I don't know where I've been all this time, CU, but I just discovered your blog. I've got some reading to do!

A big word in my vocabulary is accessibility, especially since I retired my crutches for a wheelchair back in 1990.

One day in the early 1990s, my wife and I piled into our Honda Civic 4-door sedan equipped with hand controls and with my wheelchair folded and stuffed into the back seat, and we headed up Interstate 5 for the 90 mile trek from Seattle to Bellingham. The annual meeting of the Northwest Washington Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was being held at Western Washington University, At the time, Barbara was the regional director of the Lutheran Peace Fellowship, and she was slated to conduct and attend a number of meetings and workshops. I had no official business there, but I intended to mosey from workshop to workshop and see what was going on.

One workshop on the program that looked interesting was on making church buildings accessible to people with disabilities. This mean such things as putting in wheelchair ramps. I decided to attend this one, listen, and put in my two-bits worth if it seemed appropriate.

Fasten your seat belt. The adventure starts.

I noted that the number of room where this workshop was to take place indicated that it was on the second floor. So I took the elevator up one floor, rolled down the hall to where it was supposed to be, and discovered a flight of stairs going down. I could see room number on the door of the room. Somehow, I had missed the floor. So I went back to the elevator and punched the button for the first floor. I got off and rolled to where the room was supposed to be. But no. The room was up a flight of stairs! It seems the room was on a mezzanine, and the elevator didn't stop there.

So I'm sitting there contemplating the concept of multiple dimensions when a man walking toward the stairs asked, "Can I help you find something?"

I responded that I had intended to attend to workshop on church accessibility, but I couldn't figure out how to get to the room where it was being held.

He stared for a second, then slapped his forehead. "I'm one of the pastors who is moderating that workshop! And the college has managed to put us in probably the least accessible room on the campus!!"

About that time, another man came along. Another pastor who was attending the workshop. The two of them, grunting and straining, lifted me and my wheelchair up the stairs!

The workshop was pretty interesting. There were about thirty people there, mostly pastors. The first man I had encountered opened the meeting by describing what had just happened and how that room, of all rooms available, had given them a graphic example of the very thing they had come to discuss.

After this impromptu intro, he opened his remarks by saying, "I note that about two-thirds of the people in this meeting have a physical impairment." Everybody looked around the room and noted that, other than me in my wheelchair and one man who walked with a cane, no one could see what the moderator was talking about.

"About two-thirds of the people here are wearing a prosthetic device," he prompted. They still didn't get it. So he dropped it on them:

"How well would you get along without your glasses?"

They got it. Revelation, anybody?

The discussion proceeded with talk of building wheelchair ramps, and the installation of stout handrails in churches that didn't have them, along with wheelchair lifts and elevators where necessary. And earphones connected to the church's PA system for the hearing impaired.

Toward the end of the discussion, one pastor remarked that he couldn't see the point in making any of these modifications. After all, he said, his church didn't have any wheelchair-bound or otherwise disabled members in the congregation.

I stuck my hand up and the moderator called on me.

"Have you seen the movie, Field of Dreams?" [Big hit movie a year or two before this] I asked the pastor whose congregation was all able-bodied. He looked at me, puzzled—but after a few seconds, a few others nodded and chuckled.

"The big, memorable line in the movie," I said. "'Build it, and they will come!'"

Point taken.

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I think I could write a book on the subject of accessibility. During the last twenty-some years that I have been using a wheelchair, I have run into some really bizarre accessibility situations, especially ones where someone has tried to make something accessible, but didn't manage to think it through.

Such as the rest room with the nice, big booth with a wide door and a raised toilet seat and well-placed grab-bars. But—the door swings inward instead of out, comes to rest against the toilet, and totally blocks the wheelchair user from getting close to the toilet.

Or the rest room where there is a big, well set-up booth, raised toilet seat, well-placed grab-bars, and the wide door hung so that it swings outward, the way it should—but the double-door set-up for getting into the rest room in the first place is impossible for a wheelchair user to get through without someone else there to hold the doors open.

And these are only TWO of dozens of examples. I think I MIGHT just write a book!

I firmly advocate that architects or construction companies that are concerned with making buildings, rest rooms, and such accessible (as mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act) should employ or contract someone who uses a wheelchair to oversee plans and do test run-throughs while a presumed accessibility feature is being built.

It only makes sense!

Don Firth