Beyond the Bear (24 page)

The one who made the most difference was my tutor Andy Page, an assistant professor at UAA’s College of Education, who volunteered his time and used a hands-on, kinesthetic approach to help me “see” the histograms, bell curves, and other graphics I needed to grasp. He would explain things, then have me put a finger on my computer screen, and with his hand guiding mine, trace the lines and curves. I had to convince him I had 100 percent comprehension of each concept before we’d move on to the next, and he wouldn’t be convinced until I knew it well enough to explain it back to him. He held me to a high standard, but he was also tuned into signs of cognitive overload—my restlessness, lockjaw, and deep sighs—and would end our sessions before reaching the point of diminishing returns. Day after day, night after night I kept at it. Finally, things started to click.

My statistics instructor, Linda L.D. Smith, proctored my quizzes and exams so she could see how I did my work. She would read me the questions, and I would work through them with my recorder, talking calculator, and talking software on my laptop. I did lousy on my first weekly quiz, a little better on my second, pretty good on my third, great on my fourth. By the time midterms came along, I walked out of my testing session knowing I’d nailed it. My grades climbed out of the gutter and kept going up.

At the end of the semester, Amber and I kept checking Blackboard, UAA’s password-accessible website, in an obsessive-compulsive way waiting for final grades to post. Amber found it first.

“Damn, Dan, you did it. You passed, all right. You got an A.”

“Wahoo!” I hollered with a fist pump. “That’s one big, fat boo-yah!” (an endearing term I’d picked up from Jaha).

I immediately called my parents in Carmel. Next, I called Andy to thank him profusely for his commitment to helping me. He got all choked up.

“You sure do deserve it for all the hard work you did,” he told me. “Your perseverance and discipline blew me away. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more determined student.”

When I received the letter from UAA informing me that I’d been accepted into graduate school, I felt battle-ready. Finding my way well enough to ace statistics gave me the confidence I needed to get through my master’s program, plus a two-year internship as a clinical social worker. Three years after I walked into the wrong classroom my first day of school, I came out the other side with not only a master’s degree, but a 4.0 grade point average.

During the graduation ceremony at UAA’s Wendy Williamson Auditorium, a burst of applause came as each name was called. When my turn came, I took hold of a classmate’s elbow and we walked across the stage to pick up my diploma. I’m not sure if people knew me as that-guy-who-got-blinded-by-a-bear, or whether just seeing someone who was blind getting his master’s degree was what sparked the enthusiasm, but the applause was exceptionally vigorous and kept going and going. I nearly lost it. I later heard from Amber that many audience members stood and that some were in tears. Andy Page was among them.

Hearing that bedrock of support from the community, I knew my days of fearing failure were over. I would never again visit the graveyard of who I’d been before.

CHAPTER 21

Blind Date with a Dog

The white cane has its advantages, none I appreciate more than
its lack of a bladder. Finding my way by cane can be inelegant and slow, sometimes maddeningly so. But a cane doesn’t have to be taken outside to relieve itself multiple times a day in a city where temperatures and wind chill factors make a mockery of winter coats and barge right through to your bones. A white cane would never succumb to a spontaneous bout of diarrhea in a hotel elevator. Nor would it zero in on the Minnesota Twins home-run baseball my future father-in-law had given me and mistake it for a chew toy.

Nevertheless, after white-caning it for more than two years, I got a call from Guide Dogs for the Blind notifying me that I had a dog waiting down in Oregon. Off I went to doggie boot camp, fifteen hours a day, six days a week, four weeks straight, to learn how to drive one of these prodigious animals. Leaving Amber for a month would be tough. With our wedding fast approaching, we’d just bought a house and had our celebratory, new-homeowner pizza on the floor the night before I left.

My family had first looked into guide dogs while I was still in the hospital, but I wouldn’t begin to qualify until I had a handle on travel by cane. The privately funded, nonprofit Guide Dogs for the Blind, one of several such organizations, provides dogs for free to people who are blind or legally blind as long as they meet certain criteria, among the most important being a fondness for dogs. Each dog represents hundreds of hours of work and commitment, from the volunteer breeders and puppy raisers to the professional, licensed trainers. These Rhodes Scholars of the canine world are eager to do their jobs. The organization doesn’t want them going to people more inclined to bond with a couch than a dog.

After moving back to Alaska, I filled out an application that included the question, “What is the cause of your blindness?” The online version of that inquiry was followed by an auto-list of more than ninety possible responses, and “mishap with bear” wasn’t one of them. Next came an hour-long telephone interview, followed by a home visit to evaluate my competence for taking on such a dog—my personality, home life, activity level, and mobility independence since one thing guide dogs can’t do is consult Google Maps to chart out routes. As a team, the dog is the pilot and you’re the navigator. The woman doing the evaluating watched me cane about my neighborhood and around campus
while assessing my skills and the safety of my routes.

I got a second home visit a few months later to see how I’d do with an imaginary dog called Juneau. The trainer played the dog by pulling on the dog end of the harness while I held onto the handle. Booking along at more than twice the speed I was used to walking with a cane didn’t come as a complete surprise. Test-driving someone else’s dog is kind of a no-no, but I was curious, so back in California I had tried out a friend’s guide dog on a short, straight stretch of sidewalk. When I told that dog “forward,” he forwarded so fast, he just about forwarded me right out of my flip-flops.

During this visit, the trainer also checked out the consummate Maya, who got along with every dog she’d ever met, and the insubordinate Hobbit, who could be a real ass. I was too forthcoming about his personality defects. Hobbit was territorial around food and would clobber Maya upon occasion if she got between him and even a chili pepper dropped on the floor. I got a follow-up phone call over that. Hobbit had been flagged as a potential problem.

“If bullying becomes an issue between Hobbit and your guide dog, would you be willing to re-home Hobbit?”

I about dropped the phone. My answer to that wasn’t no, it was hell no, although I’m sure I said it nicer. Hobbit was Amber’s dog, and they came as a package. She’d picked him up her first summer in Alaska on a hitchhiking trip down the Kenai Peninsula. He was a cute puppy then. And he was free. By the time his delinquent side emerged, it was too late; she was committed. Apparently being unwilling to part with the dope wasn’t a deal breaker because the next call I got informed me that I was in.

Although Guide Dogs for the Blind is headquartered in San Rafael, California, I did my handler training at the organization’s Oregon campus southeast of Portland in a town called Boring, named after an early settler who I assume did not live up to his name. I had some idea what to expect, but there’s so much more to bringing a guide dog into your life than knowing which end goes into the harness. A guide dog alters the way you interact with the world, since the type of information you get through a harness is much different than through a cane. A cane gives you sounds and textures and shapes. Something that goes
ping
at the tip of the cane creates a mental picture, as does something that goes
thud
like a sack of rocks. When all obstacles in a room are accounted for, you can create a map inside your head. Copy machine here, unidentified sack-of-rocks thing there. Canes provide a tactile connection between you and your environment, which you don’t get with a dog since a dog will guide you around obstacles. You don’t know if you just avoided a fallen tree branch or a drunk passed out on the sidewalk. Not that lack of such detail is problematic; it’s just different. Most of the time you just want to get where you’re going. With a dog, instead of moving through the world like a pinball, you move through the world like someone who knows exactly where he’s headed.

At the training center, my cohorts ranged from an auto mechanic to a mother of two, all blinded by something from that list of ninety-plus ways. What we had in common was we’d all fallen down stairs, had talked to trees after people wandered away without notice, and had felt up strangers by accident. Once, reaching for a car-door handle, I’d goosed Amber’s sister, Lynsey, so badly she shrieked and went airborne. Some of us liked to laugh; others had forgotten how. My roommate told creepy infidelity stories and refused to shut the bathroom door when he peed, which, at six in the morning, sounded like he was relieving himself beside my head. That alone made it a long month.

We spent our first
week dogless while we learned the basics—how to care for a dog, how to talk to a dog, and how to read a dog’s mind. We worked with dogs, not our own, so we could get the hang of it and feel the communication that takes place through the harness. From day one we worked on trust. If you don’t trust your dog the marriage is doomed.

Guide dogs are almost scary smart, some smart enough to tell whether the person holding the harness is blind or just pretending to be. If it’s the latter, they can get lazy. “Oh, come on, you’re not blind. Gimme a break.” Guide dogs are smart enough that trainers sometimes have to do their work blindfolded.

They’re also smart enough to exercise “intelligent disobedience.” They’re programmed to listen and obey, but if I’m standing on a sidewalk and tell my dog “forward,” but going forward would put me in the path of a runaway hotdog cart, that dog is not going to budge. “Nope, I’m not doing that,” he’d inform me. If he sees me about to be creamed by a car or some kid on a skateboard, he’ll pull me backward or yank me off to the side. My job is to take his word for it, because guide dogs are first and foremost dogs, and a dog is just as interested in saving its own skin as mine.

At the end of the first week, Dog Day finally arrived, the day we’d receive the dogs that would be going home with us. All I knew was that mine was a black Labrador retriever named Chandler. The trainers asked us to leave our doors propped open that afternoon, and one by one they brought us our dogs, our free, eighty-thousand-dollar dogs. I sat in my room anxiously waiting my turn, listening to the sounds of toenails clacking against linoleum and students going giddy down the hallway as they met their matches. The toenails worked their way closer. I sat on the edge of my bed, tapping my feet. More toenails. More shrieks of joy. A playful woof. Then I heard panting and a commotion at my door. My dog had arrived, the dog that would be my conjoined twin. In he trotted, his unruly tail thumping each side of the doorjamb as he entered my room all bonkers to meet somebody new.

“Dan, this is Chandler,” the trainer said. “He’s a good lookin’ boy, and quite the talker. Aren’t you, Chandler?” She handed me his leash. “He’s all yours, and vice versa. Spend some time getting to know each other. We’ll meet up in about an hour to take the dogs out, and then we’ll get back to work.”

Once she left, I got down on the floor. Chandler put his front paws on my shoulders and proceeded to give my face a bath. He felt lean and long-legged, with a streamlined snout. I held his head in my hands, scratched his velvety ears, kissed his forehead, and got a bonk on the nose.
Woooo-woo,
is what he had to say about it. It took me all of thirty seconds to fall in love with that dog.

“Chandler, you and I are going places,” I told him. “Sure hope you like to go fishing.”

He whapped his tail hard against the floor, which I took to mean, “How soon can we go?”

We spent the rest of our free time together on the floor playing fetch and tug-of-war and knock-the-blind-guy-over-and-pounce-on-his-head. And then with me lying on my belly, turning my head from one side to the other, back and forth, back and forth, we played a game I called escape-from-the-killer-face-licker.

Chandler was the perfect dog for me, enthusiastic, but chill and mellow when he needed to be, a real Joe Cool. A black dog with a white patch on his chest, he looked like he was dressed in a tuxedo, I was told. Amber and I would be getting married a month after he and I got home, and I imagined him wearing a bow tie at the wedding.

I’ll never forget the first time we crossed a street together. With a trainer standing by, I listened for the sound of traffic braking as the light went from green to yellow to red, then vehicles slowing to a stop. When all was still I gave the command: “Okay, Chandler, forward.”

We stepped off the curb in unison, and off we went without hesitation in a perfectly straight line, past the lineup of idling vehicles, across the sun-baked asphalt, until Chandler stopped to show me we were at the opposite curb, and then we stepped up together. Right there on the sidewalk, I got down on my knees, wrapped my arms around his neck, buried my face in his fur, and cried. That was the moment it really sank in, the profound difference this dog was going to make in my life.

My elation was short lived. I loved Chandler, and as far as I could tell the feeling was mutual. Off duty, he’d get so excited he’d make that
woooo-woo
sound of his, a sound I’d never heard any dog make. At night he’d try to crawl into bed with me, and when I’d sit on the floor he’d climb into my lap. But on duty, he wasn’t feeling it; he seemed mopey and distracted. For whatever reason, he wasn’t motivated to work for me. He let me know this right off the bat during an early training session inside a mall. We were headed down one side, passing by storefronts and kiosks, navigating around baby strollers, huddles of teenagers, and retail buffs bulging with purchases. We were trucking along just fine, not bumping into anything or anybody, when all of a sudden Chandler detoured, and I felt a strong pull on the harness that had me practically jogging to keep up. As I was taking this in, wondering what it was about, I heard the mall’s central fountain getting louder and louder until it became evident that we were headed straight for it. Maybe Chandler was thirsty. Maybe he was going for a swim and taking me with him. Either one was no good. Soon after, I was called into the office.

“Dan, we know this isn’t what you want to hear, but we don’t think Chandler is the right match for you.”

“Oh?”

“He’s a great dog. He’s a sweetheart. He’s proven himself over and over in training, and we know he’s going to make an excellent guide for someone someday. But it’s not like him to stop short of a curb or in the middle of the block the way he has been lately.”

My heart plunged to the bottom of my stomach. “Is it me? Am I doing something wrong?”

“Not at all. It’s nothing like that. We do our best as matchmakers but we don’t always get it right. Although it’s obvious you love Chandler and he loves you, the work chemistry isn’t there. We know this isn’t going to be easy for you, but we can’t have your safety depending on a dog whose heart isn’t into his work. We have another dog, one of the top dogs in his group, that we think will be a much better match in the long run. What do you think? Are you willing to give him a chance?”

I felt flattened, like all the air had been squeezed out of my lungs.

“I’ll have to trust your judgment,” I finally said. “I want what’s best for me and for Chandler.”

“That’s great. Thanks for understanding. I know this is going to be hard, but why don’t you go get him, bring him back here, and we’ll swap him out.”

I returned to the office with my dog and went back to my room with an empty leash. Losing Chandler was a punch in the gut. I tried not to take it too personally, but I really felt like I’d failed him. The reason it didn’t work out between us, I now think, was because of Chandler’s pride. The longer you work with a guide dog the better you get, and I was a neophyte. Chandler was used to traveling with professional trainers. As soon as I got behind the wheel he could tell I barely knew what I was doing. Maybe he felt he deserved better. Or maybe I’d stepped on his paws too many times. Of course I’ll never know, but six months later I would read in the organization’s newsletter of his graduation with somebody else.

A half hour after saying goodbye to Chandler, I was called back to the office to meet his replacement—a stocky, sixty-five-pound yellow lab named Anderson. He was just as excited to meet me as Chandler had been, and an even bigger lickaholic, one who’d lick your face raw if you let him. He’d come straight from the kennels, so the first thing I did was take him to the bathing area to clean him up. It should have been a bonding time, but I have to be honest, I didn’t feel that instant connection I’d felt with Chandler. It was hard to fall in love with a new dog when I’d barely begun grieving the loss of my previous one. Rather than spontaneous love, I grew to love Anderson over time.