keeping Bud from wriggling out.

"I'm an independent filmmaker. I'm scouting locales at the moment. How'd you like to be in the movies?"

"Sheee."

"You think about it," I said.

Bud cut in then with another question and Owney released him. We talked a bit longer. The young man eased down off the bandstand and headed toward us. He carried the guitar over his shoulder and dragged a knapsack along the ground behind him. He seemed a skinny broken kid in decomposing clothes, enormously happy about something. The others backed off slightly at his approach-an ethnologic retreat really, one that I sensed rather than actually witnessed.

"Hey, what's that? That an 8 or 16?"

"It's a Scoopíc 16. It's basically a news camera."

"I'm walking to California," he said.

He stood there, smiling, in ankle-high basketball sneakers. Glenn Yost said he and Bud had better be getting on home to have a look at the bloodworms. He said the boy dug up worms and sold them for bait. They were kept in large jars in the basement. He and Bud liked to look in on the worms every evening about sundown because that was the time the worms did most of their writhing and both father and son got a special kick out of seeing worms writhe, especially in masses. Glenn's left eye stuttered again. I couldn't be sure whether or not this was some local brand of double-reverse sophisticated humor. The boy's face was noncommittal and I thought they might be playing games with me, satirizing the outsider's conviction that smalltown life is a surrender to just such tiny deaths, worm-watching and Masonic handshakes. (Or were they trying to negate the serpent power of the longhair, distract him with worms while the townspeople put their torches to his guitar?) Owney Pine said he would tag along with them. The park lights came on.

"I started walking about three months ago," the young man said. "I started out from Washington, D.C., so it'll be almost a coast-to-coast walk. I've been trying to do it in a straight line, D.C. to Frisco, but I've strayed a little south. There's plenty of time to adjust, I guess."

"About two thousand miles. I'm Dave Bell. What's your name?"

"Richard Spector. Sometimes I have trouble remembering it. It seems so long ago that it meant anything."

He sat next to me, feet up on the bench and knees high as he huddled against his own legs. He was very frail and his hair covered much of his face. He looked directly at me when he spoke but with no implication of challenge in his eyes, no sense of ideologies about to clash, and I felt he had whittled these things out of his way, settling down to a position defined only by the length of each footsore day.

"People have been taking good care of me," he said. "They feed me and sometimes give me places to sleep. At first I get a lot of strange what-is-it looks. But when I tell them I'm walking to California, they get all caught up in the craziness of the thing. People are real great if you can get them off details and onto something crazy. They've really been taking tremendous care of me. I brought along all the savings I had, about seven hundred dollars in cash and traveler's checks, and in three months I've had to spend only about a hundred and fifty dollars for food and for sleeping in hotels whenever it was too cold at night for outdoor-type sleeping and I couldn't find anywhere else to stay."

"I don't want to sound discouraging, Richard, but you look awfully tired and run-down."

"You should have seen me before I left."

We both laughed and then he asked if he could handle the camera. I removed the lens hood for him and he took the camera and stood up, putting his eye to the rubber eyecup and then slowly covering the park in a virtuoso 36o-degree pan. I heard a car come to an abrupt stop and I turned and saw first a young woman's face at the window on the passenger side, and then the head and shoulders of a man about my age rising over the car's roof from the other side as he looked in our direction. Apparently satisfied that he had been right in stopping, he returned to the driver's seat, threw the car into reverse and quickly parked, tires marking the pavement. He got out, again looking our way, closing the door with a certain disdainful elan, and then came through the park entrance, looking now, it was clear, not at Richard or at me-a considerable relief-but at the camera in Richard's hands. The girl followed, quite slowly, a lissome blonde of twenty-five or so, in her quiet prime, pretty and tarrying and yet to be hurt, not at all in love. Richard extended the camera to me. The man's eyes followed it right into my hands.