Competing on the ski team would give me the final push I needed to get me back to school.
On my first day of actual racing, breathing heavily from my hike up the hill, I glided into my gate. A horizontal bar, waist high, kept me from quickly descending onto the course. The air announced itself in small puffs with each nervous breath I took. From behind me, the crowd hooted and hollered for the skier currently tackling the course. I didn’t dare look at her. I focused on my red-and-black ski boot, reviewing the course in my mind, remembering how I had skied down the hill numerous times the day before, parallel to the course, echoing each turn as if the gates were in front of me. I felt I knew the course, I just hadn’t run it yet. The weather was cold here at Bogus Basin, Idaho, and there was no fresh snow. Many racers had skied the track already, each one etching a deeper groove into the course.
Davin, who was now my coach, stood behind me. I felt his warm breath on a small exposed area of my neck as he offered words of encouragement, “Okay, relax and take it easy. This is supposed to be fun!” I grasped my outriggers, pumped my leg a few times to warm it up, took some deep breaths, and waited for the gun’s pop to announce my turn.
As I waited, it was not lost on me that in less than three years, since the abortion and since breaking up with Rob, I had found enough physical strength and emotional independence to believe I might, possibly, be okay. I still lived in the same mother-in-law apartment in Seattle and still worked at my full-time job at the stock brokerage firm, but I had enough sense of self now to feel that my life was going somewhere. I still carried around a boulder of anger at Harvey and, now, at the insurance companies and at the juror who had blamed me for my accident, but whenever I thought about it, I focused on making my body work hard …
Pop! The gun went off and I was flying down the hill, hair waving behind me. My first race!
The Seattle contingent of disabled skiers, which I was a part of, had traveled en masse to Bogus Basin for our ski competition. Our small plane had been filled to capacity with physically disabled skiers of every kind: paraplegic, quadriplegic, hemiplegics, amputees (both of the arms and legs), vision impaired, and hearing impaired. Some were a part of my team from Snoqualmie Pass, where I’d first learned to ski with Linda and Becky; the remainder were from other Western Washington ski areas. We’d kept the flight attendants busy on the hour-long flight by quickly gulping our beers and ordering more. We were loud, proud, and obnoxious. As we approached our destination, I sat back in my seat and felt the sense of belonging, at least for the moment, that I was always seeking.
But traveling with a bunch of folks in wheelchairs brought home the reality of a life I had been spared. Had Harvey’s car hit me with a little more force, my right leg would have been taken from me as well. Had I been hit a few inches higher, I would likely be paralyzed from the waist down. These people I was traveling with required varying degrees of help, from transfers to and from their chairs to carrying their equipment.
Once in Bogus Basin, Linda, Becky, and I were roommates. We shared our room with a woman Becky knew, Theresa, who was a Thalidomide baby: a child born from a mother who took this drug in the 1960s, which caused serious birth defects. Theresa had been born with four seal-like appendages instead of arms and legs. Her vibrant smile and quick wit enchanted me, but her disability riveted me and made me consider my own struggle. During the days we shared a room, I watched her surreptitiously from the corner of my eye as she maneuvered her abbreviated body around the queen-sized bed. Quick, agile, and surprisingly adept, she held her shirt under her flipper-like arm and wriggled her body into it. Even her neck seemed to have muscles mine didn’t. She clearly had accommodated her limited arms and legs years ago. I held the same awe and reverence for her that able-bodied people who had come to know me since my accident often felt for me. What I lived with was nothing compared to what Theresa lived with, but I gained something by watching her: the message that limitations were as much in the mind as in the body.
Getting dressed in the morning in front of Linda, Becky, and Theresa wasn’t uncomfortable like it was when I was around two-legged friends. Instead of feeling like the freak in the room, I was able to openly watch my roommates put on their prosthetic legs and ask questions about them. But I still wanted so much to broach the subject of anger and pain with someone who might get it, and I didn’t know how. I longed to talk about what I felt like were my false hopes about marriage and children. I didn’t want to appear prying, and I understood that such topics were personal, but I desperately needed to know how these other women were grappling with these issues.
After one full day of skiing, we all headed back to the lodge. Inside, it was littered with outriggers and artificial legs leaning against the walls. Ski parkas and hats were scattered across the long, picnic-style tables. The vaulted room was stuffy and hot, the windows steamy from all the body heat. I found space at a crowded table with Linda and Becky, anxious as usual to make the kind of connections that were continually elusive to me. These were my people, but I felt separate nonetheless.
A young, handsome guy with piercing blue eyes in a wheelchair was sitting at the table, too. “Hey, I haven’t met you before. What’s your name?” he said.
“I’m Colleen. What about you?”
“I’m Gary, and I’m gonna kill the run tomorrow,” he said, pounding his fist on the table.
Okay, so he’s had a few, I thought. But I could put the slurring of words aside for a good-looking young man.
Gary and I quickly discovered we skied on different days up at Snoqualmie and that we were both equally passionate about skiing. We filled the next hour drinking beer and talking of snow conditions, how the course would run the next day, and of new equipment coming onto the market.
“So, how’d ya lose it?” Gary asked suddenly, his voice quieter.
“A car accident,” I said, feeling self-conscious but hopeful that I was on the edge of talking to someone honestly about how they really dealt with their daily struggles—their anger, their physical pain. Here was my chance to steer a conversation into the more intimate space I longed to go. But I couldn’t think of what to say next. So I was silent, afraid the moment would be lost.
“Rough,” said Gary. He abruptly turned away from me to Davin, as if to avoid further discussion on the topic. “Hey, coach, are you going to get me another beer, or do I hafta run over you?”
“I’m making a run. Just sit there nice and pretty, Gary.” Other folks yelled their orders to Davin as he walked toward the bar.
“I expect a good tip, people.” Davin yelled through his dimpled smile.
I nursed my beer, chastising myself for hoping for more than I was likely to get from a casual conversation, and for choking up in the face of an opportunity for a meeting of the minds with Gary. I decided to skip it for the moment.
But after a few beers, I was bold enough to ask Gary how he broke his back. “Vietnam,” he said in a clipped tone.
“Oh, wow, what happened?” I asked naively.
“Oh, I don’t talk about the war.” Then he turned his torso in his chair and started a conversation with another paraplegic behind him.
I finished my beer, got up, and crutched out into the cold, dark night. The air bit my face. I felt stupid for asking so bluntly about the war. I should have been more sensitive. I felt embarrassed that I had tried to open up his world a little and had been met with a slammed door. Mostly, in that moment I felt sad for him, sad that this part of his life was so concealed, so hidden, simply not talked about. In fact, I felt sad that so many people didn’t talk about what had happened to them, even to those of us who could best empathize. It would be years later when I would finally understand that not talking about something didn’t mean that someone was running from that thing. I couldn’t see it then, because for me, I was running—or skiing—away from the shadow part of me.
In spite of some continuing sense of not quite perfectly fitting in anywhere, I was strong enough to move forward. I decided to move to Bellingham and to go back to college the next fall. As a result, I would lose touch with the many of the people with whom I’d spent the past three years. I’d had fun with them and learned from them how to show up, live in the moment, and use my body to its fullest potential. Though I’d never had the opportunity to talk about my deepest feelings with them, I did now understand that what we each went through with our disability was deeply personal, almost too personal to talk about sometimes. Had we talked about the emotions, it may have caused us too much pain. Instead we modeled for each other how to be positive; we buoyed each other in a sea of possibility; we taught one another that our disabilities were only as hard as we made them.