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Beaufort woman rides out against immigration
17,000 miles, a motorcycle and a message
Published Mon, Oct 16, 2006
By JEREMY HSIEH
The Beaufort Gazette

In May, Cindy Roddenberry put away her hospital scrubs for her new uniform: a bandana and T-shirt that read "STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, ASK ME HOW."

For 13 weeks this summer, Roddenberry and five others rode some 17,000 miles in a 54-city campaign, which included every continental state capital, to bring a message: stop illegal immigration.

As a Beaufort Memorial Hospital nurse, Roddenberry's role on the ride, dubbed the "21st Century Paul Revere Ride," was to talk about illegal immigration's effect on healthcare.

She offered testimony to what she sees as a trend of uninsured, including many illegal immigrants, not being turned away from hospital emergency rooms. If they can't pay out of pocket, the hospitals eat the cost, she said, which drives up paying patients' costs.

"It's a lose-lose situation," Roddenberry said.

She said she personally bears witness to the trend. She says adults who come into her hospital without Social Security numbers, no employment address and a list of emergency contacts with the same address as the patient are "dead giveaways" as illegal aliens, though her opinions don't interfere with her work.

"I take care of them," she said. "I don't tell them my views. That's why it's so hard, I'm a nurse -- my first reaction is to help people. God knows, it is such a burden."

It's not an issue that's easy for her to reconcile.

"I know there are really good people coming here, and they just really want to help their families ... A lot of them want a better life here."

But the way Roddenberry sees it, legal residents come first.

"I had to search myself real hard, and that's what I came up with."

And that's why she rode this summer.

Roddenberry, an avid biker since 1974, became involved online. Brothers Howard and Frosty Wooldridge had posted in a motorcycling discussion group asking strangers for places to sleep during their cross-country campaign. A few e-mails later, Roddenberry took a leave of absence from the hospital and signed up.

"It was the opportunity of a lifetime," she said. "I got to see every state in the country. But I had to go in knowing this wasn't a vacation."

She's for legal immigration, free speech, educating voters and building a border fence. She's against racism, amnesty for illegal immigrants and a policy that creates "anchor babies" -- giving the children of illegal immigrants citizen status.

The ride officially began in Denver on May 29, Memorial Day.

Beautiful places, hostile faces

Cruising down the Rocky Mountains in June with her ears pressurized from the altitude, all Roddenberry could hear was the purr of her Harley. With the air rushing past her and the bends of the highway lulling her side to side, it felt like flying.

But on Aug. 6, she was the target of a screaming sea of hostile protesters swelling over an arm-locked line of Boston's finest. In a desperate attempt to buy time and drive back the crowd, she threw her bike's throttle open to unleash her engine's hellish roar. One officer broke rank, and the heat could have made the bike explode, but at least she wouldn't hear the enraged mob's vicious protest.

Howard Wooldridge, the ride's coordinator, said there was usually "an overwhelmingly positive response" to the media blitzes he and his brother organized for their rallies at each stop. Local support ballooned their numbers but drew extremely ugly counterprotests at about 10 stops.

On the road, some drivers would read their T-shirts and honk in support while others would make obscene hand gestures.

The stop in Boston was the worst, Roddenberry said. It was a Sunday, and thousands of the city's college students had turned out on the Boston Common, screaming all manner of profanity, firing up bullhorns inches from her face and giving her the finger.

"I'm surprised we didn't get spit on," Roddenberry said. "It's hard to have people look at you with that much hatred, real hard to take."

The most painful and frustrating label for Roddenberry was "racist," which she insists is not applicable.

Wooldridge, a retired police officer, made it the policy of the riders not to engage the opposition, physically or verbally. He said no one was provoked to violence, though there were some close calls.

"My solace was to say, 'This is what makes our nation so great. We have free speech, we can assemble,'" Roddenberry said. "That's how I could put down all that ugliness. What a great nation we have."

The last stop was Washington, D.C., on Aug. 12. Roddenberry gave her last of hundreds of media interviews at the Marine Corps War Memorial and was back home Aug. 14. But Roddenberry wasn't back at work until Sept. 7. She just wasn't ready.

Back in Beaufort

Roddenberry took three weeks before going back to work. After riding a few hundred miles every day for weeks in 90- and 100-degree weather, she was mentally and physically drained. Two of the original seven riders had to drop out for fear of medical complications.

The constant numbness in her fingertips was gone, and so were the aches in her shoulders from muscling her ride around the country.

But for two weeks, a part of her just didn't bounce back to normal. Friends asked her if she'd had fun on the ride, and she didn't want to talk about it. She consulted a counselor friend, who said she was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

Even now, her eyes well up when she talks about the ride and the moral complexities of the immigration issue.

Roddenberry put on her T-shirt and bandana from the ride for the first time again on Oct. 2. She wasn't gearing up to go cross-country again, just across town to give kudos to the Beaufort County Council's Community Services and Public Safety Committee for working on an ordinance to address illegal immigration.

On the verge of tears, she asked the group, "What part of 'illegal' don't people understand?"

Contact Jeremy Hsieh at 986-5548 or jhsieh@beaufortgazette.com.