MY BATTLEWAGON
In going where you
have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you
dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent
and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into
shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about,
than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled
in the closet, but unused. —Ernest Hemingway
Although I never viewed
the hard-drinking, obsessively macho Papa as a role model for my personal life,
the man had a way with words. As an outdoor writer, I always agreed with this
quote; I came to appreciate it even more after ALS entered my life.
Nowadays when I go where
I have to go and do what I have to do, it’s in a wheelchair. I use a
lightweight, foldable, Brazilian-made chair that easily stows in a car or plane
for travel. You won’t see me use the phrase “confined to a wheelchair” because
it expresses the exact opposite of what I feel. My chair—my battlewagon—gives
me the freedom to get out in the woods.
If my wheelchair could talk, it would
entertain you with tales of slogging through the mud in South Carolina’s Low
Country, bouncing around in the bed of a pickup while we looked for pronghorns
and mule deer in eastern Wyoming, carefully negotiating a rough trail to our ground
blind on a bear hunt in the Rockies of Idaho, shivering during a wintry stakeout
for whitetails on Montana’s prairie, and enduring flat tires in Argentina’s La
Pampa province—while pointing to scars that back up the stories.
I always feel uneasy
about leaving my chair in the hands of airline baggage handlers. It often comes
back with the brakes knocked out of alignment. On the return flight from a hog
hunt in Uruguay
last year, my chair emerged with a broken foot support. The reps for Pluna
airlines were very helpful, however, and I received a reimbursement just four
days after replacing the part.
The rigors of hunting
and travel have definitely detracted from my chariot’s cosmetics, but I like it
that way. I wouldn’t be nearly as proud of a shiny, unblemished wheelchair that
had never left the safety of my home.
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