[Colorado-Talk] CCB mentioned in new book

[Dan Burke]

On 7/11/23, Dan Burke <burke.dall at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>


-- 
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