With your kind indulgence, this is a magazine article I wrote about fifteen years ago. It runs about 2,500 words.

Wheelchair Access
I had polio when I was two years old. Through most of my life I walked with the aid of a leg brace and a pair of forearm crutches. Fortunately, since climbing El Capitan or scaling the Matterhorn were not high on my list of life goals, accessibility or lack thereof rarely presented a problem. I was not real fond of long flights of stairs, but as long as there was a solid handrail, I could manage.

After about three score years, my "good" leg will no longer bear my weight reliably and my shoulders register protest at using crutches to haul the rest of my carcass around. I now rely on a wheelchair for mobility. This has given me a whole new view of the world in general and of accessibility -or lack thereof -in particular.

My wife Barbara and I recently took a weekend trip. This provided an interesting series of illustrations.

The 1994 Northwest Synod Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was held on the weekend of June 17th through 19th on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham. Barbara and I attended. Barbara was scheduled to conduct a couple of workshops, and I intended to mill around and see what there was to see.

We arrived about noonish at the Performance Hall where some of the meetings were scheduled to take place. We set about reconnoitering: schedules, where to register, which meetings were held where, the usual things. One of the first things I always want to find out about a place is: Where are the wheelchair accessible rest rooms? I want to locate these facilities before the need becomes desperate. And at that point, because we had been on the road for a couple of hours, desperation was not far off.

Although the recently passed Americans with Disabilities Act mandates that public buildings must have accessible rest rooms, we didn't see any signs indicating where they might be. There was a men's room off the lobby of the Performance Hall, but it was down two or three steps. No joy. Before we started an all-out search, and because we were in something of a hurry (not just because of my increasingly desperate condition), Barbara checked the ladies' room, which was on the same level as the lobby. Finding no one inside, she stood guard while I went in. Again, no joy. All the booths had twenty-inch doors. My wheelchair is twenty-one and a half inches wide. Couldn't get into the booth.

Barbara boarded an elevator, checked the basement, and returned a few minutes later to say she found another men's room. This one was accessible. Although there may have been signs somewhere indicating its presence, I never saw one.

After eating lunch and moving the car to a more centralized parking place (with wheelchair decal), we went into the building where the first workshops were to be held. Barbara located the room where her workshops were to be, and I went over the list to see which ones I wanted to attend.

Aha! A workshop on outreach to the disabled, with special attention to making church buildings convenient and accessible. Very good. Although our church is accessible, I decided to attend and put in my two bits worth if it seemed appropriate.

The workshop was in room 221 of this particular classroom building. I rolled down the hall to the elevator, entered and punched the second floor button. Debarking on the second floor, I checked the numbers on a couple doors, determined which direction to go, and went in search of room 221. Found it. It was off an atrium cum stairwell about half a floor down. About seven steps. Okay, I thought. I had noticed on the elevator buttons that there was a mezzanine between the first and second floors. Returning to the elevator, I boarded, pressed the "M" button, got off on the mezzanine, and rolled down the hall in the direction of room 221. Again I found it. I was on the mezzanine, but room 221 was up six steps!

While I sat there drumming my fingers on the padded arm of my wheelchair and contemplating the essence of the word "irony," several people hurried by, searching for their meeting rooms. A stocky, bearded, pleasant-looking man stopped and asked me if I was finding what I was looking for.

I told him, "Yes, but " and explained the situation to him.

He looked a bit thunderstruck.

"I am one of the pastors who's giving that workshop," he said. The other pastor arrived about that time. They conferred. There was a great aura of OOPS! about the whole thing. The pastors certainly weren't at fault. But whoever had scheduled that workshop in that room had failed to make a fundamental connection. It may very well have been one of a half-dozen least accessible rooms in the building.

To give WWU its due, they had provided. Firmly attached to the wall beside this short flight of steps was a stair lift for wheelchairs consisting of a platform that could be folded down from the wall and a control panel with rocker switches for operating the electric motor.

But one needed a key to operate the thing. And, of course, where one might find such a key was anybody's guess.

By this time, the two pastors were getting a bit steamed up. I offered just to let it go, but they insisted that since I indicated I wanted to attend that workshop, come hell or high water they would make sure I attended it. Grunting and straining, they lifted me up the steps. I'm not all that heavy, but hauling me and my wheelchair up six steps was not easy. Thank you, gentlemen, I really appreciate that.

Had I talked about accessibility problems for hours, I could not have made the point more eloquently.

All in attendance at the workshop, lay and clergy alike, were very positive about making church attendance as easy and convenient as possible for people with all kinds of disabilities.

There was some discussion of the courtesies, such as sitting down if possible while talking with someone in a wheelchair, so neither of you gets a kinked neck; talking to the person in the wheelchair, not to whoever they happen to be with as if the person in the wheelchair were some sort of non-sentient entity; or treating a person's wheelchair as if it were part of that person's body: don't lean on it or put your feet on it; and if you are pushing someone in a wheelchair and you stop to have a word with someone else, turn the person in the wheelchair toward the conversation, not away from it. This and more, all good stuff.

There was some agonizing over "politically correct" terminology. Someone wanted to ban the perfectly acceptable word "handicapped" for totally spurious etymological reasons. We explored clumsy circumlocutions such as "persons with differing abilities," and the ever-popular suffixes "challenged" and "impaired," as when referring to a short person as "vertically challenged" or "altitudinally impaired." Little was accomplished in this area.

Much discussion dealt with the problems, particularly the expense, of retrofitting older church buildings with wheelchair lifts, ramps, and accessible rest rooms. Other things, such as modifications of existing public address systems, if any, to include making earphones available; many things of this nature were talked about.

One pastor allowed as how this was all very commendable, but it was academic as far as his church was concerned. In his congregation there were no disabled people.

I asked him, "Have you ever wondered why that might be?"

He looked at me, a little befuddled.

"Has anybody here seen the movie Field of Dreams?" I asked. Several people nodded.

"Do you remember the major, pivotal line in the movie?"

A couple people started to smile. Others still looked confused, so I quoted the line:

"Build it, and they will come."

Point taken. I was kind of proud of that.

After the conclusion of the workshop, the two pastors lifted me back down the stairs again. Again, thank you, gentlemen.
*    *    *A Global Missions Festival was going on concurrently with the Synod Assembly. It was held in the gymnasium and consisted of tables and booths for exhibits, performances of ethnic music and dance, and great crowds milling about, rubbernecking at the exhibits and greeting each other. Barbara and I joined in the milling, rubbernecking, and greeting for a while, then decided to leave and track down a Mediterranean restaurant somewhere. But before we left, there was something I needed to attend to.

Since it had been several hours, I followed the signs to the nearest men's room. I was optimistic, because the sign bore the standard blue and white wheelchair logo.

One of the booths had a wide door; plenty large enough for a wheelchair to enter, with room inside to maneuver. But -instead of opening outward, the door swung inward. Against the toilet. You could back the wheelchair into the booth, but then the door was between you and the toilet. And you couldn't close the door because you and your wheelchair were in the way.

I eyeballed the general geometry of the place and tried an experiment. I found that by repeatedly moving my wheelchair back and forth a few inches at a time and turning it a few degrees at a time -similar to trying to get into a very tight parking place -and by removing the detachable footplates from the wheelchair, I was eventually able to turn far enough so I could close the door.

Mind you, I was not just being modest. With the door where it was, it was impossible to transfer to the toilet.

When finished, I extricated myself from the booth by reversing the process and reassembling my wheelchair.

My wheelchair is narrower than many. I am skinny through the hips and I use a wheelchair with a sixteen-inch wide seat and wrap-around arm rests. Despite my somewhat constrained shoulders, my arms are fairly strong and I still retain some of my former agility. Yet using this purportedly accessible rest room was, for me, at the very limit of the possible. To someone with a slightly larger wheelchair or who was slightly less mobile, this rest room would not have been accessible -despite the signs indicating that it was.

Had the booth door swung outward rather than inward, there would not have been a problem.*    *    *After a very nice dinner in a restaurant in Fairhaven, the old town district of Bellingham, we went in search of a motel. We had not really anticipated any difficulties and indeed, had we needed a room without a qualification "accessible," there would have been none. We stopped at several motels. Barbara went in, made our needs known, then came back out to say they had vacancies, but all of their accessible rooms were already taken.

Undoubtedly we should have booked a room earlier, but alas, we hadn't.

We pulled into yet another motel, and Barbara learned that they didn't have a designated "accessible" room available, but they thought the bathroom door in one they did have might be wide enough for a wheelchair. Barbara checked the room out. She measured the bathroom door with her belt, then came back to the car and measured her belt with a tape measure she had stashed away. Bingo. It was wide enough by a couple inches. She signed for the room, then I transferred from the car to the wheelchair, and we headed over.

OOPS!

Barbara had been so concerned about the bathroom door, she hadn't even noticed that there was a six-inch step from the sidewalk to the room. Barbara's back was not up to this, especially since she had already lifted my wheelchair in and out of the car's trunk several times that day. My chair isn't balanced right to do wheelies, so that was out.

Barbara found a desk chair in the room. I turned the wheelchair parallel to the door, Barbara set the desk chair in the doorway, and fortunately it turned out to be a close match, with only a few inches difference in elevation. I transferred to the desk chair, then swung around sideways and tried to make myself small enough as Barbara folded the wheelchair and horsed it through the door past where I sat. I then transferred from the desk chair to the wheelchair. I was in. Whew!

The bathroom door was wide enough to clear, provided I went straight in, not at an angle. This meant Barbara had to shove the small writing desk into the corner from its centralized position against the wall.

Once inside, the bathroom wasn't huge, but it was sufficiently large to maneuver easily.

When we left the following morning, we got me out of the room by reversing the above procedure with the desk chair.

This was pretty much the last of the accessibility adventures on this trip. There is a small coda, however.

We drove down Chuckanut Drive and headed off cross-country, intending to eat lunch in La Connor, and other than missing a turn or two and backtracking a bit, all was well. We were not in any great rush, and doodling along and sight-seeing was our main objective.

When we arrived in La Connor, I needed to make use of a rest room. La Connor has a nice public rest room complex on its main street adjacent to small (maybe 20 by 20) park complete with benches, shrubbery, a public drinking fountain, and a "you are here" style map of the area. I knew that the men's had an accessible booth. A nice, big booth.

I had to wait for ten or fifteen minutes, however, because two guys were using it for a dressing room. At least I think that was what they were doing. They were being quite leisurely about it. I didn't yell and bang on the door (bad form unless things are really desperate), but I cleared my throat a lot and rolled around enough to make it obvious that there was a wheelchair out there. Eventually they came out. They were both able-bodied; and they gave me the fish-eye, as if to say, "What are you hanging around in here for? Are you some kind of pervert?"*    *    *We had a very nice lunch in La Connor, then headed back to Seattle by a highly circuitous route: east to Darrington, around the mountain loop road to the trail head to Monte Cristo, then through Granite Falls to Marysville, where we threw ourselves on the mercy of Interstate 5 and headed home.

© Copyright 1995 by Donald Richard Firth

I've had a number of adventures of this type.

Don Firth