Ken Carroll has been traveling on foot for 146 days, but he doesn’t show it. His bright-red thermal shirt is clean, and his auburn hair pulled back into a neat ponytail beneath his cowboy hat. A hand-painted message on the hood of his backpack readswww.peacewalker.org,with a miniature flag flying out of the top of his pack bearing a picture of the globe.

Carroll left his home in San Diego on April 30, 2003, and recently walked through Missouri, the seventh state on the trail of his Peace Walk, an eight-month cross-country trek to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where he hopes to join others in his demand for world peace.

“We need to get beyond this mentality where we ask ourselves, ‘what’s good for me and mine?’ and turn to the goal of leaving a world worth inheriting for our children,” said Carroll.

Eighteen supporters joined him for the first three miles of his walk, though he has been on his own ever since.

Standing beside a row of cornfields along Highway 40, just outside of Highland, Illinois, Carroll looked fit and in good spirits.

“It was up in the triple digits until I got to Kansas. Now it’s been getting a little cooler, which makes walking easier, but it’s chilly at night, too” he said.

Carroll said he suffered from heat stroke and severe heart palpitations on a particularly scorching day in Arizona.

“I ran up a hill too fast, and the heat got to me,” said Carroll. “I fell down, and I was dying out there on the desert floor, my legs and arms flopping like a fish.”

He recovered, and has been healthy ever since, despite sleeping in a tent on most nights for more than four months.

“I get a hotel when I can afford it, but I’ve been mostly keeping my money for food,” he said.

Back home in San Diego, his partner Michele Little, who is president of Unite In Peace, the organization sponsoring Carroll’s project, said that “Kenny” contacts her regularly from the road.

“He calls me to let me know that he’s safe and in a hotel,” said Little. “So when I don’t hear from him, I know he’s not in one. At the beginning, he was in hotels a lot, but now, more times than not, he sleeps outside, because his funds are pretty much depleted. I can’t send him money, because we don’t know where’s going to be.”

Carroll left with very little cash, and now relies in great part on the generosity of people he meets along the road, both for money and food. That often means eating less than he needs. Little explained that he has lost at least 40 pounds since he left.

“A couple of people have invited him for huge meals,” she said. “But he’s lost so much weight that he can’t even eat it all.”

This generosity has taken other forms.

“I was walking along a highway in Texas, and a trucker drove by me,” said Carroll. “He saw me on the road, and then stopped and turned around, just to give [his cowboy hat] to me. I guess he figured I really needed it.”

Little said that Carroll hoped to receive donations through a post office box that he set up in San Diego, but so far has only received two checks, both over four months ago.

She said that for Carroll, an unaffiliated pastor and the author of “Remembrance of New Beginnings,” the decision to undertake his Peace Walk was spontaneous.

“I think he’s been touched by God, and God said ‘walk,’ so he did,” said Little.

Carroll is vague about what he will do once he arrives in New York City.

“Wouldn’t it be great if a million people in New York City all honked their car horns at the same time,” said Carroll. “”Don’t you think that would force world leaders at the U.N. to pay attention? I think it would.”

Little thinks Carroll should focus more on spreading his message by taking a return walk, drawing on the people he met along the way, rather than expecting a big event in New York.

“I don’t know if even he knows [what he'll do when he gets to New York City],” said Little. “I think he’s expecting New York City to open up, and millions of people are going to walk across the bridge with him, and he’ll walk right into the United Nations and speak his mind. Who knows what he’ll do. Maybe he’ll just fly back.”

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