Printer Friendly

Email This Page

Leave a Comment

Read Comments (1)

Sign Up!

I walk myself backward on my hands, planting my butt in the wet sand every 3 feet. My heels trailing leave strange elongated tracks, as if some exotic mammal had dragged itself to the edge of the salt water inlet and back. I suppose right now I could fit that very description, with my spandex bike shorts, skinny legs and diving booties; my skin scorched red-brown by the sheen of the Cape Cod sun on the water. When I’ve gone about twenty feet or so, I remove the braided line from my clenched teeth and pull the plastic kayak the same distance along the tracks I’ve just laid until it’s nearly touching my toes. Then I repeat the whole process—plop, plop, plop, pull—until I’m finally at the foot of the stairway that traverses the sea wall leading to the higher ground of our resort. It’s more civilized up there; green manicured lawn, chaise lounges and Weber grills off the back porches of the water-facing units. But until I get my gear back up there I’m stuck down in the flats—my boat, my paddle, the muck, a few hermit crabs and squirting clams and me: the paraplegic who insisted on going paddling at low tide.

It’s ten steps up, and my wheelchair sits up at the top where I left it nearly 2 hours ago. My ass is covered with sand, but I figure by the time I’ve raked it over these stairs most of it will have rubbed off. I reach back with my arms, weary from my spirited jaunt around Green Harbor and plop myself up on the first step. A group stares at me from across the inlet—residents, a whole mob of them, down the way from their eponymous Cape houses, slouching in sand chairs at the end of the dock, sipping beers. Luckily a whole 50 yard expanse of water separates me from them; I don’t have to worry about any of them trying to help me, lest my experiment in crippled brawn be tainted by outside influences. Come to think of it, my sixteen year old step son is just one cell phone call away, in our room playing x-Box; he’d be happy to come on down and grab the boat in one fell swoop (Gee, I guess he didn’t run out too badly after all), but I will have none of it. They genuinely want to help—God bless them all, every one of them—and I know it would be a lot easier for me if they did, but I must know: If I were the last man left on earth, paralyzed from the chest down, could I still do this?

I reach the landing, somewhat intact, slightly less salty. I transfer back into my wheelchair, once again conventionally disabled, and I haul on the rope; the kayak (an Old Town Otter, for those who must know, but believe me, you wouldn’t want to drag around anything fancier) springs up all ten steps like a trusty old friend. Now to pull it across the grass another fifty feet to our back porch and I’m done. The old Czechoslovakian lady in the unit next door sitting with her handkerchief around her head stares for a few seconds, but is gone from sight by the time I reach my destination—I can’t say as I blame her. You wouldn’t see anything like this in the Old Country.

It must be excruciating to watch: what has taken me about 30 minutes from water’s edge to hotel room could have easily been accomplished in a mere two or three minutes by someone able-bodied. Yet to me the time it takes is irrelevant; the fact that I can do it at all is a triumph. And once again: the dilemma—I’ve written about it many times right here, as well as in my memoir, They Call Me Wheels—triumph is in the eye of the beholder:

ME: Did you see that? It only took me half an hour to haul my own kayak up through the mud flats and back to the room. Boo-yah!

THEY: My god, that poor man. It took him a whole half an hour to haul that kayak up through the mud flats to the room. How horrible!

Yet, still I must own the mud flat—my mud flat! Stay away…

Why is that?

Perhaps coping with a permanent disability is not only knowing your limitations but also knowing your abilities as well. We need not search very hard to find the limitations; they are a near constant daily reminder: steep hills, high curbs, inaccessible bathrooms—the list goes on and on. Abilities on the other hand, aren’t always so obvious, and if you’re like me, you’ll only truly discover them by literally dropping yourself into an otherwise impossible situation, where the only alternative is to get yourself back out again.

Prior accomplishments can only go so far, for as we get older and one step further away from our youth we have to reset the clock from time to time, put ourselves back out on the wire, where for even just a short time, we might not be 100% sure we’ll succeed. If we should it only multiplies the feeling of accomplishment exponentially.

Vacation’s over and I’m back in my cubicle now, just that mild mannered guy in the wheelchair, and no one around me would ever suspect that just a day or two ago I was riding the wake of the Hyannis Ferry in a 10 foot kayak, something not many people—disabled or not—would ever find themselves doing. But I know I was there; I have the mud in my drawers to prove it. And that’s enough for me—at least for the time being.