Many A Mile To Freedom – New Haven Independent

One recent Saturday morning Katie Kowalski was helping get people with disabilities back on bicycles. She had her hands midway up my right calf, working it into a black attachment that was half-bike, half-ankle foot orthotic. She tightened a gear with a blue-headed wrench, then secured velcro straps and double-checked my helmet. With her nod of approval, I hit the pedals hard and headed onto a path at Edgewood Park.

Low-hanging trees and frizz-topped grasses bent in the wind to say hello. A couple walking their dog pulled over to the side of the road, long enough for me to notice that they werent keeping leash laws. My cycling partner, bike advocate Paul Hammer, regaled me with the history of invasive species in the park. As we cruised toward the parks small lake, a gust of cool air pressed up against my face, delivering a burst of early summer smells. Everything felt green.

It was a normal bike ride, except the bike was a recumbent, and my feet were in all sorts of toe clips, and I was riding a bike for the first time in almost 20 years. In under 10 minutes, it reminded me why biking is magical and yet still an uphill pedal in this city, especially if you have any sort of barrier to moving.

In collaboration with Northeast Passage, Bike-On, Ti Trikes-CT Adaptive Cycling, and New Haven Parks, Gaylord Hospitals sports association moved its annual adaptive bike clinic to New Haven this year as part of New Haven Bike Month, Mays month-long cycling extravaganza. When I found out Gaylord was holding the clinic here instead of its Wallingford facility, I had that finger-tingling, cheek-warming, muscle-flexing good feeling. I had wanted to get back on a bike for years, and this finally seemed like the way to do it.

I havent always needed an adaptive bike. Until I was 8, I had the idyllic, easy relationship with cycling that you see on Modern Family or The Middle. My dad taught me to ride by running alongside me, holding the kid-sized handlebars, on a tree-lined block and then letting go of the bike, letting it roll down the sidewalk until I learned to brake at the end of the street. Then in September 1998, I was in a car accident on my way home from elementary school. Our babysitter had a stroke and drifted one lane over. The backseat became detached and flipped over with me and my brother in it. When I woke up, there was a ventilator down my throat and I couldnt move the right side of my body.

I understood, still, that I was coming to Gaylords bike clinic with a level of privilege. I wasnt just young, when the brain is most plastic, when the accident happened. I was young and white, in a city where the hospital has a strong pediatric intensive care unit. The car crashed in an affluent suburb where the EMT workers were there in minutes. My parents had health insurance through their employers. I had a team of physical therapists, orthoticists, and neurologists that was willing to follow me through college. My right ankle was, and continues to be, more putty than muscle but I relearned to walk, and can do so without complaint on six of seven days in any week. Standing on two feet is an extraordinary luxury that we dont think about until were made to.

Michael Mancini was in the passenger side of a car with which a drunk driver collided 10 years ago, leaving him in a wheelchair. A hockey player before his accident, he was checking out the adaptive selections that Gaylord offers, including wheelchair tennis and hockey. But he hesitated to talk about the accident. It was so long ago, he said when I first asked. Time kind of flies when youre keeping busy. The sentence hit me like a ton of bricks.

There were also participants like Pam Rickert, who suffered a stroke over seven years ago and was getting back on a bike while awaiting a stem cell trial in Boston next month. As she described the spasticity she gets in her arms and hands, I showed her my right hand, the fingers curled into the palm like a small shell. I had taken my anti-spasticity meds that morning too, I joked. They werent helping all that much.

There was a horrible kinship there: we were a bunch of Harry Potters, sitting in a circle talking about how we defied the odds and earned our weirdly shaped scars. We were a group whose members had forgotten, almost everyone remarked, what it felt like to be on a bike, city streets opening up before us.

Until the bike clinic. As participants arrived a little past 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, Gaylord Sports Program Manager Katie Joly and representatives from Bike Month and adaptive cycling institutions unloaded dozens of adaptive bikes from three large trailers, setting them on the flat parking lot beside Coogan Pavillon. Some recumbents laid far back, a move designed for people who need to lean back as they pedal. Others focused on hand pedals, which direct bikes with upper body power. In a corner of the lot, volunteers unpacked a cabinet of orthotic curiosities: wide, walled-in pedals for added foot support, four or five kinds of toe clips and foot ties.

As I surveyed rows of recumbent tricycles that Gaylord, Northeast Passage, Bike On, and Ti Trikes-CT Adaptive Cycling had rolled out for the event, Stone was already testing out models that fit his lifestyle, which includes weekly games of wheelchair rugby with the Connecticut Jammers. (It is the only Paralympic sport that allows full contact; watching the documentary Murderball in the hospital had initially inspired Stone to take up the sport). Transitioning from a heavy, low-sitting recumbent with partial hand control to an off-road, thick-tired hand cycle, Stone let escape a few woo hoos.

Then I was off, riding toward one of the parks little lakes with Hammer by my side. Ill fish you out if you go into the river, he said as I tried (unsuccessfully) to pull up the Independents live Facebook feature, pedal forward, steer and take notes. Only after my phone was perched between my teeth did I realize it probably wasnt going to work.

Bikes dont just open up public spaces they feel urgent, and necessary, and yet maddeningly out of reach. As a carless reporter, I rely on my feet and the public bus to get me to assignments on time. Biking is only faster than one of those. But it comes, it seems, with an added side of freedom.

One of our missions is to get more people out riding, and that means everybody said Hammer of the Bike Month effort. Hammer has himself suffered a traumatic brain injury. There are still so many barriers to riding, and we want to find ways around those barriers.

If youre able to afford and store an adaptive bike they generally go for between $3,000 and $4,000 where are you supposed to ride it? Theres the states sleek new five-mile cycle track, a possible spot for recreational riding that is greatexcept when youre a reporter trying to get somewhere.

The Gaylord Sports Association offers a free monthly adaptive cycle ride on the Farmington Canal Rail Trail, starting at Lock 12 of the trail in Cheshire. Thats great, if you can get to Cheshire. Of the participants I talked to at the clinic, very few had driven themselves. Because adaptive driving, too, is a world full of red tape, expensive equipment and time-consuming lessons.

Between Jan. 1, 2016 and Jan. 1 of this year, there were 7,821 auto accidents in New Haven, according to the University of Connecticuts Crash Data Repository. These accidents involved 15,531 vehicles and 20,075 people, with 43 fatalities and 353 suspected serious injuries. Of those, 34 involved collisions with cyclists. Two have been close friends of mine. It makes you think twice.

The data in the repository havent been vetted or cleaned, said city transit chief Doug Hausladen in an email exchange about auto-bike collisions, though they do provide a glimpse into traffic conditions for cyclists. And there are other ways to have a bike accident: a pothole your tires arent ready for, sharply sloping curve, problem braking.

So these streets? Itll still be a while. Maybe someday, Ill see you there.

Original post:

Many A Mile To Freedom - New Haven Independent