Amelie smiled, as dogs tend to do when they sniff something fun in the air. Her human leaned over and checked Amelie’s harness. She twitched, yipped once. Her ears stood like furry antennas awaiting a signal.
“Go!”
Amelie went. Pete Anziano had no choice: He went, too. She bounded uphill, all legs and grins, a reminder that life’s joys can be as simple as taking your dog for a spin with the wheelchair.
Anziano cannot walk, but he sure can fly. A 42-year-old Decatur resident, Anziano recently hitched two dogs to a wheelchair and competed against others in a first for the metro area: dry-land mushing, or dog racing without snow. For more than two miles, the dogs pulled Anziano across a course at the Georgia International Horse Park in Conyers. He was one entrant in a field of six, the only guy in a wheelchair.
And when the victors came around, it was —
Well, that doesn’t matter; there is some disagreement as to who had the fastest time vs. who completed the course first. Let’s just say that Anziano proved a point.
“The idea is to remind (disabled) people to go out and do the things they enjoy doing,” said Anziano, who lost the use of his legs in a motorcycle accident a decade ago. “Go out there. Have fun!”
It's a message Anziano knows well. He's a peer mentor at the Shepherd Center, the Atlanta facility that specializes in spinal-cord and brain injuries, and he works with people who have lost the use of their legs. One of the best ways to teach people their lives are not over, he said, is to lead by example.
That brings us back to Amelie, a Belgian malinois. She, Anziano and a second dog, Meisje, are mushing partners. It’s a nascent sport, practiced by few. Some mushers hook their animals to wheeled sleds to keep them in shape during snow-free months. Others rely on dogs to pull small wagons, called sulkies. Occasionally, you’ll see that goofiest of man-mutt contrivances, a dog pulling a skateboarder.
But, until recently, no one imagined hooking a dog to a wheelchair.
Anziano got into it by accident. Six years ago, he was with his brother Nick, each with a greater Swiss mountain dog on a leash. Things were going just fine when Nick's son distracted Cashel, the dog whose leash Anziano held. Cashel began trotting to catch up with the kid. The dog was like a 130-pound tractor. Anziano's wheelchair picked up speed, bumping along. Hey, Anziano thought, this is kind of fun!
Then the dog broke out in a full gallop. Anziano decided that was all the fun he could take. He dropped the leash and glided to a stop.
When his heart rate slowed, he remembered that moment — the ground hurtling past, the wind whipping in his ears, that surge of adrenaline that he hadn’t felt since the accident. In that moment, he knew: This was something to share.
‘Discover new things’
Anziano is proof that life does not end when someone loses the use of limbs, said Ginger Martin, a supervisor at the Shepherd Center.
“(Shepherd patients) see people in wheelchairs who can live independently and have fun,” she said. “And maybe they can even discover new things.”
Like the joys of hitching a dog to a wheelchair? “Yes,” she said, “like Pete.”
Like Rodney Higgins. He’s 67, a retired budget officer who lives in Woodland, Calif. He cannot walk after contracting a disease that left his lower limbs paralyzed.
He and Sky, his 4-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, are regulars on the campus at the University of California at Davis, close to his home. They’ve been making several runs a week for two years on a specially designed wheelchair that features a third wheel.
“Obviously, life goes in a different direction” when someone loses mobility, Higgins said. “At first, you feel like your life has stopped.”
Instead, he said, it’s merely changed direction. And that’s a message he understands as well as Anziano.
Anziano, meantime, is waiting to see whether any Shepherd patients will join him on a jaunt through his Oakhurst neighborhood. A neighbor, also a paraplegic, recently introduced his dog to his wheelchair and is zipping under the community’s towering old hardwoods. Maybe it’s the start of a metro area dog/wheelchair society?
Anziano cannot say. If no one else decides to mush, that’s OK. He just wants people — all people — to know that life has the limits you put on it. The most crippling disability is the one you create.
“The purpose is to inspire people to do something,” he said. “There are plenty of people — able-bodied, too — just living their lives. There’s more to it than that.”
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