From a few blocks away, it’s like approaching a parade route — loud but distant. Somebody has set up a boombox and a microphone, and there is some memorably bad karaoke happening. There’s a coming-to-meeting feeling in the air.

On this early evening, we wheelers — many with helpers pushing — are emerging from doorways, crossing streets, lining sidewalks. Our meanderings seem random, then acquire purpose as we move away from the bright-hot streets into the cool shadows of a seven-tier parking garage. A single small elevator transports us — only two at a time — to the rooftop, and traffic backs up impossibly. Then we suddenly see there’s no need to wait — parking garages are the supreme wheelchair ramps.

The power wheelers are liberated in their promised land, seven floors of smooth, sloping speedway. The paras seize the opportunity — rare in our world — to climb seven stories self-propelled. Two sip-and-puff wheelers race each other to the top of the known world. Jubilant whoops ricochet off concrete walls as they arrive on the roof level. It’s Craig Hospital’s annual Fourth of July party, and it’s just warming up.

What are we celebrating here? For the newly injured, it’s a poignant question. They’ve only recently survived car wrecks, shootings and dives into murky waters, and you can see the anxiety in their faces and body language. They already know they can’t walk, and they know that not walking is only the tip of the spinal cord injury iceberg. They’re now discovering the physical variables (breathing, bladder, bowel, spasticity, pain) and anticipating the social ones (work, sex, child rearing, discrimination). Rehab has given them a month or so to disregard a harsh economic fact — that they’ve just joined the poorest minority in America — but it’s hard to ignore the obvious. Where will the money come from, now and forever? Who will help them, now and forever? When will a cure come?

With all their bad luck hanging out — fresh surgical scars, shaved heads, skinny legs, pressure hose, legbags — they’re here to celebrate the unthinkable.

On Top of the World

For some — not just the teenagers — the party atmosphere holds all the uncertainties of a second adolescence. There’s a lot of acting out going on. The youngest hone their supercrip behavior, so speedy you want to jam a broomstick in their hyperactive spokes. Paras show off to quads, quads show off to higher quads, and all demonstrate their I’m-a-whole-person wellness. This is not just bravado; after a few weeks of rehab, some can see that life goes on and that it’s not all bad.

Disability happens to entire families. They’re here too, and just as afraid as their wounded daughters and sons and mothers and fathers and wives and husbands, just as reluctant to embrace a minority with so little panache. But they get the message: Attending a party with 100 wheeled people is surreal but empowering. It’s a strange comfort to learn that disability has visited so many other families, that so many others have felt so vulnerable and so tentative. They learn not to flinch when their kids describe themselves as crips or gimps, to see the pride, not the perversity. They learn, especially from the toddlers clambering on wheelchairs, that disability is not inherently scary.

The party is liquor-free. Craig banned the stuff a few years back in a fit of responsible behavior. You can’t even smoke now. It’s a running joke — the good news is that you’re paralyzed, and the bad news is that you have to quit smoking and drinking. It’s cranberry juice and Gatorade for the duration.

Good Times Roll

The wheels rule: swift, silent power chairs and sleek minimalist sports chairs; vent-quads with enough tubing hanging off their chairs to suck a septic tank dry. There are kids in strollers, old people and young people face-up and face-down on gurneys. We didn’t come to the show; we are the show.

Nobody here can avoid seeing how widely varied are we humans. A casual observer might describe the scene as Fellini-esque, but it’s not all bedlam, just diversity with the volume turned up. High quads get reclined. Vent-quads get suctioned. Legbags get emptied. Ventilators hiss. Those with head injuries — and maybe broken necks as well — do whatever is necessary to communicate. I feel an unworthy impulse to define my own place in the spectrum, but it’s patently absurd. I’m just included.

Sam Andrews, a recreational therapist, is leading the karaoke group. Some of the singers can’t hold a microphone without help, but there’s a palpable whiff of empowerment as their amplified voices roll off the rooftop. When the fireworks start — not our own, but the surrounding public displays — the singers keep on singing. The non-singers emit oohs and squeals as soundless explosions light up our playground and ghetto in the sky.

Most of Craig’s on-duty staff is here. Until a few minutes ago, they were changing catheters and doing bowel programs for the celebrants, and they pushed half of us up the ramp. No matter, they’re in party mode tonight, and nobody cares who does what for whom. Good times can arise from terrible intimacies.

The Old Guard

Some of us here have been coming to Craig since before it moved from an old wooden firetrap in Denver to its present location in Englewood, Colo. We’re wallowing in nostalgia, even patriotism. Why not? However slow our country has been to cough up equal opportunity, we’re grateful it’s given us some. We’re grateful that medicine has kept us alive. In spite of all the outrage and the tribulation, all the advocacy that shouldn’t have been necessary, we’re grateful to be here.

We gather in knots and remember how it used to be. Five years ago, there would have been booze and the occasional hint of pot smoke. Fifteen years ago, both would have been openly abundant. Craig has seen its unrestrained days.

I remember those times. I’m one of the old ones, and it seems worth celebrating. After six weeks of hospitalization, I drink in the hot air, the light fading on the Front Range, and I imagine I can see my home in the foothills. It’s all worth celebrating.

Steve Epstein, a quadriplegic attorney from Miami, has come to the party on a gurney tricked up in red, white and blue. He’s Captain America on wheels, and he’s celebrating, too. A nurse perches on one corner of his pram, one hand holding a soft drink, the other gripping the IV stanchion. She has great legs. It would make a great poster.

“We’re making history,” Epstein says. “In 20 years, people will look back and say that we were here.”

That’s all? That we were here?

“Were still here,” he says.

To the youngsters, the old guard is evidence that you can live this way. We’re a pretty beat-up bunch, but we are proof that it’s possible. We’re an all-American crowd on an all-American holiday. We’re still here.