The ‘MkII’
I have fallen off my wheelchair, the Rocinante, three times now. The first was the worst of them. I was flying downhill too fast and missed an underground drainpipe that was jutting out of the pavement. I hit it at speed. The Roci stopped and rolled pretty much instantly and I flew through the air.
The Roci is incredibly robust and she seems to be able to shake off a roll faster than I can. But the falls have been a sharp lesson in how dangerous pavements can be to wheelchairs. In my travels at least half of the pavements I roll down are treacherous, with potholes, drain covers, secret hideout entrances, the odd misplaced garden gnome, all threatening to throw me. I have learned to watch the ground vigilantly for obstacles. Even then, though, I have still fallen because not all obstacles are visible. Gnomes can’t be seen unless you believe in them and I’m frustratingly agnostic.
I’ve also been taught a tricky lesson when Caz and I have tried hiking with the chair. Firefly, my last wheelchair, could manage an off road hike in the way a horse can manage a longhaul flight. I imagine it would be technically physically possible, but it’s going to draw some looks of concern and someone is going to get injured shortly after takeoff.
Fortunately, there is an upgrade available to the Rocinante that would allow us to more easily cruise over obstacles and permit us to take her fully off road. An attachment that lifts the front cams (the small front wheels) off the ground to replace them with a single larger and more robust central wheel known as a flywheel.
I bought one.
I think it might have been easier to build the large Hadron collider than to recruit the NASA-level mechanical engineering required to build the flywheel. But with a lot of screwing, unscrewing and rescrewing, and even a hacksaw at one point, we finally managed to construct and attach the ‘MkII’ to the Roci.
The MkII is a beast. With three big wheels the Rocinante can move over obstacles as large as speedbumps, can roll right over trip hazards without difficulty, and can go fully off road.
The MkII can even manage the camber of pavements. When you’re walking down a pavement you can’t really feel how much they tilt toward the road, because you’re not travelling on wheels. When you are wheeled, that gentle tilt is a huge problem. It persistently pulls the wheelchair toward the road, where all the cars are, forcing one arm to compensate to keep you moving in a straight line. On a long pavement the bias can become pretty problematic as the compensating arm begins to protest.
But the way the freewheel works is that once you’ve got some momentum it steers like a bicycle in motion, the turning circle is much larger, and so the Roci becomes more robust to the tricky camber of pavements. With the MkII more stable to tilting and eating obstacles for breakfast, the Roci has suddenly become a new machine entirely.
Today I went for my regular daily push, but took a new route. I went to the bottom of St Catherine’s hill, wheeled off road by the river, through narrow paths getting brushed by foliage on all sides, through the little backstreets of Winchester. It was so much fun.
I found someone running down the road I was wheeling up, clearly an athlete, and he flexed his arms toward me, nodding in my direction. I smiled at him, tempted to flex in return, a right of passage of gym bros everywhere. I guess that’s who I’m becoming, a disabled gym bro… trans girl…
It took two hours to get home, 6k behind me. I think a little about where we started. Me and Firefly, people constantly asking if I needed help, seeing me struggle just to move a few feet up the pavement. And I think about the guy flexing in my direction today. I make a hot chocolate and test my muscles. I take another look at the Rocinante, my trusty steed.