In the spring a lady from the state came to our house to convince my dad to send me to a month-long skills camp at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Massachusetts. When she left, I said, “Dad, you aren’t going to make me hang out with a bunch of blind dorks for a month, are you?” I bobbed my head around in my best Stevie Wonder impression to make the point, but honestly one side of me was curious. I had been a little impressed by the pieces of equipment she had brought along to interest me in the program; she had shown us a machine that could scan the print in a book and read the words in a synthesized computer voice, another machine that identified money, and she promised that the Carroll Center boasted far more impressive gadgets than the ones she had brought. More enticing than this was the fact that I had never met other blind people my age, and I wondered if I would find them to be like me. My curiosity seemed to pull me. What sports did they play? What schools did they go to? How did they read, use their canes, and carry their lunch trays through the cafeteria?
“Do you want to go?” my dad asked.
“Maybe,” I replied, and that was good enough for him. He signed me up.
When we arrived at the center, my dad and I carried my trunk through a gazebo, into a restored old house, and up a spiral staircase to my room. The supervisor gave us a campus tour, showing me how to stay on the walkways by sliding my cane along the border between the pavement and the grass. On the campus there were beeping basketball hoops, a wood shop with Braille measuring tools, and a fencing court. “Good luck,” my dad said, shaking my hand.
In the entrance of the house I sat down on a bench next to some other arrivals. A girl to my left was speaking, but I couldn’t figure out who she was speaking to. “I got a four-point-oh GPA. I’m the smartest in my class. All the teachers say I’m very smart.” I couldn’t hear anyone in front of us or to the far left, so I figured she must be talking to me. Strange introduction, I thought. “Four-point-oh, that’s great,” I responded, turning to shake her hand. She must have seen a little because she rested her big limp hand in mine and I did the shaking. “I’m Adrian,” she said so softly I had to lean in. Another arrival sat to my right. “Hi, I’m Joey,” he said; his throat vibrated as if warming up before his words leaped off his tongue. As he spoke, his fingers tapped my wrist and made little tugs on my sleeve. “Hi, I’m Joey,” he repeated. “My name’s Joey.” His fingers tapped and tugged.
“Nice to meet you, Joey,” I said, getting up to escape. Maybe coming here was a giant mistake, I thought.
That night everyone sat in a circle, and we were asked to say our names and a little about ourselves. I sat next to a girl named Jenny who seemed to have the scoop on everyone. A voice boasted, “I’m Scott, and I’m into ham radios. Once I picked up Hawaii and once I picked up the North Pole.”
“Nerd!” Jenny whispered.
“I’m Tim, and I’m twelve and I like comic books and squirt guns.” His shrill voice made him sound much younger.
“He’s got a brain tumor,” Jenny whispered. “That’s what made him blind. They say he won’t see thirteen.”
Everyone spoke: Keith, who was into Black Sabbath; Alex, who lived near Niagara Falls and had played soccer before she started having eye trouble; Jenny, who was very popular and had lots of boyfriends; Rick, who was into professional wrestling and liked putting the cobra clutch on his little brother; Adrian, who talked about her 5.0 GPA; and Joey, who said, “Hi I’m Joey. My name’s Joey.” I wondered who he was tugging on.
After that we ordered a pizza and sat under the gazebo, waiting. Jenny wasted no time. “Does anyone want to know what I look like?”
“Sure.” Keith gave her the go ahead.
“All the boys I date say I’m cute. I have long blonde hair, a gorgeous smile, and big green eyes.”
“Sounds good to me,” Keith said.
I mostly only date older boys,” she went on. “You know, boys who can drive me places and buy me things.”
“You’re allowed to date?” Alex asked.
“Of course. Aren’t you?” said Jenny.
“No way,” Alex replied. “My parents are very religious. They say I can’t date until I’m twenty-one.”
“How do you get around and do things?” Jenny asked.
“I don’t, really. I used to ride my bike to soccer, but I can’t ride a bike anymore. It doesn’t matter, though, because I can’t play soccer either. In fact, my parents forbid me from ever saying the word, blind or even from using a cane,” she added.
“That’s great,” I said. “My parents forced me to use one.”
“When I started having trouble,” Alex continued, “they thought I was tricking them. They said that God wouldn’t do that to a family like ours. So, I walked around school, crashing into lockers and tripping over people’s books. Then, when they finally started believing me, they said I must have done something so awful in the eyes of God that I was being punished.”
“No offense,” Keith interjected, “but your parents seem really weird.” When the girls left, Keith and I immediately turned to Tim, the only partially seeing member of the group, for a rating. Despite her own claims, Jenny only got a “fair” rating, but Alex got a “babe” rating.
The next morning in computer class we sat in front of Braille tactile computer screens and voice synthesizers and learned how to create simple programs. We wrote one that would ask the subject his name, age, and birthday, and then would sing happy birthday, inserting the person’s name. It would end by telling the person how many days until his next birthday and promising to send an E-mail birthday card.
During free time we could play special computer games that were all words and sound effects. One was a fantasy game called Eamon, in which you were the hero and could choose your weaponry to fight against the goblins and trolls who lurked in the deep passageways of the castle. Carl, our blind computer instructor, had altered the game’s programming so that one of the weapons you could choose was a blind person’s cane. I’d laugh each time the dry computer voice listed the selections, “Sword? Spear? Mace? Long white cane?” and when I’d type in, “cane,” and it responded with, “The journey ahead is long and dangerous, but you are wise, blind warrior, made wise beyond your years.”
The best computer game was one we played after hours. Keith had smuggled it in. “Soft Porn,” he whispered, putting my finger on the Braille title atop the disk. “It’s black market, designed by one of the world’s most brilliant blind perverts.” In the game, you wandered through a seedy, Las Vegas-like town trying to make the move on three “lusty lasses.” Different characters would give you clues. A bum sitting on a garbage can would say, “Chicks likes flowas. Why don’t you get ‘er some?” Or a bathroom attendant would suggest, “Get my dates off the bathroom wall. Why don’t you read a few?” Or a pawnshop owner, “How ’bout this ring, pal. Sell it to you cheap. Never know, it might come in handy.” The game was full of perilous turns. For instance, if you didn’t give one girl the ring and flowers before making your move, her muscle-bound brother would dash out of the next room and beat you to a pulp with a barbell. “You are dying now . . . you are not a gentleman . . . That will teach you not to treat a lady like a . . .”
A few boys and I stayed after class that afternoon, missing dinner, playing the game late into the night. Near midnight, we finally obtained the key we had been looking for from the doorman in the lobby of the Playboy Bunny Hotel. We had to bribe him with a special pack of smokes bought from a drugstore clerk with money stolen from an underworld casino. The key got us to the roof of the building, where, according to the computer, a beautiful Playboy Pet sat in a hot tub. “Get in the hot tub,” I typed, and we all cracked up as we heard the monotone computer voice read, “Ooh aah, ooh aah, ooh baby ooh baby aah . . . game over.”
The next day in class, Carl introduced what he called “systems.” As he explained the concept, he took off his shoe and bizarrely requested each of us to feel his sock. When my fingers investigated, I noticed a safety pin running through the top of the sock. “The safety pin at the top means they’re black; placed in the middle, they’re blue, and placed at the toe, brown. Systems,” he said again, “you won’t survive without them.” For the rest of class, we learned to perform a variety of tasks by creating systems. Sometimes, the systems were far from obvious, but when we all brainstormed, we usually came up with one. I learned to open a carton of milk from the correct side, by feeling for a tiny indentation. I practiced filling a glass with juice by hanging the tip of my pointer finger over the side of the glass until the juice touched it, and with a hot drink, which would scald my finger, I learned to judge the full cup by the weight.
At the end of class, Carl even showed us how to “hear” objects. He explained, “You may not believe this, but sound vibrations are constantly bouncing off objects and then moving back to us. It’s called echolocation, or sonar. Bats have it; so do humans. Sighted people just never learn to use it.” To prove the theory, Carl had each of us walk down an empty hallway. He had closed all but one of the doors along the side of the hall. “Tell me,” he said, “when you reach the open door.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I replied, but when I walked down the hallway, I couldn’t believe it. I stopped in astonishment when the confined sound bouncing back at me, suddenly, on my right, changed to open sound. I reached my hand out right and felt the open frame of the door. “Don’t take no for an answer when you’re looking for your system,” Carl ended class by saying. “You may have to look beyond the obvious, but you’ll find it.”
Carl would probably never know how important systems would become in every aspect of my life, particularly in the mountains, when trying things no blind person had ever done before. I would look for that secret system I hoped would make the adventure safer, easier, more efficient, and sometimes, simply possible.
In our afternoon class at the Carroll Center, we sat around a table, and Carl asked us to reflect on the sighted world’s perceptions of the blind. Jenny started: “My friends didn’t think I would be able to put on my own makeup. That’s why I’m here, to prove them wrong. I can’t wait for the ‘Makeup Without Mirrors’ class.”
“Sometimes, when people find out I’m blind,” Keith said next, “they start talking really loudly and slowly. I always talk back to them in the same way, ‘READ . . . MY . . . LIPS . . . I’M . . . NOT . . . DEAF, . . . I’M . . . BLIND, . . . OK?’”
“I hate it when a waiter says, ‘What will he be having?’” Tim said shrilly, and Scott jumped right in, “Or when you pay for something, and the cashier puts your change in your friend’s hand.”
“Isn’t it interesting,” Carl said, “that the problem isn’t always blindness, but all the false assumptions surrounding blindness, and that includes your own. Once, a lady wanted to ask me how long I had been blind, but she was too afraid to use the word, blind. Maybe, she thought that blindness was a kind of demon and just the mere mention of the word might give it the power to rise up and crush my spirit. So, instead she asked, ‘How long have you been a person of sightlessness?’ For some of you, blindness is still a demon, waging a war inside you, but if you can accept blindness for what it is, and lay it to rest, if you give it a place and make it a part of you, like having brown hair or green eyes or being tall or short, then the demon will wither away and it will die.”
At the end of class Carl told us that on weekends we’d make field trips to Boston museums and to a Red Sox game, sailing on the Charles River, tandem biking on Cape Cod, hiking and horseback riding in Vermont, and most intriguing to me, a rock-climbing weekend in North Conway, New Hampshire. The motivation behind the recreational program was clear. The lady who had first visited me at my house had asked me what my hobbies were, and I had told her that except for wrestling, I didn’t have any. I had signed up for a school wood shop and an art elective, but the wood shop teacher was nervous because the class worked with saws and planers, and the art teacher was nervous because his class worked with X-Acto knives. So, I had been turned down for both, due to “liability issues.” I was also restricted from PE because they mostly played ball sports. Fortunately, however, I had found wrestling, but I knew most blind kids my age weren’t so fortunate. The Carroll Center teachers had wanted to create opportunities for blind teenagers to enjoy the outdoors, take some calculated risks, and to push themselves a little further than they might otherwise. Although these reasons alone would have been enough, I think their motives were even deeper. “The human circuitry is all connected,” Carl said to us. “If you can learn to push your body, your brain isn’t far behind.”
For our first activity, we went swimming at the local YMCA. We played freeze tag, and I was constantly looking for a chance to free Alex. When I got near her, she whispered, “Over here.” When I freed her, I touched her shoulder and felt her satiny swim strap against her skin and as she turned to escape, her long, thick, wet hair brushed against my face. Halfway through the game, Jenny changed the rules so that a person could only be freed by a teammate swimming through that person’s legs. When I swam through Alex’s legs, brushing by her smooth calves, I was close to sensory overload.
During the tag games, Keith would sit on the side of the pool, idly slapping his hands against the concrete.
“What’s up?” Alex asked. “Don’t you want to play with us?”
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” he admitted. “You see, my parents, they don’t allow me to put my head under the water. They say that if I go under the water, I’ll get disoriented and won’t know which way is up.”
“So, you’ll drown?” I asked, confused.
“That’s what they think,” he replied.
“Well, what do you think?” Alex asked.
“How should I know?” he said. “I’ve never put my head under the water.”
“Well, let’s find out,” she said, grabbing his arm and pushing off the wall with her leg. Keith laughed. “No, no, I can’t!” but he was already falling into the water and splashing beside Alex. Their laughter became muted as their heads went under. When they emerged, Keith was still laughing. “It isn’t true,” he screamed. “It’s a conspiracy. I’ve been lied to.” And that started Alex laughing again. She could somehow fix things in such a natural way. Treading water nearby, I wished I had a phobia that Alex could help me overcome.
At meals, everyone hung their canes by the door of the cafeteria. I guess the staff felt that fifty blind people in a confined space, holding trays and swinging their canes, was a recipe for disaster. We stayed in the lunch line by trailing our feet along a tactile strip, but I got used to the gentle bump of a body against my back or the brush of a hand across my leg. In a sighted world, this might have been considered sexual harassment, but at a blind camp an occasional touch was a tolerated part of life. Even Alex would break the codes of the sighted world. She would lean in when she talked to me, far past boundaries of personal space, her nose only a few inches from mine. I knew she was just trying to see my face, and I was thankful her weak eyes could not detect a zit, or a possible piece of lettuce caught in my front teeth.
After lunch Keith broke out his big boom box and jammed Black Sabbath tunes. “Do you hear that awesome rhythm guitar underneath the base?” Keith shouted.
“Oh, yeah,” the other boys replied enthusiastically.
“What about that incredible drum set under the electric guitar?”
“Definitely,” they replied again. I seemed to be the only blind person in the room who couldn’t hear anything he pointed out. I tried to discern one instrument from another, trying to separate the electric guitars from the bass, from the drums, but they all merged together in a hodgepodge of blaring sound. “I love these lyrics,” Keith said. “He’s singing about when he went through drug rehab in ’72,” and all the boys would listen intently.
“Wow! That’s powerful.”
“That’s deep.”
“Did you hear that?” Keith asked grandly. “It’s a metaphor. He’s really the caterpillar crawling up the tin can.”
Being musically inclined was supposed to go hand and hand with blindness. It was supposed to be part of the package deal. You were born with the tragedy of blindness, but you were also given the gift of music to carry you through the sadness. You were supposed to play the piano or sing with perfect pitch, but someone had forgotten to bless me with the gift. I couldn’t even appreciate music, the only blind guy in the world who had no idea why the caterpillar was crawling up the tin can.
The music seemed to work the boys into a frenzy. Tim jumped around playing the air guitar and boys competed against each other in elaborate drum solos. Keith pounded his hands furiously on the table, his hands getting faster and faster, working toward the climax. Then, with one last whap on the table, he ended, saying breathlessly, “Top that!” and another boy began even more furiously.
The next day we went on a field trip to a Boston Red Sox game. For the ride to the park, I squeezed into the back hatch of the camp station wagon between Rick and Scott, who were both partially sighted, or as the teachers at the center termed, “partials.” Since I was totally blind, I was termed a “total.” It seemed as though Scott and Rick’s testosterone levels were linked in some way to their level of vision. How much they could see became a ferocious competition.
“Can you see the telephone pole?” Rick asked. “What color is it?”
“No!” Rick shot back hotly. “It’s gray, doofus.”
“What about that pickup?” Scott asked.
“Where?” Rick asked.
“Right in front of your nose, bonehead,” Scott replied fiercely.
It was like a blind version of Beavis and Butt-Head.
Rick—What color’s that guy’s hair on the sidewalk?
Scott—Brown?
Rick—You’re lying, jerk-off. You just guessed.
When we finally arrived at Fenway Park, I was glad to escape from the two battling partials. One part of me laughed at their ridiculous rivalry, but another part of me envied them. They had both bought into the subtle messages that sight meant power, and I was forced to admit that I had too. I had noticed it even at a camp for the blind, the way a partial would lead a group of totals through the campus to class or the way a total girl would show immediate interest in a boy after learning he was a partial. I had even felt the hierarchy on a group hike when totals were forced to hold a section of a long thick rope, while partials were allowed to walk along the side. I felt like a dork, trailing along on a leash while Alex walked solo. I hadn’t wanted to cause a scene, though, so I took a subtle approach, barely acknowledging the rope’s existence by only brushing my fingertips against it and frequently lifting my arm to stretch or yawn. When one of the sighted teachers scolded me for letting go, I replied casually, “Oh! The rope! I’m having such a great time talking to Alex, I completely forgot about it.”
Inside the park, I maneuvered myself next to Alex and managed to sit next to her in the stands. Thankfully, we were a few rows away from the others. Sitting next to her, though, I was consumed by the thought that she wouldn’t like me because I couldn’t see. I wouldn’t be able to tell her how the batter looked as he whacked one out of the park with the bases loaded or what had happened on the giant stadium video screen to make everyone howl in hysterics. Then I had an idea, a surefire way to impress Alex, despite the fact that I was a total. In my backpack was my Walkman. Quietly I pulled it out and slid it into my front pocket, running the long cord of the headphones to my ear farthest from Alex. I subtly tuned the radio to the game play-by-play. I hoped Alex couldn’t see the small plug protruding from my ear.
“This is silly,” she said. “I can barely see the field.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a walking encyclopedia when it comes to baseball stats. Yep!” I said importantly. “What would we do without America’s greatest pastime?”
“I don’t believe you,” Alex laughed.
“Oh, yeah!” I challenged, and then proceeded to parrot everything the radio announcers said, even if I had no idea what it meant. “Wade Boggs is first in the lineup today. He’s batting three twelve and is second highest in the league in sacrifice bunts.” For the entire game, I bar-raged Alex with a fantastic array of facts, all taken from the radio’s commentary. “Wow!” I roared. “A bat-splitting grounder. It sounds like a worm burner. That’s when the ball rolls all the way to the fence.”
“How would you know that?” Alex asked.
“By the way the bat sounds. It takes years of practice to identify that sort of thing.” Alex didn’t respond. I knew she had to be impressed, but I worried she might be getting a little suspicious. I told myself to tone it down a little, but I couldn’t resist. “Johnson loves to steal bases. I bet ya he’ll try to steal second,” and even before I finished my sentence, the crowd was standing and going wild, because, would you believe it, Johnson had just stolen second.
Near the end of the game, a strange thing happened. Out of the blue, a large beach ball landed in my arms. “What the . . .?” I said.
“What a nice present,” Alex said.
“What should I do with it?” I asked her.
“If a beach ball fell out of the heavens into my lap, I’d keep it,” she replied.
On the field one of the players, an obstinate pitcher perhaps, must have been stalling, refusing to throw the ball, because a few fans, and then a few more, began screaming, “Throw the ball, jerk!”
“Why don’t you throw it, stupid?”
As I found the plug in the beach ball and pulled it out, air whistling through the hole, the crowd was growing even angrier with the stubborn player on the field. The sound of their protests rose in an ear-splitting crescendo. I wouldn’t want to be in that guy’s shoes, I thought. Why didn’t he just throw the ball? I imagined the cocky pitcher bounding up and down the field, holding the ball up smugly in his hands, taunting the jeering fans.
I laid the beach ball in my lap and leaned down on it with my chest. It whistled louder and began to sag. Maybe I’d give it to Alex after the game.
This lunatic on the field was about to be pummeled by fifty-thousand irate fans. Even the announcers, in my Walkman, were getting into it. “Who’s this joker think he is?”
“I don’t know, Rodge, but he seems to be making a real spectacle of himself.” Then the person in the seat right behind me, yelled in my ear, “Throw it, moron!” and, with shrinking horror, it dawned on me, as fiery-hot needles shot through my skin. The joker, the spectacle, the moron were one and the same. They were all me. In times of trouble, we instinctively turn to the ones who we have faith will protect us. “Alex!” I pleaded.
“You better throw it!” is all she said.
The once round firm ball had become a jellyfish between my palms. I stood up and heaved it away to a cacophony of insults.
“Loser!”
“Freak!”
“Throw the little bum out!”
Escaping quickly down the handicap elevators, Alex, judging I had paid sufficiently for my trickery, explained the Boston tradition, “In the seventh inning stretch, someone throws out a beach ball and the fans pass it around the stadium. I thought everyone knew that, especially you, a walking encyclopedia.”
“A baseball encyclopedia,” I replied huffily, “not a beach ball encyclopedia.”
That night, everyone crowded tightly into Alex’s room to listen to a continuation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary on tape. Bodies lay on the beds, the chairs, and all over the floor. I was still smarting over the beach ball incident. During the most terrifying part, when the little devil child crept down the hallway toward his father’s room, wielding a scalpel, I inched on my belly across the floor, moving slowly, so that the partials wouldn’t pick up on the movement. I weaved through bodies, using their shuddering murmurs as a guide. Lying at the foot of Alex’s bed, I waited for the little boy to lift the scalpel to his father’s throat. Then I reached up, finding Alex’s ankle dangling over the side of the bed, and locked on. I let out a fierce growl, and, in response, she let out a high-pitched screech. Her leg shot up and her body bounced around on the bed. Then everyone was screaming and the screams were compounding. I lay on my back on the floor smiling. Mission accomplished.
The next afternoon I was walking up the spiral staircase after class when I heard Alex’s voice on the landing above me.
“Where’s your scalpel, devil child?” she asked, her voice drifting between annoyance and playfulness.
“I left it in the throat of my last victim,” I said, but as the words came out, I could feel a thick cool liquid dripping on my head and sliding down my forehead. My hands jumped to my head and touched shaving cream.
Alex giggled. “Oh, yeah, and I heard about the sick little game you boys were playing. Soft Porn,” she scoffed, and then bounded up the stairs. I chased behind, but her head start was too great. I imagined her long muscular legs leaping away. I wandered up and down the hallway, listening for a rustling behind a door or a slight giggle, but heard nothing. Then, I knocked on Tim’s door. “Want to be my first lieutenant?” I quickly asked.
“Yeah,” he answered excitedly before even knowing his assignment. He followed me into the bathroom where we crumpled up toilet paper into balls and wet them under the sink. “They’re called soggies,” I said.
“Cool!” Tim replied as I plopped one in his hand.
“If you find her, don’t let her know. Just come get me,” I ordered. Prowling down the hall, I heard a noise in front of me. Not having time to react, I chucked the wet ball of paper and heard the splat. “Uh, gross! Totally gross!” I heard Jenny’s whine. Adrian, behind her, peered over her shoulders, her dim eyes straining. “Erik? Erik?” A wad of paper shot past my shoulder and exploded on Adrian.
“They’re called soggies!” I heard Tim yell shrilly from behind me.
Soon Jenny and Adrian were both prowling through the hallway, their hands crammed with gobs of sticky wet paper. Others opened their doors and were greeted with splatters, and the halls became filled with a barrage of speeding wet missiles. There seemed to be no strategies, goals, or teamwork. Any flicker of movement generated a half dozen gooey balls hurling in that direction. The fresh splat of toilet paper against bare flesh fed the participants. In the midst of the battle, Tim grabbed my arm. “I think I saw her in the closet. Over here.” His voice was extra shrill with excitement. I filled a pitcher of water from the sink, softly stepped inside the room, and shut the door. I pretended to look around. Then, I moved to the closet, bent over, and felt through the empty shoes lying on the floor. Soon, my fingers felt a pair of sneakers that were more filled out, and running my hands up them, felt a pair of ankles. “If I didn’t know any better I would think someone’s standing in these.” That made Alex giggle and she leaped over me, dashing toward the door. I was ready with the water. It splashed over the back of her head as she groped for the door handle. Then we were both laughing as she turned around to face me, grabbing for the pitcher. Then we were tumbling on the floor, both wrestling for the pitcher. I could smell the sweet clean fragrance of her soap and could feel her breath against my cheek.
Abruptly, the door slammed open and Carl’s voice was bellowing, “What the blazes is going on up here?” and, “What is it that I’ve been stepping in?” Thank God, he was blind himself and couldn’t see the two of us tussling around on the ground. We stood up quickly and were marched out into the hallway. Others were slowly emerging from their hiding places. For the next two hours as I, along with the others, scraped wet toilet paper bits off the floors, walls, and even the ceiling, I wore the whisper of her breath against my skin.
The last four days of camp were devoted to the anticipated rock-climbing outing. On the van ride to New Hampshire I tried to imagine myself scaling a vertical slab of rock. I pictured the granite surface as smooth and straight as the walls in my room. I wondered how my body could stay stuck to its surface. Climbing a rock face seemed dangerous and risky and defied reason, and because of these elements, I was immediately attracted. I would be doing something that normal people wrote off as crazy.
On the trail to the base of the climb I raced Alex, swinging my cane furiously in front of me, Alex running hard for a moment and then stopping to get her bearings. Her long legs won out in the end, and she touched the rock face first.
When everyone arrived, Nick, our instructor, gathered us around and fitted us with gear. The small clearing became a chaotic mass of tussling bodies with flying elbows and knees as each of us wrestled with harnesses, helmets, and climbing shoes.
“Is my harness on backwards?”
“These rock shoes are killing my feet.”
“This helmet keeps falling over my eyes.”
“What does that matter, idiot?”
Then Nick familiarized us on how to belay our partner as he climbed by running the rope through a tiny metal device called an ATC and how to secure our harnesses to the rope with a special climbing knot called a figure eight. Finally we were ready. Nick explained, “When I climb, I scan the rock with my eyes. I look up, searching for potential holds, chalk marks, places to rest. I honestly don’t know whether it will work, but your hands and feet and ears will have to become your eyes. You’ll have to scan your hands across the rock and listen for instructions from your partner.”
We sat on the ground, cheering each person on as they climbed. I got pretty nervous when Jenny only made it a few feet off the ground before she got freaked out and wanted to come down. When it was my turn, I stood up and tied the knot to my harness the way Nick had shown. I touched the rock. It wasn’t quite as smooth and straight as I had imagined but it was still intimidating and thrilling to get off the ground. This first climb was what Nick called a “friction climb,” sloping smoothly up at a sixty-degree angle. The holds were practically nonexistent, just rounded polished bulges and shallow concave dishes, but the angle was moderate enough that I could rest my palms against the curved holds for balance while I centered my weight over the sticky rubber soles of my climbing shoes, which enabled me to step gingerly up the face. As I worked higher, I gained momentum and confidence and toward the top, was practically running up the slab. Nick yelled up excitedly, “Alright, monkey boy!” My heart was pounding; the cool mountain air bit deep into my lungs. My calves, forearms, and fingertips were charged with life; most of my face was taken up by a giant toothy smile. Chuck Yeager could not have been more exhilarated when he broke through the sound barrier, and as Nick lowered me down on the rope, I was already anticipating, with nervous energy, moving to the next level.
For my second climb Nick said, “This is a steeper route than the last. Friction won’t be enough to hold you to the rock.” I found the angle of the first ten feet as moderate as the first, but then I stopped as the angle abruptly steepened, my legs, chest, and cheek pressed up against a sheer face, which wanted to shove my body over backwards. I had no clue how I would propel my body to the top, hanging by the strength of my fingers and toes; the idea of it was laughable. As Nick had said, my hands were my eyes, but at least on the ground, I was free to take time to feel around and investigate my world. On the wall, however, I felt trapped. My desperate grip was the only thing locking me to the rock face, and if I let go to feel around, I would surely fall.
Nick told me to move left and, as I inched delicately in that direction, my hands fell into a narrow vertical crack. I jammed a foot and hand into it and tried to pull myself up, but the rock in my face kept pushing me back. After a few tries I turned my body sideways and began moving up the crack painstakingly slow. Soon the crack narrowed even more, and I moved right onto the face. “There’s a big knob a little above your left hand,” Nick called.
My hand flopped around the rock frantically. No knob.
“Reach higher.”
“Here?” I yelled, one foot turned sideways on a microscopic pebble, my other wedged painfully in a pocket.
“That’s not a knob. Keep feeling left . . . Three inches more . . . That’s more like three feet . . .”
“Here? . . . Here? . . . Here?” Eventually I made it to the top, but I spent the majority of the time resting on the rope with my burning forearms dangling at my sides.
By the end of the third day, I was finally learning to accurately locate the holds that Nick directed me toward. Nick’s instructions seemed to be the only difference between panicking and finding a hold. So on the last day, when he stopped giving us directions, I was annoyed. Nick insisted though, “This sport is all about self-reliance, about moving upward under your own power. To be independent, you’re going to have to find your own way up the rock.”
That morning, I hung from a precarious finger pocket, with one foot slowly losing grip on a sloping ledge, knowing that if I didn’t find the next hold within seconds, I would fall. I needed to find something, anything, but the face was so massive, a hold could be hiding anywhere. At first my hands and feet leaped and flailed around the face, just hoping to get lucky and find something. At least a dozen times, as I struggled up the face, I couldn’t find anything and fell back against the secure rope. My arms were more exhausted than after a wrestling match. When I was about to fall, my natural reaction was to panic, but I forced myself to scan my hands and feet steadily and systematically across the rock face. I stretched my limbs as far as they would reach, scanning above, below, and beside me for that hidden “thank god” hold, just at the edge of my reach. As I got a few feet higher, I decided to work the face using a grid pattern, forcing my hand to slide and not to jump across, so that it would cover every inch of the rock. I also began to realize that if I could train my feet to find the holds that my hands just discarded, I’d save myself half the work. Toward the top, as my forearms burned and my fingers began to feel limp, just when I thought I couldn’t hold on a second longer, I’d find a hold, maybe not the best one, but enough to keep me sticking to the face a few seconds longer, enabling me to claw my body up a few more inches.
Since I couldn’t “see” beyond the reach of my hands, planning my route up the face seemed impossible. Earlier, I had reached dead ends where the face seemed to go suddenly blank. As I hung on, Nick coached, “Follow the clues in the rock. A rough broken section might lead to a crack, a shallow groove to a deeper groove. A crack might disappear and resume just an arm’s length away.” I was realizing that the beauty of climbing was to join the incongruent parts, to link the cracks, grooves, bowls, nubbins, knobs, edges, ledges, and pockets and convert all of it into a road map, etched in my mind.
So, by thrashing, groping, and bloodying the rock, I worked my way up the face, and despite the difficulty, I had powered my body up a piece of rock that seemed impossibly foreign to a horizontal world. At the top I sat on a pocket-shaped ledge with my palms flat against the rock and my legs dangling over the side. I was overwhelmed by the sensation of the mountain, by the wind at my back, by the brilliant textures in the rock, the intermittent patterns of coolness and heat under my touch. It was as though my senses had awakened. Every sound, smell, and touch was so vivid, so brilliant, it was almost painful. Blindness, I thought, was an incredible nuisance. It had definitely made climbing more difficult, forcing me to climb in a different way than most, but it hadn’t stopped me from doing it, or even, loving it. Never again would I thunder down a basketball court on a fast break or jump a dirt bike over a ramp; the past was dead, and no matter how much I fought, there was no reclaiming the dead. But one hundred feet above tree line with the sun in my face and a sound of openness all around me, none of that seemed to matter as much, because, I had just discovered, I could climb.
After the long day of climbing we came home to the cabin we had been sharing in the woods. We played Braille Trivial Pursuit and talked about our experiences. It was unanimous: everyone had a blast, even Jenny, who at first was so freaked out, she had stopped talking for a while, a rarity for her. At the end of the day she had even rappelled down the side of the rock face, clutching the rope with what Nick had described as the “white-knuckle death grip,” but she had done it. “That was like, so amazing. I can’t believe it. I broke a fingernail, but I did it.” Alex and I walked outside and climbed up on a sloping boulder. We sat silently for a while, and then Alex asked, “What do you miss the most now that you’re blind?”
“Nothing!” I said at first, not wanting my mind to linger in the past.
“There must be something you miss,” she persisted. Then, I gave into it and let my mind wander through my sighted life. Riding my bike to the reservoir and down along the Glen in the summer, sprinting full bore across a field—I weighed the possible responses. Then I came upon it: faces. “I miss people’s faces,” I said. “I miss looking into people’s eyes, and I miss seeing their expressions change from sad to happy, from anger to laughter.”
“Do you wonder what I look like?” she asked, and without waiting for me to respond, said, “You can feel my face.”
I laughed. “Blind people only do that in movies,” I said, but I reached out despite myself, tentatively touching her cheekbones, lips, nose, forehead; but my mind couldn’t seem to assemble the pieces into a coherent picture. Her face kept coming out as a cartoon image. I couldn’t tell whether she was visually beautiful anyway, so I gave up and clung to the things I could understand, the things I could touch and hear and smell. Those were enough. They were all I needed: the music of her laugh, the brush of her hair across my cheek, the fragrance of her clean skin, the whisper of her breath.
“I wish you could see me,” she said again.
“I can,” I uttered and leaned forward. She must have leaned forward too, because my lips touched hers. We kissed for a long time and, later, she lay with her head in my lap and we listened to the crickets and the faraway hoot of owls.
After I got home I made a tape for Alex. I had my friends tell jokes into the recorder. Some I had to edit, because I didn’t think they’d go over too well with her religious parents. Then I made up little skits involving Keith, Jenny, Tim, and the others and performed all their voices. And lastly I took a chance and told her that her going blind wasn’t her fault; that God wasn’t punishing her, because I didn’t think God worked like that. I had thought it too, that life was a punishment, made up of only losses. “Yeah, he takes things away,” I said into the speaker, “but he gives other things back and, in a strange way, those new things can be just as good or even better. I think you just have to look for the new things a little harder.”