The Still Point Of The Turning World Read Online Free PDF

situations other people feared.
    When I was younger, I, too, played this “I’m lucky and you’re not” game. I wasn’t immune to ranking myself on an unseen ladder of luck, which in some ways, according to my skewed (but common) logic was somehow equated with goodness.
    One example: I learned to ski when I was six, at Winter Park in Colorado, at a center built and staffed and funded specifically to teach kids like me to enjoy the best sport in the world (I am admittedly biased). No matter your individual physical or mental limitations, someone could teach you to successfully and safely (well, sort of) fly down a mountain at varying speeds.
    Once, when I was a teenager, during a lesson with Dan, my favorite instructor, I said, “I’m so glad I’m not blind. That would be, like, so much worse than having one leg.” I don’t remember what prompted me to even think this, let alone say it out loud, but when Dan looked at me, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.
    “You think?” he asked, knocking one of his poles against my single boot. “You think there’s some kind of ranking system, Rapp?” We were midway down a difficult slope, and I’d fallen pretty hard near a line of trees marking the run’s edge.
    “Uh, I don’t know,” I said, embarrassed now as I hauled myself up out of the snow, but thinking,
Yeah, you butthead, there is. And I’m at the top of the ladder; I can hide my disability.
And hide it I did, in some cringe-worthy outfits (think pale blue, high-waisted parachute pants and a matching sweater). I was also thirteen, so a crisis for me might have been an inability to roll up my acid-washed jeans exactly the way my friends did, or glancing in my locker mirror to realize that my side ponytail was tilted at the “wrong” angle, or suffering in my long pants during the summer because I was afraid to be stared at in shorts. And hello? Didn’t everything have a ranking system? Every year the junior high yearbook staff handed out awards for best smile (which I
won,
dude, I wanted to say), best personal style, best laugh, et cetera. Dan was a total dweeb! What did he know?
    “Do you want to see what it might be like?” he asked. “To ski blind?”
    I most certainly did not. A blind skier is tethered with a rope to a skier who moves behind her or him, calling out when to turn; the blind skier has to trust the calls and move left or right when told.
    “We’ll tree ski,” he announced. “It won’t be exactly the same thing but it will give you an idea. You’ll be able to see, but it won’t be easy.”
    “Isn’t that, like, not allowed?” I asked. “Isn’t it, like, totally dangerous?”
    “Are you going to tell someone?” I was not.
    “You have to keep your wits about you,” he warned as he skied toward a gap in the trees. “And don’t second-guess; just do what I tell you.”
    I’d never been very good at that. I agreed anyway.
    Tree skiing was an absolutely euphoric experience that I will never repeat. There were impossibly tight turns on a steep slope, some ducking involved and sharp tree branches perilously close to my face. The shade from the trees made everything darker, icier. I could feel my heartbeat in my eyeballs. The experience of trusting someone to mark my moves for me as I hurtled down a hill at a terrifying clip was a completely counterintuitive experience. There was no sense of control. Dan would call out “left” when I thought for sure he was about to say “right,” and he cut me zero slack. He went
fast.
The experience wasn’t worse or better than skiing on one leg; it was just different. Maybe Dan was rash and irresponsible to challenge me on that day, although now I think he did me a favor by teaching me an important lesson about the value of specific experience, the value of individual bodies. It was a lesson I continued to learn as Ronan’s mom.
    Disabled people are like immigrants wherever we go, routinely asked to justify the landscape of our bodies to