A young man and his guitar.
Meet the Kiwi who backpacked around the world solo in a wheelchair with his guitar.
Eamon Wood decided he wanted to travel and to let go of everything he had going on... and be free.
His original plan had been to hitchhike the more than 250 kilometres from Miami, Florida to Key West.
But when he heard a tale of the legendary cycle trail that ran between them, he knew he was going to give it a shot.
Since setting off on his solo backpacking journey some four months beforehand, Eamon Wood had embraced his natural tendency to throw himself headlong into the great unknown and force himself to adapt. Born in Nelson, New Zealand, Wood has been in a wheelchair since the age of four-and-a-half, when a car accident left him with permanent damage to his lower spinal cord.
Now 28, he's spent a lifetime pushing himself to his physical and mental limits; representing New Zealand in wheelchair tennis and basketball, and becoming the first person in a chair to complete an apprenticeship in engineering, helping, as he says, to "deconstruct a few roadblocks for people using wheelchairs who want to become fabricators"
So, the trail through the Keys was a comparatively easy feat. Or so he thought when he set out.
"I love the sun, I love adventure and most of all I love to push myself physically," he says. "Not only because I know the wheelchair won't slow me down, but because exercise is the perfect antidepressant. The biggest high you will get is from pushing your body and mind past what you think it might be capable of. To get to a point where you have to talk to your body to keep it moving... I live for that feeling."
With zero planning, he pumped up his tyres, grabbed a coffee, and began pushing in what he hoped was the right direction. The first day was easy enough for a man of Wood's endurance: a 32km ride down "an endless backroad" in the baking sun followed by a night in a hostel to "tend to my sunburn with some aloe vera from the garden".
But on day two, things. got real. Setting out from Key Largo at 9am, he kept going until about 3pm, when he realised he'd veered off the main track. Despite hitchhiking being illegal in Florida, he managed to score a lift from a couple who showed him a few local hot spots before dropping him off at a beach they said he might be able to crash at for the night if he couldn't find anywhere else. The beach was pretty busy, however, so he decided to push on. And on. By nightfall he still hadn't found a place to stay: being Easter weekend and spring break every place he enquired at was booked out.
Setting a precedent for the rest of the trail, he kept rolling until the early hours of the morning, only stopping when exhaustion forced him to find a safe-looking spot to lay his head on his backpack. That night, he found himself pushing onward until 5am, chanting "I push for days and days" in fatigue-induced delirium, having been forced from one likely looking sleeping spot by a cluster of "beady-eyed spiders" and another by mysterious noises that left him fearful of who, or what might be lurking unseen in the bush. On day six, he completed the final stretch to Key West, arriving to find he'd become a minor celeb.
"People in stores and on the street would come up and say they saw me wheeling along the road. There was pretty much no one on this path down the Keys so I stuck out more than I usually would."
After finding a rooftop pool to cool off in, he met up with the guy whose houseboat he was couch surfing at for the night and headed to Mallory Square to hang with the "proper tourists".
"I watched the performers and looked out at the ocean and sunset and said thank you. Thank you for teaching me that I don't need much. That things will work out even if you have to sleep outside. That you can journey as long and as far as you like if you appreciate the journey."
Growing up, Wood didn't have much interest in travel until films such as Into the Wild got him thinking it might just help him find that sense of pure freedom that had eluded him thus far. At 22, he decided he'd hit the road before his 28th birthday, giving him time to complete his apprenticeship, work for a year and save up. Making good on his promise, he set out for the UK last December, aged 27. His aim: "To find out what's important in life to me without the distraction of routine".
"My main plan was to not have a plan and to just see where I ended up. I didn't really overthink it, I just did it."
Wood's spontaneous tour of the UK saw him head wherever the train system, or new friends, would take him. Getting by on his savings and the occasional bout of busking (he plays the guitar), he met people through staying at hostels and joining local basketball games whenever he could.
A highlight was discovering he could hire a car with hand controls. In characteristic easy-going fashion, he picked it up in Sandwich and headed north, planning to "get in and drive and see where I ended up". That somewhere turned out to be Iona: a tiny island off the southwest coast of Scotland. Having been told by an ex-girlfriend's father that it was a spiritual place many visited to find peace, he decided, spontaneously of course, to make it the destination of his own pilgrimage.
Wood got rid of most of his possessions in the US, deciding to travel with just a small day pack and his guitar.
Arriving on the ferry, he wheeled down what appeared to be the "more promising" of two roads, feeling, as only the sound of the ocean broke the silence, that he was as far from home as he could possibly get on Earth. Opting to sleep in a field over the hostel at the end of the road to save money, he got his first taste of that pure freedom he'd been craving.
"Looking out from the island, I felt like I had it all to myself... This is what I envision my dream of peace would look like. I just lay there looking up and out."
In late February, he moved on to the US, initially planning to buy a van to travel around in. When this proved harder than he'd expected, he decided to look for work on Workaway, a website which helps people find jobs in exchange for accommodation, and go wherever he found something. This had proved hard in the UK. "I had emailed so many places and, being in a chair without any references, I don't think people knew whether they would have to help me with everything. I just needed one person to say yes."
Fortunately one person did. A woman named Priscella offered him work painting car radiators in Locust Gap, Philadelphia - a village, he discovered after digging a path through the snow one evening and joining a St Patrick's Day celebration at the local fire station, where most residents had never met a foreigner before, never mind been overseas.
Wood spent the next seven months moving from Workaway job to Workaway job in the US and then Europe, embracing what he terms "the life of a true vagabond". He grew a beard and gave away most of his possessions, travelling with just a small day pack and his guitar. He was, he realised, closer than he ever had been to achieving his dream of leading a simple life in tune with nature.
Now back in Christchurch, he plans to work for about six months to a year before hitting the road again. He doesn't know where, if anywhere, he'll end up settling but it's a fair bet it'll be some remote outpost, probably without easy wheelchair access.
Writing on his blog from the US in June, he said he was waiting, as ever, for "the right moment to let go of everything and start the true life of a vagabond or go bush for a while. I picture myself in a bit of land on the west coast of the South Island, New Zealand completely in it. Like a man in the movies stranded on an island who has to let go of his modern world and learn to live off the land to survive... Why not strap myself to my chair and swing like Tarzan? I want to have the chance to approach life differently than in these 28 years so far." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gpgr2NmqxM
Eamon Wood is also on Facebook.
https://themighty.com/2017/07/traveling … isability/