Each floor has nineteen stairs split up into two flights. The first flight has ten stairs. At the bottom is a landing with a 180-degree turn, then nine more stairs. Usually I don’t count stairs. It’s the dog’s job to pause and let me know when I get to the top of a set of stairs and when I get to the bottom. But this time I count for something to do.
Not only am I counting stairs, I’m listening carefully. My adrenaline is pumping, and I feel very alert with all of my senses heightened. As I walk, I strain to hear and decode the smallest sounds from the building. It’s telling me a story, and I don’t want to miss what it has to say.
Part of the story is what I am not hearing. I haven’t heard any more explosions. No fire alarms have sounded. No emergency announcements have crackled through the PA system. No emergency personnel have appeared to let us know what is happening. And no one can make phone calls. Cell phones are so ubiquitous that as a culture we are used to one-sided conversations surrounding us in almost any public place. But cell phones don’t work well in our steel-and-concrete cave. So as we descend, it’s mostly quiet.
The lack of cell phone reception also means we aren’t getting any news from outside. It’s like we’re together in a bubble, isolated from whatever is going on above, below, and outside. Right now my world consists of stairs. Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs. Again. And again.
Everything feels unreal. I can’t believe that just a few minutes ago I was preparing for seminars in the conference room. Now we are on the run. But whenever I become uneasy, I listen to Roselle. The tough pads of her feet cushion her steps and since we keep her nails trimmed short, her footsteps are silent. But I can hear her breathing. Although we’ve been walking down the stairs for just a few minutes, Roselle is beginning to pant. The temperature in the stairwell is comfortable, so she’s panting not from the heat but from the exertion of her intense focus on her work.
Dogs have fewer sweat glands than people, who cool off as sweat evaporates from the surface of the skin. But canine sweat glands, located on the pads of the dog’s feet and on the ears, play a smaller role in cooling. Instead, dogs pant to cool off the blood circulating through the major blood vessels of the head, which surround the nose. The surface area of the tongue also provides cooling through the evaporation of moisture in the dog’s mouth. Roselle is not nervous, just warm. She’s at the top of her game, walking with confidence and a spring in her step.
The fuel smell is strong on certain landings. When I first noticed it, the smell was just a hint, a whisper of danger. But now it feels heavier and fuller, a toxic stench beginning to sink into my throat and my lungs. I swallow and it feels like I’m drinking a shot of kerosene. My eyes are starting to burn too. Roselle pants a little harder. I know she can taste it too.
There’s a reason we are inhaling the fumes of jet fuel in Stairwell B. We will learn later that when the Boeing 767 hit our building, it was carrying around ten thousand gallons of fuel, most of it in the wing tanks. The plane crashed into the north side of the building and obliterated several floors while spewing out jet fuel. The droplets atomized, forming a combustible mixture that exploded, ignited “by the enormous heat of friction, by sparks from pieces of steel, by hot engine parts, and most of all by short circuits in the wiring of the North Tower . . . The force of the explosion was so great that parts of the aircraft hurled out of the other side of the tower. After impact, bewildered passersby on a street near the World Trade Center stood around a huge cylinder of bent metal. It took a while before they realized they were looking at an aircraft engine.”1
Although the impact generated a tremendous explosion, not all of the jet fuel was consumed, and it shot out of the fuel tanks and sprayed over the floors below, a film of fuel covering stairwells, offices, and elevator shafts “at a rate of more than a hundred miles an hour. Curtains, upholstery, and carpets soaked up the fuel like wicks.”2
Fumes are floating along the air currents inside the building and infiltrating the ventilation system, so everyone in the stairwell can smell it now. I am the first to say it out loud. “I think the smell is jet fuel. Maybe an airplane hit our building?”
The people around us talk it over, trying to figure out what happened. We speculate that maybe there was some sort of midair collision, causing the plane to plow into our building. But we are not sure.
Actually, this isn’t the first time a plane hit a skyscraper in New York. In 1945, a B-25 bomber rammed into the Empire State Building, back then the world’s tallest building. The pilot, a decorated veteran of more than one hundred combat missions, got lost in thick fog and slammed into the 79th floor at two hundred miles per hour. In a stroke of luck, the accident occurred on a Saturday morning without too many people in the building. Still, fourteen people died, along with the pilot and two passengers. The damage was extensive, with the bomber blasting an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole in the building, spewing plane parts, and shattering windows. In addition, when the bomber hit, its fuel tanks exploded and started a fire on the 79th floor.
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 I had a disability. They expected me to do for myself. So I did.
As I mastered the art of bike riding via echolocation, I ventured farther afield in Palmdale, a town of about two thousand. I can still conjure up a map of our part of town. At the center of the grid in my mind is our house at 38710 Stanridge Avenue. Our house was between Third Street and Glenraven Street. Between the streets ran the avenues, each named with a letter of the alphabet, along with a number. The avenues were one mile apart. Our house was between Avenue Q and Avenue Q3, although it was closer to Q. So we were between Q and Q3 on the north and south, and between Third and Glenraven on the east and west.
Although I mastered riding the streets, I came home more than once to find one of my parents on the phone, hearing yet again about their blind child out riding unaccompanied around the neighborhood. The calls always ended with the neighbors hanging up in frustration. My parents never gave in, and eventually neighbors got used to the blind kid riding his bike and the lack of outrage expressed by my parents and finally stopped calling.
I spring from stubborn and self-reliant stock. I also can only hope that my parents’ persistence served to educate my neighbors a little about what blind people can do. My father’s can-do attitude was a huge influence on me. His name was George Hingson, and he was born in 1914 in Dewey, Oklahoma. A quiet man with a grade school education, he left home when he was just twelve or thirteen years old. I’m not sure why. To support himself, he went to work herding sheep on the Idaho-Montana border in the Bitterroot Mountains, a subrange of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a beautiful, pristine wilderness with rugged peaks and steep canyons carved by glaciers, but not an easy place for a young boy to live outdoors for months at a time without home or family. Big game flourishes in the area, which means predators are about, so my father’s job was to protect his flock of sheep from wolves, bobcats, and mountain lions. He used to tell us a story about accidentally cutting off his thumb with an ax then burying it in the snow for three days until he was able to get somewhere where doctors could surgically reattach it. I never saw much of a scar, but he couldn’t bend his thumb at the first joint. So even my dad, the tough guy who always defended me, had accidents too.
Later, Dad worked as a cowboy, ending up in Washington State. He finally realized he didn’t want to chase cattle the rest of his life, so in his midtwenties he enlisted in the army. He served in the Third Infantry Division, which deployed to North Africa, Italy, Sicily, and Southern France during World War II. He was part of the Signal Corps, a branch of the service responsible for all military information and communications systems. Some of the Signal Regiment’s accomplishments during World War II included developing radar and FM radio for military use. The Signal Corps also developed the first FM backpack radio, allowing front-line troops to communicate reliably and static free, thanks to frequency modulation circuits. His military training in electronics would come in very handy back in the United States.
While serving overseas, my dad became friends with a man named Sam Keith. Sam’s wife, Ruthie, wrote letters to her husband and often included pictures of friends and family. One day, George happened to see a photograph of Ruthie’s sister, Sarah. She was a slight woman, blonde and pretty. He was smitten and asked Sam if it would be okay for him to write to Sarah. Sam agreed, and a wartime romance flourished in a flurry of red-and-blue–striped Air Mail envelopes.
Sarah Stone was not your average girl. A street-smart and independent woman, she originally hailed from New York City. She was a high school graduate, she loved to read, and she earned a beautician’s license and supported herself at a time when not many women did. She had lived and worked in both New York and California, finally ending up in Chicago. Sarah and George hit it off, and when the war was over, George went straight to Chicago and married Sarah in November 1945. These two strong and independent people fell in love and were happily married for nearly four decades, thanks to Uncle Sam, both the country and the man.
My parents set up house in an apartment on the south side of Chicago. My aunt Ruth and uncle Sam, my dad’s wartime buddy, lived in a nearby apartment. Next door to Ruth and Sam lived my mom’s brother, Abe, and his wife, Shirley. We were a tight family. We still are.
Dad and Uncle Abe pioneered a television repair business together back when TVs were rare and expensive. Because people invested $200 to $300 in their television sets back then ($1,500 to $3,000 in today’s dollars), they were willing to spend money to keep them working. It wasn’t a bad way to make a living.
My brother, Ellery, was born in 1948. Two years later, I was born on February 24, 1950, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cook County, Chicago. I was two months early and weighed just two pounds, thirteen ounces. My mother always said I was rushing it, in a big hurry to get into the world.
The day I was born, Chicago was buried under a tremendous snowstorm, so my mom gifted me with a special, commemorative name: Michael Blizzard Hingson.
A blizzard usually means heavy snow and high winds, but the word can also refer to whiteout conditions. Snow and ice reflect incoming light, and objects, landmarks, and shadows are no longer discernible. Land and sky blend, and the horizon disappears into a white nothingness. True whiteouts can render a person temporarily blind. Unfortunately, my blindness would not be temporary.
When I was born, my uncle Abe and aunt Shirley braved the storm and visited the hospital when I was just two days old. “The storm was bad,” my aunt told me. “You couldn’t see anything in front of you.”
Babies were kept behind glass in those days. “The nurse picked you up and held you so we could see,” Aunt Shirley said. “You were very, very small. You looked like a little chicken with a large head. They kept you in the incubator so your lungs could develop, and you were in the hospital for two to three months.
“When you came home,” she continued, “the family thought maybe you had a cataract because one eye looked a little glassy. I went with Sarah to every possible doctor you could imagine to see what could be done.”
Meanwhile, I gained weight and seemed normal in every other way.
One day, however, Aunt Shirley noticed something unusual. She was babysitting me while my parents and my brother, Ellery, were on a trip to California. “The second morning I was there,” she said, “I changed your diaper and got you all fixed up. I made you some Pablum for breakfast, took you in my arms, and we sat down at the table. There were three large windows nearby with venetian blinds. The sun was coming in so bright I picked you up again and stood up to close the blinds. The sun shone on your face, right into your eyes, and you didn’t blink. The light didn’t bother you at all.”
Aunt Shirley finished feeding me then put me in the crib. But she was horrified by what had happened. Could Michael be blind? She ran next door to tell my aunt Ruthie, and when my parents returned, she told them too. When I was six months old, the doctor finally made his diagnosis. I was blind, and it was irreversible. My parents announced the news to the family, and everyone cried. Briefly. Then they moved on.
From the beginning I was treated no differently than my brother. I also had my cousins around to
keep me humble. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Sam had two boys, Steve and Robin. Uncle Abe and Aunt Shirley had two girls, Holly and Dava. The cousins all played together in the yard behind the apartment house, and I was allowed out with them, even when I was quite young. My parents trusted us, and we were allowed to explore the neighborhood without a grown-up in attendance. With Ellery and the cousins, I regularly headed to the candy store, where I always picked out penny pretzel sticks and orange soda pop. Sometimes I held on to someone’s hand in that absentminded way kids do. Other times I followed behind. Once in a while, I led. I couldn’t always find my way safely without help, but my cousins didn’t make a big deal about it, and neither did I.
“I always knew you were blind,” said my cousin Dava Wayman, “but I never thought of you being any different. You were doing everything my other cousins did. You were treated like any other kid. Nothing held you back.”
My big brother, Ellery, used to chase me around the apartment, not taking much pity on my youth or size. He remembers strategically placing my beloved pedal car in my path then chasing me until I ran into it.
Once in a while I got to ride along on TV repair service calls with my dad, and I loved visiting the shop. One day I put my hand inside a live TV and got the shock of my life. My dad used the experience to give me my first lesson in basic electricity: never use both hands to touch a live circuit. Always keep one hand in your pocket so as not to become a ground for the current. After that, I was safe around open, running televisions.
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