Dear Feet
by Lori Messenger
Anita Santasier, Lori Messenger, Sherene Ricci on the Bridge at Travelers’ Rest State Park
April 2026
Today I joined six others grappling with chronic illness and/or disability at Traveler’s Rest State Park to embark on an art project with Candace Garlock, who came to us through a residency with the Missoula arts nonprofit called Open Air. We will meet for three consecutive Mondays.
I recruited two friends: Anita, the brilliant, giant-hearted, sarcastic New Yorker who directed the University of Montana’s excellent PT school for a decade before retiring. She is older than me, and increasingly the tremors of Parkinson’s Disease affect her movement. And Sherene, another bright, open-hearted friend, a native Missoulian who lost her right leg to cancer and therefore wears the nickname “Lefty”. She is younger than me and one of the original founders of Missoula Adaptive Recreation & Sports (MARS), the nonprofit organization that is newly helping so many of us in the disabled community get outdoors and stay active.
So we move slowly through the cottonwoods that line the near shore of Lolo Creek, and out onto the slightly arched bridge that spans it – me in my wheelchair, Sherene on her crutches, and Anita walking slowly, with her new medicine pouch and fairly constant shake. In spite of these medical conditions – which all of us are learning slowly to understand and live with - we are today enjoying that we have decided to embark on this unusual journey together. What we have in common is that we all think of ourselves as athletes and not so much as artists, but we are here for an art project, a collaborative creation.
We have been told that we will be creating a woodblock print of some trees, and while there are a few pines here, the primary tree lining these banks of spring-swollen Lolo Creek are black cottonwoods. So we are especially studying them. We notice the hodgepodge nest of sticks and grasses in the crotch of one tree just above the bridge that houses a squirrel. We see large broken limbs on the ground and live ones reaching high into the warming spring sky with tiny, shiny yellow-green leaves just beginning to push out from stems.
We Know This Forest
The metaphoric forest that I traverse daily sometimes still feels like the Land of the Lost. Do you remember that show as a 1970s child? Well, I didn’t watch it very often, but it still triggered nightmares for me – those kids wandering that stone labyrinth where at any moment they could encounter a dinosaur clearly intent on killing them. The blocky Styrofoam “rocks” were so clearly fake, as were the predatory reptiles, but I had experienced enough “monsters” in my life already that I was plenty scared and could relate to the panic of those kids as they ran through tunnel after tunnel seeking safety.
Only now I can’t run. You know what they say about “low hanging fruit.” Hmmm… who is the monster likely to catch first?
Clearly my forest is not a peaceful one today. I think more of Dorothy’s dark woods on the route to Oz, where she and her scarecrow friend discover the cowardly lion, who hopes to loom scarier than he actually does. Or the even darker woods from Lord of the Rings… until those travelers discover the Ents, that is, those powerful ancient trees who walk about and whose personalities are fantastically non-human and alive.
It occurs to me that all those stories are adventures. Am I having an adventure? I have thought of my experience after getting smashed into by a speeding SUV as a journey, but never as an adventure. For some reason that word implies access to all the muscles and sinews in a fully able body, not my screwed together, post-shattered spine and inert legs.
But of course this is an adventure story. It would read that way to a 3rd grader, wouldn’t it? Especially if there was a forest to find one’s way through and companions alongside who also had to face their own fears and employ their own talents to meet the unexpected obstacles: the rivers or cliffs, the hornets or grizzlies, the poisonous poppies or, now, simply a tree root or stone too large for my wheelchair to pass.
So, while I mourn the loss of ability to clamber the scree and snowfields to reach the summits of the mighty mountains I love, friendships are actually flourishing. Since being injured I have gathered many of my previous communities back around me and added this beautiful new gaggle of disabled beings that I had not previously paid a lot of attention to. It turns out they are a pretty fun crowd. While they are as diverse as any population (actually the largest minority in the world), our experiences facing people’s pre-judgements and learning to navigate sidewalks and other spaces not yet built right for us give us some collective understandings and wicked-wise senses of humor.
It takes a lot of work to keep staring down the monsters and rolling forward. Sometimes I have to throw a few punches or raise my middle finger in order to get past. Prior to my injuries I could sometimes pretend I was an independent individual, but now I no longer can. While I need less help than most people who see me seem to assume I do, I still need a lot. But what if this motley crew of disabled humans could think of ourselves as fellow adventurers? None of us chose the terms of our medical situations, but we do get to select our companions, hone old and new skills, and maybe even nurture a superpower. There are necessary things we can teach the world about interdependence and resourcefulness, but we will have to stop feeling small and insignificant in order to do it.
I’d like a fierce fake dinosaur, a brainy scarecrow and a freaky kick-ass Ent by my side… along with Anita, Sherene, Kelsey, Mike, Robin and the rest of my rolling, crutching, shaking friends. Yes, certain trees in our familiar forests got uprooted by random storms, but gradually we make sense of our new landscapes and discover that we are still the heroes of our own fairytales.
Lori Messenger Bio
On a chilly but snowless January evening, 2023, I was smashed into by a speeding car while walking across a street in my town of Missoula, Montana. The impact catapulted my body 97 feet through the air. At 53-years-old I found myself suddenly paraplegic – paralyzed from the waist down. The grief has been steep, but I hold tightly to the bark boat of my changed life, paddling hard through the currents to stay upright. Periodically I capsize anyway, which teaches me rugged lessons about patience. From the hospital, I started writing Caring Bridge posts (which you can access here https://www.caringbridge.org/site/1ce22643-198c-322e-8704-fb95bc72651c) and gradually realized that I had the material for a memoir telling the story of trying to love this busted body.
Decades ago, I began explaining to people that I grew up in the Church of Aerobic Exercise. Mostly they did not understand that I was speaking pretty literally. I had a precociously physical childhood - raised rural in the 1970s and 80s by physical educator-farmer-outdoorsy parents. I backpacked into Colorado’s Rah Wah Wilderness the first time when I was 6. I ascended 14,000 foot Pikes Peak at 8. I was a high school distance runner and a collegiate Nordic skier. For my first career I was a wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and for my second career I was a high school English teacher.
I became an athlete because it was my birthright and I became a reader-writer-thinker by choice.
2026 finds me working towards a first full draft of a memoir that is forming as a triptych: the story of my body moving through the world before, during and after this injury. I combine my love of language with my love of movement to re-build a life I can want. Just as previously I refused to let people’s limited notions of being a woman keep me away from the wild lands of the intermountain west, now I refuse to let similar small mindedness about disability keep me away. None of this has ever been easy, but I have learned that bruises can heal.
Now I push to bring readers along as I learn to navigate my life from a wheelchair. Three ½ years post injury, I begin to discover that joy remains available to me – that I still possess memory, imagination and a body… and that when I speak, people listen in a new way.
Some Publications
Caring Bridge Blog Site. https://www.caringbridge.org/site/1ce22643-198c-322e-8704-fb95bc72651c January 2023-Present.
“Blazing a New Trail – The Difficult Journey.” Smokejumper Magazine. July 2024. https://smokejumpers.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Smokejumper_Issue_126_July_2024.pdf
“A Leap of Faith: 30 Years of Women Smokejumpers.” Montana Magazine. May/June 2013.
“Born Into the Church of Aerobic Exercise.” 2009. Blew, Mary Clearman, and Phil Druker, eds. Air: Essays by Idaho Writers. (Eastern Washington University Press).
“Milk.” 2006. In Bove, Jennifer, ed. A Mile In Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild. (Palo Alto, CA: Travelers’ Tales).
“Ignition.” 2005. Blew, and Druker, eds. Forged in Fire: Essays by Idaho Writers. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).
