[NFBC-SFV] New Yorker Magazine Essay "How to be Blind"

[JOE JR OTOOLE]

Hi All, hope everyone is staying cool during the heatwave.  Just sharing an
essay in the New Yorker magazine. 

The New Yorker

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.”

 

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?ots=1&ta
g=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50> 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.”

that 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_4Vqz7Kzy6vGyN20S6pmuSJqn3
IeK4zMfHdhhko4A/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-t
he-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?ots=1&
tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50> 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. 

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