Beyond the Bear (20 page)

At the same time I was making the decision to go back to school, I was also facing a much riskier one, a decision with the potential to alter my future in either constructive or destructive ways. At the urging of many, my family and I had looked into filing a lawsuit for negligence against the state and federal agencies responsible for managing the area where I was mauled. The way we saw it, the policies and procedures, or lack of them, had created a dangerous situation at the Russian River for people as well as bears. Although there had been efforts to deal with the bear-magnet buildup of salmon carcasses along the Russian and Kenai rivers, they failed to go far enough. An increasing number of bears were using the area as a buffet line and teaching their young to do the same. You don’t need a degree in wildlife biology to know that nothing good could come of that.

Conflicts between people and bears had escalated in the month leading up to my attack, including that fisherman who shot and killed a sow that charged him, in essence killing all three of her young cubs, too, since they ended up having to be euthanized. According to Craig Medred, who covered my mauling and its aftermath for the
Anchorage Daily News
, at one point thirteen bears were counted within sight of the Russian River ferry crossing, not far from where John and I had been fishing. “According to wildlife officials who have worked on the ground here for decades,” Medred wrote, “no one in the past 25 years has seen this many bears at one time near the confluence of the Kenai and Russian rivers.”

It was only after I was mauled that officials took aggressive action by closing the trails and riverbanks to nighttime fishing for more than a month, cracking down on anglers leaving food, coolers, and fish stringers unattended, and bouncing rubber bullets off brazen bears’ butts.

Having the resources to make my life work would have taken a load off since at the time I didn’t know if I’d be able to make a decent living. But money was not the sole motivation. A lawsuit had the potential to change management practices and perhaps prevent someone else from being mauled and bears from being shot. We found an attorney willing to take the case, but he warned me that it was going to be a rough ride, especially in Alaska where juries are disinclined to side against nature. Did I really want to spend a year or two or possibly more bogged down in a lawsuit? It was going to be an arduous process, and the public and the media would surely have a field day with me. I could just hear it: “What’s he trying to do, sue the bear?”

The last thing I wanted was to be the laughingstock of Alaska. And I sure didn’t want to drag Amber through it. Although we felt we had a strong case, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I wanted to leave it all behind. I wanted to move my life forward, to move beyond the bear.

But first, I needed to feel better. Time would do its part, although the numbness in my face and the phantom pains in my eyes would probably be with me the rest of my life. I was still taking bomber antibiotics as a precaution against the MRSA that had taken up residence in me. I was sick of the constant itching. I was sick of feeling nauseous, sick of the spontaneous
puking, once in the middle of a parking lot that came on so suddenly, I was mid-stride when I hurled. If I took the drugs indefinitely, they would hold the MRSA at bay. If I quit, I’d run the risk of a flare-up, of it spreading into my bloodstream, and possibly even killing me. I weighed my options. I had a life to get on with. I would take my chances. I was done with antibiotics.

Next, if anything was to come of this imprint-in-the-sand business, I needed to learn how to be a blind man. I needed to adapt the skills I had to life in the dark. I needed to learn how to make my way around a city, how to pay my own bills, and how to make my own peanut butter sandwich without mutilating the bread. I needed to learn ways of telling the difference between Blistex and Super Glue, Listerine and Mr. Clean, a piece of chocolate and a piece of Ex-Lax. The time had come for me to make my way to a school for the blind.

CHAPTER 18

Blackbeard and the Blindies

Lee Hagmeier liked to say that he was the first blind person
he’d ever met. The same was true for me, but that was about to change. After shopping around for a school for the blind, I decided on the Living Skills Center for the Visually Impaired in San Pablo, California, now called the Hatlen Center for the Blind.

I liked the school’s size, only sixteen students at a time. I like that it had virtually no classrooms, no sign out front announcing its presence, and no indulging of those used to having others do for them what they were capable of doing for themselves. Committed to teaching students to live in the world rather than being sheltered from it, the center offered full immersion, with eight double-occupancy apartments for students, one for the night manager, two for offices, and another for a state-of-the-art, adaptive technology lab. These twelve apartments were part of a three-story, seventy-five-unit complex of sighted, working-class people and families. Rather than students going to the instructors, the instructors came to the students, working with them in their own apartments, teaching everything from how to cook, to how to clean a bathroom, to how to manage finances. Normally, it takes about a year to achieve a high level of independence. I was way too anxious to get back to Amber to stay that long. The center was willing to work with me at my own pace on an accelerated plan.

That fall, I packed up what I’d need for an undetermined length of stay.
The apartment was furnished so I brought only the essentials—clothes, bedding, a French-press coffee maker, my laptop, my stereo, my guitar, a sixteen-track mixing board for recording music, and a couple of microphones in case there were any other musicians around. Brian and I loaded my things into boxes and carried them out to the back of my truck. Once everything was shoved in, I slammed closed the topper and felt my way to the passenger door, trailing my fingers alongside the truck. I swung the door open, Maya hopped in, and I climbed in after her, giving her a little hip check since she still wasn’t used to me sitting in her seat. She crawled back into the extended cab with a snort. Brian slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and headed down the canyon to deliver me to the next chapter of my life.

We arrived in San Pablo in late afternoon on the Sunday before my first day of class. We had toured the place the week before, so we knew where we were going and had already picked up the keys. Arms loaded, we began the first of three trips
up two flights of stairs to my third-floor apartment, with Brian shuffling his feet so I could follow with my ears
.
Before heading up with our last load, I let Maya out of the truck to do a couple of laps around the parking lot, which I later heard about from the building’s management due to a strict no-pets policy. She’d be staying with Jeremy at Arboleda, along with her buddy Cloey, but I’d be seeing her on weekend visits. I crouched down to have a word with her.

“Don’t you be giving Jeremy any trouble, you hear me, girl? No flying jump kisses unless by request. And no messing with the chickens. Got it?”

She licked my face and wagged her entire back end. I hugged her neck, then opened the passenger door. She hopped inside. I cupped her head in my hands, planted a kiss on her snout, and made sure her tail was out of the way before shutting the door.

I’d already met my roommate, an eighteen-year-old who’d been blind since birth, but he wasn’t around that afternoon so we had the place to ourselves. We put away the groceries we’d bought along the way, and set up my stereo in my room, where it was back to sleeping in a twin bed for me. My apartment and its furnishings looked a bit tired, Brian told me, the walls as though they hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint since before I was born. Not that any of that mattered to me. We headed out to the back balcony to check out the scene from there. I heard sirens in the distance. I heard car brakes squealing, a woman screeching at her kids, an animated conversation in Spanish, a dog going ballistic. Leaning over the balcony railing, sunglasses flipped over the top of his head, Brian described my view.

“Not much privacy,” he said. “Your neighbors can see everything that goes on out here. You’re overlooking the parking lot and the Dumpsters, and I can see a liquor store and pawnshop down the street. Looks a little rough out there, Dan.”

“Niiice,” I said with a nod. So much for my sheltered existence. I’d wanted real world and I was going to get it.

We settled into plastic lawn chairs, popped open a couple of beers, and sat out there on the balcony taking in the sounds of the fidgety neighborhood. When Brian finished his beer, he sat a moment, a restless foot tapping against the leg of his chair. He sighed and stood up.

“I should probably head out,” he said, both eager to get out of there and reluctant to go. We hugged goodbye. “Take it easy, man. If you need anything just give a call. Good luck with everything.”

I didn’t walk him out since I didn’t know if I could find my way back. I stood on the balcony, gripping the railing, savoring the cool East Bay breeze. I heard the clank of the metal security gate, the opening and closing of the door of my truck, the start of its engine, the emptiness as it pulled away.
Once the rumble of my truck merged into traffic, I turned, went inside, and with a hand out in front of me at my waist, slowly shuffled my way to my bedroom. I put on some Grateful Dead, made up my bed, and began pulling clothes out of my duffel bag and putting them into drawers and on shelves in the closet. After that, I put my things away in the bathroom, then the kitchen. When my boxes were empty, I sat on an unfamiliar couch in an unfamiliar living room in an unfamiliar city, picked up my guitar, and went to a familiar place in my mind.

My foray into the world of the blind, its language, culture, and politics would begin the next morning with a nine o’clock knock on my apartment door.

“You must be Dan Bigley.” Her voice sounded warm and enthusiastic, which instantly put me at ease. I reached out to shake her hand. “Welcome, Dan. We’re happy to have you here. Are you ready to get started?”

I was more than ready. This first day of my first class meant I was one step closer to getting back to Alaska, back to Amber.

I wasn’t a stranger in a strange land for long. At twenty-seven, I was quite a bit older than the other students, who were closer to my roommate’s age and had never lived on their own. Before the end of my first week, I’d become fast friends with two of the center’s staff members, Arif Syed, who was sighted, and Samir Shaibi, who was not, both of whom were wicked musicians. At the time, Arif was the office manager, a laid-back jack-of-all-trades with a tidy black beard and bachelor’s degree in environmental science from UC Berkeley. Samir was the after-hours supervisor, a fearless and charismatic former student with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition that had slowly cinched down his field of vision until all he had left was about what one would see looking through a straw in a room full of smoke.
I had invited Arif up first, to help me eat my homework, a chicken-and-rice casserole I’d made for my cooking class. He talked up Samir, so I invited them both next time. Out came the guitars, and we were a trio from then on. We were Blackbeard and the Blindies.

We shared meals, nipped a little Johnny Walker, and jammed together night after night, sometimes so late it was rough getting going the next morning. On weekends, I would escape to Arboleda, and now and then they’d come along for more of the same. We
recorded a homemade CD of our Arboleda sessions with a Prescott friend, Evan Raymond, on bass, percussion, and harmonies. Blackbeard and the Blindies played for staff and students, and for whoever could hear us through the walls. We even got a little gig at an outdoor cafe in Sacramento that drew a contingent from the center, as well as my parents.

When I wasn’t hanging out after hours or jamming with my two newest best friends, I was working my tail off. I was upgrading my cane skills by several notches. I was learning talking software like Window-Eyes and Kurzweil that would allow me to do Internet searches, balance my checkbook, use email and read the newspaper. I was learning how to deal with conveyor belts at grocery-store checkout lines, how to avoid product-placement booby traps, how to sign my name at the bottom of a check. I was learning how attaching Braille labels at home could help me tell ground pork from ground turkey, one medicine bottle from another, liquid laundry detergent from Liquid-Plumr.

Ron Hideshima, an accessible-technology instructor who’d lost his sight at the same age as me—in a car accident in Japan during a trip home from the states to be with his dying father—worked extra hours to get me up to speed on blind technologies and other wizardry I’d need for graduate school. I learned just enough Braille to realize the time and commitment it would take to become proficient, which made me appreciate even more the challenges Lee Hagmeier was up against in his day. I also picked up simple, no-tech tricks for managing mundane, day-to-day tasks like how to match my socks—buy all the same type and color, or connect them with a safety pin before tossing them into the wash. To tell shampoo from conditioner, I’d put a rubber band around one and not the other. To keep track of money, I’d fold my fives in half widthwise, tens in half lengthwise, and twenties and larger into thirds, and keep each in a separate compartment of a tri-fold wallet.

I’d been so intimidated at first, so afraid I’d be way behind all the others, most of whom had spent their whole lives blind or able to see
only in dabs, blobs, or shards of shape, color, and light. Over time, I found the opposite to be true. Having had sight, I had a lot more awareness, a lot more understanding of the way the world looks, and therefore how to move and act within it. It soon became clear to me that too many parents underestimate, and even undermine, the capabilities of their blind children. When the time comes to make their own way in the world, they arrive at adulthood with a debilitating lack of confidence, independence, and will. One of the stories floating around the center was that of a man in his fifties who’d lived his whole life with his mother, and when she died, he didn’t even know how to dial a phone. To us, that amounted to child abuse.

As I worked with my mobility instructor and a cane, my world gradually grew bigger and wider. My first challenge was to
find my way around the apartment complex, then out to the street. With jackhammers, car horns, and faulty mufflers cluttering the airwaves, crossing my first busy intersection was heart-thumping, and every screech, squeal, and whoosh of traffic had me bracing for impact. I practiced over and over, each day going farther and farther, with my ears and cane as proxies for my eyes. Initially my instructor was at my side, then three feet behind me, then, as I gained confidence and skill, a half-block away until finally I was on my own.

My first solo trip to a place I’d never been before was to a fish market near Berkeley that I found based on directions I took over the phone. After a series of street crossings and a couple of bus transfers, I walked inside, did a mental fist pump, and walked out. I hadn’t felt that much freedom since the bear. My instructor, who got there on her own, was waiting for me out on the sidewalk.

“You’ve got it!” she said. “Great job.”

Over time I got good enough to make it all the way to Gilroy on Friday nights, a three-hour journey that involved a ten-minute walk from my apartment to a bus stop, a bus ride to a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station, a squeeze through a ticket-accessible turnstile, a trip up an escalator to a platform, a BART ride into one side of San Francisco and out the other, a walk from that station to a Caltrain station, and then another train ride through San Jose to Gilroy, where Jeremy would be waiting to drive me back to Arboleda.

Heading out for the weekend, I’d sometimes have Jeremy pick me up in Fremont instead, which involved a transfer on BART but not a Caltrain ride. Getting from the Fremont station out to the street was the trickiest part.
I had it wired, though my technique wasn’t exactly graceful since it including bumping my cane, or even my shoulder, into this and that, here and there, as a way of orienting myself. I’d step off the train and wait at the platform until the rush of people had passed. Once the place had quieted down, I’d work my way forward until I tapped into a long row of seats, then I’d veer left until I found a wall that I’d walk along, at the end of which I’d hear the escalators, pull a U-turn around the wall, and step onto an escalator heading down to the station’s lower level. At the bottom, I’d step off, work my way across a large open area until I’d tap into a glass display case in the center. Then I’d work my way to the left, pass a customer service desk, then veer right until I found the exit turnstiles. I’d go through, walk up a set of stairs to the street, and make my way along the curb to a bench where I’d sit and wait for my ride to Arboleda.

Learning to get around independently includes learning how to deal with those who are certain you’re incapable of doing so. To find the door of the bus, sometimes you first have to find the side of the bus, and people have a hard time watching that. On one of my trips to meet Jeremy, I got off BART as usual, bumped into my row of chairs, as usual, and veered left. Everything was going fine. Just as I was about to tap into my wall, I felt a hand grip my shoulder from behind and yank me back.

“Whoa! Hey, I’m okay. Thanks, I’m fine. I know where I’m going.”

The man did not speak English.

I collected myself and continued on, with footsteps trailing me not more than a couple of steps behind. Working my way along the wall, I got off course, distracted by my stalker, and bumped into an unfamiliar row of chairs. The man again grabbed my shoulder and aimed me in the direction he assumed I wanted to go.

I turned to face him. “It’s cool, man. It’s good. I don’t need help. No help. Thank you.” I pointed to myself, gave a thumbs-up, turned, and continued on my way. As I caned toward the escalators, the man was right there steering me by my shirt. By then I was fuming. I whipped around to face him. “Hey, leave me alone! No. More. Help.”