Disability Representation and Outdoor Access in the Bay Area with Judy Smith | Disabled Hikers Storytelling Project

A video interview between Judy Smith and Syren Nagakyrie

Syren Nagakyrie, founder of Disabled Hikers, interviews Judy Smith, a longtime disabled advocate, about her experiences as a disabled person before and after the Americans with Disabilities Act and her dream for a more accessible future.

Judy Smith became disabled in 1977 at the age of 17, due to a spinal cord injury in a car accident. As a lifelong nature and outdoor lover, she had to learn how to navigate the world as a wheelchair user. A founding member and former Artistic Director of AXIS Dance Company in Berkeley, CA, Judy is an avid birder and organizes accessible outings in the Bay Area with Golden Gate Bird Alliance.

Transcript

Syren Nagakyrie:

Hello, I am Syren Nagakyrie, they/them pronouns.

I am a white non-binary person with shoulder length brown hair, and behind me is the Disabled Hikers logo. And I am here with Judy Smith, a longtime disabled outdoor advocate and recreationalist who's going to share a little bit of her story with us today. Welcome, Judy.

Judy Smith:

I'm glad to be here.

Syren:

Would you like to introduce yourself?

Judy:

Sure, I can say a little bit about myself. My name is Judy and I do use she/her pronouns. I am a white, older lesbian. I have my gray hair pulled back in a braid. I'm light skinned and I'm wearing a gray turtleneck. And I am actually zooming in from Ohlone land. They are the rightful owners of this place that I live called Oakland.

Yeah, so I was lucky enough to grow up in the mountains of Colorado. I spent most of my childhood being in nature and riding my horses in national parks and that kind of thing. So nature has always just been a first love of mine.

I was injured in a car accident when I was 17 in 1977, which was, 20 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. And at that point, disabled people were still really not very seen at all. And I was in a small town of about 1000 people. I was the only physically disabled person that I knew of in the county.

And becoming disabled that young, I have a spinal cord injury, so I use a power wheelchair. It changed everything for me. I really thought that my life was pretty much over because I was planning on an equestrian career. And so having my plan A and the only plan I had for my life yanked out from under me and not being able to access the outdoors was really devastating.

I had the good fortune, after spending 5 winters in a wheelchair in Colorado in the mountains, to have a disabled friend that I knew in Boulder suggest that I move to Berkeley, California. Which I did. It was crazy. I was 23 years old, I knew nothing about urban living. And I still kind of don't know how I ended up here in an urban environment.

But I got here in 1983. It was really at the height of the civil rights movement for people with disabilities, the independent living movement. My friends, my mentors were Judy Heumann, Ed Roberts, Marilyn Golden, you know, all of these people that were really instrumental in those of us with disabilities having the quality of lives that we do now.

So when I got hurt, you know, I did, I felt like I was never going to be able to be outdoors again, really, you know, and all of the places that I used to go, I didn't feel I could go anymore. So I think moving into a city kind of isolated me a little bit even more. Being outdoors, but I never lost my love for it.

We're really lucky in the San Francisco Bay Area. The East Bay Regional Parks District is the largest regional park district in the country, and there's parks everywhere. You know, and so of course, I started going to parks and finding these places. A lot of them were somewhat accessible, but a lot of them had ridiculous barriers, like a log in front of the trailhead so that motorcycles couldn't get through. That also meant people in wheelchairs couldn't get through, you know, gates that were too narrow for a wheelchair to get through. So when the Americans with Disabilities Act really started saying, you know, it's an imperative to make places accessible, I did start noticing a change. And I was able to get outside more and do more. So now, I spend the majority of my free time as much as I possibly can.

I retired from being a founding member and the artistic director of Axis Dance Company, in Oakland. I had an indoor career. So, when I retired in 2018, my imperative for myself was to get myself in nature more.

When COVID hit, I was able to do the California Naturalist certification online, which made, you know, that possible really. And, so all of this stuff started opening up for me in terms of being in nature.

Bonnie Lewkowicz who is at the Bay Area Adaptive Sports and Recreation Program, asked me if I would start doing accessible nature programming, especially birding. So I started doing that. My life now is really very much focused on being outdoors and making sure other disabled people can get outdoors.

Syren:

Yeah, I love that. Do you have a favorite park in the East Bay? It is so beautiful there.

Judy:

Well, I have kind of my home patches are Reinhart Regional Park, Oakland Hills. It's part of Redwood Regional Park. And I also spent a lot of time out at Arrowhead Marsh, which is part of the Martin Luther King Jr. shoreline. It's out by the Oakland Airport, and I avoided going there for most of the time I've lived in California. It just seemed too industrial, but it is a jewel of a wetland. So especially in the winter, we have a lot of shorebirds and ducks and other water birds that come in. It's just a wonderful place. I was there last week and there is a burrowing owl there now, which seems really early. But, these are all, these two places are within 20 minutes drive for me. Unfortunately, neither of them are very public transportation accessible.

But then I also have favorite parks that are further south of me, Coyote Hills. I hiked there with my sister one day, who's not disabled, and we were there for six hours. There are a lot of trails that aren't "accessible." But I think my favorite trails are the ones that I call accidentally accessible. They're not the paved half mile loop around the parking lot, you know. They're ones that -- my power wheelchair does really pretty well outdoors. It's not specifically designed for that, it's my everyday chair, it just happens to do pretty well -- So I am able to get around terrain that I might not recommend other wheelchair users try, especially.

But, having a power wheelchair, it just, really changed my life. I'll tell you a story about that.

I used a manual wheelchair when I got out of rehab. I didn't want a power wheelchair because I thought it would make me more disabled, people would think I was more disabled. But we lived on the side of a mountain with a rutted dirt driveway. My barn was down the hill, my arena was down the hill. I was still working with horses and I was teaching lessons and such, but I had to be pushed everywhere.

My mom finally got disgusted with that and she stuck my little brother in this portable electric chair that I had and sent him down the driveway to make sure he could do it without killing himself. And she said, you're getting in that. I was so pissed, but that changed my life, because all of a sudden I could get around. Then I got an outdoor, a heavier duty power wheelchair. And I was able to go to the barn myself. You know, we made the gates so that I could open them myself. I was able to go down the driveway. I still wasn't able to go on a lot of the trails that I went on, but it really opened up my life.

So, I really encourage people to get as much assistive technology as they can. Because it does, it changes your life.

I'm not wheelchair bound. This chair gives us, our adaptive equipment gives us our freedom. I really work to change that paradigm. So if people introduce me as somebody who's wheelchair bound, I correct them right away. Being in a power wheelchair allows me to, of course, access the ADA accessible trails. And there are a lot of trails that I can't, but there are so many more that I can do that I didn't expect to be able to.

Now, I'm a bird watcher and I'm a slow birder. I might be out for four or five hours and only go a half a mile or a mile, but for me, that's just being out outdoors. I just find places to sit and see what comes to me. I just notice. And I think doing the naturalist training really changed the way I am in nature. It made me much more observant, much more aware.

I used to want to go hike and go as far as I can, kind of as fast as I could. And that doesn't interest me now.

Syren:

Yeah, yeah, I love that.

I went to herbal school for two years and did a lot of, you know, studying herbs and plants and things like that. And also I will hike half a mile and spend all that time just nerding out on plants and seeing who we can see. That's how we do Disabled Hikers does our group hikes, it's a lot of nerd time in nature. It's pretty great.

Judy:

And I think, you know, birding really, lends itself to that nature. I'm not one of those birders that has my life list and I'm trying to add species to it all of the time; going as fast as I can to see as much as I can. I love introducing people to birding and to birding in a mindful way.

Syren:So how has, how have your experiences kind of changed over the past, 47 years? How do you think accessibility has improved? Has anything gotten worse? Has it kind of stayed the same?

Judy:

I think it's definitely improved. Really, definitely. Are there still things that need to be done? Yes.

You know, I travel some with Bonnie and she does trail assessments and has a wonderful website, Access California, accessca.org I’m kind of learning from her how to assess trails and how to report things that aren't accessible. But there are a lot of things that are still like really simple to fix barriers, but definitely it's improved and definitely there's more awareness.

But I'll tell you one of the things that I don't think has improved as much as I would hope or would have hoped is the number of people that are disabled in wheelchairs that I see out on the trails. So often I'm the only one out there. I get so many people that say, how great it is that you can get outdoors, how wonderful for you. And I always just say, yeah, how wonderful for you too.

But I just am still such a freak out there in nature because people aren't used to seeing, disabled hikers in a wheelchair going up the side of a hill, or being in some rather remote dirt trail. And that to me is, I get so excited when I see other disabled people out there.

So that's what I don't think has changed enough is the number of people who are disabled who know that it's an option to be outdoors, who have a passion for being outdoors because it changes your life. It affects you on, the physical, the spiritual, the emotional, the psychological level. There's a gazillion studies now that talk about the benefits of nature.

And I think people really found that out during COVID. All of a sudden, you know, going to the mall and going to the movie and going to concerts wasn't available. So what happened? People went out. A lot of people. And I see in general a lot more people, but I still don't see a lot more disabled people. And that's what I would really like to see change.

Syren:

Do you think that contributes to people's attitudes around disability? How do you think people's reactions and attitudes to you being disabled out on the trail has changed over the years?

Judy:

Well, I think disability, visibility, we know has a long way to go. Our culture in terms of media, in terms of the portrayals that we see on TV or the stories that we hear about, in podcasts and stuff, that has a lot of room for improvement.

But I think when people, and I think the same was true when I was dancing and with the dance company, is that when people see disabled people doing something that they don't expect us to be able to do or seeing us in places that they don't expect to see us, I think it can't help but even subconsciously open the mind a little bit and to get people thinking a little bit differently about disability and about ability.

One of the reasons that I started, that I was really excited to start organizing nature programs and accessible birding was because I would see all these things and I still see them, this hike or that naturalist talk or, this birding event, and they don't say anything about accessibility, or they don't say enough that, I feel like, okay, I can show up there comfortably.

So that was a real impetus to doing my own programming and, getting other people, like more experienced birders, involved as leaders so that I could also learn, and I think over the last four years -- I'm pretty active with Golden Gate Bird Alliance, which used to be Golden Gate Audubon, but one of the organizations that changed our name specifically to become more welcoming --

But anyway, I've gotten more involved in that and I have seen more field trips starting to talk about the language, more accessibility language, you know, describing the the terrain, describing the slope, describing the length, that kind of thing. I know that people in Golden Gate Bird Alliance are more used to seeing those of us with disabilities birding, because of the trips that I've been able to organize.

The more of us who are disabled, who have the ability to get outdoors and to access nature and to get involved in things like hiking groups and birding groups, and show up at events, the better it's going to be for all of us in the long run. But change is slow, and, disabled people have not traditionally been seen as, the users of the outdoors. It's the mountaineer, mountain biker, backpacker, long distance hiker, you know. So changing that idea about who is in nature is one of my passions.

Syren:

What's your vision for the next 50 years? What do you what would you really like to see change in terms of disability access, you know, and the outdoors?

Judy:

I would love to see the outdoors survive and to see nature survive. And right now, that's not a guarantee, especially under the regime that we're living under. My first hope is that nature can survive this period of time and that, you know, human beings will wake up en masse and decide to do something about climate change and the loss of biodiversity.

In terms of access, assistive technology has gotten so much better. We have track chairs, we have terrain hoppers, we have these other powered mobility devices that allow people to get out in nature. I hope those become more readily available.

And I hope that, here we're lucky to have urban parks and urban open spaces that you can get to by public transportation; a lot of them you can't, and we know transportation is a huge barrier for especially physically disabled people, and especially those who use wheelchairs.

So, seeing improvements in public transportation. I'd like to see more people being able to get the places that they want to go.

And I'd love to just know that in 50 years, every disabled person is going to know that it's an option for me to be outdoors. And “wow, the outdoors is really awesome. Oh, I feel so much better when I'm out here.” It's my happy place is being out in nature. I would like to know that every disabled person and every disabled kid is going to be able to partake in it.

Syren:I love that vision. I think it's so important. And I think too, as we're thinking about, yeah, how to really bring people together to, you know, en masse to really address these climate issues that we're experiencing. I think the disabled community has such a powerful role in that, and I think the more that we can help folks really get out there, and know that this is an option, and share our stories, I think we can really help move that.

So I really appreciate you for spending some time with me and sharing your story with the Disabled Hikers community and thank you for all your work over the years.

Judy:

Well, I really appreciate the work that you do too and we just, we need to keep pushing and we need to keep getting more people involved and being more visible, not that anomaly.

End Transcript