Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  Jennifer and her sister Wendy weren’t girly-girls. They climbed trees, pedaled bikes until the chains fell off, and ran miles a day in their Keds. Jennifer never believed she was pretty. By sixth grade she had conclusively determined that she wasn’t cute. The other girls had bras and eyeliner and boyfriends. Jennifer hadn’t developed, didn’t own a single lipstick, and spent boy time riding (and shoveling up after) the horse her father had leased for her. In photos of the time she is five foot four, 105 pounds, tanned, and with long blond hair—a flat-out looker, and California style to boot—but it would be years before she could glance in the mirror and see anyone there but plain.

  But for her grades, Jennifer would have gone to the family’s chosen elite private high school. Everyone knew she was smart, and everyone knew she tried, but schoolwork scraped against her brain; it was as if she knew the answers but somehow couldn’t get them onto the page. Her grade-point struggle continued at Saratoga’s public high school, where she fought to make B’s in classes where less capable students breezed to A’s. If it weren’t for art courses—her deepest passion—or the other few that didn’t require writing, she might have fallen off the academic map entirely.

  Things went better for Jennifer socially. She traveled seamlessly between cliques but belonged to none, making friends with cheerleaders, actors, druggies, toughs, and jocks. She had a first boyfriend in sophomore year, and even dated some football players, though they never stayed with her once they realized she wasn’t willing to give them what they wanted. She couldn’t understand why the jocks kept calling—if they opened their eyes and looked closer, they could have easily seen what she saw in the mirror every morning.

  While her friends were admitted to the best universities, Jennifer enrolled at a local junior college, where she vowed to reapply herself. But it was the same story—whenever she was asked to write, she could not push the thoughts from her head to the page. She dropped out and tried another junior college. There, a roommate with a laundry aversion proposed a deal: she would type Jennifer’s papers if Jennifer would wash her clothes. Jennifer agreed and began dictating her homework while the woman typed. Immediately, her grades improved. She transferred to Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, where she signed up to major in history and joined the ski team.

  Her grades dropped the moment she stepped on campus, causing her to sink into a depression, one she had felt coming on for years from this constant scholastic struggle. She trudged to the student counseling center, but what was the point? They would tell her to try harder, as everyone had, though she couldn’t imagine working any harder. In the office, counselors ran a battery of tests and discovered that despite her high intellect she had the spelling skills of a second grader. This suggested a learning disability related specifically to writing. They advised her to take her exams orally and see what happened. She got A’s. She liked the good grades. But she loved knowing that she had been trying all these years, after all.

  After graduating, Jennifer was tested further and diagnosed with dysgraphia, an impairment of the ability to write. She knew she would struggle with office work, so she made forays into more intuitive areas such as occupational therapy and teaching elementary school art. Along the way, she fell in love with a handsome man from a wealthy family. He had big ambitions, loved the things she loved, and wanted to marry. From a distance he appeared her perfect match, but something was missing. The man had dreams and endless potential, but he never stepped out in the world to risk making them happen, he never seemed willing to crash through even though the things he wanted went to crashers. She apologized and let him down gently, but what she wished to say was that she needed a person who understood why she jostled in her chair and waved her hands when telling stories of going lost in the Sierras, why it wasn’t crazy to say that the best part of those hiking trips was having maps that never quite guaranteed where you were.

  Jennifer continued to hang with the sandals-and-incense crowd, investigating different areas of spirituality in search of a career she could love. In 1985, when she and a boyfriend took a trip to Kirkwood, he convinced her to join him and volunteer for the resort’s program for blind skiers. That’s when she met the program’s co-founders, a long-haired hippie type named Ron Salviolo and a ruggedly handsome blind guy named Mike May.

  “We’ll see you out here for training tomorrow morning,” Salviolo told Jennifer.

  “Sounds great. We’ll be there,” she replied, then flipped a hip and skied away.

  As they continued to talk while riding horses at Kirkwood, Jennifer told May about her learning disability, about being depressed in college, about doing “sweats” and going on “quests” and the other spiritual things she continued to explore but that some wrote off as quackery.

  “I don’t write it off,” May said.

  “What part of it?”

  “Any part of it.”

  “What about my learning disability? That’s a major flaw. I still can’t write.”

  “I still can’t see. So what?”

  The couple rode for several more hours. By day’s end they were exhausted and packed up to go home. Jennifer asked how May had gotten to the restaurant where they’d met the night before. He told her he had taken a train, then a bus, then a taxi.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Jennifer said. “How far did you travel?”

  “About eighty-five miles,” May said. “Piece of cake.”

  “I’m driving you home.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Let’s go,” Jennifer said. “You lead the way.”

  When they arrived at May’s home, neither wanted to say good-bye. He invited her in for dinner, and the meal lasted well into the evening. By the time May dried the last of the dishes, he asked Jennifer to stay the night, and she agreed. It was clear that the night would end intimately, but neither had any birth control, so they decided to make a quick trip to the drugstore. Once inside, however, each seemed frozen to the ground.

  “You know where to look, don’t you?” May asked.

  “Not really,” Jennifer replied. “I’ve never bought condoms before.”

  “I haven’t either,” May said.

  For a moment, the couple stood speechless. Then each began to laugh and insist that the other be the one to look.

  “We’ll both look,” May said finally. “Let’s go!”

  He and Jennifer began to walk down the aisles—first calmly, then briskly, then in a flat-out run, teasing and tickling and poking each other along the way, grabbing for boxes that might be cookies or condoms, wondering aloud whether two such randy people had ever before spent so much time lost in a drugstore’s nail polish section.

  On Monday morning, May and Jennifer finally said good-bye. Their planned Friday night dinner date had lasted two and a half days.

  The couple couldn’t get enough of each other after that. She did her best to describe the world to May—she was good at things that didn’t move, such as nature and art; she was less capable at sporting events or other unfolding scenes. Movies were her Mount Everest. Excited by the on-screen action, she’d race for words: “Uh-oh!…Oh, my!…Did you see that?…The guy in the black just shoved the guy in the purple!…Oh, no, what’s she doing here?” May joked that he could have followed the movie better if she were blind, too.

  Dating May was a sudden education for Jennifer. Many blind people she met depended on the sighted to guide them, to find them chairs and fill their glasses, to fix their dinner plates at buffets.

  “I’m obviously not jumping up to get you appetizers,” she remarked to May at a party. “I don’t seem to be a hoverer. I hope you don’t think I’m a callous person.”

  “I like that,” May said. “I don’t want someone hanging on to me. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grab an appetizer for me. I’m always grateful for a good Swedish meatball.”

  “Of course,” Jennifer told him. Then she would go in search of that meatball, get diverted by a good conversation, and forget all a
bout May, which he also liked.

  May and Jennifer continued to fall more deeply in love. It rarely occurred to her that the man she was dating was blind. Still, every now and again, she found herself longing for little things she tried to tell herself were unimportant. On a dinner date, it was she who opened the door, chose the table, read the menu, and hailed a taxi, and if she happened to be dressed in her best outfit and shoes and coat that evening she might have wished for a moment that her date was doing those things for her. She knew that May saw her inner beauty, and she adored how he constantly told her she looked beautiful. Yet, every once in a while, when her hair and mascara and dress came together just right, she might wish for her boyfriend to swoon at the sight of her. Instead, she settled for standing before the mirror and describing it for May as he shaved.

  “Man, I really look good in this,” she’d say.

  In 1986, it seemed like the men who’d put together Finial Technology would make millions from their laser turntable. In late 1987, their dreams began to crumble under the weight of two letters: CD.

  The compact disc had once seemed a minor threat to Finial. It cost the record companies ten dollars to press a CD but just one dollar to press a record. And while it also used laser technology, the CD sounded vaguely artificial—it didn’t have the tonal warmth that vinyl records produced.

  But the CD took off. Players cost just a few hundred dollars, not the $3,000 it took to buy a Finial turntable. As CDs got more popular, the cost of mass-producing them plummeted. And that’s how fast it ended for Finial. Investors issued severance checks to the principals, including May, and showed them the door. The men took their Cat Stevens record with them on the way out.

  Jennifer had never seen May so disheartened. He looked drained, and she wondered whether he might return to the bank or even the CIA, where a regular paycheck and the certainty of tomorrow were assured. “This one really hurts,” he told her.

  In March 1988, May prepared to shut down his remaining senses in order to conquer the world.

  He and Salviolo had been training in the up-and-coming sport of speed skiing, where the goal was to go as fast as possible through a one-hundred-meter stretch of hill: no gates, no twists and turns, just speed. Sighted competitors had been timed in excess of one hundred miles per hour. There were no blind competitors. When May tried it he understood why.

  Participants wore snug, flared helmets that covered their ears and muted the world. The skis, wider and thicker than those used in downhill, absorbed the ground’s vibration, leaving little sense of connection to the earth. The skiers’ tight crouch reduced not just wind resistance but the very feeling of movement. In effect, the sighted speed skier knew he was moving only because he could see that he was moving. The blind speed skier—deprived of almost all sensory input—could feel like he was floating, even while he traveled at speeds that could kill him.

  May’s first few runs were unlike anything he’d experienced.

  “Not being able to hear is an incredibly vulnerable feeling for me. It’s a huge mental block,” he told Salviolo. “It feels like my legs and head are disconnected from each other. I’ve gotta say, Ron, being cut off from my other senses is terrifying.”

  May had good reason to worry. If he fell, the best he could hope for were burns generated through the acrylic suit. Worse was going into an “eggbeater,” in which a limb and ski pole get tangled, causing a violent tumbling that can catapult a skier twenty feet into the air. May didn’t want to think about the next category of injury.

  He and Salviolo did what they always did: invent a system to get better. They rigged two-way radios to their helmets, placing a “talk” button in Salviolo’s ski pole so that he could direct May through the one-hundred-meter timing area. This time, Salviolo would ski behind May for aerodynamic purposes. When May exited the timing area, Salviolo would yell, “Break out!,” whereupon May would stand up into a violent boom of a collision between skier and air.

  “You’re a human guided missile this way,” Salviolo said. “You have to trust me one hundred percent to steer you, even if you can’t hear or feel a thing. But if we do this right, I think we can compete with the big boys.”

  “Big boys” meant sighted skiers, the Holy Grail to a competitor like May.

  The partners trained for two years, refining their technique and attracting the attention of the legendary speed skiing champion and world record holder Franz Weber, who agreed to be their coach. In early 1988, they heard word of a weeklong competition at the Les Arcs ski resort in Savoie, France, a place that was said to have the best speed skiing course in the world. As a blind skier, May would not be allowed to enter the competition. But he and Salviolo decided to go anyway, and for a single purpose—to set their own world record.

  Heavy snows prevented the duo from starting high on the mountain, the key to attaining maximum speeds. On the last day of the event, during a training run, they were timed at sixty-five miles per hour, the fastest speed ever recorded by a blind skier. May believed he could break one hundred miles per hour, but snow closed down the runs. Still, he had his world record, one he would own for decades to come. When he returned to California, Jennifer told him she believed he could do anything.

  Now that Finial had ended, May could live anywhere. He and Jennifer decided to make the leap to San Francisco, where they took an apartment at Second Avenue and Hugo, near Golden Gate Park, and began living together as a couple. Jennifer was attending graduate school and studying art therapy, while May continued to look for his next business opportunity. Late one night, after Jennifer had returned from the last of her final exams, May poured her a glass of wine and sat her by the apartment’s grand fireplace.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ll marry you,” she said.

  They hadn’t discussed marriage, but they’d been making check marks in the boxes all along. They had their annoyances, to be sure: Jennifer seemed chronically disorganized, a minor disaster for a dynamic blind guy who didn’t want to trip over yet another tossed-and-forgotten shoe. May seemed perpetually on the go, often exhaustingly so, and sometimes made plans for both of them without consulting her. But they accepted these things as irritants, what every couple swallows in order to be together. The reasons they said yes to each other ran much deeper.

  May spent the first six months of his marriage brainstorming for new business ideas. One of them, the most unlikely for a California native, blazed to the front of the pack.

  Bun warmers.

  Countless sports fans were freezing their behinds off in arctic football stadiums across America. If May could make a fanny-sized version of the instant, disposable hand warmers popular with hunters and outdoorsmen, he could warm a football-crazed nation.

  He invested his own money and raised more from investors. He would call the business Maytek Sports.

  In early 1989, May’s friend Sheri asked if he and Jennifer might like to move into her house in Ashland, Oregon. She was leaving the country for a year and needed someone to mind the dogs. The rent would be cheap and the views, atop a hill on 160 acres, glorious. They said good-bye to their families, packed their bags, and headed to Oregon.

  Ashland was no San Francisco. Having left open a gate on their first night of residence, they awoke the next morning to find their neighbor’s cows grazing on their lawn. Jennifer knew from her experience with horses that animals could be shooed away vocally, so she sent May out to do the same with the cows.

  “I can’t, I’m naked!” May told her.

  “Quick, you’ve got to do it!” she said.

  And so May went outside wearing nothing but slippers, and began mooing and waving his arms at the cows. None budged. They simply looked at him inquisitively while Jennifer doubled over in laughter from the safety of the kitchen.

  Not long after, while dressed in their bathrobes and drinking their morning coffee on the back porch, the couple heard the unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake beside them. Without a mo
ment’s hesitation, Jennifer sprang from her chair, ran around the house, picked up a shovel, came back around, and, while still on the run, beheaded the snake with a single blow. May scarcely had time to process what had happened. Jennifer waited for the snake to stop wiggling, then scooped it up and dropped it in the garbage can.

  “You chopped off its head?” May asked.

  “Cleanly, I might add,” Jennifer replied.

  She took a moment to catch her breath, then looked down at the shovel blade.

  “Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe I did that.”

  These were the Mays’ adventures during their first weeks in Oregon. They freed goats stuck in gates, toppled down deceptively muddy hills, and put a deer out of its misery after it had broken its neck jumping into their garden.

  All the while, May focused on warming the bun. In order to build prototypes of his product, he purchased a secondhand ten-foot anaerobic chamber, the kind with holes in the sides and rubber sleeves attached to allow a worker to assemble parts inside it without exposing the chemical ingredients to oxygen. That worker was Jennifer. It fell to her to stick her arms into those sleeves and put together the bun warmers. As May made his phone calls and scheduled demonstrations, he could hear the squeaks of Jennifer’s arms moving inside the chamber, a sound he loved for its constant announcement that she believed in him.

  After Jennifer had assembled a sufficient supply of bun warmers, she and May took to the road to sell them. They scheduled appointments with pro and college teams, then drove from stadium to stadium across the country, changing into their business attire at nearby gas stations before demonstrating the product for skeptical executives in the bowels of empty stadiums. The pitch lasted fifteen minutes, with May explaining the product and Jennifer, playing the part of Carol Merrill from Let’s Make a Deal, looking pretty and assisting. The bun warmers heated perfectly, but none of the decision makers seemed overwhelmed, a change from the show-stopping effect of the laser turntable. They returned to Oregon with nibbles from the Buffalo Bills and the Green Bay Packers but little else. May said he’d have to work harder to convince these people how much they really needed his product.