We Carry Kevan

1

POINT OF DEPARTURE

IT WAS LATE JUNE 2015, a lovely time of year in Fort Wayne, perfect for walking the streets of downtown and getting a last-minute lunch with friends. I was with a couple of young adventurers: Tyler and Drew. We’d run into each other at Fortezza (a coffee shop I call home) and decided orange chicken was in the cards. Over lunch, we shared our dreams and plans. They both had college graduation on the horizon, and the question of what would come next was foremost in each of their minds.

What’s next? It’s a contagious question, you know, and I was compelled to answer it.

For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to visit Europe. I recall sitting at my desk in eighth grade and daydreaming about it. My people, the Chandlers, came from England less than a hundred years ago, and our Christian heritage can be traced back to a Dublin flat in the late 1800s. I grew up in the shadows of literary giants from all over the United Kingdom and other artists from the surrounding lands. So much of who I am today comes from these familial and cultural roots, and my heart has always been drawn back to them. As Tyler and Drew shared their hopes for the future, something within me wandered, as it so often has, into the Old World. The feeling welled up, and I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Guys,” I said, “I’m thinking of going to Europe.”

That’s how it started. That’s how the thought was finally voiced. There was now, in a sense, no turning back. Whether the dream came to fruition or not, it was no longer safely tucked away inside my imagination. The dream was out in the real world, and I was suddenly accountable to it. This was a threshold, a line drawn in the sands of life, and crossing it meant nothing would ever be the same again.

Bolstered by the encouragement of Tyler and Drew, I sent a notice of intent to three friends: Andrew Peterson, Luke Thompson, and Tom Troyer.

To each of them I wrote the following: “I’ve always wanted to go to Europe, but it seems impossible with my wheelchair. So what if I had a team to take care of me and carry me where I can’t go on my own?”

I wrote to Andrew Peterson for his blessing. He’s an accomplished songwriter and novelist. He’s traveled the world and knows well the cost (more than financially) of such an endeavor. He also knows me. And I trust him. He was the litmus test. If Andrew thought I could pull it off, if he believed in the idea, it would fly.

I also knew if we were going to do something this crazy, we needed it to be documented. We needed proof. So I contacted Luke Thompson, filmmaker extraordinaire, a man with a keen eye and a good heart. Luke and I had collaborated on smaller projects before, and an opportunity to work together again was welcome.

Then there was Tom Troyer.

After college, I was living in North Carolina and had a group of friends who were truly free. We played music together, had simple jobs, and lived fully in community. Each week, typically Monday nights, we gathered for a potluck and jam session. Everyone brought food and instruments to share, and we took turns hosting at our houses.

Not many of the houses were wheelchair accessible, but it made no difference to us. We still met at all of them. Some were accessible with ramps, but others boasted incredible flights of stairs. Not a problem. Without a second thought, my friend Hayden (a bear of a man) would scoop me up and carry me inside, leaving my wheelchair outside or in the van.

As Hayden carried me, Tom Troyer would hurry ahead to move obstructing furniture or hold open a door. I’d be set on a couch or on the floor (I preferred the floor), and from there my friends brought the evening to me. Philip Keller gathered food for me or would be the first to come and visit. Tom and Philip shared an apartment with their wives, and two other guys (Luke Carson and Jackson Holt) shared a house just down the street from them. A handful of others came from surrounding neighborhoods and the UNC Greensboro campus nearby. Folks filled their plates and then joined me on the floor, and music came together in the same space. No one thought of these evenings as exceptional. This was our community, living together and loving one another in subtle choices.

One day around that time, Tom and I were driving together to a recording session in the mountains. We had a few hours in the car, and conversation turned to the topic of crazy things we wanted to do in life. The time I had spent with Hayden, Tom, and this group of friends had awakened in me an ever-growing desire not to be limited by my wheelchair. It had been the case growing up—my parents encouraged me to do plenty of things outside of my chair—but these guys took the concept to a new level. I began to realize the possibilities. So I mentioned to Tom that I’d like to spend a day or a weekend independent of my chair.

“What would you do?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure, because I hadn’t given it more thought than that.

Fortunately, he had something in mind. “If you’re going to be out of your chair, we should do something you couldn’t do in your chair.” His idea? Go urban spelunking. It’s like cave exploration, with ropes and hooks and headlamps… the whole deal. But instead of caves, we would trek through a sewer system. I wanted to have an adventure outside of my wheelchair, and Tom wanted to explore the Greensboro underground—and what’s more, he wanted to explore it with me. So we had a plan.

Jump ahead to a cool April night in 2014. We met at Luke and Jackson’s house. Tom put a steel backpack frame on the coffee table, and I was placed in it. As I lay there on my back, with my legs hanging off the table and my arms crossed over my chest like a dead man, the wrapping commenced. We had two ENO hammocks that formed a cocoon around me, securing me to the frame. I faced backward, opposite my carrier. This process was all done with the faithful aid of Philip, along with Luke and Jackson.

Once the makeshift pack was assembled, we set off into the night. I started on Tom’s back, and we found a door to the city’s plumbing at the bottom of a short flight of stairs. Unfortunately, it was locked from the inside, so Jackson entered through a nearby manhole and navigated his way to open our door. We broke into the underbelly of Greensboro like burglars. We found ourselves in a warm room, well-lit and full of black pipes. This is kind of odd, we thought, and a little disappointing. Not exactly a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles setup. And we certainly wouldn’t find Batman, Killer Croc, or Solomon Grundy in these parts, but we decided to go farther in and farther down. As we proceeded, the pipes crossed our path more frequently and inconveniently, until there was little room left to maneuver. The pristine lighting also abandoned us, plunging my friends and me into darkness.

Tom is a tall man, almost treelike. His thick, black beard and hair, along with a set of pronounced eyebrows, are his canopy, and long limbs swing loosely at his sides like branches blowing in the wind. Fitting into smaller spaces is a challenge for him already, but add me to his back and those close quarters were suddenly even tighter.

“We’re gonna have to take you down,” Tom said to me finally.

A thick pipe hung across our path like a fallen tree. So far we’d climbed over obstacles or crawled under them, but this space was simply too narrow. The guys would have to dismount me from Tom’s back and pass me over.

“Let’s do what we need to do,” I said.

On the other side of the pipe, we came to another open room. It was a wide, circular room, and I half expected guardians to step out of the shadows, surrounding us with dark eyes and raised swords. This room was fairly bright, a kind of oasis before returning to the shadowlands beyond.

Our limber scouts, Philip and Luke, went on ahead and returned with shaking heads. Pipes wove like vines in those halls, and even they couldn’t get through, let alone a man with a burden. With this news, we returned the way we came, back topside to find other routes. This wasn’t the only sewer in town, after all.

We found another sewer with a different kind of entrance. Philip stayed close to support Tom, who still carried me, as we eased our way down the muddy bank of a freezing creek. Thin branches whisked our faces and legs as Tom’s shoes sank into clay and slid on slick leaves. A splash announced our arrival in the creek, and we stared into the gaping maw of a pitch-black sewer world.

With a deep sigh from each of us, we headed inward. The first section was submerged, except for a ledge along the side, so we carefully edged our way into the cave. Tom stepped slowly yet with confidence, and I hung on his back, suspended over the water below. My feet dangled loose like bells from the steel frame, swinging back and forth with a whimsy the rest of me didn’t share. This is adventure, I told myself… danger, discomfort, chance. It is a strange paradox to want entirely to be where you are and at the same time not want it at all. This is what adventure looks like from the inside.

Eventually the ledge connected to a tunnel and everyone dropped to all fours. I was suddenly on my back, staring up at a concrete ceiling less than an inch from my face. I cringed with the prospects of what could happen—anything from serious rug burn to an all-out broken nose. I had never broken my nose before and didn’t plan to do it that night. Jackson crawled up behind us, reaching out to keep his hand like a veil between my nose and the rock.

This tunnel led to a small opening with a manhole overhead. Three tunnels branched off from there, but we decided to linger a moment. Looking up through the manhole, we realized exactly where we were. A street we’d driven on and walked down a hundred times! The revelation brought laughter among us, which led to shouting as we called up to the street and its unsuspecting passersby.

We made our way back to the creek and set off for one more sewer. We found another creek, this one deeper and colder, and it led us into a massive sewer entrance, much bigger than the last. This tunnel was tall enough that we all stood upright, though the ceiling was still uncomfortably close. We walked together side by side with room to spare. Water rose to the shins of my friends, and the darkness of the sludge made it impossible to know what we were slogging through. Phones and flashlights illuminated our path, along with the headlamp we’d brought for the carrier. Graffiti decorated the concave walls with signatures and warnings to turn back now, which we did not heed. How could we?

The passage curved to the right, and we followed it. Our voices, even as low as we kept them, echoed like an army down the watery hall and back. We walked beneath a highway, and the rush of cars rumbled like a distant thunderstorm. Drainage ran from holes in the walls, which added to the mix a subtle sound of moving water. And of course there was laughter. It’s one of my favorite things about these guys—the joy in the journey, which they embrace… children at play with the scope and strength of men.

An hour later we sat together at Jimmy John’s (the only thing open in the middle of the night). Sandwiches and sodas marked the celebration of our success. Shoes dried under the table as we reminisced. And I don’t remember who said it, but someone mentioned spiders, and I flashed a curious look.

Philip scratched an itch and pushed up his glasses. His sharp elbows jutted out as he prepared for another bite of sandwich, “Yeah,” he said. “In that last sewer, there were big wolf spiders all over the ceiling.”

“How did I miss this?” I cried, realizing how close I’d been to them.

For a moment I was rattled by this revelation, feeling vulnerable to such creatures and what they could’ve done to my defenseless body. Suddenly I even felt those devils creeping up my spine. A shiver shook them free, though, and I felt instead a profound sense of virility. I’d walked with my friends in the spiders’ lair, and we had emerged unscathed and better men than when we had entered. We were changed by survival, shaped by the going, and the world opened up that night to ask the same thing we did: What’s next?