By Tom Dunkel

WITH LITTLE FANFARE, Pat Rummerfield strides through the outpatient clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute's International Center for Spinal Cord Injury in Baltimore. He's a non-physician making his rounds, checking on the quadriplegics and paraplegics who find inspiration in his every step.

He ducks into a side room where Robby Beckman is immersed in a tank of chest-high water. At the bottom of the tank is a wide rubber belt that scrolls like a treadmill. Thanks to the buoyant properties of the Hydro Track, Beckman can practice ambulating on his own. Keep those heels down. Don't drag the toes on that right foot. It's tough going, like wading through melted caramel.

Beckman broke his neck in an Ocean City diving accident during the summer of 2003. In an instant, he became a quadriplegic. Catapulted into a wheelchair at age 19, he was told that's where he'd forever remain. Yet here he is on a March morning almost four years later walking in water, which for him seems almost as remarkable as dancing upon it.

Rummerfield, a senior staff member at the spinal cord center, watches Beckman struggle to keep his legs moving. To take Beckman's mind off his aching muscles, Rummerfield asks about a ski trip Beckman recently took with a group of disabled athletes.

"Any crashes?"

"I just fell on my face a lot," says Beckman, who sat on a monoski to whiz down the mountain. "It was awesome! Being on the edge of out-of-control."

In a place where people move mostly in slow motion, the conversation turns to speed. "Mr. Pat, I bet there's nothing like the adrenaline of being behind the wheel and going 200 miles an hour!" Beckman exclaims. He knows that Rummerfield has competed in a few minor NASCAR races and holds a world speed record set in 1999 on the Bonneville Salt Flats: 245.5 mph clocked in an electric car. Those accomplishments only hint at what his presence in this room means to Beckman, who, in private, calls Rummerfield "more or less the person I want to be."

Rummerfield, 54, is himself a quadriplegic, injured in a high-speed car crash decades ago. You would never guess that without reading his medical chart. Even then, you wouldn't know he has run marathons and completed triathlons in addition to his auto racing exploits. Along the way, Rummerfield has overcome five knee operations, broken legs and fractured ankles. He doesn't walk with a limp, never uses a cane and is modest of both build and demeanor. In short, the most ordinary of extraordinary men.

Rummerfield often is described as the world's most fully functioning quadriplegic, meaning he copes with severe loss of function in his arms and legs. (Paraplegics, as a rule, are affected only from the chest down.) "He's missing two-thirds of his spinal column," notes John McDonald, director of Kennedy Krieger's spinal center. "If you lined up 10 people's MRIs that look identical to Pat's, nine would be in wheelchairs."

By any reasonable definition, Rummerfield qualifies as a medical miracle. That poses some beguiling questions. Is he a lone Lazarus, or can his comeback be replicated on a grand scale? Contrary to conventional wisdom, are spinal cord injuries curable?

McDonald believes they are. He's the neurologist who the late actor Christopher Reeve believed would help him conquer his paralysis. He's a very vocal proponent of the notion that repetitive exercise -- so-called activity-based therapy -- can revive damaged muscles and nerve endings, can replace blown fuses that disrupt the mind-body spinal connection. "What if people have the same ability to regenerate as reptiles?" he asks.

Indeed, McDonald insists that someday as many as 75 percent of paraplegics and quadriplegics will regain the ability to walk -- and that Pat Rummerfield is pointing the way toward a previously unimaginable future.

RUMMERFIELD'S TITLE AT KENNEDY KRIEGER IS "PATIENT LIAISON," but in many ways he's a role model without portfolio. Part of his job is just to be Pat Rummerfield -- to serve, literally, as a walking inspiration. There are those who cry upon meeting him, who thank him profusely for providing them with a thin thread of optimism.

Not long ago, Rummerfield got a letter from Alvaro Gomez, a Colombian high school senior who had come to the United States from Bogota for treatment after a horseback-riding accident left him paralyzed. Inside was a photocopy of his yearbook-page dedication: "Patrick, you are like my guardian angel. You give me the strength and hope to keep moving on . . . 'No pain, no gain.'"

Rummerfield is in regular contact with dozens of quadriplegics and paraplegics, counseling them on everything from Depression to health problems to insurance hassles. He considers Nate Waters, a 29-year-old accountant with an Oklahoma energy company, "like a little brother." When Waters was a teenager, his mother's boyfriend broke his neck in a vicious beating; then the family abandoned him.

"I didn't know Pat from a hole in the wall," says Waters, who lives in a Tulsa nursing home and comes to Kennedy Krieger for periodic checkups. "Watching him and how focused he is on work and getting things done had a big impact on me . . . I've been paralyzed for 10 years. Sometimes I get burned out going to therapy. After talking to Pat, it's like, 'Okay, I got more juice in me to keep on doing it.'"

Rummerfield doesn't motivate with locker-room-type pep talks. He's by nature low-key. In repose, his face often has a hangdog expression, giving him the air of a softhearted but overextended priest.

"A lot of people that find him are at their wits' end and don't know what to do," says Rummerfield's wife, Barbara, who has watched Pat struggle with being the sounding board for so many sad stories. "It weighs on him. He has said in the past, 'This is just so hard.'"

Yet there are also those who view Rummerfield as a possible purveyor of false hope. Steven Edwards, a quadriplegic and spinal cord injury activist from Charleston, S.C., sees him standing on a distant, perhaps unreachable, mountaintop. While McDonald points to Rummerfield as activity-based therapy's ultimate success story, Edwards is wary. "Ask Dr. McDonald," Edwards says, "who he can drag out besides Pat Rummerfield."

No question, Rummerfield's recovery remains largely a mystery. A howdunnit. About 10 percent of quads and paraplegics spontaneously recover a degree of mobility, specialists say. Others make important, less dramatic gains with therapy, such as moving fingers enough to operate an electric wheelchair or lifting an arm high enough to feed themselves. But Rummerfield's comeback is so extreme that it's off the charts.

"We can't explain it in a scientific way," says Cristina Sadowsky, Kennedy Krieger's clinical director and Rummerfield's personal physician. The best Sadowsky and McDonald can offer are educated guesses of what went incredibly right. Rummerfield's broken neck fortuitously healed in an almost perfect straight line. His car accident may have rattled a part of the brain that controls inhibitions, hence his unusual capacity for pushing himself far beyond the norm. Good genes probably play a role, too.

There's a study underway at Kennedy Krieger in which high-tech, three-dimensional MRIs are being taken of a total of 100 healthy and injured spinal cords. Rummerfield was the first volunteer to be scanned. McDonald and research coordinator Visar Belegu couldn't wait to get a peek at his pictures. Their coolly professional reaction? "We completely flipped out," says Belegu.

They discovered collateral tissue damage above Rummerfield's wound site at Vertebrae C3 and C4 that doesn't show up in a standard MRI. Belegu points to a section of the vertical, lateral and dorsal columns within Rummerfield's spinal cord. About two-thirds of it is black. A dead zone.

"He's got no signals coming from those areas," says Belegu. "That's less than Chris Reeve had, and he was completely paralyzed."