The Tricycle Down The Rabbit Hole

Category: Travels

paraclimbing, travel with a disability, conference visits

  • Coping with Covid

    Because the number of Covid infections increased rapidly, the Dutch government has decided that the Netherlands should go into a ‘partial lockdown’. I fully understand why this is necessary, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t bother me. I live alone, and although I don’t always show it, I really love company. What is also very important for me, is a well-structured day. What to do when social interaction is actively discouraged and I’m not allowed to go to work every day? How do I go about coping with Covid?

    I have come up with several ways to deal with these things, and I have the idea (or hope?) that others might benefit from them as well. That’s why this blogpost will be the first in a series of posts about strategies to cope with the quarantine situation. I know that the situation is far worse in other places, but I hope that perhaps my strategies also work for others.

    FIRST STRATEGY OF COPING WITH COVID: ENTER A FANTASY WORLD

    Alexander the Great, who helps me coping with COVID.

    Since my early childhood, I’ve been a bit of a fanboy of Alexander the Great. I had a poster of him in my bedroom and I knew the names of all the battles he had fought and cities he had conquered. My passion for Alexander has not become less over the years: I have visited many places where Alexander has once been, and in my bedroom there is now a map of his expedition.

    In these times of quarantining, one of my ways to cope with the loneliness is curling myself up in a warm easychair and start reading a book about the history of Alexander the Great. So much is written about his expedition, that I never have any trouble finding a book about Alexander which I haven’t read yet (when I heard about the new semi-lockdown yesterday, I immediately mail-ordered W.W. Tarn’s 1948 classic ‘Alexander the Great’).

    To optimise my Alexander-experience, I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ for 60 minutes. I choose appropriate background music (The Kaiser Chiefs for Alexander’s youth; Wagner for Alexander’s return-journey), while I surround myself with dictionaries and (historical) atlasses that might assist me when Alexander’s expedition is under way. Sometimes I put a poster up with a detailed map of the territory involved, so that I can really follow the development of the story. All these things together really help me get my mind off things that are happening around me.

    Donald Duck, who also helps me coping with COVID.

    I think a similar strategy could work for ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Game of Thrones’, stories about ‘Donald Duck’ or ‘Mickey Mouse’ (combine this with Stravinsky!), or perhaps also with romantic literature (Tolstoy with Tchaikovski?). But be sure to think it through! The strategy only has effect if you are doing things in an unusual way. Try to make a real ritual out of it: move your armchair to the centre of the room every afternoon at four o’clock sharp, turn on the music, turn off your phone, and dive into your fantasyworld for 60 minutes!

    wrap up:

    • choose your fantasyworld
    • reposition armchair
    • set phone to ‘do not disturb’
    • choose suitable background music

    Do you have another strategy to get through the corona-crisis? let me know by posting below!

    [also: don’t forget to subscribe to this blog (fill in your emailaddress in upper right corner) to find out more about my coping strategies ;)]

  • Strange Encounters

    The man from Dutch Railways (NS) had actually grabbed and stopped my tricycle and walked around to stand in front of me. My front wheel was between his feet, so I couldn’t turn away. He looked at me and said: “I could take you from your tricycle easily if I wanted to.” I was perplexed. Was this guy actually threatening me?! “yes, that’d be easy,” I said, “because my left arm and leg are paralysed.” My response did not have the effect I had hoped for. He smiled at me and said: “can you prove that?”

    Because of my disability I use a tricycle to get around. Inside buildings, and even inside shops, when I have to walk a long distance, I cycle my way. That of course raises many eyebrows – you don’t see a bearded man on a tricycle in the supermarket every day. I understand that, and I don’t mind telling people that I’m on a tricycle because of a brain tumour, not even if I have to do that every day. But what happened to me on the particular morning I’m telling you about, was simply astonishing.

    The story starts several months ago. I had been teaching the whole day, and I was trying to find the train to Utrecht, to get back home. So I tricycled my way through the station, when an employee of the Dutch Railways (NS) told me to step off from my tricycle and proceed on foot. Normally I would have told him about my brain tumour, but since I was tired, I told him that I don’t ride a tricycle for fun. “Then why do you ride a tricycle?” he asked. “Because I can’t walk” I told him. He wasn’t convinced. He put his hands in his sides and took on what they call the ‘power-pose’. “I’d like to see that” he said with a smile. I couldn’t believe my ears. I became very angry, but I couldn’t think of the proper way to answer him. I just shook my head in disbelief and decided to ignore him. I cycled past him, and found my way to the train to Utrecht – and never looked back. I did my best to forget about what had happened, and I didn’t think about the events very much afterwards.

    Until today.

    Again I was on my way to the train travelling to Utrecht. I was tricycling across the central hall of the train station when my eyes met those of the NS employee that I had met before. I was about to cycle past him, but apparently he didn’t remember our previous encounter, because again he told me to get off my tricycle. Without turning my head I cycled on, towards where the platforms are. I had hoped that this would be the end of our second encounter, but I was sorely mistaken. The man ran after me and grabbed the frame of my tricycle.

    “How can I prove that I have a brain tumour!? I can’t just cut myself open, can I?!” I felt that I was losing my temper, because I really didn’t know what to do or say. A colleague of the man was standing several meters away from us, but didn’t interfere. It felt as if they were waiting for me to become aggressive. I knew that, so I knew that that’s what they’d expect. At a certain point the man looked aside, towards the entrance of the railway station. when he turned his head, he also moved his foot a little bit. And that’s when I escaped. I got on the train, and went home.

    As I write this, I feel both proud and ashamed. Proud, because I hadn’t started shouting or become aggressive, but also ashamed, for escaping…

  • Reizen met een handicap 

    Om te reizen met een handicap moet je soms (letterlijk) out-of-the-box denken

  • Paraclimbing Edinburgh

    edinb sit

    In September I competed for the IFSC Paraclimbing Worldcup in Edinburgh (UK). The two qualification routes went well, but in the finals I fell from the third grip (the grip I’m sitting on in the picture). But I had a great time!

    (more…)

  • Paraclimbing in Imst

    Imst site

    Last month* I participated in a paraclimbing competition in Imst, Austria. The wall which we climbed was situated between the beautiful Tiroler mountains.

    In the movie below you can see my attempt at climbing the second of the six routes I had to climb. As you can see the number of grips available is large, so that wasn’t a problem. But you’ll also see that there’s quite a bit of overhang, which becomes a problem after a while (when it becomes more difficult to stretch my left arm and unstretch my left leg)

    Any expert climbers out there with useful tips?!

    (more…)

  • Paraclimbing World championship – Paris, 2016

    paris2016_fallmost2

    UPDATE: I ended fourth in my category. That’s less than I had hoped for, but a lot more than I had expected (I was the only Dutch finalist). The next worldchampionship (Innsbruck, 2018) I’ll do better! (more…)

  • Olympic paraclimbing

    Besides physics and philosophy I invest quite a lot of time and energy in sports. Several years ago a friend of mine asked me to join him to go climbing in a gym. When he saw me wavering he spoke the magic words “perhaps it’s not such a good idea. Your disability will make it very difficult for you to get up there”. That’s when I was sure that I was going to go climbing. And so it started. Now, almost four and a half years later, I go climbing every week and I have made some nice rock climbing trips abroad. DSC_0288 (more…)

  • Disability As A Networking Skill

    When abroad I use a wheelchair because it’s quite a hassle to take a tricycle with you on an airplane. When I visit conferences on my own I cannot use a wheelchair because my left hand doesn’t work (and I don’t want to go in circles all the time). Being on foot at a conference can be a challenge for me because often you have to cover distances of over 100 or 200 meters in between speaker sessions for which you only have five minutes. It is also challenging when the conference-organised lunch consists in a DIY buffet, because I can’t even walk with a cup of coffee in my hands; let alone with a tray filled with food! I often have to ask total strangers for help. This can be a bit of a nuisance because I like being independent. But on the other hand it is also a great advantage because it allows me to come into contact with other conference-goers (without being annoying) whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise. In short: it allows me to extend my academic network.

  • Conference Vienna, part II – customs, Kant and quantum mechanics

     

    When I had exchanged email addresses with the Japanese girl and we had said goodbye to each other, our wheelchairs were pushed off by one of the airport’s employees. With great dexterity he steered both wheelchairs at the same time to our next stop: customs. The customs check is one of the most unpredictable parts of a journey in a wheelchair. Sometimes the check is very thorough: the douaniers check every inch of the wheelchair; frisk me while I remain seated and even swab the wheelchair’s tires for explosive residue. At other times merely seeing the wheelchair is enough to just let me pass and wishing me a pleasant journey. The only constancy that I can detect is that never once have they checked the tubes in the frame of my wheelchair – I wonder what could fit in there.

    When we had passed customs the wheelchair pusher dropped me off before the gate from which my plane was to leave. I was lucky, I thought, because the gate was straightly opposite from a coffee bar, so I wouldn’t have to walk very far for my ‘daily worship of the black gold’. Neither were the toilets very far from my gate. I sat down and made myself comfortable. Out of my bag I took a sandwich and the book I wanted to read. To get into the spirit of the conference I had chosen a German book on Kantianism. At the conference I was going to give a talk on something I’ve been working on the past few years. I’ve been working on the role of Kant’s philosophy in modern philosophy of physics. Many physicists see little value in philosophical systems, no matter how well thought-out, of over two centuries old. At the other extreme there are those who believe that modern physics, and particularly quantum mechanics, present philosophers and physicists alike with problems that can only be resolved within a Kantian approach.

    Looking up from my book, rather sleepily, I noticed on the view screen that the regular boarding was to be preceded by what they call ‘priority boarding’. People with babies or other disabilities or people who are willing to pay for priority boarding are allowed to board the airplane before the horde of regular passengers. Since I fall in the category of people with disabilities I’m allowed to make use of priority boarding.

    By the time the actual boarding of the airplane begins I’m not in a wheelchair anymore, and as long as I’m not walking I don’t really look disabled so I always try to make sure that the people behind the boarding-counter see me walk up to them so that they’ll allow me to ‘board with priority’.

    When I walked up to the counter to tell the lady behind it that I wanted to make use of priority boarding she had been very busy with a conversation up until that moment and hence had not seen me walking up to her desk. So when I asked her whether it be possible to make use of priority boarding I could hear her starting a sentence “but why do you need…” As I was quickly trying to think of a way to convince her of my disability (should I show her the scar on the back of my head, which was due to the latest brain surgery I’d had?) I almost fell over backwards. When I had regained my balance the lady behind the counter was a lot more willing to accept that I belong in the disability priority class.

    The stewardess behind the counter, made anxious by her experience, now wanted me to board the plane with extra priority – even over the other priority passengers (she was probably afraid that I would fall). Once in the plane I could relax: “if anything goes wrong now it’s not my fault” I thought. I always like flying because on a flight you can read or work without being disturbed. But not only that. Not only without being disturbed but also without the possibility of distracting yourself with Google or Facebook or what-have-you: you can sort of force yourself to do the work that you have taken with you. For most people this strategy will not work because it will only make them stare out of the window of the airplane. For me the situation is somewhat different because I have so much double vision (because of the spasticity of the muscles moving my left eye) that staring out the window while actually seeing things requires a lot more effort than reading. For me the strategy works perfectly: often I look forward to a flight for weeks because I have already decided upon what to read.

  • Conference Vienna, part I – ethical asymmetry at the airport

    images

    At international conferences the university or institute hosting the conference often provides a list of hotels which are a relatively small distance from the conference site. The hotels on this list are usually neither the cheapest nor the cosiest, but rather well-suited for grave and grey professors. Since I am neither grave nor grey I often search for a (youth-)hostel myself. I can’t always find hostels that are close to the conference, but the nice thing about hostels is that they force you to have some social interaction. When I had found a suitable hostel near to the University of Vienna (which was the place the conference was held) it was time to book a flight.

    In daily life, as I told you earlier, I make use of a tricycle. I even enter supermarkets riding on it. The obvious alternative, a wheelchair, is impractical for me because due to my spasticity I can’t use my left arm to spin the wheels of a wheelchair. Travelling by plane pretty much rules out the tricycle as possible mode of transport when I’m abroad, because it costs a small fortune to take the trike with me. A wheelchair it is then. Because I have ‘special needs’ – such as the wheelchair – I often opt for one of the larger airlines to fly with, because their service towards disabled travellers is better than the service provided by smaller airlines (matters are even worse with the so-called low-cost airlines).  For my trip to Vienna I chose to fly with KLM, the Royal Dutch Airline. To travellers in a wheelchair KLM provides ‘wheelchair assistance’, which you can simply ask for during the check-in at the counter (officially you need to book this in advance, but I never do that).

    The lady who checked my passport and printed my boarding pass told me to report to the special ‘disability counter’ and there await being picked up for a wheelchair-push to the gate from which my flight was to depart. At the disability counter they told me to take a seat in their waiting room and wait for one of their colleagues. I looked around and I saw four rows of chairs most of which were empty, save for a somberly gazing elder couple and a Japanese girl with a rather blank stare. I sat down in, or rather stumbled into, one of the chairs in the row closest to me. The Japanese girl sat in the same row, with several empty chairs in between. I was about to start reading the book I had brought with me, when I noticed that the girl’s blank stare hadn’t changed direction since I first saw her. She was blind. While I was busy trying to imagine what it must be like to be blind I suddenly realized that I was staring at her. People often stare at me too. Especially when I ride my tricycle. I can understand why people stare. At my tricycle in the supermarket, naturally, but also at my tricycle in general, out on the street. I think people stare for the simple reason that they do not often see tricycles – let alone tricycles with adults on it. This curiosity for the outlandish, as I see it, has a significant advantage. When I meet people I don’t know they are often favourably inclined to having a conversation; they want to find out why I’m on a tricycle.

    Blindness probably also induces the curiosity of strangers, but for blind people it is more difficult than for me to exploit this curiosity (if they even want to) because they can’t see the people with whom they could potentially have a nice conversation – life is not fair. I decided then and there that I would not let this particular girl be the victim of such ethical asymmetry. I decided to start a conversation with her. It turned out that she wasn’t as helpless as she seemed: she had been in the Netherlands to represent the Japanese Society for Blind Athletes. After learning about each other’s jobs and impairments and exchanging other pleasantries we decided to go for a coffee, as we had to wait another 30 minutes before one of the airport’s crewmembers would come to pick us up. I was a bit alarmed because I didn’t know how far we needed to walk to the nearest coffee bar. I had told Tomoe (I don’t know whether that was her first or last name; the other name was Takada) I could only walk very short distances, but perhaps she had misunderstood? Her English was not perfect, to put it mildly, so perhaps she didn’t even know I was disabled? I became even more alarmed when she asked me whether it was ok to hold my arm because she didn’t know the route to the bar. I told her that I would do my best and started lumbering out of the waiting room with the Japanese girl clasping my arm. I must admit that I felt a little proud at the situation; I didn’t feel like the handicapped one for a change. So we had coffee and our ways parted; hers back to Tokyo, and mine to Vienna. For a very brief period of time the half-spastic man was king in the land of the blind.