“All the time,” Connie said. “There are lascivious men who look you up and down. Because they think you’re blind they take another look and then another. That’s when I’d just stop the training and stare them down. They’d panic then, turn red, and run away.”
“Then of course there are those looks of pity—it’s always intolerable—the poor blind person look.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I’d like to put a portable camera on my head and record the able-bodied . . . I’d just walk around in the role of a blind traveler. Then I’d confront the starers, like Candid Camera . . .”
“I like it,” I said.
* * *
Guide-dog trainers always play the role of blindness. The nature of their job is to train a dog so soundly that the trainer, wearing a blindfold, can walk that dog in heavy traffic. They will trust the dog while walking down subway stairs in the Bronx. They’ll commit their own safety to the dogs they’ve trained. Blindfolded you can’t second-guess a dog. The hours spent praising and encouraging a dog’s confidence are rewarded. That spritely Labrador who you thought might fail because at first she was silly has become a take-charge girl, and because you can’t peel back the blindfold you have to trust her. Below ground in the 138th Street–Grand Concourse station you know she’s ready to work. You didn’t surmise it, you felt it while you moved in pitch blackness beside a railway platform.
Sometimes you wear occluders, spectacles designed to minimize vision. You see only silver light and shadows. You work a string of dogs—six dogs most days—up and down flights of stairs in a shopping mall. Training dogs, you relinquish some parts of yourself at moments. Confident dogs must know they’re helping you.
There’s no job quite like it. It doesn’t pay well. You go through a long apprenticeship to gain your place, starting out performing manual labor in kennels, then looking after the dogs of senior trainers, following those trainers, sitting in on classes with the blind, wearing a blindfold for weeks while feeling your way around the training center. You experience helplessness, vague humiliations, tears, occasional danger, extremes of weather. Trainers get the kind of sports injuries known to runners and tennis players—repetitive stress, knee problems, fasciitis, joint inflammation. They work in all weather. Connie told me about wearing a blindfold and working a dog in heavy rain. The roar of water from passing cars robs you of your sense of traffic; you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It was one of Connie’s first blindfolded outings. “Right away I understood,” she said. “I was going to trust this dog. And I wasn’t going to let her know I was fearful.”
It wasn’t until I worked at Guiding Eyes that I understood how much the trainers endure. Most trainers are introverts. They’re not natural talkers—you might say they’re outdoorsy strong, silent types. They’re generally not boastful. One trainer told me over breakfast early on a winter’s morning, “What we do isn’t much, hell it’s not even interesting, we get the dogs to go in a line, we get them to stop. We teach them to trust their own instincts. Give them some lingo. It’s the dogs who do the work.”
I didn’t believe a word he said. But I knew why he said it. We all face a choice between freedom and grief. The former requires not thinking so much of yourself you forget what road you’re on. Modesty is a requirement if you’re walking a long way.
* * *
What do dogs really think of us? All kinds of people asked me this, so I had to think about it often. Who presumes to speak for all dogs? I couldn’t even speak for blind people, how could I generalize about Corky or any other dog? I realized dogs would be a fascination for me but one I’d never get to the bottom of. Admitting what I didn’t know about dogs meant I had to be both ironic and skeptical. Some dogs are smarter than others. Guide dogs tend to be Renaissance types—dogs capable of doing many things. As Brian Hare, the famous canine cognition researcher at Duke University points out, Renaissance dogs show flexibility across five cognitive dimensions: empathy, communication, cunning, memory, and reasoning. Guide-dog trainers, the best ones, the ones whose dogs succeed most often, know that these five qualities are characteristics of the dog and not the man or woman who trains it. The job is to bring these capacities out. “It’s a bit like Michelangelo carving the Pietà,” Kylie, my trainer with Corky, said to me one day. “The dog emerges from a block of marble. Maybe the marble was excellent to begin with. The Guiding Eyes breeding center has a lot to do with that. But we’re giving dogs the opportunity to thrive.”
Corky: Empathy. Check. Communication: sure. Cunning. A great word. Achieving one’s ends by deceit or diversion. Would deceit be a good quality for a guide dog? No. But every dog has some deceitful qualities. Guide-dog users must know what to do when their dogs want them to enter a hedge because there’s a rabbit down by the roots. A duplicitous dog is a thinking creature. Now you have to be in charge.
Memory. Certainly. Reasoning. Absolutely. When a guide dog takes you around an open construction site, carefully working her way off the sidewalk, looking for the right path back to safety, that’s reasoning par excellence.
It became a kind of gift I could give back to Corky, to say I couldn’t quite get to the bottom of what she thought. Her life was elusive.
Connie and I agreed dogs make us more human.
Working at a guide-dog school one gets to see it every day. There’s a gruff student, an older man; he’s gone blind late in life, he’s angry. When he speaks he’s basically monosyllabic. When he’s introduced to his new dog he talks to it robotically. His words are like little needle points. And his dog, who’s used to praise, well the dog wonders what’s up. She looks at the man frequently, and her expression is inquiring. Then the unknown beautiful happens—it can’t be explained—the man warms, laughs, by week two he actually laughs.
Something inside the man, some wheel, broke under its own weight. The trainer sees: it was the dog who did it. The Renaissance dog knows she can outlast the man. How does she know? She just does.
Chapter Twenty-Five
After five years at Guiding Eyes I returned to teaching. Connie and the kids and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, where I took a job teaching creative writing and disability studies at Ohio State.
“The only perk to being blind is you can take your dog anywhere,” I said to students when I entered the classroom. Teaching with a guide dog was glorious. It wasn’t just the shtick of the thing—as when students were quiet and I’d say, “Well Corky knows the answer . . .” It was really the case that for the first time in my academic life I felt even-tempered. Silence was good. I didn’t have to fill gaps in conversation. And if a student was distressed he or she could have a dog-petting session. Higher education can be painful, steeped in competition; often students struggle without evident maps. “Another natural place for dogs,” I thought.
We learn best when we’re safe, when we feel intimacy with ideas. We don’t learn well with arbitrary pressure and force. When dogs stare into our eyes, releasing in us oxytocin, the bonding hormone—Lord knows, our pulse rates drop, our breathing steadies.
The whole room changes for the better when a large dog lying outstretched decides halfway through the allotted period to put her four feet in the air and waggle them. Even the fluorescent lights in a cheap university classroom won’t bother you. A dog in class insists love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Love may be the hardest thing to put into action, but after each class I encouraged my students to visit with Corky.
* * *
A guide dog taught me to live wisely. She did it every day of her thirteen years. After she died I sat in my backyard with her ashes. I cradled her urn in my lap. “What,” I thought, “would she want to teach me now?
“She’d want me to trust what’s ahead,” I thought. She’d want me to live in the now. She’d certainly want me to be happy and never give up on love.
“Courage,” said Hemingway, “is grace under pressure.” I’d never felt like an especially courageous person. But in the veterinary clinic a
s she was breathing her last I knew quite clearly Corky had spent her life protecting me. She always looked out for me, my special angel. I knew I had to force back my tears because I couldn’t let her die to the sounds of my distress. I lay beside her, held her, and sang for her our special walking song. And she died in my arms.
One day your dog is with you, a keen physical presence. She stands under lilac bushes as reliable as always. The next day she’s gone. She becomes, finally, something of you. Every death is just so. We look for consolation. We falter. With grace we’re turned and loss is yet another segment of our path.
Corky’s spirit was never my sole possession. She wasn’t me. She was never mine. She was wisdom’s passing gift.
She wrote commentaries on my sad and sometimes joyous frame, wrote them as only a dog could with her translating eyes and prophesying gait.
After Corky passed I thought hard about my transformation. She brought it the same way she brought my shoes each morning. She’d rise from her bed and retrieve my Nikes. Shoes first, then the glorious day, always a dog’s suggestion.
Afterword
In writing about guide-dog travel I’ve tried to portray both the freedom a dog can bring as well as the occasional misunderstandings service-dog users encounter. The latter are much like anything else—obstructive things happen but they’re infrequent. A cursory reading may lend one to imagine every day is filled with roadblocks when you have a guide dog. In fact most days are expansive and inviting. Walking with a professionally trained dog is a magnificent way to travel. Though I’ve had a few bad taxi rides, the majority of cabbies are terrific. Once, outside of Macy’s flagship store in New York a cab driver told me his sister in Cairo was deaf. He was putting in long hours, saving his money to bring her to the United States. “People here understand disability,” he said. Corky was sitting tall and looking at him. He asked if he could pet her and I said yes. He stroked her ears. I knew he was silently telling her to keep up the good work.
Disability is a Victorian word, strange as “antimacassar” or “corset,” and just so, you shouldn’t rest your head there or wrap yourself in a pejorative meaning. A disabled life is as stimulating as any other. That disablement and blindness sometimes have social barriers is a fact. A shopkeeper may not understand a guide dog, but generally such people are educable and the problem is minor.
Why mention stumbling blocks at all? In part I’ve done so because service dogs are an increasingly important accommodation and I want to convey my sense that as the organized training of dogs for the disabled approaches the century mark we must reconfirm the place of canine companions in the village square. There’s nothing like having a serious, professionally trained dog when you’ve a disability. I don’t even mind being called a “shill.” I am an enthusiastic customer.
If you’re a business owner the law does not force you to endure a misbehaving animal. In fact it’s the performance of a service dog that really matters—not merely in traffic or in crowds, but everywhere. Not long ago a reporter for a New York tabloid took her own badly behaved dog into a famous restaurant, telling the manager she had a disability, knowing full well she didn’t need to produce any proof. Then she ostentatiously encouraged her dog to eat off plates on tables. Her point? Anyone can bring his or her dog anywhere because of the specious ADA. Lost on this writer was the hoary fact that people can imitate anything in America. If you wish you can pretend to be a Rockefeller or dress as a priest. We’ve always been a nation of con men, and the able-bodied have often pretended to be disabled, imagining advantages like better parking or early boarding on airplanes. Here’s what I suggest: look for the professionalism of the disabled and their companion animals and try to remember real working dogs are pros.
Throughout this memoir I’ve mentioned how Corky made me more self-accepting. Not everyone needs to have this kind of journey. In these times, post ADA, it’s more likely one will train with a service dog simply as a helpmate, without the psychological elements I’ve described. To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, “sometimes a dog is just a dog.”
I’ve had four dogs from Guiding Eyes for the Blind and I’m a proud alum of their program; however, there are a dozen guide-dog schools in the United States and they’re equally good. You can read more about guide-dog training schools by visiting the website of the National Association of Guide Dog Users, which is a working group of the National Federation of the Blind. Their site can be found at: http://www.nagdu.org.
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Saltonstall Foundation for residencies that greatly assisted me during the writing of this book.
Many friends, both blind and sighted, have helped me along the way. I owe special thanks to Melinda Angstrom, Bill Badger, Becky Barnes, Marvin Bell, Graham Buck, Eric Holzwarth, Arthur Krieck, Connie Kuusisto, James Lecesne, Michael Meteyer, William Peace, David Reilly, Jane Russenberger, Ralph Savarese, Diane Wiener, Ken Weisner, David Weiss, and Kathy Zubrycki. Crucial support was provided by my agent, Irene Skolnick, and by editors Karyn Marcus and Sydney Tanigawa.
About the Author
© CONNIE KUUSISTO
Stephen Kuusisto was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1955. He is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Eavesdropping: A Life by Ear, and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. He has also authored a book-length essay Do Not Interrupt: A Playful Take on the Art of Conversation. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and the Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University. He lives in DeWitt, New York, with his wife, Connie. He is a frequent speaker in the United States and abroad. His website is: www.stephenkuusisto.com.
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Several names and identifying characteristics have been changed, some individuals are composites, and certain events have been reordered.
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2018
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Have Dog, Will Travel Page 14