Leaping back into life’s adventures

By Theresa Curry, Correspondent
Published: August 9, 2008

Wilmer “Terry” Terrell was an ironworker walking on beams 30 feet up when he fell. 
His neck and back shattered in dozens of places when he hit the ground.
The company eventually folded, but Terrell went on.
“At first, with all the drugs and surgeries, you don’t know much,” he said. By the next August, he was in school. “I tried to keep focusing on what to do next,” he said.
Paralyzed from his upper chest down, he knew construction work was not in his future. He knew his options were limited because as a Waynesboro youth he had dropped out of school after eighth grade.
By the next October, Terrell had finished rehabilitation, gotten his GED and was enrolled in college. He was headed for a business degree – first at Blue Ridge Community College and then at James Madison University – when he saw “Twelfth Night.”
“I have to say that changed my direction,” he said. The Shakespearean play, staged by the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, convinced him to go for a degree in English literature.
“It was just the beauty of the language,” he said. He graduated from James Madison in 1993, learned sign language and taught middle school at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind in Staunton until his most recent operation.
“Looking back, I’ve been able to do much more than if I’d never had the accident,” Terrell said. He owns a home, lives independently, travels and is active in the Waynesboro community. But one thing was missing.
As an athletic young man, Terrell played on an amateur soccer team when he wasn’t doing the grueling physical labor required by his job. Terrell missed competition, the outdoors and exercise.
Enter Leisure Experiences for Active People, a local group that provides the professional coaching, amazing devices and logistical support for people like Terrell to have high-energy outdoor adventures. At the helm is Amie Trinca, who has worked in the field of recreational therapy for 30 years, the first 23 at Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center with Augusta Medical Center taking the balance.
Trinca spent a good portion of her childhood in hospitals and wheelchairs, weakened by a crippling kidney disease.
“I have good health now,” she said, “but I remember watching everyone else run outside or swim. I know what it’s like to be left behind.”
Trinca said the world has changed for the better in the years she’s been working to reintroduce disabled people to active fun.
“There’s better technology, of course,” she said. “People also know more about disabilities and understand them better. In the past, sometimes people in wheelchairs or disabled by stroke or diseases kind of kept to themselves.”
Creating ways for people to function at their highest level has attracted some of the best technical minds, and new gadgets and adaptations have pulled people with disabilities into an exciting new era. Terrell skis in a kind of space-age device that skims like the wind over soft powder. The water ski has a similar design: it cradles the skier’s body as it bumps over the water.
Able-bodied professionals and volunteers provide low-tech, hands-on help. A child with muscles too weak to allow her to sit upright on a
jet ski is safely sandwiched between two counselors. A water skier is pulled in a line with several experienced skiers, all connected by a rod. As a group, they all rise from the water to plane on top. When that happens, parts of the rod disassemble and the helpers sink and drift away.
“I’ve been doing this so long, I know how to find people to help with just about anything,” says Trinca, 52.
Glen Smith, a Grottoes man hurt in a car crash 20 years ago, has had his share of adventures, both on his own and with LEAP. “Before the accident, I was always around here hunting and fishing,” he said. He’s resumed those outdoor sports, and added a couple of new ones courtesy of LEAP: scuba diving and water skiing.
Smith hunts deer and spring gobblers with the Wheelin’ Sportsmen, and fishes from a kayak with his friends.
“It’s like I tell people who have just become disabled,” Smith said. “Your life isn’t over. You can either try to make things work, or live like a hermit. There’s still a lot out there.”