Thunder Dog

by Michael Hingson

  When my parents enrolled me in kindergarten at Perry School in 1954, they decided they wanted me to learn Braille so I could learn to read and write. Back then public schools didn’t offer specialized classes, but my parents, along with a group of other parents of prematurely born blind children, pushed hard for it, and the school ended up hiring a Braille teacher. I began to learn Braille, starting with the alphabet. I practiced writing on a Braille writer, a special device something like a manual typewriter that produces Braille characters on paper. I picked it up quickly, and by the end of the school year, I could read and write Braille at a good, basic level.

  After kindergarten, we packed up and moved to Palmdale, California, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles, out in the Antelope Valley. My parents had yearned to live in the Golden State, and my dad found an engineering job at Plant 42, a government facility later operated by Lockheed Martin.

  But at my new school in California, I was the only blind kid, and for several years I had no Braille teacher. I was at the mercy of my teachers and my parents, who had to read my assignments to me. When the other kids colored, drew pictures, or did other visual projects, I waited. And waited.

  My parents knew I was bright and worked with me at home. My father was mostly self-educated, picking up electronics and electrical engineering on his own along with a few technical courses he picked up along the way. I probably learned much more from my parents than I learned at school those first few years.

  My dad taught me how to do algebra in my head when I was six. I not only got the answers to the problems, but I knew why I got the answers. Mom worked with me on my other assignments and with most of my learning taking place at home, I was often bored at school. The teachers couldn’t involve me because I couldn’t read printed materials or look at diagrams or pictures. There were no books for me to read, and I was often left to my own devices. I felt detached and separated from the rest of the kids and often wandered over to the window and stood, listening for what was happening outside.

  One day in class, the teacher asked us to draw a picture. I sat with my blank sheet of paper while the other kids drew. The teacher told me the other kids would help. I kept asking the kids at my table for help, but they were too busy with their own drawings. Finally, one boy got fed up with me, grabbed my piece of paper, and crumpled it up. He dropped it in front of me and said, “Don’t bother us.” I got the message. It was the first time I remember my blindness provoking hostility.

  Outside of school, Palmdale was an exciting place for a boy to grow up. Edwards Air Force Base nearby was the testing ground for top-secret military aircraft with Chuck Yeager and the rest of The Right Stuff guys breaking through the sound barrier and creating tremendous sonic booms, often over the general’s house.

  At first I wandered around the quiet neighborhoods with my mom and brother, but before long I navigated the streets all by myself. I made it a game to find my way back to our house. I learned that each driveway had small but detectable differences in elevation, length, and in the number and shape of cracks. Our driveway was a bit longer and flatter than the others, and I learned to feel and hear the difference in the incline. In a perfect world, I would have learned how to use a cane at this point. But I didn’t know any other blind people, and I didn’t know anything about canes. Instead, my senses naturally sharpened as I explored the area, and I used touch and hearing to travel on my own.

  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 the banister and flip up the crystal on my watch, a Seiko quartz with raised markers at 3, 6, 9, and 12. I gently touch the hour and minute hands, and I’m shocked. It’s only 8:55. That means it’s been just nine minutes since the plane—if that is what it was—hit our building. I wonder how much damage the fire has done. Is it spreading? Will it enter the stairwell?

  To help me focus, I use my watch to time our descent. Each step takes about a second, with a full flight of stairs equaling about twenty seconds of travel time. With sixty-eight floors remaining, and assuming we can keep up our current pace, it will take us just over twenty-two minutes to evacuate. However, chances are there will be some slowdowns along the way. So far we’ve been lucky.

  The stairwell is heating up from the mass of bodies, and I begin to sweat, my dress shirt sticking to my back. Roselle is getting warmer, too, her breath heavier and faster. The air feels heavy and the jet fuel smell is still there, sometimes faint, sometimes stronger than ever. I can wonder again what it must smell like to Roselle.

  Then we hear shouting from somewhere up above. “Look out!” a voice cries. “Burn victim coming through. Please let us by.” I move to the right, gripping the railing, and pull on the harness, nudging Rosell
e in close to my legs. We stop for a moment as a knot of people rushes by. Their breathing and hurried steps tell me all I need to know. I can feel Roselle watching, her head tracking the group as they pass by and go down.

  After the group passes and we start back down the stairs, I call out to David. “What did you see?”

  “A woman,” David says. “She is burned so bad that she doesn’t even look like a human being.” The group of hurried people had surrounded the woman to help her get down. Somehow she is still able to walk. She is the first injured person we’ve encountered, although I know there must be many more.

  But where are they?

  We continue down. Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs. Five minutes later there are more shouts, directing us to move aside. I pull Roselle in again as another burn victim hurries down the stairs. Again it’s a woman, and David says this one looks even more horrible than the first. Deep in shock, she walks like a zombie, eyes straight ahead and expressionless. Her clothes are partly burned off, her skin blistered and separating, her blonde hair “caked in gray slime.”1

  A number of people on or near the sky lobby on our floor were sprayed with burning fuel after the plane entered our building. One of these I heard about later was a forty-four-year-old woman named Virginia DiChiara. She was in an express elevator, waiting to leave the 78th floor when the plane hit the building. Fire flashed into the elevator then left just as quickly. The lights went out and burning jet fuel dripped down through the elevator shaft and onto Virginia’s shoulders and back. Roy Bell, another elevator passenger, said, “It looked like sheets of white fire, thin sheets of fire. The flame was coming through the elevator car doors from the inside out, shooting through the elevator shaft.”2

  Somehow Virginia forced her way out of the car into the sky lobby. She erupted in flames, her hair and blouse burning. She used her hands to put out the flames in her hair and then rolled on the ground to stop the burning on her body. When she finally sat back against the wall to rest, she saw that her hands and arms were completely burned. She didn’t know that her face was badly burned too. She felt no pain. Two men helped her to the stairwell then walked ahead of her “so that they could catch her if she fell. She had to walk carefully because the burns on her hands kept her from holding onto the stair rail.”3 Virginia may have been one of the burn victims who passed by.

  About the same time the burn victims are passing by us in the stairwell, another plane hits the South Tower, our sister tower. United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashed into Tower 2, lower this time, exploding into the sky lobby on the 78th floor. But in the concrete stairwell, it’s as quiet as a cave. We keep moving, shuffling down the stairs, staying to the right so the injured can pass by on the left, but it’s quiet up above. No more are coming. It seems like more people should be coming down from the top floors. Where are they? There must be more injured.

  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 orally.

  “What great training that was for me as a new teacher. I think I learned as much or more from you than you learned from me,” Mr. Herbo told me. “You could do calculations in your head faster than the kids in class could on paper.”

  On my birthday, Mr. Herbo invited me to Foster’s Freeze for a banana split, and we made it an annual event. He was amazed when the servers couldn’t tell I was blind. Even though my eyes are not functional, the structure of my eyes is intact, and so are the muscles that move my eyes and my eyelids. I have learned to look at people, using their voice and movements to cue in on their locations and heights, so when you talk to me, you will probably get the impression that I am looking at you, even though I have no vision. Blind people have eye colors that range the spectrum. My eyes are a light, milky color. I like to think they match my strawberry blond tresses.

  One day I invited Mr. Herbo to my house to see my ham radio setup. My dad and I were licensed ham operators, and with our high-frequency radios we could talk to people on any part of the globe. My parents had given me a small room in the house to set up the equipment, and when Mr. Herbo came over, I took him back to show it off. I went in first and started booting up the system. I was busy and didn’t notice that Mr. Herbo hung back.

  “I can’t see what you’re doing,” Mr. Herbo said. I was working in pitch black.

  “Sorry, Mr. Herbo,” I said. “I forgot you can see.”

  Mr. Herbo and I stayed in touch for many year
s. He came to my wedding and visited Karen and me several times. At one point we lost touch for a while. Finally Mr. Herbo looked up my number one day and gave me a call, out of the blue. When I picked up the phone, he said, “Hello, Mike.”

  “Hi, Mr. Herbo!” It had been fifteen years, but I will never forget his voice. I always end our conversations with, “Just remember, Mr. Herbo, I’ll always be younger than you.”

  While many of my teachers were as encouraging and accommodating as Mr. Herboldsheimer, my high school experience was not without obstacles. In the spring of my freshman year, I was called into the assistant principal’s office. “We have a problem, Mike,” he said. He opened up the Palmdale High School student handbook and began to read: “No live animals of any kind are allowed on school buses.” I had been riding the bus to school with my very first guide dog, Squire. We were both still new and building our handler–guide dog relationship, but Squire was doing a great job. He minded his own business on the bus and had never caused any problems. The other kids were interested in him for the first few days, but after the novelty wore off, they went back to discussing kid stuff, and everything went back to normal. So I was shocked and confused. The law is clear. Certified guide dogs can legally go anywhere a blind person goes.

  I went home and checked the handbook for myself. That I even had access to the handbook was due to the work of a wonderful local group called the Antelope Valley Braille Transcribers. At that time, not many Braille books were mass-produced, so many books and other printed materials had to be transcribed into Braille, page by page, by volunteers. Later on, in the late ’60s, transcribed books began to be mass-produced using a thermoforming device. It was a slow process whereby the bumps on a Braille page were transferred to a special sheet of plastic. The plastic sheet was heated and then used to imprint a sheet of paper, resulting in a duplicate page of Braille. The process was something like a printing press, but it was revolutionary and meant that books and other printed materials could be produced cheaper and more quickly, a page at a time. But at this point, we didn’t have access to this type of device and that meant most school-related materials had to be laboriously hand transcribed.