Allegiance to Winds and Waters: Bicycling the Political Divides of the United States
In 2011 and 2012, I bicycled around the perimeter of the United States, 12,000 miles. I was 53 when I began and 54 when I finished the circle fourteen months later. I was not an athlete. I was a laid off college instructor, a woman suffering from PTSD, a political activist and social movement scholar. I was in the kind of mental hole that can leave one with a foolish kind of nothing-to-lose courage.
When I began the trip, I knew about the magic of the loaded bike. On much shorter trips, I discovered that when people see a person with a bike with luggage on it, they break rules about talking with strangers. After they ask about your adventure, they are likely to tell you intimate things about their lives. Maybe it is the stranger-on-the-plane syndrome: they know you won’t be in town long, so they feel free to tell you, their secrets. Or maybe they can see that you are pursuing a dream and it makes them want to share theirs. For an introvert, the loaded bicycle is a vehicle for conversation.
I began the trip determined to record the stories I heard on the road. I thought I would use a tape recorder. What I didn’t realize is most of encounters on the road are serendipity. So instead of recording or taking notes I worked on focusing on the person as much as I could. When I was in a place where I could use my cheap laptop, I wrote what I could remember.
When I began the trip, I wanted to leave my life behind. But of course, that was impossible. Internal struggles followed me. My nearly daily writing ritual forced me to deal with job loss, relationship issues (my husband rode with me), and ghosts of my past I would have preferred to leave at home.
I came home with 650 pages of blogs and notes. It was not a book. I needed to contemplate and study to find the meaning of the sum of the whole. I needed through-lines, I needed focus, I needed to get rid of 400 pages of text and add 100. I needed to learn how to write a book.
Photo credit: Eric Mueller
It took me ten years, taking writing classes, engaging readers, being willing to part with treasured stories, exploring themes that arose from the stories I collected. I have a Ph.D. in history and had been teaching college for fifteen years before I embarked on the trip. I knew how to write for an academic audience. I didn’t know how to write a book that, in the words of my Kirkus Review, “keeps you turning pages.” Luckily, I live in a town that has a fantastic center for writers. At the Loft Literary Center, I took courses on memoir writing, travel writing, writing humor, writing through trauma with a light touch, historical writing.
Allegiance to Winds and Waters: Bicycling the Political Divides of the United States, (published by Wise Ink, March 22, 2022, available for pre-order) is a personal/political memoir; a poignant, funny travel book, and a treatise on inequality in the United States. It is a personal story of one woman’s struggle, a collection of fascinating stories about people met on the road, and a political book that asks questions pertinent to the United States in 2022.
Why don’t we have the just sustainable communities that over 90% of us want? What is keeping us from building the local economies and communal structures that would sustain us?
How do we rectify the past and present — the conquest, genocide, enslavement, the factory farms, mass incarceration, boarding schools, the gentrification, and homelessness; the collective structural trauma that holds us back? How do we elevate our legacies of resistance that would restore our faith in what we humans can do?
On an individual level, how do we face the ghosts that hold us back from being part of the solution? On a planetary level, how do we overcome nationalisms that thwart our ability to address threats to our existence as species—drought, climate change, pandemics, global inequalities?
Allegiance to Winds and Waters will be published March 22, 2022. Order your advanced copies here.
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Anne Winkler-Morey has a Ph.D. in history and has been an activist scholar studying and participating in social movements since the 1980s. Her book, Allegiance to Winds and Waters: Bicycling the Political Divides of the United States is forthcoming April 2022. Her Minneapolis Interview Project is a collection of one hundred oral histories with a social justice lens. She is currently planning her next bicycle adventure and her next book.
Category: How To and Tips, On Writing
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