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Starting Over
BY ANNE WINKLER-MOREY
 It is that time of year when blooming crab apples produce amnesia, causing us to forget our February pledge: “Not one more winter.” We overdose on flowers, noses painted with the tell-tale signs of pollen. Like new mothers giddy with baby-love, we forget the pain we have just experienced and start thinking we could handle another one—another baby, another year in Minnesota.
This year, however, I will not be swayed by pink blossoms. I’m taking my job hunt and my life-partner, David, on the road for 14 months of pedaling.
As an adult I have always wanted to escape, to be where I am not known and can observe. When I moved to Minneapolis at age 17, dropping out of a college I wasn’t ready for, I began to fantasize about taking a raft down the Mississippi.
Every day I crossed the 10th Avenue bridge on my way to work, whispering, “ East of the Mississippi … west of the Mississippi.” I paused in the middle to watch barges filled with iron ore and wood headed for New Orleans and imagined myself on them.
It was 1976, the “Me decade,” and though we told ourselves we were “OK,” we secretly believed we could be better; and some of us migrated to Minneapolis to seek that better life. Well-off white addicts escaping drug-filled lives in New York City for the Hazelden cure; working class African Americans escaping gang and drug controlled neighborhoods in Chicago; Ojibwe and Dakota leaving the reservation for the city; and Whites escaping dying rural communities. All came in hope of finding new opportunities in the River cities.
While I did not fit into one of these categories I was part of the mix of people who came—not planning to stay—and found ourselves still here, year after year, even though in February we swore this would be our last winter.
In the mid 1970s Minneapolis was ground zero in the national fight against addiction. Twelve-step groups focused on Alcohol, Drugs, Food, Sex, Anger and Relationships. One day at a time, there was no end to the problems, personal and global, that an Anonymous program couldn’t solve, as long as we came to meetings and kept believing we could be cured.
One of the mantras of the twelve-step program is that the geographical cure does not exist. One can’t escape addiction or any other internal demon or character flaw by physically moving.
Well, after 35 years of buckling down, I’m going to test that theory. I’m looking for a cure for the lost-my-job-don’t-know–who-I-am blues, and I’m hoping to find it riding a bicycle out of town.
I am, in the old-fashioned sense, seeking my fortune. David has a career as a Minneapolis school social worker waiting for him when he gets home. I have been underemployed for a year and I am looking for a way to make a living. Since I’m not Maria Shriver I can’t just ask the world for ideas, and poof, start my own reality show. I do however, plan on interviewing people as we travel, to find out how real people cope with and organize around issues of social injustice that they experience on a personal level.
Because … here is the deal: Without work I don’t know who I am! My radical activist experiences and my study of Latin American history with its focus on historical materialism left me slow to understand that the need to know who you are is right up there, behind water, food and shelter. My students have taught me this valuable lesson. Watching young people—especially those who are first-generation college students, not white, working class—figure out who they are, in a context not created for them, is much more edifying than reading an academic text on “identity.” I learned that figuring out who they are was as essential to their college success as finding money for tuition and balancing the responsibilities of work, school, family and community.
It is that community piece that continues to fascinate me. I moved often as a child and perhaps that has something to do with why I’m uncomfortable joining a group or pledging my allegiance to one community. Minneapolis is a city large enough to allow some internal escapes from one circle to another, but not vast enough to swallow my desire for the geographical cure.
So I’m going to put my overweight, over-fifty, achy-breakey body on a bicycle for 14 months and go where not fitting in is part of the experience and not a character flaw.
I invite you to join me. Each month I will write an essay on our travels and the people we meet and what I am learning.
Anne Winkler–Morey is an historian currently working as part time community faculty at Metro State University. She and her partner David have a website where you can track their progress on a daily basis. You can also learn about the local and national organizations they are raising money for and how you can donate:
http://www.facebook.-com/l/4bd507-9st0MaP25W-Dayno-ShoA/https%3A%2-F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fpedalstory%2Fhome
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