Thunder Dog (10 page)

The precision and complexity of the mathematical equations applied to the real world through the science of physics appealed to my sense of order and balance and helped satisfy my curiosity about how the world works. Mathematician Henri Poincaré put it this way: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing.”
¹

My passion for physics coupled with a great deal of hard work paid off in college when I made the dean’s list every quarter. But to make that happen, most of my first years at the university were spent in academic pursuits rather than a social life. I had friends, but my best friend was probably my guide dog. I still wasn’t too interested in girls. Instead I filled my life with academics, reading, and vintage radio.

My social life began to take off after I started my own radio show on KUCI, the campus radio station. My show featured vintage radio programs from 6 to 9 p.m. every Sunday night. I competed with
60 Minutes,
and around the city of Irvine the KUCI Radio
Hall of Fame
show pushed Mike Wallace’s face in the ratings dust. The radio station operated out of a small room in the physical sciences building. Our equipment was pretty primitive and we each produced our own show. I did research to provide some background and commentary for each vintage radio show I featured. Sometimes I conducted interviews or chatted with callers. I became very comfortable talking to people I didn’t know, and I even began trying out jokes on the air, sort of a poor man’s Dr. Demento. For a while I made it a point to memorize one joke or insult a day. Here’s one I still remember: “How do you tell a male chromosome from a female chromosome? You take down their genes.” Don’t like that one? Okay, here’s another. “Don’t pitch your tent on a stove, because you can’t build a home on the range.” The jokes came in handy later when I went into sales. The better the insult, the more respect you get from the other salespeople. And I had good teachers—Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Milton Berle.

Whenever I could, I tried to put people at ease with my blindness, even using it for laughs if I could. One of my radio station buddies and fellow science geeks was Mat Kaplan. He had a show on Sunday nights right after mine. He’s still in radio, hosting and producing
Planetary Radio
, which covers everything related to space travel. One time he scraped up a hundred dollars, a lot of money for starving college students in those days, and ordered a small helium-neon laser from Edmund Scientific, the wonderful old mail-order science and gadget supply house that is still around. Back in the ’70s, lasers were not yet widely available at every local drugstore like they are now. Mat and I had a great time playing with the laser, and we immediately noticed how my guide dog Holland was mesmerized by the bright laser pinpoint light and loved to chase it. We sent him into a frenzy chasing the laser around a big room by the radio station. The laser was so powerful, though, that we had to be careful. We didn’t want to injure the dog’s eyes by accident. But my eyes—that was a different story. Without giving Mat any warning, one time I picked up the laser and flashed the beam straight into my eye.

“Funny, I don’t see anything,” I deadpanned.

“Mike, Mike, don’t do that!” yelled Mat, frantic. I think that was the last time he let me play with the laser.

Although desktop and laptop computers were still far in the future, UC Irvine had a mainframe computer. In the ’60s, most mainframes accepted input from system operators via punched cards, paper or magnetic tape, or Teletype devices, which looked something like an IBM Selectric typewriter or the bulky old printers you used to see in newsrooms. By the ’70s, at universities like Irvine, mainframes had interactive user interfaces and operated as time-sharing computers “talking” to many individual users as well as doing batch processing.

These were exciting times for physics students, as we were required to do extremely complex mathematical equations. The school computer could do calculations in a few seconds that would take us hours, and we were only at the beginning of understanding how computers could be used in the world outside the university walls.

But there was a problem. I couldn’t use the computer even though I knew how to type. The Teletype had a standard QWERTY keyboard, but there was no way for me to read the display on the screen or decipher the output when it was printed out. I was virtually locked out of the computer age. I needed some help. John Halverson, another blind student a year ahead of me, also wanted access, so together we appealed to the powers that be for some technology to allow us to use the computer.

Enter Dick Rubinstein, a wunderkind graduate student and researcher at UCI working with Julian Feldman, head of the computer science program. Julian asked Dick to help us, and we immediately hit it off. It was an era when many college students were taking up political activism and making their voices heard, and John and I were no different. We came up with a phrase for our computer-access lobbying project. We took the popular slogan “Power to the People” and gave it a twist: “Blind Power.” We had a great time joking around about our own civil rights movement, and Dick joined right in.

Then he got to work and whipped up a Braille terminal for us. Dick was an engineer who describes himself as “a generalist.” He had just graduated from Caltech in engineering but had shifted gears at Irvine to study social sciences. Dick loves to make and fix things and has an innate understanding of how equipment works. He also loves people, and his sense of design comes from an understanding of what people need. He started with a Teletype machine that printed with a type cylinder that rotated and pressed against a ribbon to make marks on paper. It printed at only ten characters a second, very slow. Dick designed a new cylinder and installed pins to emboss the dots needed to create Braille marks along with a number of other modifications needed to put the paper in the right position to receive the marks. Then he wrote a software program to run on a Digital PDP-8 minicomputer to translate the received information into the Braille marks. The minicomputer acted as a controller for the Braille terminal.

“It wasn’t fast, but it did the job,” said Dick, who went on to earn his PhD and spend his career as a human factors engineer. His project was written up and published in 1972 in a journal for the Association for Computing Machinery.

Dick and I kept in touch and batted some ideas around on other sorts of Braille displays, and Dick went on to be involved in developing electronic mail (or
e-mail
, as we call it now) as a communications aid for deaf adults, way back in the late ’70s when most people had never heard of e-mail yet and the Internet was still called the ARPANET. Smart guy. He loved my pachinko machine.

The pachinko was a mechanical Japanese gaming device that was similar to a vertical pinball machine. You shot small balls up into the machine, which then cascaded down through a mass of metal pins, sometimes landing in special pockets for bonus points.

“What’s a blind guy doing with a pinball machine?” Dick once said.

“Wait until you see me play darts,” I replied.

Dick’s Braille terminal helped ignite my love affair with technology, and one of my passions is helping to put the latest, most powerful, and most easy-to-use technology in the hands of blind people. The technology we have available today has changed the rules of the game and given me and other blind people more independence and access to information than ever before. It’s an exciting time to be blind.

When I graduated from UC Irvine with highest honors, my parents and my brother were in the audience, watching. Besides my brother, I was the first one in the whole family to earn a college degree. Well, besides Squire, my aging guide dog. Chancellor Aldrich awarded Squire a degree too. Only instead of physics, his degree was in “Lethargic Guidance,” a nod to his propensity for frequent naps now that he was in his sunset years.

I stayed on at Irvine and earned a master’s degree and a teaching credential. I also took some business courses that I thought might be useful out in the real world. But I did run into one roadblock at school. As I began to consider pursuing a doctorate degree in physics, I ran into some pushback, from certain professors, that seemed to be related to my blindness. I did some work with a lawyer and in the process gained access to my file in the physics department. We discovered a shocking letter. It read, “A blind person cannot do the high level work necessary for an advanced degree in physics.”

At first I was stunned. Then I got angry. But those feelings passed pretty quickly, and I was left with a two-word response.

Why not?

As it happened, I ended up landing a great job right out of grad school, so I decided not to pursue a doctorate. But, I also decided to live out the rest of my life on the “why not” principle.

And those two words are my secret, the secret behind blind power. Why not? Why not ride a bike or drive a car or play darts or earn a PhD in physics? Why not try it all, just to see if I can do it?

Here’s a great Milton Berle quote from my vintage radio show vault. He sums it up perfectly: “I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might-have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.”

I think there is truth to the observation that your life passes before you when you face death or a very stressful situation and so I remembered my college life as I descended the stairs on September 11, 2001. I constantly looked for memories that could help me survive whatever happened to Roselle and me in our time of terror.

The temperature inside the stairwell continues to climb. I’m feeling more upbeat, so I try another joke. “All this walking is a great way to lose weight.” Laughter again. Other quips filter back up to me. Each one puts a smile on my face.

Boy, do I need to lose some pounds
, someone says.

I’m going to have a double dessert tonight!
Laughter.

I never want to see another stairwell again as long as I live
. We all agree.

For a moment, people sound almost lighthearted. Almost.

I chime back in. “I have an idea. On our first day back in the tower, let’s all meet on the 78th floor at 8:45 a.m. and walk down the stairs as a way to lose weight.”

We’ve gone from being strangers to teammates. Somehow our fear and anxiety have turned into closeness and teamwork. The usual boundaries are down. All we have is each other. We know instinctively that we must all work together to prevent panic, or we might not make it out.

Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs
. “Thirty-nine . . . thirty-six . . . thirty-four,” calls out David.

If the lights go out, Roselle and I are ready.

Then from somewhere on the flights below, I hear a murmur. There’s something happening down below, and a ripple of tension and excitement makes its way up the line.

The firefighters are coming.

Intuition is linear; our imaginations are weak. Even
the brightest of us only extrapolate from what we know
now; for the most part, we’re afraid to really stretch.
RAYMOND KURZWEIL

R
oselle’s big Labrador tongue lolls down one side. The stairwell is hot, and we’re walking down sometimes two abreast, sometimes single file, and beginning to pack more closely together. Since the explosion we’ve made it down to the 33rd floor.

I hear an excited buzz in the voices of the people below me, and I can just make out the words: “Water bottles!” Someone has broken open a vending machine, and people are passing cold water bottles up the stairs.

I pass a few bottles to the people behind me then twist open a bottle and take a few swallows. The cold water is a relief, and it tastes sweet compared to the acrid taste of the fumes.

Roselle nudges my hand. Her nose feels hot, and I wonder if she can smell the water. I bend over and offer her the bottle. She begins to lick the top, and I tilt it just a bit so she can drink the rest. I know she must be thirsty because she hasn’t had anything to drink for a while. Many guide dogs don’t eat or drink anything in the mornings so they don’t have to interrupt work to relieve themselves, and Roselle is no different. She hasn’t had any food or water since last night. She finishes up the bottle and wants more. She licks the last few drops. I can hear her smacking her lips, and then she begins to pant again. She’s still thirsty.

“Good Roselle,” I say. I gently grab the sides of her head, just under her ears. I rub her cheeks with my thumbs. Other people around me have stopped to drink some water, too, and I can feel them listening. “Good dog. You’re doing great. Just keep going. You can do it.”

I know I have to stay calm for Roselle. If I show fear or begin to panic, she will pick up on it and might get scared too. It’s important that Roselle doesn’t sense that I am afraid. If that happened, it would make it harder for us to get out. So far, we are staying calm and focused, and I’m able to control my fear.

But there is undercover fear all around us, the general panic level increasing the lower we go. I can hear it in the whispers, feel tension in the footsteps echoing around me. But Roselle does not react; she is in the moment, secure in herself and her work.

As long as the harness is on, even in a life-and-death situation, I am confident that Roselle will continue to do her job just as she always does. Besides the jet fuel, she can also smell the fear around us. When people are afraid, their autonomic nervous systems react with an increase in sweat gland activity, with the apocrine glands producing secretions through the hair follicles that result in a very faint odor that dogs are able to pick up. They don’t exactly smell the emotion of fear, but they can smell the result: an olfactory fear signal inadvertently produced by the body. Dogs are not as visual as people, and their primary sense is smell, said to be a thousand times more sensitive than that of humans. Roselle has more than 200 million olfactory receptors in her nose, while I only have about 5 million.
¹
These receptors feed information to the highly developed olfactory lobe in Roselle’s brain, making her a scent machine. She lives in a world of smell, not sight, and thus is not light-dependent, either. We have that in common.

She has her ears too; dogs can hear sound at four times the distance humans can. That means if I can hear things happening twenty steps below, she can clearly hear what’s going on eighty steps below. She also has a powerful sense of touch. Not only does she hone in on the signals I send through my hand on the upright handle of her harness, but her entire body is covered with touch-sensitive nerve endings, and around her eyes, muzzle, and jaws, she has exquisitely sensitive hairs called
vibrissae
that continuously feed her information about her environment.

On top of that, dogs seem to have a sixth sense, sometimes surprising us by predicting earthquakes or finding their way home from a distant location. They can read our moods through our pheromones, the chemicals produced by our bodies in connection with emotion. They seem sensitive to changes in the earth’s magnetic field and to infrared wavelengths of light. And, like Roselle did earlier this morning, dogs can detect sudden changes in barometric pressure, like when a storm is brewing.

Thinking about Roselle’s special abilities gives me confidence.
We are going to make it out
. My teamwork with Roselle and the confidence it gives each of us seem to transmit to the people immediately around us, almost like a zone of security. We are close on the stairwell and our defenses are down. All we have is each other, and there is a feeling of working together to make it out safely. We are strong.

A few steps below, David calls out. “There are firemen coming up the stairs. Everyone move to the side.” I go down to where David stands.

It’s the 30th floor, and here they come. As they approach, we instinctively string out into a single-file line to let them pass. The firefighters are loaded down with equipment. Besides having to wear protective thigh-length jacket and pants, most of them carry fifty or sixty pounds of gear, including helmets, gloves, axes, and air tanks. They are tired and sweaty, and they’re not even halfway up to the fire.

Later, reports on the events of September 11 would suggest that the firefighters in the stairwell didn’t know much more about what was going on than we did. Cell phones and radios weren’t working well and communication was spotty at best. Oral histories from the few firefighters who survived say they were “clueless” about the details and knew “absolutely nothing” about the reality of the impending crisis.
²

“Hey, buddy. Are you okay?” The very first of a long line of firefighters stops and talks to me on the 30th floor.

“I’m fine.” I feel Roselle moving and I know he is petting her. It doesn’t seem like the time to give him a lecture about not petting a guide dog in harness.

“We’re going to send somebody down the stairs with you.”

“You don’t have to do that. Things are going fine and I don’t think I need help.”

“Well, we’re going to send somebody down with you, because we want to make sure you get down okay.”

I think of the millions of pieces of burning paper raining down outside my office windows.
These guys need to get up those stairs to fight the fire
.

“You don’t have to do that.” I can tell he’s determined to help me. “I’ve got a guide dog and we’re good.”

“Nice dog,” he says, stroking Roselle. She is friendly, as usual, and gently mouths his hand.

“Anyway, you can’t get lost going downstairs.” I try to make it light.

His voice deepens and takes on a bit of an edge. I can tell he’s used to being listened to. “We’re going to send somebody with you.”

I want to tell him my blindness isn’t a handicap, but it’s not the right time for that lecture either. I use the last gun in my arsenal. “Look, my friend David is here. He can see, and we’re fine.”

The firefighter turns to David. “Are you with him? Is everything okay?” David reassures him we’re fine.

I hear him shrug his shoulders and resettle the tank on his back, and I know he’s about to head upstairs. The men below him stir, restless. They’re anxious to get upstairs and get to it.

“Is there anything we can do to help you guys?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “You’ve got to go.”

He gives Roselle one last pat. She kisses his hand and then he is gone. I would realize later that this touch was probably the last unconditional love he ever got.

I tighten my grip on the harness. The cold water is long gone, and I can taste the jet fuel again.

“Forward.” We head down the stairs. I think about Roselle and the firefighter and wonder,
Can she smell courage?

I’ve had a lifetime to develop the skills needed to navigate through a world not set up for me. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: sight is not the only game in town.

Blindness is not a handicap; it’s something I’ve always lived with. The real handicap comes from the prejudices people have about blindness. I knew the firefighter was only trying to help, but sometimes help is not what I need. Even so, the firefighter couldn’t be diverted until I pointed out that I had a sighted colleague “assisting me.”

I just use a few different tools than other people do. One of the tools I got along the way allowed me to do something I’ve always wanted to do: pilot an airplane. But first let me tell you about some of the others.

It all started with Braille, my entry into the world of words and ideas. Unfortunately, the majority of blind people cannot read Braille. A tactile system developed in Paris by Louis Braille in 1821, Braille is a reading and writing language all blind people should learn how to use. By using combinations of up to six raised dots, a person can interpret printed codes for letters of the alphabet or combinations of letters by running an index finger across the raised surfaces.

In fourth grade, my parents bought me a Braille writer from Germany, called a Marburg. A Braille writer is a wood-and-metal machine about half the size of a typewriter. Six Braille keys and a spacing key are made of wood topped with ivory. The six keys operate the mechanism that produces dots to form the letters, contractions, or symbols used to write Braille. Paper is fed into a cylindrical paper roller and turning knobs at either end of the roller feeds the paper into the machine.

The Perkins Brailler, manufactured by Perkins Products/ Howe Press in Massachusetts, was the best Braille writer on the market, but it cost more than a hundred dollars, a small fortune at the time. The Marburg was half that, so I used it for three years before the local Lions club bought me a Perkins.

When I was nine, I discovered “talking books” and became enthralled with Perry Mason, the defense attorney determined to prove his clients’ innocence, and Nero Wolf, the fat, gourmet private detective. I listened to many classic and contemporary books recorded on twelve-inch records. These books were created by a program administered by the Library of Congress. Special libraries were established throughout the United States to distribute or loan out these books to blind people. Some books required ten to twenty records, and I remember hearing that the recording of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
required fifty-six records. I decided to skip that one.

I still listen to talking books, work on my computer, and use Braille daily. But instead of a wood, metal, and ivory manual Braille writer, I now use a BrailleNote, a small computer about the size of a medium size hardcover book with a tactile display that allows me to electronically read and write in Braille with no monitor needed.

Another technological tool I use daily is a talking smart phone. I have software on my computer that operates a screen reader that verbalizes the information contained in documents, spreadsheets, and on Web sites. After years of practice, I can listen to and decipher the voice of my screen reader at hundreds of words a minute. The voice sounds a little like an auctioneer on speed, but it allows me to get through e-mail and documents quickly.