Have Dog, Will Travel

by Stephen Kuusisto

  I thought of the history of the place.

  I remembered during World War II a train platform was constructed under the Waldorf for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He could exit the train in privacy—the Secret Service would raise him from his wheelchair and help him into an open sedan. The car would then be lifted to the street in a customized elevator.

  I thought of FDR and the stagecraft required to conceal his disability from voters. Well, I’d done that too, though I never had any voters—I just had shadow men and women whom I’d followed, hoping to arrive at my destinations. Jesus, that had taken work. And what a battery drain it had been. Now I was visible with my disability and more pleased about it than I’d ever thought possible. More than pleased—I was loaded with energy.

  * * *

  That night at Guiding Eyes I talked with classmates about being pleased for the first time with their dogs. Doug recalled walking solo with his first guide dog after returning home. He walked ten blocks from his house to a motorcycle shop and talked about bikes with a sales guy. Then he walked some more and had lunch in a diner. “Nothing,” he said, “had ever been that good, no conversation or sandwich had ever matched it.” In the condensed version of guide-dog life, all at once everything is reachable. Reachable is a word sighted people rarely have to think about—but it’s one of the main coordinates of independence.

  Doug said when he first hit the street with his dog, “People saw me—like before I got a dog they’d see my white cane and look away, but now they had a point of contact and could say something; even if it was just ‘Great dog,’ the ice was broken. All of a sudden I was having conversations with strangers. It was like breaking through to the other side of something.” Standing in the Waldorf I too felt I’d crossed over to a new kind of living. I was in a public place, a strange spot, and yet I was composed. I was calm because Corky was calm. Dogs reflect us and our moods. A dog’s stress hormones rise and fall along with its owner’s stress. This is why dogs yawn with us. I was sitting beside Corky in our dorm room and I yawned. She yawned. I saw it made sense. If a man is calm his dog is calm. But why did I feel her calmness on Fifth Avenue? She couldn’t have been taking her emotional cues from me.

  Like all topflight guide-dog schools, Guiding Eyes breeds its own dogs. Unlike show-dog breeders, guide-dog breeders focus on developing invisible traits. The characteristics they hope to produce in dogs are wide ranging—disposition, confidence, the ability to recover from sudden upsetting experiences—just to name a few. The breeding program also promotes breeding strains that are resistant to diseases and allergies. And as if these qualities aren’t enough, they also aim to assure repeatability. They need a steady supply of field-worthy dogs.

  One night a trainer named Jack told me a story from the old days when guide-dog schools didn’t have breeding programs and relied on donated dogs. Jack had been a trainer for almost fifty years. “We used to go to animal shelters and dog pounds,” he said. “We’d look for tough dogs back then, dogs that could stand up to the training. We’d go to the pound and the dogs would be crazy, jumping and carrying on. If they looked us right in the eye we’d take them. It helped if they didn’t bite us!

  “Those old dogs were tough,” he said, and laughed. “Sometimes they really did bite us.”

  We were in the dining room drinking strong black Chinese tea and rain was coming down hard, hitting the dining-room windows. In a few minutes all the students would come in for dinner. Corky rolled over for a belly rub and I reached down and stroked her.

  “In the early fifties, dog training was still based on a military model,” said Jack. “We pushed those dogs hard. The training was ‘aversive,’ which meant each time a dog did the wrong thing it received a heavy correction. The dogs grew to anticipate the correction and would do the right thing. You could say those were the bad old days. And of course we trained all kinds of dogs—Bouviers, boxers, shepherds, Weimaraners, standard poodles, Belgian Tervurens, border collies, and mixed breeds—if a dog was tough and loaded with life we could train it. Trouble was, once we’d trained one of those donated dogs, we couldn’t be certain of repeating our success. We spent way too much time looking for dogs that might make it. And often we had more failures than successes in the early days.”

  I thought about those early days. Even as late as the 1950s a guide dog was a rare sight. The pressure to produce perfect dogs must have been on the mind of every trainer. “Yeah,” said Jack, “we were all ambassadors. And we felt that the large failure rate with found or donated dogs was completely unacceptable. By breeding our own dogs we could assure better and more consistent results.”

  In the mid 1960s, Helen Ginnel, a champion breeder of Labrador retrievers, donated a large portion of her “Whygin Labradors” breeding colony to Guiding Eyes. “Almost overnight we were in business,” said Jack. “We had superior dogs to work with. And lots of them.”

  He told me how with a breeding program in place they could count on having dogs readily available that would be of medium size, healthy—and they’d be calm, easy to handle by persons with minimal dog-handling skills. They’d also be confident in all environments, able to cope with the pressure of making decisions, and they wouldn’t be distracted around other dogs.

  Jack explained that “repeatability” was the principal factor in the adoption of Labradors for guide-dog work in the 1970s.

  “We found we could breed confident Labs. They could get on an airplane in New York and arrive in San Francisco and be happy. Suddenly we had dogs who didn’t just do the work—they loved the work.”

  He told me the German shepherd was a superb working dog, but over the years they had trouble producing enough dogs to meet the demands of training. Shepherds could be tense, sometimes nipping at people’s ankles. He explained that they still bred shepherds but couldn’t turn them out with the same consistency as Labs.

  “So, in a way, things haven’t changed that much since the days when Dorothy Eustis was trying to restore the German shepherd as a working dog,” I said.

  “That’s true,” said Jack. “But it’s also true shepherds are herding dogs. When they’re in a familiar place they’re great guide dogs, but in strange locations they can become agitated. And finding shepherds that don’t have these traits is harder than it is with Labs.”

  “Why do you still breed shepherds at all?” I asked.

  “Because a great shepherd is a first-rate guide. And many guide-dog users who began with German shepherds still want one. Our problem has to do with assuring solid guide dogs are always in the pipeline. Trainers need dogs to train. Clients need dogs when they need them—and our Labradors are a ‘get up and go’ solution. But when we have a great shepherd we know we have a quality guide dog.”

  He went on to explain the calmness factor.

  He told me how guide-dog success is multifaceted. On one side there’s the breeding program. They breed dogs for temperament and health. They want dogs that are outgoing, eager, self-assured, and readily able to problem solve. They want dogs with “recoverability”—it’s okay for them to be surprised by a sudden noise or strange sight, but they prize the dogs that can’t be surprised twice.

  “We want dogs that say, ‘Been there, done that, no big deal,’ ” said Jack.

  “So temperament is the first side.”

  We poured more hot water into our cups. The tea was good.

  “Another side has to do with nurture,” said Jack. “Our puppies receive love from volunteer families. Never underestimate loving-kindness. Behind every confident dog is a team of loving people.”

  I’d never thought about puppy raising as an act of love. It was almost overpowering. There I was, in love with Corky, and Jack was telling me there was a transmission of love behind this.

  Jack said puppy raisers are the foundation. They’re responsible for the successful upbringing of the dogs. But they aren’t called upon to introduce the dogs to traffic. They do teach the dogs verbal signals and hand signals.
/>   “When you become a puppy raiser,” Jack said, “you really stretch your spirit.”

  “We teach our puppy raisers that the handler and the dog must maintain awareness of each other at all times when they’re together,” he said. “Either handler or dog may be engaged in something else while still maintaining awareness. Awareness is demonstrated by response to a change in the other. For instance, the handler should notice if a dog moves or changes focus; the dog notices if the handler moves or alters his actions.”

  “Does this eventually become natural?” I asked.

  “Exactly. Mutual awareness becomes a way of life,” said Jack. “And when a puppy grows up and comes back for its adult training—its guide-dog education—the dog will focus ‘right in’ on his or her person.”

  “What other kinds of things do the puppy raisers need to know?” I asked.

  “Tons of things,” said Jack. “Body language. When a puppy raiser offers feedback to a dog they need to use their whole body; both voice and actions tell a dog how pleased or displeased you are. Dogs pay attention to everything. You’ve noticed how Corky watches you? She’s watching you as if you were a dancer.”

  Jack paused for a moment, then said: “You’d be surprised how many people think they understand dogs but can’t read them. Dogs look at us for confirmation, or with expectation, or concern, or even with impatience. Our goal is to train each puppy by understanding these ‘reads.’

  “We’re trying to foster confidence,” he said. “Your basic pet owner thinks, ‘Well I don’t understand my dog, I’ll give him a hard leash correction.’ Our puppy raisers learn to understand everything about a dog. We want each dog’s inner poise to come out—like the grain in wood.”

  I said: “These puppies have better childhoods than I did. When I was a kid no one tried to bring out my inner poise.”

  “Right,” said Jack, “and no one tells us we’re part of something big, a big loving life. Or maybe they do if we’re lucky. But every puppy learns this.”

  “I can feel the confidence when I’m walking with Corky,” I said. “She often looks at me, as if to say, ‘See what we did!’ ”

  “That,” said Jack, “has everything to do with the puppy raisers.”

  There was a transmission of love behind our triumphs. People had loved Corky and fed her, housed her, laughed with her, and then, when their bond was deepest, they gave her back to the school. The act had a purity about it—a quality one may call rejoicing. I could feel it. I who’d spent my days taking unhappiness too much to heart.

  Chapter Thirteen

  After three weeks of training, Linda said it was time for graduation. We could invite our parents, friends, family, anyone we wished. As with all commencements, we’d be celebrating human accomplishment; but then again, we’d be honoring our dogs. They’d been through eight months of training and a year of structured life with their raisers. In dog years they’d been to college and graduate school. “This is their ceremony too,” Linda said.

  Linda continued: “Your puppy raisers are coming. This is a huge day for them. Seeing these successful teams brings them a sense of fulfillment. And these dogs carry a lot of love inside. More than a little has come from the puppy-raising families.”

  Though Linda didn’t say it, it was clear: graduation was about something bigger than each student’s individual experience. I worried it might be awkward. This was an old habit, imagining how a scenario would seem to others. I pictured the class in front of a room, all of us wearing wrinkly clothes; each with our dog beside us, all smiling and failing to look directly at the camera. It didn’t sound promising. But I’d do it for Corky’s puppy raisers. I’d resist embarrassment, at least for an afternoon.

  * * *

  My mother still didn’t like my embrace of blindness. Now that graduation was coming I called her to share how good the training experience had been. I talked about Corky, told her how Corky had taken me through the Waldorf. I said she was slowly working her way into my bed at night. “In Corky’s world the bed is the sign of justice,” I told my mother. Then she said it: “I wish you weren’t doing this. Now everyone will know you can’t see . . .”

  I was never going to change her. And when all was said and done it wasn’t my job. My job (so to speak) was to travel with Corky, forgetting old fantasies about mind over matter, to forget my mother’s insistence that not thinking about disability would make it vanish.

  I let out a long sigh. Sensing preoccupation Corky nuzzled my hand. I knew it was finally time to defeat my mother’s idée fixe. My heart would no longer be subdued. I went outdoors and sat on the porch and thought about my blind-dog self, so freshly bold.

  Our trainers spoke of “turning over”—the transfer of a guide dog’s love to its new owner. “She’s turning over to you,” was the best pat on the back I’d ever received. There’d been no praise in my life to equal it. “Bring on graduation,” I said. I said it for Corky. “Look at us, girl,” I said. “Just look! We’ve turned over!”

  I called my sister Carol, four years my junior, now a physician in Manhattan. While I’d struggled to find walking room in the world, Carol had gone far. But like me she knew what a difficult person our mother was. Like me, she’d struggled to find emotional purchase and freedom.

  Should I invite our parents to commencement? I asked my sister. I feared our sorrowing mother and ascetic father would ruin the occasion. Carol would be entirely celebratory. “Who doesn’t want to see a dog graduate from college?” she said. She said having our parents at the ceremony would be stressful, but it was worth the effort to invite them.

  “Maybe they’ll learn something,” she said.

  “You know,” she said after a pause, “I’ve always been worried about you.”

  “Please be specific,” I said, laughing.

  “When you’re with me in New York, I’m anxious for you,” she said. “That’s why I’m always grabbing your arm.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “It’s funny,” I said, “but growing up with Mom, I felt like being visually impaired was a kind of stain on the family.”

  “The only stain on the family,” said Carol, “is The Momster herself.”

  “Well you know,” I said, “the main thing is she drinks too much. And she never goes anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” said Carol, “which is how she sees your blindness . . . just don’t talk about it and don’t go out.”

  “How does Dad live with her?” I asked.

  “He reads books and more books,” Carol said.

  “And the more he keeps his own counsel, the more he doesn’t have to think about customary human relations,” she said.

  “But the whole thing is so improbable,” I said. “I mean, if you had a kid who was blind, wouldn’t you teach him how to live?”

  “Not if you’re them,” she said. “You remember how it was . . . back in high school . . . you’d come home at three in the afternoon and Mom would be passed out on the sofa with the shades drawn.

  “There’s your preparation for life,” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied, “but I should have done this sooner—learned how to do things earlier . . .”

  “You read books with your one half-sighted eye,” she said. “That’s what they taught you to do.

  “Hey,” she said, “it’s not so bad . . . not now anyway . . . and I can’t wait to meet Miss Corky!”

  I invited Carol to visit a week before the ceremony. I felt giddy. I was excited to introduce her to Corky and I danced in my room and Corky followed, jumping up and down. I felt like some weird berserk Viking. I was experiencing raw exuberance and it was utterly uncomplicated. It was Sunday. Carol would arrive around two p.m. It was almost one. I had a blues harp and I played it and whirled around the room while Corky wagged.

  That’s when it happened—the “it” improbable, unforeseeable, but clear—I entered the life of confident blindness, that thing I’d scarcely been able to imagine. Perhaps I’d never fully im
agined it—but suddenly I was in the world as an adept blind guy with a superior dog.

  We were twirling around the bed when a knock came at the door. I opened it. Corky pushed her nose into the corridor. There before us stood the mayor of New York City. He was with his wife and children and a photographer and the president of Guiding Eyes. “Hi,” said the mayor. “I’m Rudy Giuliani.”

  Rudy had come to receive a “release dog” for his family. A release dog is just what the name implies—it’s a guide dog that didn’t make it all the way through training but will make an exceptional family pet. These dogs are highly prized and there’s a long waiting list. Many release dogs join police departments or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and work as detection dogs.

  Rudy wasn’t yet “America’s Mayor,” and he hadn’t yet cashed in his political and PR capital as “the man who cleaned up New York,” but he was working on it. Instead of his charcoal Armani suit he wore a Members Only aqua baseball jacket and blue jeans.

  “Hello, Mr. Mayor,” I said. “I’m Steve and this is Miss Corky!”

  Corky eyed everyone and displayed good body language, an alert “ho hum.”

  I was an ambassador—a circumstance Linda had told us would happen and happen frequently.

  I shook hands with the mayor’s wife and assumed the pose of a confident guide-dog team, the role first played by Morris Frank. “Of course, Morris Frank would be wearing a suit,” I thought, “and I resemble a lunatic from the woods.” I had long, uncombed hair, and was wearing a cable-knit sweater covered with dog hair.

  * * *

  Journal, March 20, 1994:

  When a dog is your teacher you find you’re the one who’s spent his life uneasy in his own skin. You’re the one who lived by rote, who never slowed down, and seldom if ever luxuriated in the present. The dog teacher says, as if she’s been reading Robert Frost, “I’m pleased. You come too.”

  * * *

  My dear sister understood what a rare opportunity Guiding Eyes represented for me. When she arrived on campus we went to an empty lounge and I let Corky out of her harness, unsnapped her leash, and she ran and stopped, changed direction, ran again, stopped, then zeroed in on Carol’s face and gave her a significant wash.