Do Gooder: Travis St. Amant

Jun 1, 2014 | People

[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
images: Jeromy Price”][/title]

Travis was nominated as a Do South Do-Gooder by his brother, Aaron.

Travis St. Amant pulls up in his golf cart on a Friday morning bright with sun. He is stopping just long enough to tell his story, and when he’s finished he’ll return to mowing the grounds of the Fort Smith National Historic site. There are thirty-five acres Travis helps tend, all of it surrounding Judge Isaac C. Parker’s courthouse, on land where the original fort was established, back in 1817.

Today, schoolchildren scramble from rows of yellow buses. It is a busy time, the end of the school year, and field trips invariably involve this place, so beautifully maintained that several families have also shown up to have picnics here, in clear view of the Arkansas River where a mama goose and her five goslings swim in a neat row near the grassy banks.

Travis, who’s forty-one, looks sharp in his brown uniform. A white T-shirt shows at his neckline. His boots are sturdy. He stands five feet two inches tall, he’s slightly built, and he’s wearing glasses. It is not until he steps away from the golf cart and speaks that you realize he struggles with certain things. “If I think about what I’m going to say, then it’s easier,” he confides, although it is not difficult to understand him, as long as you pay attention. “And when I walk I have to remember to kick my heels out. I can remember my dad telling me, ‘Travis, kick your heels out.’ You don’t have to think about those things; they’re automatic, but I do.”

The reason Travis has to consider the words he says and the way he walks is because he has cerebral palsy. The diagnosis came when he was two or three. But his journey started much earlier. “I was born D.O.A.,” Travis says, “and I was brought back to life. It took me five minutes to breathe, and twenty minutes to breathe on my own without oxygen.”

Travis describes what it was like growing up. “There were five kids, and when I was younger I played baseball and basketball. I was just Travis, just another one of the kids. I wasn’t any different to them. I wasn’t picked on any more or any less. My mom always said, ‘You can do anything you put your mind to.’”

One of the hindrances of cerebral palsy is that Travis’ muscles hurt, more so as he gets older, he says. Sometimes, at the end of a long week all he can think about is getting home, crawling into bed, and resting up. But he rarely does that. He loves mountain biking, and often he’ll show up at Chaffee Crossing in Fort Smith where he’s ridden as far as twenty-one miles in a day. He has a deep sea fishing trip in Mexico coming up with his uncle soon, and he’s been up in a glider. And then there’s the trip to Vegas. When he talks about it, he smiles wide, his eyes brighten, he taps his work boots repeatedly.

But none of that compares to another trip that’s fast approaching. He’s getting ready to go to Special Touch, a camp in Colcord, Oklahoma. The website describes the camp as “a premier retreat experience for people with disabilities.” Travis was thirty-five the first year he attended. His pastor talked to him about the camp, told him the church would handle the cost of sending him, and Travis remembers thinking that he didn’t need to go; he didn’t have a disability. But his pastor persisted and he gave in.

What he remembers about that first year is the great need he saw in some of the other campers. Their ages ranged from about six years old to seventy, and he came to understand that they could use someone like him, someone who saw life as a great adventure despite the hardships his body offered up each and every day.

The next year he went back, but as a helper and not a camper, and each year since he’s continued to do so. It is a great joy to him, this ability to give back, and he’s developed strong friendships with those he meets at Special Touch. “I don’t need to be served,” Travis says, and then shakes his head. “I need to be serving others.”

One of the best things about Travis is his ease in making friends. He is so genuinely open, so outgoing, that it’s easy to see how it happens. He starts telling stories about his best buddies and the list keeps growing. He talks about his time in high school, in Muldrow, Oklahoma. He couldn’t play football but his brother Aaron did, and, oh, how Travis loved to watch. He kept showing up at football practice until the coach finally offered to make him the team manager. He describes the duties: washing uniforms, making sure the players had water, showing up for two-a-day practices in the heat of the Oklahoma summer. Each year the team did well, making it at least to the first round of state playoffs. Travis got to know a ton of people, and he became part of something extraordinary. “I traveled all over Oklahoma on that yellow bus,” Travis says.

Eventually, he was helping the boys’ baseball and basketball teams as well. In a town the size of Muldrow, which is now about 3,500, a lot of the residents show up to urge on the Bulldogs, and many of those fans fell in love with Travis, who was always smiling, always trying to make life a little easier for the team.

When he finished high school he attended college, both in Arkansas and Oklahoma. What he loved more than anything, though, was manual labor, and so he left school and found work, sometimes holding down two jobs at a time. When the position at the historic site came open, he couldn’t wait to apply.

During his interview, they asked if he could operate a zero-turn mower. He’d driven them only a few feet at a time when he worked at a home improvement store, but that was the extent of his experience. Still, he assured them he could, and then he called one of his friends who sells mowers, who told him to come on over. He practiced like crazy, and he was ready when the call came that he’d gotten the job. Travis is beaming as he talks about his work here. This place, so full of history, beautifully preserved, carefully maintained, fills him with pride.

The conversation then turns to a former Muldrow football player who is now a preacher in Morrilton. He recently asked Travis to share his testimony with his church and Travis accepted. He stood at the pulpit and he talked about his incredible life. “With God, all things are possible,” he told the congregation.

As he’s talking, he keeps mentioning people who make his life better. “You wouldn’t believe how many friends I have,” Travis says, and then he tells a story of his closest buddy. “My best friend Mike and I were talking in the car last week. I had taken some medicine for my muscles and Mike asked me why I was taking the pills, and I said, ‘Because I have CP,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I forgot you had that.’” It is at this point Travis grows quiet. He moves his glasses off his face and wipes his eyes, and he shakes his head at the wonder of people who see him the way he sees himself.

The sun is hovering overhead now, and the wind is kicking across the grounds of the historic site. The buses are starting up and schoolchildren rush to climb aboard. Travis looks across the thirty-five acres, so pristine they look like a postcard. His face lights up again, and he climbs aboard the golf cart. There’s a mower waiting for him, and he’s ready to get back at it. He can’t imagine a better way to spend an afternoon in May, the smell of cut grass rising through the air, the world made better by a little order, a bit of tidying up, by a few more hours doing the work he loves.

When asked to describe his life, he calls it a full one, filled with friends and family, blessed by God. He has every reason, he says, to be happy, and so he tries to be, without fail, all the time. It is a spectacular way to live, and holds so many lessons for the rest of us that they could fill an entire book.

Do South Magazine

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