Thunder Dog

by Michael Hingson

  One interesting route I discovered was underground. A one-hundred-yard-long utility corridor ran underground from the computer science building to the engineering building. For some reason, the facilities people kept the tunnel access doors unlocked, so I got in the habit of using it as a shortcut, as did many others. I usually had Squire with me, and there were places I had to duck for pipes. Squire noted the hazards and learned to guide me around them. The tunnels were pretty busy at times; it was one of those poorly kept secrets that college students love to share, even before the days of easy information sharing via texting and Facebook. On weekends, though, the tunnel was deserted, and I used it to exercise my dog. I would stand at one end and throw a SuperBall as hard as I could. The dog would chase it, and depending on how fast he was that day, he might catch it in flight or he might just have to run all the way to the other end. Sometimes there would be someone else coming along the tunnel from the other side, and the poor student would get caught in the crossfire and get a little miffed. But what’s a SuperBall-shaped bruise or two among friends?

  I bought my first car as an Irvine student—a ’64 Ford Mustang with a leaky transmission. Even driving became an adventure for me. I made friends with some of the campus police officers at University of California–Irvine, and they didn’t make much of a fuss about me occasionally driving around campus in the evenings. My dad had let me drive a few times at home, and when I was six or seven years old, a friendly mailman named Mr. Judd had let me help drive the mail truck every once in a while. I couldn’t make echolocation work for driving a car, so I had to have someone direct me. And I didn’t have a driver’s license, so that limited my driving options—usually I had someone else drive me while I directed from the front passenger seat. But I loved the Mustang, and sometimes we’d have a parade and drive around campus or drive in the parking lots and honk and wave at friends just to get a reaction.

  While getting around at Irvine wasn’t much of a challenge, the academics were. I had more competition from the other students, who worked at a higher level than I was used to; the teachers didn’t always describe what they were doing when they wrote on blackboards or overhead projectors; and sometimes I missed out on getting involved in discussion groups. Whether that was due to some shyness on my part or some uncomfortable feelings on the part of the other students, I’m not sure.

  But one wonderful thing about college is that I had access to most of the books in Braille or via recordings. The books and materials I couldn’t read were read to me by readers, typically other college students who became my eyes and read to me a few hours a week. I started to find my academic sweet spot, keeping up with a demanding course load and participating in group discussions, sometimes even shaping discussions.

  Math courses were the hardest, especially if I didn’t have the material. It wasn’t easy for readers who weren’t math or physics majors to convey the equations to me. So I spent lots of time with readers, trying to understand theorems. One professor, Dr. Naylor, at first didn’t describe much of what he was doing in his lectures. I kept at him, asking questions and trying to understand. He was gracious about the whole thing. One day he called me on the phone and said, “Thank you for helping me get to the point where I am verbalizing more.” For all the math students who came after me, I apologize right now if Dr. Naylor overexplained things. I take full responsibility.

  I began to fall in love with physics. C. S. Lewis, the great writer and Christian thinker, once said, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.” My love for physics and math is also a quest for beauty and for understanding how the world works. I had always been interested in science, especially electricity and magnetism, probably because of my dad’s influence. For as long as I can remember, I was particularly drawn to physical science. In my freshman year of high school, my science teacher noted my interest and arranged for me to attend the senior physics class for the entire last quarter of my freshman year. I always knew that I would major in physics.

  The precision and complexity of the mathematical equations applied to the real world through the science of physics appealed to my sense of order and balance and helped satisfy my curiosity about how the world works. Mathematician Henri Poincaré put it this way: “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing.”1

  My passion for physics coupled with a great deal of hard work paid off in college when I made the dean’s list every quarter. But to make that happen, most of my first years at the university were spent in academic pursuits rather than a social life. I had friends, but my best friend was probably my guide dog. I still wasn’t too interested in girls. Instead I filled my life with academics, reading, and vintage radio.

  My social life began to take off after I started my own radio show on KUCI, the campus radio station. My show featured vintage radio programs from 6 to 9 p.m. every Sunday night. I competed with 60 Minutes, and around the city of Irvine the KUCI Radio Hall of Fame show pushed Mike Wallace’s face in the ratings dust. The radio station operated out of a small room in the physical sciences building. Our equipment was pretty primitive and we each produced our own show. I did research to provide some background and commentary for each vintage radio show I featured. Sometimes I conducted interviews or chatted with callers. I became very comfortable talking to people I didn’t know, and I even began trying out jokes on the air, sort of a poor man’s Dr. Demento. For a while I made it a point to memorize one joke or insult a day. Here’s one I still remember: “How do you tell a male chromosome from a female chromosome? You take down their genes.” Don’t like that one? Okay, here’s another. “Don’t pitch your tent on a stove, because you can’t build a home on the range.” The jokes came in handy later when I went into sales. The better the insult, the more respect you get from the other salespeople. And I had good teachers—Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Milton Berle.

  Whenever I could, I tried to put people at ease with my blindness, even using it for laughs if I could. One of my radio station buddies and fellow science geeks was Mat Kaplan. He had a show on Sunday nights right after mine. He’s still in radio, hosting and producing Planetary Radio, which covers everything related to space travel. One time he scraped up a hundred dollars, a lot of money for starving college students in those days, and ordered a small helium-neon laser from Edmund Scientific, the wonderful old mail-order science and gadget supply house that is still around. Back in the ’70s, lasers were not yet widely available at every local drugstore like they are now. Mat and I had a great time playing with the laser, and we immediately noticed how my guide dog Holland was mesmerized by the bright laser pinpoint light and loved to chase it. We sent him into a frenzy chasing the laser around a big room by the radio station. The laser was so powerful, though, that we had to be careful. We didn’t want to injure the dog’s eyes by accident. But my eyes—that was a different story. Without giving Mat any warning, one time I picked up the laser and flashed the beam straight into my eye.

  “Funny, I don’t see anything,” I deadpanned.

  “Mike, Mike, don’t do that!” yelled Mat, frantic. I think that was the last time he let me play with the laser.

  Although desktop and laptop computers were still far in the future, UC Irvine had a mainframe computer. In the ’60s, most mainframes accepted input from system operators via punched cards, paper or magnetic tape, or Teletype devices, which looked something like an IBM Selectric typewriter or the bulky old printers you used to see in newsrooms. By the ’70s, at universities like Irvine, mainframes had interactive user interfaces and operated as time-sharing computers “talking” to many individual users as well as doing batch processing.

  These were exciting times for physics students, as we were required to do extremely complex mathematical equations. The school comput
er could do calculations in a few seconds that would take us hours, and we were only at the beginning of understanding how computers could be used in the world outside the university walls.

  But there was a problem. I couldn’t use the computer even though I knew how to type. The Teletype had a standard QWERTY keyboard, but there was no way for me to read the display on the screen or decipher the output when it was printed out. I was virtually locked out of the computer age. I needed some help. John Halverson, another blind student a year ahead of me, also wanted access, so together we appealed to the powers that be for some technology to allow us to use the computer.

  Enter Dick Rubinstein, a wunderkind graduate student and researcher at UCI working with Julian Feldman, head of the computer science program. Julian asked Dick to help us, and we immediately hit it off. It was an era when many college students were taking up political activism and making their voices heard, and John and I were no different. We came up with a phrase for our computer-access lobbying project. We took the popular slogan “Power to the People” and gave it a twist: “Blind Power.” We had a great time joking around about our own civil rights movement, and Dick joined right in.

  Then he got to work and whipped up a Braille terminal for us. Dick was an engineer who describes himself as “a generalist.” He had just graduated from Caltech in engineering but had shifted gears at Irvine to study social sciences. Dick loves to make and fix things and has an innate understanding of how equipment works. He also loves people, and his sense of design comes from an understanding of what people need. He started with a Teletype machine that printed with a type cylinder that rotated and pressed against a ribbon to make marks on paper. It printed at only ten characters a second, very slow. Dick designed a new cylinder and installed pins to emboss the dots needed to create Braille marks along with a number of other modifications needed to put the paper in the right position to receive the marks. Then he wrote a software program to run on a Digital PDP-8 minicomputer to translate the received information into the Braille marks. The minicomputer acted as a controller for the Braille terminal.

  “It wasn’t fast, but it did the job,” said Dick, who went on to earn his PhD and spend his career as a human factors engineer. His project was written up and published in 1972 in a journal for the Association for Computing Machinery.

  Dick and I kept in touch and batted some ideas around on other sorts of Braille displays, and Dick went on to be involved in developing electronic mail (or e-mail, as we call it now) as a communications aid for deaf adults, way back in the late ’70s when most people had never heard of e-mail yet and the Internet was still called the ARPANET. Smart guy. He loved my pachinko machine.

  The pachinko was a mechanical Japanese gaming device that was similar to a vertical pinball machine. You shot small balls up into the machine, which then cascaded down through a mass of metal pins, sometimes landing in special pockets for bonus points.

  “What’s a blind guy doing with a pinball machine?” Dick once said.

  “Wait until you see me play darts,” I replied.

  Dick’s Braille terminal helped ignite my love affair with technology, and one of my passions is helping to put the latest, most powerful, and most easy-to-use technology in the hands of blind people. The technology we have available today has changed the rules of the game and given me and other blind people more independence and access to information than ever before. It’s an exciting time to be blind.

  When I graduated from UC Irvine with highest honors, my parents and my brother were in the audience, watching. Besides my brother, I was the first one in the whole family to earn a college degree. Well, besides Squire, my aging guide dog. Chancellor Aldrich awarded Squire a degree too. Only instead of physics, his degree was in “Lethargic Guidance,” a nod to his propensity for frequent naps now that he was in his sunset years.

  I stayed on at Irvine and earned a master’s degree and a teaching credential. I also took some business courses that I thought might be useful out in the real world. But I did run into one roadblock at school. As I began to consider pursuing a doctorate degree in physics, I ran into some pushback, from certain professors, that seemed to be related to my blindness. I did some work with a lawyer and in the process gained access to my file in the physics department. We discovered a shocking letter. It read, “A blind person cannot do the high level work necessary for an advanced degree in physics.”

  At first I was stunned. Then I got angry. But those feelings passed pretty quickly, and I was left with a two-word response.

  Why not?

  As it happened, I ended up landing a great job right out of grad school, so I decided not to pursue a doctorate. But, I also decided to live out the rest of my life on the “why not” principle.

  And those two words are my secret, the secret behind blind power. Why not? Why not ride a bike or drive a car or play darts or earn a PhD in physics? Why not try it all, just to see if I can do it?

  Here’s a great Milton Berle quote from my vintage radio show vault. He sums it up perfectly: “I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might-have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.”

  I think there is truth to the observation that your life passes before you when you face death or a very stressful situation and so I remembered my college life as I descended the stairs on September 11, 2001. I constantly looked for memories that could help me survive whatever happened to Roselle and me in our time of terror.

  The temperature inside the stairwell continues to climb. I’m feeling more upbeat, so I try another joke. “All this walking is a great way to lose weight.” Laughter again. Other quips filter back up to me. Each one puts a smile on my face.

  Boy, do I need to lose some pounds, someone says.

  I’m going to have a double dessert tonight! Laughter.

  I never want to see another stairwell again as long as I live. We all agree.

  For a moment, people sound almost lighthearted. Almost.

  I chime back in. “I have an idea. On our first day back in the tower, let’s all meet on the 78th floor at 8:45 a.m. and walk down the stairs as a way to lose weight.”

  We’ve gone from being strangers to teammates. Somehow our fear and anxiety have turned into closeness and teamwork. The usual boundaries are down. All we have is each other. We know instinctively that we must all work together to prevent panic, or we might not make it out.

  Ten stairs, turn, nine stairs. “Thirty-nine . . . thirty-six . . . thirty-four,” calls out David.

  If the lights go out, Roselle and I are ready.

  Then from somewhere on the flights below, I hear a murmur. There’s something happening down below, and a ripple of tension and excitement makes its way up the line.

  The firefighters are coming.

  7

  WARRIORS

  WITH GUIDE DOGS

  Intuition is linear; our imaginations are weak. Even

  the brightest of us only extrapolate from what we know

  now; for the most part, we’re afraid to really stretch.

  RAYMOND KURZWEIL

  Roselle’s big Labrador tongue lolls down one side. The stairwell is hot, and we’re walking down sometimes two abreast, sometimes single file, and beginning to pack more closely together. Since the explosion we’ve made it down to the 33rd floor.

  I hear an excited buzz in the voices of the people below me, and I can just make out the words: “Water bottles!” Someone has broken open a vending machine, and people are passing cold water bottles up the stairs.

  I pass a few bottles to the people behind me then twist open a bottle and take a few swallows. The cold water is a relief, and it tastes sweet compared to the acrid taste of the fumes.

  Roselle nudges my hand. Her nose feels hot, and I wonder if she can smell the water. I bend over and offer her the bottle. She begins to lick the top, and I tilt it just a bi
t so she can drink the rest. I know she must be thirsty because she hasn’t had anything to drink for a while. Many guide dogs don’t eat or drink anything in the mornings so they don’t have to interrupt work to relieve themselves, and Roselle is no different. She hasn’t had any food or water since last night. She finishes up the bottle and wants more. She licks the last few drops. I can hear her smacking her lips, and then she begins to pant again. She’s still thirsty.

  “Good Roselle,” I say. I gently grab the sides of her head, just under her ears. I rub her cheeks with my thumbs. Other people around me have stopped to drink some water, too, and I can feel them listening. “Good dog. You’re doing great. Just keep going. You can do it.”

  I know I have to stay calm for Roselle. If I show fear or begin to panic, she will pick up on it and might get scared too. It’s important that Roselle doesn’t sense that I am afraid. If that happened, it would make it harder for us to get out. So far, we are staying calm and focused, and I’m able to control my fear.

  But there is undercover fear all around us, the general panic level increasing the lower we go. I can hear it in the whispers, feel tension in the footsteps echoing around me. But Roselle does not react; she is in the moment, secure in herself and her work.

  As long as the harness is on, even in a life-and-death situation, I am confident that Roselle will continue to do her job just as she always does. Besides the jet fuel, she can also smell the fear around us. When people are afraid, their autonomic nervous systems react with an increase in sweat gland activity, with the apocrine glands producing secretions through the hair follicles that result in a very faint odor that dogs are able to pick up. They don’t exactly smell the emotion of fear, but they can smell the result: an olfactory fear signal inadvertently produced by the body. Dogs are not as visual as people, and their primary sense is smell, said to be a thousand times more sensitive than that of humans. Roselle has more than 200 million olfactory receptors in her nose, while I only have about 5 million.1 These receptors feed information to the highly developed olfactory lobe in Roselle’s brain, making her a scent machine. She lives in a world of smell, not sight, and thus is not light-dependent, either. We have that in common.