At 74, Gloria Karvonen has lost most of her sight and her right leg below the knee to diabetes. She’s used a wheelchair for six years, and other than going to medical appointments, she rarely leaves her apartment in White River Junction.
The highlight of her day often is watching — as much as her limited vision allows — Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.
Enter Carolyn Lorie and Hetty Thomae. Lorie runs a Medicare program for people “aging in place” called SASH, which is short for Support and Services at Home. Thomae is a volunteer at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon.
They’ve worked with Karvonen, a retired nursing home cook, for a couple of years. “She’s had a really hard life with some insurmountable obstacles, but she’s still as cheerful as can be,” Thomae said of the 74-year-old.
Karvonen recently expressed interest in getting out more. “What about a shopping trip?” she asked.
She wasn’t asking for much — an afternoon at the Upper Valley Plaza in West Lebanon — but it didn’t go as planned. (More on that shortly.) Thomae offered to accompany her, but they’d need a ride in a specially equipped vehicle to accommodate Karvonen and her wheelchair.
Lorie contacted Advance Transit, the free bus service that operates Monday through Friday in the Upper Valley. Along with its regular routes, Advance Transit has five smaller buses that pick up disabled folks at their homes and take them where they need to go.
Karvonen and her husband, Dave, who have been married for 53 years, live at Graystone Village, an affordable apartment complex for mostly seniors. Dave, 79, no longer drives and has health issues of his own.
The shopping trip was scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon in early November. It turned out to be a cold and rainy day, but Karvonen didn’t mind. “I hadn’t been shopping like this for years,” she told me. “I just wanted to do something a little different.”
Advance Transit picked up Karvonen and Thomae at Graystone Village, which is off Sykes Mountain Avenue, at 2 p.m. They started their shopping at JCPenney before stopping for lunch at Five Guys. Karvonen bought flannel pajamas for her sister-in-law’s birthday and treated herself to a new pair of earrings.
They had asked to be picked up outside Kohl’s at 4 p.m., but were aware that Advance Transit requires a 30-minute window, meaning the bus could arrive anytime between 3:45 p.m. and 4:15 p.m.
Checking out at Kohl’s took longer than expected and they didn’t reach the pick-up spot until 3:55 p.m. After waiting 20 minutes — and no bus in sight — Thomae called the Advance Transit office in Wilder on her cellphone. Sorry, she was told, the bus had come and gone. The worst part: “That was their last run of the day,” Thomae said.
Now stranded, Thomae called Lorie who also got on the phone to Advance Transit. Lorie explained the predicament to no avail. Darkness was settling in and a cold drizzle continued to fall. SASH employees aren’t supposed to transport clients in their own vehicles, but Lorie didn’t see any other way. With Thomae’s help, she hoped to lift Karvonen into her compact Kia.
No go. Thomae then called her husband, Irv, who drove to West Lebanon from their home in Norwich. “We were all very worried that Gloria would fall,” Lorie said. Between the three of them, they swung Karvonen into Irv Thomae’s Toyota Matrix.
“What was supposed to be Gloria’s first fun day out in years turned into a logistical nightmare,” Lorie said.
Thomae realizes that she goofed by not getting to the bus stop at the start of the 30-minute window. But could the unfortunate episode have been avoided by the bus driver simply calling or texting Thomae to indicate that he was waiting?
Advance Transit Executive Director Van Chesnut told me that bus drivers don’t carry contact information for even its disabled passengers. Drivers are instructed to wait five minutes, but no longer. They often have other disabled passengers to pick up or drop off, Chesnut said. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s the nature of public transportation,” he said.
“I’m not blaming Advance Transit,” Lorie told me. “Advance Transit is stretched so thin. They simply don’t have the capacity to serve everyone who needs it.”
“That’s very accurate,” Chesnut said.
By federal law, Advance Transit must offer ride services to people with disabilities who qualify for transportation help. But it’s another underfunded federal mandate. Advance Transit, which provides about 800 to 1,000 rides a month to people with disabilities, has been level-funded by the feds for the last decade, Chesnut said.
Lorie thought it was important — and I agreed — to bring attention to what folks such as Karvonen are up against in their daily lives. For instance, since Advance Transit doesn’t operate on weekends, Karvonen can’t attend Sunday church services.
So Lorie recently started carving out time in her schedule to ride with Karvonen — thank goodness for Advance Transit — to Friday morning Mass at St. Anthony Church in downtown White River Junction.
“Gloria’s story illustrates the few options that some older adults in the Upper Valley have for transportation and how much it contributes to their social isolation,” Lorie said.
In spite of the mix-up with the initial outing, Thomae is determined that Karvonen have more opportunities to shop, eat out and maybe even visit a museum.
“I’d like her to have a richer life,” she said.
Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.