My 13-year-old stepson is unable to walk or even stand up. But he has dog-sledded across frozen lakes. He has shared ghost stories and cups of hot chocolate around a campfire deep in the north Minnesota woods. He has even tried out a Finnish sauna, including the obligatory dip in an ice-cold lake.
He has done all this thanks to the folks at Wilderness Inquiry, a Minneapolis-based organization that specializes in wilderness tours that accommodate–sometimes against all odds and logic–the disabled.
Young Peter has muscular dystrophy. During the last several years, this progressive, still-incurable disease has robbed him of much of his strength, leaving him confined to a wheelchair. So many of life’s simple adventures are now closed to him: climbing a tree, skateboarding, hiking through the woods. Yet he maintains an adventurous spirit.
Eager to feed that spirit, his mother and I turned to Wilderness Inquiry, a group I’d heard about from a friend. When we received their schedule of trips in the mail, we were amazed.
The list was endless and exotic: canoe trips through the Everglades, white-water rafting excursions through the Grand Canyon, dog-sled adventures in Minnesota’s North Country. And all of them open to people with disabilities.
“Even people in wheelchairs?” I asked the young woman at WI when I called the next day.
“Even people in wheelchairs,” she assured me.
WI staffers can tell some remarkable stories of disabled adventurers. Like the quadriplegic who wielded a pointer with his mouth to serve as navigator on a canoe trip. Or the nearly blind man who teamed with a wheelchair-bound companion, one serving as the muscle, the other as the eyes. Or the people, unable to walk, who have dragged themselves with their arms through the woods.
“We see ourselves as providing outdoor adventures for people of all ages and abilities,” said Tracey Fredin, WI’s outreach director. “We try to have trips that celebrate diversity.”
Their trips also celebrate the accessibility of the outdoors. In so doing, they destroy the myth that wilderness travel–and by extension, wilderness preservation–is something of an elitist notion, shutting off part of America to the disabled, the aged or the infirm.
That myth, in fact, is what started Wilderness Inquiry. In the mid-1970s, a debate raged in Minnesota, as it still does today, over how much of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in the state’s northernmost reaches should be open to motorboats and snowmobiles. Perhaps the most compelling argument for more liberal rules was that without such transport, only the fittest could enjoy the region.
Poppycock, thought Greg and Mary Lais. Greg at the time was a college student in Collegeville, Minn., who occasionally led groups of junior high school students through the Boundary Waters. His sister, Mary, worked for the Minnesota State Council on Disabilities and suffered from multiple sclerosis (although it was not yet diagnosed). The two put together a group of eight people–four able-bodied, including Greg, two paraplegics and two deaf mutes–for a weeklong canoe trip.
Their goal, as Greg put it, was to “prove the politicians wrong.”
The trip was not without mishaps. The interpreter dropped out the day before the trip began, so the deaf persons had to rely on children’s scratch pads to communicate. Heavy rains soaked the group’s sleeping bags and strong winds blew their tents away one night. The paraplegics fell out of their wheelchairs more than once, and perhaps worst of all, the group got stranded on a stormy lake and wound up renting motorboats to reach the other side.
Looking back, Lais concedes the trip failed to prove anyone wrong about the need for motorboats. “But we’ve proven them wrong many, many times since then,” he said. “And that first experience was so powerful, for everyone involved, that we were determined to share it with others.”
From that soggy political statement in 1977, something larger has evolved: a social movement, aimed not only at opening the wilderness to the disabled but also at engaging both the able-bodied and the disabled as co-adventurers, to their mutual benefit.
Other organizations take disabled persons out into the wilderness. Wilderness Inquiry mixes the disabled with the able-bodied on adventures that are consciousness-raising as well as challenging.
“For the disabled, the trips are a real physical challenge,” explained Fredin. “But they’re a very powerful experience for the able-bodied as well. For a lot of them, it’s an emotional challenge. They may never have even talked to a person in a wheelchair before.”
Last year, 3,500 people took part in the more than 100 trips and workshops offered by WI. About half were disabled–a loose term in WI parlance that includes the old, the young, even the out-of-shape. The rest were not.
“I can’t say I have a handle yet on what the magic is, but it’s there,” said Greg Lais.
We let Peter pick our trip. His sister and stepsister were going, as were his mother and I. But this adventure was his.
To my surprise (and his mother’s disappointment), Peter skipped past the warm-weather sojourns in Florida and selected a five-day ski and dog-sled trip in the Boundary Waters, a snowball’s throw from the Canadian border. The trip was offered several times–all during the dead of winter. We picked a date, swallowed hard a few times and signed up.
In the few months before we left, we received a series of letters detailing what we should expect (plenty of cold weather) and what we should bring (plenty of wool clothes).
On a cold, clear February afternoon, we arrived at Camp Menogyn, a YMCA camp on Daniels Lake, 29 miles up the Gunflint Trail from Grand Marais. Immediately we faced a challenge: Getting Peter across the mile-wide lake that separated the parking lot from the lodge. (There are no roads on that side of the lake.)
No problem. We tucked him into a “pulk sled,” a specially designed sled on skis, with long poles and a harness attached to the front. Tom, the trip leader, and I took turns strapping on the harness and pulling him across the frozen lake.
It was quick, it was simple, and it was handled with the no-nonsense aplomb that would characterize much of the next few days.
Our group was made up of three WI leaders and 16 paying participants, including a mildly retarded woman and a middle-age man from St. Paul who had suffered a traumatic head injury.
Peter was by far the least physically capable of the group, and it would be a lie to say he did everything the rest of us did. He could not take part in a memorable snowshoe trek to a frozen falls on the Canadian border. And a night spent outside in temperatures that reached 20 degrees below zero–endured by my 14-year-old daughter and a few others–was a bit too much for him–and others–who spent the night at the lodge.
But he took part in far more than he missed–far more, for that matter, than he does in his everyday life.
When we cross-country skied, one of the better skiers would strap on the pulk sled and pull him along. When we went dog-sledding, he was bundled into the sled, paired with an experienced musher, and off he went.
Some ventures were more of a challenge. Getting Peter in the sauna, for example, took the good-hearted efforts of a half-dozen helpers: three fellow bathers to carry him into the bath, three more to carry him out and gently dip him into the icy waters. The experience seemed as exhilarating to his helpers as it did to Peter–who was to get plenty of mileage boasting about his icy dip to his friends.
In fact, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the entire trip was the attitude not only of Tom and our other capable leaders, Kay and Melinda, but also of the entire group.
His fellow group members were always there to carry Peter to his sled. They played cards with him in the evening, brought him water or hot chocolate when he needed it, helped him with his boots, his gloves, his cap. And not one displayed the discomfort common to so many people when dealing with someone in a wheelchair.
The world is not yet comfortable with the disabled, who are often excluded, neglected, ignored. Isolation is a constant threat for them, and a constant worry for their parents. Peter is no exception, and just getting him to a restaurant or a friend’s house can seem like an impossible task.
But for this week, in the most remote and potentially hostile part of the world he had ever visited, he was made to feel part of the group.
The highlight of Peter’s trip, he later said, was the campfire on the next-to-last evening. The night was gorgeous. A billion stars shown overhead, and the fire, set up a few hundred yards from the lodge, illuminated the snowy north woods.
We had to pull Peter out to the campfire in the pulk sled, but once there he was a natural part of the group. Watching him as he enjoyed the warm fire and even warmer company, I pondered the incongruity of the scene–the wonder of his presence out there in the middle of nowhere being taken for granted, by him and by everyone else.
“Cool” was how he later described it. “A minor miracle” would be my own description. Whatever, there was indeed a magic to it.
DETAILS ON WILDERNESS INQUIRY
Wilderness Inquiry offers a wide selection of trips–nearly 100 this year–all suitable for the disabled and able-bodied.
The five-day ski and dog-sled trip we took includes four days of dog-sledding, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in the pristine Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Minnesota. A Finnish sauna is available one evening.
Participants stay in dormlike rooms in a lodge with shared bath; they have the option of spending one night camping outdoors. Participants also must help out during the stay, taking turns preparing and cleaning up after meals.
Seven trips are being offered this winter. The trip costs $545 per person. Round-trip van transportation between Minneapolis and the lodge is available for $60 per person.
Other WI trips this year include kayaking through Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands, canoeing the Green River in Utah and horsepacking through the Colorado Rockies. Trips vary in length from 3 to 16 days and in price from $195 to $2,500.
For more information, write Wilderness Inquiry, 1313 Fifth St. SE, Box 94. Minneapolis, Minn. 55414 or call 612-379-3858 (voice or TDD) or 800-728-0719.
