Many A Mile To Freedom

One recent 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 weren’t 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 park’s 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 Hospital’s sports association moved its annual adaptive bike clinic to New Haven this year as part of New Haven Bike Month, May’s 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 haven’t 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 couldn’t move the right side of my body.

There’s a blurring between things I remember and things that people have told me from that time. Doctors drilled burr holes into my skull to alleviate swelling, and I can still find their slick, minuscule marks beneath sections of hair. I have a tiny, pink keloidal scar where I yanked a chest tube out in my sleep, causing a lung to collapse a second time. My brother and I have matching scars where the seatbelt pulled too hard and turned our small intestines into goop. In total, I spent nine weeks in the hospital, and nine years after that in doctor appointments and therapy sessions. If people ask (and please, ask!), I say that I broke my brain. It’s a fantastic icebreaker that leaves the taste of metal in my mouth.

I understood, still, that I was coming to Gaylord’s bike clinic with a level of privilege. I wasn’t 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 don’t think about until we’re made to.

Almost everyone else at the bike clinic had some version of this story. In April 2012, Joseph Stone was trying to readjust his young daughter’s seatbelt when his vehicle slid on the road and went careening down a hill. He fractured the C6 and C7 vertebrae, an injury that left him with almost no communication ​“between my brain and the rest of my body from the chest down.”

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 you’re 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 weren’t 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 it was my turn. Working with Joly and Kowalski, a therapeutic recreation specialist at Gaylord Hospital and a certified therapeutic recreation specialist (CTRS) for the Sports Association, I tried out a low-lying recumbent, but realized that my legs were too short to reach the pedals from where my butt fell on the seat. Joly and Gaylord sports assistant Katie Kowalski walked over to the Titan, a chrome-blue trike with an upright seat and pedals close to where a person’s torso falls. Looking at my right leg, the two pulled out another tool: a long black attachment that looked a little like an ankle brace I wore for years, meant to steady the foot and calf.

Then I was off, riding toward one of the park’s little lakes with Hammer by my side. ​“I’ll fish you out if you go into the river,” he said as I tried (unsuccessfully) to pull up the Independent’s live Facebook feature, pedal forward, steer and take notes. Only after my phone was perched between my teeth did I realize it probably wasn’t going to work. 

Bikes don’t 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.”

His ideas include an adaptive bike share program on the city, of which there have not yet been murmurs on any legislative level. But you probably won’t see me riding to an assignment anytime soon. Adaptive cycling is an expensive hobby that reveals, in ways it may not even intend to, holes that exist in New Haven’s biking infrastructure — and transportation infrastructure more widely.

If you’re 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? There’s the state’s sleek new five-mile cycle track, a possible spot for recreational riding that is great — except when you’re 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. That’s 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.

But say you stick with those options. What of the city’s main arteries, where you’ll be low to the ground, slightly wider than any given bike lane, and competing with both able-bodied bikers, and the ground’s daily offerings of broken grass, gravel, and sediment? I don’t think so. One traumatic brain injury is enough for a lifetime. 

Between Jan. 1, 2016 and Jan. 1 of this year, there were 7,821 auto accidents in New Haven, according to the University of Connecticut’s 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 haven’t 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 aren’t ready for, sharply sloping curve, problem braking.

So these streets? It’ll still be a while. Maybe someday, I’ll see you there.