On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (26 page)

For an expert cane user, the broader sense of peripersonal space is permanent, too. The space around the cane tip is as thoroughly experienced by her brain as the space around a sighted person’s hand is to him. She will be able to react as quickly to a sound from or touch to the cane tip as sighted people do to something near their heads or hands.

 • • • 

After a short way, Gordon let go of my arm, mindful of my promise that I would not let her wander off a cliff or into traffic. Immediately, her cane found a bulky concrete planter, which she probed, identified, and negotiated around. Clear of any obvious obstacles, Gordon nonetheless began veering very definitely to her left. And to her left was a fourteen-story prewar building made, I could see at a glance, of the kind of stone that is extremely unlikely to give if you walk into it.

So here I committed a cardinal walking-with-the-blind sin: I tried to guide her. I reached out, about to grab Gordon’s arm to prevent this inevitable progress into the wall. Barely restraining myself, I managed to plainly offer, “Um, you’re swerving to your left quite a bit. You’ve about a quarter of the sidewalk left before . . .”

Gordon was unfazed. “If I go too far, I’ll hit the building. But I know where I am.”

I couldn’t be convinced. “. . . And now you’re pretty close to hitting the side of the building . . .”

She stopped and seemed to look at me steadily, then resumed walking. True to her word, she went ahead and banged right into the building with her cane. Gordon’s cane tapped a quick pattern on the wall and sidewalk, a perfunctory petting of an unbeloved animal. Then she smoothly righted herself, turning just enough to take a path parallel to the building’s line.

Gordon had deliberately veered, I realized, in order to get a reference point. Out of the sea of the middle of the sidewalk, she headed for something tangible that could give her her bearings.

I was at least in good company in my overweening desire to help her avoid bodily injury. People grab her all the time as she approaches buildings, Gordon said. But they, and I, were simply not seeing how
she
was seeing the space. She was aiming to run into the building, not trying to avoid it.

“It’s not an obstacle at all, is it?” I asked. “It’s something you’re using to navigate the space.”

“Exactly.” Gordon smiled, continuing on a perfectly parallel course.

I had watched her do something similar earlier as we left her apartment building together. Rather than merge into the flow of pedestrians walking to and fro along the sidewalk, Gordon cut straight across them until she hit something tangible—a lamppost—at the far side of the sidewalk. Heading into an undefined
space, she had begun to define it by locating its breadth and its edge.

Even without a visual sense of it, she was essentially drawing a map of the space. Sighted people, blindfolded, do something similar. Left alone in a room, people tend to explore first by making loops out and back—and then they try to find a wall. Having found one, the blindfolded will follow it, then tentatively cut across to the opposite wall. After only ten minutes of this wall-bouncing, they are quite good at describing the shape and size of the room.

Essentially, Gordon and the blindfolded are developing what psychologists call cognitive maps: representations in their head of the space of their environment. This is something we all do, even under ordinary, non-blindfolded circumstances. Arriving at a new scene, we first compare what we see (or hear or feel) to the various stored representations of previously constructed maps of environments we have been in. If there is a match, we can proceed to ignore what we see—save anything novel or unusual that pops up—and wander into it with confidence. Thus we do not find ourselves truly examining a familiar environment every time we step into it. Stumble out your front door in the morning, and you can count on that stored map to guide you, blearily and barely awake, through the streets to your car or subway station. You already know which block has the fewest missing sidewalk stones, where the potholes are, on which side the sun is low and direct. Blindness does not stop this process of developing a cognitive map; it simply obliges map-making through non-visual means. For Gordon, that meant wayfinding by locating the edges of her path first. Once a location was familiar, she could use her stored map of the environment to walk through it without “looking” in her path-veering way.

 • • • 

It would be a mistake to think that all that a cane user experiences is the information borne through the cane, though. After a half block of supervising Gordon’s left-veering and straightening behavior (never once needing me to help her), I saw an interesting scene ahead. It was the end of the block. Would Gordon see it?

The corner building was another grand old prewar apartment house—tall, well bricked, and shade lending. The moment we stepped past its corner, Gordon stopped.

“Are we at the end of the block?”

I grinned. “Right!” I assumed that she had heard her way to that conclusion. The street intersected with a larger boulevard, full of car and truck activity and its accompanying horns and hubbub. But I was wrong.

“I could feel it.”

“Feel it?”

“The breeze.”

Indeed, there was a subtle but noticeable current of air traveling along with the traffic, going north to south. City dwellers grow familiar with the superficial appearance of the buildings on their regular walks to and from their home and work, but there is another, unseen architecture that is nearly as consistent: the winds. Though winds change with weather, the shapes of large structures like buildings act on those winds in reliable ways. Urban microclimates are created largely by the changes in airflow induced by the man-made environment. In a city like this one, full of right angles between streets, a turned corner almost always brings with it a change in the flow of air. Though the direction and temperature of the air might vary by hour or day, the contrasting orthogonal airflow is more reliable than the particulars of street or sidewalk activity.

The urban windscape manifests a Who’s Who of physics phenomena, involving forces and flows described by the Bernoulli
principle, the Venturi effect, turbulence, and the properties of eddies and vortices. Streets lined by tall buildings become wind tunnels, through which the air being blown around in a large, wide-open area accelerates dramatically as it gets pushed into the small canyon of the street (the Venturi effect). Thus, winds over the rivers flanking Manhattan Island speed down side streets on land. No one who lives along one of these side streets needs to be told that the wind plasters the face and requires a whole-body lean to push through.
³
This occurs whether the streets are lined with particularly tall buildings or not, but in the former case, the winds blow faster for farther. Tall buildings create other wind effects: winds that hit high on a building rush down its face, sometimes creating enough pressure to make passage in and out of the doorway difficult. Sheer glass towers can pull air not just down, but also up from below (the Bernoulli principle)—as well as lift any skirts being worn in the vicinity. The edges of buildings have their own wind phenomena: circling eddies of air appear as air travels around the building’s corner, snatching hats off approaching heads. Combine enough of these forces, and a vortex may appear, an independent whirlwind which lifts fallen leaves, discarded plastic bags, and city debris in its path down the street.

Gordon and I turned left, and I watched as people took a wide berth around us. With her cane and me riding sidecar with a microphone, no one could miss us. I wondered how she fared when there was not someone walking along with her. In particular, thinking back to my walk with Kent, I asked her, what about the cell-phone users?

Walking-while-talking (on phones) or texting is now commonplace, as is decrying the activity (unless you are doing it yourself).
The decriers can be a sympathetic lot. When Oliver Sacks lost peripheral vision on one side, the West Village outside his home became suddenly unnavigable. In particular, he bemoans the hazards presented by people rushing hither and yon, “so preoccupied with cell phones and text messaging that they themselves are functionally deaf and blind.” For people like Sacks, the behavior of people not considerate enough to look out for others makes the sidewalk a perilous, stressful place.

The trouble with cell phones on the street is that, though “talking on the phone” and “walking” do not seem cognitively complex, each requires attention. Even before there were retail mobile phones, there were studies using them to test distraction. A 1969 study asked subjects to listen to sentences on phones while driving to see if this distraction impaired their judgment and increased the mistakes they made (it did, on both counts: including mistakes in judging if that gap up ahead was big enough to fit one’s car through). The reams of subsequent research on how cell-phone use impairs driving ability has led to bans in most states on doing these activities simultaneously—and to the subsequent upsurge in hands-free headset use (solving only part of the problem).

It is understandable that cell-phone use is problematic when doing something requiring concentration, such as driving at breakneck speeds down an interstate highway. But even walking down the street requires concentration, albeit of a more unconscious sort. Simply by having open eyes, pedestrians notice changes in the environment: a handcart being pulled across the sidewalk, an approaching carriage, a wayward long-leashed dog. Without consciously intending to, we make small adjustments. My walk on Broadway with Kent had been a testament to the success of this in keeping us, as most people, from colliding.

With Gordon, I became more attentive to the violations of the pedestrian rules. I noticed that people tended to slow down when
using their phones. Rather than a benefit, this could be a menace, as the pace of pedestrian traffic is usually instinctively adjusted by pedestrians considering each other’s pace and route. I saw examples of cell-phone walkers weaving, violating the time-honored stay-to-the-right street rules. Most critically, they were not
checking
: they did not look up. Walkers typically acknowledge each other with eye contact, enforcing the social rule of at least attempting to mind other people’s paths. Cell-phone talkers are less likely to notice others, let alone acknowledge them. Nor do they notice something unusual at their feet, or even see a unicycling clown with a red nose and purple jumpsuit on their route (as one study tested). The pedestrian dance of Fifth Avenue is replaced by the herky-jerky stop-and-go dance practiced by poor dancers—and by pedestrians who suddenly find someone directly in front of them. With their eyes focused not on the street, but on the conversation in their ears, the skill we have developed in navigating pedestrian traffic is wasted.

So how did Gordon feel about these cell-phone users? They were always a hazard, she agreed, describing a number of full-body collisions because of distracted walkers. As she spoke, a young woman on a cell phone was gaining on us from behind. Her laughter was punctuated by periods of silence presumably filled by the person chatting into her ear. Gordon stopped. She often slowed to a stop herself when she wanted to make a point. The cell-phone laugher passed us.

“But one thing I will tell you. They make it easier to hear people.”

For a noisy species, human pedestrians can be awfully silent. Walking with Gordon, I began to notice the numbers of sneakered, light-footed walkers almost stealthy in their passage by us. There are, to be sure, a number of people who give away their presence in their manners or clothing. There are the flip-flopped,
the high-heeled, and those whose boots or hard-heeled shoes gently clip-clopped. There are the key jinglers, the pocket changed; the package burdened, the wheely suitcased; the panters, the grunters, the hummers, whistlers, and singers. You hear the foot scrapers and scuffers coming; and you can smell the perfumed or smoking brushing by. You hear the suspiration of a bag strapped across and banging against the body. The corduroyed.

Apart from these people projecting their path ahead of themselves, most people are remarkably quiet: the electric cars of pedestrian traffic. So people on cell phones may be a nuisance, but to the visually impaired, they are also beacons, sending out information about where they are (and what they are doing). To Gordon, they served to identify at least some of the presence in the otherwise unknown space around her. She appreciated their uncivil loudness.

They also were giving Gordon something I might not have heard (or, at least, attended to): details about themselves, conveyed in their voices. A voice carries a large amount of information about the speaker—from the person’s sex to his size, ethnicity to age, even level of fitness (we can all hear the habits of the cigarette smoker or the physique of the obese in their voices). Voices carry emotional information, too, from disgust to sadness to surprise, even when speaking words that have nothing to do with emotional state. Most of us are quite good at naturally distinguishing emotions in vocal sounds. Potentially, the blind could be even better, although they are not always. With this in mind, the Belgian Federal Police force recently hired a few blind officers especially attuned to analyzing voices, especially on wiretap recordings. These officers are masterful at distinguishing accents and identifying what kind of room a speaker is in—things normal listeners can hear but do not attend to.

I cleared my throat, probably in an Alexandra-typical way,
and, telling Gordon something she likely knew, announced that we were at the corner. Gordon was already turning it. She began reminiscing about the building we were passing. As a young girl, she lived in this same neighborhood, less than a block away. “I remember when [the corner building] was being built.” Her cane began tapping faster. “It has a gorgeous roof garden, overlooking the river.” High above our heads, trees that would have been saplings when Gordon last saw them rustled and murmured.

A huge wind hit us as we turned the final corner back to her home. Gordon stopped in her tracks and stopped reminiscing. “That [wind] would be hard for the blind,” she said, clearly thinking about “the blind” as though the category did not include her. The white noise of the breeze drowned out all the little sounds that are such a large part of Gordon’s vision of her environment. But as she resumed walking, she continued to talk about her memory of the “new” building that had gone up on the corner. Gordon described the windows and the long, deep garden—and I gazed right at it, into her memory.