UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2004

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Extended Family

Woman, Interrupted
A motorcycle crash handicapped Cale Kenney's body but not her spirit.

–Faye S. Wolfe




	Cale Kenney ’77

READERS MAY FIND IT DIFFICULT to give their unflinching attention to Cale Kenney’s memoir, Have Crutch, Will Travel. Just as in 1971 a driver’s careless swerve into the wrong lane changed Kenney’s carefree cruise through the blooming countryside north of Amherst into a passage through hell, the author drives the reader headlong into the very worst of her story.

There she is, page 19, a UMass Amherst freshman trying on a swimsuit that shows off her curvaceous figure, minutes before hopping on her friend’s motorcycle. Ten pages later, she’s in Mass. General Hospital “under the big tent,” a frame attached to her bed with a sheet draped over it that conceals but does not shield Kenney from the nightmare of successive amputations and a medical procedure called debridement. Her life was saved, but she lost one leg and part of her lower torso.

Kenney ’77 rewards the reader for enduring the trying tale of her ordeal. Once she tells you the worst, zoom, she’s on to the best—how, for instance, she became a champion ski racer. How she managed, despite seven flights of stairs between a friend’s flat and the street, to see the sights of Paris. (She left “Carolimb,” her prosthesis, parked in the courtyard closet, much to the concierge’s consternation.)

Kenney modestly explains her physical courage by saying, “Growing up, I was one of those kids who couldn’t stop moving. After the accident, I was miserable lying around.” Kenney is also someone to whom the life of the mind has always been important. She has been a journalist and from 1995 to 1997, published Howlings, a literary magazine. In 1995, she won an artist residency in playwriting to the Mark Tapor Forum in Los Angeles, and in 1998, she won a writing fellowship to the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony of the Arts. At press time, before its official release, the self-published Have Crutch, Will Travel had already sold several hundred copies. Another memoir is in the works.

Her intellectual side found its first real encouragement at UMass Amherst, she said. As a teenager who “hitchhiked and partied,” she recalled, “I was outside looking in: I wanted something engaging for my mind…instead, I was hanging out on the street corner. At UMass, I found intellectual stimulation, food for the spirit and the mind.” After the accident, “getting back to school was what drove me,” Kenney said, to take each hard-won step. And back on campus, “huge snow banks” aside, Kenney found a supportive, exciting environment: “I couldn’t have been in a better place.”

Evident in her writing and conversation is the astounding, irrepressible way Kenney goes after life. Her spunk, her openness to adventure, her quick wit all play a part. As does introspection. “Seeking adventure—there’s a high price for that,” Kenney notes. In her book she doesn’t shy away from describing moments when her courage failed her. Still, she manages an uncommon grace. For instance, in the chapter “Gimps on the Go,” Kenney recounts an experience on a peak in the Canadian Rockies. This “all-American girl” from Revere, Mass., has an epiphany. Without the agony of her accident, she sees, she would never have gotten to this mountaintop, or to a kind of personal apotheosis. And then, she skis back down and goes dancing.

Have Crutch, Will Travel is available on www.Amazon.com and autographed copies can be ordered through www.howlings.com

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