The Road to Mobility
After almost three weeks in the hospital, Kit is now back at the Lodge. His recovery will take time, patience, and the effort of the entire Lodge community of nurses, aides and therapists to get him on his feet again. As I sit with him each day while he is resting, my mind wanders down roads to forms of mobility from decades past. First is Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR where Kit standing next to a 1940s era sedan with no motor. It’s resting atop rows of plastic feet—ready to take him wherever he wants to go. Another image is of the wheelbarrow Kit used to transport me back and forth from our house and my writing studio at Boomerang Creek following my last bunion surgery. Mobility takes a village and lots of muscle.
I also recall bicycle stories. I learned early on that Salters love to “Ride Bike!” While a student at Oberlin College, Kit saw an ad for a new Huffman tandem bike and wrote to the company. He and a friend would gladly take the new tandem bike on an 800-mile test ride from Oberlin, Ohio to New Haven, CT where the two (Kit and Linda) were enrolled at Yale in a Chinese language course. “How much will you charge?” the company president wrote back. “Eight cents a mile,” Kit answered, astonished that they’d responded at all. The company’s VP personally delivered a tandem bike from Dayton where Huffman bikes were manufactured and the two were on their way. At the end of that summer when Kit received a teaching assignment in Taiwan, Huffman shipped the tandem bike to Taiwan and LIFE magazine sent a reporter to write up the story.
In the years Kit and I lived at Breakfast Creek, bicycling became a part of our lives. The two-lane, paved country road that ran in front of our seven-acres was ideal for early morning and late afternoon rides in the fall and spring. For longer rides we’d cautiously cross two lanes of north and south bound traffic on Hwy. 63 to Mount Pleasant Road and cycle north into Ashland along a quiet stretch of a narrow, meandering ribbon of the old highway that once connected Columbia and Jefferson City.
We both had prior bicycle histories. When I was ten, I had a black, 3-speed Raleigh bicycle with a wicker basket for toting snacks and small treasures acquired on my neighborhood excursions. On one outing, I brought along an apple that I could eat while peddling like a trapeze artist without holding on to the handlebars. When an unleashed boxer came hell-bent-for-election out of nowhere and began chasing my bike, I figured he intended to eat me for lunch. When he reached the side of my bike, lunged and sank his teeth into my side. Maybe my tires hummed or my bicycle chain needed oiling or he was after that apple. More likely, I was merrily whistling and off in a world of my own imagining. The episode ended with a bad fall, a painful tetanus shot, and a few now faded scars on my knees and elbows.
When Kit and I moved to Boomerang Creek in 2005, we soon got back into cycling. One Sunday morning, we rose early, put our bikes in the back of tour truck and headed for the K.A.T.Y Trail. A few days earlier, Kit had taken my bike to Walt’s Bike Shop for a seasonal tune up, where a very tall mechanic raised the seat and took it out for a spin. On our Sunday ride, up I hopped on the still elevated seat, and off I rode. Our pace was easy. Shaded under a canopy of August vegetation that thrives at the base of towering limestone bluffs, we had the trail to ourselves save for a box turtle that quickly pulled its head in as we passed by.
That was when Kit called ahead to me that he was stopping to roll up his right pant leg. I geared down to stop, gripped the break lever, and leaned to the left expecting my foot to reach the ground. But from my elevated perch, there was no ground underfoot when I attempted to lift my rear from the seat. My descent was like the fall in a forest witnessed by no one—not even the turtle we’d just passed on the trail.
Life is filled with stutter-starts and falls, some worn as scars that become part of our personal history. Mostly, we rebound. That morning, my motivation for getting back on my bike was a country breakfast at a café at Cooper’s Landing five miles on up the trail. The decision was easy. I lowered my seat, dusted off my pride and peddled with bloodied knees past fields of corn and soybeans, happy to be back in gear again.
When Kit wakes up from the nap he has been taking, I ask what his mobility goals are now. As hard as the task will be, he wants to get back up and walk unassisted again. And being a Salter, he wants is to “Ride Bike”—be it on a stationary bike at the Lodge—or to trek with me along our quiet crescent of road in the Sierra Foothills.