Crashing Through

by Robert Kurson

  Jennifer didn’t think twice about making babies with a blind man. She knew that May was meticulous and would never leave a baby gate open or lose track of a crawling infant. Twice a week they babysat their friends’ two children—their “trainer kids,” as they called them—and Mike took them to the park, made pizzas for lunch, and even taught them to windsurf. When a friend asked Jennifer if she’d considered the hurt children might feel knowing their father couldn’t see them, she’d say, “Oh, he’ll see them. He’ll spend more time with them than any father I know.”

  The Mays loved Ashland so much they bought a house there. A year later, Maytek went on life support. Jennifer went to work as a teacher’s aide to provide for the family. Money grew tight. May burned hotter at Jennifer’s disorganization—he could not abide knocking over another wineglass left haphazardly in the middle of a business desk, or waiting forty-five minutes while Jennifer again searched in vain for her car keys. She found it increasingly difficult to work for her husband, who too often seemed to believe that his method was the only method, and who could get testy or even downright angry when she continued to do things her way. The couple argued, a departure for them, and sometimes they said things they didn’t mean. But it always seemed to dissipate with a walk down the hill or a dinner at a neighbor’s house.

  In 1991, May and a blind friend from Oregon, Bill Belew, started a business called Custom Eyes. The idea was to build personal computers for the blind. Using May’s business acumen and contacts and his partner’s technical skills, they believed they could produce and sell computers that could talk, emboss braille, and convert text into speech—everything a blind person might need. It was door-die time for May. He needed this one to work.

  Custom Eyes bolted from the starting gate and didn’t look back. Blind people nationwide ordered computers faster than the company could build them, but the part customers liked best was the personal service May and his partner provided, a folksy level of unlimited technical support that was the antithesis of the two-hour telephone hold times endemic to mainstream manufacturers. The noose began to loosen in the May household.

  In 1992, May and Jennifer welcomed their first child, a son named Carson. In the hospital, May took lessons from nurses on changing diapers and making bottles, and when they returned home he held Carson, bathed him, burped him, and comforted him at night. During the days, even while he worked, he carried the baby in the front-facing pack he wore, telling him fairy tales and plans for his new business. When Carson began walking, May called on a lifetime of focus and mobility skills just to keep track of him.

  “There’s no pattern to where he’s going!” he told Jennifer.

  She didn’t panic. She just kept allowing May to take Carson to parks and grocery stores, kept watching as he trained his Seeing Eye dog to help him follow the baby’s zigs and zags. Jennifer loved the view from her kitchen window when May towed Carson to the street on the garbage can dolly, then held hands with him as they walked back home together.

  Money grew even tighter in the May household. Custom Eyes was doing well, but May had to use the proceeds to grow the business and pay the employees. Jennifer sometimes found the ATM empty and had to use credit cards to pay for groceries and electricity. She spent increasing portions of her day feeling bulldozed by May, who constantly wanted to go, go, go—on business trips, on drives, on another hike, on an eight-hour ride to Kirkwood—and seemed angry and exasperated when she finally said no. She told him that she didn’t like the methods he used to get his way, pushing until he wore her down.

  For May, going was elemental. And what was he supposed to do? He couldn’t jump in the car and drive himself to Kirkwood, though increasingly he wished he could. As these lean months wore on it seemed to May that his marriage was becoming less the open-ended road to experience he’d loved and more an interference in his natural way. On business trips he basked in the attention of attractive women who didn’t complain about grocery shopping and nursing. He stayed faithful to Jennifer, but all of it made him wonder whether his marriage was built for the long term.

  He and Jennifer agreed to try to do better, and for weeks at a time they did, but inevitably the same notes sounded and the same songs played and neither seemed to be who they had been anymore.

  “This isn’t working,” May finally said. “I think we need to move on.”

  Jennifer was stunned. “Do you mean divorce?” she asked.

  “I think so,” May said.

  Divorce meant that one person didn’t want to deal with the other person anymore. Jennifer couldn’t process the word. How could he not want to deal with her?

  “We’re not happy. Why stick with it if we’re unhappy?” May asked. “Don’t you think it’s the right thing?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s the right thing,” Jennifer said.

  “How do you know?” May asked.

  “I just know. It’s not time to give up.”

  Jennifer’s voice was suddenly calm and certain in a way May hadn’t heard it before. She didn’t sound panicked or even worried. She just sounded like she believed, more deeply than she had about anything in her life, that they weren’t done knowing each other.

  “We still have things to learn, Mike,” she said. “We picked each other for a reason. If we throw in the towel now we won’t get there. So, no, I don’t think it’s the right thing.”

  “But it’s not good the way it is.”

  “Then we need to work on it. We need to go to counseling. It might be ugly and uncomfortable, but it’ll be worth it. We’ve been heading somewhere since we met seven years ago. I want to keep going there, wherever it is. I still want to go there.”

  May agreed to attend counseling. Little came from the sessions themselves—Jennifer believed her husband charmed and out-smarted the therapist, and May didn’t buy into the counselor’s earthy approach. But it was enough to force the couple to examine and address their issues. And it was enough to cause May to rethink some things.

  He saw that he had lumped together financial and Jennifer frustrations. He recognized a tilting back toward his instinct to cut and run in romance—a trait he disliked and had worked to overcome. He knew he had piled immense complexity onto the life of a woman who would have chosen a less harried existence but for the fact that she adored him. And he understood that the fresh and uncomplicated ladies he met on the road also lost their keys and got sick of driving sometimes. How many of those women, he wondered as he listened to Jennifer sleeping beside him in their bedroom, would have stuck their arms into vinyl sleeves and assembled bun warmers in the basement? How many would have been his Carol Merrill?

  So they tried. The storm passed in a month or two, helped along by the increasing success of Custom Eyes. Sales doubled in each of its first three years, providing May with an annual income of about $30,000, which went a long way in Ashland. As he saw it, the business had excellent growth potential but could not expand further unless it was relocated to Portland or California. His business partner, however, loved Ashland and wouldn’t move. May knew he would have to make a decision.

  In 1994, Jennifer gave birth to the couple’s second child, a son named Wyndham. Wherever the family went, Jennifer carried one of the boys, May the other. He summoned every bit of concentration and ingenuity to keep track of the boys when he took them to the park, and he trained his Seeing Eye dog, Josh, to do the same.

  Not long after Wyndham’s birth, May flew to Chicago to attend a convention. On the airplane, he happened to meet Jim Fruchterman, the CEO of Arkenstone, a California company that made reading systems for the blind. When Fruchterman mentioned that his company was considering building a product that utilized global positioning system technology to help blind people get around, the words hot-wired May’s instincts. He had never heard a business idea that sounded so promising or that seemed capable of doing such good for people. Near the end of the flight, Fruchterman told May that he was looking for a vice president of sales and asked him to call
if he ever decided to leave Custom Eyes.

  A few weeks later, May flew to California to learn more. Fruchterman made him a startling offer. May would be given a staff of seven, a network of forty dealers, and an unlimited budget with which to travel the world. Best of all, Arkenstone had committed to moving forward with the GPS. May thanked Fruchterman and told him he would discuss it with his wife.

  Jennifer couldn’t argue with the offer’s appeal. But the idea of leaving Ashland, where the family had its own farm animals, canyon-top views, and the closest of lifetime friends, shocked her system. This was the place she and May had promised would be forever. He told her the GPS was a new frontier. She told him, “Let’s go.” May sobbed when Jennifer packed the last of their possessions and closed the door to their van.

  May’s job with Arkenstone put him all over the world and put him there often. But the solitary life in San Jose, where the family had moved, took its toll on Jennifer. It wasn’t just that May was gone so often, it was that she felt he didn’t hear her concerns when he was at home. Jennifer needed his attention and help, but it never seemed to her to work out that way—he was just too tired and busy, and then he was gone again. She could feel the resentment and anger building inside her.

  For his part, May was trying to build a career and make better lives for his family. He too was exhausted and needed to exhale rather than run errands or go shopping—things Jennifer had a knack for asking for the minute he stepped in the door.

  As it had before, the road beckoned May. Every port seemed to offer admiring women who didn’t complain. There were close calls, times when he phoned his closest women friends to talk him off the ledge. Sheri from Oregon was particularly good. She would remind him that no matter how clean a fling looked, it was always more complicated, not just with the mistress but with how he’d feel about himself and his life when it was over. She told him to remember what he had at home. And he would climb down from the ledge and go home.

  Again, May broached the topic of divorce. Again, Jennifer told him that she didn’t believe they were finished, that the road for them was still open. They agreed to keep going.

  After a time, May’s travel schedule lightened, and the marriage lightened with it. But things were getting heavy at Arkenstone. The company, which had done much to develop a GPS system for the blind, had in the end decided not to pursue it. May argued passionately that they reconsider, but the board voted him down. The GPS still seemed a beautiful product to May. He approached Fruchterman with a different plan. He would quit Arkenstone and start his own GPS company, one that licensed Arkenstone’s software as its foundation. He would work with Charles LaPierre, one of the inventors of the technology and a brilliant thinker. Fruchterman liked the idea but wanted to see a business plan. May went to work.

  As she always had, Jennifer signed on to the plan. Now free to live in a quieter setting, the family found a home in Davis, California, a university town that was familiar to May from his undergraduate days, and that felt friendly and earthy in ways reminiscent of Ashland. It was April 1998. For four years, May had enjoyed an unlimited travel budget, the backing of an established company, and the security of a regular paycheck. Now he was leaping into unknown waters with a product no one had ever made before.

  “That’s me,” May thought. “I’m back.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Just three weeks remained until May’s scheduled surgery in San Francisco, but all his thoughts pointed east. A Colorado businessman was ready to make a major investment in Sendero, a deal that would add layers of muscle to the start-up’s ninety-eight-pound frame. May worked the phones, refined his prospectus, and grabbed sleep when he could.

  He always, however, found time for his sons, seven-year-old Carson and five-year-old Wyndham. The men of the May household continued to wrestle after school, scour the Internet for pictures of weird animals, walk to the doughnut shop on Sundays, and tell stories with pretzel-shaped plots before bed. Ordinarily, May lost himself in these moments, but lately they had him thinking about a world in which he could see. He might be throwing the Frisbee and wonder, “Would I know Wyndham had made a spectacular catch before he announced it himself?” Or he might run his fingers over one of Carson’s art projects and think, “Would I know right away why this collage won a school prize?”

  He and Jennifer had mentioned the prospect of new vision to their sons. They’d told them that a doctor in San Francisco might be able to help Daddy to see, but that the doctor needed to do a new kind of operation that might not work, and even if it did work, Daddy wasn’t sure he wanted to do it.

  “But what if I did want to do it?” May would ask them. “What would you guys think if I could see?”

  They wanted to know what was in it for them: the new amusement parks he could take them to, the new sports he could play with them, the new bike paths he could show them. He loved their answers. Then May would warn, “You’re not going to be able to sneak around as much, right?” and the worried sound they made was sweet to him because it wasn’t the sound of them worrying for him.

  May considered himself lucky to be so closely aligned with Jennifer in his child-rearing instincts. More than anything, they wanted their sons to grow up curious about the world, to be interested enough that they couldn’t help but explore it. It wasn’t always easy for him to point his children toward curiosity. Better than most people, he knew what could happen in a split second to a kid left on his own to explore. Sometimes, when Carson and Wyndham sought to leap from the cliffs in their lives, his reaction was to jump in between and forbid it. When that happened, he tried to listen back in time for the echoes of his sneakers as they flew across playgrounds and threw him into goalposts, and when he heard those echoes he would come back to the present, take a deep breath, and tell his sons, “Go try it.”

  November blew into Davis through the back door. Just twenty days remained to decide about new vision. If time didn’t seem tight already, May was scheduled to leave in two days for a weeklong business trip to Switzerland. In their bedroom, he and Jennifer packed a suitcase and reviewed the landscape.

  May went over the list of risks of pursuing new vision. Jennifer couldn’t argue with any of them. She agreed that Sendero was at a critical juncture and could not afford distraction. She conceded that marriages were indeed finely balanced equations vulnerable to sudden change. She even joked about the list of stressors published periodically by psychiatrists.

  “They say that if you’re experiencing any two of them you’re in dangerous territory,” she said. “I’m looking at our lives and counting, ‘six…seven…eight.’”

  May laughed, but he knew there was truth in her joking. If anything, his reservations about new vision had become even more serious in recent days as he came to contemplate a new kind of risk, one that had roared into his life unexpectedly and had shaken him with its power. It was a risk that made him question who he really was.

  For decades, May had believed that blindness was cool, that life was every bit as good without vision, that there was always a way. These ideas were more to him than guideposts for living—they were how he understood himself, they were what made him Mike May. What would it say about him now if he chased vision the moment a doctor told him it was possible, and especially at such risk? What would that show about how he truly felt about being blind? He shuddered to think that he’d been deceiving himself about the importance of vision, and about who he was as a person. Yet he couldn’t help but reflect on his long-standing thought—that a person could believe himself to be anything, but it was what he did when he got there that defined him.

  May began to think a lot about who he was. Faced with the loss of his blindness, he could imagine a world in which the special things he did became routine, where catching buses in Europe was expected, where skiing moguls was ho-hum. Vision, for all its reported wonders, also made men ordinary, and it hit May that he didn’t necessarily want to be ordinary, that maybe he enjoyed or even thrived on the
accolades and attention that came to him for being blind, and he wondered why someone might choose to see if that meant no one would see him anymore.

  And what of his blind world? For years, May had been part of a community of blind friends, agencies, and colleagues. The notion of seeking vision felt like a divorce to him, and he found himself wondering if he would still have visitation rights and who might take custody of his relationships. He had asked Bashin and Kuns, two of his closest blind friends, about how the community would receive him if he became sighted. They could only say, “We’ll still be your friends. But the community overall? We just don’t know.” And no one seemed able to tell him. There were agencies set up for people who went from sighted to blind, but nothing for people who went in the other direction—it just didn’t happen.

  Even if the blind world stuck by him, May wondered if he would still be himself. By all accounts, vision was among the most dramatic and fundamental aspects of a sighted person’s life, basic to one’s self-conception. He had no doubt that being able to see would change him, yet he couldn’t begin to fathom the nature of that change. People routinely changed jobs, even spouses, but very few changed themselves, and May could only wonder where that kind of change would take him.