Where Wheels Meet the Ground
In 2023, the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation launched “Outdoors for Everyone,” an initiative ensuring that the great outdoors is equally accessible and inclusive for all people–including those living with paralysis, their families, and caregivers. The Reeve Foundation's Content Specialist, Hannah Soyer, authored the following about her outdoor experiences.
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When I was little, I’d take walks with my parents and brother to the end of our street. As my brother would take fast steps to meet my parents’ long strides, I’d drive my wheelchair beside them to the place where concrete met grass in the curve of our cul-de-sac, then turn around and venture back to our house. My mom and brother and I would often go on bike trails as well, my mom and brother biking or rollerblading, me zooming along in my chair. As I got older, the walks I took evolved: evening ventures through the prairie behind my grandparents’ house, journeys with helpers through the cool, older neighborhoods in Iowa City where I was going to college, and then meetups with friends at the height of the pandemic, our outdoor, masked wanderings a safe way to be in community.
I started taking solo walks around my neighborhood the year I moved back home to live with my parents, after finishing grad school. Being outside, in relationship with nature and the world around me, became something of a balm during a time of not knowing when my care situation would be stable enough to live on my own again. Or, perhaps, putting myself in conversation with the natural world had never stopped being a balm to growing up in a society not built for my body.
Disabled people being able to access the outdoors is nothing short of revolutionary – so many of our community have been isolated inside institutions, kept away from each other, and kept away from the world. That’s why the Outdoors for Everyone campaign – which is working to expand access to green spaces, parks, and trails for people with disabilities – is so important. All people should be able to enjoy the outdoors, however that may look for them.
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Perhaps because people with disabilities have historically been isolated, there’s a tendency to think that accessibility and nature don’t go hand in hand. But this doesn’t have to be the case. Disability and nature are intertwined. Accessibility and the outdoors aren’t opposing forces, if we crack open our understanding of what “accessibility” looks like, of what “the outdoors” can mean.
While it’s true that I’m not going to climb a mountain, it’s also true that many able-bodied people can’t do this, either. The error lies in assuming that access to the outdoors is going to look the same for everyone – that in order for people with disabilities to enjoy nature, they need to be able to experience nature in the exact same way that able-bodied people can (“able-bodied” being itself an unstable category). For someone unable to tolerate extreme temperatures, access to nature may look like sitting under the shade of a tree for 10 minutes on a summer evening. For someone unable to navigate snow and ice, it might look like holding a snowball in their hands before going inside. For me, it looks like my wheeled walks through the wildflowers and my awe at each Iowan sunset.
There was a time when I believed my disability – my flesh and blood body and my mechanical body beneath it – to be in conflict with nature. Or if not in conflict, then at least somewhat poorly suited for each other. My wheelchair, an extension of my body, is made of metal and plastic and gears. It’s clunky and industrial, and it’s true that it stops me from being able to go on certain trails, or maneuver to certain, rocky places. But it’s also true that it takes me everywhere I can go, to see everything I can see – the strawberry patch across the river that flows by the apartment I’ve since moved into, the pink heads of the coneflowers in the backyard meadow at my parents’ house where I go on some weekends to visit, the glitter of Lily Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, a view I drink in on a recent family vacation.
The crunch of my tires on gravel reminds me that my body is in harmony with nature, that adaptation – such a hallmark for disability – is inherent in nature, too.