[Colorado-Talk] CCB mentioned in new book

[Dan Burke]

On 7/10/23, Peggy Chong via Colorado-Talk <colorado-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>
>
> Hello:
>
>
>
> I just learned that a new book, The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland
> will be released on July 18 over Amazon.
>
> This is not a recommendation or a book review.  I found one of the chapters
> in the book that related to CCB.  I though you might be interested.  See it
> below.  It appeared this past weekend in the New Yorker.
>
> Peggy Chong
> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/how-to-be-blind
>
>
> How to Be Blind
>
>
> As a kid, I was told that one day I would lose my sight. Recently, I went to
> a residential school for the blind, where I learned to live without it.
>
>
> By Andrew Leland
>
> July 8, 2023
>
>
> <https://media.newyorker.com/photos/649f03ae7ac8745598303fb9/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Leland_Learning_To_Be_Blind.jpg>
>
>
> Illustration by Camille Deschiens
>
> I first noticed something wrong with my eyes in New Mexico. I was a freshman
> in high school, in the mid-nineties, and had recently been accepted into a
> clique of older kids whom I admired—the inner circle of Santa Fe Prep’s
> druggie bohemian scene. We hung out at Hank’s house; he was our charismatic
> leader, and his mom was maximally permissive. One night, in Hank’s room, our
> friend Chad sat on a beanbag chair, packing a pipe with weed. Nina danced
> alone in front of a boom box to Jane’s Addiction, throwing around her
> bleached hair. After dark, we hiked up the hill behind the house to get a
> view of the city. The moon was bright, but I found myself tripping on roots
> and stones and wandering off track. At one point, I walked right into a
> piñon tree with prickly branches. My friends laughed—“You’re stoned, aren’t
> you?” Chad said—and I played up my intoxication for effect. But, on the way
> down, I quietly put a hand on Hank’s shoulder.
>
> This became common. At the movies, I got up to get a soda, and, when I
> returned, I couldn’t find my mother in the rows of featureless bodies. I
> complained about night blindness, but my mother assured me it was normal—it
> was dark out there! Eventually, though, she brought me to see an eye doctor.
> After a series of tests, he sat us down and said that I had retinitis
> pigmentosa, or R.P., a rare disease affecting about a hundred thousand
> people in the U.S. As the disease progressed, the rod cells around the edges
> of my retina would die, followed by the cones. My vision would contract,
> like looking through a paper-towel roll. By middle age, I’d be completely
> blind. The doctor asked if I could see stars, and I said that I hadn’t seen
> them in years. This was the detail that made it real for my mother. “You
> can’t see stars?” she asked.
>
> I spent my teen-age years mostly in denial: my blindness seemed distant,
> like fatherhood, or death. But in my thirties the disease caught up with me.
> One morning, I swung my car into a crosswalk and heard—and felt—something
> slamming my hood: I had almost hit a pedestrian, and he was banging my car
> with his fist, shouting, “Open your fucking eyes!” Soon after, I almost hit
> a cyclist, and I gave up driving. One weekend, while living in Missouri, I
> found that I had lost my sunglasses. My wife, Lily, was out of town, so I
> decided to walk to a nearby LensCrafters. But what was normally a ten-minute
> drive became a harrowing ordeal on foot. There were few sidewalks, so I
> walked in the road, with cars speeding past. The sun and haze made it hard
> to see. I stood for a long time at a large intersection, trying to turn left
> without getting hit by a truck.
>
> In 2011, I ordered an I.D. cane, used less for tapping around than to signal
> to the world that its bearer might not see well. It folded up, and mostly I
> hid it in my bag. But, after running into fire hydrants and hip-checking a
> toddler in a café, I began using it full time. Reading became difficult: the
> white of the page took on a wince-inducing glare, and the words frosted
> over, like the lowermost lines on the optometrist’s eye chart. It was only
> once I’d reached this stage that my diagnosis started to feel real. I
> frantically wondered whether I should use my last years to, say, visit
> Japan, or plow through the Criterion Collection, instead of spending my
> evenings watching “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” with Lily. One night, I lay awake in
> bed. I knew that, if Lily were awake, she’d be able to see the blankets, the
> window, the door, but, when I scanned the room, I saw nothing, just the
> flashers and floaters that oscillated in my eyes. Is this what it will be
> like? I wondered, casting my gaze around like a dead flashlight. I felt like
> I’d been buried alive.
>
> In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado
> Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National
> Federation of the Blind, and is staffed almost entirely by blind people.
> Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and
> learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical
> approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a
> woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they
> have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people. The
> most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in
> circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a
> smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park,
> or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her
> way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one
> question along the way. A member of an R.P. support group told me, “People
> come back from those programs loaded for bear”—ready to hunt the big game of
> blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time
> there, “It was an epiphany.” That fall, I signed up.
>
> In 1966, the sociologist Robert Scott spent three years visiting agencies
> for the blind for his book “
> <https://www.amazon.com/Making-Blind-Men-Robert-Scott/dp/0878556877> The
> Making of Blind Men.” Most of these agencies, whose methods were based on
> the training programs developed for veterans after the First World War, took
> an “accommodative approach”: they believed that clients could never be truly
> independent, and strove only to keep them safe and comfortable. The agencies
> installed automated bells over their front doors so that residents could
> easily find the entrance from the street, served pre-cut foods, and gave out
> only spoons. They celebrated clients for the tiniest accomplishments, with
> the result that, as Scott put it, “many of them come to believe that the
> underlying assumption must be that blindness makes them incompetent.”
>
> Blind education already had a fraught history. The first secular institution
> for the blind—the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, established by King Louis IX of
> France around 1260—housed residents, but required them to beg on the streets
> for bread. Blind people were popularly depicted as lecherous, duplicitous,
> and drunk. The first schools that actually tried to teach blind students
> were established in the eighteenth century. Catherine Kudlick, a disability
> historian, pointed out that this was during the height of the Enlightenment,
> when there were discussions about educating women and people from the lower
> classes. “The idea was to give them the tools so that they could become
> educated members of society,” she said. But, in their determination to
> prepare students for employment, many schools, like other institutions at
> the time, came to resemble sweatshops, making blind children spin wool and
> grind tobacco for subminimum wages.
>
> The best institutions Scott visited were those that followed the philosophy
> of Father Thomas Carroll, a Catholic priest who worked at the Army’s
> rehabilitation centers during the Second World War, where many
> innovations—including the long white cane—were first developed. Carroll
> argued that the average blind person is capable of some independence. His
> students took fencing lessons, which he thought helped with balance. But
> Carroll took a surprisingly grim view of blindness. “Loss of sight is a
> dying,” he wrote. His students, he believed, would always be significantly
> impaired. One student who recently attended the Carroll Center, in Newton,
> Massachusetts, told me that he felt coddled there. “I didn’t feel a lot of
> independence,” he said. “We go to these places because we want to level up
> our independence, and be pushed to the edge. We need that.”
>
> Carroll’s philosophy met its sharpest critic in Kenneth Jernigan, the
> president of the National Federation of the Blind. The N.F.B. was founded,
> in 1940, as an organization of and not for the blind: its constitution
> mandated that a majority of its chapter members had to be blind. Jernigan
> rejected Carroll’s Freudian sense of blindness—Carroll has described it in
> terms of castration—in favor of a civil-rights approach. Blindness, he
> insisted, was merely a characteristic, like hair color; it was an intolerant
> society that was disabling. He organized protests against airline policies
> that forced blind passengers to sit in handicap seats and give up their
> canes; his followers held sit-ins on planes, and were physically carried off
> by police.
>
> In the fifties, Jernigan and his colleagues proposed an experiment: the
> N.F.B. would take control of a state agency for the blind in Iowa—which a
> federal study had rated one of the worst in the country—and reinvent it. At
> this center, and those which followed, blind teachers took students
> waterskiing and rock climbing. At traditional agencies, blind students (but
> not instructors) were addressed by their first names. Jernigan mandated that
> his students be addressed by “Mr.” and “Ms.” as a sign of respect. N.F.B.
> employees followed a strict dress code: ties and jackets for men, skirts for
> women. Bryan Bashin, the former C.E.O. of the San Francisco LightHouse for
> the Blind, one of the largest blindness agencies in the U.S., compared this
> to the suited brothers in the Nation of Islam: “We were not going to give
> our oppressors the right to say we’re sloppy or unprofessional.”
>
> Blindness agencies traditionally taught students to travel by route
> memorization: walk down the block for fifty-five paces, and the entrance to
> the café is on your right. Jernigan pointed out the obvious flaw: you were
> at a loss as soon as you travelled or the coffee shop closed. The N.F.B.
> developed a method that came to be known as “structured discovery”: students
> learn to pay attention to their surroundings and use the information to
> orient themselves. Instructors were constantly asking Socratic questions,
> such as “What direction do you hear the traffic coming from?” and “Can you
> feel the sun warming one side of your face?” Bashin told me, of what he
> learned by spending a year at a center, “Confidence isn’t a deep enough
> word. It’s a faith in your ability to figure it out.” He added, “Until you
> get profoundly lost, and know it’s within you to get unlost, you’re not
> trained—until you know it’s not an emergency but a magnificent puzzle.”
>
> Students were pushed out of their comfort zones. Gene Kim, a recent C.C.B.
> graduate, told me that, for his independent drop, he was let off at some
> place resembling a hospital. He spent hours crossing bridges, “weird islands
> and right-turn lanes, weirdly cut curbs.” He was on the verge of giving up
> when he heard a dinging sound, and followed it to a light-rail train that
> took him home. The experience, he said, helped him make peace with the
> “relentless uncertainty” of blind travel. The historian Zachary Shore, on
> the other hand, got so lost on his independent drop that he stubbornly
> picked a direction and just kept walking. Police officers stopped him when
> he was about to walk onto a highway, and gave him a ride back to the center,
> where the director told him, “You failed this time. But we’re gonna make you
> do it again—and you will do it. I know you can do it. And we’re going to
> give you an even harder route.” (On his second try, Shore found his way
> back.)
>
> Sometimes teachers crossed a line. In 2020, dozens of students alleged that
> staff at N.F.B. centers had bullied them, sexually harassed or assaulted
> them, or made racist remarks. Many students at the centers had, in addition
> to blindness, a range of other disabilities: hearing loss, mobility
> impairments, cognitive disabilities. Some reported being mocked for having
> impairments that made the intense mental mapping required by blind-cane
> travel a challenge. Bashin ascribed this to the fact that blind people, like
> any collection of Americans, regrettably included their share of racists,
> abusers, and jerks. He said, of the N.F.B., “As a people’s movement, it
> looks like the U.S. It is a very big tent, and it is working to insure
> respect for all members.” But a group of “victims, survivors, and witnesses
> of sexual and psychological abuse” wrote an
> <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdhi5MUB_4Vqz7Kzy6vGyN20S6pmuSJqn3IeK4zMfHdhhko4A/viewform>
> open letter in the wake of the allegations, blaming, in part, the N.F.B.’s
> tough methods. “What blind consumers want in the year 2020 is not what they
> may have wanted in previous decades,” they wrote. “We don’t want to be
> bullied or humiliated or have our boundaries pushed ‘for our own good.’ ”
>
> The N.F.B. has since launched an internal investigation and formed
> committees dedicated to supporting survivors and minorities. Jernigan once
> mocked Carroll’s notion that blind people needed emotional support, but the
> N.F.B. now maintains a counselling fund for members who endured abuse at its
> centers or any of its affiliated programs or activities. Julie Deden, the
> director of the Colorado Center, told me, “I’m saddened for these people,
> and I’m sorry that there’s been sexual misconduct.” She is also sad that
> people felt like they were pushed so hard that it felt like abuse, she
> noted. “We don’t want anyone to ever feel that way,” she said. But, she
> added, “If people really felt that way, maybe this isn’t the program for
> them. We do challenge people.” Ultimately, she said, she had to defend her
> staff’s right to push the students: “Really, it’s the heart of what we do.”
>
> The twenty-​four units at the McGeorge Mountain Terrace apartments are all
> occupied—music often blasts from a window on the second floor, and laughter
> wafts up by the picnic tables—but there are no cars in the parking lot,
> because none of its residents have driver’s licenses. The apartments house
> students from the Colorado Center. At 7:24 A.M. every weekday, residents
> wait at the bus stop outside, holding long white canes decorated with
> trinkets and plush toys, to commute to class. I arrived at the center in
> March, 2021. When the receptionist greeted me, I saw her gaze stray past me.
> Nearly everyone in the building was blind. In the kitchen, students in
> eyeshades fried plantain chips, their white canes hanging on pegs in the
> hall. In the tech room, the computers had no monitors or mouses—they were
> just desktop towers attached to keyboards and good speakers. A teen-ager
> played an audio-only video game, which blasted gruesome sounds as he
> brutalized his enemies with a variety of weapons.
>
> When I met the students and staff, I was impressed by blindness’s variety:
> there were people who had been blind from birth, and those who’d been blind
> for only a few months. There were the greatest hits of eye disease, as well
> as a few ultra-rare conditions I’d never heard of. Some people had traumatic
> brain injuries. Makhai, a self-described stoner from Colorado, had been in a
> head-on collision with a Ford F-250. Steve had been working in a diamond
> mine in the Arctic Circle when a rock the size of a two-story house fell on
> top of him, crushing his legs and blinding him. Alice, a woman in her
> forties, told me that her husband had shot her. She woke up from a coma and
> doctors informed her that she was permanently blind, and asked her
> permission to remove her eyeballs. “I never mourned the loss of my vision,”
> she told me. “I just woke up and started moving forward.” She said that
> she’d had a number of “shenanigans” at the center, her word for falls,
> including a visit to the emergency room after she slipped off a curb and
> slammed her head into a parked truck. At the E.R., she learned that she had
> hearing loss, too, which affected her balance; when she got hearing aids,
> her shenanigans decreased.
>
> Soon after, my travel instructor, Charles, had me put on my shades: a
> hard-​shell mask padded with foam. (Later, the center began using
> high-performance goggles that a staffer painstakingly painted black, which
> made me feel like a paratrooper.) I was surprised by how completely the
> shades blocked out the light—I saw only blackness. I left the office,
> following the sound of Charles’s voice and the knocking of his cane. “How
> are you with angles?” he said. “Make a forty-​five-​degree turn to the left
> here.” I turned. “That’s more like ninety degrees, but O.K.,” he said.
> Embarrassed, I corrected course. With shades on, angles felt abstract. On my
> way back to the lobby, I got lost in a foyer full of round tables. Later,
> another student, Cragar Gonzales, showed me around. He’d fully adopted the
> N.F.B.’s structured-discovery philosophy, and asked constant questions.
> “What do you notice about this wall?” he said. This was the only brick wall
> on this floor, he told me, so whenever I felt it I’d instantly know where I
> was. By the end of the day, though, I still wasn’t able to get around on my
> own. I felt a special shame when I had to ask Cragar, once again, to bring
> me to the bathroom.
>
> That afternoon, I followed Cragar to lunch. He had compared the school’s
> social organization to high-school cliques, except that the wide age range
> made for some unlikely friendships; a few teen-agers became drinking buddies
> with people pushing fifty. A teen-ager named Sophia told me that so many
> people at the center hooked up that it reminded her of “
> <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/the-glorious-depravity-of-the-british-love-island>
> Love Island”: “People come in and out of the ‘villa.’ People are with each
> other, and then not.” Within a few days, I started hearing gossip about
> students throughout the years who had sighted spouses back home but had
> started having affairs. Some of the students had lived very sheltered lives
> before coming to the program: classes brought together people with Ph.D.s
> and those who had never learned to tie their shoes. One staff member told me
> that some students arrive with no sex education, and there are those who
> become pregnant soon after arriving at the center.
>
> I’d heard that some people find wearing the shades intolerable, and make it
> to Colorado only to quit after a few days. I found it a pain in the ass, but
> also fascinating—like solving Bashin’s “magnificent puzzles.” On the same
> day that I arrived, I’d met a student nicknamed Lewie who had a high voice,
> and I spent the day thinking he was a woman. But people kept calling him man
> and buddy, and, with some effort, I reworked my mental image. Lewie had
> cooked a meal of arroz con pollo. I felt nervous about eating with the
> shades on, but I found it less difficult than I expected. Only once did I
> raise an accidentally empty plastic fork to my lips. At one point, I bit
> into what I thought was a roll, meant to be dipped in sauce, and was sweetly
> surprised to find that it was an orange-flavored cookie.
>
> I began to think of walking into the center each day as entering a kind of
> blind space. People gently knocked into one another without complaint;
> sometimes, they jokingly said, “Hey, man, what’d you bump into me for?”—as
> if mocking the idea that it might be a problem. Students announced
> themselves constantly, and I soon felt no shame greeting people with a
> casual “Who’s that?” Staff members were accustomed to students wandering
> into their offices accidentally, exchanging pleasantries, then wandering
> off. One day, I was having lunch, and my classmate Alice entered, then said,
> “Aw, man, why am I in here?”
>
> I learned an arsenal of blindness tricks. I wrapped rubber bands around my
> shampoo bottles to distinguish them from the conditioner. I learned to put
> safety pins on my bedsheets to keep track of which side was the bottom. I
> cleaned rooms in quadrants, sweeping, mopping, and wiping down each section
> before moving on. I had heard about a gizmo you could hang on the lip of a
> cup that would shriek when a liquid reached the top. But Cragar taught me
> just to listen: you could hear when a glass was almost full. In my
> home-management class, Delfina, one of the instructors, taught me to make a
> grilled-cheese. I used a spoon on the stove like a cane to make sure the pan
> was centered without torching my fingers. Before I flipped the sandwich, I
> slid my hand down the spatula to make sure the bread was centered. When I
> finished, I ate it hungrily; it was nice and hot.
>
> One weekend, I went with a group of students to play blind ice hockey. The
> puck was three times the size of a normal puck, and filled with ball
> bearings that rattled loudly. On St. Patrick’s Day, we went to a pub and had
> Irish slammers. One day, Charles took me and a few other students to Target
> to go grocery shopping. This was my first time navigating the world on my
> own with shades, and every step—getting on the bus, listening to the stop
> announcements—was distressing. When we got to Target, we were assigned a
> young shopping assistant named Luke. He pulled a shopping cart through the
> store, as we hung on, travelling like a school of fish. Charles had invited
> me to his apartment for homemade taquitos, and I asked Luke to show us the
> tortilla chips. He started listing flavors of Doritos—Flamin’ Hot, Cool
> Ranch. “Do you have ‘Restaurant Style’?” I asked, with minor humiliation.
>
> At the self-checkout station, I realized that I couldn’t distinguish between
> my credit and debit cards. “Is this one blue?” I asked, holding one up.
>
> “It’s red,” Luke said.
>
> I couldn’t bring myself to enter my PIN with shades on, so I cheated for my
> first and only time, and pulled them up. The fluorescent blast of Target’s
> interior made me dizzy. I found my card, and then quickly pulled the shades
> back down. We retraced our steps back to the bus stop. As we got closer, we
> heard the unmistakable squeal of bus brakes. “Go to that sound!” Charles
> shouted, and we ran. I wound up hugging the side of the bus and had to slide
> to the door. When I made it to my seat, I was proud and exhausted.
>
> One day, after class, I headed back to the apartments with Ahmed, a student
> in his thirties. Ahmed has R.P., like me, but he had already lost most of
> his vision during his last year of law school. He’d managed to learn how to
> use a cane and a screen reader, which reads a computer’s text aloud, and
> still graduate on time. But his progression into blindness took a steep
> toll. After he passed the bar, he moved to Tulsa, where he had what he
> describes as a “lost year.” He deflected most of my questions about what he
> did during that time, only gesturing toward its bleakness. “But why Tulsa?”
> I asked.
>
> “Because it was cheap,” he said. He knew no one in the city. He just needed
> a place to go and be alone with his blindness.
>
> With apologies to a city that I’ve enjoyed visiting, after listening to
> Ahmed, I began to think of Tulsa as the depressing place you go when you
> confront the final loss of sight. When would I move to Tulsa?
>
> The public perception of blindness is that of a waking nightmare. “Consider
> them, my soul, they are a fright!” Baudelaire wrote in his 1857 poem “The
> Blind.” “Like mannequins, vaguely ridiculous, / Peculiar, terrible
> somnambulists, / Beaming—who can say where—their eyes of night.” Literature
> teems with such descriptions. From Rilke’s “Blindman’s Song”: “It is a
> curse, / a contradiction, a tiresome farce, / and every day I despair.” In
> popular culture, Mr. Magoo is cheerfully oblivious to the mayhem that his
> bumbling creates.
> <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/caught-act> Al Pacino, in
> “Scent of a Woman,” is, beneath his swaggering machismo, deeply depressed.
> “I got no life,” he says. “I’m in the dark here!” Many blind people
> (including me) resist using the white cane precisely because of this stigma.
> One of the strangest parts of being legally blind, while still having enough
> vision to see somewhat, is that I can observe the way that people look at me
> with my cane. Their gaze—curious, troubled, averted—makes me feel like
> Baudelaire’s somnambulist, the walking dead.
>
> In response to this, blind activists have pushed the idea that blindness is
> nothing to grieve—that it’s something to be celebrated. “Blindness is not a
> tragedy,” the writer and former C.C.B. counsellor Juliet Cody said. “It’s a
> positive opportunity to have faith and believe in yourself.” I find this
> notion appealing, even liberating. But I’ve also struggled to force myself
> into an epiphany. When I’m honest with myself, I find that I’m already
> mourning the loss of small things: the ability to drive my son to the
> mountains for a hike, or to browse the stacks in a library. Cragar told me
> that, when his vision loss began to accelerate, he told his family that he
> wasn’t scared—that he was ready. But he admitted to me that he wasn’t so
> sure: “I say that, but do I really know?” Tony, another student I met at
> C.C.B., told me that, when he realized he could no longer see the chalkboard
> in his college classes, he retreated to his dorm room, flunked out, moved
> back in with his father, and spent his disability money on weed, to numb
> out. “I hit some very dark chunks,” he told me. One night, in Colorado, I
> heard a student say, “When I lost my vision, I didn’t leave my bed for a
> month.”
>
> In my weeks at the center, I began to suspect that consolation lies not in
> any moment of catharsis but in an acknowledgment of blindness’s
> ordinariness. The Argentinean writer
> <https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jorge-luis-borges> Jorge Luis Borges
> wrote that blindness “should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be
> seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.” Accepting blindness’s
> difficulty allows one to move on. “Life is never meant to be easy,” Erik
> Weihenmayer, the first blind person to climb Mt. Everest, wrote in his
> memoir, “
> <https://www.amazon.com/Touch-Top-World-Journey-Farther/dp/0452282942> Touch
> the Top of the World.” “Ironically when I finally accepted this reality,
> that’s when life got easy.” Under sleep shades, I found that I could read,
> write, cook, travel. There was frustration, but this wasn’t unique to blind
> life. At one point, as I listened to the chatter of a cafeteria full of
> blind people, I thought, How strange that I’m still myself. I’d worried over
> stories of people unable to handle total occlusion, but, in the moment, it
> felt surprisingly normal.
>
> I began to appreciate the novel experiences that blindness gave me. The
> notion that blind people have better hearing than the sighted is a myth, but
> relying on my ears did change my relationship with sound. Neuroscientists
> have found that the visual cortices of blind people are activated by such
> activities as reading Braille, listening to speech, and hearing auditory
> cues, such as the echo of a cane’s taps. At lunch, one day, Cragar’s wife,
> Meredith, who was visiting from Houston, came into the room carrying their
> fifteen-month-old daughter, Poppy. The sounds that she made—cooing,
> laughing—cut through the room like washes of color. I didn’t quite
> hallucinate these colors, but I came close. In the coming weeks, I had
> several mildly psychedelic experiences like this, a kind of blind
> synesthesia. The same thing happened with touch. I played blackjack with a
> Braille deck, and, after a few days, began to intuitively read the cards as
> if I were seeing them. In the art room, a teacher taught me to pull a wire
> through a mound of wet clay. Later, as I described the experience to Lily
> and our son, Oscar, on a video call, I had to remind myself that I’d never
> actually seen this tool or the clay. It was so clear in my mind’s eye.
>
> My sense of space gradually transformed. Walking the carpeted halls of the
> center’s lower level, I could see a faint black-and-blue virtual-reality
> environment lit by some unseen light source. Sometimes my cane penetrated
> one of the velvety walls, and I had to redraw my mental map. When I was out
> in the city, Charles sometimes informed me that what I thought was Alamo
> Avenue was actually Prince Street, or that east was actually north, and I
> had to lift the landscape in my mind, rotate it ninety degrees, and set it
> back down. I could almost feel my brain trembling under the strain. But it
> was also kind of fun.
>
> On your last day at the center, the staff presents you with a “freedom bell”
> emblazoned with the words “TAKE CHARGE WITH CONFIDENCE AND SELF-RELIANCE!”
> (Students sometimes quote this when doing banal activities like trying to
> find the bathroom.) At Lewie’s graduation, a few weeks into my stay, Julie
> invited him to ring the bell, saying that it represented not just his
> independence but that of blind people everywhere. My time at the center was
> cut short by family demands, but this spring I returned to see how far I had
> come. On my second-to-last day, Charles told me that I would be doing an
> independent drop. This seemed extreme; most students do that test after
> being at the center for nine months; I had been there for a total of four
> weeks. I rode out in the center’s van with another instructor, Ernesto,
> feeling nervous. “I need some reassurance,” I told him. “Do you really think
> that I’m ready to do this on my own?”
>
> “Actually, Andrew, it was two against one,” Ernesto said flatly. He had been
> outvoted.
>
> When we arrived at my drop point, Josie, one of the center’s few sighted
> employees and its designated driver, seemed worried. “Don’t get out on that
> side!” she said. Stepping out of the van, I felt immediately disoriented.
> The sun was shining on my face, so I had to be facing east. My cane hit a
> wooden door, and a dog started barking. This must be a residential street.
> I’d learned, when lost, to find a bus stop. Most students used their one
> question to ask the driver where to go, and had memorized the bus routes and
> rail lines sufficiently to make it home from there. There wouldn’t be a bus
> stop on a residential block, so I set off toward the sound of traffic.
>
> I soon arrived at a busy intersection. One of the hardest parts of blind
> travel is crossing the street. Once you leave the curb, there’s nothing
> guiding you to the other side, and you might walk in front of a car. Most
> corners have a dip for wheelchairs, but these sometimes point across the
> street, and sometimes point diagonally into the middle of the intersection.
> I learned to use my ears to find my way. I listened to the perpendicular
> traffic driving past my nose and calibrated my alignment so that the sound
> was equal in both ears—like balancing a stereo. When the light changed, I
> took off. I listened to the cars roaring past me, adjusting my trajectory to
> stay parallel to them. I felt the crown of the road (which rises and falls,
> to allow water to drain) beneath my feet, and that let me know that I was
> halfway. When my cane connected with the far curb, I could feel my heart
> pounding.
>
> I must have often looked bewildered on my journey. At one point, I was
> trying to decide whether a dip was a corner or a driveway, and a driver
> slowed down and said, “You drop something, buddy?” I answered, with forced
> cheer, “Thanks! I’m just exploring.” At a big, four-lane intersection, I
> stood for a long time, listening. A worker from a hospital came out to check
> on me, and, when I told him I was looking for a bus stop—not technically a
> question, but a little sneaky nonetheless—he pointed me in the general
> direction. He went back to work, saying mournfully, as though leaving me to
> die, “Please take care.”
>
> Blind travel requires you to think like an urban planner. Charles had taught
> me to swing my cane wide in search of a bus pole. On wide downtown blocks,
> bus stops are curbside, but on narrower streets they’re set back behind the
> grass line. Halfway up one block, I connected with a metal bench. I lifted
> my cane and hit a low roof. There was no pole, but what else could this be?
> When the bus arrived, I climbed aboard and let fly my official question:
> “How do I get to Littleton/Downtown station?” The driver told me to go to
> the end of the line, then take the light-rail. When we got to the rail
> station, I crossed the tracks, and boarded a train. In Littleton, I almost
> stepped on a person passed out on the ground. I walked back to the center,
> hearing the familiar sound of tapping canes as I arrived. An announcement
> went out that I had returned, and cheers rose up from the classrooms.
>
> The next night, I did a cooking test, making lemon-garlic kale salad and
> red-lentil soup. It took me about twice as long as it would have without
> shades, and I burned a finger. Still, I was surprised by how good it tasted.
> The students gathered around the kitchen table, and one sat on the couch;
> this arrangement would have been visually odd, but, sonically, it felt
> perfectly natural. Ernest, a member of a Black Methodist church, said that
> he thought his blindness made him more holy. “I walk by faith, not by
> sight,” he said, quoting Scripture. My classmate Steve suggested, dubiously,
> that being blind made him less susceptible to racism. He told us that he’d
> been working with a physical therapist who came from Japan, and had
> accidentally touched her cornrows and realized that she was Black—she had
> been born in Congo. Michelle, a sound engineer from Mexico, disagreed,
> saying that she didn’t think blindness made her any more “pure.” I spilled a
> cold cup of coffee into a supermarket cake, but we were all full by then
> anyway.
>
> The next morning, I flew home. As I exited the plane, sweeping my cane in
> front of me, a man asked if I needed help. I ignored him and headed toward
> the baggage claim, but he followed me, irritated, repeating, “Do you need
> any help?” I shook my head. I didn’t. I followed the sound of roller bags,
> feeling the carpet of the gate area give way to the concourse’s linoleum. I
> was halfway to the escalators before I thought of using my eyes to look
> around for an exit sign. I already knew where I was going. ♦
>
> This is drawn from “
> <https://www.amazon.com/Country-Blind-Memoir-End-Sight/dp/1984881426> The
> Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight.”
>
>
>
>


-- 
Dan Burke

National Federation of the Blind of Colorado Legislative Co-chair

President, NFB of Denver

"Blindness is not what holds you back.  You can live the life you want!"

My Cell:  406.546.8546
Twitter:  @DallDonal