Thunder Dog - Michael Hingson [21]
What I didn’t know then is that the top of our building had become a death trap. Hundreds perished instantly when the plane crashed above us, and hundreds more on the floors above were blocked, unable to get out. We had kept the left side of the stairwell open for the injured, but most of them never made it down.
My throat is coated with the stench, like it’s been painted in gasoline. I try to keep my breathing shallow. Then I hear a woman’s voice. “I can’t breathe,” she says. She has stopped moving and sounds frightened. “I don’t think we’re going to make it out.” She’s somewhere close by. Her fear is palpable in the close atmosphere of the bodies in the stairwell. She’s not in a full-blown panic, but she’s close.
The line stops moving for a moment. People murmur encouragement and reassurance. Voices are gentle, concerned. No one lashes out in anger or frustration. We gather around her as a group. “It’s going to be okay,” several say. “We are going to make it.”
I give her a hug. Without urging, Roselle nudges her hand, asking to be petted. A nudge from a Labrador retriever is more like a punch than a tickle, and the woman can’t ignore it. She pets Roselle’s head, stroking her soft fur. Roselle enjoys the attention and the break, panting happily. The woman relaxes, her breathing slows, and she even laughs a bit. Roselle has worked her magic.
The panicked woman takes a deep breath, gives Roselle one last pat, then takes her place in the line, heading downstairs once again.
I take a deep breath too. Are we really going to make it? Maybe she’s right, because it’s getting harder to breathe.
As we support and encourage each other in the stairwell, I think back to someone who was once a great source of encouragement to me.
805-947-8675. Mr. Herboldsheimer’s phone number. I still remember it, and it’s been years now.
Dick Herboldsheimer, or Mr. Herbo, as he liked to be called, was my geometry teacher in the ninth grade. He was a brilliant man, gifted in math, who had been working for the Kansas Nebraska Natural Gas Company and trying to support a wife and infant son on a whopping $1.65 an hour. He went back to school and earned both a BA and MA in mathematics. Lucky for me, he needed a better-paying job than they were offering him back in the Midwest, and he ended up teaching at Palmdale High School. His very first year teaching, he ended up with a blind kid in his geometry class. Me.
“It was like the principal dropped a bomb on me,” said Mr. Herbo. “I had no idea of how I would cope.” He was not only suffering from the shock of trading the lush, green fields of Nebraska for the hot, dry high desert, but now he had to figure out how to teach me a subject that is inherently visual. Geometry, one of the oldest sciences, is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of size, shape, relative position of figures, and properties of space. The word geometry means “earth-measuring” in ancient Greek. But if I couldn’t see shapes on a piece of paper, how on earth was Mr. Herbo going to teach me how to measure them?
The first day of class, I sat in the front row directly in front of his desk with my guide dog Squire. Mr. Herbo, probably nervous as could be, began to write out the first set of equations. “Mr. Herboldsheimer, you’ve got to tell me what you are writing on the blackboard,” I said. He paused, thought for a minute, and then began to explain exactly what he was writing. And that was the beginning of a wonderful year.
I stayed in the front row. I had a Braille geometry book, and I took my geometry tests in the library with Mr. Herbo. We used an erasable slate, and Herbo used the stylus to draw images for me to use on the tests. He would take my finger and show me the raised image and then I would do the calculations and give him the answer