A Personal Declaration of Independence : Books: ABC-TV correspondent John Hockenberry examines his life as a journalist in a wheelchair in ‘Moving Violations.’

Even after half a lifetime in a wheelchair, ABC-TV correspondent John Hockenberry says he has this recurring dream.

He is sitting in the chair in his kitchen and sees something he wants on a counter. “And you get up and sort of limp over and grab it, and limp back to the chair. And think to yourself, before you wake up, ‘I should do that more. I’m not going to do that at all if I don’t practice that a little more.’ And you lie in bed [thinking], ‘Is that right? Can I walk a little?’ ”

Hockenberry, 39, who is on the departing newsmagazine show “Day One,” is sitting atop the sun-filled pool patio of a West Hollywood hotel with a picture-postcard view of Los Angeles, sipping iced tea and talking about his new book, “Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence.” It’s his memoir and testament.

His long legs--he writes that standing he would be 6 feet tall--have an elastic band around his thighs to prevent erratic movement.

So does he feel bad when he wakes up after the dream?

“No, not at all,” Hockenberry replies. “I laugh. I just kind of go, ‘Isn’t that funny?’ [because] given the choice between zipping over to the counter and hobbling over to the counter,” he’d rather zip.

He adds, softly: “What I’m nostalgic about in the dream is the sort of sensation all the way down to your feet. It’s the sensation you miss; it’s not the mobility.”

In 1976, Hockenberry was a student at the University of Chicago with plans to major in math, when he and his best friend hitched a ride with two female students. The driver fell asleep, as did Hockenberry in the back seat. He woke up just before the car hit a guardrail and plunged 200 feet over an embankment in Pennsylvania. The driver died, but Hockenberry’s friend was not hurt. A truck driver with a fire extinguisher put out the flames before the car blew up.

Hockenberry lost all sensation below his chest.

Describing himself then as a “confused 19-year-old hippie college student,” Hockenberry is quite certain that without the accident he would not have become a journalist, though he can’t “conceive” what he would have become.

“For all the difficulty and pain of the accident, and the trauma it represented, it was a very exciting challenge always. And I think that molded me into a much more focused individual.”

At a glance, the book appears to be what you’d expect from network TV’s first on-air correspondent in a wheelchair--and before that a commentator and foreign correspondent for National Public Radio and host of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

It is a poignant, funny and surreal account of his “adventures” abroad: How in the midst of the 1989 funeral for the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, an Iranian named Oskar pushed his wheelchair, all the while shouting, “Death to America!” How covering the Intifada, he was able to roll though the streets of occupied Gaza during a tight curfew and talk his way past astonished Israeli soldiers. How during an interview with a leading Israeli settler, he had an intestinal accident and, instead of turning off his subject, it drew them closer.

But “Moving Violations” is also part-novel in its exploration of the lives of his one-armed grandfather and his severely mentally retarded uncle who was born in 1936 with a genetic disease known as PKU (phenylketonuria). A generation later, his uncle could have been been treated. Instead, he was put away in an institution in a small town in Upstate New York, near the family home. Hockenberry says he did not find out his uncle was still alive until “I was into the manuscript [in 1993] and I asked my mother, ‘When did he die? . . . And my mother, long pause, she looks at me and she says, ‘He’s not dead.’ ”

And there’s poetry in the book as he writes of “my own lifetime in two bodies”--the one he can feel and the one he cannot--and of the day he and his former wife took a ride in Oregon in his chair, rolling downhill, she on his lap. “We were four arms, four legs, four wheels, one lap, two smiles, connected without rationalization. The wind cleansed our faces.”

It was in Oregon that Hockenberry got his first “real job”--as opposed to what he refers to as a “crip job”--working for KLCC public radio station in Eugene. Crip, Hockenberry says, is “a term my disabled friends use when we talk about our peers . . . it’s an in-your-face kind of thing, [a] shorthand.”

At one point, Hockenberry becomes upset. He is explaining how he volunteered at KLCC in the spring of 1980, and then with federal funds under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, he designed a job as a newscaster. “I’m a welfare mother,” he laughs of his six-month funding, but cringes when his listener suggests lightly that it was a form of affirmative action. “It [disabled] wasn’t a protected affirmative action category. It’s what governments are supposed to do, dammit.”

Meanwhile, Mount St. Helens had erupted and NPR discovered it had quite a reporter in its midst. In November, 1981, he moved to Washington to be the newscaster on “All Things Considered.” His first assignment abroad was in Jerusalem in 1988. He moved to ABC in 1992.

The title “Moving Violations” essentially sums up Hockenberry’s attitude about life in a wheelchair.

“I’m confronting expectations in some of the ways that I behave, and that by moving, by doing in my chair what I presume I’m supposed to do--that is move, go places, roll --that that somehow violates stereotypes and expectations and projections . . .

“It has more meaning when you add the subtitle,” he says. “Because moving is a declaration of independence. Sort of, ‘Hey, look, I don’t need help. Hey, I’m independent, I’m OK.’ When in fact none of us are ever as OK as we claim. And this is a way of describing all of my tickets--on the roads of the world.”

With “Day One” going off the air in the fall--”we were plasma for [NBC’s hit] ‘ER,’ “--Hockenberry and ABC must determine his next assignment. He already turned down Moscow--”it’s such a crumbling infrastructure; it’s impossible in a chair.” Besides, he and “Day One” producer Alison Craiglow are getting married in October.

Hockenberry is asked about his reaction on hearing about Christopher Reeve’s devastating fall from a horse. An NPR producer had called him to discuss “the implications” of such an injury. “At the end of the conversation I said, ‘Isn’t it strange, Superman in a wheelchair?’

“I thought of how I have one or two pictures of me walking, and Christopher Reeve has pictures of himself flying . . . .

“In a certain way, my reaction is to say, ‘Welcome: come on over.’ In another way, I can’t conceive of what he’s going through because of who he is and the nature of that injury. I have quadriplegic friends who say, ‘Paraplegia, that’s kind of a cute little disability.’ Just a couple of inches on the spinal cord is a completely different world.”