Of course as mundane as this is, it is also connected to really deep and important issues about impairment, ableism — a word that the software obviously did not know — and disability. One of the sessions that I went to at SDS last summer was about a speech impairment and different modes of technology to either enhance or make possible communication, some of the strategies responding to impairment and others resonding to ableism. The panel of people who spoke included quite a range of different kinds of speech impairments. I ended up feeling very emotional and not very articulate or analytical about what I heard at the time. So many bits and pieces of what some of the panelists talked about struck personal chords, but those chords are very fragmented for me. Mostly now as an adult my speech is understood, or if it isn’t, then the miscomprehension, or the unwillingness to listen to a crip with slurred speech, doesn’t have a big impact on my life. But as a child I struggled with communication a lot, needing translation, facing harassment, and dealing with harmful assumptions all of the time. So listening to the adults on the panel, all of whom were talking about current strategies and the current twine of impairment and ableism in their lives, was really about remembering my past that is loosely connected to my present but not to my actual day-to-day present. Emotional but in ways that I’m still not being able to describe very well.

And this isn’t even beginning to think about the issues of being a writer for whom the act of fingers, or more precisely one finger, on a keyboard is the physical action of writing. If speech recognition works for me this time, how might it change my writing? It’s funny how these questions seem inconsequential because they are about impairment, not about ableism. And yet don’t I know all too well that the sheer physicality of our bodies has to be important too?

As a side note, this of course has very little connection to the main topics of my blog–writing, disability, queerness, trans identity, and social justice–except there is a tangent. I cycled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles on the back roads of Oregon when I was a teenager. I was more or less inseparable from first my single speed upright bike and then my Schwinn ten speed. But when I moved to Portland to go to college, I left my Schwinn behind because I knew my cerebral-palsy-tippy balance wasn’t good enough to safely navigate city streets. Now 25 years later I have a recumbent trike, dubbed the Red Crab, and once again I’m riding the back roads, practically inseparable from the sheer pleasure and motion of pedaling. So I could stretch and say that I’m writing about crip recreation.

Anyway my sweetie Samuel and I have been on several multi-day rides (read about cycling in Oregon and around the northern part of Lake Champlain part 1 and part 2) but never a camping trip where we carried all our gear.

The biggest surprise was how friggin hard the hills were on a trike loaded with 40 pounds of clothes, food, sleeping bag and pad, tent, and sundries. I was huffing and puffing, particularly because our loop took us 80 miles into the Adirondaks, so we had a lot of climbing in the first two days and a lot of descent in our fourth day.

The wackiest campground was Poke-a-Moonshine, a state park that’s squeezed between Interstate 87 and the massive miles-long cliff face of Pokamoonshine Mountain. It had some attributes of a great campground–almost empty, great hot showers, a campsite shielded by a 20 foot high boulder, an easy trail up to the cliff face–and attributes of a lousy campground–freeway noise all night, a park ranger mowing grass for hours near our campsite, mosquitoes galore. At some point I woke up in the night all worried about raccoons and our food until the freeway noise reminded me that of the two problems–coons potentially eating a day-and-a-half worth of food (didn’t happen) and carbon-emitting, planet-destroying vehicles roaring by in astounding numbers even at 2 a.m.–only one (the latter) really warranted worry, and then I fell asleep again.

The best road was a paved logging road called Forestdale–quiet, green, rolling, no traffic–perfect.

The most notable vehicle was the dump truck parked in a ditch, thistle, chickory, and grass grown high around it.

The biggest adventure was when the paved Stracksville Road turned into hard-packed sand and stone, went straight up for a mile, descended a bit, turned softer, then turned to an impassable two-track. We backtracked, took another marginally passable two-track, on a hope and crossed fingers, to avoid a long sandy descent, and two hours and six miles later we were back at the point where we turned on to Stracksville. It was an adventure and demoralizing. I got reminded about how much of long distance, endurance activity–hiking, running, cycling–is mental, how I can psych myself in or out, have fun or be miserable on the same road with the same legs and same weather just depending upon my state of mind.

And the many moments of joy: fresh pumpkin pie, sweet peaches, loons on Buck Pond, rolling along side the Ausable River, dipping my head into an unnamed creek, watching the moon rise over Lake Champlain, sleeping deep in a cocoon of a tent with my sweetie, feeling my quads and gluts work the miles, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream at a Mobil Station in Peaseville, swimming in Buck Pond and Lake Champlain. It was good.

At the same time I kept expecting some queerness to appear in the art, the circus, the politics. I mean, it was all so resistant of capitalism, war, consumerism, greed with such an ethic of outlandish/outrageous creativity, all so bent, so queer in the general sense of the word, that I kept being surprised by the lack of specific queerness. I know white Vermont hippie culture, out of which B&P grows, is quite heterosexual; but probably because of my time with the radical faeries, where queerness, drag, outdoor community, and theater merge in a myriad of ways; I really did expect some flavor of queerness to rise to the surface. It didn’t.

On the other hand, I’ve come to practically expect racism and ableism at these kinds of events, and unfortunately my expectations were met in this regard. One of the performers in the circus yesterday was a woman of color and manual wheelchair user. Her roles–passive, limited, using her so clearly as a token woc–had me just shaking my head in disgust. For one, there were no attempts at creating any access in the performing space–a bumpy, slightly soggy pasture–leaving her to wheel over the lumps and softness and perform all at the same time. For two, she was totally not present in the big group song and dance numbers. (Has no one from B&P heard of or seen integrated dance?) For three, in one number she rolled out, followed by a white guy who held a sign saying “Ethiopia” over her head, while other white people in masks performed a dance about how the U.S. gives much more military aid than food aid to Ethiopia, and then at the end when she spoke about this disproportionate aid, the sign holder repeated her, as if the audience might not have understood or heard her. Arg! It was simply a big tangled wad of ableism and racism. And I was dismayed but not surprised.

I’m struck by the contrast between the ways I was surprised by the lack of queerness and the ways I was not surprised by the racism and ableism.