Disability Life Hack: Adapting Drainage Pipe As Desert Ski Tracks for Sliding Above Hazards

During the two months I was unable to stand or walk while alone on my desert land, I had to cycle through a number of innovations to survive. Everything was all of the sudden out of reach. The facts of life require enough mobility to acquire inputs and manage outputs. Without help, when disabled even temporarily, you have to MacGueyver everything. My water supply was only about 10 feet away from my truck tiny home, though it felt like a mile away, and important items that were placed further out on the land, or left there when I could walk, it was as if they were on other continents. I’ve told the story of my injury before, basically a perfect storm of deadly heat and hard work resulted in the rupture of several blood vessels that led to massive internal bleeding that debilitated and seized up both of my legs. It could have been much worse and I got really lucky to gamble with not getting a medical evacuation. To avoid financial ruin, I chose to tough it out on my own and hope that I’d heal with rest. Though I was also experiencing extreme malnutrition so my whole body ached and I had almost no strength. I couldn’t do much other than lay flat, I had to push myself and use my limited arm strength to lift and drag myself inches at a time. I had to set up props to move my center of gravity across. I built a bridge from the tailgate of one truck to another and used a bamboo pole to slide and pull myself up and down with an inverted trash can as a safety net. There were many more horrors I could detail, however just trust me that it was grueling and gruesome. What’s relevant here for the purpose of introducing the innovation of my desert skis, is that I had just enough arm strength move myself like a spider with only one side of it’s legs working. I’d start by sitting on the ground, then place my palms flat behind me and me feet out in front of me, then shimmy around. Though both legs were cramped and locked in a bent position, unable to hold any weight. I had to lift my rigidly bent legs with my arms and scoot a few inches at a time. At first I used two flattened cardboard boxes so I could put one after the other and buffer myself from rusty nails, broken glass, biting/stinging insects, shards of metal, and many other hazards across the desert wasteland. It worked for a few quick missions at close range, however it wasn’t safe enough for longer ranges. I had plenty of time to think, so eventually after doing a mental inventory of every object I’d brought to the land, I somehow had the idea that I could use drainage pipes to make a cross-country ski-like implement. I had several 4 inch wide, 10 foot long plastic pipes and I realized that with 4 of them, I could sit on two of them like rails, then toss the other two several feet ahead, then push, drag, and slide myself along the rails to meet the other two pipes, then lift myself over onto the new rails in front, toss the ones now behind me ahead, and repeat the process. As long as I did it within the first hour of sunlight, I wouldn’t be scorched and could make round trips of several hundred feet without too much exhaustion. The last thing I’d want is to be further injured or completely draining of energy out in the desert and be unable to get back to the shade and shelter of camp before it temperatures hit between 110 and 120F. The system ended up being quite effective and I was able to acquire important items that were essential to making it through the whole two months until I could walk again. Getting back on my feet is a whole other story. Get full access to Tactical Ecology at tacticalecology.substack.com/subscribe

Disability Life Hack: Adapting Drainage Pipe As Desert Ski Tracks for Sliding Above Hazards | 3