Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [19]
Contrary to popular misconceptions, blind people do not magically obtain other heightened senses. We have to develop better hearing through practice, just like anyone else. And with practice, it wasn’t long before I learned to walk on my own to Yucca Elementary School, three blocks from our house. Soon after that, I began riding my bike and alarming the neighbors.
Several times during my early school years, my parents were called in to meet with the principal, who would strongly recommend that I be sent to the residential school for the blind in Berkeley, California, several hundred miles north of our town. My parents always refused. They wanted me at home and in regular classrooms, “mainstreaming” me before the term had ever been coined.
Finally, the summer between third and fourth grade, the school district hired a resource teacher to provide me and a few other blind children in the area with training in Braille. Her name was Cora Hershberger, and she helped me relearn Braille. I picked it up quickly and at last I could read for myself—the door to books and to learning now open. My curiosity and imagination ignited, and I fell in love with books as I explored the world through dots on a page, just as I had explored my neighborhood by learning the cracks and bumps of the sidewalks. Those exploration techniques I learned as a child came in so handy when we had to make our way out of Tower 1. I have always felt that every life experience helps us prepare for what is to follow.
Like using my ears to hear my driveway or to avoid parked cars when riding my bike, I developed the skills I needed to navigate the World Trade Center. I am as familiar with my building as I was with the cracks in my childhood sidewalk. And my early feeling of being an outsider still makes me strive hard to be part of the community, no matter the cost. I don’t rely unnecessarily on other people, and I never play the blind card.
Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs. Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs.
On the 70th floor, the stairwell ends, and we file through a door back into the building. It’s quiet, the abandoned floor a ghost town. We go back into the stairwell through a different door and start back down.
I remember something a PE teacher taught me when I wanted to run faster and farther. Count to two when you breathe in, and three when you breathe out. I try it, synchronizing my breathing with the stair count. One, two, in; one, two, three, out.
Then the shouting starts, from somewhere above.
5
KICKED OFF THE BUS
The whole idea of compassion is based on a
keen awareness of the interdependence of all
these living beings, which are all part of one
another, and all involved in one another.
THOMAS MERTON
Ten floors down, sixty-eight to go, and the stairwell is beginning to fill up. People are leaving the North Tower in droves, and we form a slow but steady single-file line that snakes down. Sometimes when a door opens on a landing, we smell smoke. Most people are calm and quiet, lost in thought and focused on getting out. Every once in a while someone gets out of line, anxious, walking quickly to pass by on the left. But there is no pushing or shoving, no angry or panicky voices.
Instinctively we all keep to the right, with the left side of the stairwell open for people who, for whatever reason, need to get down in a hurry. But we have dozens of flights and hundreds of stairs yet to go, so we pace ourselves. As we walk, I let go of