STOWE, Vt. — About 10 times a day, Jake Burton Carpenter reaches for a note card and jots down thoughts and reminders. The index cards he uses are five inches by eight inches, made with brown recycled paper, and have 15 lines. They are stamped with the logo of Burton Snowboards, the company that Carpenter founded in 1977 and christened with his middle name.
There is always a stack within his reach.
“I don’t trust people who don’t write stuff down,” Carpenter said.
So it was a speck of good luck that when Carpenter was paralyzed for several weeks earlier this year with a rare disorder called Miller Fisher syndrome, strapped to breathing machines and fed through tubes, one part of his body that he could move were his hands.