Momentarily Lost At Sea

There is a frequently-used technique in cane travel known as “shorelining,” which is essentially using your cane to follow a curb, wall, grass sidewalk, or other perimeter. The vaguely aquatic metaphor is an apt one. In fact, I’ve been finding that navigating with a cane and a blindfold is almost as much like swimming as it is walking. Shorelining is like clinging to the side of the pool when you’re first learning to swim: eventually, there comes a time when you have to let go of the wall and venture into the deep end.

My “deep end” moment came last Friday, at the end of my first week of training at the Colorado Center for the Blind, when my travel instructor sent me on my first “independent” – an unsupervised trek to a nearby coffee shop I had never been to. Much of the route was familiar to me, as the coffee shop is close to the area where the bus to and from my apartment stops every day. However, where I normally go left to pick up my bus, I now had to instead go straight across a wide expanse of concrete, knowing only vaguely what I was looking for and having no way to tell whether I was really on the right track.

There was a moment where I stopped shorelining the curb, paused to try and orient myself, and then struck out in the direction where I thought I was supposed to go. And for that brief moment, I felt completely adrift – suddenly disoriented, with no nearby curb or other marker to tell me where I was. Floating, as it were.

The moment of indecision was a brief one. I could tell from the feel of the sun on my shoulder that I was headed roughly north, and the sound of nearby traffic helped me fine-tune the direction I was going. I took a deep breath and plunged ahead. While prudence and caution are critical for a cane traveler, so, too are confidence and decisiveness.

Over the past week, I’ve had several more successful travel adventures – longer trips, crossing busy streets, exploring the local light rail system, etc. But that moment of feeling myself adrift and then making an educated guess on direction and plowing ahead was definitely a turning point.