Deepening connection to Portland through Alternative Winter Breaks

Exploring maine: Considering ability and accessibility, on campus and beyond

This Monday morning, I drove 10 minutes from Bowdoin to Thomas Point Beach, armed with a late-season apple I picked at Rocky Ridge Orchard the weekend before. What better way to start the week than scampering down wide wooden stairs, flopping in sand so warm it feels like August, not October and watching the shadows of minnows darting over the ocean floor?
Two Mondays ago was the opening of a photo exhibit about the experiences of Bowdoin students with disabilities. Walking into a packed Lamarche Gallery and seeing my face on the wall was momentarily surreal. Living with what is called an “invisible disability” rarely puts me under the public eye. But living with any type of disability means a constant reevaluating of spaces and places: navigating accessibility.
Everyone moves through space with certain capabilities. I can run down the steps at Thomas Point Beach. I can flop in the sand with the delightful mix of confidence and carelessness that signifies comfort and ease. Some other people can run for exercise or take long plane rides without the relief of Tylenol, which are not options for me. Accessibility is wavelike and mutable; everyone’s specific abilities lead them to find different spaces and places easier or harder to navigate, and what we find accessible can and will change.
Before continuing I want to note that I am privileged to have insurance that covers not only routine doctor’s visits, but also the tens of thousands of dollars worth of medication I take each year. This dependence represents a sometimes forgotten way in which this election will impact so many lives. Trump’s misogyny, homophobia, racism, xenophobia and climate change denial are frightening, and his healthcare policies and extreme ableism represent another enormous potential harm to people with disabilities and chronic conditions. T-2 weeks to Election Day.
My current medication increases my quality of life, but it is also a powerful immunosuppressant, which leaves me vulnerable to the kinds of communicable diseases that flourish when we return from breaks. I am unable to travel through any regions with a possible threat of yellow fever, including 43 countries in South America and Africa. Accessibility can be local and global, personal and communal.
At Bowdoin, we should hold each other accountable for questions of accessibility on all levels. Will every space be accessible for every person? Likely not. Can we thoughtfully utilize places and change spaces to make them navigable to as many people as possible? Yes.
A few years ago, hiking Tumbledown over Fall Break would have been out of the question for me. Perched atop its peak, I saw swathes of red and umber, autumnal hills spilling down to Webb Lake. Tucked by the ascending path, Tumbledown Pond reflected blue sky and yellow trees in a splendor of complementary colors. The memory of scrambling up the rocky, leaf-sprinkled path is a dear reminder that mobility is not a given in my life—my own narrative of accessibility in my connection to places.
It’s easy to assign our own abilities to other people, to overlook that one person may need extra time to read and process work for a group project, while for another person the meeting location might pose a challenge. Having a broader conversation about ability at Bowdoin will also help us understand one another and give students with disabilities space to advocate for themselves and their stories.
But my story is not everyone’s story. Climbing Tumbledown or visiting Thomas Point are very different issues from climbing the stairs to the top floor of a College House. Basic accessibility should not be a privilege, but an individual right—one our community must push itself to reflect upon. As Bowdoin students, we can look out for one another and provide space for community and personal advocacy. We can open the conversation about accessibility and ability and, in doing so, engage more deeply with the personal needs people have for the spaces and places we share.

Exploring maine: Exploring activism in Brunswick and beyond: our places as political spaces

Our sense of place may be seen as inherently connected to our physical location, but at the same time, we are connected to innumerable places at any given moment, regardless of where we are. I usually write about my explorations of Maine’s beautiful coast—my search for connections in the pebbly serenity of my adopted home state. But over the past week and a half, I have been compelled to reevaluate my sense of place within the historical and present political context of physical and emotional safety in Brunswick.
A presidential election radically shifts our sense of place from the micro to the macro: we become not just Bowdoin students or New Yorkers but residents of the U.S. We become aware not just of the people within our communities but the people living in the remarkably different communities, from this small town on the Atlantic to across the country on the Pacific.
From coast to coast, the U.S. has not recently been a safe place for an incredible number of its residents. It has been some time since we have had a major political leader who normalizes vitriolic language and has built a campaign on the exclusion and hatred of groups of people, but racism—and classism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia, ableism and xenophobia—are American realities and have been American realities throughout national history. To overlook this history in the face of new political concerns is to overlook the generations of people who have been fighting and waiting and struggling.
Here in our Brunswick microcosm, within the first week following the election, I heard stories about aggressive harassment over Hillary Clinton bumper stickers, conflicts between students and town residents and schoolchildren yelling racial slurs out of school bus windows. But in the United States macrocosm, these instances are neither novel nor one-off.
During my three and a half years at Bowdoin, there have been explicit reports of racism, homophobia and sexism manifested through language and violence—not to mention the innumerable moments that go unreported and affect people of so many identities. There was a violent homophobic altercation on Maine Street and many cases of sexual violence, harassment and rape. Within the past year alone, three explicit acts of racial bias occurred on campus. Discrimination, marginalization and fear for personal safety are not new to this place, but neither is the fight and the struggle that many are beginning to participate in for the first time. Privilege—white privilege—is never so clear as when people begin to experience fear for the first time, without realizing that their neighbors, friends and classmates have been experiencing fear—and fighting against discrimination—for their entire lives.
This week, I’m not going to visit any beautiful Maine locations (although that respite is one that everyone should still take, and I could write pages upon pages about my fears and griefs regarding Trump’s environmental policies and the potential for literal destruction of this place I love so dearly). Instead, I’m planning to attend on-campus events about experiences of discrimination, go to Portland for community meetings and join students who are planning political actions. Those are a few of my own ways to understand how hometowns have become even less safe for so, so many people in the past week and to contextualize my sense of place within that reality.
Caught between the micro and the macro, the awful truths of the past and the terrifying realities of the present “place” takes on new, layered meanings. It holds the memories from which we should learn and possibilities towards which we should look forward. But it also carries the physical and emotional well-being of marginalized people across all identities. It carries the fears of people who are being told that places, from their home towns to the entire U.S., will no longer be open to them. As a white woman living with chronic illness, I am looking for ways in which I can continue to be a better ally, a better listener and a better fighter, for everyone experiencing marginalization who have always been fighting. For me, it’s not about making our country great again, but making our places safe—finally.

Exploring maine

Deepening connection to Portland through Alternative Winter Breaks

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Penelope Lusk

Columnist

November 4, 2016

Bowdoin brought me to Brunswick, to Little Dog, to Simpson’s Point and afternoons on the Quad. The streets of this small town became familiar and quotidian—the experiences that come with residence. But Bowdoin has also brought me to places much farther from the images in the college brochure. Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Myrtle Beach—away from Maine, but related to my time at Bowdoin nonetheless. Even my semester in Granada, Spain, feels inherently tied to my Bowdoin experience.

Despite having a campus you can walk across in about seven minutes, Bowdoin is a fluid, expanding space. College is tied to the people you meet and the places those people bring you. I’ve taken numerous friends on their first tours around New York City and encouraged classmates to go to the Maine beaches I went to as a child. Places and communities are tangled and those intertwining relationships stretch like tin-can telephones from childhood homes to Gelato Fiasco and the top of Mount Katahdin to all the places we will move after we graduate.

Some of these links mean more than others. Some places will always belong to someone you love. Others will carry the sour taste of a meal made awkward by a friend’s sexist grandpa. But a few of my most important Bowdoin journeys are unforgettable primarily because of what I learned through living, if only briefly, in a brand new place.

I went on Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trips my first and second years at Bowdoin. My first year I went to Atlanta, Georgia. and participated in a trip that focused on immigrant detention and the experiences of refugees in Atlanta. My second trip went to the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point, where I have spent time every year at Bowdoin. These trips were undoubtedly formative: not service trips in any typical definition of that term, but rather unique group experiences of learning from individuals and organizations about the issues they face and hopes they have for their own communities.

This past Sunday, 10 women gathered in the McKeen Center common room for the first meeting of the Alternative Winter Break (AWB) trip I am leading with my friend Harriet. Our trip, focused on Reproductive Justice, aims to engage many of the questions that my past ASB groups grappled with. Conversations surrounding privilege, injustice, community engagement, intersectionality and allyship lie at the core of most Alternative Break (AB) trips, regardless of topic or location.

So Harriet and I gathered our trip members together with trepidation and excitement and led them through a name game and discussion. We are clinging to the hope that we will be able to foster a thoughtful and engaged microcosmic community around our trip issue, a community that will be able to bring that thoughtfulness and engagement out of the McKeen Center and into places that are not on a typical holiday destination list. Typical holiday trips are usually with family or close friends—ABs are not, on the surface, about friendship (although friendships will hopefully be formed) but bring students from differing campus spheres into a shared space.

Unlike many of the ASB trips, the AWB participants live on campus and the trips stay in the Midcoast area. Our trip will be visiting the Portland Planned Parenthood, the Maine Trans*Net and the Maine ACLU, among other community partners. Harriet and I have a scripted seminar syllabus, a schedule for our trip and eight wonderful participants—now we’re hoping, through connection to people and connection to issues, to create a new connection to place among our group members.

I am excited for my experience of Portland to expand beyond Otto’s and the Old Port and to spend a week on this campus I know so well with only a few other people, focusing on rarely had conversations about sexual health and safety and access to reproductive care for people of all identities.

Bowdoin has connected me to multitudinous places. This winter, I look forward to the opportunity to reshape my connection to a few of these places—to remember to look a little deeper, and ask a few more questions and try to understand more thoughtfully and holistically the diversity of experiences walking on the streets around me in Midcoast Maine.

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