‘Moving Violations’ Sends Reader Into World Of Wheelchairs
Even for someone who uses it as well as he does, language sometimes inconveniences John Hockenberry.
One moment he might speak of “running” in Central Park, then the next be more literal, explaining he “rolled” down Broadway to meet the reporter for an interview.
Yet to be coined is the verb that suitably accommodates this ABC News correspondent, who has spent half his life in a wheelchair - and seldom failed to get where he was going.
Certainly, he carries the reader along with him in his magnificent new memoir, entitled “Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence.” It is a book about obstacles, some all too obvious and some you’ve never thought about. It is also a book about resourcefulness.
“It works. I actually am pleased with the book,” says Hockenberry, 39, a husky fellow with a bit of mischief about him and blue eyes that manage to be both penetrating and dreamy.
Written by a man who is not only a reporter, but also a thinker and a feeler, “Moving Violations” is a zany, brash, outraged and transforming account of a most extraordinary regular guy.
If the book has any single message, it’s this: Get beyond your preconceptions, particularly where paraplegia is concerned.
“The nature of this experience is anything but ‘lost the use of your legs,’ ” he says. “It’s so much more complicated and interesting than that.”
Hockenberry, who in February 1976 happened to be a college kid riding in a car that happened to crash through a guard rail and hurtle down a hill, compels the reader to question the discomfort that wells up in the company of “the disabled” - and the attendant guilt at being “able-bodied.”
These are bogus labels to Hockenberry, who began his journalism career in Eugene, Ore., serving as a National Public Radio correspondent for months before they ever learned back at headquarters in Washington, D.C., that his voice belonged to a man in a wheelchair.
Now, everyone knows. In 1992, Hockenberry came to television and ABC News (an Emmy-winning correspondent for the canceled “Day One,” he is awaiting his next assignment).
He has covered such trouble spots as Afghanistan and Somalia, where he worked with, and in time fell in love with, ABC News producer Alison Craiglow, whom he will marry this fall.
Meanwhile, he allows, he has mellowed a bit. There seems less that he must prove, and less reason to do so.
Hockenberry rejects the notion of “a finite integer called ‘human life,’ such that if anything happens to you - you get in an accident, or the IRS audits you, or you lose your job - then your life is subtracted from by that amount.
“What happened to me subtracted some things, but added so many others,” he says. “I don’t wish the accident hadn’t happened. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“If somebody came in here and said, ‘Hey, you can walk tomorrow,’ I would probably respond by saying, ‘I really don’t have time. I mean, I’m really too busy.’ “