Helping Benny

After a week in the Pacific Northwest, damned if I haven't come back to some serious improvements.  Tom, my landlord of 18 years, decided that I needed more than new washers in my leaking shower.  He instructed the plumber to install new faucets and a tap.  The result is shiny chromium and a major step backwards for quadriplegic independence.  Truth is, the old faucets had X-shaped handles, perfect for wrapping one's impaired fingers around.  The new ones are round and ribbed, much more modern and streamlined, and much less functional.  With the old handles, a little soap on my fingers meant nothing.  But the new ones slip badly beneath a sudsy grip.  And getting a grip is what it's all about.

Take my week in the Pacific Northwest.  No, just take a couple of days, the ones I spent with my cousins, my uncle and aunt, not to mention spouses and secondary and tertiary cousins and their offspring...a hyperextended family whose names come into focus, only to fade away for another two years.  Thus my biennial family reunion.  The experience is short, but intense.  And it includes a fair amount of help.

For Benny, as I am known to my family...a jokey corruption of Bendix...needs lots of assistance.  Principally lifting.  Why lifting?  Because it's summer in the state of Washington, and the sun is actually shining for hours at a time, the temperature soaring toward 70° along the base of the Olympic Range.  And in the rural and suburban environs of Puget Sound, people make recreational hay while the sun shines.  And, they will heartily confirm, it does not shine all that often.  So, anyway, it's summer time, the family reunion is cranking away, things are outdoorsy and physical, and here's Benny, a.k.a., me, badly in need of inclusion.

My cousin Larry has a surprisingly large chunk of Washington forest and meadow that he calls home, and upwards of 30 people assembled there this year in the name of family togetherness.  Many camped.  Quite a few stayed in motels.  But whatever their sleeping arrangements, the attendees used a section of Larry's forest as a picnic grounds/campsite.  For me, there was constant maneuvering up to the end of picnic tables, in and out of canvas chairs, and there was always help.

I have had 40 years of people helping me stand up from low chairs.  I've almost gotten used to it.  By now, I've got the instructions down.  I tell people what to do with something bordering on clarity, backed by quasi-assertiveness.  Have I always been afraid of being bossy?  Afraid of appearing to take people's assistance for granted?  I don't know.  In any case, over the years it has become much easier for me to request help.  Gone is the cringing sense of feebleness, of being one down in relation to my helper, any bystander, any witness.

What hasn't changed is the essential bafflement of those who help.  I tell people, for example, to grip under my right armpit, then pull me forward, not up.  To me, this seems simple enough.  But for most people, it's too much.  First, few can resist the temptation to pull on my left arm.  This is the arm that's working, actually not only working hard but well, as I push myself up to stand.  On the right, virtually nothing is happening at all.  The right arm hangs loose, neither gripping nor pushing.  It is on this side that I need force.  Still, people feel drawn to the arm that is pumping out effort.  They want to add their own.  And they do.  Which actually diminishes the effectiveness of the left arm, clamping the muscles out of action.  Worse, it actually throws me off balance.  As for the armpit, my right arm is so rarely used, so stiff and inactive, that pulling on it can tear what's left of my musculature.  Which has happened a time or two.  So, it's the armpit, and it's forward as much as upward.

Pulling forward gets me over my center of gravity.  Once I am there, the challenge is to stop the process.  Balance, or what my physiotherapist tells me is really proprioception, seems to be the real issue.  Once I'm on my legs and standing, it's a matter of adjusting the position of the feet to get something like a stable base beneath me.  To do this, I ask the person helping to let go.  This is the critical thing.  It's the hardest thing for most people to do.  They see me wavering, teetering this way and that, and the inclination is to stabilize the fucker, hold on tight, get him solid.  The problem is, standing firmly on my own two feet requires that my helper let go, while I do the opposite.  I grab the helper's wrist, preferably, lean this way and that, get my feet arranged...until it all feels sure and certain.

Of course, what constitutes solid footing on a concrete floor isn't necessarily solid on the forest floor.  There things, if not shifting, are inherently bumpy, spongy at unexpected moments, rock hard at others.  It takes a bit longer in the woodsy circumstance to get myself stable enough to grab a crutch and walk a few steps to, say, a canvas camp chair.  This makes the well intended helper all the more determined to grab and hold the swaying quadriplegic.  There is a surprising amount of dialogue involved in all this.  A surprising amount of time.  And yet in the end, we must be closer, my helpers and me.

Unless they're my Northwest cousins, for our closeness is taken for granted, naturally extends over the years, and is not an issue.  It is Sunday morning and Victor, son of cousin Dave, is clamoring for my attention.  Will I watch him jump off the dock?  What dock, you ask?  The dock of cousin Larry's pond, of course, recently stocked with trout and the center of kid activity throughout the weekend.  I haven't the heart to tell Victor that he is asking someone old and achey to bounce down a dirt track in a flimsy portable electric wheelchair one time too many.  I regard the distant pond, wondering how to get out of this.  Not that I really wanted to get out of many things around Larry Land.  It's a woodsy paradise, this Northwest compound of his.  In fact, just yesterday I actually held and fired cousin Tom's potato gun.  

A word about this.  The last potato gun I saw amounted to a toy pistol, the tiny end of which inserted into a potato to extract a plug...then fired under pressure of some kind...producing a mild sort of pleasure, if you happened to be a young boy.  If you happened to be a middle-aged man of the rough and ready Northwest cousin variety, by 2010 you were into considerably more when it came to potato guns.  Tom's version amounted to a potato cannon.  Constructed of large bore PVC pipes, the thing required an entire Russert potato to be stuffed down its plastic maw, propellant from a can of hairspray or deodorant squirted into one end, a seal screwed into place, then an electric ignition switch to spark a small explosion.  The latter launching one of Idaho's finest into something just short of low-earth orbit, the reentry occurring a good 200 meters downrange on Larry's distant lawn.  The thing had quite a kickback, as I discovered, having unfortunately positioned the potato cannon on my crutch.

All of which helps explain why, faced with Victor's request and another overland wheelchair pummeling, I decided to go for the all-terrain vehicle.  I think that is what is actually called.  An ATV.  Larry seems to have a fleet of these.  On this particular final morning of the family camp out, he had attached a small trailer to one of his ATVs and was busy hauling a refrigerator and freezer back into...what, but some kind of storage?  Leary has not only a supply of permanent national-park-style picnic tables, but a fair smattering of freezers and refrigerators, not to mention portable ovens and smokers.  In short, and I haven't mentioned his boat on the scale of a commercial fishing trawler, this guy is equipped not only for outdoor life, but for large events requiring mass domiciling and institutional-scale catering.

So there it was, the ATV with its trailer...which the driver straddles like a motorcycle...and soon there was I somehow aboard and bouncing across the fields, not even the dirt road, with Larry at the wheel.  How I even got on the thing eludes me.  I vaguely recall cousin Dave directing one of his sons to grab Benny here, some other secondary cousin grabbing there.  In any case, somehow I was aboard, precariously perched and flying along.  Incredibly, my electric wheelchair on the trailer behind.  All of this arriving pond-side, lifted back on the ground...just in time for me to see Victor splash into the water.  But I've done this sort of thing over many years.  Cousins have hauled me into canoes, stuffed me aboard trucks and carted me about the Northwest for more reunions than I can recall.  They help me.  Perhaps I help them in some way I can't understand.  And we get older, and we're here, mostly here.