John Nirenberg, of Brattleboro, Vt., leaves the State House on his walk to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday morning.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

Word came Wednesday morning of a man walking through Rhode Island on his way to Washington, D.C., to seek the impeachment of the president.

There was a time when the prospect of meeting a man on this kind of mission would have raised some disturbing images — an Uncle Sam on Rollerblades perhaps — and caused a hurried search for something else to do.

But not this time. Not in the final days of the seventh year of George W. Bush.

So I gladly hoofed it up to the State House where I met John Nirenberg, who was not dressed as Uncle Sam. He was dressed for the cold with a camera around his neck and a sign in his hands. The sign called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney and urged a call to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to let the process begin.

Nirenberg, 60, a professor from Brattleboro, Vt., has run the full range of Bush-fed emotion — anger, frustration, fear, disappointment. But he admits he has been mostly a bystander in the political process. He voted, wrote letters, but never put himself out there with a message before. But he says he finds the battering the Constitution is taking heartbreaking. The decision to walk from Faneuil Hall in Boston to Pelosi’s office in Washington shows, he says, “a citizen awakened from complacency.”

There was not a lot of planning. He did not line up a network of supporters or a schedule of rallies along the route. He and a friend, Frank Enneking, whom he met two months ago around common concerns, just started walking toward Pelosi’s office five days ago. They plan to cover 15 miles a day and stick to Route 1 as much as possible, with a side trip through the middle of Manhattan and a stop at the Statue of Liberty.

But word of the walk has spread through groups such as the New England Impeachment Coalition. Already, people have joined the two men to walk a few miles and lend support. Tonight, at the Westminster Unitarian Church in East Greenwich, there will be a potluck supper, and music, to support the walk.

“There are few enough people who lay it all on the line,” said David Floyd of Wakefield, who joined Nirenberg on the walk in North Kingstown yesterday. “John is one of those people.”

Floyd said he is part of a network of organizations in the Northeast that have been pushing impeachment for more than a year. When he heard of Nirenberg through that network, he knew he had to put in some miles with him.

“Even in this most cynical time, a person can still make a difference with dramatic action,” said Floyd.

So two guys, one 60 and the other 72, are heading down the road to try to wake up the government and get years of foul deeds dragged into the light of official hearings. It is a long shot. Some will surely call it crackpot. But it is democracy in its most basic form — the citizen walking to the doors of power and asking to be heard. In some ways, it is like Cindy Sheehan’s campout in Crawford, Texas, where she, too, went to be heard.

Nirenberg has not called ahead. He does hot have a scheduled appointment with Pelosi when he gets to Washington next month. But he is counting on the Cindy Sheehan example to serve him well.

“Yes, I think I will get to see Pelosi,” he said as he prepared to move on from the State House on Wednesday. “I don’t think she’ll want the kind of embarrassment Cindy Sheehan caused the president. I’ll just keep coming back until she has a few minutes.”

If you want to know more about a man walking to Washington, go to marchinmyname.org.

bkerr@projo.com