By the time he reached Stony Plain, Alberta, Ramesh Ferris had handcycled over 800 miles, braving snow, sleet, exhaustion, trucks that almost grazed his body, and a nasty headwind that seemed determined to stop him.
Even before this adventure, he had lived through the unthinkable: paralysis in both legs, a nearly foiled international adoption, and three reconstructive surgeries.
But this day was especially hard. Soldiering up two steep hills, his body begged for an easy coast back down. But the wind was so vicious that the downhills required even more effort than climbing up.
Nearing the summit of the third hill, Ramesh’s shoulders, biceps, and triceps burned. He told himself this must be the last hill. After this, he would glide along the plains and his arms could relax. He gritted his teeth and pushed onwards.
It was only once he reached the top of the hill that he exhaled and looked towards the horizon.
Six more hills towered ahead.
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Ramesh was born in 1979, the year smallpox was eradicated. It’s the first and only disease humans have completely defeated, permanently reducing infections to zero.
Public health experts hoped polio might be next. American virologist Jonas Salk had developed a brilliantly effective vaccine for the disease 25 years prior. Soon after, a medical researcher named Albert Sabin had discovered an easy-to-administer oral version. All a child needed for protection against potential paralysis and death was two drops.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a polio survivor, ignited a movement to eliminate the disease in the US. By 1979, American children could finally live without fear of an invisible enemy that would regularly shutter churches, theaters, and parks.
But kids elsewhere in the world were not so lucky. At the time Ramesh was born in a poor neighborhood in the riverside city of Coimbatore in south India, the country was the global epicenter of polio. Researchers estimate there were around 200,000 cases a year.
Most polio cases are asymptomatic, but about 1 in 200 paralyze their victims. Although paralysis is rare, tens of thousands of Indian children lost the use of their limbs despite the fact that a vaccine had existed for decades.
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Ramesh was one of them.
The firstborn child, his name evoked the Hindu god Vishnu, signifying prosperity and divine protection. But tragedy soon struck the bright-eyed baby. Around six months old, as he was starting to babble, Ramesh fell ill. Months later, while other toddlers took their first steps, Ramesh couldn’t stand up. His legs didn’t work.
Ramesh’s mother tried her best to help her son onto his feet. But it was in vain. She hadn’t known about the polio vaccine, and the disease had ravaged his tiny body, disabling him forever.
She didn’t know where Ramesh had contracted polio, which often spreads through water contaminated with fecal matter. But she did know she couldn’t provide a good life for her son. Heartbroken, she dropped him off at an orphanage called Families for Children, where the staff carried Ramesh from room to room as other kids scampered ahead.
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When Ramesh was two, a Canadian couple, Anglican bishop Ron Ferris and his wife Jan, decided to adopt him. But devastating news soon arrived from the Canadian government. Due to his disability, little Ramesh was deemed too much of a burden on the country’s social services. He was denied entry.
The Ferrises refused to give up. Finally, a special ministerial order granted them permission to bring Ramesh to Canada. “That was all through sheer determination,” Ramesh reflected.
His adopted father greeted him with a long-awaited kiss at the Edmonton airport.
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It was in Whitehorse, a Canadian town so far north that the aurora borealis often glows above, that Ramesh learned to walk. After three reconstructive surgeries and physical therapy, he could slowly move with braces and a walker. His adopted parents encouraged him as he walked for the first time, inching from the end of the driveway to a nearby fire hydrant. It took 45 arduous minutes.
But eventually, Ramesh was racing. Even though neither leg could support any weight and his shorter right leg dragged behind his longer left, he charged along the snowy streets, a grin lighting up his face as he swung on his supports. He played ice hockey using his crutch as a stick.
At school, some kids called him names and kicked his crutches out from under him. When people told his friends, you look just like your mom! he felt a pang of jealousy. He might never know what his parents even looked like.
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Upon graduating college, Ramesh’s adopted father presented him with his notarized adoption papers. It was the first time Ramesh had held the document, the first time he saw his birth mother’s name: Lakshmi. He couldn’t pull his eyes away.
“It was the first time I saw a piece of my culture, a piece of my history,” Ramesh told me. “I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I just said to myself, I’m going to meet her.”
At 22, Ramesh stepped foot in India for the first time since he was adopted two decades prior.
Soon enough, she was there in front of him. His mother. Lakshmi. Her hair, now streaked with white, shone against a pink sari. She wept as she held Ramesh. They were so alike, he thought. The nose. The smile. The height. Features he had never seen anywhere but in the mirror.
Looking Lakshmi in the eye, he thanked her for giving him up for adoption. “Your selfless decision allowed me to walk,” he said. “It allowed me to live.”
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Ramesh’s days in Coimbatore were full of joy. Time with his birth mother, whose laugh echoed his own. A visit to the orphanage, where staff members cried as they reminisced about carrying him through the compound. But then, he saw something that horrified him.
It was a man, his legs stick-thin and wasted by polio, crawling along the street over dirt, spit, urine, and litter. Hunched over, the man inched forward using slivers of a tire to cushion his knees and ragged sandals under his hands, looking for scraps to eat. A family dining at a nearby picnic table ignored him.
“What am I looking at?” Ramesh asked his translator.
The response hit Ramesh like a ton of bricks: “You’re looking at your life if you weren’t adopted.”
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Back in Canada, Ramesh couldn’t stop thinking about his trip. His joy and gratitude were tempered by the memory of the crawling polio survivor.
“I don’t believe that any person in our world, a fellow human being, should be living a life doomed to dirt and crawling on the streets,” he said.
Even more confounding was the fact that two drops of the polio vaccine could have saved that man – and the thousands of others who live paralyzed by the disease.
“That’s when I vowed to do everything I possibly could to make sure that the polio virus didn’t claim any more victims,” Ramesh said.
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The name came to him in a dream, around three o’clock in the morning. In the dark, Ramesh jotted it down before fading into sleep again.
Cycle to Walk.
The idea was audacious: handcycling 4,440 miles along the Trans-Canada highway to campaign for polio eradication. There would be bad weather, physical exhaustion, and the chance of accidents. But Ramesh had overcome challenges before.
“I just felt like I could do it,” he said. “I saw it, I believed it, I felt it.”
He trained and organized for three years with support from Rotary International, whose volunteers work towards eradicating polio. Most coaches didn’t understand a polio survivor’s specific needs, so Ramesh trained himself for the immense physical feat ahead.
Finally, the day arrived. Helmet buckled, Lycra on. Ramesh was ready to begin.
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The journey started at the end of his adopted parents’ driveway in Whitehorse, where Ramesh had taken his first steps in a metallic tangle of braces and walkers. He handcycled to the fire hydrant down the road – the short distance that had once taken him 45 minutes to struggle along. His community cheered.
Then Ramesh flew west to Victoria, where the Trans-Canada highway began. He started handcycling, not fully knowing what awaited him.
As he cycled over the Rockies, along Lake Superior’s shores, and through Saskatchewan’s prairies, he battled the strongest eastern headwind in decades. A distance he estimated would take six hours ended up taking nine or ten. A tropical storm battered him. Trucks were constantly flying past; he could hear the hissing of their brakes.
To keep himself going, Ramesh listened to one song on repeat: Man in Motion, from the movie St. Elmo’s Fire. The lyrics drove him forward.
Gonna be your man in motion / all I need’s this pair of wheels
I can make it, I know I can / You broke the boy in me but you won’t break the man
“Like with ending polio, failure is not an option,” he told himself.
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His soundtrack accompanied the conversations he had along his route, including hundreds of visits at schools, churches, Rotary clubs, and government offices.
Sitting on classroom floors amongst building blocks and colored pencils, elementary schoolers blurted out a slew of questions.
If a knife cut your legs, would you bleed? (The answer: yes.)
Are your legs ticklish? (Also yes – extremely ticklish, to the point it requires extra efforts to take measurements for casts and braces.)
“They’ve never seen legs like mine,” said Ramesh. “So they were asking these questions that some people would think are outlandish, but really, they’re quite normal for a disease that’s out of sight, out of mind.”
In Valemount, British Columbia, an older couple volunteered to host Ramesh. As he prepared to leave in the morning, he noticed their adult daughter crying in the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I didn’t get any of my kids vaccinated,” she confided. “And ever since I’ve met you and heard your story and seen your legs, I’m questioning why I was so stupid. I’m going to encourage them to get vaccinated.”
Ramesh even met with Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister at the time, guiding his handcycle into the wood paneled office. Two months later, the Canadian government committed millions of additional dollars to combat polio in Afghanistan, one of two countries where wild poliovirus is still endemic. Many advocates deserve credit for this victory, but Ramesh likes to think he played a small part.
By the end of his journey, he himself had raised around $318,000 to fight the disease that had disabled him. But as he reached the Atlantic after six months on the road, the cheering crowds felt dissonant.
Yes, he had successfully handcycled across the continent, but others in his position were still crawling on the streets.
“It really felt like my end was just the beginning,” said Ramesh. “I knew that I wasn’t done.”
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As a human race, we are 99% of the way to polio eradication.
But we risk undoing all our efforts. The US, the UK, and Germany have slashed funding for global vaccinations. Pledges to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative declined by 30% this year. As international travel booms, unvaccinated children across the world, including in the US, are at constant risk of infection.
“Polio truly is a plane ride away,” said Ramesh, who continues to be a tireless advocate for vaccination.
When he speaks about polio, Ramesh always wears shorts – even if it’s freezing. He wants people to look at his legs, thin and debilitated. He wants them to see the consequences of apathy.
“We all have a part to play in a polio free world,” he says. “My body is my message.”
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This is my favourite one yet!! I really really loved reading this, what an inspiration