Have Dog, Will Travel Read online

  “Well,” she said, “you sweep the cane back and forth and basically you hope you’ll find obstacles before colliding with them. It’s really primitive.”

  “With your dog,” she said, “the whole thing is fluid because she sees things and adjusts without breaking stride. And when I walk with my sighted friends, I’m always faster than they are. Sighted people can’t keep up.”

  “Sighted people are incredibly primitive,” said Aaron.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” said Joseph. They laughed.

  “So what do you mean? How are sighted people primitive?” I asked.

  Aaron was working on a PhD in languages. He’d been silent for the first few days. But now he was warming up.

  “So,” he said. “You’re in a restaurant and twelve other folks, strangers all, are eyeing you because you’re significantly different. Sighted people enjoy novelty and you’re the novelty du jour. Even if you’re just chewing a muffin, you’re entertainment. And then a stranger can’t resist and approaches and says: “ ‘I knew a blind person once . . .’ ”

  “Oh God, yeah,” said Tina.

  “There’s some nuance to this,” said Aaron. “The stranger once knew a blind guy in college, or a blind person who lived down the street. Sometimes he’ll ask if I actually know the aforementioned blind person because, after all, shouldn’t all blind people know one another?”

  “You’re swallowing the damned muffin and you think, ‘What if I asked if he knows all businessmen who wear London Fog raincoats’?

  “Now you’re in a fix,” said Aaron. “The stranger’s invitation to chat is also a signal to you, the blind one, to say moderately inspirational things. Or in turn the stranger says upbeat things like: ‘I knew a blind guy once who could take apart a radio and put it back together.’ ”

  Aaron continued: “He knew a blind guy who climbed a mountain. He knew a blind guy who went skydiving. Who caught more fish than the rest of them combined . . .

  “And you want to say—I knew a short guy once. I knew a short guy who could reach the peanut butter on a shelf with a special device called a stepladder. He was amazing.”

  “Faux disability heroism,” I thought, “is like every other kind of American hero worship. If ‘one size fits all’ is the United States’ universal motto, then surely any distinguishing quality makes a man or woman remarkable. I knew a guy who could eat more hot dogs than anyone in Peoria. I knew a woman who ate spiders to amuse her children. In the United States anyone curious is refreshing.” I didn’t say this. I heard their proper frustration. “Can’t a blind person just be customary?” I thought. Judging by what Aaron had to say, the answer was no.

  “I don’t put down stray sighted people who ask me dumb questions,” Aaron continued. “It is better to be polite. Sometimes I use my dog as a ploy and say: ‘I’ve got to go. The dog needs to take a piss.’

  “Anyway,” said Aaron, “I don’t talk about blindness. There are agencies for that. I tell people I want to talk about neutrinos.”

  “One thing’s certain,” said Harriet, who’d been listening and combing her dog. “You’re a celebrity with a guide dog. People always approach you.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’ll mind that,” I said, then added, “I like the small, sensible faces of life.”

  No one knew precisely what to say to that. There was a brief silence. Then Aaron said, “Well you’re a poet. But don’t let strangers talk you to death!”

  Listening to them I wondered if I’d have a problem with strangers. My principle hang-up had always concerned accomplishment—a misunderstanding of accomplishment—as if blindness was an obstacle to success. I’d lived without any examples of blind triumph. Now triumph was all around me. The other students were skilled at living with their disability. Maybe Aaron didn’t like talking with intrusive people, but he was in the world and could live as he wished. I resolved not to care too much about curious strangers. In a way, questions might be a relief after living for so long with blindness as a largely unspoken element of my life.

  Chapter Nine

  Back again in White Plains we made our way toward Macy’s department store. The goal each day was to go someplace new, and a store would present us with our first opportunity to try revolving doors and escalators.

  I was feeling dog-man confidence. And that’s when Miss Corky leapt backwards, taking me with her. A Jeep had jumped the curb. I tasted my heart for a second. A woman said, “Are you okay? Are you?” Two men talked at once. “Just like that! The dog jumped just like that!” The other said, “I didn’t get his license number.” And Kylie appeared. She said, “That’s what Corky gets paid to do!” Then she said: “We call that in guide-dog work a traffic check.”

  For Corky this was a routine matter, and Kylie’s satisfaction meant we were a success. We continued on our way.

  “Oh Corky, good girl, my sweet duck! My precious goose!” I said.

  “You’re pretty weird,” Kylie said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  As we walked the next block I realized, paraphrasing the poet Theodore Roethke, we’d learn by going where we have to go, but we’d also learn by stopping.

  “Intelligent disobedience isn’t empathy,” said Kylie when I talked to her at the next curb. “It’s instinct.”

  * * *

  “Dogs,” she said, “have multiple smarts.”

  We arrived at the entrance of Macy’s and a woman asked what my dog’s name was.

  “Smarty Pants,” I said. “But I call her ‘Smarty.’ ”

  “That was good,” said Kylie.

  “What was?” I asked.

  “Giving that woman a false name. In general you don’t want strangers calling your dog’s name when you’re working her—they’ll just start talking to her and distracting her. If you say her name is Smarty they’ll call her that and she’ll never respond.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  * * *

  Back in the training lounge, drinking coffee, I wrote some more about trust in my notebook:

  Journal, March 9, 1994:

  Don’t know why I’m thinking of this now . . . but when I was studying in Helsinki on a Fulbright, 11 years ago, I broke my typewriter. And I took it to a repair shop. I spoke to the proprietor in my mediocre brand of Finnish—typing machine broken . . . can you fix? And then the strangeness of the enterprise came over me, for the typewriter man was deaf and he wrote his responses on a tiny pad of paper. I couldn’t read his writing. So I handed him my terrible thick glasses. Ah! He saw the problem. Then he said: “Yes, yes . . .”

  Deaf man, blind man, broken machine . . . and mutual trust . . . seeing each other . . . I’ll never forget the warmth of that little shop. Old man, inky machines, unspoken kindness . . .

  I think dog life will be something like that—communicative, fully understanding, and never with the proper words . . .

  * * *

  After a long day of walking, we sat alone in our room. With Corky I felt the margins of my loneliness were porous.

  I felt the irony of being middle-aged and just beginning to appreciate the richness of being human. Formerly I’d relied on poetry alone to grant me hints about whatever we mean by “life,” and now I was feeling all my own joy and melancholy flowing together.

  Corky allowed me to put my weak eyes against her face. I tugged gently on her ears. Their softness was like down. “Oh Girlie,” I said, “Your ears are supreme. Did you pay extra for those or did they come standard?” I kissed her nose.

  Then I lay on the floor and played dead. She came and stood over me and washed my face, her tongue like a silk fish, and then, tiring of the game, she put a paw on my forehead, gently, very gently, as if to say, “Arise.” And I laughed, in part because of her gentleness—because there was intelligence in her gesture.

  Empathy, at its core, is knowing how not to hurt each other.

  I held her paw in my hand and smelled it. It smelled like bread or corn chips—a yeasty odor.
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  “Corky, how do you stand it, you’re perfect!” I said. Then I yawned. And she yawned.

  I played a game of contagion with her by pretending to be distressed, waving my arms, shaking all over, saying “Oh, oh, oh!” (Though not too loudly—we were in a dormitory with rather thin walls.)

  Corky stood, ran at me, then bounced up and down, eager to be of assistance. Dog researchers call the desire by dogs to help humans “sympathetic concern.” “Oh, Corky,” I said. “I’m just fooling! What a good girl!”

  I knew for the rest of her life I’d need to respect Corky’s empathy. And I made a note to myself to never feign distress.

  * * *

  We walked the grounds of the school at dusk. We were on a path beside a pond. We were loose. “Dogs can’t make you feel better about yourself,” I thought, “but brisk walking is a reconciliation with whatever isn’t you. Walking fast you don’t have to ask who you are.”

  Eventually I stopped and sat on a bench and Corky lay beside me. Soon it would be dinnertime and the students and trainers would gather in the dining hall. It was nice to have a quiet moment, man and Labrador alone in the spring twilight. It was cold and we wouldn’t be staying long. But I needed to sit. I was filled with changes—transformations both big and small had come over me in just a few short days. I sat with my left hand on Corky’s head and breathed in and out slowly. I was mindful of my healing—not because blindness needed a cure, far from it. I was healing from a wounding failure to love my blindness. I was embracing emotions I hadn’t known were in me. Where before I’d felt abandoned, I now appreciated the acceptance of others. Strangers on the streets admired the man-dog walking with our two heads up. Where before I’d experienced the intimidating quality of unseeable spaces, I was feeling some kind of affectionate awareness—an appreciation of what? Of the world’s attraction, both spiritually and intellectually. No I didn’t need to be cured of disability. Yes, I could open my breathing. I could breathe from deep down, like an opera singer. I could breathe slowly. I could let jubilations into my life—our life, the Corky-Steve life. Sitting on the bench at dusk I felt liberated and a little daffy. “Which is a dog feeling,” I thought. Corky looked at me then and wagged her tail.

  Chapter Ten

  In the lounge I found some books on tape about guide dogs. I knew a little bit about their history but reading more on the subject was captivating. I learned that halfway through the First World War a German physician, Dr. Gerhard Stalling, introduced a blind veteran to his pet dog. The two men were in a hospital garden when Stalling was suddenly called away. When he came back the soldier, whose name is now lost, was laughing as the dog licked his hands. Stalling had a breakthrough. Dogs had been performing heroically on the battlefield. It seemed as though dogs could do almost anything under difficult circumstances. Stalling believed dogs might be trained to guide the blind. The war had produced an astonishing number of blind veterans. The total number of wounded from the First World War remains unknown but during the four and a half years of the conflict 230 soldiers died every hour. Eleven percent of France’s entire population was killed. The ten-month Battle of Verdun in 1916 caused over a million casualties. Chlorine and mustard gas killed nearly 90,000 troops and left 1.25 million men permanently disabled. Blindness was a common result of gas warfare and one of John Singer Sargent’s most famous paintings (Gassed, 1919) depicts a ragged line of soldiers, their eyes bandaged, all the men walking in a line, each man’s hand on the shoulder of the man before him—with two sighted men in the lead. The sky is yellow above a field of corpses.

  Trench warfare included working dogs. Germany employed 30,000 dogs in the field and their work was divided according to need. Sentry dogs were used on patrols. They were taught to give warning when a stranger entered a secure area. Scout dogs were also used. Their job was more refined—they accompanied soldiers on reconnaissance and had to keep quiet. They could detect the enemy at a distance of a thousand yards, “scenting” and pointing.

  Casualty or “mercy” dogs were trained to find wounded or dying soldiers in the heat of battle. They carried medical supplies on their backs. The wounded could use the supplies if they were able, or they could count on the mercy dog to wait with them as they died.

  Dogs also ran long distances across battlefields carrying messages, often during artillery attacks. The heroism of working dogs was well known on all sides. The Germans employed 30,000 dogs during the war. British and French forces had approximately 20,000 dogs in the field.

  The guide dog was a direct consequence of war. Because dogs had proven themselves capable of miraculous work under the worst battle conditions ever seen, it was clear to Stalling that war dogs could be trained to help the blind navigate the postwar streets, which were filled with automobiles. With a small group of military dog handlers, Stalling began training dogs for blind soldiers. Old photos show trainers and veterans working with German shepherds, all the men wearing peaked hats and long wool coats. In addition to harnesses, the dogs wore tunics bearing the Red Cross logo—the insignia of the battlefield mercy dog.

  Stalling’s discovery captured the public’s imagination. An official guide-dog school opened in Oldenburg in 1916. The sight of veterans and dogs working in traffic was powerful and seemed natural. In the popular imagination blind people had always been accompanied by dogs: a first-century mural in the Roman city of Herculaneum depicts a blind man with his dog. A nineteenth-century woodcut from the United States shows a blind man from Boston being led by a dog and crossing the Commons. Such pairings were likely the products of serendipity—the blind and their dogs forged relationships by necessity. The history of blindness is filled with sorrow. Before reforms like social security and organized rehabilitation services in the twentieth century, the blind often begged for food and shelter—some played musical instruments—many wandered searching for compassion. Dogs helped ease their loneliness and offered untrained navigational assistance.

  The war dogs displayed something new, a steadfastness and resilience never fully seen before. Stalling’s sense that dogs could work with the blind was both shrewd and far-reaching: the blind would go wherever the public went since dogs were adept at handling the pressures of modern traffic. Motor cars and backfiring trucks were minor annoyances compared to artillery shells.

  * * *

  The first guide-dog trainers had to teach dogs how to “pull out” and show them their role as navigators. Obstacle courses were devised with sawhorses and logs and low-hanging branches. As they worked, dogs learned they couldn’t count on their handlers to make intelligent navigational choices. They also learned to think about the combined width of a man-dog team when walking. A German scientist named Jakob von Uexküll Brull actually developed a rolling cart to replicate the height of a man and the width of a dog team. Dogs pulled these carts and learned to make good street decisions prior to being paired with a blind person. While this method of training is no longer in use, it showcases the creativity of early German training methods.

  I started to notice how many of the trainers were “outside the box” people. Not a single one would trade their day job for life in a bank. Conversely no banker would submit to wearing a blindfold for weeks and walking with a dog.

  “There’s a swashbuckling quality to the guide-dog biz,” I thought.

  In the foyer where students often waited to board the vans, I found Linda putting neatsfoot oil on leather dog leashes and asked her about the earthy cowboy aspect of guide-dog trainers. How far back did this go?

  “In the old days,” said Linda, “a trainer named J. P. used to keep his horse out behind the kennels. One day the dogs got loose and he leapt on his steed and took off after them. J. P. always wore tall rubber boots and cable-knit sweaters and he was unkempt and you have to picture suburban people standing on their lawns with their children, waiting for the school bus, and this wild man, a guy who looked almost feral, went pounding down the street on a chestnut stallion chasing a pack of dogs.”

/>   “Working with animals has its perks,” I said.

  “Well, no two days are exactly alike,” Linda said. Then she added, “But that’s what makes working with animals and people so appealing. Every day is a frontier.”

  * * *

  One night I joined a half-dozen students in the lounge to watch a film, Love Leads the Way. It told the story of Morris Frank, the first guide-dog user in the United States. As we settled our dogs beside us and passed a bowl of popcorn, trainer L read the synopsis. Released in 1984 as a made-for-TV movie, it told the story of Frank and his dog, Buddy. It also highlighted Frank’s single-handed fight to gain acceptance for guide dogs in America. It dawned on me as I listened to L, the guide dog “as concept” was only sixty-five years old in the United States and Frank was, in historical terms, still nearly our contemporary.

  Morris Frank was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to prosperous parents. His mother was blind, and as a boy he served as her sighted guide. Frank’s own blindness occurred as a direct consequence of accidents. When he was six he went blind in one eye after being struck by a branch while riding a horse. At sixteen he was blinded in his other eye while boxing with a friend. Strangely, his mother’s blindness also involved improbable events: she’d gone blind in one eye when giving birth to her first child; then she lost the vision in her remaining eye when she was thrown by a horse. These calamities happened during and just after WWI when ophthalmology was still primitive in the United States.

  Despite his blindness Morris Frank attended Vanderbilt University and supported himself by tuning pianos and selling insurance. In 1927, when he was nineteen, he read an article by a wealthy American heiress named Dorothy Eustis in the popular magazine The Saturday Evening Post. Eustis was a fancier of the German shepherd and was leading an expatriate’s life in Switzerland, where she was working to restore the shepherd to its former glory as a solid working dog. By the late 1920s many American and European dog breeders believed the shepherd was in decline owing to overbreeding. As she traveled through Europe in search of breeding stock, Eustis visited Germany, where she encountered guide dogs. Her article in The Saturday Evening Post gave Americans their first glimpse of dogs for the blind. Her prose is now terribly dated but it reflects the common feeling in the late nineteen-twenties that blindness was a great misfortune. She wrote: