Master of His Fate James Tobin (free e books to read online .txt) 📖

condition caused his family. It reminded her “that much of his gallant joking was merely a way of forcing himself to accept cheerfully what he could not help.”

For that reason, or simply because her husband wanted so much to take this trip, she said yes.

He found a comfortable houseboat to rent called Weona II, fifty-eight feet from bow to stern, with two decks and a motorboat for fishing. Carrying FDR, a small crew, a few friends, Missy LeHand, and Eleanor (who came along for just the first few days), the vessel sailed out of Miami in mid-February 1923, then turned southwest toward the Keys. Soon broad-winged herons and frigate birds were passing overhead. The sun washed over the passengers. The pace was slow and easy.

The deck of a boat presented FDR with entirely new problems in moving around. Two strong men could carry him aboard, but then he had to navigate Weona’s narrow passageways and steep staircases on his own. The passageways were too narrow for him to be carried. His wheelchair would be impractical.

But somehow he managed.

He discovered he could take the narrow stairs between decks just as he did at home seated on the stairs and hauling himself up and backward. He told Dr. Lovett that he maneuvered through narrow passageways “by reaching up to the deck beams above, this gave me enough balance and support to move the legs forward in walking.” (If he meant that he did that regularly, the claim is hard to credit, given the difficulty of standing with braces on a moving boat. Perhaps he managed it once as an experiment. He may have stretched the facts to impress Lovett.)

Of course the point of the trip was the warm ocean water. But how to get in and out? The deck was ten feet above the waves, and he couldn’t just jump in.

He studied the boat’s architecture and equipment, then rigged a solution. He described it later in a letter to Dr. Lovett:

On the top deck where we sat most of the time I had a section of the side rail cut out and hinged. The forward davit [a small crane for hoisting heavy objects] swung around to a position just off this opening. From this davit I suspended a plain board, like the board of a swing. I then sat on the deck, put my feet through the swing, pulled it under me. The davit was then swung out and I was lowered into the motor boat or, in going in swimming, into the water. It was perfectly simple once in the water to slide out of the swing and to get back into it.

It was an ingenious solution, and FDR was delighted with himself for thinking of it. But then a new obstacle arose, one that he might have anticipated. The waters around the Keys are home to up to a dozen species of sharks. Typically the sharks keep their distance from humans, but even so, Weona’s crew apparently advised the passengers not to spend as much time in the water as FDR had been planning.

With that, some people might have concluded that the whole trip was a waste. But FDR just turned his attention to things he could do while safely above the water’s surface.

On the deck of the Weona were low, comfortable rocking chairs without armrests. They were designed for lazy lounging on sunny afternoons, but FDR now saw them as devices to exercise his legs. At first he had to fight the temptation to rock the chair by the motions of his head and upper body. But with concentration and practice, he told Dr. Lovett, “within a few days I could rock back and forth by using only the knee and the lower leg and foot muscles.”

That was calm, quiet work, but he wanted adventure, too. Using his makeshift swing, he had himself lowered into the motorboat. Then he and his friends sped across the blue water for some deep-sea fishing. The big fish they were going after can be brought up only with heavy-duty tackle, and you have to be strapped into special chairs to haul up the heavy lines. When they reached a good place to drop their lines, FDR got himself ready. “At first I tied a strap round my chest and around the back of the revolving fishing chair,” he wrote. “This gave the necessary purchase. [He meant that the strap would hold him tight to the chair so that he could exert his strength on the fishing line.] After a little practice I … was able to hold heavy fish on a large rod without much difficulty.” He reeled in one big fish after another, some weighing forty pounds—not bad for a man who couldn’t walk. He must have felt a quiet thrill in discovering that he still could perform difficult feats of coordination and strength.

He was having a ball and getting plenty of exercise, if not quite the type he had planned. And he thought there was another good force at work. He wrote about it later to another man with polio. “I have … found for myself one interesting fact which I believe to be a real discovery,” he said, “and that is that my muscles have improved with greater rapidity when I could give them sunlight.” On his Florida cruise, he said, he had been “much in the open air under the direct rays of the sun with very few clothes on, and there is no doubt that the leg muscles responded more quickly at that time than when I am at home [and] more in the house.”

He didn’t tell Dr. Lovett about his sunlight theory. The orthopedist probably would have thought it was silly. But now sunlight, like water, was giving FDR another reason to hope for a breakthrough.

Later on, as medical scientists learned more, they would discredit the idea that sunlight could have any good effects on nerves and muscles damaged by polio.

But what science-minded doctors like Dr. Lovett sometimes