By STARLA POINTER

of the News-Register

Matt Wiggins is taking a semester off from Boston College to travel the country with three buddies, meeting others from their generation and making new friends of all ages.

"Instead of being in school, I'm traveling around getting educated," he said. "Really educated."

Wiggins and three recent Dartmouth University graduates - Adam White, Ben Grinnell and Matt Heineman - left Acadia, Maine, five weeks ago. They pointed their 30-foot motorhome west and logged more than 7,300 highly educational miles before reaching McMinnville on Wednesday.

Calling their road trip the Young Americans Project, they have been recording their impressions and profiling 18- to 25-year-olds they meet along the way. They plan to end up with a video and a book.

Right now, their work-in-progress appears on a website at www.tyap.com.

"Totally young Americans," Grinnell said, jokingly explaining the website acronym.

The "T" actually stands for "the," but "totally" would fit equally well. The quartet aims to explore the entire range of people in its age group.

"It's really about the people we're meeting, rather than about us," Wiggins said.

They don't consider themselves completely representative of their generation. White, middle-class and well-educated, they make up only one small segment of a diverse population linked by the single characteristic of age.

But they are eager to meet, talk with and write about a broad cross-section of people in their generation.

"Sometimes I feel really, really young, like when I'm talking to a guy who already has a 4-year-old kid," Grinnell said. "But sometimes I talk to someone who's into playing video games and nothing else, and I feel really mature."

Such diversity is apparent all across the country, he and his friends said. But they have noticed strong geographical differences that cause people in one region to be more alike than their counterparts in another.

For instance, when they stopped in a small town in South Dakota, almost everyone they met - their age or any age - was a conservative Republican avidly supportive of President George W. Bush. That was no surprise, they said, since the local economy was dependent on agriculture and oil.

In Portland, on the other hand, the travelers witnessed a protest rally where people of all ages were vehemently opposing the administration. Police on horseback were trying to keep order, and several people were being taken into custody.

"That was eye-opening," Heineman said.

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Heineman and Wiggins are high school friends from Darien, Conn. Grinnell is from Vista, N.Y. White is from Damariscotta, Maine, but his mother's family hails from Oregon.

While Grinnell, White and Heineman are traveling the country with Wiggins, most of their fellow Dartmouth grads are breaking in new suits as they start climbing the corporate ladder.

Most consider careers in investment banking or other high-paid fields the inevitable next step along a path they have been following for years.

"If you're not making upward progress, you're not achieving," White said, summing up how many of his friends think.

Those friends don't quite understand the idea of crossing the country without a rigid timeline or agenda. "We took the road less traveled," White said, "and they're jealous."

As they've traveled the country, the young men have often been hosted by relatives and friends. In McMinnville, their guide was Roger Heller, a longtime friend of Grinnell's father.

Heller pointed them in the direction of Noah's Wine Bar, took them to dinner at KamZ and fed them breakfast at the Wild Wood CafZ. The visitors also stopped by Valley Skate Surf Snow and hung out with owner Ehren McGhehey.

"This looks like an ideal small town," Wiggins said. "It's vibrant."

Heineman and White also spent some time at Cameron Winery in Dundee doing a profile on Jimmy Maresh.

"He's almost a stereotype buster," White said. "He makes fine wines and he hangs out doing freestyle rap."

They traveled to Eugene on Friday to do a profile on a young man who works with the HIV alliance, then returned to Portland.

"Portland is great. It has a very strong identity," Heineman said. "Everyone there was so incredibly nice and welcoming. We met fascinating people."

A fundraising concert will benefit the Young Americans Project this evening.

The Portland event, featuring three bands and a DJ, is open to anyone 21 and over. It will be held at the Gotham Building Tavern, 2240 N. Interstate Ave.

Admission is $15. Proceeds will go toward refueling the project's vehicle.

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The four friends are taking turns keeping a journal on their website. While the profiles are other people's stories, their blogs provide personal impressions of what they see and do.

In a recent blog entry, titled "Every Generation Has Its Jerks," White talks about the range of people they met during a stop at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"Most places we go, people are nice. Strangers around the country have cooked meals for us, given us directions, let us use their showers, and even bought us books just because they thought we'd like them (we probably will) and because they thought we might not have enough money to buy books (we don't).

"But sometimes people are not nice, and we have to talk about those people too.

"We have to talk about people who aren't nice ... because this project is supposed to be unbiased and unfiltered, or at least as unbiased and as unfiltered as possible. We set out to present a fair portrait of our generation , even if sometimes the picture isn't pretty.

"So if we left out the derelicts, the junkies, and the poopheads, we wouldn't be fair and balanced."

In addition to the blogs and profiles, the website includes their itinerary, their photos and a suggestion box. Readers can send e-mail suggesting places they should visit or people they should interview.

So far, about half a million people have checked out the website.

Some have offered comments, both positive and negative. "It's good to hear both," Grinnell said.

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