The Port of Columbus is Fully Accessible, part 2 of 5: From Airport to Hotel

From Airport to Hotel

The Port of Columbus is Fully Accessible • The Perplexity of Hotel Shuttles • Lifting • Dan, Al & Muhammad • The Legend of Permission from the Port

Without much difficulty we came upon an information desk and asked where we might find a wheelchair van to take us to the hotel. Goodness, the  information lady had absolutely no idea. Nor whom to ask. The information desk is for the purpose of handing out brochures. If it’s not on a brochure, it’s not information. The map of restaurants in Columbus, that's information. The flyer about golfing, that’s information. But how to get your wheelchair to the city of Columbus in order to dine or to golf, that’s not information.

But just as it all looked bleak, we were pleased to come upon a very nice woman holding a sign that read, “Welcome Episcopal General Convention!” We knew that quite a number of delegates, exhibitors and visitors to the convention were of limited mobility. So surely the representative of the Convention would know how to get people to it, and so she did.

“The Port of Columbus is fully accessible!” she said happily.

“Really?” Pamela asked, skeptical.

“Oh yes, every van has a wheelchair lift!”

And our welcomer wasn’t even wrong. Of course, she wasn’t anywhere near right, either. After a bit of confusing oversignage that showed us you can get there both ways, but the one you take is always the least convenient, we found the shuttle area. On our right, shuttles with hotel names. On our left, plain white shuttles. Across the street, a little island with a waiting area, a bus stop, a hotel phone kiosk, and a little house for the Port of Columbus Transit guy. Then beyond another street, taxi stands, and a door to get back into the airport.

Let us digress for a moment to meditate upon being lifted. Feel free to mentally hum some happy hymns. Being lifted is so metaphorical for people. We lift babies. We remember the joy at being lifted when we were children. We may find uplift in religion, and our spirits are lifted. If it’s something that hasn’t happened to you much since you hit adulthood, it sounds pretty fun, and pretty easy.

But say you’re all grown up. Imagine that it is no longer a metaphor, but that everybody you talk to keeps suggesting that you agree to have some stranger, or a group of strangers put their hands all over you and haul your body around. And worse, what if the stranger is overestimating his or —nevermind, sorry, it’s nearly always testosterone-influenced— ability to lift weight? What if they drop you or hurt you? What if they fumble your incredibly heavy, incredibly expensive chair? What if they damage it? What if this suggestion pops up every single time you need to go somewhere? Being lugged around as an adult is uncomfortable, tiresome, awkward and dangerous. So everybody with two working legs: unless there is fire, flood or earthquake, think of another idea, or shut up.

Brainteaser: there are eight vans. Four are white, and four have hotel logos on them. Your hotel is the Crowne Plaza, which is near the convention center. None of the vans have the Crowne Plaza logo on them. All eight vans randomly come and go at approximately ten minute intervals. The vans with logos will not take you to your hotel, but they will take you to a hotel near your hotel. They are not wheelchair vans, but the drivers are more than willing to carry you. All the white vans are wheelchair vans, but they will not take you to the City of Columbus. They will take you to your car parked in the airport parking lot. The city bus has a wheelchair lift, but does not have a map. Which stop will you need to get to the Convention center? The driver does not know, but it will take at least an hour, and require a transfer. He is not certain of the stop for the transfer, either, and there is no route map. He does helpfully hand you a list of stop names so that you can familiarize yourself with a list of stops whose locations you cannot possibly imagine, so that’s nice.

Along came Dan and Al. They are from Rhode Island, and were already friends of Pamela. First we chatted generally, then about transport, then specifically, how on earth we were going to get to the city. We began working the phones to Crowne Plaza. No, the Crowne Plaza does not have a van. Yes, the Crowne Plaza is fully accessible, once you’re there. No, the Crowne Plaza has absolutely no idea how a woman in a wheelchair actually gets there, perhaps we should have a taxi driver carry her? We’d rather not, so the hotel guy offers to call around and get back to us, and we never hear from him again. Dan and Al found a shuttle to their hotel, and we bid them adieu, just as we were about to make a new friend.

The Port Authority Transit of Columbus has a little house on an island, which sounds both exotic and tropical, but it’s a booth on a traffic island. But the man staffing it that day was a kindly, curious, and smart guy named Muhammad. First, he explained that the Port of Columbus is actually fully accessible. That is to say, the Port of Columbus only owns the white vans that take you to the parking lot to your car, and the city busses. And all of those have wheelchair lifts. The Port of Columbus does not own the hotel vans, or the taxis. So the Port of Columbus is fully accessible if you pretend that the things that aren’t accessible don’t exist, and you pretend that the things that are accessible will actually help. When he realized where this left a newly arrived and tired traveller in the soup, and found out that over the next two days many more would arrive, Muhammad snapped into action. He contacted everybody, and in two hours, Muhammad achieved the impossible. He found a livery service wheelchair van. It was the only livery service wheelchair van in Columbus. And it really was impossible, because it turned out that the company had been trying for months to get a license to pick people up at the airport, but was repeatedly denied, because it was neither a taxi nor a shuttle. Most of the two hours was Muhammad getting special permission from the Port of Columbus to allow our one pickup.

The Port of Columbus is Fully Accessible, part 1 of 5: Getting There

Disclaimer: this story occurred in 2006, when I accompanied a woman from my church to the Episcopal Convention in Columbus Ohio, where she was a delegate. Our heroine uses a wheelchair, hearing aids, and is missing an arm. I've changed a couple names for privacy reasons. I hope things have changed for the better in the intervening years. The bar was certainly low enough.

Peter Eisenman architect of Greater Columbus Convention Center: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eisenman “It was frequently repeated that the Wexner's colliding planes tended to make its users disoriented to the point of physical nausea; in 1997 researcher Michael Pollan tracked the source of this rumor back to Eisenman himself. In the words of Andrew Ballantyne, ‘By some scale of values he was actually enhancing the reputation of his building by letting it be known that it was hostile to humanity.’”

Getting There

Our Heroes Embark • Security and Mobility • Let’s Go Riding in a Plane • Ancient History Our Heroes Disembark

Saturday, June 10, began for me like most other days, except about three hours too soon. Packed, showered, and moderately alert, I bade goodbye to my family and arrived at Pamela’s around six am. By seven-thirty or so, we were on the road to the airport with our friend, Scott.

I hadn’t flown since before 9/11, so I was nervous about what security would entail, and I looked up a lot of tips online. Either I got lucky, or my research paid off, because I sashayed through. However, Pamela, in her wheelchair, had to undergo a complete and infuriatingly thorough scan. Perhaps it is the same spirit that causes the TSA to feel that infants and extremely elderly nuns so closely fit the prevailing profile of a terrorist. They think, "aha, here is a person who is faking her inability to walk, and hates our freedom here in America." Still, if they’d known we were going to the Episcopal General Convention, would they have let us through at all?

Those of limited mobility get seated in airplanes first (as well as people accompanying them, score!). They also find themselves at the end of a boarding ramp to discover that the plane is a shuttle run by Chautauqua which looks for all the world like a pop-‘n-fresh biscuit tube, and contains about as many seats. Maybe they did know we were going to a church convention, because it is at this point that the airline personnel suggested that Pamela rise and walk.

Well worth a shot, however, because the alternative is just as loopy. To get a person from a wheelchair into an airplane is a difficult and never-practiced maneuver. First, you must debate for a bit on the philosophical nature of the phrase, “I cannot walk. I am paraplegic.” Because the dissenting view from the staff is that she may well be a person who simply feels entitled. The thought process on the dissent is as follows: she’s got legs. I mean, you can see two of them right there, so she must be able to use them. Once it’s grudgingly settled that a person may possess legs that do not work, the next point to debate is that your passenger could simply be carried. Surely that would work. Heck, it might even be fun—who doesn’t like a piggyback ride, or that rush of being hoisted by your teammates? If no one volunteers, they must send a minion away for the mysterious “aisle chair,” and hope someone has an idea which janitor closet in the airport they keep it in.

An aisle chair turns out to be an amusing little foldy toy about 12 inches narrower than a standard adult human, made largely out of bent electrical conduit, a couple of office-chair rolly wheels and inadequate velcro. With a bit of backwards driving, a hairpin turn and a caught foot that the staff, still struggling with the concept of paralysis, couldn’t believe she didn’t feel, our passenger is finally seated.

We left Hartford in dreary rain, passed over a quarter of the United States having perfectly lovely weather, and landed, two hours later in a Columbus of dreary rain. Because I feel that the pilot should either land or crash with no help from me, I was resolutely not looking out the window. So I found out about the next bit of fun when Pamela said, “Oh no.”

Traveling in a wheelchair is like a do-it-yourself version of The Great Race. Open your instructions, contestants. You’ll find that the Columbus Airport don’t use no new-fangled jetbridge for no stinking model-airplane-sized shuttle. Instead, as we traveled an hour backward on the clock, we traveled substantially backward in time because a staircase was wheeled to the plane. The kind the Beatles are waving from. Or Nixon in his tight suit flashing his V fingers. Or Jackie O smiling in her cute pink hat.

Columbus Airport is the Land That time Forgot, because here we are, and there, in the rain, is the only way to get off the plane. Limited mobility people leave last (un-score). And The Great Race begins again, only in this version, it’s not about getting there first, it’s about getting there at all. The staircase is replaced by giant modified forklift. Again with the toy rolly chair, and practice has not made anybody more perfect. Now onto the wet forklift, take a little wet ride, go down to the wet ground, transfer to the wet real wheelchair, and have a short discussion about battery connection. Have I mentioned that it’s pouring rain? With a little luck and much banging of umbrellas, Pamela is sitting in a wheelchair that has not shorted out, and off we go.

The Second Automotive Miracle

I've had two events that I'm willing to call miracles (I wrote about the first one here). Here's how the second one went down.

Prima was 13, because this involved a trip to a city 45 minutes away to get her braces adjusted. Penny and Treya, 11 and 8, came along, because they knew that going to the orthodontist traditionally ended with a trip to the Barnes & Noble Starbucks. Normally.

We drove a six-year-old light blue Geo Prizm. It had been a little ragged lately, but the garage guys checked it out and said it looked fine about a week before. After the orthodontist, I stopped at a craft store, and it was a little cranky starting off, you know, it just seemed like it didn't want to get moving, but then it perked up and was fine. I told the girls we'd probably have to leave it at the garage overnight again.

Then, on the interstate on the way home, it really started sounding and feeling sort of wrong. I was worried, and pulled into the emergency lane and stopped. Again, it perked up and I said, Starbucks is off, girls, sorry, this thing is going straight to the garage. And I pulled out onto the highway. It's a good thing that I wasn't at speed, because about 200 meters down the road, the car just stopped completely.

The engine was still going just fine, but the car was not moving. And I was in the right lane. And I was just at the spot that the highway merged not just an on ramp, but an off ramp at the same spot. Everybody driving by on the highway did that doppler swerrrrrrrrrrrvvvvvvve-hooonnnnnnnnnnk around us at 80 mph giving us the finger. The day was bright and sunny, and nobody was going to see my blinker lights.

I was doing what I think of as "mama panicking," which is where you keep your voice very clear, very even, and very deliberate, as you race ahead panic-thinking what the hell you're going to do, because everything has just gotten very, very bad. "Hang on, just a second, be prepared to run together fast," I told them.

I ran through my options, none of them good.
1. I could get out and run in front of the car but if someone hit it, I'd be run over by my own car.
2. I could get out and run around the back, but I'd be squashed like a bug into my car.

It had been about twenty seconds since we'd stopped dead. I realized I'd have to dive into the passenger seat, grab them and get the hell over the on ramp lane and over the guard rails, but not over the part nearest to us, because that was a fifty foot drop off an overpass.

The very second I formulated this plan, the miracle started happening. First, a car pulled up on my right. A total dump of a car, a derelict, dirty, ratchet beater of a car—with two sketchy, grungy guys with long, dirty hair. The driver slowed and rolled his window down. "Hey, are you in trouble? Do you need help?"

And in less time than it takes to tell it, Hat Guy parked his car right there to block the on-ramp. NoHat Guy got my kids out of my car, across the highway ramp to safety behind the guardrail. Then they both ran to me in the Geo, and those guys pushed for all they were worth,

"Lady, get your foot off the brake—"
     "It's not on the brake!"

"Lady, take the emergency off—"
     "It's not on!"

"Lady, put the car in neutral—"
     "It is!"

"Lady—GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE CAR! GO, GO, GO!"

My two grungy angels made sure I was safe with the kids, apologized (apologized!) because they had to go since their own car was in danger, and whoosh, they were gone.

Now we weren't going to die, but we were probably going to cause someone else to die.

Just as I was frantically calling 911 to report that my car was going to cause a horrible accident, an eighteen-wheeler semi pulled up carefully behind my tiny car and stopped. He yelled across the ramp to us, "Are you ok there? I'll just stay here until the cops come, and keep my flashers on. People can see me better than your little car, there."

And the driver stayed until the state trooper came, and the state trooper stayed until AAA came and towed it to Northampton.

The guy at Firestone said that the Geo was totaled. The axle was just cracked through, and that there's nothing I could have done about it, and I couldn't have known it was about to break. The desk guy asked me what happened, and when I told him, he said, "Oh, that was your little blue car broken down a couple hours ago? I saw that on my way into work." And I said: "You saw us? You left me and my kids to die on the interstate while you drove to your job at an auto repair shop? Thanks so much—did you also give us the finger?"


So in the end, we're alive, and breathtakingly beyond lucky. There were no shortage of jerks on the road. But it profoundly doesn't matter. The only people that mattered were the two strangers in the beater car, who saved our lives, and the driver of the semi, who saved the lives of everybody else on that highway. I wonder sometimes if the three of them really realized what they did that bright autumn day. I think about them a lot, because they are who I want to be.

November. Just November.

I have never been much of a fan of November, poor month.

After the roaring gold and red beauty of October, November comes on cold, blech and dreary, with skeletonized trees, and murk. The routine is in place, there's a lot of generalized busy guilt about the impending holidays, and between leaving home before sunrise and returning after sunset, I feel like a clean coal miner. To reuse Douglas Adams' description of Sunday afternoons, November is the long, dark, teatime of the soul.

So this November, I'm going to finally do something I've always wanted to do, which is National Novel Writing Month. It'll mean going on a bit of a hiatus from this and my other blogs (Kindernerd and Cordelia Flakk), but I'll do some updates here and let you know how it all goes.

Lies I Told My Children

I am fine with a good lie. Little falsehoods are how we smooth out the bumps of being human, and the unvarnished "truth" is the hallmark of the passive-aggressive jerk and the sociopath. But there are rules. Like the Hippocratic oath, first, do no harm. You shouldn't get away with lying that would get you jail time in the outside world. And keep it simple, because the more byzantine you get, the harder it is to uphold. From a skills perspective, remember Emily Dickinson's advice, "tell the truth, but tell it slant." In terms of fallout, don't be a weasel: own up to your lies. Be ready with a reasonable rationale. However, for parents, there really isn't a statute of limitations, so you can be a weasel for a while, as long as you out yourself good-naturedly in good time. I fessed up to the following about six years after it takes place.

The biggest lie I told my children was the now infamous "Grocery Store Lie." This lasted half a decade, until it was destroyed accidentally, and was of no use any more. The Grocery Store Lie was a defensive lie, as the shopping experience is one where the weight of all the power of the marketing industry burdens the tiny shoulders of your child, and you are responsible for somehow relieving them.

Prima was a bright, intelligent child, an advertiser's dream, and she was captivated by the omnipresent, attractive candy that rises like bonbon shrubbery tunnelling the checkout counter at the grocery store. It is cunningly and deliberately placed within the arm reach of the average-sized two-year-old. I didn't forbid sweets, but there was a time and a place, and it was not going to be a debate every trip to the store.

My first defense against the checkout was the salad bar. After getting groceries as quickly as humanly possible, I'd wheel up to the salad bar, get tiny containers that are meant for salad dressing, and Prima and I, and later Penny, would carefully discuss and choose grapes, blueberries, small chunks of melons and so on, for a "special snack."

When we reached the checkout gauntlet, I didn't avoid the candy or try to look the other way. To the contrary, we took our time. Everything there must be for decoration. And wasn't it all beautiful? Bright colors, interesting shapes, and big-print words. How lovely it was of the store to dress up the register with all these pretty things! Gosh, how many colors could we name? Tons!

Smart cashiers enjoyed this exchange. Dim ones, the ones who tried to correct my obvious mistake, I talked over. Here's your special snack! Remember which one is yours? Right! The one with five blueberries! Let's count them: one, two, three, four, five!

This one-act play ran at our local grocery theater every week for five whole years. Until my sister came to visit. Auntie Eyeball (a story for another time) took my oldest with her into the store while I waited with the little ones in the car. And lo, it came to pass, that grocery paradise was lost. "Mama! I got decorations! It's real candy! Auntie Eyeball bought me candy at the store! If you ask them, they'll sell it to you and you can buy it!" Prima shrieked while she danced the parking lot dance of a kindergartner hopped up on M&Ms. Penny and baby Treya howled in excitement. My sister looked like she had just had a revelation, too late, too late.

The only thing left to do was my final performance, the one where I exclaimed, "Oh. My. God. That's absolutely incredible! They let you buy the decorations? That's the most amazing thing I have ever heard! I cannot believe it!" Then I turned to my sister and shouted, "This Changes Everything!"

Jack & Oscar

I am not much of a fishtank person. I think if you have to have them at all, they should be in a medical waiting room, because they are the pet equivalent of the Care Channel, the hospital tv station where you literally watch the grass grow. Fish swim around, the tank gives off blue light and a gentle bubbling sound, and all I want to do is read old magazines and yawn. Besides the lack of real interaction, my biggest problem with pet fish is the complete lack of personality, with one exception.

In college, I lived in an off-campus room. This was one of those highly illegal setups where the landlord barely kept up a mouse-ridden aging four bedroom big old house, but also walled off the dining room and rented out the attic. Because legally only three unrelated people could be on the lease, the other six of us technically subletted from them. Two of the people on the lease were Shelly and Mike. Shelly had a fifty gallon aquarium in the common room. I did not much like Shelly. She was cranky and bossy, and abused her position on the lease to treat the rest of us like her minions.

When we moved in, there were two fish in her tank that she had imaginatively named Oscar (who was an oscar fish), and Jack (who was a jack fish). A year before, there had been twelve small fish in a beautifully kept tank, lovingly fed and adored. Then one day there there were eleven, and Oscar was a little bit fatter. Then like a dismal children's book, there were ten, nine and then eight increasingly paranoid fish. As their number diminished, Oscar noticeably expanded. Then one day, in the expanse of gravel and glass, there was just Oscar and just Jack.

Jack's life was a Kafka-esque nightmare. For some crime or mistaken identity in a past life, he was serving a life sentence in a fifty gallon see-through prison with a stone-cold, homicidal psychopath. He was condemned to swim furiously around the giant, desolate tank twenty-four hours a day, trying to avoid getting cannibalized by the malevolent, predatory Oscar. Like a Roman coliseum audience, we witnessed the quiet but desperate fish drama every time we were in the living room. Even with this traumatic history, though, the ultimate takeaway was that the living room had a big tank with two fish swimming around in it.

Then one day, doing his chores from the house list, my boyfriend may have knocked the aquarium pump plug out of the wall when he plugged in the vacuum, although he was certain that he did not. Most likely the pump simply have failed. Whatever it was, Shelly went ballistic, with screaming accusations of deliberate piscicide. Apparently the overweight stalker depended on the pump more than the fit athlete. The reign of terror had ended. Shelly was howling. Oscar was dead.

Jack, however, was alive, more alive than he had ever been in his whole life. And this is where there exception to fish being mostly floating decor, because within days, Jack developed an observable, quantifiable personality. He stopped his frantic marathon swimming and began to leisurely enjoy hanging out in different areas of the tank. But more extraordinary, Jack took up a hobby: renovation.

Every time you came into the room, the look of the aquarium had completely changed. Small hills would appear in the blue gravel terrain at the front of the tank. The next morning, the front was flat but a promontory had risen in the back left corner. The castle was buttressed, then regraded. Grabbing little mouthfuls of stones, Jack sculpted the eden that had so unexpectedly appeared out of his personal hell. If work is love made visible, Jack was a fish in love.

I can't claim that Jack represents entire genus. I've never observed another fish with much interesting going on, certainly not enough to justify keeping a tank full of them in the house. And Jack was pretty boring before his liberation. But afterward? He was fascinating. He will always be my second thought. Fish really don't have much character. Except Jack.

The First Automotive Miracle

I am watched over by Saints Click and Clack. The two experiences I can identify as miracles were both automotive.

Every parent with young children and a dodgy car tends a flourishing garden of mental dread at all times: a certainty that something deeply awful will happen to them in that vehicle. We had $1,000. We could throw that at the five thousand needed to fix the dead old Ford Taurus in the driveway. Or we could try to find something for $1,000 that at least ran. We found a very big, very old blue van, and we were always one tiny decrepit auto part away from catastrophe.

The kids were ages five, three and less-than-a-year old. The house was two years old. I had named the house Entropy North, and described it as "do-it-yourself Habitat for Humanity."

Although this seems unrelated—bear with me—a story about a local high school appeared on the front page of our little town newspaper. The gymnasium was finally getting renovated. I was at the construction site first thing in the morning, asking for the old gym flooring.

A lot of my house is reclaimed materials. I had my eye out for this kind of thing all the time. But something weird happens with wood flooring. When it's installed, it's necessary and desirable. While it's in the state of disrepair, or being torn out, or tossed in the dumpster, it's worthless debris. But if it has been lifted from the dumpster, even if nothing has been done to it, just that experience of resurrection transforms the wood into an antique, and it is priced accordingly. So if you have absolutely no money, and you want wood flooring, you need to be getting at it when it is in that middle limbo of needing to be tossed away and actually being tossed away, but before anybody else thinks of wanting it. And that's how we ended up with crowbars, prying out the free-throw zone every morning before six and every evening after five for a week. We had company: the Cuban American club had the exact same thought, but there was plenty to go around. And it's nice to think we have twin floors with them now.

Because this was a big project, we had borrowed an extra car so that we could tag-team. Because I had just unloaded a ton of flooring, the van was empty. Because I had paid the babysitter, I had my checkbook. Because the flooring was free, I had about $100 in my bank account. I loaded the kids into the van and went to pick up their father.

At a giant four-way stoplight by the mall, at ten o'clock at night, my nightmare began. The van just died. No engine, no electrical. The key went click and then nothing. Tots and baby slept in the back seat. The car blocked the lane, the mall was closed, no pay phones, long before most people had cell phones. It was very dark. Summer, so bus service had ended, although there was still plenty of fast traffic. I sat as the light changed through once, twice, wondering what on earth I was going to do. Getting the kids out and across the intersection was going to be incredibly dangerous. Then someone pulled up next to the passenger side and honked. Of course drivers were going to be pissed off at me, my car was blocking everything.

But good grief, it was a tow-truck. "Need help, lady?" The tow guy told me he could tow me right here, right now, as long as I could give him a check. One problem completely solved from out of the blue. I asked how all of us would fit in the cab of the truck. We couldn't, he already had someone with him. He had room for one. This was absurd: my five year old? Three year old? Baby? I guess we'd be walking in the dark for a while.

I had barely gotten my mind around this when I heard a little beep. In the dark, a car had pulled up close to me in the oncoming lane on the driver side. Windows rolled down, "Hi, are you guys ok?" And there was a family from church. The rest goes like the end of a nursery rhyme: the van got towed, the tow guy got paid, the friends got thanked, the kids and I got a safe ride home, and, in the borrowed car, picked up their father about a half-hour later.

Nightmares depend on certainty about the uncertain. You get crazy because you're so sure that the worst case scenario will be awful. But lots of times, situations you actually control become a train wreck, and complete chaos turns out to be fluffy at the bottom.