Dr. Erickson likes to describe therapy as a way of helping patients extend their limits and he has spent his own life doing that. In 1919 when he was stricken with polio he was informed that he would never again be able to walk. After spending many hours concentrating on achieving a flicker of movement in the muscles of his legs, he was up on crutches within a year. He even managed to obtain and hold a sitting-down job in a cannery to help finance his way into the University of Wisconsin. After his first year at the university, he was advised by his physician to spend his summer vacation getting a great deal of exercise in the sunshine without using his legs. Deciding that a canoe trip would provide the appropriate exercise, Erickson set out in June in a 17-foot canoe, wearing a bathing suit, a pair of overalls, and a knotted handkerchief on his head for a hat. He did not have the strength in his legs to pull his canoe out of the water and he could swim only a few feet. His supplies for his summer's voyage consisted of a small sack of beans, another of rice, and a few cooking utensils. His wealth for the purchase of more supplies consisted of $2.32. With these provisions, he spent from June until September traveling through the lakes of Madison, down the Yahara river, down the Rock river, into the Mississippi and on down to a few miles above St. Louis, then back up the Illinois river, through the Hennepin Canal to the Rock river and so to Madison. He foraged for his food along the way by eating what fish he could catch, finding edible plants on the river banks when he camped at night, and harvesting crops from the Mississippi. These crops consisted of the bushels of peelings the cooks on the river steamers threw overboard. Among them, there were always a few whole potatoes or apples thrown out by mistake. By the end of the summer, he had traveled a distance of 1,200 miles with almost no supplies or money, without sufficient strength in his legs to carry his canoe over the dams which blocked his way, and so physically weak when he began that he could hardly paddle a few miles downstream without getting overtired.
ThejourneywasevenmorecomplicatedforEricksonthanitwouldhavebeenforanyoneelse,Hewasthekindofyoungmanwhorefusedtoaskassistanceofanyone.Thatis,herefusedtoaskdirectly,butheenjoyedarrangingthesituationsothatpeoplewould"spontaneously"dothing
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