LANGEVIN

U.S. Rep. James Langevin compares chairs with Jeanne Vivenzio, of Narragansett, during a visit to South Kingstown.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

SOUTH KINGSTOWN – The old people descended with gingerly steps from a specially designed bus to enter The Center, a sunlit retreat that has the look of a rambling beach house – stone foundation, weathered shingles, trim of forest green.

This was a harvest scene, a time-worn set piece of election season in Rhode Island – this time with a unique piece of casting. The lead player came to gather votes in his own custom vehicle – a motor chair that rolls on thick-tread tires behind his atrophied legs, electronic control box under his slack hand.

As with every entrance he makes on every political stage, Rep. James R. Langevin crossed this threshold with an infirmity in plain sight.

Seen through the eyes of the aged, however, the man in the wheelchair displayed an ability that other politicians can only imagine. For people just arriving in the jungles of illness and pain, Langevin is a guide of rare experience and skill.

“He has lived a life that I have not lived,” Mary Peno, 71, said of Democrat Langevin, who seeks a fourth term in the U.S. House of Representatives. “He is able to help us more because he knows what we are going through,” said Peno, a retired bus driver from South Kingstown.

During this day on the campaign trail, Langevin, 42, showed and described how his paralysis colors much in his political profile, from his selection of legislative projects to his dogged – some would say stubborn – methods of decision making.

The congressman’s high-tech wheelchair became a touchstone of his appearance before several dozen elderly constituents and during an interview that focused on how his physical condition affects his habits of mind, his emotional disposition and his politics.

As a general proposition, Langevin said his injury taught him the hard way about the virtues sung in a popular prayer. “I accept the things I cannot change,” he said, paraphrasing “The Serenity Prayer.” “I try to change the things I can, and I hope I have the wisdom to know the difference.”

The fancy wheelchair, Langevin said, is one of those tools “that changes the things you can change.” The chair can “walk” over sidewalk curbs, mount stairs, take him four-wheeling on the beach and elevate him so that he looks directly into the eyes of a standing interlocutor.

Langevin said that when he first tested the machine a few years ago, “I guess I didn’t realize how big a difference it would be, how nice it was being able to look at someone at eye level, as opposed to looking up at them.”

The realization could apply to a host of compensations Langevin has made since a handgun accident severed his spine when he was a Warwick police cadet in high school.

He discussed several instances that pertain to his profession and how he practices it.

Unlike the large majority of people who lack personal experience with such permanent bodily damage, Langevin has long since lost any squeamishness or sentimentality about his bodily limitations.

“A lot of your privacy and independence are stripped away,” Langevin said as he balanced part of a sandwich atop a largely crippled left hand. One useful consequence among all the bad ones, Langevin said, is that he can relate in a matter-of-fact way to people with comparable difficulties.

“I know what it’s like to need assistance to do basic things in the course of the day,” he said. Like a lot of old people, he said he knows what it’s like to depend on medicine to stay healthy and prolong life.

Langevin noted that he takes a drug every day to prevent one of the curses of spinal cord injury, urinary tract infections.

As one of his constituents observed the other day, “You have to feel pain to know pain.” Johnny O’Hara, 85, an elderly affairs activist and former mail carrier from Narragansett, clad in an argyle sweater and hiking boots against the October chill, said of Langevin: “He listens to us because he knows pain. That’s a big plus for him.”

Langevin meets often with recent victims of spinal cord injury for much the same reason that he got into politics as a young man. He was “overwhelmed,” he explained, by the goodness and helpfulness that other human beings – many of whom he and his family did not know – bestowed on him in his time of need. Langevin said he wanted to give the same gifts back to others.

Having entered politics and prospered, Langevin developed what he describes as an uncommonly methodical approach to career moves, selection of favorite issues and difficult votes on the floor of the House.

Whenever he enters a room, Langevin said, it is second nature for him to take stock of possible courses from one place to another – with a focus on the potential obstacles to somebody in a wheelchair.

Figuratively speaking, he tends to take the same sort of detailed inventory of the political course ahead. “I’m always conscious of the ‘if-then’ questions. ‘If this happens, then what do I do?’ ” Langevin said. “What’s the upside and what’s the downside?”

The habit can be time-consuming – a source of occasional frustration to allies and staff. It also promotes a doggedness, even obstinacy in pursuing a course once he has taken it.

The connection between his injury and some of his legislative initiatives is clear. Examples are health care in general and stem-cell research in particular, since that realm of exploration holds some promise for people with spinal cord injuries, among others.

“I hope in the future that I never need the stem cell,” said Mary Pena, the former bus driver, “but if I do, I know it might be his work that got it going,” she said of Langevin.

If Langevin’s personal affinity for sweeping health-care reform is evident, his power to effect such change is less so. For a junior congressman with no committee jurisdiction over medical issues, Langevin has devoted an unusual amount of energy to the production of his own legislation to create a health-care system that offers something approaching universal insurance coverage.

Langevin said he intends to renew the health-care initiative in the upcoming session because he promised his constituents that he would work on the issue.

After a session in the common room of The Center, Langevin rolled into the lunch room to work the tables quietly and, finally, took a central position to address the entire group of a few dozen.

Langevin paused, turned to face the crowd and issued a digital command on his control box. The chair’s front wheels rose and Langevin reared up high and back like a horseman astride a mechanical steed.

The maneuver never fails to induce wonderment. Langevin’s audience broke out in oohs and ahs, with a punctuating ripple of hand claps. He ordered another adjustment from the control box. The chair’s front axel eased into place atop the rear axel and evened the congressman’s stance.

Langevin looked at the seated citizens from a vantage point a head or two above them – instant campaign stump. He repeated some high points of his earlier speech and he asked the people for their votes.