It’s a rough time in the world. For those of us for whom this is new, this recent rough time, we also get to realize what an incredible position of privilege we occupy given that it’s only now that we’re worried. In other countries, in other places around the world people worry all the time about what their governments will do.
But privilege or not, I’m not sleeping and having to work on my breathing. Sometimes I joke and say I am holding my breath until the real grown ups wake up and fix everything. (What everything? The climate, the future of human life on the planet, nuclear war, restrictions of rights and liberties, raising tides of racism and Islamophobia. You know.) And yes, I know. There are no real grown ups in charge. That’s terrifying. Deep breaths. I’m not sure I’m joking.
I’m not normally the kind of person to make statuses with the hashtag “blessed” and the idea of a gratitude journal has sometimes rubbed me the wrong way. But maybe these days lists of things that bring us joy are sometimes needed.
This week I’m on holiday with my daughter. I’m taking a break from work and we’re visiting with a friend in Victoria. I’m making more effort than usual to make sure I get to do some of my favourite things. Here’s some things that made me smile this week and for which I’m grateful.
Hiking with dogs and friends: That’s Audrey, friend and an occasional guest on the blog, her dogs (good and bad), me, and my daughter Mallory at Thetis Lake.
Image description: There are three women on beach, facing the camera, dressed for col weather hiking. One of them is holding a dog at waist height. There is a lake and trees in the background.
2. Visiting the tops of mountains
Image description: Sam at the Mount Douglas lookout, facing camera, wearing a rain coat, with messy hair from the hike up the hill.
3. Dipping my toes in the ocean
Image description: Sam in her red raincoat enjoying a grey day at Cadbo Beach, surrounded by driftwood.
4. Playing in playgrounds
Image description: Sam sitting atop a giant red octopus in a children’s playground.
5. Playing games–cards of many different kinds, Balderdash, Scrabble!
Image description: A young woman in her twenties, with shoulder length brown hair. wearing a red shirt and black jumper smiles at the camera while playing cribbage.Image description: A scrabble board near the end of the game. Someone (me!) played “Linchpin” over both triple words.
6. Spending time in the woods, in particular, this time, in Goldstream Park
Image description: A selfie featuring a mother being hugged from behind by her tall daughter in a leafy, mossy, green forest.Image description: Steps up into mossy forest.
How about you? What’s making you smile and keeping you going in hard times?
So before I started traveling around New Zealand, I knew I wanted to do many (possibly all) of NZ’s Great Walks. (There are 9 of them although one is a canoe/kayak trip not a walk.) This is a short blog post about tramping (hiking if you’re not a kiwi) the Abel Tasman Coast Track.
Why this one? First off, it’s gorgeous. Secondly, it’s easily accessible- water taxis will drop you off at various points and you can walk back, plus my bus picked me up from a campground 100 m from the end of the trail. Thirdly, last time I was there it was June and cold and wet and I wanted to see it in nicer weather. This time I was there in the summer which had much better weather!
So, I planned on it being a five-day trip. However, my watch didn’t realize it’s was a leap year and skipped Feb 29. So I woke up on my “planning day”, saw the date, panicked, packed in twenty minutes and rushed to the water taxi only to be told I was a day early. Oops. (I’d already separated from technology and turned my phone off for the week) Luckily the water taxi people let me go a day early so my five-day trip turned into a six-day trip.
To be honest, this was not one of my better planned trips. I had planned on a day to plan/pack before I left but instead packed in twenty minutes. Mostly this was fine, I’ve done enough tramping that I know what to pack pretty quickly/easily. And the Abel Tasman track is very accessible, water taxis are coming/going regularly from most of the beaches. And the track is clearly marked and I wasn’t walking huge distances. Where my quick packing was an issue was food.
Normally when tramping I carry a small backpacking stove (if anyone is buying one I love my MSR Whisperlite). And in fact, I brought mine with me. However, I didn’t bring a fuel bottle (airline travel restrictions) and they are almost as expensive as the stove itself (once you buy them the fuel is cheap though). Plus I didn’t have a pot, utensils, lighter, any of the usual cooking gear I have at home. So I had decided to not cook any food on this trip and to cook food in advance. However, when I “lost” my planning day, I simply shoved any food I had that didn’t need cooking into my pack: bread, a jar of peanut butter, OSM bars, carrots, chocolate, dates, nuts. Not bad food but I ended up eating some strange meals.
Over six days, I traveled around 80 km. The track itself is only about 60 km but I did one section twice plus detoured to a few lookouts and waterfalls. I carried all my own gear- tent, mattress, sleeping bag, food, clothes. The weather was gorgeous and I was able to swim everyday. I was surprised both at how many people I saw and how empty it was- water taxis come/go regularly to many of the beaches but once you leave the main beaches it gets empty fast. I was also surprised by the range of experiences of the people I met camping overnight in the park- some people had all the gear, were cooking fancy meals over their stoves, were clearly prepared. Others were traveling without proper gear- a guy with a hammock (with no covering) instead of a tent and hoping it wouldn’t rain, a girl carrying a bag of (uncooked) pasta but no stove, pot, dishes or even a fork to eat it with hoping someone would have pity on her. But again, this trail is clearly marked and if you get into too much trouble, you can just wait on a beach until a water taxi shows up.
The first 4 nights I tented in the designated campgrounds along the trail. I say campgrounds but all they had was a sign, drinking water and a toilet. Nothing else. I bought a tent here in NZ which I’ve fallen in love with, it will likely come home with me and join my collection. (It’s a Kathmandu Mono tent if anyone is interested). I brought a small sleeping bag and my mattress with me from home since I knew I’d be camping. Camping gear is one of the hardest parts about backpacking since anything I buy has to either get left behind or carried with me for the next six months. At home I have a growing collection of gear to choose from depending on the trip whereas here I really have to limit myself.
My last night I stayed at a floating backpackers, Aquapackers, in Anchorage. BBQ dinner and a night onboard the boat before my last day of hiking.
The weather was fantastic, the views were unparalleled, everybody I met was friendly. The trail was easy to follow, and relatively flat (for NZ which means it really wasn’t flat!).
Would I do this trip again? Absolutely! But first I’m already planning which of the other Great Walks I can do while I’m here in New Zealand.
Academics travel a lot to give talks, share our work, attend conferences, discuss our ideas. It’s part of what we do.
(Conference travel is written about in the campus humour novel, Small World, by British author David Lodge, though it’s set several decades ago. The Guardian book club discusses it here. Norms of behavior while traveling an academic have changed since then.)
I’ve written before about exercising on the road. (See, for example, Finding my inner Arnold in Peterborough.) Mostly though these have been individual solutions. But lately a new thing has been happening. In part, thanks to the blog, I think, and our growing community.
I love that my reputation for physical activity now precedes me. The first inkling something was changing was last fall when I was invited to keynote a conference, with short notice. Perhaps the result of the gendered conference campaign, I don’t know. I couldn’t do it but the organizer tried to make it more attractive with the offer of a bike ride. I wouldn’t even have to miss my long weekend ride. And I needn’t bring my own bike on the plane. I could borrow his wife’s road bike. Tempting. (Though I did wonder what his wife might think of the offer. What bike would she ride?) A beautiful part of the world where I’d never ridden before. But still, I couldn’t do it. Bike ride possibilities didn’t make the conflicts in my schedule go away.
Last week I was in San Diego for the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association and the conference bike ride idea finally worked out thanks to guest contributor Sharon Crasnow. See Guest Post-Cycling after 60. Sharon generously arranged me for to borrow her daughter’s road bike. I packed cycling clothes and my helmet. Off we went! We had a lovely bike ride around Fiesta Island.
Great spot for riding and racing. You can do loops, which I love. Ocean view and no snow! Just perfect. Also, flat!
Last month I was in the Los Angeles area giving a talk and I was happy to be taken on a hike on the beach the day of my talk. Later that weekend I got to go hiking in the hills and canyons of LA. I hadn’t thought of LA as a great hiking city. But I was wrong.
Sharing physical activity, hiking and biking, with fellow philosophers is terrific. We can talk while moving. I get to see a new part of the world. And I don’t feel like I need to sneak off on my own to exercise.
I’m organizing bike rides for friends attending the Canadian Philosophical Association conference in May also for philosophers coming to the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy conference in Waterloo in August.
I emerged from the woods, intending to follow a secluded laneway to the next trail, when I noticed a white van parked about 100m behind me on the laneway. There was a man in the driver’s seat. I paused imperceptibly, then walked in the opposite direction. As I trudged through the deep snow beside the lane, I could hear the van’s motor running behind me. The van was slowing driving closer. The hairs raised on the back of my neck. Without moving my head, I eyed my surroundings. There were no other hikers nearby, this time of day. After all, I liked to hike in solitude. There was plenty of open space if I needed to run, and I was about 800m away from some buildings that should have people in them. My heart started beating rapidly, and I stiffened as the van passed me. It drove on down the lane, around a bend to a parking lot out of sight. As soon as it disappeared, I ducked back into the woods, striding quickly in the opposite direction, down a steep incline towards the pond. I made sure I couldn’t be easily tracked if I were followed, and I only stopped when I was certain any danger was past.
As much as I enjoy hiking in the woods alone, there’s one aspect that makes me incredibly nervous: the fear of being assaulted. If I dwell on it too much, I start to get righteously pissed off that I’m a woman who has to worry about such things. But I do worry. The scenario above? It actually happened, just a few weeks ago. The man in the van was probably harmless, but when I’m alone in a semi-secluded area, every man is a possible threat.
I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse from a distant male relative, and I suffer from mild PTSD related to my experiences. In the past I’ve also had a couple of close calls that have kept me from walking alone for months. The first happened when I was a young teenager. I’d decided to walk in my suburban neighbourhood early one summer morning before dawn. An older man in his 50s passed me on a bicycle, then circled back, quietly catcalling to me. I immediately ran to the nearest house and pounded on the front door, waking the inhabitants and scaring the man off. Then, in my late 20s, I was walking alone by the university on a weekend morning, and a man exposed himself to me near the river.
A quick online search on the subject of running safety (the closest thing to hiking safety that I could find) turned up repeated admonitions never to run alone. This frustrates me to no end, because I don’t want to have to depend on someone else’s schedule to get my exercise. Besides which, I enjoy exploring the natural world at my own pace, stopping often to take photographs. In my experience, this doesn’t make me a great hiking partner. More importantly, I feel less free when I have to curtail my activities because of the implied vulnerability of my gender. This is not cool.
So I compromise. I may go alone, but I try to be as conscious as I can of any possible threats to my safety. I try not to be predictable. I vary my locations, as well as times and days of the week. I “check in” my location on Facebook when I arrive. (My mom once asked why I always identified my location on Facebook when I went for a hike. “Um, so you know where to start looking if I disappear, Mom.”) I watch for other hikers – or other people, period. I plan escape routes. I don’t listen to music while I hike. I stay aware of my surroundings – I’m alert to every twig cracking, every leaf rustling. And if I get a bad feeling about a secluded area before I enter it, I immediately turn around and go somewhere else.
I still make poor judgements, though. Like the time I went hiking alone at the Sifton Bog early one morning. I had never been there before, and didn’t know what to expect. There were signs posted in the parking lot, warning of a local thief who was repeatedly breaking into parked cars. That should have given me pause. The trail map showed long trails circling the bog, and a single trail going right in to its centre. I chose the latter, because I wanted to see the bog itself. The landscape was amazing; the boardwalk made me claustrophobic. At the end of the trail I quickly snapped a few pictures and then turned around to leave. I was startled by another woman walking towards me with a large dog.
“I didn’t know if this was a good idea,” she said. “I’ve never walked here alone here, this time of day.” I admitted that I’d felt uneasy, too. Our hushed, embarrassed laughter revealed our unspoken fears. I made a decision: I wouldn’t be taking that particular trail alone again. And maybe I should finally look into those Aikido classes that Sam is always recommending. This article suggests that learning even a basic martial arts fighting stance could deter a potential attacker:
“A woman’s immediate reaction is going to determine her fate…If I’m an attacker and I run towards a woman and she steps back and gets into a martial arts fighting stance I’m going to say ‘This woman is crazy or knows what she is doing and I’m going to find someone else to mess with.'”
I so want to be someone who an attacker wouldn’t dare mess with.
[Author update, July 2016: I started studying the martial art of aikido in early 2014, and am currently about half-way to achieving my black belt. I was also diagnosed with breast cancer in the summer of 2015, and both aikido and cancer have shifted my perspective on fear. Aikido taught me to “enter” when I’m being attacked, and cancer proved to me that I could fight. Martial arts may not be the answer for every survivor of abuse or trauma, but I would highly recommend aikido to anyone. MLG]
When Sam recently asked if I would write a guest post for this blog, my first response was, I don’t work out that much. Then Sam pointed out that I hike in the woods most weekends, and I realized that I’m probably more fit – and fit in non-traditionally female ways – than I give myself credit for.
Raised a city kid, I’ve been hooked on being out in nature since I was about eight or nine years old. I grew up in the suburbs, near a conservation area – my first elementary school backed onto it, as a matter of fact – and I loved regular class expeditions down the ravine and into the woods where we might see snakes, frogs and turtles, as well as Ontario’s provincial flower, the trillium.
One of my best friends lived right beside the ravine, and we would play for hours among the trees, making up stories, building makeshift forts out of dead branches, and concocting pretend meals out of tree leaves and wild plants.
When I was about 12, I had the chance to take a guided hike with a naturalist one weekend at a family camp-out. I was fascinated by the different species of trees and birds – many whose names I’d never heard of.
Fast forward about 17 years; I’d moved from my childhood home and was now living near a river. I’d just lost my brother to suicide, and I was devastated and suicidal myself in the aftermath of his passing.
That first summer after my brother died, I made a point of visiting the woods along the river every night after work, slowly pacing the winding footpaths and wading through the shallows to a small island in the middle of the river where I would sit and cool my feet in the rapids, away from the prying eyes of the world.
I saw herons and swallows, in addition to the ubiquitous mallards and Canada geese. I picked up smooth round stones along the riverbank, and occasionally found worn clamshells or driftwood that I took home with me to remind me of my hikes.
After a few months, I realized something miraculous was happening. The woods and the river seemed to be healing me. I didn’t know why or how – to this day I still don’t – but no matter how crazed or anxious I felt during the day, being in nature every evening calmed and restored me. I felt like I reconnected with my true self on every one of my hikes.
Fast forward another 17 years to the present day, and I still hike through the same woods of my childhood, or along the river paths of my young adulthood. I’ve learned the names of most of the trees and plants; if I’m lucky, I still see snakes and frogs. I know where the river bass spawn, and where the ducks nest. I know where there are wild apples, tart and hard.
As woo-woo as it sounds, the trees have become my familiar friends. I touch them when I pass; I notice where beavers have gnawed at their trunks. I know where to find a firefly show that would make you believe in fairies. I lie on the forest floor on perfect autumn Sundays every October, and weep at the fleeting cathedral canopy of red and gold overhead.
A couple of years ago I read about something called “forest bathing” on Mark Sisson’s Primal living blog, Mark’s Daily Apple. Suddenly, my miraculous forest healing had a name.
“Time in a wild setting, studies indicate, unleashes a powerful cascade of hormonal and cellular responses. Salivary cortisol, for example, dropped on average 13.4% when subjects simply looked at a forest setting for 20 minutes. Pulse rate, blood pressure and sympathetic nerve activity decreased as well. Even more remarkable is the significant – and lasting – impact on so called “natural killer” cells, powerful lymphocytes known to fight off infection and attack cancer growth. A longer three day trip in the forest with daily walks resulted in a 50% rise in NK activity as well as an increase in the number of NK cells! The forest exposure, researchers found, also resulted in increased anti-cancer protein expression.”
Are we hard-wired to respond positively to nature? I have no idea. But it works for me.
I love that my hiking gear needs are few: a sturdy pair of rubber boots (I like to go where there’s water, and I hate wet feet), and a sturdy pair of pants are all I need (I’ve been known to go off trail – shh! – and sweats or yoga pants can’t take the assault of grabby undergrowth or thorns). Layers on top, that peel on and off quickly, keep me warm or cool enough. I’m also usually never without a camera or few (including a waterproof point-and-shoot for rainy days or river wading), because I love photographing what I see.
I hike in nature because it’s the one place where I feel most like myself. I hike because it’s never boring. I hike because it gets me away from city life and my daily worries. I hike because I’m addicted to the smells and the sounds and the exquisite beauty I see everywhere. I hike because when I leave the woods, I feel better than when I entered. I feel, dare I say, like I’ve been home… and leave regenerated enough to bear the “real world” once again.
My fitness activities of choice are hiking, trail running, and just plain running. I don’t mind gym workouts – long before I became a philosopher I earned my living as a personal trainer and group exercise and dance instructor – but as a philosopher on the tenure track, I want my fitness activity to do double duty, which means mental rejuvenation is just as important as physical. This means I need a fair amount of solitary activity to offset my urban lifestyle.
Image description: left side of photograph is dominated by tall, striking, red rock cliffs. There is a small deciduous tree with bright green leaves in the lower left foreground. The dirt trail begins at the right lower corner and curves to the left, with a rocky rise on the right of the trail, and a few shrubs to the left of the trail, which is lower ground.
I just returned from a (car) camping and hiking vacation at Capitol Reef National Park in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. I kicked off each day with a baby hike (4-10 miles) of moderate elevation gain (800-2000 feet). This is not so different from my usual summer routine, where I hike several times a week, mostly in the Sandia Mountains just east of Albuquerque, which is home when I’m not in Washington, DC.
Whether I am hiking in the Sandias or at Capitol Reef National Park, invariably I get this question: are you hiking alone?
Usually I don’t hear the question the first time, since I’m lost in a reverie of philosophical thought, so I point to my ears, mention that I’m deaf, and ask them to repeat. The deafness reveal often freaks them out even more – that a deaf woman hikes alone is beyond their ken, I suppose.
Mind you, I’m pretty sensible about my hiking routine.
I always carry a daypack with the Ten Essentials and then some. This includes a first aid kit, cell phone, extra clothing, survival blanket, rope and small lightweight tarp for emergency shelter, signaling mirror, food, water and water purification tablets, compass, waterproof matches, lighter, newspaper squares, whistle, knife, flashlight, work gloves, toilet paper, USGS topo maps (since GPS isn’t always reliable and batteries die but paper doesn’t), sunscreen, bug repellent, collapsible trekking poles, philosophy reading material, pens, and paper to write on. Okay, so maybe I should have called this the 25+ Essentials!
I never hike without telling at least one person what trail I’ll be on, and I leave information about the trail, my time of departure and my ETA guesstimate on my car seat. I also pick hiking trails based on traffic. I hike less traveled trails on the weekends and major trails (the hiking equivalent of interstate highways) during the week.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of my adult life living on or near national forests or other public lands. I’ve taught first aid and CPR to Forest Service trail crews. I’ve logged scores of hours doing fieldwork of various kinds, am decent at identifying animal scat (especially bear, coyote, and mountain lion scat), tracking patterns, and I’m blessed with an extremely keen nose – I often smell large mammals before I see them. Weird, I know!
I’m as comfortable in the backcountry as I am in a library.
So why the incredulity about a disabled woman solo hiking?
Perhaps the identity of who inquires is a tip-off.
I’m usually questioned by women in small groups or male-female couples. Their first response is concern for my safety. Mind you, these aren’t what I’d call serious hikers – they’re usually hiking the first mile or two of the trail with nothing more than a bottle of water and a cell phone. (I like to think of this as the trail version of the Dunning-Kruger effect –- that is, the cognitive bias of those with little competence and lots of confidence, who lack the skill to see that they are incompetent, and thus overestimate their competence.)
I’ve yet to be questioned by a solo hiker. That said, in my experience the ratio of male to female solo hikers is about what you’d see at an APA division meeting, with the number of solo middle-aged seemingly non-disabled women hikers roughly equivalent to the proportion of tenured M & E women philosophers at an APA – in other words, pretty small!
Image description – shaded trail bisects photograph. Tall pine trees in background, lush green shrubbery on both sides of the trail, with dappled sunlight in the right corner and on the pine trees in the background.
Part of the problem here is that my take on safety probably differs from that of the concerned hikers. They are worried about (I think) rapes and muggings and bear attacks. I am not so worried about these things on the trail. In DC, well, that’s another matter… I am more worried about weather than wild animal attacks; I’m more worried about trail-inflicted injury than human-caused harm. Even these worries don’t dominate my thinking, but I do take care to notice signs of possible weather changes and to think through navigating tricky spots on the trail before I venture forth.
I’m well aware of the ethical issues related to solo hiking, and I’ve considered that disability adds a twist. (As I hike the trail this summer, I’ve been composing a paper in my head about this…)
In my case, the worry is about how sound impacts my safety. I mostly hike in rattlesnake country, and even though I am aware of the impact of elevation on rattlesnake habitat and how cold-blooded creatures respond to weather changes, I am still extra vigilant about scanning the trail and the surrounding brush for snakes. I step on logs, not over them. I hike when it is too hot for rattlers to venture out. In fact, scanning the ground for snakes is such a habit that I even do it while walking or running in Washington, DC, even though the chances of getting bit by a rattlesnake in this city are pretty slim. (Tempting as it may be, I refuse to impugn snakes by comparing them to another locally abundant population: politicians…)
Another worry is missing the environmental noises giving warning of danger – the sounds of a tree limb about to snap or a massive boulder tumbling down the hillside are sounds I will not hear. The chances of these happening are pretty small (I’ve been hiking all my life and have yet to experience either of these, though I do know Aron Ralston’s story). A more likely danger is human-related – mountain bike related, to be precise.
There’s a reason I don’t solo hike trails that permit mountain bike traffic. Mountain bikers have the right of way, and riders usually assume that hikers can hear them. In fact, the last time I was hiking with a companion on a trail shared with mountain bikers, my friend pushed me off the trail as he leapt to the opposite side of the trail in order to avoid a biker careening down the hillside. I think this would have been a mad scramble even if I had been hearing, but that I do not hear bikers calling out warning means that I have to pick my trails carefully.
I suppose yet another concern for deaf hikers is the use of sound to locate lost or injured hikers. I’m adamant about staying on the trail and have pretty sound trail craft skills, but I’m well aware that in unfamiliar territory, a missed blaze or cairn can lead one astray. This is why I carry trail marking tape (biodegradable) and a compass, and why I often miss verbal enquiries lobbed my way by other hikers as they pass me on the trail – I am looking for trail indicators and tracks (humans and non-human animals). I’m extremely diligent about making sure I’m on the trail – which means I probably do much more unnecessary backtracking than most. (And for the local trails I hike all of the time, this isn’t an issue, of course!) I also know the first rule of what one should do if one IS lost: stay put.
The cost of human and economic resources expended on search and rescue missions can be extremely high. Locating a deaf person who cannot hear searchers calling out makes a rescue more difficult. But most search and rescue efforts deal with unprepared and inexperienced (hearing) hikers. I think that my prudence, caution, and experience significantly cuts down my chances of being the focus of a search and rescue effort.
I could tell many stories about the clueless hikers I encounter!
Here’s a sampling from last week: on Sunday I encountered two teenagers on the trail (about 3 miles in) at noon, they carried only one water bottle to share between them, and then asked me (in a slot canyon under deep tree cover) why their cell phones didn’t work. The next day I ran into a mother-daughter duo half a mile in from the trailhead, who told me they planned to hike to the crest (nine miles roundtrip with 2500 feet elevation gain). The mid-50s mother was wearing flip flops and carrying a water bottle, her twenty-something daughter was slightly more prepared with a Camelback and sneakers. Later in the week I chatted with two young men planning to day hike a 26 mile loop trail that included traversing over the mountain crest in mid-afternoon — this during a flashflood warning. They had scant water, no rain gear (they looked at me with incredulity when I asked) and no emergency supplies…
There are those who claim that hiking alone is always irresponsible.
I’m not sure I buy this; for one, hiking alone on a frequently traveled trail seems to be in a different category than hiking alone in true wilderness. And there are those who argue that women should hike in pairs or groups for safety. Safety here seems to mean mostly human-related danger, I think. Hiking alone can be done responsibly, just as hiking in groups can be incredibly irresponsible.
The default (should that be deafault?) assumption that a deaf woman hiking alone is taking a foolish risk is worth questioning. It says more about the questioner’s fears and biases about what women with disabilities can and should do than the evidence of the reality of risk on the trail.
On this twenty-third anniversary of the (U.S.) Americans with Disabilities Act, it is easy to think about the removal of barriers to access that are physical, structural, and institutional. But there are attitudinal barriers as well, and after a lifetime of people telling me I cannot or should not do things because of my hearing loss (starting with my high school vocational rehabilitation counselor’s suggestion that I forego college for cosmetology school), I’ve become quite deliberate about questioning their assumptions.
Why assume that the risks of solo hiking are significantly greater for a deaf female hiker than for an able-bodied hearing dude? Shouldn’t the assessment be of the particular hiker’s capabilities — of which being able to hear is only one capability?
