2007-04-13 - 6:31 p.m.
It fucking snowed Wednesday. It�s freezing cold today and is expected to stay so through the weekend at least. You might think the earth had shot off from its orbit around the sun and was hurtling through frigid deep space. But of course there are vast swaths of the world where the weather isn�t like this. Right now, I�m jealous if you live in one.
I guess I should be used to this. But it still sucks. I grew up in New York and lived most of my adult life in New England. I remember in mid-April 2003, my first year at Brown, there was a similar late-season snowstorm. I wrote a poem for my German class about shoveling spring snow off my front porch. (It turned out I was an equally bad poet in German as English.)
That snow also led to me helping found a group for Brown students with disabilities called BDAC, for Brown Disability Awareness Community (or maybe Advocacy Committee or Action Council or something; we were always unclear about the last part). We were a peer support group as well as a squeaky wheel, voicing concerns about issues the school should take action on.
Like the problem that started everything was getting Brown to not do such a half-assed job of shoveling the snow. On the Monday after the April snowstorm, I went to walk from a library to a class in the German department all of two blocks away (along Waterman from Thayer to Hope, if you know the area). The sidewalk was completely covered in piles of snow.
I wasn�t fully disabled at this point, but I did have a hard time keeping my balance. Especially on slippery surfaces like unshoveled snow. Halfway down the first block, I did a face-plant into a big snowdrift. People passing stared at me in alarm (although no one offered help, possibly because they didn�t want to mess with a prone figure unleashing a nonstop stream of curses).
As I lay face-down in the snow, it occurred to me: �I am a grown man. I have taken out massive student loans to be here. Right here, right now. Lying sprawled in the snow. I am paying a lot for this. And Brown didn�t bother to shovel. What, do they think physical challenges breed character? Can they not afford it? Brown may be the poorest Ivy, but they still have $1.6 billion more than me��
I complained to Disability Support Services and there ended up being a meeting of other students with disabilities who had also had a hard time in the snow. A blind girl, a guy with muscular dystrophy who used a power wheelchair, a girl with just the temporary disability of being on crutches. Hmm. I had never seen so many students with disabilities in one place.
It in fact turned out that the unshoveled snow had been a problem even for students without disabilities. (I later met an able-bodied grad student who had slipped in front of his dorm after that same snow and gotten a concussion resulting in temporary short-term memory loss�) But, we were told, since the snow was so unexpected, shoveling hadn�t been planned for. What could you do?
What could you do? That I actually knew a fair amount about. I had worked in property management and snow � even unexpected snow � fell on our buildings all the time. Getting it removed was one of my jobs. We had contracts with snow removers and they could be called on for last-minute emergency service for a price (one amusingly referred to snow as �white gold�).
Brown�s Facilities Management people could certainly get the snow shoveled. Apparently, some prodding was needed to effect it. Perhaps this concern should be voiced. Perhaps it would be taken more seriously if it came from a formally organized student group. Perhaps, there being a whole bunch of students with disabilities in this very room, we here could start one.
BDAC managed to extract a promise from Brown to keep the snow clear (in retrospect, I don�t think they wrote anything down, although the snow was indeed removed the next two seasons that I was there). The group slowly gathered new members (which was pretty tough with all the confidentiality surrounding disability) and started having events.
It became as much (if not more) a social network as an advocacy group. Not that we all hung out together, but we had movie night and invited speakers and had a pre-exam period study break to calm the nerves of students both with and without disabilities. A few of us participated in candidate interviews to find a new head of Disability Support Services (I�m proud to say that they hired the applicant we said we liked).
Probably our finest hour was when people from BDAC were asked to speak to a student group that held weekly meetings looking at issues of diversity. I�d never really thought about people with disabilities as being a part of �diversity�. I�ll talk about what I said to the kids in a later entry, promise. For now, I�ll just say it made me think a lot about identity and how disability fit into who I am and who anyone is.
I don�t know if BDAC is still extant. I lost track of it my last year at school when my mind was wrapped up in dealing with becoming more disabled. There may be another �official� group now. Certainly there are still students with disabilities and they still have concerns and things to say. Certainly the snow still falls in New England and still needs to be cleared away.
I think the most important lesson I learned from my BDAC experience was this: things need to get done and you are who needs to do it. You know how people always say �They should do this� or �They should do that�? Well, They is You. You. Do things. Make sure things get done.
And make it stop being cold.
� 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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