By Laura Hancock In the dark, five men exit an old school bus at the edge of the parking lot of Riverton's Wal-Mart. They walk past empty parking spaces, then past rows of cars. They are illuminated by light thrown off store signs and tall streetlamps. "How long do you think you have?" asks a filmmaker who's following them. "Three minutes," answers Bruce Wilkinson, the leader of the crew. Inside the store, Charlie Hardy, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, and his stepson, Carlos Acosta, walk briskly past the greeting cards, past the jewelry, past the pharmacy, past the auto care center and into the sporting goods section. There, they find a man chatting on his cellphone. Without a word, they hand him a leaflet. "Do you or a loved one earn less than $15/hour? Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi voted AGAINST raising the minimum wage this year. Despite making six digits, benefits, and flying in private jets. NOT VOTING IS A VOTE FOR ENZI! Does Senator Enzi care about Wyoming workers? RUN WITH Charlie Hardy for US Senate!" The man on the cellphone has no time to react. Hardy and Acosta move on to a worker by the coolers, a couple looking at bikes, an employee in sewing. They keep walking. They have to deal out as many leaflets as possible before they get kicked out. They've been removed before, at a Wal-Mart in Casper. It's after 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night in September, and the back of the store is almost empty except for a few people strolling down the aisles, shopping baskets in hand. Country music plays on the loudspeaker. It's been two minutes, and Hardy and Acosta have so far managed to elude security. They head toward the pharmacy and the area near the registers, which are busier. Hardy hands a leaflet to a woman bent over a shopping cart. She glances it over. "Oh, my God, I don't even make $10," she says. "And I work hard." Hardy and Acosta exit the store. Back in the parking lot, they give the leaflets to people rolling carts to their cars. "I really don't have anything against Wal-Mart," says Hardy, 75, a former Catholic priest who spent decades of his life among the poor in Venezuela. "But I do kind of weep for all of the merchants who no longer exist because of big discount stores." One by one, the other men, who are young, long-haired and part of Hardy's volunteer campaign staff, filter from the store -- unaccompanied by security personnel: Wilkinson, 34, the campaign manager; Felix Agulto, 24; and Nick Brashear, 33. Brashear is the bus driver. He exits after almost nine minutes. They've distributed 131 leaflets in all -- a success but also a letdown. "You can't get thrown out of anywhere anymore," Brashear says. "What fun is that?" Enzi, a Republican, has been in the U.S. Senate since 1997. In each election since then, he's easily defeated Democratic challengers. He has all the advantages: money, experience, connections and an R in front of his name in the one of the nation's reddest states. The bus Hardy travels the state in a 1970 Crown school bus that's painted blue, white, green and black and has Washington plates and Wyoming Cowboys plate holders. The bus belongs to Wilkinson, the campaign manager, who is from Olympia, Washington, and purchased it about a year ago for social justice activism road trips, such as the Tear Down the Walls National Gathering, held most recently in Tucson, Arizona. Wilkinson and some friends replaced the seats. They built tables of plywood and bunks of mahogany they found in a Dumpster at a hardwood business. It seats about 30. It sleeps six comfortably. The bus is cluttered with luggage, bedding, power chords, campaign signs and a printer Wilkinson purchased at a thrift store for $5. The bus is where the campaign travels, works, socializes, sleeps and spends time asking each other questions, such as "Whose cellphone is this?" and "Has anyone seen my sleeping bag?" Sprawled across the dashboard are rocks, sage, feathers, alien figures and a potted plant with an American flag. Brashear is always in the driver's seat. Wilkinson, Brashear and Agulto are friends from back home. Wilkinson has known Hardy for six years, beginning with a college trip he took to Caracas. He'd read Hardy's 2007 book, "Cowboy in Caracas: A North American's Memoir of Venezuela's Democratic Revolution." Last year, Hardy told Wilkinson he was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate. They kept in touch. When Hardy began campaigning, Wilkinson offered the bus. Wilkinson had the time. He'd been laid off from his nonprofit grass-roots organizing job. These days, the bus runs at a maximum speed of 62 mph. After arriving in July, Wilkinson crawled beneath the bus each time they stopped to refill a leaky power steering reservoir. In search of someone who could help, Wilkinson called a friend in Olympia who told him about a mechanic in Douglas. "Sissy crawled under the bus in his blouse and tutu and fixed everything," he says, referring to Sissy Goodwin, a well-known Casper College instructor who dresses as a woman. Goodwin fixed the bus for free, Wilkinson says, saving the campaign hundreds of dollars. That's a good thing because money is tight. As a principle, Hardy refuses contributions from all political action committees -- including labor, corporations and ideological groups. Thus far, they've been offered money by only one PAC, Hardy says. "We basically accept donations from warm-blooded people," Wilkinson says. Enzi has raised at least $3.5 million for the campaign cycle that began in 2013, vastly outraising and outspending his challengers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks contributions. Hardy has raised about $53,000. Hardy says he has additionally borrowed about $50,000, most of which he used at the beginning of the campaign, before contributions began coming in. If he wins, he'll pay it back. If he does not win, he'll ask friends for help, he says. Charlie Hardy sleeps on the floor of the bus. On the sixth night of an 18-day tour of Wyoming, he went to bed in a T-shirt and shorts, since he runs first thing each morning. After wishing everyone goodnight, he broke into a lullaby, one of many spontaneous musical moments for Hardy on the trail. "O wie wohl ist mir am Abend," he crooned, a tune his Austrian immigrant parents sang to him, "Oh, how lovely is the evening." In 1985, after serving two decades as a priest in the Cowboy State, including as superintendent of Catholic schools, Hardy was loaned by the Diocese of Cheyenne to the Maryknolls, a Catholic religious order known for missionary work. Most of that time, he lived in a pressed fiberboard house with a tin roof in a Caracas barrio. He returned to Wyoming in 1993, he says, and ministered at St. Anthony's in Casper. He was writing an old friend in Caracas, the mother of Acosta, whom he had known for eight years through her work running a school for poor children. After nine months in Casper, he decided to leave the priesthood, return to South America and marry her. They divorced six years later but remain friends. Hardy helped raise Acosta and returned to the United States in 2011, when Acosta was 18, Hardy says. Acosta, now 21, is in Wyoming, helping with the campaign. Ask Hardy a question. He'll answer by telling stories, perhaps a lingering trait from preaching. Riverton resident Omid Rahimi wants to know Hardy's position on abortion. "I talked to a woman who said she had a child," he starts. "She was expecting a second child, and the doctor said she may not live. She decided to go ahead and give birth to the other child, but she said, "I could understand the decision of a woman who would say I cannot abandon this 2-year-old or 3-year-old and would have come to a different decision.'" He continues. "I'm not in favor of abortion; I don't think anyone is in favor of abortion," he says. "But I would never judge any woman who has had an abortion. It is a very difficult decision. "Bishop Hubert Newell said to me many years ago, 'We men should thank God every day that we do not have to make the decisions that women make in their lives.' As a man, I think men should talk to men about male responsibility and stop shouting at women about what they should do with their lives. It's a very, very difficult decision." So how does that translate on the floor of the U.S. Senate? "If someone were to ask me to vote in the Senate, I think I would stand up and ask all the men to refrain from voting and let the women in the Senate decide that issue," he says. Modest means Before the bus, Hardy planned to travel around the state by car and sleep at friends' houses. Sometimes Hardy drives his car to events, a $1,400 Dodge his sister bought a few years ago. She can't drive it for medical reasons. The car bounced among family members until it reached Hardy. Money has never been a priority for Hardy, who wears a jacket he received from participating in a course by the Lander-based National Outdoor Leadership School 40 years ago. He never earned much income in his first career as a priest or second career performing drug tests on oil tank and cargo ship workers in Venezuela. These days, he receives $400 a month in Social Security and $80 in an annuity. He lives in the Cheyenne house where he was born, and a sister provides him food. If elected, Hardy will earn $174,000 a year, a figure he describes as excessive. In the Senate, he would earn more in six years than he likely has earned if the wages of his adult life were summed together, he says. Shopkeeper Rhonda Slack is kneeling on the ground, working on a buffalo hide, when Hardy enters her shop, Western Supply Saddles Tack and Custom Chaps, about five hours before he visited Wal-Mart. Slack's store is on Main Street in Riverton and smells of leather from the saddles and chaps that are on display. "Are you registered to vote?" Hardy asks. "I am," Slack says. "What is something you'd like to see changed in Washington?" he asks. Slack laughs and says "the president." "Only the president?" Hardy asks. Slack nods her head. "I don't like some of the things he's done in office," she says. "I don't like the health care reform act." Hardy supports universal health care, meaning everyone would be provided health care, paid by the government and through taxes. "The largest reason for people going bankrupt in the United States today is hospital costs," he says. "Well, officially, for your information, I am at poverty level," she says. "Owning a business in Wyoming, I'm what they consider poverty level. But I would rather do what I have done in the last several years than be dependent on the government or have my government tell me I have to do something. That is not what the United States was built on." When Hardy realizes there will not be a meeting of the minds, he thanks Slack for her time, admires her store and leaves. Slack later says she will vote for Enzi. She's happy with the job he's done. Hardy is confident Slack does not represent the average Wyoming voter. "People are upset about government," he said. "But what they're really upset about is the people running the government. You just have to look at the voting records of the people back there. We're hopeful." Nice guy Hardy knows people think he's a nice guy who has no chance of winning. Hardy responds by telling a story. In February 1989, Venezuela was in turmoil with hyperinflation. People were looting in Caracas. Armed soldiers stormed the barrio where he lived to keep order. They enforced a 6 p.m. curfew by shooting violators, he said. One night after curfew, a neighbor somehow made it to Hardy's house, desperate for someone to take her dying sister to the hospital. Hardy had access to a Jeep but didn't want to risk their lives traveling on the streets after curfew. He told the woman to find a soldier to help. Having found no soldier, she returned later, pleading with Hardy again, he said. Hardy relented. Since he normally didn't wear a collar or black shirt, he improvised with materials in his house and created priestly attire. They created a white flag from a pillowcase and broomstick. Scared for his life and the lives of those in the car, he drove them through the empty streets of Caracas to the hospital. They arrived safely, unbothered by soldiers. "What I'm saying is, 'Charlie's a nice guy; nice guys don't win,'" he said, referring to the words of his critics. "Charlie's been in some pretty tough situations, and it's for those people who are in those tough situations that Charlie has the guts to say, 'I'm going to run for the U.S. Senate.'"

By Kaelyn Forde As his volunteers began to stir, descending from bunk beds and grabbing towels and soap, Charlie Hardy double-knotted the laces of his black sneakers. He turned his deeply lined face toward the sun hanging low next to Casper Mountain and surveyed the dozen or so antelope grazing in the campground around him. "Isn't this just wonderful?" he said, and took off alongside Interstate 25, jogging 3 miles, as he has every morning for the past three decades. Hardy, 75, isn't Wyoming's average candidate for the U.S. Senate. A former Roman Catholic priest who once ministered in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas, Venezuela, and lived in a cardboard and tin shack, he is a Cheyenne native running a grass-roots campaign without corporate or PAC donations. His opponent is Republican incumbent Mike Enzi, one of the Senate's most successful fundraisers. Hardy left the priesthood in 1994 to marry Susana Gonzalez, the mother of his stepson, Carlos, in Venezuela. Though the couple divorced six years later, Hardy said they remain friends. "I think I am alive today because I started running 30 years ago," he said with a smile, veering slightly toward the campground's P.O. boxes to check the headlines of The Casper Star-Tribune for news of the last debate. "It's a time for reflection about what happened the day before and the day ahead. I carry with me all the time a little tape recorder, and when I have an idea, I blurt it into the tape recorder. A lot of my ideas come while I am running." He said the idea to run for political office came to him after a 10-day retreat in which he took a vow of silence, sharing his reflections only with a priest friend for an hour per day. "At the end of it, I thought, "My health is still good,' and so I asked myself, "How could I make the best contribution to humanity? And what responsibility did I feel?'" Hardy said. After that, he said, he and 100 volunteers went door to door gathering some of the 3,746 signatures he needed to get on the ballot as an independent for the state's sole House seat. "We in Wyoming are the most politically powerful people in the United States," said Hardy. "We have two senators and a representative, and we are a small number of people, so we can get in and meet with them." Hardy fell a few hundred signatures short of getting on the ballot in 2012. But the idea stuck, and he won the Senate primary on Aug. 19 this year to become the state's Democratic candidate. It was never going to be easy, he said. Wyoming is overwhelmingly Republican, and Enzi was re-elected in 2008 with a robust 75.8 percent of the vote. "The last Democratic candidate to challenge Enzi, Chris Rothfuss, told me, "Charlie, three minutes after the polls closed, they called it for Enzi. So if you can last longer than three minutes, that's something,'" Hardy said. Hardy's watch beeped, and he circled back to the bus, carefully placing his running shoes under a J.C. Penney garment bag hung on the edge of the bunk beds. Inside was a blue blazer, pressed and ready to be paired with his uniform of Wrangler jeans and checked shirt for a candidate meet-and-greet that night 144 miles away in Sheridan. "Wouldn't it just be incredible if we win?" he said as he gathered a white towel and bottle of Pert shampoo and headed toward the campground bathroom to shower. Afterward, he took his place at the picnic table next to the bus, where his five campaign volunteers -- including his stepson, Carlos, 21 -- were typing and tweeting away on laptops hooked up to the bus' massive engine via an orange extension cord. "I think the fundraiser went well last night," campaign manager Bruce Wilkinson told the small team. "So we are going to do some canvassing at Casper College today, and then we have some folks to meet and a newspaper interview in downtown Buffalo, and then we have the 7 p.m. Chamber of Commerce event in Sheridan. So in total, 288 miles today." And with that, they were off on another day of Hardy's campaign. The blue and green 1970 Crown school bus with "Run with Charlie" campaign posters stuck to its sides belched as it merged onto the interstate. Wilkinson, 34, sat in the front seat, typing furiously into the omnipresent iPhone usually stuck in the front pocket of his tweed jacket. A Kentucky native with long blond hair and a thick beard, he left his job as a grass-roots organizer with the Alliance for Global Justice to run Hardy's campaign out of the school bus, which he bought in Olympia, Washington, for $3,000. "I come from a horse-racing family, and you know, that is one of the only kinds of gambling where you can beat the odds with skill. So running this campaign is a lot like that," Wilkinson said as his housemate and friend Nick Brashear navigated the wide-open highway between Casper and Buffalo. Wyoming's sparse countryside spilled out around them, vast landscapes interrupted only by the occasional grazing cow or antelope or horse. "We are running a sort of asymmetrical campaign, a guerrilla campaign against a much bigger opponent," Wilkinson added. And the campaign is looking very asymmetrical. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted Oct. 1, showed Hardy at 17 percent to Enzi's 75 percent. According to reporting of Federal Election Commission filings by the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog, Enzi raised more than $3 million from Jan. 1, 2013, through July 30, 2014, and spent $2.6 million in the same period. The Enzi campaign has raised $13.16 for each of Wyoming's 264,069 registered voters -- among the most in the nation. Hardy, on the other hand, has received $53,057 and spent $51,010 from May 2, 2013, through June 30, 2014. He said he also spent about $50,000 of his own money. Wilkinson said the campaign budget averages $130 per day: $50 for gas and $80 for food. Most nights, the team sleeps in the bus at a campground, but sometimes one of Hardy's supporters offers a spare bedroom. "We only stayed in a hotel once, the first night," Wilkinson said. "And Charlie insisted on giving us the beds and sleeping on the floor. There is no question that Charlie is a humble guy. He will do anything for anyone. He's never lived high on the hog -- he lived in a cardboard shack for eight years -- but he has a lot of pride." Aside from Hardy, two other candidates are in the race against Enzi, who has served as senator for the past 18 years. Curt Gottshall, an independent, and Joseph Porambo, a libertarian, have also eschewed corporate and PAC donations and have made campaign finance reform a central issue in their campaigns. According to FEC filings, Gottshall has raised $6,415 and spent $6,315 from Sept. 4, 2013 through July 30, 2014. He said he has spent about $43,000 of his own money on the race. Porambo said he is running entirely on the salary he makes as a cook in an assisted-living facility. "We have politicians who are taking PAC money, and that money is power. People who give vast amounts of money to any political candidate want something in return," Porambo told Al Jazeera America after an Oct. 13 debate at Wyoming's PBS station. "They are giving a million dollars because when I get to Washington, they want me to do something for them." According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Enzi's biggest donors are DaVita HealthCare Partners, Gilead Sciences, Murray Energy, Peabody Energy and the Making Business Excel PAC, which is affiliated with him, according to ProPublica. According to FEC filings, the treasurer of the Making Business Excel PAC is Enzi's former daughter-in-law, Danielle Enzi. The firm that has received the most money from the PAC is a fundraising company run by Danielle Enzi. Enzi Strategies has received $45,411 from the PAC this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Such a practice is not illegal under U.S. law. "There is nothing illegal about [Danielle fundraising for me]. She is one of the best fundraisers in America. And she was a fundraiser before she married my son, and she is a fundraiser after my son and she got divorced," Mike Enzi said as he left the Oct. 13 debate. Danielle Enzi did not respond to Al Jazeera America's request for comment. Mike Enzi has denied that his son, Brad Enzi, benefited from his position as a U.S. senator when the company he worked for received almost $10 million from the Department of Energy to develop the Two Elk Energy Park in the northeastern part of the state. Mike Enzi said he voted against the carbon-capture project, which never got off the ground. Mike Enzi declined to be interviewed for this article, but his campaign manager, Kristin Walker, wrote in an email, "Sen. Enzi voted against the stimulus bill which included funding Two Elk later qualified for. He thought the stimulus bill would do little to improve our economy but a lot in terms of driving up our debt. And he was right. Any suggestions that his family benefited inappropriately from stimulus funding have long been dismissed." But both Hardy and Gottshall have criticized the project on the campaign trail. "Sen. Enzi said he votes against these things, but he has so much influence in the Senate. He's pulling in 85 percent of the vote. He can easily tell his friends to vote for it, pull himself out, vote against it and have plausible deniability," Gottshall said. "The only way to correct the system is to create nepotism laws, and say, "Look, if the situation comes up that federal funds are hitting family members, one of you has to quit.' Period. That's it," he added. Enzi said in his closing statement during the debate that being the incumbent means taking the majority of the hits. "I now know what it is like to get a lot of criticism without rebuttal," Enzi said. "When you are the sole source of the shotgun, it's a little bit difficult. Yes, you can criticize some of my votes. I have had over 5,000 votes, and I would say that even my wife wouldn't agree with all 5,000 of those votes. But I can explain every one of those votes." After the debate, Hardy and his campaign headed back to Casper to fundraise at a low-slung house with a peace pole in its front yard. Inside, a crowd of mostly middle-aged women had gathered to hear him speak. They arranged themselves around a kitchen table filled with homemade baked goods. A few younger voters pressing for the legalization of medical marijuana milled about on the deck outside. Enzi's campaign, according to Walker, is focused on curbing government spending, promoting the coal industry, protecting Second Amendment rights and repealing the Affordable Care Act. Hardy's platform, on the other hand, is left of center. He supports abortion rights, equal pay for women, raising the minimum wage and legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. Wyoming has the second-largest gender wage gap in the nation, according to the American Association of University Women. Women in Wyoming working full time earn an average of 69 cents for every dollar earned by men. "I grew up with four sisters," Hardy told the small crowd, smiling behind his wire-rimmed glasses. "So if I didn't support women's rights, I was certainly going to hear about it." After his talk, a cereal bowl was passed around, and several people dropped checks inside. A crisp $100 bill sat on the top as the hostess wrapped the leftover cookies for Hardy's volunteers. "Let's suspend our disbelief for a minute here," Wilkinson told the remaining attendees. "We have all seen the polls. But we are going to see a lot of special things here in the next couple of weeks." Jane Ifland, a Casper resident, said she wasn't concerned about the polls. "Frankly, whether Charlie wins or not, it seems really important for me to state as clearly as I possibly can that Mike Enzi doesn't represent me, it's not what I want from my government and that I do want a kind of heart-centered policymaking that Charlie proposes," she said. Night fell, and Hardy and his volunteers piled into the bus, stopping briefly to shine a stage light with his campaign slogan stenciled on it onto Casper's mostly deserted downtown. Back at the campground, Wilkinson unfurled two mattress pads and laid them gently on the floor of the bus. Hardy undressed and pulled his sleeping bag all the way over his head, a practice he said is leftover from when he had to protect himself from rats in the Venezuelan barrio he once called home. His stepson kissed him on the forehead as he folded his glasses. "The only thing I know about Nov. 5 is that my life will be totally changed, no matter what the results are," Hardy said. "I may sleep all day long on Nov. 5. I may be a senator-elect. I don't know. But it will be a totally different day than what this past year has been."