Week Seven: The Wanderer

When John Steinbeck wrote in his memoir, Travels with Charley, “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found,” I’m quite sure he wasn’t referring to wandering around Colorado under sleep shades. It can be a trying ordeal, it turns out.

I spent a good bit of time lost this week. On Tuesday, having pulled a somewhat unnecessary all-nighter to work on some music projects and generally faff around, I downed a massive cup of coffee and reported to my travel instructor. He sent me off on what sounded like a relatively easy independent trip to a breakfast spot in downtown Littleton. I knew where the intersection was. Piece of cake, metaphorically and, time permitting, literally.

It was not to be.

Even before I got up the stairs and out of the building, I started feeling kind of off. I felt dizzy and confused – doubtless a combination of sleep deprivation and over-caffeination. I hadn’t gone ten feet from the door of the Center before I was disoriented. I got back on track after a minute or two, but then was lost again before I made it down the hill and to the busy street that runs north/south about six minutes from my building. This was on my home turf, mind you. I thought about turning back – I was at this point feeling so dizzy that I had trouble walking a straight line –- but decided to forge ahead.

I did eventually, arduously, make it to my target location and back again, but I got lost every couple minutes and was in a bad way by the time I finally returned. I tried to participate in home management but couldn’t think clearly. I took a half hour nap, ate some food and….then was completely fine the rest of the day. It was strange.

Mostly, it got me to thinking how safe and successful traveling without vision can be a walk on the razor’s edge. I’m pretty good at travel. My program recently bumped me to another instructor / class because I was making such rapid progress. And yet, there I was this past Tuesday, utterly lost on familiar ground, temporarily unable to process the information my senses were taking in and to translate it into the kind of reasonably assured travel I’ve been working on.

I thought of this again on Thursday when a fellow student and I went on a long independent to a climbing gym about an hour away. This time, I had all my wits about me; and yet we still managed to get completely lost, despite the fact that we’re both fairly skilled travelers.

It didn’t help that we didn’t do nearly enough research ahead of time to let us know what to expect when we arrived at the light rail station nearest to our destination. Preparation is probably the most important key to traveling blind. It is helpful to know as much as possible in advance, because there is a limit to how much you can find out when you can’t see. We should have had a better idea of what streets to take, what direction they would flow in, etc. Instead, all we really knew was that we were to get off the light rail and head roughly west, and that the street the climbing gym was on would appear shortly after crossing a bridge away from the light rail station.

As it happened, the route we took wasn’t exactly a surface street at all, but rather a path that wound its way between two apartment complexes. When traveling blind, you are constantly looking for clues that sighted travelers don’t even think about – sidewalks that provide structure to the vast expanse, the difference in texture between a smooth parking lot and a rough street, the existence of traffic and the direction it flows most commonly in, etc. When you’re on a path with little to no traffic and limited curbs or sidewalks, you don’t have these clues. Without them, getting around becomes, as I alluded to in an earlier blog post, more like swimming. There are times when, without direct clues, you feel as though you could forge ahead in any direction and it’d be just as sensible as any other. That’s a bad place to be as a traveler.

We turned a 15-20 minute walk into an hour’s trip getting to the gym, and only managed to make it there in the end because of the kindness of a groundskeeper at a nearby apartment complex who walked us the last several hundred yards. On the return trip, we decided to try a different route that sounded like it would be more surface streets and less meandering paths – longer, but easier, in other words – but were given faulty directions. When we stopped another person for directions after 45 minutes or so, we got different but equally flawed directions.

It turns out that, while people generally want to be helpful, they’re not always very good at doing so. Without exaggeration, I would estimate that people confuse right and left about half the time when they give me directions. Actually, I’ve been tracking this mentally for the past couple weeks, and it’s more than half so far. A reader asked me after my last post to address the issue of how to be helpful to blind people out in the world: this is a great question, but one I’ll need to return to, probably over Christmas break when I have no new updates on my activities to bore you with.

Anyway, suffice to say that traveling is difficult under the best of circumstances. On Friday, I went to Office Depot to run an errand. It was after school and I wasn’t wearing sleep shades. But it was in a location I had previously been while under them. I was struck by how different the experience was – how much more information I picked up when sighted. It wasn’t strictly better, mind you – I’m much more attuned to relevant information when walking blind, because I have to be. But there’s a lot – what sorts of buildings or landscapes you’re walking next to, for starters – that you don’t and can’t get when you’re walking blind. It’s interesting how different the experiences are, even when you’re essentially walking the same terrain.

But enough about traveling. I should report before signing off that I made a whole bunch of hummus for an event at the Center this week. For a novice’s novice like myself, any sort of culinary accomplishment is a major milestone. And the hummus was actually pretty good, I must say. I won’t lie, though – making it was hilariously messy. I’m not at the point, and may never be at the point, where cooking is tidy under sleep shades. In particular, I still find measuring and pouring liquids to be absolutely maddening. I needed two and a half cups of olive oil for what I was making, but between what was spilled in the sink as run-off and what ended up on me, the food processor and the counter in the general course of events, I probably went through nearly four cups. I wouldn’t exactly call myself ‘fastidious,’ but I must confess that this level of chaos and disarray is a bit disconcerting for me. I hope I get a little neater as my kitchen skills progress.

Anyway, that’s about all for now. As always, thanks for reading, and feel free to leave comments and questions here or on my Facebook page. I’ll get to them eventually – I just tend to stockpile them for the blogger’s rainy day fund. Cheers…