Beyond the Bear (23 page)

Amber nudged me. “Dan, he’s right here in front of us.”

Sometimes, sometimes, I sit in the dark alone,

Sometimes . . .

“Oh my god, he’s singing to you, Dan. He’s reaching out for you. Reach your hands up. Reach up. A little more to the left . . .”

I reached up, and Franti pulled me up on stage and wrapped me up in a huge hug. He spoke into my ear. “I know who you are, and I know what you’ve been through. Let’s dance.” So we started dancing, well, jumping up and down while hugging each together, anyway, looking like two guys who’d just won the lottery. The next thing I know we’re at the mike and he’s singing so I started singing, too—if you could call it singing. (Had I known, I would have skipped the tequila.) I probably sounded like Peter Boyle in
Young Frankenstein
attempting “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” but he didn’t seem to care. A memorable scene was made more so when, singing and hopping about with my arms around Franti, my white cane went flying as if I were announcing to the crowd, “It’s a miracle; I can see!”

Among other revelry that summer, Amber and I hiked in the Chugach Mountains, scrambling in steep sections on all fours while Maya and Hobbit jammed their noses down every pika hole within a quarter-mile radius. We strolled down the Homer Spit, shuffling our feet in the sand and listening to waves lap the shore. We stopped by the Salty Dawg Saloon, a classic Alaska watering hole carpeted in wood chips and wallpapered in dollar bills autographed with Sharpies. We camped along the pristine, cyan waters of Kenai Lake, where for the first time since the bear I threw my head back and howled at the moon.

It goes without saying Amber and I did a lot of fishing that summer. Halibut fishing in Resurrection Bay and salmon fishing along the Kenai Peninsula. By then Jaha was co-owner of a guiding business, Alaska Drift Away Fishing. He took Amber king fishing for the first time on his favorite river, the Kasilof, where she hooked into a magnum and was so excited she didn’t mind that it got away. But it wasn’t until my brother came for a visit and he and I took her fishing for reds that she began to understand my fishing obsession. We took her to that favorite spot on the Kenai River, the one John and I had fished earlier the day of the bear. At the time the daily limit was six per angler, and she and I were nailing them right and left, with Brian running back and forth between us, bonking them in the head and getting them onto stringers. We were hauling them in so fast, he couldn’t keep up.

It was right about then that Amber and I started finishing each other’s sentences. It was obvious to us and everyone around us that we made a great team. When Jeremy and Paige came to visit, they started calling us Danber. And when it was the two of us and our two dogs, we were Danber Mayobbit Biglevitz.

As the summer started winding down, Amber began thinking about going back to work and I got serious about my graduate-school application, but not before celebrating my birthday in late August. Birthdays take on a whole new significance when you’ve come so close to never having another one. As my twenty-eighth approached, I put some serious thought into how I wanted to honor it. I decided returning to the Brown Bear Saloon would be most fitting. Although the name is unfortunate, it was the perfect place to celebrate, not only that I was able to have another birthday, but also coming full circle with Amber. So we made plans to return to the Turnagain Arm bar where we’d stopped the night of the beluga convergence and sparks between us first flew.

The place hadn’t changed a bit. We walked in and there was the same bartender and the same duo of decrepit dogs sacked out on the floor. We sat at the same table, and ordered the same beer.

A couple of days earlier, Amber had come up to me in the kitchen and said, “Close your eyes and open your mouth.”

“Very funny.”

“No, seriously, just open your mouth.”

“Ahh, I don’t know if I should trust you.”

“What? You don’t trust me? Why wouldn’t you trust me? Come on. Be a man. Trust me.”

“Okay, but this better not hurt.”

I opened up and she popped a bacon-wrapped scallop into my mouth.

So when Amber went up to the bar to get us another round, I dug a little something out of my pants pocket. She set the beers on the table and sat back down.

“Amber, close your eyes and open your mouth.”

“Huh?”

“Close your eyes and open your mouth.”

“Forget it.”

“What? You don’t trust me?”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t trust you.” We laughed. “Besides, how are you going to find my mouth?”

“Yeah, good point. Okay, then how about you close your eyes and hold out your hand instead.”

She held out her hand. I slipped a ring on her finger.

“Amber, will you marry me?”

“Wait a minute, are you serious?”

“I’m dead serious.”

“You’re not just messing with me?”

“Would I do such a thing?”

“Yes. I mean, yes, I will. I would love to marry you.”

My whole body began to tremble. I lunged across the table just as I had a different life ago and held both of her hands in mine. This time I didn’t let go. Then I rose to my feet, found my way up to the bar, and rang the bell; the next round was on me. “Hey, everyone, my girlfriend and I just got engaged! Wa-hoo!”

The room erupted in cheers. The dogs raised their heads off the floor, looked around, dropped their heads back to the floor, snorted, and went back to sleep.

CHAPTER 20

Ungulate Landmines and Statistics
Sinkholes

No one has ever accused me of being old school, but on a meet-
the-parents trip to Minnesota, I got her father’s permission before asking Amber to marry me. I’m sure Frank and Diane Takavitz had all the same questions Amber and I had: How was this going to work when I couldn’t even mow the lawn, let alone, at the time, make a living? And what if we had children? How does a blind dad watch the kids while mom makes a dash to the grocery store? How does a blind dad change diapers? Eesh. The thought was too gross to consider. Amber and I had a simple answer to such questions: No idea. Despite all the unknowns, Frank didn’t hesitate: “We’d love to have you in our family.” As proof, he bestowed upon me one of his treasures, a home-run baseball from a Minnesota Twins game that was smacked right to him in the bleachers above left field. I kept it on my dresser next to my prayer beads.

Amber’s belief in me, and the vote of confidence from her family, added more fuel to the fire of my ambitions. Amber trusted me to find my way, for us to find ours, and I wasn’t about to let her or her family down.

Lee Hagmeier found his way, and he faced much more daunting obstacles in his day. If I got into graduate school at the University of Alaska, I had all this talking, high-tech gadgetry to help me along. The university’s Disability Support Services, the Alaska Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and other services on and off campus would have my back.
When Lee started college in 1962, other than financial aid, he had no such services. The technology he relied upon amounted to a Braille writer and reel-to-reel tape recorders. On top of being blind, he was also deaf in his right ear, a result of the spinal meningitis I had dodged but he hadn’t. Losing hearing on one side lopsided his audio orientation, particularly in places as busy and noisy as a college campus.

At Chico State, nearly thirty years before the Americans with Disabilities Act, he’d had to white-knuckle his way through a world disinclined to accommodate him. Between the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation and a trust fund established by the Territorial Sportsmen of Juneau, his tuition, books, supplies, and the cost of hiring readers was covered. But Lee had to figure out his own system for making things work.

He recruited readers from his dorm and through campus bulletin boards. He used a state prison’s volunteer program to create his own books on tape. He’d get lists of textbooks from his professors well in advance, buy the books, and mail them to the prison, where inmates would read them aloud and send back reel-to-reel tapes.

His typewriter-like Braille machine was much too noisy to use in class, so he’d record lectures, then back in his dorm room he’d listen again, constantly turning the recorder on and off to take notes on his Braille writer. To do a term paper, he and a reader would hit the library together to gather research materials. He’d have these read to him while he took notes. He’d write his paper in Braille, hire a Braille translator to put it into writing, have a reader read it back to him so he could make corrections, pay someone to type it up, then have it read to him one final time before turning it in. As cumbersome and time consuming as this process was, he graduated summa cum laude with a degree in psychology in 1967. He then moved on to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he got his master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation in 1969 and his PhD in educational psychology in 1973.

I would have things so much easier than Lee did. Even so, graduate school would make blind school seem like summer camp.

In the middle of fine-tuning my application essays, I went through yet another surgery, my last, although I’d made that claim before. The tendons that attach the eyes to the nasal bridge had been torn off by the bear, which left me with an anchor problem. Although initially the reconstructed area around my eyes had been reasonably symmetrical, as I healed contractile forces pulled my right eyelids down, leaving my prosthetic eye on that side drooping lower than the one on my left and looking like it was melting off my face. Also, I was all sunken-in at the temples. Due to lack of blood flow, atrophy of the fat pads covering the muscle there left me looking like a walking cadaver.

If this bothered Amber she never mentioned it, but it did bother me. Most people told me I looked fine, given the circumstances. I didn’t see how. My face felt bizarre to me, swollen in some places, hollow in others, my eyes all out of whack. It wasn’t like I expected to come out of it looking like
GQ
cover material; I just hoped to look less alien. Although a surgeon as talented as Dr. Kallman can only do so much with a face as exploded as mine, I wanted to look as good as possible for Amber. And I didn’t want people I’d be dealing with at school or in my future profession to be distracted by my looks. So I had surgery number six to even up my eyes and plump up my temples with implants. Afterward, Amber got stuck gooping my sutures with antibiotic ointment, a chore that made her a little queasy but one she did without complaint.

While recovering, I made plans to tackle two prerequisites I’d need before starting my graduate program should I be accepted: a human development course and statistics. I would be accepted only if I managed a B or better in both of these classes, so no pressure or anything. The first one I wasn’t so concerned about, but statistics? I couldn’t imagine anything more visual with all its equations, symbols, charts, graphs, and tables. The vocabulary alone gave me a headache: central limit theorem, sample mean (X bar), p-value, quantile, correlation coefficient.

As school loomed, I spent my first Christmas with Amber suffering from a bad case of discrete-variable angst. With a fire in the woodstove, a round of hot buttered rums in hand, and the Grateful Dead on the stereo, we put up our first tree together, a Fraser fir from “Minnesota Bob,” one of the few independent roadside tree vendors left in the city and a little taste of home for Amber. I held the tree upright in the stand, trying to get it straight while she stood back and directed.

“A little to the left, a little more, now back the other way a touch. There. Now don’t move.”

She anchored the tree in place, gave it a drink of water, and wrapped a gold-colored tree skirt around its base. I then fed her tinselly garlands and twinkly lights as she strung them around and around the tree. She’d bought maroon and gold balls and beaded ornaments with dangles at Fred Meyer, which we divvied up and hung on the tree. If she redistributed any of mine, she did it on the sly.

“It’s crazy that I’m starting school in a couple of weeks,” I said as I passed her the onion-dome topper.

“How are you feeling about it; do you feel ready?” she asked from atop the stepladder. She took the topper from me and impaled it on the tree.

“I have no idea what ‘ready’ should feel like. I feel ready to give it my all. My all may not be good enough, that’s what I’m worried about.” I tried to laugh but it came out like a nervous wheeze.

“Then we’ll figure out what’s next. I’m not worried about it, though. I know you can do this.”

“I hope you’re right.” I backed away from the tree, sank into the couch, and began fiddling with my beard as anxiety swelled in my chest. Amber climbed down off the stepladder, sat next to me, and put her hand on my knee.

“You can’t think that way, Dan. It will just get you off to a bad start. No matter how hard it gets, you will find a way to make it work. I’ve learned that much about you.”

I had good reason to worry. I was still relatively new at blindness, and I hadn’t taken a math class since high school. Our future was riding on how well I did the coming semester. It would be my litmus test. Blowing it was not an option.

Nervous about getting lost, afraid of feeling like a bumbling fool, I spent several days and many long hours memorizing and practicing my routes from one class to the next, to the library, to Disability Support Services, to the bookstore, to the coffee kiosks, back and forth, over and over, only to show up the first day of school to discover the room had been switched and I was standing in some engineering class.

Things spiraled downward from there. By the end of my first day of statistics I was already overwhelmed. By the end of my second, I’d come to the realization that sitting in class was going to be of no help to me whatsoever. Virtually the entire class took place via overhead projector or on the board. I got nothing out of it. Nothing. While the professor and all my classmates worked out problems on the board, I sat there with my laptop taking notes that would later make no sense. The squeaking of felt-tip marker on the projector glass and the tapping of chalk on the board were like exclamation points after every detail I missed.

My first in-class panic attack slammed me halfway through class number two. It started with my professor’s voice morphing into something distant, as if she were lecturing from a culvert. My palms turned sweaty, and my heart began beating like hooves on pavement.

Oh no. Not here. Not now. Just breathe your way through it. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Damn, I’ve got to get out of here . . .

My arms and legs were noodles. I’d crawl if I had to, to get out the door, to take refuge in the men’s room. Then I thought better of it. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself. If I managed to make it as far as the men’s room, I might pass out, hit my head, and be dead before anyone found me. If I was going to lose it, I’d be safer staying put. So I just sat there poker-faced and lock-jawed, my stomach a pit of fire, fingers frozen on my laptop keyboard, hoping nobody would notice.

The worst of the attack passed in twenty minutes. But my nerves were sizzled by then. When the professor wrapped up class, I’d recovered enough to rise up on wobbly legs, gather up my things, and cane my way out the door.

At the start of the second week, I asked my professor if I could learn the material on my own, show up for tests, and skip taking up space in her class. The time it took getting to and from school, I reasoned, I could apply to studying. As much as she wanted to accommodate me, that was a no-go since attendance was part of my grade. Unless I came up with some kind of alternate plan, I was going down.

At home at night, I tried bulldozing my way through my homework with three pieces of technology in front of me—a talking computer, a talking calculator, and a voice recorder for recording the order of operations, to keep track of where I was in the equation.

The variance is the sum of the squared deviation of the scores from the mean divided by the number of scores minus one.

Even state-of-the-art technologies have their limits. I started relying on Amber way too much. She would read a problem to me, and I would record it. I’d then tackle it one step at a time, keeping track of where I was on my computer while doing the math on my talking calculator, and Amber reminding me of what, say, the value of N had been. I also had to learn complicated computer software programs for creating charts, graphs, tables, and histograms. Since Amber was way more computer savvy than I was, I drafted her help with that, too. Reading aloud my statistics textbook and walking me through light-year-long equations was the last way she wanted to spend her evenings and weekends. She did it, but not always graciously. She was giving of her time, but she was no martyr. The long, tedious sessions made us both
grumpy.

“You know, you’re not that much fun to be around,” she’d tell me when I was short with her. “Maybe you should go for a nice, long walk. If you don’t, I will.”

Then the semester got harder and the workload increased. I started falling behind. As bone-deep frustration set in, I became a regular at UAA’s Disability Support Services, where Director Kaela Parks became a tireless advocate for me. We tried different strategies, including a sighted assistant accompanying me to class. That was no help. I started working with a tutor. That helped but not enough. I often stayed up half the night trying to stay on top of my workload. When I did sleep, I thrashed about and hollered. I don’t know how many times Amber shook me awake: “Honey, wake up. It’s okay. You’re having a nightmare.” I’d come to and find my bedding twisted around me, sheets and pillow soaked with sweat. Not damp, soaked, and soaked so thoroughly I’d have to flip my pillow over and lay towels beneath me to get through the rest of the night.

As if that wasn’t hellish enough, caning to and from class in perpetual pitch darkness kept me on edge. Hearing footsteps crunching in the snow would trigger my post-traumatic stress response and nearly rocket me out of my skin. In California I’d worried about being bitten by a black widow spider. In Alaska, I worried about being stomped by a moose. Somewhere around a thousand of them spend their winters in the Anchorage bowl. They could show up anytime, anywhere. I nearly caned right into one on my way home from the bus stop one day after school. Shoveling the walkway up to our porch one time, I had no idea a moose was standing right behind me until Amber banged on the window and hollered for me to get inside. For all I knew, I’d been shoveling snow right in its face. Now and then someone ends up in the hospital after being kicked or trampled, including a six-year-old boy who was kicked in the head moments after getting off his school bus. In the 1990s, two people were stomped to death in Anchorage, one in a backyard, the other in the heart of the UAA campus, and these were people who could see.

Between the crushing pressure of school and walking around without eyes in a city inhabited by thousand-pound land mines, for the first time since the hospital I ended up on antidepressants, plus homeopathic remedies for stress. They took the edge off my nerves and gave me enough space from my fears to allow me to think.

I vowed to keep changing strategies until I found one that worked, one that relied a whole lot less on Amber. In addition to my one tutor, I got another. And then another. Working at one point with three different tutors, three nights a week, plus a little Amber on the side, I figure I poured three times the number of hours into that class as most of my peers.