Trouble was, the rest of the first floor was occupied by upperclass women. “So I broke two barriers. Not only was I the first freshman in recent memory confined to a wheelchair, but I was also the first male to live in a women’s dorm!”

We approached the front door. The college had installed automatic openers for Alex, but he wanted me to see how hard it is to get through heavy doors without them. There would be many doors to push through on campus. “Try it without the door opener,” he said, “and you’ll see what I mean.”

I tried to push the door open using the footrests on the front of my wheelchair. But the door could be released only by pushing the bar in, and I couldn’t quite reach it. So I turned my chair around and tried it backward. After several tries, I finally leveraged the door open and squeezed through. Alex just grinned.

As we wheeled down the hall, he pointed to the door of the room where he had lived. The college had to replace the doorknob, which he couldn’t grasp, with a lever he could force down using his arm. People who have mobility in their hands and feet simply take these things for granted. In the bathroom down the hall, he demonstrated what he had to do to hoist himself into the shower and onto a small plastic chair he set in the corner.

“Since my hall mates were women, you should have seen how I got here. I had to strip naked and then streak down through the hallway in my wheelchair hoping no one entered at that moment.” He laughed as he said this, then paused. “Well, that’s not quite the story. I did put a towel over my lap.”

My arms were beginning to ache as we left Roadman and headed toward the nearby Olsen Student Center. As we started to cross Peters Avenue, a car driven by a woman talking on her cellphone sped through the crosswalk without stopping.

“Can you believe?” Alex shouted, flipping his wheelchair in reverse. “This happens all the time.”

At the ramp up the front side of the student center, he cautioned me not to run off the concrete and into the flower beds. “Once, during the winter when it was icy, I slid off into a snowbank,” he said. “I could have been buried alive for months!”