Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [15]
Just like us in the World Trade Center, those Empire State Building survivors took to the stairs, and some of them descended seventy flights to get out. But rescuers also used the still-working elevators for evacuation. One miraculous survivor story emerged after an Empire State Building elevator operator named Betty Lou Oliver was thrown out of her post by the impact of the plane crash and badly burned. Betty was given first aid then was put into a different elevator and sent down to meet a waiting ambulance. Disaster struck when the elevator cables, weakened by the crash, snapped, and the car plummeted a thousand feet to the basement. Strangely enough, Betty survived and was recovered when rescuers cut a hole in the car to get her out.3
The Empire State Building survived the crash and the fire, and the beautiful old skyscraper still stands. But I am certain the hole in our building must be much larger than just eighteen by twenty feet.
An airplane crashed into the building. Why? How could this happen? The thunderstorm is long past, and September 11 is a clear autumn day, no fog. With instrumentation and air-traffic control, no airplane should have come anywhere near the World Trade Center. What is going on?
As we walk down the stairs, the sound of the initial explosion reverberates in my head. The crowd on the stairs is large enough that many of the usual echoes I would hear while going between floors are muffled or gone altogether. The walls of the stairwell are the boundaries of our little world. Although our senses are on high alert, inside our cocoon it feels natural, almost hypnotic, just to continue to walk down ten stairs, turn, and then walk down the next set.
While this situation was unfamiliar, navigating down the stairwell wasn’t too much of a challenge. But learning how to ride a bicycle blind was. When I was about six years old, a girl named Cindy Loveck moved into the neighborhood during the summer. The Lovecks lived across the street, a few doors down, and Cindy and I became friends. Cindy had a full-sized bike and rode it up and down the streets of our high desert town of Palmdale.
One day she offered to let me try out her bike. I didn’t hesitate. After several attempts that included a number of falls and scrapes, I learned how to balance the bike on two wheels.
But once I learned to ride the bike, I had to figure out how to avoid obstacles, so I set out to use the tricks I’d learned while driving my little pedal car. Just as I learned how to hear the coffee table, I learned how to hear parked cars so I could avoid them while riding down the street. “You would click your mouth just like a bat, kick it out there, and listen for the returns,” my older brother, Ellery, says now. Also, the rubbery echo of the bicycle tires rolling down the street provided me with invaluable information including sound changes as I approached parked cars and other objects. No one taught me echolocation; I just figured it out on my own.
My parents always encouraged me to go outside and play with the other kids on the street, and they never stopped me from trying new things. Soon after I learned how to ride Cindy’s bike, my parents bought me a bike of my own, and I rode it for hours a day. I loved the feeling of freedom and control.
One day I came in the house from riding my bike, and my dad was on the phone.
“Well, he was just out riding his bike,” he said. There was an edge to his voice. Then, a pause.
“Did he crash into anything?” Pause.
“Then what’s the problem?” My dad hung up. I don’t want to say he slammed down the phone, but he hung it up with some force.
It turned out that a neighbor had called to inform my dad that his son (not the older kid who can see but the younger kid who is blind, she had said) had been spotted riding a bicycle down the street. I guess the well-meaning neighbor thought my parents should know. But just as my parents had ignored the doctor’s recommendation to send me away to a school for the blind, they ignored comments like these. No one in my family treated me like