This was before the Americans with Disabilities Act. That act would not have helped me on the train, but it would have prevented American Airlines’ attempt to keep me off a plane. Only Senator Edward Kennedy answered my letter; he also wrote to the Department of Transportation, and a man from the Department contacted me and said he could get me on any plane I chose, but he could do nothing about airlines charging for a first-class ticket, though I had no other choice but to sit in the front seat. Amtrak sent me a form letter dealing with inconvenienced customers; the letter constituted a gift certificate for a sum I don’t recall, except that it was under a hundred dollars. Amtrak wrote to Kennedy, or the Department of Transportation—I forget which—and said the toilet in that compartment was accessible. My friend Jack. Herlihy, who traveled with me, got me onto the toilet. He told me to put my leg and stump over the left wheel. Then he dragged the chair sideways to the toilet, the right wheel against its front, and I backed over that wheel and lowered myself to the toilet. Then Jack pulled the chair away, to make room for my leg, and went to his room across the passageway, leaving me with the shards of my privacy.
I AM SITTING IN MY WHEELCHAIR, TWO DAYS before the Fourth of July, trying for the third time in four months to write to you of the emotional pain and humiliation of my experience as an Amtrak passenger on 10 March 1990. I am enclosing a copy of the letter by Amtrak Chief-on-Board Sheila Beyda-McGraw. I have taken so long to write to you because it hurts me to write about it. I had an overnight berth on the train from Albany to Chicago, and the toilet in the berth, and all toilets on the train, were inaccessible.
I used to be able to walk, until a car hit me in 1986 and I lost a leg, and the other one received such severe damage that I am now confined to a wheelchair. I used to enjoy traveling by Amtrak. In the winter of 1989, I planned a trip to Seattle and Portland, so my reservations were nearly a year in advance when I boarded the train at Boston on 10 March 1990, to travel to Albany and then to Chicago. In Boston, the door to the coach for handicapped people, a door with a wheelchair painted on it, would not open widely enough for my chair to go through it. With some hard work, my oldest son, my traveling companion, and Amtrak personnel got me into another coach, the club car. Then at Albany, I changed trains and was in a berth with a toilet I could not use.
I am a fifty-three-year-old writer, a father of six children, a former Marine officer, a voter, a taxpayer, an American citizen, and from Boston, Massachusetts, until I boarded a train in Chicago, Illinois, I could not use a toilet. As I wheeled my chair into the station at Chicago, I looked up at the large American flag on the wall and for the first time in my life I felt that it did not include me, it did not want me. I felt not like a man or a father, but a damaged piece of meat. On the return trip, we flew from Chicago to Boston on American Airlines, which is not American either; they did not want me: they told my travel agent if I did not have a traveling companion, they would not allow me on board; and they made a lot of money because my remaining leg has to be elevated, so I had to be in the front seat, which is of course first class. I believe Amtrak should refund the cost of the trip, for me and my traveling companion, from Boston to Albany.
But that is not why I am writing to you. If I were the only disabled person in this country, we could just call it bad luck and forget about it. There are millions of us and we must have access to trains. I want access to trains. I want to go to Baton Rouge on the New Orleans Crescent in December for a niece’s wedding. I want to go to the University of Alabama in September 1991 for a symposium on the short story. Politicians lose something when they travel by air. Do you know what happens when you travel by train? You see the country the way you saw it as a child, in history and geography classes. Once, when I could walk, and therefore had the right to use a bathroom, I traveled from New York to San Francisco. I woke the first morning in the flat fields of the Midwest, the train cutting through them as if this were a hundred years ago; then out the window appeared the skyline of Chicago, a huge sculpted city rising out of the earth, and if you’re traveling by train instead of by air, you suddenly see the history, feel it. Ah, the water, you think. It started with water that led to the sea; they built wharves and warehouses and saloons and dry-goods stores. You see things like that, on the train; and you see where the poor live, because always the tracks go through where the poor live; you see things like the juxtaposition of homes along the tracks in Philadelphia and then Bryn Mawr; you see antelope grazing in Wyoming. You can cross the nation from sea to shining sea.
But if you’re in a wheelchair, you can’t use a bathroom east of Chicago. If those conditions of bladder and bowels had been imposed on the settlers of this country, they wouldn’t have gotten as far as Albany. In Albany on the night of 10 March, the Amtrak people at the station were unkind. They had a simple and curt attitude: It’s your problem; you can stay on the train or get off. So I stayed. What would I do in Albany? I wanted them to fly me and my friend to Chicago to catch the train next day. No guarantee, they said; you can take your chances, they said; this train is leaving. Car attendant Barrick Ketchum was particularly kind and showed great empathy from Albany to Chicago. Sheila Beyda-McGraw was as compassionate as a human being can be.
I’m sending copies of this to several of our leaders. I want them and you to get to work and make American citizens of those of us who are handicapped; I want us to be citizens wherever we travel in this country, whose anniversary is this week. We’d like to be able to walk, but we can’t. There’s nothing we can do about that. You’ve got to do that for us, the way our friends do, those of us who have friends. Some of us don’t, and you certainly can’t travel alone in a wheelchair on Amtrak. But you don’t travel alone either. Nobody does. We either buy help or receive it from people who love us, or both; and those who are truly alone die, in the spirit and in the flesh. Give spirit to our flesh; give our flesh a private place where we can sit on a toilet, then return down wide aisles to our coaches or berths to look out windows at the vast stretch and climb of America; let us bring our particular and private suffering to a train that is truly public and open to all who have the price of a ticket, all races and beliefs, all manner of broken and diseased bodies. Let us gather in dignity and kindness and grace; let us be Americans on your trains too; let us see our country.
cc: President George Bush,
Barbara Bush,
Sen. Edward Kennedy,
Sen. John Kerry