Doris Haddock

THE most trying part came in the Mojave desert of California. The royal blue sky glared down on the grey brittlebush, and the heat was searing. Great trucks thundered past, showering her with grit, and a fierce wind got up that made her stagger. The worst of it was that her hat (the straw garden hat that had belonged to her dear friend Elizabeth) was whipped off and trundled through the cacti, where it splintered and broke.

She was walking across America, an odd occupation for a woman of 89. But Doris Haddock became annoyed if anyone made much of that. Her large, dark eyes narrowed then, and her gentle voice acquired an edge. And indeed there was little in that voice, with its perfectly enunciated consonants (drilled into her at Emerson College of Oratory, when she had girlish dreams of going on the stage) to suggest she was much over 30. The adventurer in her heart, she liked to say—stressing that she meant the adventurer in everyone's heart—was always young. She could still ski, hump a 25-pound pack, sleep on the ground and get up again; and though she went to bed choking on dust in Arizona, or nursing bleeding feet from frozen shoes in West Virginia, the next day she made sure she walked her set ten miles, until all 3,200 had been done. Friends in Louisville made a stout oak staff for her; she slung it over her shoulder, and hung her banner from it.

The question she wanted people to ask was not how (on earth!), but why. Why, in January 1999, had she set off to walk from Pasadena to Washington, DC? The simple answer was that she had lost patience with the power of big money in American politics. Congressmen and senators did not listen to people like her—people who spent years nursing their husbands when they had Alzheimer's, or who battled to keep the interstate out of their small towns, in her case Dublin, New Hampshire. They patted little old ladies like her patronisingly on the head, while taking wads of money from special interests for whom they would do favours later. Mrs Haddock was sick of it. She had organised petitions for campaign-finance reform, with tens of thousands of signatures, but got nowhere. So it was sneakers on, and hit the road.

She also had more complex reasons which, with her usual candour, she didn't hide. Six years after her Jim's death she had entered a “dry and blank space” where she seemed to need to do something, but couldn't tell what. She had always hiked the mountains as a respite from order forms and insoles at the Bee Bee shoe company in Manchester, where she worked for 20 years and became the manager's assistant. And once in 1960 (though she found politics a “total bore” in those days) she and Jim had taken the Volkswagen as far as Alaska to protest against hydrogen-bomb testing near an Inuit village. Almost 40 years later, oddly enough, as she was being driven through Florida by her son, also Jim, she spotted in the wilderness, miles from anywhere, an old man in a mackintosh holding a paper bag and walking with a cane. He seemed, to her, some ghost or remnant of her protest days, calling to her to get walking.

Hat and feather

Her trudge was not just a lone yell for honesty and equality in politics, though that was the burden of the bright yellow banner flying over her bent back. She also treated it as a meditation, a way to represent love in the world in the style of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, from whose pulpit in Little Rock she preached when she got there. Her notion was to walk as a pilgrim, fasting until she was given food and not resting until she found shelter. She never had to worry on either score. She was taken in all along the route, serenaded on street corners, welcomed by marching bands and protected on the highways by squads of hefty bikers. Nature was her only opponent, choking with reeds her path to the Pecos river, sending down blizzards that forced her to take to skis in the Appalachians, and playing up her arthritis—though she made nothing of that.

Boldly in February 2000 she marched into Washington and up the Capitol steps, announcing that she was going to sweep the scoundrels away as thoroughly as leaves from her porch. The scoundrels stayed, shameless as ever. The election that November proved the most costly to date. In advance of the next one Mrs Haddock—now universally known as “Granny D”, for Doris, with her straw hat brightly banded and stuck with a turkey feather—tried a new tack of driving in a gaudy bus through swing states, persuading women to register to vote. She was then 93; she covered 22,000 miles. The next year she ran against Judd Gregg, pretty creditably, on small donations only, for the Senate.

Public funding of campaigns, her great hope, got no closer. And even McCain-Feingold, the most solid reform of recent years, passed not long after her triumphant walk, was gutted by the Supreme Court in January this year. The ruling came just before Mrs Haddock's 100th birthday, when anyone else might have been content to sit smiling beside the cake. But she was busy drafting a letter to the nine “bastards”, threatening to go in “breathtaking new directions” to defend democracy, and casting more than one longing thought towards the sneakers in her closet, and the desert's mischievous wind.