Crashing Through Read online

  The rest of May’s day moved like every other: business calls, wrestling with the boys, feeling a new fabric Jennifer had picked for a client, drafting a business letter, doing the dishes, telling bedtime stories. It had been ten hours since May had returned from his meeting with Dr. Goodman. In that time he had not thought once about new vision.

  And that is how quickly life returned to normal for May. His start-up business was primary in his mind. In a risky move, he had resigned his executive position at a major adaptive technology company in order to design, manufacture, and market a portable GPS system for the blind—the first of its kind. By linking May’s receiver and mapping software to a laptop computer contained in a backpack, a customer could tune in the global positioning satellites that orbited the earth. Then, with the push of a button, that customer could receive real-time, turn-by-turn directions to whatever location he desired: home, work, grocery store, restaurant, park, Star-bucks—anywhere. May saw his product as liberating. It gave a kind of vision to the blind.

  But he needed funding, so much of May’s life centered on pitching potential investors. He had bet it all on this company (which was still without a name), drawing on personal savings to support both business and family. Neither he nor Jennifer was of independent means, which meant that he had maybe a year to make the business work. After that, he would need to return to the corporate world. The restraint on freedom that came with a traditional executive position was discordant with May’s DNA.

  He worked eighteen-hour days, testing the GPS between coffee shops in Davis, on the ferry to San Francisco, in airplanes as the unit’s cables spaghettied onto the shoulder of the person seated beside him. In Anaheim he raced a group of blind cane users from their hotel to Disneyland. Even though he had to stop along the way to hot-glue some loose wires, he still won. May believed in his product.

  And he was able to work from home, a godsend in allowing him the time with his family he so deeply desired.

  When Wyndham’s soccer coach quit before the team’s first practice, parents gathered at May’s house to determine what to do next. He told them that he would coach the team, practices and all, and that he would mail them schedules immediately. The parents applauded. When May got up to adjourn the meeting and reached for his cane, some of the mothers said, “Wait a minute—you’re blind?” May said, “Yep.”

  He ran drills like Sharks and Minnows, set up orange cones in a mostly symmetrical field shape, and taught the five-year-olds (Jennifer called them “widgets”) to run together in packets toward the correct goal. They loved his stories about playing soccer in college, like the one where he made the other team use his beeping ball for an entire half, and how he got a bloody nose when the silent ball hit him in the face.

  Many of the players knew May from school. Every year, he’d bring Josh to area classrooms to tell children what it was like to be blind. He loved their questions: Do your kids get away with stuff because you can’t see them? No, because I have secret techniques to stop them. But they always try. Were you all bloody after your accident? Super bloody. When you met Bill Clinton, how did you know it was really him? I asked him to talk so I could make sure. He demonstrated his talking gadgets with the robot voices, set up a maze of chairs to show how he could zigzag around with Josh, and printed each kid’s name in braille on a card they could take home. Carson and Wyndham thought they had the coolest dad in the world. The couple had never taught the boys to be proud of May. As Jennifer told people, “They just are.”

  In the time between working and parenting, May squeezed in the remainder of a full-blown life. Much of this was made possible by his exceptional ability to move through the world. Often, sighted people would observe him walking smoothly through a banquet hall or an airport or an unfamiliar house and insist that May could see. Some would even challenge him on it. He was hard-pressed to explain his skill in simple terms.

  Part of it stemmed from May’s highly refined ability to detect echo. Over the years, he had learned to distinguish tiny differences made by the sounds of voices or footsteps or canes as they bounced off various objects and openings. The information was so subtle that it vanished if May tried to think about it. Many blind people cannot use echolocation—some can’t hear the echoes; others refuse to trust them. Echoes were sewn into May’s instinct.

  Spatial perception and spatial memory were also critically important. As he moved about a place, whether in a friend’s dining room or New York’s Penn Station, May’s brain vacuumed in the relative locations of obstacles, openings, and passageways, then assembled them into mental maps he could recall at will. He attributed this understanding of space—and his ability to memorize and utilize it so fluently—to his lifetime of participation in sports.

  And May was flat-out good with his two primary mobility instruments, the cane and the dog. Few blind people use both, but May saw power in each. The cane was simpler to use and didn’t need feeding, but it bogged down in crowded situations and never picked up overhead obstructions, the enemy of the fast and free. The dog was difficult to take overseas and had to be fed and walked during business trips, but he was able to detect overhead obstructions, could move quickly through crowds, and was nice company. Of the 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States in 1999, the great majority used canes, while only 7,000 used dog guides.

  May’s mobility skills lowered the drawbridge to the world. But it was his approach that took him places. To go where May wanted to go—which was everywhere—one had to be willing to get lost, a terrifying prospect to many blind people. To May, getting lost was the best part. He told people, “I’m very curious. So getting lost doesn’t feel like a bad thing. It’s part of the process of discovering things.” When they asked how he’d gotten so adept at cane travel he told them it was his curiosity, not his cane.

  Weeks had passed since May had met Goodman and still he’d given little thought to the doctor’s offer. Every so often, Jennifer would ask her husband for his thinking on the subject of new vision, and it was at these times that May appreciated her most. There was no longing in her question, no subtext of urging him along. May confessed to Jennifer that he hadn’t thought much about Goodman’s offer. He also told her that life already felt good and busy and full. And that’s how they left it as winter turned to spring.

  As the months passed, however, May did not feel that it was responsible to allow the matter of new vision to linger dormant on his to-do list. He respected the import of Goodman’s offer and knew that he should give it the serious consideration it deserved. He began to turn things over in his head.

  He tried to imagine a life with vision. But his thoughts always returned to his current life, his real life. He had risked everything on his business, which was now in its most critical phase and demanded his full attention; a single misstep could tear it from its moorings and drown the project. After two recent close calls during similarly stressful periods, his marriage was now thriving and hopeful. He was focused on raising his boys and being present for the moments in their lives—especially the small ones—which already seemed to fly past too quickly.

  He tried to imagine what vision could offer. He could already go virtually wherever he chose—and loved the adventure of finding his way. He could already do whatever he desired—sometimes better than the sighted. And he continued to believe that he saw Jennifer and his boys in the real sense of the word—the sense that speaks to what it really means to know a person, what it means to connect to another’s soul.

  Vision was not calling to May. He knew that the idea of a blind man refusing sight would strike most of the world as unthinkable. But he thought of it this way: What if a sighted person was offered a new sense? What if he was offered, say, the ability to foretell the future? At first, that prospect might seem thrilling. But if the person was already leading a full and rich life, would he really want it? Might it not disrupt an otherwise wonderful life? And what if it turned out to be something wholly different from what the perso
n had bargained for? May wondered how many happy people would proceed if offered a permanent crystal ball or sonar or the ability to read minds. How many of them would say yes to a new sense? And that is how May felt about vision. His life was already complete without it.

  And yet, during the breaks in his days, May found himself wondering about what it might be like to see. He might be touching one of Jennifer’s fabrics and think, “What would my favorite color be?” Shooting hoops with his sons he might ask, “Would I recognize my boys right away?” At the neighborhood coffee shop where he loved to listen to the lilting conversations and high-heeled clicks of women, he wondered, “Would I still prefer blondes?”

  May continued to focus on his work and his family. This was no time to be distracted from what was most important. Still, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge he might ponder, “What would I find beautiful?” Walking in the park he might ask himself, “What would look familiar to me?” Shaving in the bathroom he thought, “Would I look like myself?”

  And he wondered about the red hat.

  When he was a very young boy, just before his accident, his father had taken him deer hunting, a mystical adventure that had required awakening before dawn, carrying weapons, and wearing a bright red hat for visibility, one that could be seen from distances of forever. This was May’s first memory in life. Since losing his vision, he had felt himself just a whisper from being able to see that red hat in his mind; it was always just a hairsbreadth beyond his grasp—there but not there. And he asked himself, “Would I see that red hat if somehow I were made to see?”

  One night in August, after the boys had been bathed and tucked in, Jennifer and May sat on lawn chairs under the orange tree in their backyard. She had asked him little about the prospect of new vision. Tonight, she wanted to know.

  “So, where are you on this?” Jennifer asked. “Do you think about it?” “I do think about it,” May said. “Every time, I ask myself if vision would really change my life. And every time the answer is the same: I don’t think it would. Life is already so full. I don’t need it. I don’t feel like I’m missing a thing.”

  For a minute neither of them said anything. Then Jennifer leaned over, kissed her husband’s cheek, and said, “Okay.”

  May’s summer got even busier. He amped up his efforts to recruit investors, took his sons to minor league baseball games, kept up with his father, who was not feeling well. He had less time than ever to think about a topic like vision. And yet, something about the subject didn’t sit right with May. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But it felt like it was something that went back a very long way.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On a sunny spring morning in 1957, Ori Jean May sent two of her children, four-year-old Diane and three-year-old Mike, outside to play while she finished washing dishes and feeding three-month-old Therese. The May family had recently moved to Silver City, New Mexico, a mining town, where Bill May had taken a job as an industrial engineer.

  Mike and Diane decided to make mud pies. Mike needed a packing container, so he headed to the family’s old garage, a place of crooked shelves, cobwebbed containers, and tools that had died of old age. Gloriously, none of it was easy to reach. Mike climbed into the rafters and found a glass quart jar, perfect for mud pies, but filled with a hard, dried powder that would have to be cleaned. He took the jar to a cement horse trough near the garage and plunged it underwater. A plume of gas began to rise. Nearby, a pile of garbage sat burning.

  Inside the house, Ori Jean dried the last of her dishes. A moment later she heard an explosion. She ran to the backyard and found Mike lying on the ground, drenched in blood and sharded in glass. He was in shock and whimpering. Diane sat stunned but uninjured. Ori Jean picked up her son and ran inside, where she wrapped him in a blanket and dialed frantically for help. Mike’s injuries did not hurt. He just wanted to crawl away and put his head down.

  Ori Jean found a neighbor to watch the baby, then grabbed Diane and followed the ambulance fifteen miles to the nearest hospital, drawing a curtain over her fears in order to stay on the road. Emergency room doctors swarmed around Mike. He had lost massive amounts of blood from his face, neck, arms, stomach, everywhere. Critical veins in his wrists had been slashed. A doctor found Ori Jean in the waiting room. He told her that Mike was going to die.

  Ori Jean pleaded with God, “Please let him live, please let him live. Do it to me. Do anything to me. Anything is okay if you just let my baby live.”

  The doctors kept working. Staff scrambled to find a helicopter to rush him to specialists in El Paso, Texas. “We don’t think he’s going to make it,” they told Ori Jean, and she could not believe the words. Mike had just been twirling in the kitchen and walking his tarantula around by a little string leash. That boy doesn’t die, that boy moves and laughs and tells jokes, he does not die. A helicopter came. Someone drove Ori Jean the 150 miles to El Paso, a horrible trip, an endless drive silent but for the sound of tires on burning pavement and the murmurs of her prayers. Inside the helicopter, wrapped tightly in blankets, Mike felt the sun streaming through the window warm on his face.

  Mike was still in surgery when Ori Jean reached El Paso. She waited for hours. Doctors told her to prepare to say good-bye to her son. More hours passed. Finally, a surgeon delivered different news. It had required five hundred stitches to quilt Mike together. His eyes had been badly damaged. But he was going to survive. The eyes part meant nothing to Ori Jean. Nothing mattered but that Mike was alive.

  Mike remained in the hospital for three months, Ori Jean by his side. His face and head and skinny body were bandaged, and his system so stunned that he did not realize he couldn’t see. Bill May blamed himself for the accident. The powder in the glass jar had been calcium carbide, a chemical that reacts violently with water to produce the explosive gas acetylene. If only he’d cleaned out the garage when the family had moved in.

  Doctors told Ori Jean it could take a year for Mike to recover. And they told her that he was blind. At home, she kept Mike on a cot in her bedroom; she talked to him and stroked him constantly, assuring him that they were all very lucky. Ori Jean changed his dressings and read to him for hours every day.

  A social worker advised Ori Jean to get blindness and mobility training for Mike, and to take lessons herself on how to accommodate a blind child. A doctor told her to start thinking about sending Mike away to a school for the blind. That was what happened to blind children in the 1950s. It was the way.

  But it was not Ori Jean’s way.

  Ori Jean James was born into adventure. Her American parents had eloped in 1922 from Texas to Chile, where her father set out to trade livestock. He knew his cattle. By 1928, when the family welcomed Ori Jean, her father was wealthy. He was also deeply admired by the Chilean locals. It was more his spirit than his money that moved them.

  Origen James (for whom Ori Jean had been named) flung himself into Chilean culture. He danced the cueca as nimbly as the natives, spoke nuanced Spanish, made the town’s customs his family’s. He defied legend and warning and rode his horse on the notorious road from Rancagua to Santiago, where he was kidnapped en route by mountain bandits and told to make peace with his God. When one of the bandits freed him under cover of night, Origen promised the man a lifetime job—and delivered. Weeks later he conquered the same route on the same horse. Ori Jean made him tell the story over and over.

  That kind of curiosity was oxygen to Ori Jean’s parents. They wanted one thing for their children: a sense of what it meant to explore the world. The family had servants and cooks and maids. But the idea of simply allowing life to happen rather than inhaling it was poison in the James home. A person had to go look.

  Ori Jean looked. She joined her father for camping trips across the Andes into Argentina, where they would hunt the llama-like guanaco, chase ostriches, and find their way by the stars. She became lost investigating the giant ice and snow mazes called penitentes. She rode her horse alone into the same kind of bandit-prowled moun
tains where her father had been kidnapped.

  When her father lost his livestock business, he did not seek refuge in the security of America, nor did he go to work for friendly competitors. He built a new business from scratch, bigger and more profitable than before, and the family continued to live where they were meant to live, in the mountains of a country that seemed to stretch forever. That idea—that there was always a way—thrilled Ori Jean. It meant she could do whatever she wanted to do.

  When she turned eighteen, Ori Jean returned to the United States to attend the University of Texas. In a way it felt like she was eloping. During a visit to her sister in Colorado she met a tall and handsome engineering student at the University of Colorado. Bill May had already been accepted into the government’s V-2 rocket program, an honor reserved for the highest intellects. He was studying to be an industrial engineer.

  Ori Jean and Bill fell in love and married. By 1957 the couple had three children and the world in front of them. In Chile, Ori Jean’s father became gravely ill. He’d suffered a heart attack and was told by doctors that it was no longer safe for him to ride his horse. He told them, “If I have to live that way then I’m not alive.” He continued to ride, high into the mountains. His wife kissed him before every journey. Ori Jean told him she admired how he lived. A short time later, at age sixty-two, he died. It was the same year that Ori Jean’s son, Mike, lost his vision.

  Mike’s physical recovery lasted nearly a year. When the social worker visited, Ori Jean told her that she wanted Mike to attend public kindergarten and to participate in normal activities. The woman gently reminded her that Mike could not see and asked which activities Ori Jean had in mind. “All of them,” she replied.