This week, I’m eight miles closer to my goals. Eight miles, 2400 feet and three doorways that seem a little more open than they did just one week ago.
The first doorway is technological. I continue to be amazed by how many technological advances have been made in the last eleven years. When I first traded in my driver’s license for a transit pass, there were certainly many useful tools that helped the blind and visually impaired do more with their lives then sit on a street corner with a can of pencils, but the comparison between now and 2003 is staggering. A lot of it has to do with size and chipset power. There have been optical character recognition scanners for years, for example, but the idea that you can plug a miniature camera into the USB port on my laptop, snap a picture of a piece of paper and have it read it to you less than five seconds later seems, to me, well within the boundaries of science fiction. I’ve been learning Braille, mostly for the convenience of adding labels to items in my pantry and so as not to have to ask anyone for an assist when it comes to elevators and such, but the invention of a digital pen that you can touch to a label, speak the contents of what you’re labeling into the pen, and come back later to identify the label by touching the pen to it and hearing what you previously recorded based on which label you’re touching… this is powerful technology.
I met with a representative from a company called Adaptive Technology Services this past week, and what struck me most of all was the pervasive attitude in their corporate culture that somewhere, there is a technology that can be used to assist any disability or handicap. These are people who hear the words “blind video editor” and they don’t think “oxymoron.” They think “possibility.” I like that. I’ve already said that I intend to use every last rod and cone that my retina is willing to give me to tell interesting stories the way I want to tell them, and these are the people who can help make that happen.
The second doorway has to do with my own attitude. I’ve been doing more cane training, because the refresher course I took in May is not nearly enough. The need for this training put me in mind of a conversation I had with a friend of mine a few weeks ago. He was talking about a comment he heard that went something like this: if you keep running into jerks all day, you have to at least consider the possibility that you’re the jerk. I cleaned it up a bit, but that’s the general idea, and it occurred to me that there’s a message to be applied to my own life. I’ve written about how I continually seem to be coming across people with skewed perceptions and low expectations, and it seems I have to at least consider the possibility that if I keep running into these people, then perhaps I’m the one who isn’t inspiring confidence.
So when my application for continued mobility training was accepted, I was more than ready to go. I have to say… it’s not easy. Nobody wakes up with the idea that it’s going to be a party and a half to be the guy with the cane, parting the crowds on the sidewalk like Moses on the banks of the Red Sea, but the alternative of either turning oneself into a shut-in to avoid those crowds or not using the cane at all and tripping on every curb or staircase on a route is much worse. So, cane training it is.
Once again, the cliché is wrong. Turns out… you do have to sweat the small stuff. Holding the cane with your index finger on the side of the grip in order to get a good sweep. Keeping your hand and forearm relaxed instead of thrust out in front of you. Not jerking your head from side to side like a frightened jackrabbit, but using more relaxed motions to see whatever what’s left of your vision will allow you to pick up and… whether you like it or not, accepting that vision is the secondary means of evaluating your surroundings, or… at best… a tie for first. These are all subtle actions and habits that convey to others the impression you know what you’re doing. I’m very anxious to see if it helps, but my sense after these first few days of incorporating these techniques is that they are indeed making a difference. I think there will always be people on one side of the bell curve of expectations who assume that the label “disabled,” is synonymous with “helpless.” I think, though, there will also always be people on the other end of that curve… the ones who assume the highest possible outcome for anyone willing to make the effort.
That’s what leads me to the third doorway, the one that opens into the world of physical accomplishment. My friend Loren and I hit the trail again this past weekend, and we took the obligatory selfie at the top of the hike up Montero, just south of Pacifica. The third member of this most recent trek is the incorrigible Miss B…. short for Miss Behaving, of course, and she does a pretty good job of living up to her name, but I think she was as excited as I was to successfully reach the summit, enshrouded in fog or not.
The hike was a great way to gauge my progress after a month’s worth of shorter hikes, and I’m more convinced than ever that my goal of seeing the world while I still have some sight left to see it can indeed happen. The hike was a great combination of challenges. The fire trail to the top was steep – roughly eight hundred feet of elevation gain per mile – great training for endurance, and not just for me. Loren was using the hike as training for a trip to Montana later this month that’s part of a larger highpointing expedition and tackled the trail with a full pack. There was also more than enough single track trail to give me a run for my money. I’ve been trying to become more proficient in using trekking poles in place of a cane for navigation in the backcountry, and it’s finally starting to feel comfortable, with fewer missteps along the way. I’m finding that Leki poles are very reliable when it comes to both weight bearing strength and for their comfortable grips. I may still experiment with the REI brand but it looks like Leki is going to be the way to go for the technique I’m developing – left pole/right foot, right pole/left foot, each successive foot landing exactly where the same side pole had been a moment before. It’s a rhythm that is working well, at least on trails that are more than shoulder width. It’s several degrees more difficult when the trail is very narrow, and I’m not sure if one method I’m trying – placing one pole in the center of my gait followed by one foot, then one step forward with the pole and another step with the other foot, is going to work. At least the penalty for mistakes this week was only a shallow gulley and not a tumble off a ridgeline. Room for improvement, but it’s coming along.
It really does seem to be about finding a good rhythm, and that’s what I’m finding to be true about so much of this little escapade, both on the streets of San Francisco as well asin what’s remaining of my career and what I’m starting to think of as “my previous life,” and now the entire journey that’s starting to involve, at last, more and more people and partners. There’s something about the confidence bestowed by rhythm. This idea that if the next step is like the last, you get places, and you get there with style. I can’t say for sure that I look like the most confident person on the trail, or in what I sometimes call “real life,” by which I mean everything that happens off the trail. Still, I think that a good rhythm is the foundation for everything worth doing – that if you master the basic beats and steps of whatever it is you’re trying to learn, you can riff from that point on. This comes back to the old adage that you have to know what the rules are before you can break them, and I think it’s a good adage to keep in mind. Right now, I’m learning some new rhythms that are helping me play some old tunes. It’s a great pleasure to see the two fitting together so well.
