There’s a creature that can both walk and wheel.
I’m in love with it. I want to be it.
It’s a large grazing animal, with a horned head and a short trunk, like an elephant, and not the most attractive visage. It has four legs, in a diamond formation – one to the front, one to the back and two to the sides. But here’s the thing. On the fore and on the aft leg, there’s a wheel.
The first person to see the mulefa, as they’re called, can’t believe it. Wheels did not exist in nature, she thinks.† You needed an axle with a bearing that is completely separate from the rotating part. It couldn’t happen, it’s impossible. Then she sees that the wheels are seed-pods. Perfectly round, immensely hard and light – they couldn’t have been designed better. The mulefa gripped the centre of the pods with the claws of their front and rear legs while pushing against the ground with their two lateral legs, and off they went.
I love wheels. And I’m very keen on being able to walk. When I met these creatures, who live in one of the worlds created by Philip Pullman in The Amber Spyglass, I felt a kinship that straddles imaginations. They’d survived by being able to adapt. They had the dexterity of being upright and ambulant and, thanks to the rotating seed pods on the end of their legs, they had speed: ‘The thundering of the wheels, the rush of the grassland on either side, the sure and powerful lean into the broad curve ahead, the clear-headed rapture of speed….’††
I love that phrase, the clear-headed rapture of speed. My own movement involves a walking stick, concentration, and very little speed.
When I’ve had jobs in large workplaces, I’ve always used my motorised wheelchair (called a power chair these days) to get round. The same when I shop in a mall or go to the movies. The power chair helps with speed and energy conservation. However when I’m at home or going a short distance from my car, I usually walk. For people who’ve only ever seen me on wheels it gives them quite a shock to see me ambulant. They think something miraculous has occurred. Conversely when people who’ve only seen me ambulant see me in a wheelchair they think something terrible has happened.
The fact is, I’m a part-time wheelchair user. But part-time does not mean half-hearted. My love affair with wheels is passionate. The wonder of them. The spin and speed of them. The pure visceral splendour of going places you never thought you’d be able to go.
For most of my life I haven’t been great at walking, thanks to the arthritis which arrived when I was six. At age eleven I was taught to use a walking stick. ‘Heel toe, heel toe, stick, stick,’ said the physio, teaching me the art of walking a duet. Some days I could stride. Other days I shuffled. Years later, when I met one of my former secondary school teachers, he said: ‘We always wondered if you’d win the battle and keep walking.’ His comment surprised me. So that’s the battle I’d been fighting.
At age 14 I went on a camp for disabled kids and got to drive a car – an adapted car that you could drive even if you didn’t have much movement or strength in your limbs. It was the 1970s and we made the most of the empty Coastlands carpark on a no-shopping Sunday afternoon in Paraparaumu. We drove in short lines and slow arcs, small movements which belied the big places this experience went in our imaginations. As life became grindier in the years following, it was the dream of driving, the dream of wheels that might take me places with ease, that kept me going.
At age 17 I had my first hip replacement, the old bone traded in for a titanium rod and plastic cup, my joints and I relieved about this new addition to the body corporate. Then my first car at age 18 – a brand new red Honda Civic with a padded seat for height, and controls adapted for reach and dexterity. Not only could I now drive anywhere, anytime, tasting the ‘clear-headed rapture of speed’, but I could also be the one that helped others with offering lifts or running errands. An enormous change from being the one who needed help.
In The Amber Spyglass we never learn what assisted the mulefa in their transition from being creatures who only walked, to ones that could wheel as well. Maybe, for thousands of years, walking was sufficient for them. My own experience of walking has been more of an evolutionary tangle than any free-flowing dance. The movement was not easy, yet our world, my world, rewards a two-legged-no-wheels approach to living, and maintaining the ability to walk was important. I had my second hip operation at 20, and then, because even new hips don’t last forever, it was re-done when I was 30. I’d been doing my version of flying high in terms of work and other activities and to be reclaimed back to earth by my shonky body was a shock. I tried to avoid thinking about the imminent removal of the loose hip, but it didn’t work. I kept having a waking nightmare: I was being wheeled down to the operating theatre, gowned and stunned, when suddenly I sat up and started yelling, ‘I want a second opinion, I want a second opinion!’ It seemed like such an ungrateful thing to contemplate. Could a patient really raise their hand like Oliver and say, ‘Please may I have another…..?’
Apparently you could. The ‘second-opinion’ surgeon agreed with the first, that the procedure being suggested was the best way to go. It involved two steps: taking out the old metal hip and cup and doing bone grafts and, in a second operation, putting in a new hip. As I listened I wondered why I thought I’d only need six weeks off work. And how did I envisage I’d walk in the meantime, with no hip? The surgeon spelled out what I probably hadn’t wanted to hear in previous appointments, namely that in between surgeries I wouldn’t be able to walk.
That’s when I detached. Although ‘not walking’ was only a temporary measure, when I came home from that surgeon’s appointment everything inside me went dark. Those battles to ‘keep going’ and the emotions surrounding them condensed into a black hole. It felt like the battle might be lost, not through me giving up but through this unexpected surgical intervention.
In the end that first surgery went better than expected. I came round from the operation with the new hip safely in place and didn’t need a second operation. The darkness shifted and lifted, and I did walk again. That was the left hip. Nine years later the right hip was revised, in a more difficult operation involving nearly three months in hospital. However, the result is that my stiff old hips are a working, walking model, and I’ve gained a tiny bit of movement in the process.
Both those things are major. But unlike my relationship with wheels, I’m not sure that I’m in love with walking. Measuring distances, measuring pain thresholds (or these days discomfort/fatigue thresholds) is a well-developed neural pathway in my head. But for several decades walking for pleasure was not. That’s why it’s been so unexpected, this more recent discovery.
I have a driveway that goes uphill from my house, starting gradually and becoming steeper. It’s about 30 metres long. After living here for a couple of years, that driveway that I drove up and down all the time, began to beckon me: come for a walk, why don’t you? Come on… Walk up it for no good reason? Why on earth would I do that? The answer, once the querulous voices had been shushed, was I wanted to walk it because, maybe, I could.
One morning, walking stick in hand, and hips, knees and ankles in good enough condition to walk casually, I left the house, stepped up onto the footpath and slowly, bit-by-bit, walked alongside the fence, past my neighbour’s place, past the car park and up the drive, towards the main road. At the top I stopped, turned around, looked out towards the city and local hills, breathed it all in, and walked back down again.
This small excursion, which I can do equipment free (except for the stick), is now one of my favourite things. And I’ve come to know this patch of my outside world well. The gradient of the path, the scattered kowhai seed-pods which you can roll under your feet and break open, the cats, the neighbours you get to say hello to. It’s so different from the behind-the-steering-wheel view.
Thanks to the pleasure of that driveway ‘stroll’, and the wonder of wheels, my relationship with the outdoors has changed. The pinnacle was five years ago, on the Central Otago Rail Trail.
A group of 11 of us arrived in Middlemarch on an autumn morning so clear and crisp you could almost snap it. People had adapted bikes, tandem bikes, hired bikes, single bikes. I had my power chair, a spare battery, and two rechargers. And we had a van with a hoist.
The Central Otago Rail Trail is 150km long. What followed was five days of being outside in this barren beauty. Five days of bumping and driving, jiggling and navigating. Five days of being stretched across a large landscape. Five days of doing something so quintessentially Kiwi – spending time with a group of friends in the great outdoors. So ordinary, so extra-ordinary. This was my joy – no longer living vicariously, but living through the senses, and the land.
From that experience came another imaginative leap. I dreamt of having a crane that would lift my power chair into my car. A crane that I could operate myself.
Here is where I long for the mulefa freedom. This is where some of my envy lies. The seamless way they can move from walking to wheeling. The simplicity of their ‘equipment’ – the claw, the seedpod, and that’s it. ‘Propulsion’ for me, seems to involve a collection of metal and a mountain of bureaucracy. Occasionally that mountain moves however, and when one of the forms I filled in to apply for a car with a crane said, ‘How will the item you are applying for improve your quality of life?’ I told them what it was like living with the ability to walk only a short distance. The planning and compromises. The limitations. The endless organising of getting the power chair – which I am unable to dismantle and lift into my car – to a destination by using wheelchair taxi transport with their restrictive hours and need to book. The great thing is that they listened, and granted the funds. It means I can be spontaneous, and spontaneity in amongst a life that still takes quite a bit of planning, is a very sweet thing.
It’s a taste of being a mulefa – a taste of moving with ease. But where does the next step lie? In creating a mulefa world, of course. Because in a mulefa world the mulefa need the trees as much as the trees need the mulefa. They each know that their survival and health depends on the other. In order to forage far and wide for food, the mulefa need wheels. In order to have their seedpods break open and germinate, the trees need the pressure which the mulefa exert on the seedpods through wheeling at speed. The two are deeply inter-dependant. Maybe, way back in their evolutionary past, it came to them – here was a way to not only survive, but to flourish. Imagine that.
† Pullman, P. (2001), The Amber Spyglass, pp91-2. London: Scholastic Children's Books.
†† Pullman, P. (2001), The Amber Spyglass, p449 . London: Scholastic Children's Books.