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Good books, old friends

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By Kara G. Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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Needless to say the inconvenient layout of most airports was at the forefront of my mind as we rushed from terminals to gates to make last-minute rebookings on other airlines's flights. I dusted off this August 1995 column to help me put our experience into perspective.

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We often feel disabled in an airport where we must juggle several extra extensions of ourselves — heavy suitcases, slippery garment bags and overstuffed carry-on totes — through what seems like miles of parking structures and corridors.

Engineers have sought to make the ordeal easier for our less than fit bodies by installing moving walks and cargo-size elevators. Suitcases on wheels or luggage trolleys help us manage our our bags of dead weight.

Still, on a busy day, even these measures seem inadequate. When my mother and I took my sister and her son to Detroit Metro for a flight, I realized it would require several trips before one of those cargo-size elevators could accommodate the line of people waiting for it — our party, which included my nephew in his stroller and several pieces of luggage, a man with an extra-wide luggage carrier piled high with extra-wide luggage, a woman in a wheelchair and several other people who obviously had no intention of living off the land when they began their journeys.

I felt twinges of panic as I wondered if we had given ourselves enough time to get an excited two-year-old to his airplane on time.

I was acutely aware of how difficult negotiating an airport was for a normal person, much less for the woman in the wheelchair, because at the time I was reading John Hockenberry's Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence, a memoir of his life as a paraplegic, published in 1995 by Hyperion.

Hockenberry, a former correspondent for National Public Radio, was paralyzed in a car accident when he was 19. In his book he deftly describes the major transition a person must make after losing all feeling in his lower body and realizing he will have to carry it around as dead weight for the rest of his life.

In this 372-page memoir, Hockenberry challenges our common perceptions of physically disabled people. When we would normally avert our eyes from their struggle to navigate a landscape designed for people with the full use of their limbs, he forces us to look deeply into the landscape he sees from his wheelchair.

Heartbreak vies with humor and anger with stoicism as he describes in a fluid writing style his crippling car accident and how it changed his life physically, emotionally and intellectually.

Although he repeatedly questions whether he would have a permanent, irreversible, spinal-cord injury if he had not been hitchhiking during his college's spring break in February 1976 and if he had not been picked up by a tired driver who lost control of her car, he says he never contemplated suicide.

Instead, he developed the upper body strength he would need to propel his lower body in its wheelchair and the determination to transcend the physical limitations the car accident imposed on him.

Hockenberry left the University of Chicago, where many professors refused to hold their classes in wheelchair-accessible buildings, and moved to the West Coast where he rebelled against taking menial "crip jobs."

As a reporter for a local public radio station, NPR asked him to cover the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption.

NPR did not know he was crippled until he missed a deadline because he could not fit his wheelchair into a phone booth to call in a story.

Recognizing his talent, NPR producers assigned him stories in Washington, D.C., Chicago and the Middle East. Ironically, in Third World countries, where virtually nothing functions correctly, he discovered a people much more willing to accommodate his disability. While he was covering the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in 1989, an Iranian solicitously pushed his chair through the crowds of mourners while shouting "Death to America" with his countrymen.

Whether he is "walking with the Kurds" by riding a donkey through the Iraqi desert, driving a car with a manual transmission or crawling up and down steps with wheelchair in tow so he can ride the New York City subway, Hockenberry refuses to let his disability limit what he can do.

In fact, he believes that he probably would not have had such extraordinary adventures if he had not become crippled.

While he is righteously indignant about the American culture's neglect and deliberate ignorance of those who differ from the norm, his injury has intensified his empathy for others with disabilities, making his stories about his one-armed grandfather and mentally retarded uncle among the most moving in the book.

Few books are written from the point of view of people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries. For that alone, Moving Violations deserves our attention, and it will definitely make us think about the design of airports and other public buildings.

It is also a well-written memoir, which, as a good autobiography should, helps put a life into perspective. Along with an intrepid man in a wheelchair, you will take away from this book the haunting image of a starving boy in Somalia, just one of the human tragedies he has witnessed and deemed much more serious than his own.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and works for the Genesee District Library.

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