I stood waiting in the lobby for a few minutes. Soon a wiry man in heavy glasses burst from behind a door. He came at me with his open hand, as a mugger might with a fishing knife. This was a man whose hand needed shaking, and bad. So much, in fact, that he snatched mine from my side before I could offer it. Only later would it occur to me that he couldn't be sure I'd seen his greeting, so he took responsibility for the ritual. That memory is my clearest of the day. It may be the first time somebody ever approached me as a blind person.
“Hi,” he said. “Ryan, right? I'm Jimmy. I'll be your m-m-mobility instructor today.”
We'd spoken briefly on the phone, and I recognized his voice. The stutter, too.
“Today?” I asked. “Will this take more than today?”
“Just a fewâa fewâ” His stutter hamstrung him on the next word, so he changed the approach. “It won't take long,” he said.
He placed my hand on his elbow for guidance. Together we made our way through several corridors. The place seemed to be bursting at the edges. Boxes and broken chairs and the odd table crowded the hallways, stuff pushed and stacked to the sides. Maybe these obstacles would be part of
my training, I thought. I paid attention and memorized what I could. If training wouldn't take long, I'd make it take even less time.
Our final turn brought us into a stairwell that we descended, until we emerged into the bowels of the bunker. A large, open, and musty concrete basement. A few orange pylons peppered the floor, and a few large support beams interrupted the open training space. Otherwise, two men were off in a corner, one of them rhythmically tapping a cane while the other offered praise. The room was dim. I could hardly make out a thing. I only heard the two men, and I only knew of the pillars and pylons because Jimmy yanked me around them, saying, “Watch out for the pylon on your left,” or “We're passing a post on your right.” Extra letters accompanied his descriptions. I don't mean to mock them, either. The stutter remains something memorable and good. I felt more at ease because of it. We were both somewhat vulnerable and, in our own ways, hesitant.
From a rack of canes on the wall, Jimmy selected a few, measured them, and chose one that stood chest-high. He showed me how to collapse the stick into its four short segments and how the cane could be quickly reassembled with a flick of the handle, allowing the lengths to drop and the elastic cord to naturally pull the cane back into shape.
“Quick to store, quick to retrieve,” he noted. High-speed camouflage, I thought.
Next we used one of the pillars. My first lesson would be about swinging the cane for maximum defence. The cane, Jimmy explained, is held at a forty-five-degree angle to the
ground, lifted, and swung left and right. The outside edges are tapped. Don't drag or wipe. Lift and swing.
“When I step forward with my left foot,” he said, “I should be t-tapping on the right. This way I know nothing is where my right foot will g-g-go.”
Made sense to me. I tried the method out and became a walking metronome. Caning is a perpetual rhythm. You do, quite literally, walk to the beat of your own drum. A beat also involves beating on something. That was our next concern. Jimmy aligned me a good distance from a pillar and tasked me with some deliberate stick work.
“Now, I want you to cl-cl-close your eyes, no cheating with what you've got, and walk towards the post. Use your cane and st-st-stop when you tap the obstacle in front of you.”
I did as I was told, closed my eyesânot that I could see much, anywayâand walked directly towards the pillar. After a couple of steps, a more natural rhythm with the cane emerged, but I slowed. I knew something was coming. I could feel it, but not with the cane, not yet. My anticipation swung out further. It felt for what I knew must be inevitable. After a few more steps, I still hadn't connected, so I slowed down even more, breaking into a pronounced stutter-step. I worried my cane would miss the pillar, and that worry lit in me a familiar but curious sensation. Vertigo. Walking in the dark, unsure of what's to come, is closest in feeling to walking off the edge of a cliff. Each step was into nothing until I felt firm and empty ground under my foot again. The edge of the world is always the next step when you're blind.
Then Jimmy spoke with what sounded like urgency.
“S-s-sâ” he began, so I stopped. Maybe I was about to clip the pillar or trip over a pylon orâ“S-super! Keep it straight,” he said, “you're doing great! Maybe pick up the pace a bit. You'll learn to t-trust the cane after a while.”
I resumed my shuffle. Soon enough, my cane whacked the pillar. Artificial sight rattled through my hand and up my arm. From now on, that would be my way of looking. Not a subtle vibration of light but clunky, whopping frictions in my muscles. I was groping and pawing about the face of the planet, like my ancient forebears. I was primal.
“Good,” Jimmy said, “now follow my voice and we'll try the stairs.”
At the foot of the staircase he took my cane and showed me how to tap the lip of the steps as I ascended them. The sound carried a memory. I was a kid again, running a stick along a neighbour's fence. Or maybe that was a movie about a kid and a fence. Either way, the technique transformed a little boy's pleasure into a set of eyes. When the sound stops, Jimmy explained, when there's nothing left to tap, you know the next step is the final one. Then he showed me how to descend. Hold the cane parallel with the decline of the stairs, he said, and let the tip extend below. The cane connects with the ground first and tells you when the stairs finish. Again, it all made sense. Such a simple and elegant solution for the complex eye. I tried it out, and it worked. We had stairs, and we had obstacles down tight. Now it was time for the building ledges and open sewer covers.
“G-g-great,” Jimmy said. “Any questions?”
“Nope. Seems clear enough. What's next?”
“That's it. You're r-ready. Call if you have any questions.”
“That's it?” I couldn't imagine every situation solved with just those two techniques. “What about, I don't know, traffic?”
Jimmy laughed. “If you can touch it with your cane, you're too c-c-close.”
My training, in the end, took as much time from my life as morning toast. My new complex eye wasn't that complex after all. When I stepped outside, I tried my caning technique on the sidewalk. Then, feeling ridiculous for swinging it across what I knew was a clear and open path, I stuffed my stick in my backpack and caught a bus home. My cane stayed in the bag for several weeks. I had an aid, but despite its handiness, I had yet to truly take it on. That would be the next evolutionary stage, if I could make it.
The problem was this. Only after accidents or near-accidents would I think, shit, you know, I really should take that thing out of my crud bag. Maybe I'd think that after bouncing my nose off a vending machine or sitting on the lap of what I took to be an empty chair. After moments like these, I'd flirt with the idea of my cane or haul the actual stick out for a little while. But when I grew safe and confident again, back into my bag it went. I treated my mobility aid like I treated my blindness: both were occasional. Keeping them camouflaged was a temptation I couldn't resist, as long as I wasn't being outed by an accident. To really commit to the cane, something more had to give. Because I didn't always need it, I had to go one step beyond. I had to want it.
Wanting to cane is a challenge, counterintuitive as it may
sound. I may not need a cane at every waking moment, but that doesn't mean I can put it down until I say, hey, here comes another pesky phone booth, better get out the trusty old stick. Although we may be blind all the time, that doesn't mean we're always uncertain about what is around us. To keep my cane in hand I had to learn to enjoy its certainty and potential, even when neither seemed necessary. That's a difficult lesson.
Put it this way. If nobody's around, and everything is safe, how does somebody enjoy a stick? Even more difficult, how is a stick enjoyed when everybody else is watching? I think of that poor Star Wars Kid on the Internet. One day, at school, he videotaped himself playing Jedi knight. Bad idea. He made the sound effects with his lips, swung a broom handle like a light saber, and danced and battled as only a Jedi can. Then somebody outed him. Some doofus classmate came along, found the tape and, having eaten too much paste in elementary school, proceeded to upload the footage to the web. The cult following that ensued, and its mockery of the Star Wars Kid, are global.
I think I can identify, even though the scale is different. I mean, if this poor kid was the Death Star of embarrassing situations, proportionately speaking, I was the freight elevator on Level 12. I, too, felt for weeks that whenever I swung my own stick, everybody in the world caught a glimpse of me. I was playing Blind Man for the crowd. Hey, look at me! I'm acting like a guy who needs a stick. Even I don't think I need one right now, so I'll casually swing it around until it seems useful again. In effect, I'd grown so accustomed to the secrecy, the privacy, of my condition, that I wasn't prepared to be seen yet.
Denying my blindness wasn't my own job, either. Not anymore. Many faces joined in on the work. Within my shrinking tunnel vision, I glimpsed people's expressions of confusion, derision, suspicion, and surprise as I tapped past. In these faces I found too much accusation. I didn't look blind to them or blind enough, not all the time, and I still don't on occasion. What could I do, though? Stop and describe my pathology after every sidelong look? For the first few weeks, the shame was powerful enough to keep my cane in my backpack.
Eventually I nursed a small shift in perspective. Somehow I stopped looking at myself just long enough to discover the terrific and strange power I had over others. With a cane I could conjure dynamics just too wicked to put down. The awkwardness I caused some sighted people made the cane easier to hang on to while I grew accustomed to its use. I caused chaos. That was my methadone, my Nicorette gum, and my crutch. It was the cane for my cane. Here's an example.
Typical reactions to a white cane separate sighted people into several distinct groups. The most common behaviour is exhibited by a group I'll call the Stumps. They are people who, despite a wide walkway, be it a parking lot or mall or even a Canadian prairie, see a blind person approaching, perhaps a hundred yards away or a hundred feet, and then quietly wait. Instead of stepping aside or indicating their presence with some noiseâa grunt, a shriek of terror, a “Look out, I'm just ahead of you”âinstead of a simple coping technique, Stumps fix in place. They are stumped. They hope that somehow the blind person heading their way will
magically change course. Stumps seem to survive and perpetuate their useless activity only because the blind have not yet evolved enough weight or speed, like a car, to make our impact enough to wipe out the Stumps one at a time. Of course some of them feel regret. Some apologize, too, and are sincerely sorry for not moving. The apologists are Stumps who've added a moral dimension to their paralysis. They're kind but draining. Everybody feels rotten for everybody else.
My favourite people are still the Jiggers. Given a wide berth and a long, plain view of an approaching white cane, Jiggers paralyse, then boogie at the last second. They threaten to bolt left, then right, then left again, indecisive and panic-stricken, until either a direction is chosen or, more times then not, they dance in place until impact. Their dance is best described as the same one managed by all grade eight boys who can't dance. You know the moves. Their arms lock at a ninety-degree angle and swing, their fists chug up and down, and their hips sway with self-consciousness, all this to the rhythm of their own bouncity-bounce. Totally neat. Unfortunately, I think they do it in front of cars, too, so I meet fewer of these folks.
Everybody else is great. They hear and see you coming, and they go like creek water around a rock. The groups above were helpful, though. They're an example of what made a cane just too strange a thing to put down. It's too fun to cause that much trouble, too intoxicating to upset the expectations of daily, public routine. A white cane causes as much slapstick as it prevents. Whenever I felt awkward in public, I saw I wasn't alone. I wasn't the only one who had mobility issues.
My perspective changed in other, more serious, and material ways. For one thing, the world shrank. Walking along a city street, inside my own darkness, my cane keeps me focused on these few intimate points of here and now, on this little patch I swipe at. Each tap of my cane is comparable to opening an eye, a brief glance, then my eye lifts and swings, closing again, until it taps the other side, winking at this and that. My sense of the view became tactile, not colourful; immediate, not distant. Something within arm's reach.
The cane also changed my disposition. Because it concentrates me on the “here” and the “now,” I probably won't die of hypertension. Mine is a relaxing passage through space. A cane keeps the focus on what is present and in front of me. I am never in a hurry, because I don't think of “there,” only “here.” I'm interested in my next step, and I make it carefully. My pace is slow, not resentful of having a long way to go or too impatient, say, to use a crosswalk. What I tap is where I am and what I'm doing. It's nice living in the here and now. My cane made me this way, and I can't say with certainty I'd be of the same spirit without it.
The downside of caning is that, like the prey of so many millions of years ago, I'm different because I'm seen now: people recognize me as a blind man and act accordingly. I'm conspicuous, like a minor celebrity, even. I'm the blind guy around here. That can create a false sense of safety. In some respects I take less care when walking around, less caution than I did in my caneless incarnation. Before, I used to worry about both not seeing something and not being recognized as a blind man. If I walked through a crowded mall, I had to try
and move around people because I couldn't assume they'd notice me, and I couldn't assume that they would steer clear of this guy who happens to be shuffling in a funny way. Now that I have a cane, I tend to assume people see me, and they do. That's why I take more risks. Not huge ones, but risks all the same. When I step into traffic because I think it's safe, I trust my cane will stop everything. Usually it does. I hope never to be proven wrong.