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[Pyrotex]

Wheelies and Chair Fu -- A True Story
by Nelson Thompson

Wheelchairs may seem safe, in that the rider is securely supported by four wheels, but believe me, on uneven or irregular terrain, keeping a wheelchair upright can be a precarious proposition. This is especially true if one is also attempting to make a wheelchair perform extreme maneuvers. Learning to be a master at "Chair Fu" (the art of doing incredible things in a wheelchair) comes, in part, from learning the hard way that wheelchairs can fall over.

My first wheelchair wreck was at the age of seven, at Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia. I was in one of those old-fashioned wood and woven cane rush wheelchairs that had the big drive wheels in front. I attempted to go down a long, rather steep sidewalk that cut directly through the middle of the campus. My speed quickly reached the point where the ride was scary. I drifted to one edge of the sidewalk and corrected. But it over-corrected, and I found myself about to go off the opposite edge. I corrected again, but this threw me violently in the opposite direction, off the sidewalk and into the trees. My last correction turned the chair so sharply, it flipped over on its side. I lay there, staring at the sun filtering through the pine branches, until several nurses rushed out of one of the buildings and picked me up. I was grounded for two weeks.

My second lesson came shortly after I returned home from my first stay at Warm Springs. I was eight years old and getting around the yard in my very first wheelchair, a modern one with the castors in front. Pushing through grass was more difficult than I had anticipated. It helped, though, to lean forward and then allow my upper body to impact the chair's backrest as I pushed the wheels; this transferred a "twist" to the chair, causing the front wheels to briefly come up, and sail over the clumps of grass that were slowing me down.

I came to a slight rise in the ground that together with the clumpy grass brought me to a stop. I was headed toward my Dad, who was some distance in front of me raking leaves. So, I leaned as far forward as I could and slammed back in the chair with all my might as I pushed forward on the wheels. The chair flipped over backwards, dumping me on the ground. Needless to say, I learned that this technique (which I call a "back slam") must be used with extreme caution.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I decided to try something that I had seen others do at Warm Springs -- the "wheelie". I had my brother Charlie tip my wheelchair back until it was nearly balanced on the back wheels. While he lightly held onto the handlebars, I attempted to maintain my balance by pushing and pulling on the main wheels. It was very much like learning to ride a bicycle, I suppose. At first, I just could not get the hang of it. After several attempts, I suddenly "got my balance" and keeping the chair upright was easy. After that, it was a snap to learn to do a back slam of just sufficient strength to raise the wheelchair up to the balance point, and then keep it there.

I was doing a wheelie in an old high school cafeteria once, where the floor was a hardwood floor, and none too stable. While balancing, I rolled backwards onto a loose board which gave slightly under my weight, and over I went, banging the back of my head and embarrasing myself in front of teachers and fellow students.

By the time I got to college, I was a master at doing wheelies. And then I saw another disabled student, a man in his thirties, who not only did wheelies, but could push his chair forward, backward, twirl around in place and go over curbs while doing a wheelie! In other words, he got around better on two wheels than I could on four.

I took this as a challenge and an opportunity. By then, I had ceased to see my wheelchair as a fate worse than death. It had become more than merely a way to get around. I saw it as a piece of exotic sports equipment, like a racing bike. I saw it as a way of earning respect (and attention) from other young people my age. By the time I was a senior in college, I could replicate those wheelie tricks that I had seen. And I could do them one better. While doing a wheelie, I could rock the foot peddles up and down at just the right rate to cause the front castor wheels to whirl around at high speed. A real attention grabber at dorm parties.

Of course, learning to do that cost me another bump on the back of my head.

In graduate school, I once went over to Jim Gladney's apartment. There was one big step up to his front door. Gladney grabbed the handlebars and said he would give me a boost. My best friend, MB Stacy opened the screen door for us, and I said, "I'll get the front wheels up." I did a smart little back slam and placed the front wheels on the step.

That step was just a quarter inch too high. The chair was off balance and began to tip backwards. I pulled hard on the wheels to pull off the step and force the front wheels down, but I was just a smidge too late.

I didn’t worry even a tiny bit. I knew Gladney was right behind me, and I had felt him grasp the handlebars. What I didn't know was that Gladney had turned loose, taken the cigarette from his lips and had turned to flip it away. In that instant when he wasn't behind me (and wasn’t looking), I jerked on the wheels and took off down the driveway, while simultaneously flipping over backwards.
The impact of my head on the concrete stunned me badly. I almost lost consciousness. I was only vaguely aware of sliding out of my wheelchair and under Gladney's automobile. As if through a fog, I heard him and Stacy hollering. I did not feel them grab my legs and haul me out from under the car. I was able to open my eyes only after they had picked me up and put me back in my chair.
Gladney had a first aid kit, and patched the bloody wound on the back of my head. He gave me a pill that dulled the pain, and they put me to bed. While I slept, they partied in the next room. They say I missed a good one.

At this point, I can safely predict what many readers are thinking: “Why don’t they make wheelchairs that can’t tip over backwards?” There are at least three good reasons.

One, the chair must be built to tip back easily so that a single assistant can grab the handlebars, tip the chair back and maneuver it up and down steps. If the chair couldn’t be tipped, then it would take at least two assistants and they would have to carry the full weight of the chair and occupant. Major inconvenience.

Two, all rotatable bodies have what is called angular inertia. This can be thought of as the effort (or strength) required to rotate that body, and it depends upon how far apart the axis of rotation is from the center of weight (also called the “center of gravity”).

Okay, this is beginning to sound complicated, so let’s use a simple example: a hotel luggage cart. The front wheels are castors (they roll in any direction) and the back wheels are not (they always roll in just one direction: forward). You are at the rear and want to rotate the front of the cart to your right so you can push it through the hotel’s front door.

Easy? Well imagine that a hundred pounds of luggage is stacked on the front end, farthest from you. Twisting that cart around is going to be frightfully difficult. However, if the luggage is stacked at the rear end, closest to you, twisting the front of the cart around is quite manageable.

It’s the same with wheelchairs. When I roll it to face in a different direction, I do this by pushing on one wheel and tugging on the other, often by equal (but opposite) amounts. If I want this to require the smallest possible effort, then the total weight of me and the chair must bear down directly between the rear wheels. But if this is true, that means the chair will tip over backwards if I so much as sneeze; it will be unstable.

We don’t want the chair to be dangerous, so it is adjusted to the user in such a way that the total center of weight is typically a (very) few inches in front of the rear wheels. In this manner, the user can sneeze, tilt her head backwards, reach behind her or manage small bumps and ramps without fear of falling over backwards. But the total center of weight is kept close enough to the rear wheels so that turning and maneuvering the chair requires only slightly more strength than is absolutely necessary.

This makes the wheelchair reasonably safe, reasonably maneuverable, and facilitates doing wheelies. The more tippable a wheelchair is, the easier it is to turn and maneuver.

And the third reason is: doing wheelies is too damned useful to give up. Wheelies increase independence, mobility and self-confidence, and the risk of flipping over backwards is a small price to pay for that.

In graduate school, I had occasion to visit the college student clinic. It was very modern in every respect -- save one. There was no ramp from the parking lot up to the sidewalk that surrounded the building. Usually I was lucky enough to see another student entering or leaving, and I could ask for a boost. On this day, there were none. After waiting for several minutes, I decided to look around for a curb that was low enough for me to jump.

Jumping curbs was another trick I had learned while in college. If the curb was no higher than four inches, I could place the front wheels up on the curb, and with a strong lunge, I could roll the back wheels up. If the curb was between four and five inches high, I used another technique, slightly more dangerous.
This involved rolling at the curb at moderate to high speed. At the last instant, I did a back slam to raise the front wheels enough to clear the curb. As the rear wheels hit the curb, I added a strong push to the already considerable momentum of the chair, and this was often enough to mount the curb. Sometimes, it took several attempts because the strength of the back slam and the timing of the push were critical. It had to be done with split second precision.

I found a place in the parking lot behind the clinic where the curb was just under five inches high. The concrete sloped gently down to the curb, which enabled me to attack the curb with higher speed than I normally would have had. I looked around -- still nobody in sight. Ready, set, go!

It almost worked. But my left wheel hit the curb ever so slightly before the right one – and bounced. When I shoved hard on the wheel rims, the left wheel was not in contact with the curb. My push encountered no resistance – the wheel just slipped in place as if it were greased. My body lurched to the left. Meanwhile the right wheel had grabbed properly and rolled up the curb. The entire chair spun and tilted hard to the left and fell over on its side, spilling me onto the concrete.

Ten seconds later, a group of half a dozen students emerged from the rear door not twenty feet away. In fact, the one in front was just opening the glass door while I was attempting to mount the curb and had seen the whole thing.
They were quite helpful, and in a minute I was at the nurse's front desk, asking to see a doctor for two problems: a bad case of bronchitis AND a bleeding wound on the side of my head.

Two weeks later, they installed a ramp at the clinic.

There are two entirely different ways of getting a wheelchair safely down a step or curb. Forward on two wheels, and backward on four. You would think that the latter would be immeasurably safer since no precarious balancing is required. Ha!

Once, I was going back to my apartment in Dallas from the manager’s office. I was taking a different route, one that was considerably shorter, but included a high curb that dropped down onto a sloped street. That is to say, the street tilted “sideways”, away from the curb. I would have to drop down the curb, coast downhill across the street and mount the relatively tiny (and easy) curb on the other side. A young man was approaching the street from the other side, and of course, I wanted to handle the first curb without his assistance.

The first curb was a doozy. I could go down forward on two wheels, but the impact might snap some spokes and ruin the shape of my wheels. So, I turned briskly around, leaned forward at the waist, and propelled myself backwards. This is typically a safe maneuver, and can be done with curbs up to nine inches high.

I dropped off perfectly and started to straighten up. To my intense surprise, the wheelchair shot backwards at high acceleration! I had forgotten the slope of the street. I was coasting backwards downhill so fast, that any attempt to stop might flip me over backwards. I leaned forward again and gripped the wheels firmly in an attempt to bring my speed down. And then I relearned the painful lesson of my first wheelchair crash.

Wheelchairs with their caster wheels at the rear are highly unstable going downhill or traveling at high speed.

Going backwards as I was, my casters were at the “rear”. Without warning, the chair swerved sharply to one side, attempting to make an instantaneous ninety-degree turn. My velocity in the downhill direction did not have time to change, so there I was, sitting in a wheelchair that for a brief instant was trying its damnedest to go sideways.

The chair spun faster than I could react, and flipped violently over on its side! This occurred at such a blinding speed that I was literally slung through the air…and into the arms of the guy walking across the street toward me. We both went tumbling to the asphalt, but neither of us was hurt at all. He righted my chair, picked me up and placed me in it. He thought the whole event was frightfully funny. He joked that that was quite a spectacular way to meet people. I was quite grateful, as you can imagine. He may have just saved my life.

By the time I left graduate school, I was fully intent on becoming as skilled at using a wheelchair as was humanly possible. And not just to impress people. It was obvious to me that the more 'tricks' I could do, especially if they were useful, the more independent I would become. Though I no longer had any serious difficulties in asking for assistance, it was a great source of personal satisfaction and self-confidence to know that I didn't have to depend on others. It wasn't always possible to ask for help -- like when no one else was around. And often, the assistance I got was as dangerous as the extreme Chair Fu tricks I had mastered.

In Dallas, I was at a company picnic in a shady park. There were several hundred people around within earshot. I rolled over near a small embankment between two trees to park and eat my burger and potato salad. Suddenly, the packed dirt under me gave way, and my wheelchair slid dangerously close to the edge of the embankment. -- and kept sliding. I hollered for help.

Six guys ran over, and I started explaining what they should do, but no one paid any attention to me. Two of the men began shouting orders and before I could stop them, six pairs of hands grabbed at various parts of my wheelchair and pulled in six different directions.

One hand pulled off my armrest. The sudden loss of lift on that side caused the wheelchair to tip over and I had to grab on tight to keep from falling out. There was a 'snap' and another guy lost his balance, one of my foot peddles dangling uselessly from his hand. The balance of the chair sharply shifted the other way, and I began to slide out of the chair. Several hands turned loose of the chair and grabbed me.

Eventually, I was lowered gently to the ground, but that operation cost me a sprained shoulder. I finally managed to shout loudly enough so that the guys (who now numbered over a dozen) paused their chaotic fumbling, and they allowed me to instruct them how to reassemble my wheelchair. More or less. Then they picked me up and put me in it.

At the end of all this, they were grinning and patting each other on the back for the great rescue job they had done. They felt like heroes. I'm sure they wondered at my apparent lack of appreciation.

I went home early. The damage to my wheelchair cost forty dollars and I was putting ice packs on my shoulder for a week.

Some years later, still in Dallas, I inherited a girlfriend. Actually, she was living with, and engaged to, this guy in the apartment above me. We three had become good friends, grilling burgers together on weekends, that sort of thing. He worked hard, and worked on a swing shift arrangement. There were many evenings and weekends when Julie was home alone. Often, she would come downstairs and watch television with me until Ted parked his car outside my apartment.

Ted came over one day and asked me to take Julie out for some beer and dancing. He had promised to take her, but his boss had moved him to the evening shift and she would be heartbroken if she couldn’t go. He gave me some money to cover expenses, and I had a date for Friday night.

It was a country western dance bar with a live band – her favorite place. We hit the buffet and piled up finger snacks on tiny paper plates. We found us a table next to the dance floor and ordered a pitcher of beer. Then Julie began getting restless. She wanted to dance. She asked me if I would be offended if she left me alone and found a guy to dance with. I had had just enough beer to suggest that she dance with me. She had had just enough beer to think it was a great idea!

Out on the floor we went, and I popped a wheelie. I rocked the chair back and forth to the rhythm of the music and twirled my chair around as if it were effortless. I pulled out all the stops, and gave no thought to the danger involved. I was dancing! Julie backed up to my rear, and threw her rump into the back of my chair. I saw it coming and took the impact and twirled away. We were doing the Bump!

In short order, a space appeared around us. Some folks were more interested in watching us then they were in dancing. I did things with that wheelchair that, looking back on it now, scare me to death. I had drunk enough beer to be totally reckless, but not enough to make me stupid. We danced through an entire music set. We returned to our table followed by a spatter of applause from the other dancers. The owner came over and gave us a free pitcher of beer. He told me I was welcome back any time. You have no idea how good that felt.

The next morning, my wrists were so sore, I couldn’t brush my teeth with either hand.

My brother Tom visited me in Dallas once, and I took him to the Northwest Mall. I had something in mind. While we were there, I told him that the mall had an escalator, and I had convinced myself that I could ride it up and down in my wheelchair. Safely.

He protested at first, but I explained (with drawings) that even though my front wheels would be on a higher step than the rear wheels, those steps were flat. Neither set of wheels would want to roll off, and the chair wouldn't tip backwards as long as my center of gravity was between the front and rear wheels. All I had to do was lean forward and hold onto the rails.

He was skeptical, but he agreed to help me in an experiment. He would get on the escalator a second after I did, and catch me if anything went wrong.
Nothing went wrong. My first trip up the escalator went perfectly, and let me tell you, it was a thrill. Tom was impressed, too.

Going down the escalator was a little trickier, since I had to go down in the same configuration -- in other words, I had to go down backwards. Tom got onto the escalator first and I backed onto it, leaning forward and looking down between my legs. I had about three seconds to jockey the chair and make sure that the steps split precisely between the front and rear wheels.

The trip down was just as perfect. Neither time did Tom have to grab my chair or even hold onto a handlebar; I had done it entirely by myself. I had accomplished the world's first recorded round-trip escalator wheelchair ride.
I was the Cosmic Black Belt Master of Chair Fu!!

In the years to follow, I was to ride many an escalator, including the one from the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit up to street level, a height of two stories. I loved it when somebody would glance up, see me, glance away, and then do a double take! Oh, the shock on their faces! Oh, the glee in my heart!

Today, I cannot indulge this pleasure anymore. Have you seen those little signs that say baby buggies and other wheeled vehicles are not allowed on the escalators? The “other wheeled vehicles” are referring to me. After clerks at both Dillard's and Macy's literally dragged me off their escalators and threatened to call the police if they caught me on them again, I gave it up.

But I still have my Black Belt, dammit.