“Disability Pride calls for celebration, hope, rebellion. We take shame, fear, and isolation, turn them around, and forge wholeness. Pride refuses to let the daily grind of ableism, discrimination, exclusion, violence, and patronizing define who we are. Pride knows our history, joyfully insists upon our present, and stretches into our future. It must not leave anyone behind—not folks in prison, not folks in nursing homes, group homes, their families’ back rooms, not folks in psych facilities, not our elders nor our youth. Pride demands and nurtures open, expansive community. Pride means listening hard and being accountable to each other. It means struggling against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and classism, just as stubbornly as we fight ableism. Pride isn’t about any single identity or community but rather about all of who we are—disabled people of color, disabled lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people, disabled women, disabled poor and working-class people, disabled immigrants, disabled transgender and transsexual people, psych survivors, people with intellectual disabilities, people with chronic illness, people with nonapparent disabilities. Pride asks uncomfortable questions and demands honest answers. It dances, sings, protests, loves, cries, fights, rolls, limps, laughs, stutters. Pride invites us to make home in our bodies and with each other.

“Pride fuels rebellion. During a time when U.S. troops are waging war in Afghanistan, millions of gallons of oil have been pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, and Arizona’s anti-immigration policies have just become law; strong, vibrant, rebellious communities are more necessary than ever. I hope we, as disabled people, will continue to take to the streets, knowing that war, environmental devastation, corporate greed, and criminalizing people of color have everything to do with disability. We need revolutionary pride, liberatory pride now!”

The photo is of Eli speaks at Disability Pride rally, wearing a black top hat with rhinestones and a rainbow boa.

I and a host of other folks decorated my trike for the parade. Here’s another pic:

The photo is of the back of Eli’s trike, above which is a banner that reads “Lame is sexy.” The trike is decorated with a big orange flower that is a whirlygig and spins in the breeze and a small disco ball hanging over the banner, among other things. Beside the trike stands Riva Lehrer, co-creator of this crip pride mobile, with her hand on her hip looking sexily into the camera. During the parade, a number of folks handed out Emi Koyama’s wonderful “Lame Is Sexy” button.

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.