Berniacs' long strange trip ends up in Philly...sort of

They say news travels fast. But a cynic might have wondered Sunday whether word that Sen. Bernie Sanders has ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Hillary Clinton ever reached the far corners of Washington state, about 3,000 miles from the Wells Fargo Center.

How else to explain this craziness - a wired and tired 42-year-old Shanda Masta, cigarette dangling from her fire-engine-red nails, telling the story of how she and 21 complete strangers all met up Thursday morning at Seattle's Safeco Field and then drove 70 hours nonstop in four vans and a tricked-out RV called "The Berniemobile." They took turns driving and sleeping upright, their moral compass set on Philadelphia.

It sounded like the lost verse of C.W. McCall's 1970s classic pop song "Convoy," with everything except the "11 long-haired friends of Jesus on a chartreuse microbus." They ditched one of the vans when it couldn't clear a mountain pass in Montana, survived a thunderous hellstorm in Indiana, occasionally posted requests for more donations on GoFundMe and squabbled nonstop about when to stop and where.

And yet her tale had to be true; Masta was leaning against the flagship of their "Journey for Bernie" fleet, a big white Town and Country minivan with Washington plates and "#NeverHillary" in big greasepaint across the back. Along with "#See You In Philly."

But this wasn't Philly. This was Parvin State Park in Pittsgrove Township, Salem County - a lush lakeside oasis surrounded by cornfields and blueberry stands, now baking in 97-degree heat and a good 45 minutes from Center City.

Welcome to Bernstock, deep in the woods of South Jersey. Parvin is just one of the meeting hot spots for this Aquarian exposition of thousands of Sanders fanatics who've invaded the region in bumper-sticker-plastered vans, tents and sleeping bags jammed in the back.

Nothing has kept this multitude of Berniacs from swarming the Democratic National Convention - not the record heat, not yesterday's surprising news that their longtime nemesis Debbie Wasserman Schultz is out as Democratic Party chair, nor the fact that Sanders himself will be - presumably - saying nice things about Clinton on Monday night.

"Our voices need to be heard - this country clearly chose Bernie Sanders. . . . We clearly did," Masta told me Sunday, as a dozen kids frolicked on the lakeside beach behind us. A resident of tiny Sequim, Wash., near the Cascade mountains, she believes the Vermont senator was robbed of the nomination and she'll be marching all week in Philly to spread that word.

Over just a few hours on a scorching Sunday, before the first pounding of the DNC gavel, Philadelphia saw arguably more protesters than the entire week of Republican festivities in Cleveland that resulted in the nomination of Donald Trump, who all but pledged an authoritarian regime to restore "law and order" in America.

Trump's Nixonian policies should be anathema to progressives - but they didn't go to Ohio. They came here. They came to fight the devil - in their opinion - that they know in Clinton, and also to sit at the right hand of the one politician they love and respect: Sanders.

The chattering classes had assumed that the Left would chill out after Sanders' endorsement, Trump's alarming rhetoric, and a more liberal Democratic Party platform - not to mention Sunday's sacking of the widely disliked Wasserman Schultz. To the contrary, Clinton's selection of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate - viewed by ultraliberals as an apostate on financial regulations and Big Coal - and the leaked emails suggesting Wasserman Schultz's DNC was biased against Bernie have stoked fresh rage.

Sunday morning, before I dashed out to South Jersey's Bernstock (I was worried that the New Jersey Turnpike would be closed, man, with a lot of freaks ... Baby Boomers will get that), I hit up a news conference with the Bernie Delegates Network, claiming to represent about one-quarter of the delegates on the floor of the Wells Fargo Center.

Norman Solomon, a Sander delegate from northern California and the network's national coordinator, lashed out at Kaine as another Democratic "corporatist" and said some Sanders' delegates were looking at how to stage a divisive floor fight over his veep nomination. He declared that the pick showed Clinton's "dismissive contempt for the progressive wing of the party."

Philadelphia was supposed to be Hillary's big week, but the streets on Sunday were teeming with rank-and-file Sanders supporters talking about a delegate walkout - maybe after the nomination vote, maybe even during her acceptance speech on Thursday night. Some pushed the fantasy that their mere presence and news of the DNC email fiasco could somehow, someway even cause the rabidly pro-Clinton superdelegates to flip and hand Bernie the nomination.

Evan Duke, a Seattle-based political activist who caravanned east with Masta's group, said he's a veteran of protests such as the pitched 1999 battle over a World Trade Organization, and now he's come to Philadelphia to show young Sanders voters not to give up hope.

"They've been even insulted by the lackadaisical-ness of their generation," said Duke, 43, who wore a bandanna around his neck and a T-shirt that read "Bernie [Bleeping] Sanders" in a mock Pabst Blue Ribbon emblem. "Suddenly they come forward and I feel that we, as older activists and protesters, need to teach them how to be activists and protesters."

Indeed, Duke - who was also a leader of Occupy Seattle - spoke of the bucolic Parvin State Park as if it were a revolutionary hideaway in the style of Fidel and Che up in the mountains. "My plan here is we'd have a place to organize outside of the city and be safe," he told me.

On the other side of Lake Parvin, in the thick woods, six young millennials - four women in flowing peasant dresses or cutoffs, two guys in psychedelic shorts or T-shirts - huddled around their red van with the scrawled message: "I Water You, You Water Me; We Grow Together."

"Very, very peaceful" is how Kyle Kunar, a 25-year-old commercial roofer from Toledo, Ohio, described Saturday night at the campground, where about half the vehicles carried Bernie stickers or messages, and a Guy Fawkes mask hung from a pole.

He and his new friends had joined a pro-Bernie caravan in Columbus. Two 19-year-olds from the Ohio capital, Madison Dixon and Ciara Owens, said their boss at a coffee shop wouldn't give them the days off - so they both quit to come here. "You gotta prioritize," Dixon said.

Ironically, the six Ohioans had held no interest in protesting Trump's nomination in their home state. "We wanted to avoid Trump supporters," said Kunar, citing the violence they'd seen at the Republican's rallies on TV.

Despite Trump's unvarnished appeals to racism and xenophobia, the hard core Bernie supporters have instead been worked into a tizzy over Clinton, and nothing will divert them from that preprogrammed route.

"Hillary is the bigger threat - not that we'd ever support Trump - most of us never would," Masta said. "But she's a war hawk, a proven war hawk."

"She has more blood on her hands than all the candidates combined!" Duke added.

A short time later, their white van and the "Journey for Bernie" was back on to the road, headed into Philly and another protest. What a long, strange trip this week is going to be.

bunchw@phillynews.com

215-854-2957 @Will_Bunch

Blog: ph.ly/Attytood.com