It was a brisk seventeen degrees when I woke up Friday morning, but Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” was nevertheless blasting in my brain, even if it wasn’t season-appropriate. As grateful as I am for the training I’m receiving and the life-changing skills I’m acquiring, I must confess that life at the Center gets a bit exhausting at times. I’m definitely ready for a break. I’m off for the next two weeks, which I’m really looking forward to.
I’m starting to reach the point in my training where the days blur together and I can’t easily recall everything I did. Usually, I keep a record to help sort things out, but for whatever reason, I didn’t do so this week. So I’m a bit at a loss as I sit down to write this morning.
One thing I know happened and that I am proud to report is that, after last week’s incident of dropping the chicken I was making before I could get it into the oven, I successfully remade the same somewhat involved chicken tikka masala recipe. I also whipped up some basmati rice to go along with it, not on the stove or in a rice cooker, but in the oven. Kudos to my instructor for coming up with a novel but delicious way to prepare rice.
I also learned about a pretty cool website called directionsforme.org. It’s basically a compendium of packaging information for all manner of consumer products – everything from cooking instructions and nutritional information for food products, to instruction manuals for home electronics. The site is very accessible and surprisingly comprehensive. My parents have asked for technical assistance with their new FitBits for Christmas, so this website will hopefully enable me to help them.
Let’s see…what else? On Thursday morning, I explored a bike path that covers most of the mile and a half between the Center and my apartment. I walked it under sleep shades, so I can’t say precisely what the environment was like, but it was very peaceful and quiet, with running water in places and what I took to be a fairly wooded terrain.
I had the thought as I was walking along ahead of my travel instructor and two other students that peace and quiet are sort of the enemies of a blind traveler. Order and data are the most important things to successfully navigating without vision. A secluded bike path has neither: it wends and winds at its own leisure, with no predictable right angles or discernible patterns; and it’s also empty and devoid of the sounds that I normally rely on to paint a picture of where I am and where I’m headed.
Many students at the Center are intimidated by busy streets with lots of traffic. That’s understandable, and I certainly recall being slightly terrified of the noise and motion of the first few busy intersections I encountered under sleep shades. But as my travel skills have progressed, I’ve come to realize that busier is almost always better.
When you go to cross a busy intersection, there are a couple of things that you need to do and listen for. The first thing I like to do is to find the wheelchair ramp (“curb cut”) that typically points in the direction I’m trying to cross. Once I have an idea where that is, I then sweep around with my cane to find whether there is a crossing button. Here in the Denver area, busy intersections often have buttons to push which will extend the pedestrian crossing time.
Button pushed (assuming there is one), I return to the low spot on the curb where I plan to walk from, and then I listen. It seems obvious to say, but under sleep shades, you don’t really know what the geometry of an intersection is. Denver isn’t Manhattan, where streets reliably run at 90 degree angles and curbs meet at mostly sharp corners. Intersections are often slightly off kilter here. And the only way to know that is to listen attentively to the direction cars are traveling around you and to try and visualize how to cross based on what you hear of their trajectories.
This is why a busy intersection is actually much more navigable than a deserted one. Ideally, you’ll have steady parallel traffic to walk with, and idling perpendicular traffic to orient by as well. I prefer walking in the same direction as the parallel traffic – it’s still a little nerve-racking to cross a street with cars zooming past you in the opposite direction – but in either case, having a steady stream of parallel traffic helps you to walk a relatively straight line without the benefit of a curb to follow. And idling traffic helps you maintain your trajectory as well, ensuring that you’ll come out on the other side of the crossing where you intend to, rather than twenty feet up the curb.
Crossing with minimal traffic, on the other hand, is a bit more of an educated guess, since you have less information to reckon by. And wandering in a secluded setting, like the bike path I was traveling this past Thursday morning, is even more of a leap of faith. There’s only so much you can learn from listening and sweeping about with a cane; and when there’s nothing to listen to, there’s even less to go by.
I’ve started to try and rely more on my sightless travel skills even when I am not under sleep shades. I am now much more methodical about finding the curb cut as the origin point for my crossings. I will frequently close my eyes for a moment at a crossing, just to listen and try to parse what I’m hearing. I still cross relying on the vision that I have, rather than crossing with my eyes closed; but the process of listening and following the methodology of sightless travel is still useful in terms of the growth of my travel skills.
In fact, I am finding that one of the most useful things I can do is to pair my emerging sightless skills with the remaining vision I have. For example, if I close my eyes at a crosswalk and listen to build a mental picture of what’s in front of me, and then I open my eyes and confirm or adjust this picture based on what I can actually see, I can slowly improve the accuracy of my listening skills. I’ve been discovering that the most useful travel skill for me is the ability to build an accurate mental picture of where I am, so I’ve been doing this ‘listen and then cross-check visually’ thing a lot.
When I travel, I find it very useful to try to imagine what I would be seeing if my vision were not impaired or blocked altogether by sleep shades. It’s somehow a little less scary and a little more tangible than not imagining a mental picture of where I am. In a certain way, it grounds me in a world I am more familiar with. I expect I will continue to do this if / when I lose all my sight.
This sort of leads to a discussion I’ve been meaning to get to about the primacy of sight amongst humans, but that will have to wait til next week. For now, I’m going to sign off by wishing you all happy holidays and best of luck with your last-minute shopping. Talk to you soon!
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