Have Dog, Will Travel

by Stephen Kuusisto

When I got home I dug up a pamphlet from Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a guide-dog school just forty minutes north of New York City. I’d acquired the brochure a few weeks earlier from a social worker. I called their number.

  Little did I know I was about to enter guide-dog Corky’s story.

  Chapter Three

  Aristotle described happiness as “human flourishing,” which, he said, results from action and virtue. Both must be in accord with reason. Waiting for my class at guide-dog school I found myself thinking about virtue and reason. I wasn’t genuinely old, but fearing how to live had made me prematurely tired. Reason and flourishing were, I thought, two long thin wings, like those of the osprey. I wanted uplift, possibility, and if flourishing had a preliminary step, I thought hope would be a good start.

  I jotted notes about virtue and started drinking chrysanthemum tea at the suggestion of my friend Lu, a Chinese herbalist. Thick blossoms floated in the cup and sometimes petals went down my throat. The tea was meant to calm me. In fact I found I was starting to feel kind of cool—the temperature of my wiring was coming down. “That’s because I’ve made a good decision,” I told myself. Lu said it was also the tea. “Chrysanthemums cool the body and the mind,” she said. “This,” I thought, “must be one aspect of flourishing.” I wrote: It’s likely Aristotle was cool all over.

  So waiting for my dog, a matter that would take around three to four months was actually satisfying. I’d made a true choice, a blossoming decision. Chrysanthemum tea was the drink of ironic accord.

  Maybe it was the tea but I began seeing ironies everywhere. Early one morning I got a phone call from a field representative at Guiding Eyes who said his name was David See. “You work for a blindness organization and your name is See?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Ain’t that nuts?”

  He laughed. “I’m See,” he said. “And now I want to see you.”

  Dave said he’d come to my apartment, interview me, and watch me walk around my neighborhood. I’d demonstrate what he called my “white cane” skills.

  “Why do I have to display proficiency with a white cane?” I asked.

  “We want our applicants to have good travel skills—to show they can make sound choices while walking,” he said.

  “But doesn’t the guide dog do those things?” I asked.

  “No,” Dave said. “A guide dog assists you moving from place to place but you have to know how to set the compass. Otherwise a guide dog is just a faster way to get lost!” I laughed, envisioning people with no idea where they might be going, all attached to fast-moving dogs.

  Laughter aside, I wasn’t about to tell Dave I had zero white-cane skills. We made a date to meet in four weeks and I hung up.

  It was time to get serious. I called Mike Dillon, a well-regarded orientation and mobility teacher for the State of New York. Mike worked out of the Syracuse office, and was the nearest go-to person for Ithaca. His job was to instruct blind people how to travel safely.

  Mike appeared on my doorstep the next week with a brand-new cane.

  I was going to work hard to get to Guiding Eyes.

  Mike handed me the cane and escorted me along snowy sidewalks. I told him I’d been faking vision all my life. “You know,” I said, “faking sight is like being illiterate—you pretend to [have] competence but live by guesswork.”

  “Faking puts you at a terrible disadvantage,” Mike said, adding I shouldn’t trust my imagination.

  We stood together in the winter cold and I found the curb with my stick. Mike had me repeat the production, sweeping the cane, locating the sidewalk’s edge, finding the drop. I approached the curb several times. I made cane dots in the snow.

  I was so self-conscious my skin felt tight. It was my mother. She was telling me to avoid being blind. She was saying it was shameful. Even though I was listening to Mike I was worrying about strangers: Did they see me from their front windows? Were people whispering about me? I imagined someone saying: “Look at that man with his white stick, how sad!”

  Because I was absorbed with worry about strangers I could scarcely hear what Mike was saying about perpendicular traffic flow; four-way intersections; one-way and two-way streets. I made a conscious effort to forget the buzz in my head and concentrate. Eventually there’d be a dog. I was training for a dog. I strained to interpret traffic. I caught the myriad intricate noises of cars. The lesson—the goal—was to hear the directional flow of vehicles. In a world of twisted streets and inattentive drivers, the blind must be like high-wire artists, utterly steady. The snow was gusting. Mike watched my progress. I arrived at a corner where a group of laboring men waited for a bus. I found the curb with my cane. “Ese es su trabajo,” one of them said. “That’s his job.”

  Over several weeks Mike taught me to find the locus of my own freedom. I walked every part of Ithaca. I climbed steps at Cornell; rode the town’s only escalator in a downtown mall; clamored on and off buses. I swept my cane from side to side, found a row of trash cans outside a pub. I stepped in a pot hole. I tripped on a pile of snow and walked into a street sign. I followed a path beside Cayuga Lake in a driving December wind. Freedom didn’t really give a damn about the weather.

  * * *

  Andy Warhol said: “As soon as you stop wanting something you get it.”

  Walking with a cane, I didn’t desire acceptance in my time-honored way. If waving a blind man’s stick wasn’t precisely liberating (as no manufactured object should hold such potent significance in my view), it was both useful and explanatory. In public I was just who I was. There was no pretending, no grasping for admission to normal-land. I pushed the cane from side to side and for the first time in my life I was in no immediate danger of being struck by a car. Moreover, I was powering a dynamo inside my head, a fanciful machine I pictured as throwing blue sparks—the electricity of forceful difference. My cane said I was unique but assertively so. I didn’t care what others thought.

  The arts of cane-walking and street-discernment were turning me, had turned me, loose from the impressions of others.

  “What a goddamned thing to discover,” I thought, “at thirty-eight I’m done with creeping.”

  * * *

  When David See rang my doorbell three weeks later I was prepared. I was as ready for a test as I’d ever been.

  We sat in my living room in the very chairs where the lemon factory man and I had discussed my joblessness. But Dave was as different from the lemon man as it was possible to be. He radiated confidence and he liked what he did.

  Before we tackled the matter before us he asked what kind of music I liked. Though I’d cleaned my apartment in preparation for his visit there were lots of LPs and compact discs piled on my coffee table.

  I wondered if it was a trick question. If I said “classical opera,” would I be disqualified from getting a guide dog?

  What about the Clash?

  Dave was a muscular and outdoorsy kind of guy. He seemed like a Country Western type. I couldn’t pretend to have any knowledge of country music.

  “Eric Clapton,” I said. “But not the Clapton of Cream—I prefer his days with Derek and the Dominoes.

  “Ah!” he said. “Got to get better in a little while!”

  “Exactly!” I said. “The sun’s got to shine on my guitar someday!”

  We laughed.

  “So here’s the thing,” he suddenly said. “You’ve got a spotless apartment and very good taste in music, but are you sure you’re ready to have a dog?”

  “What do you mean by ready?” I asked.

  “A guide dog is a huge responsibility,” he said. “Even if you’ve had a pet dog before, this is a far more serious thing.”

  “Serious how?”

  “Once you have a guide dog you’ll be together almost every hour, every day. You’ll have to observe strict rules and follow nonnegotiable guidelines,” he said.

  “You think you can handle that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. No one had ever asked me to d
eclare my maturity before.

  “I can be that person,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I think you can too.”

  * * *

  It was ten days before Christmas. Gusts of snow blew across the street as Dave and I set out. It was bitterly cold. Wind was masking traffic sounds. I worried I might cross an intersection against a red light or trip over a curb.

  Dave’s job was straightforward. He needed reassurance that I was a competent walker.

  My task was tougher. I had to be skilled both inside and out—needed to have martial arts talents—to display balance, poise, and self-assurance. These weren’t my strengths. But I was all in.

  Then Dave hit me with something unexpected.

  “Would you be willing to wear a blindfold?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, though the thought of navigating without my sliver of vision was scary—Mike and I hadn’t trained for this and it felt like I was about to take a trigonometry test knowing nothing about the subject.

  “I just want to see how you’ll do under nighttime conditions when your residual vision isn’t effective,” Dave said.

  “That sounds reasonable,” I said.

  Dave handed me an airplane sleep mask and I pulled it over my eyes.

  “Is it tight?” he asked.

  “It’s nice and tight,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s go!”

  I set off walking east, wagging my stick, listening to cars and ambient noises—crows in a tree, a skateboarder, a truck grinding gears, two college girls laughing, a beeping traffic light.

  With the blindfold I walked slower than usual.

  “Can you go faster?” Dave asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and pushed my pace.

  I lurched to a curb, found it with my foot.

  I crossed the street successfully.

  Somewhere on the next block I tumbled into a snowbank.

  I leapt to my feet and forced myself to plunge ahead. I felt like a skater who’d lost his chance at a gold medal.

  After ten minutes of sweaty work Dave told me to stop and remove the blindfold.

  “You know you limp when you wear that thing,” he said.

  “I had no idea,” I said.

  “Yeah, you kind of drag your left leg,” he said.

  “You look like a peg-leg pirate,” he said and laughed.

  “It’s okay, you were perfect. You have ‘good cane,’ ” he said.

  “You drifted sometimes because of the blindfold, which is why you tumbled into the snowbank, but really it was a good moment because when you got back on your feet you knew exactly how to reorient yourself and continue,” he said.

  * * *

  So I’d passed my audition. I felt as if I’d undergone a “coming of age” ritual, the blindfold like a ceremonial mask. I’d danced with the ogre of happenstance and his brother the traffic spirit and I’d emerged intact.

  Over coffee we discussed what would happen next.

  “We’re going to get started at the training center,” Dave said. “Our job is to find a dog whose gait and temperament will be right for you.”

  “What does that involve?” I asked.

  “Well, you’re fairly athletic,” Dave said. “So we’ll want to give you a dog that moves along at a good pace.”

  “But wasn’t I slow when wearing the blindfold?” I asked.

  “Yes, but that was just an orientation test,” he said. “Without the blindfold you move at a good clip.”

  “You’ll also need a dog that can really go places,” he said.

  “Well don’t they all go places?” I asked.

  “Sure, but not all guide-dog teams have the same lifestyle,” he said. “So for instance, some people never stray from their neighborhoods. Some people walk around the block and maybe go to the corner store. That’s different from someone who wants to go to lots of distant places, who flies a lot, who has what I like to call geographical ambition.”

  He looked me square in the eye. “You have geographical ambition,” he said.

  I asked him if there was anything else I should do while waiting for my upcoming dog class. “You’ve got three months to kill,” he said. “If I were you I’d hit the gym. You’ll want to be in good shape.”

  Chapter Four

  The evening before Dave’s visit I talked with my mother who lived an hour west of Ithaca. There was a buzz on the phone line and she sounded drunk, though it was just dinnertime.

  “I’m getting a guide dog,” I said. My voice was high and happy—in effect I was a child saying “I’m getting a puppy!”

  “Oh,” she said, “I think that’s a dreadful idea.”

  “Dreadful how?” I asked.

  “People will know you’re on the fritz,” she said.

  “On the fritz?” I repeated. “You mean like a household appliance?”

  “Yes,” she said, “you should never let people see you’re defective. They’ll think less of you.” I announced I was excited and said she should think about that. Then I hung up.

  I drank my chrysanthemum tea, chewed the blossoms, and understood my future dog shouldn’t carry the burden of weak self-esteem. “No dog should have to do that,” I thought.

  * * *

  My parents were essentially decent people who’d survived the Great Depression. Both were working-class kids and both went to college after the Second World War. My dad got his PhD in political science at Harvard in 1950. Having fought in the Pacific in the Army Air Corps he told my mother, “I need to learn how these damn things happen.”

  In turn my mother was accepted to law school in 1951, a true feat for any coed in those days, but instead she chose to raise a family. Later the decision haunted her. She belonged in a larger world than the one offered by postwar domesticity. She became a housewife in Durham, New Hampshire, a college town, and became a hostess for faculty parties.

  No one knew how to confer about difficult or liminal subjects. Not talking became its own drama. As I grew up I formed an antinarrative. My parents’ silence about my eyes sent me in two directions. One was physical and daring. The other was inward and bitter. When climbing trees or becoming the unchallenged king of hide-and-seek I secretly knew I was the most deficient child alive. The feeling, however wrong, didn’t get better as I grew older.

  “If I’m going to get a guide dog,” I thought, “then I need to do more than just hit the gym.” I needed to access my proper life—not academic life; not something from the Gospels. I would vanquish old embarrassments. As I set out on my dog journey I knew it was time.

  * * *

  When I was twelve, my mother, who’d already become a heavy drinker, met me one afternoon as I came home. I’d hoped to find safety after seven hours of bullying in school.

  Instead I found my mother clutching a smoldering sofa cushion in her arms. “I don’t know how I did it,” she said. “Get out of my way!”

  She ran across the yard holding the thing at arm’s length and for some reason she didn’t drop it. She just staggered from place to place until flames singed her hair. Finally she threw it into a neighbor’s hedge, where it sent up smoke signals.

  That was a gradient point on the arc of withdrawal. My job was to endure by stamina whether in school or at home. So blindness became a tortoise-like affair. My blind soul stayed quiet in its shell.

  My mother was generally drunk by midafternoon. Like most alcoholics she had several modes of intoxication. There was a giddy vaporous kind born from merriment. Then there was a drunkenness forced by what I came to call her misery gauge—I pictured a glass indicator on a submarine—pressure was building against the hull. She also engaged in vengeful drinking, the kind Nixon did as president, a mumbling paranoia.

  If I was lucky, she’d be asleep when I came home, stretched on the living room sofa with the curtains drawn, her highball glass on the floor, and one shoe off. I’d race to my room, lock the door, and strip off my torn shirt—for daily bullying always meant the
death of a shirt. I’d lie on the rug and listen to the shortwave radio. There was a station from Belgium that played only Duke Ellington. Something in his music felt right to me—the Duke was complex, buoyant, I didn’t know what to call it, but I always luxuriated in it.

  Because my father was an academic, and moderately less guarded than my mother who refused to talk about my eyes, he told a colleague just how little I could see. One night he came home with a large cardboard box containing a dozen sealed and labeled mason jars—his friend was a scientist of some kind and the jars held dark specimens floating in formaldehyde. The idea was that I could hold the jars close to my one good eye and see things.

  Alone in a circle of lamplight, I held the first jar close to my face. A white human fetus floated in viscous brown liquid, trailing its umbilical cord. The jar was so near my left eye my eyelashes brushed the glass, and owing to my shaking hands the fetus turned gently, that gentleness of the drowned, until its face was straight opposite my cornea. It had gray veins across its temples and a determined frown. I thrust the jar back in the box. I wanted to go downstairs and tell my father to take it away but he was fighting with my mother and I shoved the whole collection into the back of my closet behind a heap of shoes.

  After that I lay in bed knowing the fetus was in my closet, suspended in its soup with its little face all closed up.

  * * *

  I wanted to grow my hair long like the Beatles’ guitarist George Harrison. In public I was a mark. Boys stole my glasses, pushed me into walls, shoved me on the stairs, all because I was the deviant. I could feel their contempt all the way down to my spleen. Long hair would save me.

  My mother was painfully drunk when she called me for supper one evening. Before I knew it, she had me in an armlock and was dragging me across the kitchen.

  “You look like a fairy,” she said.

  “What’s a fairy?” I asked. I really had no idea.

  “A faggot!” she said.

  She was blowing whiskey vapor, clutching my hair, poking my skull with scissors. I pushed her. She fell backwards waving her shears and fell into the trash. Because she hated domesticity she’d long ago decided a thirty-gallon garbage can was perfect for the kitchen; you didn’t have to empty it daily, and of course it stank and then she was in it.