The Old Story

In my new book Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening I recount several instances of what I can only call “weird travel experiences”. If you are a person with a disability or a friend or family member of someone with a disability the chances are good that you have experienced odd situations when traveling.

In Eavesdropping I describe how strangers approach me in hotels and restaurants asking if they can pray for me. A self proclaimed firewalker sat next to me on a Continental airlines flight and flat out told me that he cures all sorts of disabilities at his ranch in New Mexico: according to this fellow all you have to do is conquer fear and walk barefoot through fire and “voila” you’re Multiple Sclerosis or blindness is gone. 

There’s plenty of dark comedy surrounding the experiences of disabled travelers. But the stories also suggest that being treated with dignity and professionalism in public is still not a common right of passage. Yesterday while I was waiting for a flight from Manchester, New Hampshire to Columbus, Ohio I overheard two women who were clearly members of the “temporarily abled community” discussing how badly they’d been treated when they’d been forced to use wheelchairs in the airport while recovering from minor sports surgeries. Here, approximately, is how their conversation went:

Woman One: “I don’t see how disabled people can stand traveling.” (She’d seen me sitting alone with my yellow Labrador guide dog.)  “I mean, the airlines treat you like your stupid.”

Woman Two: “Oh I know. I had to travel with my 90 year old mother who needs a wheelchair and we were treated like cattle.”

Woman One: “They don’t look at you; they look for a ‘normal’ person to talk to; and they roll their eyes and act like helping you is beyond the pale of expectation.”

Woman Two: “Yeah, if I really had a disability and had to travel I’d just plain quit.”

As Kurt Vonnegut would say: “and so on.”

I am increasingly interested in hearing stories from people in the disability community about their travel adventures. It’s time I think to start putting the stories into the record. We all know that there are affidavits and complaints that have been lodged with the Department of Justice or the Federal Aviation Administration. That’s all to the good. But I’m interested in seeing to it that stories about the disability travel experience are better heard by representatives of the travel and hospitality industries.

As a travel and accessibility consultant for people with disabilities, I’m now very eager to gather your stories as a means of encouraging broader public awareness about the state of disability travel.

Comments

[Georgia Whitney]

Several years ago I did some business traveling with a friend who was born with a malformed hip. At the time, she was on crutches, and what was most astounding was how poorly hotels were laid out to accommodate someone with limited mobility. She couldn't use stairs easily, so whenever she and I went anywhere in the hotel we took the elevator. So far, so good...except in one hotel, which shall remain nameless, you actually had to travel twice as far to use the elevator. I was fine with this, but my friend was exhausted. In another nameless hotel, I watched my friend struggle with simply getting around her room. The room was small and the bed was positioned so that it left almost no way to negotiate the limited space. It's a wonder she didn't fall and break her neck.

[Ann Tracy]

I've traveled all over the country (and a few excursions abroad) on crutches. All in all, I can't complain too much. A lot of "barriers" are just opportunities for me to use my creative side. But a few more challenging instances remain in my mind as having had some really accessibility issues:

1. Some airlines use the smaller planes (30-50 people) when they have smaller demand -- but they don't generally tell you when you reserve. I got on one plane where my crutches were forcibly taken away (by "Stewardess Mary Ellen Brezhnev") and put in the bag hold below us. She said they could not accommodate them in the cabin. So if I had to go to the bathroom, or get up for any reason -- it was just too bad.

2. I actually had someone at an airport check in gate demand that I go through the metal detector without my crutches. Sorry man! With no hip joint, that’s a bit of a problem! I walk on my arms.

3. Again with a smaller plane, I went from the gate through one of those passageways that takes you right to the door of the plane -- only to find a LONG set of steps descending to the runway -- and another LONG set of steps going up to the plane once you'd crossed the tarmac. Stairs are a real problem for me (plane stairs are particularly difficult to maneuver) and there was just no way around it.

4. Elevators are frequently a million miles from any staircase which is a problem for me, a problem for the sky caps, and a problem for anyone I travel with. Honestly, don’t architects have a clue?

5. Leg room in planes is a constant problem. No, my legs don’t bend after a certain point. There’s just nothing I can do about it. Sitting on an aisle helps, but is not an actual solution if the plane ride is more than an hour long. And other passengers, for whatever reason, often feel the need to get in and out a lot when I’m at the end of an aisle. That isn’t very practical either, since my crutches are usually buried under everyone else’s stuff in the overhead. The plain truth is that I need more room – and decent armrests with which to get myself up and down.

6. The other things that come to mind are instances of my being used to a western standard of care and understanding of medicine. I've had some very entertaining reactions to my disability and how I manage things from people in some other countries -- because medicine in other parts of the world is sometimes so behind our own. Word to the wise -- don't get hurt abroad (especially if you're not in a city)!!!

One the flip side, I got some artificial parts several years ago, and was uncertain how my newly implanted metal would fare in airport detectors. So I headed to the check point with "artificial part" card in hand, and speech ready on how I may look young (I was 35), but really -- I have some metal parts. Sure enough, the metal detector went off. As they wanded me, I was gearing up to relate my saga of being born without certain bodily architecture. It was actually kind of disappointing when they discovered it was extensive amount of metal in my underwire bra that was the problem! I still laugh when I think about how much I worried before that flight!

[Georgia Whitney]

Today I heard a hair-raising story about air travel from an elderly woman in Red Wing, MN. She uses a motorized wheelchair and simply cannot take planes any more. There's no place to put the wheelchair. But even before she was wheelchair- bound she had problems. She's on oxygen, and was not allowed to take her own onto the plane. She had to BUY it from the airline! Another time they took her oxygen away and took so long to bring her some of theirs that she had to call 911.
So she takes Amtrak. It's slow as molasses in wintertime, she says, but it's considerably more accommodating for people with disabilities.

Georgia