Thunder Dog (9 page)

Then, more panic. Overwhelmed by the burn victims, the smell of the jet fuel, and the overall terror, David Frank’s voice begins to quiver. “Mike, we’re going to die. We’re not going to make it out of here.”

My hand tightens for a moment on Roselle’s harness. She looks up at me, I know, watching my face and listening for a command. I relax my hand.
I need to stay calm for Roselle. I cannot panic. I cannot let her sense any shred of fear in me
.

“David,” I say quietly, so only he can hear. I use my best managerial voice. “If Roselle and I can go down the stairs, then so can you.”

I’m not afraid of the fire. If those burned women can make it down the stairs, so can we. Roselle is quiet and calm next to me. I know if the fire had gotten close, she would have become nervous and pulled at her harness. I’m not afraid of the descent; people are working together to evacuate, and it won’t be long before we’re out of the building and on our way home.

But I am afraid of one thing. I can’t banish this thought from my mind. It’s there, nagging at me. A chill runs across my back.
What will I do if the lights go out?

A joke is a very serious thing.
WINSTON CHURCHILL

T
he stairwell is bathed in fluorescent light. Some of the fixtures give off a slight, comforting buzz as we continue down the stairs. I remember hearing that in the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, when a Ryder truck filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives was detonated in the garage of our building by a terrorist named Ramzi Yousef, people had to walk down darkened stairwells, and for some it took more than three or four hours to evacuate.
What would happen if the lights went out?
I keep pushing away the thought.

David, once right in front of me, has passed several people and moved about a floor ahead. He begins to act as scout, calling back whatever he sees. Every few floors, he calls back the number. “Sixty.” Then “Fifty-nine . . . fifty-six . . . fifty-four . . . fifty.”

I’m still touching the fire doors, but they are cool. The fire must be contained to the upper floors although the air is still foul. There is a hint of smoke as well.

As the traffic in the stairwell continues to build, the atmosphere warms. Bodies are closer together. Adrenaline is pumping. The acrid smell of sweat hangs in the air. The railing under my right hand feels warm and damp now, losing its original cool metal feel to the dozens, maybe hundreds, of hands gripping it on the way down.

I’m still timing my breathing to the steps, but Roselle is breathing fast. Today our partnership is working well. While guide dog training has prepared Roselle to confront new and dangerous situations, there is no way any dog could ever be prepared for something like this. “Good girl,” I say to Roselle. “You are doing a great job. I am so proud of you.”

I give her head a quick rub, and she lifts her head up against my hand. I slide my hand down around her left ear and stroke her throat. It’s damp.
I bet her body is trying to flush out the stench of the fumes. I hope it doesn’t hurt her
.

“Forty-eight . . . forty-five . . . forty-three,” David calls back. I touch my watch. It’s 9:05. While our pace is slowing, my anxiety level begins to ratchet up. We’re heading down the stairs at a steady pace. Roselle is doing her job. David is ahead, scouting. But the buzz of the lights brings the fear back.
What if the lights go out?

As I walk, I mull over what I know so far.
There’s been an explosion, and the building took a tremendous hit. The explosion rocked the building, blew out windows, and ignited a maelstrom of a fire. From the smell of the jet fuel, I’m pretty sure an airplane struck our building. So far, there has been no hint of emergency assistance. There are no alarms, no firefighters, and the fire sprinklers have not activated. I’m assuming the power at the top of the building has been cut off by the explosion, but on the 78th floor we still had power in our office, at least when we left. We still have power in the stairwell. But how long will it last
?

There are no windows in the stairwell. There are hundreds of us enclosed in cement and steel. We don’t know what’s going on above us or below us. We have no idea what’s happening outside or even on the floors as we pass by. Without cell phones or contact with the outside, we are, all of us, in a blind descent.

Then the thought I’ve been pushing away returns. I can’t ignore it anymore.
What if the power goes out?
If the fire spreads or the power systems begin to fail for some other reason related to the crash, the stairwell would be plunged into darkness. Through voices, breath, and movement, I can tell that the people around me are anxious, driven by a desire to get out of the building and into fresh air and freedom. There is no panic yet. New Yorkers are tough. But if everything goes dark, that could change. The irony is that if the power went out, Roselle and I would be fine. After living for fifty years in a world designed for the sighted, I’ve been forced to find ways to adapt and to cope. My parents’ refusal to send me away to a home for the blind because I might become a burden prompted me instead to get creative, to learn how to survive, and to find and use the tools I need to make a life. A very good life.

There are certain advantages to being blind. I can save money on electricity. When I became proficient at reading Braille, I used to stay up till all hours reading in the dark. I like to think my parents never knew, but parents know everything, so they probably had a pretty good idea of what I was doing when I was supposed to be sleeping. I’ve developed a strong awareness of people’s thoughts and feelings, gleaned from the sounds of their movements and their voices. I can’t read their faces or look in their eyes, so I read everything else. I can’t even really verbalize how I pick up on feelings and thoughts; it’s intuition, honed by years of listening carefully. I learned to hear the coffee table, I learned to hear the driveways on my street, and I learned to hear people’s emotions, too.

Try it out. If you are angry or irritated, the muscles in your face tighten up, especially around your mouth and lips, and the tone of your voice changes. It’s sharp and short. On the other hand, if you are happy and relaxed, even smiling, your voice takes on a relaxed, open tone. It’s the same with other emotions and mental states, such as sleepiness, sadness, guilt, fear, anxiety, enthusiasm, and love. I can hear them. Anyone can, if they pay attention.

The challenge of growing up blind also forced me to develop a boldness and a confidence as I faced new situations. And working with a partner helps.

Suddenly a thought hits me. Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?

I can be a guide
.

If the lights go out, Roselle will guide me, and I’ll guide the others. The lights might not work, but we can still get out. Roselle and I will lead the way
.

Immediately, the fear lifts. I take a deep breath, hold it, and breathe out.
Relax
. We are still moving downward, a long line of people on a journey none of us wanted or anticipated. But we are in it together.

I call out, my voice loud and strong. “Don’t anybody worry. Roselle and I are giving a half-price special to get you out of here if the lights go out.” People around me laugh. The mood lightens, and we talk quietly as we walk.

I like to think that even in the most serious situations, I can find humor or some other way of relieving stress. I learned a lot about this in college.

Heading off to college challenged me to learn how to manage my fears. At first, being out on my own was daunting, as it is for any freshman. I had visited the University of California at Irvine with my parents before high school graduation, and we got the chance to meet with the chairman of the physics department. Everyone in the department was warm and welcoming and seemed to have no qualms about having a blind kid, so I applied and was accepted. My parents were over the moon; all of their hard work was paying off.

It must have been hard to let me go out on my own into the sighted world. But just as they’d let me shove off on my bicycle and brave the mean streets of Palmdale, they let me take off to the manicured, curving pathways of Irvine. There were a good many more people at UCI than in the whole city of Palmdale, but I was excited and looking forward to the academic challenge.

I did have Squire with me, though. But I also had learned to use a white cane, and I explored just about every pathway on the 1,500-acre campus, located in the coastal foothills of Orange County just south of Los Angeles and only five miles from the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I walked with a cane, I purposely took different routes to build a 3-D map in my head so I would never get lost. Once I learned the campus, I rode my bike or walked with Squire to get around.

I also took different routes whenever I walked with Squire. Guide Dogs for the Blind trains students to travel a variety of routes so that a dog does not get overly familiar with a particular routine. I had a friend who walked her phone bill to the phone company office every month. One day she took a walk in the same neighborhood but headed to the dry cleaner’s instead. Her guide dog didn’t know; he dragged her into the phone company, ignoring her commands and tugging on his harness because he thought he was supposed to take her there. Like us, dogs are creatures of habit and easily fall into a rut, so it’s better to keep them guessing.

One interesting route I discovered was underground. A one-hundred-yard-long utility corridor ran underground from the computer science building to the engineering building. For some reason, the facilities people kept the tunnel access doors unlocked, so I got in the habit of using it as a shortcut, as did many others. I usually had Squire with me, and there were places I had to duck for pipes. Squire noted the hazards and learned to guide me around them. The tunnels were pretty busy at times; it was one of those poorly kept secrets that college students love to share, even before the days of easy information sharing via texting and Facebook. On weekends, though, the tunnel was deserted, and I used it to exercise my dog. I would stand at one end and throw a SuperBall as hard as I could. The dog would chase it, and depending on how fast he was that day, he might catch it in flight or he might just have to run all the way to the other end. Sometimes there would be someone else coming along the tunnel from the other side, and the poor student would get caught in the crossfire and get a little miffed. But what’s a SuperBall-shaped bruise or two among friends?

I bought my first car as an Irvine student—a ’64 Ford Mustang with a leaky transmission. Even driving became an adventure for me. I made friends with some of the campus police officers at University of California–Irvine, and they didn’t make much of a fuss about me occasionally driving around campus in the evenings. My dad had let me drive a few times at home, and when I was six or seven years old, a friendly mailman named Mr. Judd had let me help drive the mail truck every once in a while. I couldn’t make echolocation work for driving a car, so I had to have someone direct me. And I didn’t have a driver’s license, so that limited my driving options—usually I had someone else drive me while I directed from the front passenger seat. But I loved the Mustang, and sometimes we’d have a parade and drive around campus or drive in the parking lots and honk and wave at friends just to get a reaction.

While getting around at Irvine wasn’t much of a challenge, the academics were. I had more competition from the other students, who worked at a higher level than I was used to; the teachers didn’t always describe what they were doing when they wrote on blackboards or overhead projectors; and sometimes I missed out on getting involved in discussion groups. Whether that was due to some shyness on my part or some uncomfortable feelings on the part of the other students, I’m not sure.

But one wonderful thing about college is that I had access to most of the books in Braille or via recordings. The books and materials I couldn’t read were read to me by readers, typically other college students who became my eyes and read to me a few hours a week. I started to find my academic sweet spot, keeping up with a demanding course load and participating in group discussions, sometimes even shaping discussions.

Math courses were the hardest, especially if I didn’t have the material. It wasn’t easy for readers who weren’t math or physics majors to convey the equations to me. So I spent lots of time with readers, trying to understand theorems. One professor, Dr. Naylor, at first didn’t describe much of what he was doing in his lectures. I kept at him, asking questions and trying to understand. He was gracious about the whole thing. One day he called me on the phone and said, “Thank you for helping me get to the point where I am verbalizing more.” For all the math students who came after me, I apologize right now if Dr. Naylor overexplained things. I take full responsibility.

I began to fall in love with physics. C. S. Lewis, the great writer and Christian thinker, once said, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.” My love for physics and math is also a quest for beauty and for understanding how the world works. I had always been interested in science, especially electricity and magnetism, probably because of my dad’s influence. For as long as I can remember, I was particularly drawn to physical science. In my freshman year of high school, my science teacher noted my interest and arranged for me to attend the senior physics class for the entire last quarter of my freshman year. I always knew that I would major in physics.