Our
Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State is
Mary Losure's account of what happened to the anti-Highway 55
movement in the Nokomis neighborhood after those fucking hippies
moved in.
I
was sixteen and working at the Bridgeman's on Hiawatha next to the
old Walgreens location, which is next to the For Pet's Sake and the
Chinese restaurant, and on the other end from the Burger King and the
gas station. That Dairy Queen across from Minnehaha Falls is around
the corner. Jerry and Kathy, the couple who owned the Bridgeman's
franchise, were opposed to the 55 reroute. So was I, so were my
brother, my parents, the next door neighbors, the across-the-street
neighbors, and hundreds of other people who lived within a mile or
two of the 55 corridor. I remember a full past capacity meeting in
the Roosevelt High School auditorium: Then-mayor Sharon Sayles Belton
gave a little speech about "Light rail!" and everyone
cheered. The county planning commissioner came up to the microphone
and effectively said: "This has been on the books since the
'70s. Why are you complaining now?" Then the floor opened up
for public comment. People lined up, pro- and anti-reroute, and
alternated speaking at the microphone. They ran out of pro-reroute
people in twenty minutes. The neighborhood was solidly against the
reroute. A few weeks later, I was riding the bus from the U, and I
saw a dreadlocked dude walking across the grass, barefoot, in
Minnehaha Park. In November. An old lady next to me said, "There
are those protesters," and I knew then that the neighborhood had
lost because the anti-55 activism had been taken over by unwashed
youths who went shoeless to make a point about, presumably, The Man.
After that, community meetings stopped being something I went to with
my mom and my brother and started being something everyone read about
afterwards in the paper.
Our
Way or the Highway explains what
the protestors were doing wandering around Minnehaha Park for all
those months. Apparently, word about the reroute spread to someone
who told someone who told someone who was way out West and a veteran
of the anti-logging campaigns in Northern California and they and all
their friends showed up on Riverview Road, which is one of those
weird little roads where the river keeps Minneapolis from being a
perfect grid. Several houses on one side of Riverview Road were
already slated for demolition; the only hold-out was an older lady
named Carol Kratz. The other side of the street was not slated for
demolition and remained occupied by good Minneapolitans. Carol Kratz
welcomed the Earth First! activists and some tribally unaffiliated
Native Americans. They pitched tents and tipis in Carol's yard and
along the empty street, drumming and singing all night long and
peeing wherever they liked. The neighbors across the street were
trying to live their lives and raise their kids. The same neighbors
who had been turning up at public meetings for years, saying, "I
don't want to look out my front window and see a retaining wall!"
were calling their city council members and their legislators saying,
"Fine! Get rid of the hippies! We'll take the retaining wall!"
The
trouble with the 55 reroute, something that I didn't know until I
read the book, and something that the protestors never learned, was
that the battle against 55 had been raging for decades. Higway 55
was, on its first imaginings, going to be a major freeway like 94 and
35, ripping through neighborhoods, destroying hundreds of homes and
blocking the Nokomis neighborhood from the Mississippi. A couple
named Walter and Carola Bratt questioned it. They enjoined
neighbors, attended meetings, spoke to every alderman they could
find, volunteered on every committee and proposed a four-lane,
forty-mile-per-hour, ground level freeway with light rail, which is
what it remains to this day. Walter and Carola Bratt saved the city
from another massive freeway smashing its way through the
neighborhood and ruining everything, and then-Hennepin County
chairman Peter McLaughlin respected them as people who could stop a
freeway.
The
Earth First! camp was raided by police several times, partly for the
protestors safety. They had some legislative support until a
protestor shoved a vegan cream pie into a 65-year-old, pro-reroute
female state representative's face. Ms. Losure's book is
well-written and unbiased. She was a reporter for MPR during the 55
shenanigans, and knew many of the protestors well. She weaves an
interesting narrative, and fills it in with plenty of history. As we
all know, The Man won, as he often does. Honestly, 55 couldn't look
better, the green space over the tunnel is seamless and I don't
regret the reroute at all. However, it would have been nice to let
the neighborhood make the decision itself instead of having the
situation wrested from its hands by a bunch of barefoot, dreadlocked,
tree-sitters.
Juliet,
Naked is no High
Fidelity, but it's also no How
to be Good. Nick Hornby seems
to have his writing powers back, although he's never going to
recreate the success of his two brilliant masterworks. Juliet,
Naked is a quiet story about
British people and an American, who is, thankfully, not as bombastic
as British people usually make Americans out to be (see David Lodge).
Duncan is obsessed with a reclusive American rock musician to the
point of running a fan site. Annie lives with Duncan and works at
the local seaside museum. Tucker Crowe is the reclusive American
musician. Annie posts an article on Duncan's website and Tucker
e-mails her and says, "Watch out for the fan site weirdos,"
and they strike up a correspondence while Duncan and Annie's
relationship falls to pieces. Some great lines, like, regarding
Duncan, "“He
had never once felt itchy, in the way that two connecting pieces of a
jigsaw never felt itchy, as far as one could tell. If one were to
imagine, for the sake of argument, that jigsaw pieces had thoughts
and feelings, then it was possible to imagine them saying to
themselves, 'I'm going to stay here. Where else would I go?' And if
another jigsaw piece came along, offering its tabs and blanks
enticingly in an attempt to lure one of the pieces away, it would be
easy to resist temptation. 'Look,' the object of the seducer's
admiration would say. 'You're a bit of telephone box, and I'm the
face of Mary, Queen of Scots. We just wouldn't look right together.'
And that would be that.” Juliet,
Naked
is a good, solid minor novel hampered only by a weak ending, when
there's a strong tension between what the reader expects to happen
and the characters' lack of interest in doing that thing, leading to
foreplay by googling health concerns. Nothing sexy. The actors on
the audiobook are all perfect in their roles.
And
Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, author of Half
the Sky,
the best hiking novel so far, is kicking ass on religious topics in
Leap of Faith.
Abby stabs her classmate and is forced to go to Catholic school.
This book has so much going on but none of it feels forced. The
themes are so seamlessly woven that Brubaker Bradley moves from
space-cadet parents to love of theater to sexual harassment to
Catholic sacraments to friends' parents to anger and makes it all a
whole. Leap of Faith is
a nearly exquisite novel about the mundane. I'm feeling a little
rushed on the Brubaker Bradley, as Leap
of Faith
came into work right after I reserved her other book, For
Freedom,
at the library, so I should read two books by the same author one
after the other, which I don't really like doing, if I want to get
For Freedom
back to the library in a sensible amount of time.
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