Veni,vedi,navigati! by Rioria Valenzuela

Women who have physical limitations or disabilities are much less likely to participate in recreational sports than other women.

 

Their physical limitations may include difficulty with standing, walking, lifting and bending. These physical limitations are frequently accompanied by pain and fatigue and may be further complicated by visual and other sensory impairments. Women with physical limitations often believe or have been told that they cannot or should not exercise, even though, with assistance, they may be physically capable. Women with MS are often told that exercise can raise the body’s temperature which can make existing MS symptoms feel temporarily worse and bring about fatigue, weakness or vision problems. Yet there are many recreational sports that could be beneficial to their health and well-being.

Many women with disabilities wish to become more physically active and participate in recreational sports but face barriers to becoming more active. Common barriers include lack of time, money, assistance, and transportation; and inaccessibility to fitness centers and equipment; and of course, the ever-prevalent pain and fatigue. Lesbians with disabilities face even more barriers than other women. This is because they have life experiences atypical of mainstream culture. These experiences simultaneously set them apart from, and at the same time make them virtually invisible within mainstream culture. Both women with disabilities and lesbians experience societal, familial and economic pressures that directly impact their lives and the range of options available to them. When a woman is both a lesbian and disabled this impact is even more strongly experienced and limits the range of option even further.

These women are also rarely made aware of the resources in the community that will help them achieve their recreational and fitness goals. Women with physical limitations are often unable to obtain information on how to exercise safely. Most GPs and health professionals do not receive training in advising women with physical limitations how to exercise safely. Nor do they usually have the time to make referrals to organizations that could be helpful. As well, most GPs and health professional are unaware of the resources and organizations within their community that could help women find accessible recreation. As a lesbian with MS it is my intention that this article will provide other lesbians with disabilities and even the odd health professional, some hope, inspiration and the necessary information that may help open some doors to a more confident and rewarding life. The following is an account of my how I found these resources and came to be smitten with sailing. Sailing brought the winds of positive change to my life and took me on a voyage of self-discovery that still continues to this day.

I have never been one to get to the point quickly, probably because I have always enjoyed long adventures, whether they are tangible ones of my own making, or intangible ones of somebody else’s literary imagination. Consequently, as I recount my initiation into sailing, I first need to talk about my relationship with ‘walking’.  What I called ‘walking’ is what many people refer to as hiking. I’ve never called it hiking unless I put a pack on my back went out for several days in a row. As I a child I called it exploring. Walking/hiking was something I had always done.

I started walking with my father as a child when I was four. He and I would spend our entire Sundays walking together. We usually covered about 25 miles in and around Edmonton through ravines and along the valley of the North Saskatchewan River. It was a long distance for a small child to walk. It was often bitterly cold in the winter, and sometimes dangerous as well. But I never complained because I loved being outdoors and walking in nature was my only real connection with my father. As I got older I continued these walks on my own and I taught myself about the natural world in the process. I could identify most of the flora and fauna of Northern Alberta by the time I was 10. I spent much of my days observing nature. I would often see moose, deer, golden eagles, beaver, muskrats, and even a lynx on occasion. In one of my walks, I remember spending an entire day watching the activities of a muskrat family as they played on their mudslide and fed.

On these walks I often collected fossils and dinosaur bones on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River and thought I would grow up to be a paleontologist. Sometimes I would build structures on the banks of that river, no doubt the beginning of my life as a sculptor. Walking was something I had always done; it was as much a part of me as breathing. It was on my walks that I taught myself to cook over a campfire. At 14 I made my first souffle in a makeshift tinfoil oven. As a young woman, I wooed my lovers by taking them on walks with a picnic lunch of fresh caught trout, wild mushrooms cooked in butter, wine and garlic ending with a wild strawberry shortcake and Turkish coffee. Walking was my expression of everything important in my life. If something good happened I celebrated by going for a walk. If something bad happened, I coped with it by going for a walk. Previous to becoming ill, walking provided me with everything I needed: it was my meditation and my spiritual practice; and it was my major form of exercise, although I never saw it that way.

In the year 2000 my life came to a crashing halt. I was diagnosed with MS. It seemed to me an ill-fated start to the new millennium. It was as if one minute I had this very busy, joyful life; teaching, making art, exhibiting my work, traveling to New York and Los Angeles and ‘walking’ always ‘walking’. And then bang!  A simple household task became incredibly difficult and would take me all day to complete and leave me exhausted in its wake. As time went on my universe shrunk, I became isolated, and depressed.  I did the usual things that people do when faced with these things. I attended an MS support group. I saw a psychologist, naturopaths, acupuncturists and physiotherapists. I reached out to my family but those maxims about closeness at times of adversity did not bear out with my family and left me feeling more isolated.   I tried many other things to cope but I just became more isolated and more depressed. As well, I was not use to sitting still but I just wasn’t able to do much physically. What had always me got me through the tough times in my life was walking. Walking was my most cherished activity. As well it was one of my deepest and most precious pleasures, it was my raison d’Ítre. Now it was no longer available to me and I felt lost from myself.

In that darkest of moments I remembered something important. I had always loved water. I always need to live by a body of water. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am happiest in or on the water. I was a good swimmer and I loved swimming. My partner often accuses me of having gills. In the back of my truck are always two air mattresses, a small inflatable boat with oars and life jackets; and several beach towels. Much of my sculpture and installation art involves water in some way. When I went to an art residency in Maine in 1990 I took a small inflatable boat packed in my suitcase. Because most of my water activities had always been connected to and accompanied ‘walking’, I had not seen them as separate things. Although nothing will ever replace ‘walking’ in my life, this new realization about water gave me some hope. So I went swimming. Unfortunately, I could no longer swim at all, I became panicked and confused in water, even though I had always been a good swimmer. I described my recent experience of swimming to a physiotherapist at the MS centre. She told me that MS could cause a problem with proprioception, which is the sense of the orientation of one’s limbs in space. A woman in my support group told me about an organization called Recreation Integration Victoria or RIV. I set up an appointment with RIV. http://www.rivonline.org/index.html

RIV’s mandate is to facilitate recreation and leisure for people with disabilities.  A wonderful woman, Bonnie Blacklock, explained their program. I told her I was looking to find something to replace hiking, I thought maybe I could do some kayaking. She told me about their kayaking program and also told with great enthusiasm about their Disabled Sailing Program.http://www.reachdisability.org/dsa/ I said I wanted to learn how to kayak. I went for my kayak orientation at the Commonwealth pool and learned how to paddle and do wet exits. I had no problems with the wet exits and I had canoed in my youth so paddling was easy enough to understand. What I had not anticipated was the level of fatigue I would experience after only a few seconds of paddling. I knew I would never be able to handle an ocean current therefore I could never go anywhere really interesting by kayak.

I returned to RIV and enrolled in their sailing program. I was still very depressed, I felt no enthusiasm about sailing, so my expectations were very low. Bonnie had told me they used special sailboats adapted for people with disabilities. I could barely admit to myself that I had a disability, so the idea of sailing an adapted boat was totally unappealing. I envisioned one of two scenarios: The first one that my experience would be like riding a horse that is attached to a lunge line and all you get to do is go around in a circle while the person in the middle holding the lunge line controls the horse. The second scenario was that sailing would be so complicated that I wouldn’t be able to do it.

The other strike against sailing for me was that The Disabled Sailing Association or DSA, sails out of The Canadian Forces Sailing Association in Esquimalt. Being a peace activist who had at one time chained myself to The Cold Lake Missile Base in Alberta, I would now be sailing in military waters. Would that also mean losing my integrity? But losing ‘walking’ had taken away so much from me. I desperately needed something that would reconnect me to nature and give back to me some of what I had lost with walking. When I got to DSA  in Esquimalt, the woman instructor that greeted me was very young and I felt like an old woman. But the boats, called Martin 16s, were beautiful and they looked like any other small sailboat I had ever seen. Yet they were adapted, so that even someone with no arm movement like a quadriplegic could sail this boat with its ‘sip and puff’ mechanism
It was a sparkling sunny day and from the moment I was out on the water for my first sailing lesson, I was completely taken. It felt like this was something I was always meant to do and I could do it well without becoming exhausted. It was an intimate magical experience with wind and water and still remains that way for me, even today. It is sculptural: it is all about space and geometry. It is ancient, when I release my sails to sail downwind, everything goes quiet, it is transcendent and I think about the Phoenicians and feel like I might be one. I am in awe.

In a few short weeks I was sailing as often as I could. I could see that learning to race was a good way to learn to sail quickly. I started racing.  As well as learning about racing from DSA, I  was also able to get my CYA White Sail 1,2 and 3. Then I was asked if I would like to race at the Mobility Cup held in Kingston Ontario. http://www.mobilitycup.org/ 

As their web site states “The Mobility Cup is recognized as Canada’s International Regatta for Sailors with Disabilities. Canada has become a leader in making sailing accessible to people with severe disabilities. Disabled people from around the word are invited to participate in Mobility Cup.” So I said, “yes”  to Mobility Cup without even thinking.  The upside of being depressed is that nothing scares you. The trip was one amazing adventure after another.

I was one of the most novice sailors and was not prepared for the high level of competition. Out on the water everyone is the same, you can’t tell who is using ‘an auto helm’ or ‘a sip and puff’.  What you do know is  that you don’t want anyone to beat you round that mark and everything becomes about the sailing. The comradery was wonderful. We went out for dinner and talked about sailing, and all manner of things, everyone’s disabilities disappeared and we are all just sailors at a regatta wanting to do are absolute best. That first Mobility cup changed me. I took off the hip-wader that I used to wallow in my depression and started to make a life for myself again.  I have competed in two other Mobility Cups since and I have my CYA Bronze 5 and I am working on my Silver.

Paul Tingley was the person who introduced me to racing. I wasn’t able to get in or out of the boat from a standing position and always need assistance. He showed me  his technique of how he rolls out of the boat so I would be able to get out on my own. Now I never need assistance getting out of a boat. I have taught this technique to other sailors, as well as people on my MS dragon boat team. I call it the Tingley maneuver. Paul recently won a gold medal in sailing at the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing. It is an incredible achievement. Stacie Louttit and John McRoberts took the bronze. In fact the entire paralympic team all came from DSA Victoria. My greatest inspiration is a woman, Hilary Lister who sailed solo across the English Channel and is now, in 2009 going to  sail solo around Great Britain. She is only able to move her head and uses the ‘sip and puff’ mechanism that was  developed in Canada control her boat. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2138555/Quadriplegic-woman-to-sail-around-Britain-using-only-her-breath.html

I can still walk so I wanted to see what else I could do. So I crewed in some able-body keelboat races.  Outside of DSA, I also got my CYA basic cruising and my ISPA Day Skipper and my Maritime Radio Certificate. But sailing is still a very male dominated sport, less so in the world of disabled sailing, but if you want to venture out it is an amazingly sexist world so learning from men was not great. Listening to one instructor’s “stupid women stories” was almost more than I could take.  Alcohol plays a prominent role in the world of sailing and every marina has at least one bar. The only thing worse than a belligerent sexist male is a drunk, belligerent sexist male. 

Another instructor I had, thought it totally appropriate to belt back a few scotches at lunch. What I needed was a women sailing instructor. Surely there must be some in Victoria but so far I have not found any. What I did find was a wonderful woman, Captain Valma Brenton in Nanaimo who runs a company called Herizen Sailing for Women.  http://www.sailingforwomen.com/  There were some courses coming up in Nanaimo but I noticed on her Website, that she also had courses in Mexico and the British Virgin Islands.

It was coming up to my 50th birthday and I wanted to do something really fabulous so I booked a 7-day sailing course for women in the BVI with Herizen Sailing for Women. I was very afraid that physically I wouldn’t be able to pull this off. So just after I booked my trip I saw a poster in my community centre for a course called Living Well with a Chronic Disease. I phoned the number. It was a three-month government funded program that was free to its participants. It was very structured, we got a great book to work through and we set a goal that we would focus on for the course. My goal was to be able to relearn to swim well enough to be able to snorkel in The British Virgin Islands. This course was so helpful; I recommend it to anyone with chronic illness or chronic pain.

Through this course I managed to go to a pool and relearn how to swim. I started out in the slow leisure lane once a week. I worked my way up to three times a week. Eventually I had to move to the fast lane. I still can’t swim like I did before MS but I can do it and it’s pleasurable.  Then I bought, a mask, snorkel and fins. I took a snorkeling course  and used one of my swimming days to practice snorkeling. I was ready to snorkel in the BVI!

It was important to me that I do this trip by myself. My partner understood this completely. I had not done any major traveling by myself since before I had been diagnosed. I was still ambulatory, but I walked with a cane and had some serious balance issues. My partner encouraged me to have wheel chair assistance at the airports. I arrange it even though I didn’t think I would need it. I had booked a flight from Victoria to Seattle then a direct flight from Seattle to Puerto Rico, staying overnight at the airport hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico then a short morning flight to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands.

I had a hotel booked for 5 days in the BVI before the sailing course started. All this was done in an effort to manage my fatigue so I would arrive on the boat in the best of shape possible. But everything that could go wrong did.

My flight from Victoria was delayed and eventually cancelled due to mechanical problems. We then had to line up for hours to reschedule our flights. After two hours, I could no longer stand in line; someone brought me a wheel chair. By the time I got to the counter my flight to Puerto Rico had left and I was still in Victoria. The only flight they could get for me would not leave for another two days.

The new itinerary was brutal. It was a flight to Seattle with a 10 hour wait, then a red eye to Chicago with a 5 hour wait and a flight to San Juan with a 9 hour wait before I finally reached Tortola. But I would still have four days to recover before my course started.

By the time I reached customs in Tortola, I could not walk, my left foot and shoulder were numb and I was exhausted. The people of the British Virgin Islands are very formal. But when the customs officer asked me the purpose of my trip and I told her I was taking a 7-day sailing course for women, she raised an eyebrow and made an odd exclamatory sound and stamped my passport with a bang. Then she left her post behind the customs desk and came behind me and drove my wheel chair out to the street where the taxi drivers were hanging out and talking. In her lovely lilting and powerful voice the customs officer asked “Which one of you are going to drive this woman to her hotel now! Immediately!” The drivers responded as if they were schoolboys being reprimanded. I was quickly put in a cab with four other passengers. 

The man in the front seat was from Toronto. He was telling the driver that he was celebrating his 60th birthday by going sailing. I asked the woman next to me where she was from, she told me her name was Jacqui and she was from Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland. Her husband had given her a gift of a 7-day sailing course for women for her 50th birthday. I told her it was my 50th birthday as well and I was from another island off the other coast of Canada and was also taking a 7-day sailing course for women. We both figured there couldn’t be that many sailing course for women we knew we were on the same course. We were also staying at the same hotel. Starting with the custom officer it felt like a good beginning to my trip. 

When we arrived at our hotel, we were given a rum punch to welcome us. Even though we were both exhausted we drank our rum punch  and then another and talked into the night. The next morning I started my day with a swim in the pool then Jacqui and I headed to the beautiful white beach at the end of the road.   She said that although she and her husband had a boat, she didn’t really know how to sail and didn’t understand the points of sail. So in the sand on the beach I drew out the points of sail for her. As I explained the points of sail, I also told Jacqui about the MS and I how I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to handle the course. She said, she had felt that she wouldn’t handle it either, until she realized that, I was the same woman who had been taken through customs in a wheelchair. We laughed and realized we would both be fine.

As lesbian women we will often find ourselves talking about ‘coming out’, how old we were when we ‘came out’, our parent’s reaction to our ‘coming out’, the people who stayed by our side when we ‘came out’ and the people who abandoned us. We talk about a whole assortment of experiences around the coming out process, from the excitement and thrill of discovering one’s sexuality, to the pain caused by the rejection and homophobia. Most films about lesbians centre on coming out. When we talk about “coming out’ we talk about it as if, like young debutantes at a ‘coming out’ ball, once we ‘come out’ then everyone knows we are gay. It is over and we can get on with the rest of our lives. But it is not like that at all, unless you live a life like one of the characters in the 1978’s feminist utopian, sci-fi novel The Wanderground or you are permanent employee of the Michigan Women’s Music Festival. 

The reality for most of us is that our daily lives are full of a series of ‘coming out’ events, each one of these coming out events, ripe with the possibility of rejection, or with the renewed hope of a more tolerant world. I have always been acutely aware of the continual coming out process and the wear and tear it takes on our psyche. Even though most of these encounters are benign it always surprised me where homophobia lurks and how it will manifest. Now, with MS, I had another thing that could and did marginalize me.  I was nervous about meeting the rest of the crew, and even though I knew that everyone else on our trip was probably going through some version of self doubt themselves, it is different for lesbian women and even more so for a lesbian woman with a disability.But my fears were not to be realized; I wasn’t even the only dyke on board.

There were 7 women including the captain and none of us knew each other previously.  We came from all over North America. Cynthia from Vermont, Marlis from California, Catherine from New Mexico, Jacquie from Newfoundland, Lorna from Red Deer, Alberta, myself from British Columbia and Valma our Captain from Mexico and Nanaimo. We spent the first night just moored at Trellis Bay as we waited for everyone to arrive.

Oddly enough, we arrived and left in the order in which we registered. A fifty-two foot boat sounds big, there were after all, four bathrooms,  but the sleeping quarters were small and it is hard for middle-aged women to share a room with a stranger. Somehow we all found a way to sleep on our own.

Each morning at 7:00 am we started on deck with Yoga and Qi gong specially designed for sailing. After breakfast we started sailing, learning how to sail this huge 52 boat. Her name was J-Sea.  There wasn’t a moment where we were not learning. Valma was an amazingly patient captain and teacher who left nothing to chance.  We each took turns being skipper.

It was sometimes very difficult for me physically. I couldn’t just step into the zodiac when going to land and I had to be more careful walking on deck and would get fatigued. Despite the fatigue, I had a racer‘s mentality and wanted to spend every waking moment sailing but if we had done that we would have missed out on all the other amazing experiences. We moored at a different island every night. We moored at many fabulous reefs and had great snorkeling adventures. We went to wonderful little towns both in The British Virgin Island and The US Virgin Islands. An important aspect of cruising was learning how to go through customs. We explored an island that was all national park.

 We went to a bar on a boat that was only accessible by boat. We made most of our meals together except when in a place with a good restaurant. Catherine and Jacqui both wanted to cook the evening meal. Jacqui has a gourmet restaurant in Rocky Harbour Newfoundland close to Gros Morne National Park so Jacqui did most of the evening meals. Having done so much cooking in my life it was nice to keep that part of myself closeted for a change and just enjoy someone else’s cooking. We spent our evenings talking and getting to know each other. I usually made breakfast because I started every morning with a predawn solo swim in the nude as I watch the sun come up over what ever bay we were moored in. I also ended my evening with a before bed swim.

Another thing I learned to do after learning to sail was to sing. I am still learning but at that point in time I had no confidence. Yet I loved it. One morning I swam to land. It was quite a distance away and thinking no one could hear me, I sang Renaissance and Baroque arias at the top of my lungs. When the women came on top of the boat to start their yoga, I swam back to join them. They had all heard me but actually thought I sounded great, Catherine thought it was another boat listening to an opera station.

  I watched each woman on our boat have these little moment where their confidence in themselves grew by some experience they had or a some reflection back at themselves from one of us. We learned so much about sailing and in the process so much about each other and ourselves. The sailing course was wonderful experience. Cynthia, who I called the pocket Amazon because of her diminutive size and amazingly large presence, made us each a DVD of the trip. She also made us each a glass dishes with a map of the British Virgin Islands on it. She sent these to us later and it is wonderful to watch the DVD and relive the trip. Our initial fearfulness of each other when we first arrived, was replaced by intense sweet sorrow at having to part, knowing that quite possibly, we would never see each other again in this lifetime.

I have lived in Victoria for years. It is one of the best places to sail in Canada. As a child, on my many ‘walking’ adventures, I made little sail boats out leaves and wood or whatever materials I could find at the time. I sailed my little boats on bodies of water large and small. I even intuitively figured out about keel length and sail height and the angle of the sails to the wind. Yet despite living in Victoria, and my childhood boatbuilding experiences, it took me until I was 45 and a diagnosis of MS to find my way to sailing. But it was exactly the circumstances of my disability that started me sailing and led me on this magical adventure. Chance knocks on one’s door at peculiar times of our lives and sometimes in our bleakest moments offers a panorama of innovation.

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Written by sking

Filed Under Sports & Fitness

3 Responses to “Veni,vedi,navigati! by Rioria Valenzuela”

1. alisha Says:
   December 2nd, 2008 at 12:32 am

   I used to go to the community swimming pool to take my swimming lessons. I must say the trainers there are very professional and friendly.

2. Veni,Vedi,navigate! by Rioria Valenzuela | The Pink Elephant | boatknees.com Says:
   December 2nd, 2008 at 9:30 am

   [...] Veni,Vedi,navigate! by Rioria Valenzuela | The Pink Elephant [...]

3. Vita Says:
   March 18th, 2009 at 5:54 pm

   Thanks for the article and for helping me into the water world.
   hugs
   Vita

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