Walking Is Extraordinary. I Don’t Want to Give It Up.

Yet as much as I understand my friend’s wisdom — the joy that can be found in acceptance, in embracing limitations, and in exceeding or transcending the expectations that most people hold about disabled people — I can’t let go of my sense of wonder and excitement at the human ability to walk.

Years ago when I first contemplated a book, I wrote to my editor to tell him excitedly about my observation that there had been 100 million views of the IMAX film “To Fly!” Perhaps I could expose people to an equally wondrous endeavor, “To Walk.” Infants and infants’ parents view it that way, I wrote. The injured and recovered who rise out of wheelchairs do. Walking is extraordinary to the researchers who’ve spent careers studying the complex human biomechanics (and still don’t understand it) and to the evolutionary scientists who have also yet to satisfy themselves with why man rose upright when his ancient ancestors did not. They describe man’s first steps — the byproduct of anatomical mutations in the skull, spine and femur — as the most singular event in human history. I was constructing the book’s arc and building to its assumed endpoint, walking again.

But I am a hard case. The only wheelchair I possess I saved for my mother, now 90 and wisely thinking ahead. I went home with it when I was discharged from the hospital five years ago, and eventually I stuffed it in my barn, well out of my sight. The rest of my early assistive tools — crutches, raised toilet seat, walker — are gone. The tale of them strewn rudely across my driveway in a fit of rebellion was an early signature moment in my recovery.

My best friend, Brad, the one who rushed to my address five winters ago to build my wheelchair ramp so I could be discharged to go home, never fails to smile at the rebellion story. It is about right for me, he knows. I’m known for my fight. I can’t help thinking what he will think when I finally take a seat.

Todd Balf is the author of “The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-La.” He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Outside and other publications, and is at work on a book about his disability experience.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/opinion/wheelchair-mobility-disability.html?emc=rss&partner=rss