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Travis Roy is waiting to be introduced
to speak. It's early June, a Sunday, and he is back in his hometown, Yarmouth,
Maine, inside the First Parish Church just off the North Yarmouth Academy
campus, where he attended high school for two years. His teachers are there, a
few old friends, and his mom, Brenda.
In a pew near Travis, a
man whispers to a woman the 30-second version of the Travis Roy story. Hockey
phenom. Broke his neck in his first college game. Paralyzed - with the partial
exception of his right arm - from the neck down.
"He wrote a book called
Eleven Seconds," the man says. "It's named after the amount of time he spent on
the ice before his accident." The woman shakes her head with disbelief. "No.
No," she says.
When Travis is
introduced, applause erupts. He moves his wheelchair in front of the podium,
past the graduates who have asked him to be their commencement speaker. He's
cloaked in a black robe, his blond hair is neatly parted, and he's wearing a
pair of small oval glasses. Travis talks about taking risks, not being afraid.
He uses the remote control attached to his chair - a device that opens the door
to his Boston condo - as a metaphor.
"It's great to have, but
it only works if I use it," he says. "Go through as many doors as possible,
especially those you don't know what's behind." Don't be afraid to try a door a
second time. Travis rarely looks at the notes on the music stand in front of
him. His speech is short, about eight minutes, and applause, louder than before,
erupts as he thanks the graduates, turns his chair, and moves back to the side
of the room.
We won't be able to go
out on the boat today," says Travis, turning his wheelchair around in the
driveway of his parents' summer cottage on Goodsell Point in Colchester,
Vermont. The threat of rain has forced Travis to scrap plans to motor around on
his pontoon boat with his family. The point, just north of Burlington—a rocky
bump of land, marked by high granite ledges, jutting out into Mallets Bay of
Lake Champlain - is home to a string of eight cottages owned by Travis, his
parents, and his mother's family. Cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends descend on
the property each summer, as they have since the 1940s.
As a boy Travis raced up
and down the dirt road that runs like a spine alongside the cottages, playing
with his cousins, swimming, fishing, and climbing the ledges. In 1997, two years
after his accident, he bought a cottage that had fallen out of family ownership,
made it handicapped accessible, and turned it into his summer home. Family
members outfitted their own cottages with ramps and wider doorways, and Travis
paid for the construction of an outdoor elevator near his parents' cottage that
lowers him from the driveway, down a steep embankment, and to the dock where his
boat is kept.
Travis is crossing the
driveway in the direction of his vegetable garden, which his great-aunt Nat
helped to plant, when his father, Lee, approaches.
"I've got a request," Lee
says, revealing a copy of Travis' memoirs and a pen. "You know the routine?" he
asks jokingly. Earlier in the year, Glen Davis, a photographer, took pictures of
Travis at a Portland press conference on spinal cord injuries. At the time, Lee
had promised Glen an autographed copy of Travis' book. The father moves behind
his son, puts the pen into Travis' mouth, opens the book to its title page, and
holds it in front of Travis' face. In big lettering, surprisingly quick and
straight, Travis writes: "To Glen. Thanks for the pictures. Best wishes, Travis
Roy."
Back at Travis' cottage
there is a swirl of activity on the deck as Lee moves through the crowd of
family and friends, saying his good-byes. Tomorrow is Saturday, race day, and as
director of the NASCAR Busch North series, he needs to be at the track in
Thompson, Connecticut, by 8:00 AM. He's carrying a blue strip of plastic, about
six inches long and an inch and a half wide. He walks up to Travis with a smile
and bends the strip back and lets it slap against his son's left shin.
"Does that hurt?" he asks
him. He slaps the leg again. "How about that?" Everyone on the deck is laughing,
including Travis.
"Keep it coming," he
tells his father, growling. "Grrrrrr."
"Why don't we try a
finger?" Lee asks, taking the piece of plastic and pretending to saw his son's
left index finger. "We'll start at the joint first."
"How about my right
hand?" Travis suggests. "Those fingers are starting to curl." He raises his
right arm, the only body part below his shoulders that he can move effectively,
to show five tan fingers that have begun to fold in toward his palm, as though
he had started to make a fist.
Travis Was Just 20
Months Old when Lee laced up his son with his first pair of
skates. They measured 3 1/2 inches long.
The ice rink, says
Travis, "was my church, my holy place. It's where I would spend hours and hours.
There's just something about the sport. Just the skill of ice skating is one
thing in itself. The skill of shooting and handling the puck is completely
unique. You don't have those three things in any other sport."
Travis wasn't big, nor
was he especially fast, but what he lacked physically he made up for in
intelligence and voracity.
"The kid just knew how to
play ice hockey - and not a lot of 20-year-olds do," says Boston University
hockey coach Jack Parker, who has won three national titles. "He understood the
nuances of the game, but on top of that, he had a lot of talent. It was obvious
when we were recruiting him that he would probably be captain his senior year."
By the autumn of 1995,
Travis was headed to BU to play for a program that was preparing to begin a
defense of its Division I title.
"I felt like my feet
never touched the ground when I was at BU," says Travis.
Travis Has Watched The Video Of His
college hockey career. It starts and ends on the night of October
20,1995, and lasts 11 seconds. It begins with a face-off against a backdrop of
screaming fans at Walter Brown Arena. It concludes with Travis chasing the puck
into the corner of the rink and setting up to check North Dakota defenseman
Mitch Vig before careening into the boards off balance and head first. He drops
to his knees, his body sliding back ward and falling forward at the same time
until he's laid out completely on the ice. Motionless.
"When I was coming up,"
Travis says, "he kind of moved out of the way at just the right point and
basically I kind of left my skates, more or less. I caught a little bit of him
but not enough of him. And that left the space between me and the boards just
right."
It's mid-April, Travis'
28th birthday, and I am sitting with him in the living room of his condo in
Boston's Back Bay. Light streams in through windows that offer a view of the
Prudential Center; the outside sounds of a city starting to wake from a long,
hard winter trickle in. It's a good-sized place - two bedrooms, two bathrooms,
spacious kitchen - that's been decorated with a few antiques. Atop a corner
table in the dining area sit several framed pictures of Travis with his family
and friends. On the wall above the pictures hang four watercolors of flower
arrangements that Travis painted by holding a brush with his mouth. They are
bright, cheery, and remarkably detailed.
There's a knock at the
door. With his right hand, Travis reaches to the remote control clipped to his
chair and pushes a button to open the front door.
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"Hi, Denise," he says in greeting. Denise is one of five home health aides
Travis has in Boston. "Thank you for my birthday present." Denise, who dropped
off a box of Ritz crackers and cheese earlier that morning, lets out a shy
laugh.
Travis moved into the condo about four years ago, after he graduated from BU
with a degree in mass communication. "This is all about making sense of my
condition," he says. "If I lived in Yarmouth, I would probably need somebody to
drive me whenever I wanted to go somewhere. [Here] I can come and go. It's that
independence. That is the most valuable thing I have."
It's an independence
created in large part by Travis' comprehensive medical insurance, which
provides him with 24-hour home health care at a cost of over $200,000 per year.
Home health aides are always there—to help him with basic day-to-day activities
such as dressing, bathing, and eating, to get him his medicine, to put him to
bed, to stay at his side when he goes out.
"It's the fundamental
things," Travis says. "I need my pills. I need a drink. I need a telephone book
- I can't do it on my own." There's also some money. Following his accident,
donations poured in. One Boston radio telethon alone raised $452,000 in cash and
$150,000 in services on Travis' behalf in about 15 hours. The money is enough to
give Travis a financial cushion, but it's not enough to live on for the rest of
his life. Travis needs to work—more than 75 percent of paralysis victims are on
welfare— and the work he has found as a motivational speaker earns him enough to
live on. And, beyond his physical limitations, he's struggling to figure out
what he wants to do with his life. The accident did more than just take away his
physical gifts; it robbed him of being able to do the one thing he lived for:
playing hockey. Now, more than eight years after the accident and the tidal wave
of attention that rushed over him, Travis finds himself, in a sense, more like
many other 20-somethings, still in search of something to be passionate about.
"I think it's pretty rare
to feel the way I did," he says. "Most people don't have passions like that. I
was constantly thinking hockey. I didn't stop. Everything was somehow related.
How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? How can I eat better?
or Where can I practice? or Where can I lift weights? And that
whole process has now been completely replaced with, Have I taken my evening
pills? Do I look all right in the chair? Do I look funny? Is my leg crooked? Is
my body deteriorating?"
He's found some
satisfaction in helping others. There's the Travis
Roy Foundation, which he created to raise money for research and for
people on limited incomes with spinal cord injuries. In 2003 the foundation
passed the $1 million mark in total money distributed. He works with the New
England Spinal Cord Initiative, a project that hopes to create a world-class
Boston-based rehabilitation center focusing on spinal cord injuries. The absence
of such a center—in a city known for its medical facilities—often forces New
Englanders to go outside the region. Finally, at schools and businesses, Travis
is paid to tell his story.
But passion? Excitement?
For Travis, all his worthy efforts pale next to what hockey gave him.
"But [this work] does
have purpose. And that helps. That's what a lot of my life is now. It's having
purpose. It's having meaning. Sometimes it's not so much about my life as it is
about others'."
His father, Lee, admits it's a battle. "I hope he finds it, but I don't have the
faintest idea what he could get passionate about or feel like, 'This is what I
want to do.' There aren't a lot of options out there. The unknown is the most
difficult part, but as long as Travis can get together with his friends and live
by himself, it allows us to feel things are OK, relatively speaking. It's never
OK, and it's never going to be OK."
"Like I tell my friends,
I feel like I'm breathing out of a straw," Travis says. "I never get to have a
real good laugh. Life is good, but you're kind of limited. Everything is on a
completely different scale. I used to have these highs and lows—actually, my
lows weren't that big. But my highs were just on top of the world, and now my
highs ..." He pauses briefly. "Real emotion, real happiness, real excitement,
there's not much of that. But I appreciate what I have. I'm grateful. I've got
so much more than most of the world. I've got nice parents. I've got family.
I've got friends. A lot of able-bodied people can't say that."
IN THE SPRING OF 2001 LEE TOOK
A picture of his only son. The photograph shows a smiling Travis sitting in the
passenger seat of his father's restored 1954 Porsche Cabriolet. It was snapped
just before Lee and Travis took the car into Portland and paid a surprise visit
to Brenda at the high school where she works as a principal. The top is down and
Travis' arm rests along the passenger door. It's a picture that is absent of his
wheelchair and his paralysis. It's Travis' favorite photo of himself.
EVEN IF A
CURE FOR SPINAL CORD INJURIES is found in Travis' lifetime, it
won't be soon. Research increased following the high-profile injuries to Travis
and actor Christopher Reeve. Duke University scientists made news in October
with their study using brain signals from a monkey to drive a robotic arm.
Recently, Israeli researchers reported trial results showing that activated
macrophages injected into the spinal cord may bring feeling and limited movement
in the lower extremities. Could this mean that one day 200,000 permanently
paralyzed Americans will be able to walk again? Dr. David Apple, medical
director at Shepherd Center in Atlanta, cautions that headway in research does
not mean a cure is around the corner.
"I don't think anytime in
the next 50 years we'll see someone get an injection in the spinal cord and be
made normal again," he says. "But everyone thought polio wasn't going to be
cured and it was. I hope I'm wrong, but it's a lot more complex."
Even if there is a cure
someday, it would mean thousands of hours of therapy to rejuvenate muscles and
joints that haven't moved in years. "I try not to get too far ahead," says
Travis. "I know that I may hardly be able to walk. I may hardly be able to
skate. I know it's not going to be normal. I know it's not going to be the way
it was." Still, there are moments when Travis can't help but think about the day
he might be able to get back all of the little things that are missing in his
life.
"Being able to give my
mom a hug. Being able to drive. To be able to walk down the street and look at a
girl and feel like you're an equal and not have her feeling bad for you.
Standing in the shower and just letting the hot water run over you and feel it.
Rolling over in bed when you want to switch positions. It may not sound like
much." He pauses and then continues. "Going to bed when you want to and not
having to have somebody there to help you. Just grabbing the fork and knife
yourself, or making a sandwich exactly how you want it."
EVENING IS STARTING TO SETTLE IN
AT Goodsell Point, and Travis is out near the swing set that was
installed down the road from his house. His 4-year-old niece, Olivia, is
recruiting Travis for a game of hide-and-go-seek.
"Where are you going to
hide, Uncle Trav?" she asks. As Olivia closes her eyes and counts to 10, Travis
wheels his chair to the other side of a nearby car. He peers through the windows
to see his niece scurrying about. And then she spots him. She smiles and runs
toward him. "I found you!" she shrieks. "You found me," he says, welcoming her
into his chair. His wait for this little moment is over.
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