Twenty years since her big ideals collided with a big snow

I'm raising a glass tonight to my Minnesota anniversary. It was 20 years ago that my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I moved to the North Star State from Michigan for no reason we could articulate - except that we figured a state that would elect Paul Wellstone must be pretty cool.

We were less than a year out of college, underemployed and searching for reasons to be optimistic. I kept coming back to the newly elected-senator from Minnesota: Working at my college newspaper, I'd watched his green bus campaign ad on the ancient TV in our basement newsroom and exulted, with my fellow college journalists, in his improbable victory. Maybe that was when I decided to go a few hundred miles west. I had no trouble convincing my restless boyfriend.

We drove from Detroit to St. Paul, bringing just clothes, books and the few hundred dollars we had between us. With no jobs lined up and only the sketchiest connections — my beloved uncle had lived here in the '70s; my second cousin, whom I barely knew, still did — we looked reckless and batty to friends and family. One concerned elder, prone to hyperbole, warned that we were bound to end up on welfare in a Minneapolis tenement.

When we arrived, the cash disappeared quickly; rent, security deposit and a few days' worth of food emptied our wallets. We slept on piles of coats because we had no money left for furniture. It's interesting to consider that in the years to come, every college grad — and college student — had a credit card, or several. If I'd had one then, I'd have bought a cheap futon immediately. But at that time, if you were 22 and out of money, you were 22 and out of money.

Our one-bedroom apartment was one of those 1930s units built for workers at the Ford plant. This was pre-Internet, pre-cell phones; we used the pay phone at the gas station next door to call our loved ones and let them know where we were.

And then the snow came. Just days after our arrival was the infamous Halloween blizzard of '91; my '82 Chevy Cavalier hatchback was literally buried on the street. Steve went looking for it in the disorienting snowscape and discovered that it had been plowed under; he found himself standing on its roof. Even if we'd wanted to pack up and head back home at that point, we couldn't have.

One of the first things I did after finding paid work was to show up at Sen. Wellstone's office and request a regular volunteer slot. It was a constituent service shift, taking calls about a vast range of issues and concerns. While most callers were pleasant and respectful, a few were not. Regardless, I felt good about the certainty that every single person on that phone was genuinely important to the senator. Seeing a public servant so clearly devoted to the people of his state — not just the ones who voted for him, but also those who detested him — affirmed the youthful idealism that had brought us here.

Few would disagree with me that the health of our democracy has sharply deteriorated since then. And like thousands of my fellow Minnesotans, I was crushed by Wellstone's death nine years ago. Yet I like to think I've retained at least a bit of that idealism, in spite of all that's happened in the past 20 years.

Lately, as we visit the Occupy Minnesota demonstration with our sons, I've felt surges of hopefulness that remind me of how I felt in 1991 — when war, cynicism and a lousy economy were no match for our new state, its people or its senator. We knew, deep down, what we were doing when we came here: As Wellstone once said (before his 2002 vote against authorizing the use of force in Iraq), "I'm not making a decision I don't believe in."

We're not quite the free spirits we were then. Two kids, three pets, work we enjoy and a circle of friends keep us rooted in Minneapolis. And I give thanks often for our home, for our beds; I have no particular desire to sleep on a pile of coats again.

But a large and growing number of adults and children in our adopted state don't have these things. That's one reason we'll be down at Government Plaza now and again, agitating in our polite middle-aged way, for fairness and economic justice. And why we're again pledging to stay true to the spirit — personified in the senator who so energized us 20 years ago — that brought us to the state we're still proud to call home.

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Susan Maas is a Minneapolis-based a freelance writer and editor.

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