By Nancy Huddleston, Editor

Bryan Peterson doesn’t like crowds and doesn’t consider himself politically active.

But last week he got on a bus bound for Washington, D.C. with 50 people he’d never met to add his voice to concerns being raised about health care and the national debt at a Tea Party rally. He boarded one of three buses that left Eden Prairie at about 10 a.m. Nov. 4 and returned Nov. 6. He stayed a total of five hours in the nation’s capital, slept on a bus and didn’t take a shower for the entire time.

“I was completely out of my element,” he said. “But I’m concerned about the debt … in fact I’m scared to death of it … and it feels like our nation is on the verge of collapse.”

As a small business owner -- Peterson and his wife own Cal’s Market and Garden Center on the corner of county roads 42 and 27 -- he is also concerned about the impact of the proposed reforms to health care on small businesses. “There’s going to be a lot of burden placed on small business owners, especially in the second through fifth years of the bill,” he said.

Peterson said he’s been watching the health care debate along with everyone else for the past few months. But when he started yelling at the TV about it last week, he told his wife he was going to D.C. to the rally.

“At first I thought I’d ride my motorcycle, then figured that wouldn’t work,” he said.

So he called the Savage Chamber of Commerce trying to get a carpool together of other interested business owners. No one contacted him, so he began asking friends and other business owners and then contacted Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office where he found out about the buses leaving Eden Prairie.

He said the three buses carried a mix of people – grandparents, business owners and many others and he got to know a lot of people on his bus.

“It’s nice that we live in a country where we can still do this – to show up and have our voices heard,” Peterson said.

When they got off the bus, many people from the group fanned out to visit elected officials in the House. Peterson said he was in line to see House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not to “change her mind, but to have her hear our voices.”

But a couple of radical protesters were in line in front of his group and they tried to see Pelosi with fake blood splattered on their clothing. “They got arrested right in front of us,” Peterson said, saying security shut down visitors to Pelosi’s office after the incident.

Even though the House of Representatives voted Nov. 7 to pass the health care reform bill, Peterson said he hopes he made a difference. “It was good to be with like-minded people,” he said.

The health care bill passed by the House is almost 2,000 pages long, Peterson said, so he’d like to work with others to take sections and read it to figure out what’s included. “There were 110 attachments – other bills that no one knows what they are,” he said.

Even though he hates crowds and doesn’t consider himself an extrovert, Peterson said it felt good to take part in the process.

Nancy Huddleston can be reached at editor@savagepacer.com.