"...(P)aralyzed
limbs may not particularly limit a person's mobility as much as attitudinal and
physical barriers. The question centers on 'normality'. What, it is asked, is
the normal way to be mobile over a distance of a mile? Is it to walk, drive
one's own car, take a taxicab, ride a bicycle, use a wheelchair, roller skate,
or use a skate board, or some other means?”
-- Prof.
David Pfeiffer, Ph.D, internationally recognized scholar in the field of
disability studies, and polio survivor
Although it pains me to admit it,
driving a car remains an acid test of human normalcy in American culture. You
are what you drive. You drive, therefore, you are.
Dear reader, before you attribute
my distaste for automobile dominance to being too gimped up to operate a vehicle,
let me put that to rest. I own a wheelchair lift-equipped mini-van and I drive
it daily. I’m grateful for it. But I wish everyone – myself included -- had
numerous, high-quality transportation options besides driving a car.
I think my ambivalence began the
summer I learned to drive. I didn’t feel ready to take Driver’s Ed when I
turned 16, so I waited until the summer after my freshman year of college. I
enrolled in a course taught by a sweaty, little strawberry-blond man who
sounded like Foghorn Leghorn and preached to a fundamentalist congregation on
weekends. He taught classes in a seedy storefront space in the dying downtown
of formerly robust Rust Belt city. My classmates and I sat at beaten-up desks
and perspired while Rev. Blowhard shouted continuously for no apparent reason.
My friends, who already had their
licenses, told me stories about the nauseating films they’d seen in Driver’s
Ed. There were tales of tough-guy high school ballers who tossed their cookies
in the trash can while watching “Highways of Agony” and “Mechanized Death.” So,
I was filled with dread when the sweaty preacher man fed the leader for “Signal
30” into his 1950s-era reconditioned projector. Then I had an epiphany: each
minute of amateur footage of teenagers with crushed vertebrae screaming in pain
meant one less minute of being preached at.
After several weeks of classroom
instruction and gore porn, it was time to get in a car. My instructor, a
pleasant middle-aged woman with a penchant for tank tops, picked me up at my
house. I was anxious but also excited to get out on the road. This was an
important milestone in my young adult life!
As we set out, my instructor held
the steering wheel with her left hand. “OK,” I thought. “She’s letting me get
warmed up. She’ll let go soon, right?”
Uh, no. We drove around for 45
minutes while Tank Top Tina kept a white-knuckle death grip on the wheel. Keep
in mind we were doing 25 mph on dry, flat Ohio streets, not screaming down the
Mokee Dugway in a blizzard.
I was befuddled. None of my
friends had mentioned this. Neither my instructor nor I broached the subject.
We simply pretended like this was normal, a construct I was all-too familiar
with.
I told my parents when I returned
home. This resulted in my mom calling Rev. Blowhard, who agreed to come to our
house to discuss “the situation.”
In other words, to discuss the
driving school’s baseless trepidation of teaching a gimp girl to drive.
‘Cause, you know, them cripples
can’t be trusted not to crash into a brick wall.
When the Sweaty Rev arrived at
our house, I was seething with rage, but containing it like the good, little
demure girl I was back then. Was.
My mom and the Rev engaged in an
awkward conversation in which they danced around the elephant of ableism
trumpeting its trunk in front of them. The Rev. refused to say I couldn’t be
taught to drive, yet dodged any direct answers to my mom’s questions. The
conversation concluded with him swerving off on a tangent about how a spinner
nob on the steering wheel would solve all “my problems.”
That was the last I ever saw of
the Good Rev or Tank Top Tina. Since I was 18, I didn’t need a driving school
certificate to get a license. Over the next couple weeks, my dad patiently
taught me to drive and I passed both the exam and field test on the first try.
I’ve driven ever since. But I
still wish the world was full of wheelchair-accessible trains, trams and taxis
so I had more choices.
Choices are good.
