SOMETIMES IT takes entire decades to travel from Baltimore to Washington. The journey is a state of mind. Three weeks before his swearing-in as a congressman, former Baltimore County Executive C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger remembered last week the moment his journey began. It was the weekend the whole world changed.

Thirty-nine autumns ago, as the murdered John F. Kennedy lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, Ruppersberger, his parents, Peggy and Al, and his brother Reese, went to Washington and stood in line all night to pay their respects.

The night was cold, and the line seemed to stretch forever. An entire nation mourned. "Five or six hours, we stood in line," Ruppersberger recalls. "We were all in such a state of shock, and we just wanted to say our goodbyes. This was the man who'd inspired the whole country. Especially young people, like us."

Kennedy started his presidency when Ruppersberger was at City College, where he played football and lacrosse and was elected sergeant-at-arms of his graduating class.

"Not exactly a big political deal," he laughed. "Sergeant-at-arms, that was the big jock position. I had a very low political consciousness."

Two months after entering the University of Maryland, College Park, Ruppersberger heard the news from Dallas that still seems impossible to believe: Kennedy's assassination.

In the sorrow that swept the country, thousands lined up that weekend to walk past Kennedy's closed coffin inside the Capitol.

"It's one of those things that stays with you for a lifetime," Ruppersberger said. "I mean, we thought so much of him. We were young, and he represented energy and enthusiasm and change. We'd watched him through the Cuban missile crisis, and the civil rights movement, and he was somebody who seemed to care, who reached out to all walks of life.

"When you graduated City College, that was the thing that stuck with you. We didn't care what your background was, we were all learning to work things out. Those issues touched us, and he seemed to represent them."

When they walked back into the cold that night, it was already about 11 o'clock.

The Ruppersbergers looked across the Mall toward the Washington Monument. The whole city seemed lighted up.

Then, Ruppersberger says, he turned to his mother.

"One of these days," he told her, "I'm gonna come to Congress."

It was the dawning of a political consciousness, and the moment lingered through the years in Ruppersberger family lore.

And there was another defining moment.

In November 1975, when Ruppersberger was a Baltimore County prosecutor, he drove home from work along Dulaney Valley Road and had an accident that nearly took his life.

The cause is still unclear. Ruppersberger thinks he may have swerved to avoid a deer. He says there were dozens of deer accidents on the same stretch of road that year.

He wound up at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, his body a mass of broken bones.

He was hospitalized for a month, and doctors weren't certain he would live. He needed 47 pints of blood.

When he was released, he asked Shock Trauma's founder, Dr. R Adams Cowley, how he could possibly repay him for saving his life.

"Run for office," Cowley said, almost off-handedly. "We need all the help we can get in Annapolis."

The two moments -- Kennedy in the Rotunda, and Cowley connecting life and death with politics -- were Ruppersberger's inspirations.

It took another Kennedy -- Kathleen Kennedy Townsend -- to propel his congressional bid last summer. Townsend, raising huge campaign money, seemed to have the Democratic nomination locked up. Party elders told Ruppersberger to forget about running for governor and to look elsewhere.

Frankly, he didn't want to. After running a county, he wanted to run the state.

When anybody mentioned Congress, he said he didn't want to be one of 435 people. Then he started talking to people in Washington. One, Rep. Steny Hoyer, helped change his mind.

"He told me how this was the focal point of the whole world," Ruppersberger said. "How they dealt with issues that change the country. It was pretty moving. I wound up telling him about what I'd told my mother that night after Kennedy's assassination."

Hoyer understood. He was part of a whole generation whose idealism was sparked by Kennedy.

Four decades after Kennedy's death, a journey continues.