The Rolling Exhibition: Capturing the Stare

I sat on a plane descending into Kiev, Ukraine. It had been 36 hours since leaving New Zealand, a place where I had found new friendships and romance and had traveled for the past year. It was difficult to leave it behind. I knew it would be, and I found myself in a mental no-man’s land, caught between thoughts of an old life and a new one about to start. With new destinations on the horizon, I began searching myself for the hyper-awareness of my own experience that comes part-and-parcel with being a 20-something world traveler working to document his journeys. For the past nine months, I had been able to squeeze out that gushing, over-enthusiastic type of writing that exudes from most people on their first passage abroad and wanted more of the same in Ukraine.

But instead, I was uninspired: I was sweaty and tired, and my most immediate concern was how the hell I was going to get into the country circling outside the plane window. The visa requirements had been constantly changing for the past few months to the point where I had given up on trying to fill out the (un?)necessary paperwork ahead of time, and instead decided to take my chances at the border.

As the plane began to come in for a landing, I leaned over to the man beside me and asked in gestures what he thought the status of the visa requirements might be. He echoed the sentiments I had been hearing for weeks.

“Ah, some days you need one and some days not. I don’t know anymore.”

Excellent! I was landing in Kiev, Ukraine, at 1 p.m. with no visa, no guaranteed accommodation and no legs. It was shaping up to be an interesting afternoon.  

So I should probably explain the “no legs” thing. Well, I don’t have them. Not having legs would seem like a big problem to most people, and my evidence for this notion has been witnessed in the thousands of similar expressions on people’s faces that I’ve seen from my skateboard as I’ve rolled by. For me, being legless has never really been anything more than a logistical difficulty. But it certainly elicits other people’s curiosity, no matter where I go in this world. Was he in a car accident? A shark attack? Maybe it was thalidomide? He could be a war veteran—Iraq? Land mine?

For the purposes of this story, and everything that I’ve done over the past couple of years, how I came to be legless isn’t really that important. In fact, it’s probably for the best to let that question mark rest (or hang) from my waist down. But at least I’ll set the scene: I was born in East Helena, Montana, in 1985. I went to public schools and used a wheelchair as my primary mode of transport to get around until the end of high school.