Allegiance to Winds and Waters: Bicycling the Political Divides of the United States

"This moving and intelligent book succeeds as odyssey, as a showcase for its author's skills as an historian, and as a loving appreciation of a land, if not a nation."?David Roediger, professor of American studies at the University of Kansas and author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History People break rules about talking to strangers when they meet someone with luggage on their bike. That's what a laid-off Minneapolis professor found when she bicycled the perimeter of the United States seeking to understand the forces moving the country toward less equity, sustainability, and understanding. In this bicycle memoir, Anne Winkler-Morey collects the stories of hundreds of "trail angels" who shared their hearts and homes.
Over her fourteen-month bicycle tour, Winkler-Morey discovers US regions that are unique in beauty and culture, but similar in the things that ail them: historical trauma, unsustainable economies, inequities, and crippling fears of people outside their borders. Winkler-Morey is not physically or mentally prepared for the ride. She wants to leave behind the emotional baggage of a past trauma, but even as she rides, it climbs into her panniers. As Winkler-Morey finds ways to talk back to her ghosts, she discovers that national allegiance is manufactured, but attachment to place is real.
Despite the inequality, nativism, and rural-urban divisions that threaten the United States .